Proposal to OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association)

In a nutshell this idea has three elements:

1. A user-centric view of the utility of an academic article. Perhaps this is axiomatic. The full appreciation for the intellectual contribution that a new scholarly article makes to the professional literature calls out for unfettered access to the referenced sources of the article. A reader of that article cannot fully appreciate or question the argument and assertions made if they don’t have access to the referenced sources. The full vision of Open Access won’t be achieved until scholars, independent of how well resourced their library is, have unfettered access to the professional literature of their discipline including the referenced sources that each article bases its contribution on.

2. A tool is needed that makes it easy to assess the accessibility of referenced sources in a bibliography, a journal article, or even a body of work (journal, publisher, discipline, etc.). Perhaps this is more than one tool. A tool that ingests a scholar's c.v. and identifies opportunities that scholar has to archive things that are not yet open needs to deal with a messy set of inputs. A tool that assesses a list that is part of a published work (journal article or annotated bibliography) has the benefit of input that is cleaner. A tool that looks at a whole body of work (from an institution, a country, a discipline) may also need some normalization at the input end. If these tools are built open source, then publishers or others could modify the tools to suit their own purposes in automating the process of assessing accessibility.

3. Identifying places where there is self-interest that would urge authors of referenced works to self-archive in cases where they are allowed to, but have not done so. It’s generally recognized that it’s hard to motivate academics as a group because they don’t behave as a group. However, the right tool to shine a light on how accessible are a set of references can empower various actors who can then urge archiving.

Here are a few of the areas of self-interest that might be empowered by such a tool:
• OA publishers with an OA advocacy agenda
• Traditional publishers to simply improve the utility of their product and to reach important scholars in their areas of focus
• Institutional efforts where support for an OA policy might include some measure of overall accessibility of the institution's scholarly output
• Libraries who might offer help to faculty members to do the archiving
• Individual scholars motivated to be good OA citizens
• OA advocates who, informed by such a tool, could identify the most frequently cited works in some domain which could be archived but haven’t been and bring social pressure on authors to self-archive (e.g. Wikipedians).