Commentary: open access to research and the individual responsibility of researchers.

Readers of Language Learning & Technology are undoubtedly aware of the debate raging through the international research community about open (i.e., free) access to research and knowledge. As readers of the journal, we may not feel very concerned with this debate, because when LLT was established in 1997 (and ALSIC Journal in 1998) it seemed natural that articles should be freely accessible from every part of the network. But this perspective is misleading. First, it is important to recognize that LLT, Alsic, and 2000 open access (OA) journals are the exception and not the rule among the 25,000 peer-reviewed journals. Secondly, like it or not, we are directly concerned individually as researchers at several levels.

* As readers, we face potential restrictions in access to publications and data in our field as well as to tools that could support our research and teaching.

* As authors we seek being published not only in journals that have good reputations but also that have a large audience so that our work can be cited. Citation is becoming an important feature of the research evaluation process of individuals as well as of institutions, and OA offers an impact advantage (OpCit, 2006).

* As citizens, when our salary and research are paid for out of public funds, we are often responsible for giving free access to our work as requested by research agencies, provided we can actually use our Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and not forfeit their use when signing publishers' copyrights agreements.

We have the hardware and software solutions to guarantee open access. But social and economic models are well entrenched in the scientific publishing world. I would like to describe here, from a researcher's standpoint, two ways to open access: the so called "green" and "gold" roads to OA (open archives and OA journals) and the obstacles that stand in the way.

WHAT DOES OPEN ACCESS MEAN?

In January 2001, when more than thirty thousand researchers from 200 countries signed the Public Library of Science petition to urge the creation of a public world library where research could be freely accessible, observers were skeptical. The scientific publishing field was dominated by large-scale commercial publishers that were proud to announce outstanding profits, extracted from a market they controlled with "core" journals and access based on a "pay-per-view" model. At the same time, academic libraries were overwhelmed by substantial increases in journal subscription costs.

Less than three years after this symbolic gesture, broad discussion among actors of the scientific publishing world ensued. Public organizations in charge of funding and assessing research issued precise guidelines.

The Bethesda and Berlin declarations (Bethesda, 2003; Berlin, 2003), signed respectively in June and October, 2003, by several national research institutions from North America, Asia, and Europe, gave a straightforward definition of an "open access contribution," which must satisfy two conditions.

1) The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship (community standards will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

2) A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving.

The reader will have noticed that the word "contribution" not only refers to publications but also to all source materials and data from which the original research findings are derived. This view strongly correlates with the argument made by the Research Councils in Humanities that, from a research methodological standpoint, we have a "special obligation to openness" since "sharing data strengthens our collective capacity to meet academic standards of openness by providing opportunities to further analyze, replicate, verify and refine research findings" (SSHRC, 2002), as did the pioneering work of the Perseus Project (1987 / 2007). Keeping in mind that all we are going to explain about open archives can be applied to publications as well as research data, we will limit our focus here to the former, taking into account its direct links with the burning question of individual scholarship evaluation (MLA, 2006)

However interesting the definition of open access contribution may be, it does not address the temporal constraints that are part of the research process. Between the date of the first draft of a paper and the eventual publication of the final version, several years may pass--even more if we consider the "moving wall" (i.e., the time lapse some publishers impose before an article can become open access). The time scale in Humanities may be different from that in Science, Technology and Medicine (STM), but the difference comes not so much from the time researchers have to wait before accessing a finding published by another colleague as from the life cycle of the result (results may become outdated after six months in biological research, whereas in the humanities a life cycle of 5-10 years is common). In CALL, for example, Jung's (2005) analysis showed that research orientations made significant moves within several years.

THE PARADIGM OF OPEN ARCHIVES

While public organizations issue statements on open access, academic librarians (among others) are ready to deploy online servers where researchers can deposit their work. The idea came from physicists, who created the first network called "open archives" in 1990. Researchers from the same discipline also invented the World Wide Web, with its protocol and language (HTML) oriented towards sharing publications. The current OA paradigm comprises four facets:

* A network linked to the Internet where contributions can be deposited, described, saved and accessed. There exist two kinds of servers within the network: data repositories, where actual contributions are stored, and data harvesters, where (meta)information on these scientific deposit can be retrieved, searched, reorganized, etc.

* A set of licenses that formulate the legal rights and duties between authors, readers and managers of the archives, guaranteeing permanent free access, non-profit use, and authorship acknowledgment.

* A communication protocol named OAI, which permits a coherent description of metadata associated with contributions (cf. metadata information sold with the Current Contents database).

* A standard free software package that assures inter-operability among the various kinds of servers and users' navigators.

Such a paradigm introduces a fairly formal (but easy to use) framework. OAI compliance means using the Open Archive Initiative's metadata-tagging protocol to tag the critical information (author, title, date, etc.) in a uniform way. There is an official date of deposit, a unique permanent resource locator (no more invalid URLs!), and the author of the deposit is identified. A deposit is by no means an act of publication, but can and should be done during the process of publication. A researcher can deposit the first version of an article submitted to a journal (the "preprint" version) and/or the final peer-reviewed version (the one to be published by the journal). All versions of the same work will appear as inter-related in the archive.

There currently exist around 800 open archive repositories around the world (ROAR, 2007; OpenDOAR, 2007). As an illustration in education and ICT (Information and Communication Technology), see Edutice (2007). Developing countries are also involved (Bangalore, 2006). The infrastructure and technologies are well-developed, stable, and easy to use (Eprints, 2007).

Now that we have defined the framework, let's now consider the current publication practices.

THE EDITING AND PUBLISHING PROCESS

Scientific publication in the humanities differs from that in STM in several ways, and there are important discrepancies across disciplines and fields. When considering CALL, we noted that the time-sensitivity brings us closer to STM. Similarly, when considering the type of publication, monographs, prominent in the humanities, are only marginally present in CALL, where journal articles are the focus of attention. Table 1 lists some features of five CALL journals. Their types of publishers are similar to those encountered in the humanities: academic/university press (Recall), commercial publisher (Call), learned society (Calico), auto-publishing from academics (LLT and Alsic).