Public Access
Open-Access Glossary
Open Access (OA): Making peer-reviewed scholarly manuscripts
freely available online, permitting any user to read, download,
copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software,
or use them for any lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or
technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining
access to the internet itself.
Open Educational Resources (OER): Openly licensed, online
educational materials for sharing, use, and reuse.
Copyleft: A form of licensing that makes a creative work freely
available to be modified and requires all modified and extended
versions of the creative work to be free, as well. (OA does not
require works to be copyleft, nor does it necessarily exclude
copyleft works from being OA.)
Creative Commons (CC): A suite of licenses that set out the
rights of authors and users as alternative to the standard
copyright.
CC Attribution (CC-BY): A license clause that allows the reuse,
sharing, and remixing of materials providing the original author
is appropriately attributed.
CC Non Commercial (CC-NC): A license clause allowing the
reuse, sharing, and remixing of materials providing that it is for
non-commercial purposes.
CC No Derivatives (CC-ND): A license clause requiring that
derivatives are not made of the original works.
CC Share Alike (CC-SA): A license clause requiring that derivative works have the same license as the original.
CC-O: A waiver of copyright with no rights reserved.
Paywall: A restriction via a financial barrier to research.
Login wall: A requirement to log in to a system in order to access content.
Open-washing: The appearance of OA for marketing purposes,
while continuing proprietary practices.
Green OA: Making a version of a manuscript freely available in
a repository.
Gold OA: Making the final version of a manuscript freely available on publication.
Diamond OA: A form of gold OA where there is no APC.
Gratis OA: A work is available to read free of charge, though
reuse is restricted.
Libre OA: A work available under an open license.
Version of Record (VOR): The final version of a manuscript after
peer review and publisher processing.
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ASH Clinical News
for the OA designation is that the research have
a critical impact on patient care, Dr. Löwenberg,
who also is professor of hematology at Erasmus
University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the
Netherlands, explained.
The open designation is entirely up to the discretion of the Blood editors. “Basically, we make
any clinical trial or any research that has clinical
significance open access.”
Other publishing models grant OA status
after a certain period of time. For instance, NEJM
makes all research articles OA six months after
publication, though not copyright release, while
the Journal of the American Medical Association
makes research articles freely available after six
months for the main journal and after a year for
its specialty journals.
Cheers for Peer Review?
Dr. Löwenberg pointed out that free access does
not mean a “free-for-all” when it comes to crosschecking the research – all Blood articles undergo
the same peer-review process
“We have a high-quality journal, so what we
publish should be of broad interest, should have
an impact on the field, and, perhaps most importantly, should be right. That requires a sophisticated peer-review system,” Dr. Löwenberg said.
Usually, three experts will review the manuscript and, if they green light it as particularly
important, the paper goes back to the authors to
address any reviewer queries with an eye toward
making the paper even better, he explained. The
average time to “First Decision” for all papers is
around 19 days, according to the Blood website.
While Dr. Löwenberg said he appreciates that
the OA movement is leveling the playing field
when it comes to making information publicly
available, he questioned whether those papers
offer as much scientific value as those published
traditionally – particularly if they don’t undergo
peer review.
“I feel like every day, a new journal is founded,
but I wonder, ‘Who is interested in the content
of those journals?’” he said. “I worry that they
contain a lot of junk science. I believe a reader
wants to be assured that, when he or she opens
a particular journal, it contains high-quality,
peer-reviewed information. This information is
considered ‘right,’ or, in other words, truthful and
reproducible.”
Peer review is important, Dr. MacCallum
agreed, but it’s not without its own problems, such
as reviewer bias (based on gender, geography,
practice-level, or other factors) or a failure to fully
declare competing interests. “It is widely accepted
that peer review is not perfect,” she said. “I was
a professional editor for 18 years, and I handled
thousands of manuscripts – I’ve seen the best and
worst of peer review.”
As science grows more complex, Dr. MacCallum suggested that the model of one editor and
a couple of reviewers looking at a manuscript
may no longer be adequate. “Science is becoming
increasingly global, collaborative, and multidisciplinary with huge datasets – how can one or two
reviewers really assess every aspect of a paper?”
Even with those processes in place, those
models are still based on an old algorithm; a more
appropriate paradigm would be open peer review,
Dr. MacCallum offered. In this model, reviewer
information would be transparent and other
interested parties who are not formal reviewers
could still offer comments. The review process
would continue after publication to ensure the
ongoing accuracy of the data.
“OA is about the infrastructure to support
digitally linking research objects in a networked,
global, interactive environment,” Dr. MacCallum
said. “The responsibility of OA publishers is to
facilitate and enable that infrastructure through
commonly agreed-upon standards to provide the
tools and infrastructure to enable others to share
research freely. It’s not just about slapping the
article up on the web.”
The Preprint Pathway
In the fields of physical sciences and mathematics,
“preprint”’ has been in play for some time. In this
model, researchers upload their articles to a preprint server (the site where the content is hosted);
that work can then be accessed – and commented
upon – by end-users.
While the formal structure of preprint may be
relatively new, the concept of sharing one’s work
with colleagues is not, Jessica Polka, PhD, director of ASAPBio in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
pointed out. “I think that scientists have been
sharing their work before publication in various
ways – face-to-face meetings, a poster presentation, a talk at a seminar. Preprint is bringing that
kind of sharing on to the internet and democratizing the access to that content.”
ASAPBio is a researcher-driven initiative to
promote preprints. However, unlike arXiv.org or
“I feel like every
day, a new journal
is founded, but I
wonder, ‘Who is
interested in the
content of those
journals?’ ... I worry
that they contain a
lot of junk science.”
—BOB LÖWENBERG, MD, PhD
bioRxiv.org – two major preprint servers in the
physical sciences realm – ASAPBio does not have
a preprint server. Rather, it’s an advocacy organization for the preprint movement, Dr. Polka
explained.
What are the benefits of preprint and how
does it differ from OA? First, preprint is an opportunity for researchers to get feedback on their
work without going through the formal submission process to a journal – OA or otherwise.
“In one sense, preprint is OA, in that there are
typically no restrictions on viewing or reading the
content,” Dr. Polka noted. “But one advantage that
preprint offers over OA is that the work gets out
October 2016