Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications/Scope of our Work
2. Scope of our Work
2.1. Our terms of reference specified that we should focus our attention on the published findings of research, in the form of journal articles, conference proceedings and monographs. They also made clear that in considering questions of access we should not restrict ourselves to publications produced in the UK, but extend our view to those produced in the rest of the world.
2.2. Much of our attention focused on journal articles, since they constitute in volume and importance the major published outputs for researchers in the great majority of disciplines.[1] There are some exceptions to this, for example in some fields of engineering, where conference proceedings enjoy high value. To the extent that we consider conference proceedings, we focus on those that are formally published after peer review; and in that case there is little difference between them and other kinds of journal articles.[2]
2.3. Monographs and edited collections of essays are of course particularly important in the humanities and some areas of the social sciences; but they feature hardly at all as key outputs of research in the life sciences and physical sciences. Moves towards digital and open access publishing have been much slower here than with journal articles, and experimentation is at a much earlier stage. We consider briefly some of the issues relating to access to monographs in the following section.
2.4. We also note that researchers in the UK and across the world are increasingly engaged in the production of reports, papers, technical notes or other documents commissioned and published by governmental agencies and other bodies but not distributed or indexed by recognised publishers. Publication may take the form of a link on an institutional website, or the distribution of hard copies to interested parties. Such reports and papers are often referred to as grey literature, since they lack strict bibliographic control, and basic information such as author, publication date or publishing body may therefore not be easy to discern. Similarly, non-professional layouts and formats, and low print runs, mean that the organized collection of such publications by libraries can be challenging as compared to more established media such as journals and books. It is therefore difficult to assess the volume and scope of the research that is now reported in grey literature, since by its nature it is often difficult to identify and to trace. Such literature may also be highly variable in quality: while some is subject to peer review, much is not, and the status of many documents is unclear. Moreover, reports and papers of this kind can be difficult to trace, particularly if active steps are not taken to preserve them and make them readily-findable for the long term in digital format.
2.5. We recognise the increasing importance of grey literature, however, both as a source for researchers themselves, and also as a channel for reporting the results of research to wider audiences. We suggest, therefore, that repositories can play an important role in providing access to the various kinds of grey literature produced by researchers, as well as in organising and preserving it; but we do not give extended consideration to grey literature in the rest of this report,[3] principally because our terms of reference focused our attention on access to peer-reviewed literature.
2.6. We note finally the growing volumes and importance of research data and other kinds of information produced during the course of research; the increasing interest in ensuring that such data are properly managed and, where appropriate, made available to others to scrutinise and re-use; and thus the increasingly close relationship between data and formal publications of research findings. Questions relating to access to research data itself, however, are being considered in the separate study being conducted by the Royal Society,[4] and we examine them only insofar as they impinge on issues relating to access and the use of formally-published findings.
- ↑ Research Information Network, Communicating Knowledge: how and why UK researchers publish and disseminate their findings, RIN, 2009.
- ↑ We do not consider in this report conference presentations and posters which are published only in the sense that they are made available at the conference in question and after that on a conference website.
- ↑ Definitions of grey literature are sometimes extended to cover working papers which are circulated to selected colleagues, or on occasion and in some subject areas—such as economics—distributed more widely. Since there is no formal publication process involved, we do not consider issues relating to them in this report.
- ↑ Royal Society, Science as an Open Enterprise, 2012