Open Access as Enabler for e-Democracy

Krems.
The next keynote speaker at EDEM 2010 is Stevan Harnad, who shifts our focus to the question of open access to research - which is perhaps not a democratic issue in the strict sense of the word, but connects closely to questions of open government data, of course. The point of contention here is the unresolved question of how specialist knowledge connects with broad-based user-driven approaches to knowledge management - best examplified perhaps by Wikipedia. This is about user empowerment, but is not democratic in any traditional sense - and citizen engagement initiatives in e-democracy face similar challenges (especially in the context of complicated and controversially debated issues).

In the first place, then, open access means free, immediate, permanent full-text online access to published peer-reviewed academic research across all scholarly disciplines (some 2.5 million articles per annum) - so it deals primarily with specialist knowledge. Additional materials, including generalist publications, creative works, and unpublished data and texts may also be included - and access, impact, and esteem metrics are also gathered in the process.

There are two ways to provide open access, then: green open access, where researchers provide their refereed preprints to open access archives, and gold open access, where the refereed journals themselves are providing open access to the final version of the article. The former, then, relies mainly on the authors, without journal publishers needing to be involved - and yet, only 20% of authors make their articles freely available online.

Such green open access can be promoted through open access mandates (requiring researchers to submit all of their publications to an open access archive as a matter of course): these mandates turn out to maximise open access metrics (i.e. the visibility of open access publications), and these metrics in turn motivate the further strengthening of open access mandates. Open access articles are cited more frequently (by up to 200-300%), which acts as a further encouragement for researcher and institutional participation. Some 157 universities around the world now mandate open access, and research funding institutions increasingly require open access to the research outputs they fund, too.

Surveys indicate that only some 15% of researchers would use open access in the absence of an institutional mandate, while 80% would willingly comply with an institutional mandate, which documents the importance and impact of such mandates. There is substantial top-level university support for such mandates (e.g. as government policy in the US and EU), but many universities still have to institute and enforce their own mandates.

Where open access is starting to happen, then, a range of new publication and citation metrics become available, and it is possible to trace research usage patterns. Such tools may also be able to be translated to the e-government sphere, in fact - where they could track citizen participation in government consultation initiatives, for example, and provide metrics that document the impact of such initiatives.

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