Law Bytes Podcast – Episode 28 was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the latest audio-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors. Sonix is the best way to convert your audio to text in 2019.
Michael Geist:
This is Law Bytes, a podcast with Michael Geist.
Joe Biden:
We have to use every weapon at our disposal. We’re going to meet our goal to help patients even more than you’re already helping them today. And to be honest with you, it requires somewhat of a change in mindset, which requires a lot more openness, open data, open collaboration and above all, open minds.
Randy Schekman:
Corporations like Elsevier are avaricious. They they have the highest profit margin of any publisher and possibly of any corporation in the world because they they charge authors going in and they charge authors access to their own information.
Michael Geist:
This week is open access week, an opportunity to celebrate and raise awareness of the emergence and continued growth of open access. Countries have been taking increasingly strong steps toward making their research openly available, with mandates that require researchers who accept public grants to make their published research results freely available online within a reasonable time period. The basic principle behind open access is to facilitate public access to research, particularly the research that’s funded by taxpayers. This can be achieved by publishing in an open access journal or by simply posting a copy of the research online.
Michael Geist:
To help sort through the issues associated with open access. I spoke with Professor Leslie Chan, professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough and one of the earliest leaders on open access. Professor Chan was one of the original signatories of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, a historical and defining event in the global open access movement, and has long been active in the experimentation and implementation of scholarly communication initiatives around the world. He joined me to explain the basics where things stand today and how open access may develop in the future.
Michael Geist:
Leslie, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast.
Leslie Chan:
Thanks for having me, Michael.
Michael Geist:
Okay, that’s great. So as you know, this podcast is going to run at the start of Open Access Week, a week that’s been used for a number of years now to celebrate and raise awareness of the emergence and continued growth of open access. So why don’t we start there for those who are new to the issue? What is open access?
Leslie Chan:
Ok. So I guess it is simply it’s open access. Simply refer to mechanisms that allow the distribution of research outputs online that is free of costs and free of other access barriers. And the most common access barriers would be that of copyright. So a key reason for that access is to reduce the barriers to copyright. And so that people can not only access the material for free, but they’re allowed to copy them, who can we use them and to read and we distribute them. So generally, some advocates like to see open access materials with a clear, open license attached to it so that people can make use of them legally without having to worry about the legal implications of that.
Michael Geist:
So we’re talking about large amounts of research that typically available via subscription that’s certainly accessible to people who find themselves on university campuses or within the educational community who often buy these bulk subscriptions, which can be very, very expensive. Open access takes that same research and ensures that it’s openly available to anybody who wants to be able to access the access, the scholarly work.
Leslie Chan:
Yeah, that’s the intention. So as you know, the bulk of the academic literature, that’s a peer review research literature, is still largely under subscription access model. And so the goal of open access is to reduce the amount of subscription access and increasing the amount of all open access over time. So that’s really the goal because as you said, the subscription is really
