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by Teodora Poiata
If we take a look at what meant the advent of the Internet for people, and especially for domains as research and education in which the conservator-restorer is directly involved, we will see that three main areas have changed: resources, communication and visualization. These changes brought many benefits but there are also certain disadvantages involved, which must be taken into consideration. Internet offers direct and easy access to data. There is a great amount of public content which can be browsed today with the help of search engines such as Google and Yahoo. For this, all we need is a computer and a connection to internet, thus the access to this content is extremely easy. Much easier, compared to the access we have to the printed publications which have limited circulation and distribution, and involve costs on the reader’s side. So we benefit of this data, media, and information-rich database which is available for the public at any time and almost at no cost. Today anyone can contribute to this database by publishing content online. For instance, there are websites which allow people to create their own webpage and place content online free of charge (e.g. tripod.com). This can be seen as an advantage, but taking a closer look we realize that there is a knowledge-poor and information-overload syndrome present on this type of websites. However, we will be surprised to find out that many articles are uploaded to these websites with the good intention of file sharing. There is both good quality and low quality data since the access is free for everybody with no restriction. From here, the other big disadvantage: there is no librarians’ quality control and information is being used, spread without being reliable and organised. In conclusion, the readers must train themselves to get access to the real information, to learn how to perform a good search and to avoid the 'tricks' which may appear all the time. Besides the free content which is available online, we find websites that are selling content. By paying the access to certain information, the readers have the certitude that the content is trustful, verified and can be learned or used up to their needs. Conventional publishing houses, which made history in printing, turned now to digital publications as the investment is smaller but the profit is still high. One of the most famous and reliable sources of digital content is for example Elsevier, a publisher which is using ScienceDirect as distributor among others. If on this website we perform a search on a topic we are interested in, indeed we will find many results but we only can access the abstract so we can get a better preview of what we are buying. The more common way to get access to the full content is to pay for the download of the electronic version which is obviously cheaper than the printed one. But due to the general tendency of avoiding digital data many times the reader ends up more satisfied buying a printed publication and pays easier for something he can see. Thus, this is another factor that diminishes the dissemination of knowledge among professionals. However, a new approach is now growing, which appeared due to the authors’ colleagueship. Open Access is a recent concept and there are many people that never heard about it or don’t know exactly what it means. As an introduction for those who are new to this concept, basically open access (OA) literature, scientific or non- cientific, is free of charge and free of most copyright restrictions. Depending on the OA publisher, different restrictions may be abolished: some may allow commercial re-use or derivative works while others do not. Citing the Budapest Open Access Initiative: “There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.” OA was only possible when the internet appeared, as an online method of information dissemination. In fact, OA was impossible in the age of print for the simple reason that printing costs were inevitable. Today, however, it has already made the publishing industry to reconsider their models. There are already many OA journals but very few exclusively for conservation. That’s why we created e_conservation magazine, which still, should not be confused with a journal, as e_conservation, like any other magazine, delivers all kind of interesting information for conservators. However, an OA publication is not free to produce. It is definitely less expensive than the conventional literature but it is not free of costs. There are many costs involved in a digital publication. Besides the costs of the technical maintenance, there are costs for providing good quality content, as the peer-reviewing, proof correction, translation, manuscript preparation, editorial management, appropriated software and hardware, etc… Then, there are also costs for editing and web designing. For these reasons, there are Open Access journals which charge authors themselves for publishing their articles. In exchange, they grant fame, a label, fast publication and a large readership. The e-conservationline survey on the topic of OA among conservators and other people involved in conservation of cultural heritage gave only some partial results until now. Because of the relatively low number of people taking the survey, we can not say yet that the results are representative. That’s why we invite everyone involved in this field to take our survey. By accumulating more results we will be able to generate a more realistic statistic, and in a year from now on we can make a comparative study to see if and how the situation has changed. From the conclusions that we drawn, the most relevant are: (see table 1)
- Almost a third (28%) of those taking the survey never published an article. The other part (72%) published an article but mostly in paper (41% in paper, 11% in electronic format and 20% in both paper and electronic format).
- Only 9% of those which published in electronic format were using the open access system. 25% were familiar with OA concept as a reader, 30% heard about it but did not know what it means and most of the people (36%) never heard about it. - From the overall of those that were familiar with OA, only 16% were able to name the respective journals, but in reality only some of referred publications were indeed periodic open access journals (see table 2).
For those that are new to this information delivery system, there are two main ways in which OA is provided: OA journals and OA archives. - OA archives (or repositories) simply make information available for free, without any peer review process, and are freely accessible on the internet (see table 3). The author does not need anyone’s permission for publishing and the process is very straightforward. These archives requirements - and costs - are almost negligible as they are based on open-source software. There are evidently a few drawbacks on this model such as the lack of peer reviewing and implicitly the un-referred or incomplete information, possible mistakes and besides the reader will not know which and where these archives exist. - OA journals receive articles, perform peer reviewing and all the other processes mentioned previously and then make the content available to the entire world (see table 4). No matter the costs involved, for the reader the access is always free, hence the information and knowledge dissemination is done towards a bigger market with less money. Going back to the results of our survey, we found out that 55% of the people that never published an article in OA were ready to publish in this system, 43% were willing to publish but first they wish to be better informed and only 2% would not publish in this system. Asked about the reasons why they never published until now in OA, the majority (55%) replied they never had the opportunity, followed by 38% which were not familiar enough with this concept. 3.5% considered the OA journals have low prestige and 3.5% that the readership is smaller of OA than for the paper based publications.
Table 3. Examples of Open Access Archive or Repositories
More publications can be found at DOAJ, Directory of Open Access Journals.
Why some people and in fact, everybody may show precaution when it comes to Open Access? Sometimes “being free” is confused with “having low quality” because of the tradition in paying for everything we own and mistrusting the fact that something free can have a real value.
Concerning our survey, asked about their reasons for publishing in OA, the majority of our respondents named the free access for all readers as the most important factor. Faster publication, reaching a larger readership and being more frequently cited were mentioned in this order, in intermediate positions. The concern for the costs of the publication placed last on the list of reasons for choosing OA as publishing system. Overall we notice that people show a high curiosity and interest towards publishing in OA. Especially because of this high interest which we remarked, we find useful to draw the attention over other important issues which must be known. Issues like intellectual property, copyright, data protection are all part of the next issues of e_conservation magazine and will be discussed one by one. Each of us should evaluate the advantages and possibilities which Open Access gives and, in accordance, should decide if it does or does not serve to our needs. What is certain is that OA is one way to improve knowledge dissemination by sharing information with all the other professionals in the conservation field.
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