Five Minutes with Professor Sonia Livingstone on the benefits of open access and institutional repositories.
Professor Sonia Livingstone shares her thoughts on the LSE’s institutional repository, LSE Research Online(LSERO). Since 2010, content in LSERO has received over six million
downloads. For 2015, it has already received over one million downloads.
LSERO is a rich resource containing a variety of LSE research,
including journal articles, reports, book chapters, working papers,
conference papers, datasets and video.
Do you think of yourself as an open access advocate?
Yes. I think all academics have had to rethink their attitude to
journal publication in recent years. Like many, I was trained to write
for the (often esoteric) academic journal, thinking little about the
accessibility of the resulting publication but simply proud to get my
work into this or that bound volume on the (gated) library shelf. While
this still has merit, it also has its limitations. And today, it is far
from the only way to make research available.
A few years ago, it seemed that to be an open access advocate (which I
now am, for reasons of both principle and practicality) one had to act
against copyright (i.e. simply uploading pdfs to one’s website and
hoping not to be noticed). But increasingly the publishers have had to
give ground, and I relish the ongoing struggle (still unsettled) over
ownership of and access to knowledge.
Increasing your research impact – Open Access Week 2015 – LSE library events
What were your original motivations for depositing your research in LSERO? Have these changed over the years?I honestly don’t remember how it all began, though now depositing my
research is second nature (and such a regular activity that I fear I
burden the always-helpful library staff). I think I began with the
documents that seemed to have no place but that I had worked hard on and
so wanted to be able to point to on occasion.
What was great about depositing such documents was that I held
copyright so they could be instantly accessible to anyone interested. In
other words, the publication lag demanded by most journals (usually of
one or two years) meant that depositing manuscripts submitted to
journals seemed fairly but not hugely useful.
Over the years I’ve expanded the types of things I submit, and my quick reckoning would include:
- Research reports
- Consultation responses and other policy statements
- End-of-grant reports
- Keynote lectures (often a bit tidied up from the spoken version)
- English versions of works published only in translation
- Survey questionnaires
- Various other grey materials (e.g. short pieces written for policy or public magazines)
- Out of print books (actually, just two, but I was astonished when the publisher said yes, it’s yours)
- Book chapters (which, in the Google era, are very hard for folk to discover any other way)
- Some of my early publications which seem to have disappeared from
ordinary libraries (casting no aspersions on the BLPES of course) - Oh yes, and the original submitted version of a journal article
they’d made a mistake when a piece went online even before it was
published. But no, it was all legit and a good example of how publishing
practice is changing. So my piece got out there as soon as it had been
accepted for publication (and nicely in time for a conference on the
theme).
One more observation about the journal articles. I realise that
colleagues don’t want the pre-copyedited, error-prone version of their
manuscripts online (and that’s all journals usually allow). So my simple
(but admittedly slightly costly) workaround is to get all my work
copyedited before I submit it to a journal. Since it seems that in
recent years journals have severely cut back their investment in
copy-editing in any case, and since some reviewers are, like me,
grammar-nerds quick to adverse judgement, I think this serves me well on
all counts. In other words, why submit error-prone work in the first
place?
Have you been surprised by how many downloads your
research has received in LSERO? So far this year you have received over
86,000 downloads!
Astonished! What can I say? I work in a topical field (children and
young people’s engagement with the internet), though I am encouraged
that some of less topical work (e.g. on media audiences) also gets
noticed through LSERO. I also work in a field that has fostered a
constructive and lively dialogue between academics and
stakeholders/publics. This leads me to another list – who do I imagine
is the audience downloading on such a scale?
- It might be academics in universities with nicely resourced
libraries looking for a convenient source, and it might be my students
(thanks guys!). - But I hope it is also academics in less well-resourced universities
who wouldn’t otherwise have access to work that, once published, sits
beyond a pay wall. - And I also believe (and hope) that it’s non-academics, whether
policy makers or journalists or NGOs and other stakeholders who also
lack access to academic journal publications and who don’t generally
(like to or have budget for) purchasing academic work.
click to download and no impediment to register, pay, subscribe or any
other complications that put people off.
This convenience applies to me also. I can build my website and the
sites of my research projects around easy hyperlinks, and I can curate
these links and refashion them at will. I can tweet short eprint urls,
link them into blog posts or email them to people quickly too. I know
where the definitive version of any publication is (without the muddle
of Academia.edu versus ResearchGate etc.) and if, in a funder report I
spot a mistake a few months later (as happens) it’s easy to correct.
More important than convenience is that fact that, as far as I can
gather, LSERO works. Their download numbers often dwarf those reported
by journals in their annual reports. And consider LSERO’s stats for one
of my articles (selected at random) – while most downloads come from
countries with well-resourced universities, the country spread invites
reflection. We don’t know more but I think LSERO has a wider reach than
pay-walled publications.
And why? Well, consider the results of a Google scholar search for
“Sonia Livingstone media audiences”: The two books are available to read
(or parts thereof) on Google. The three articles are behind pay walls.
But the three right hand links give you full text for free.
As you deposit more accepted manuscripts in LSERO, are you becoming more aware of publisher embargo periods?
Acutely! As the staff in LSERO know well, I am also happy to write to
publishers and request better terms – and to protest or complain if
they say no. We have some power via the professional associations we
belong to that do business with publishers, and we have some consumer
power in deciding which publishers to favour or avoid. Let’s use it.
How do you think LSERO can improve as a repository?
It will not have escaped the LSERO staff that I have described the
process of submitting to the repository as easy! It may not be so for
them, but they make it easy for academics – checking copyright, staying
in touch, creating the front page, etc. But publishers, libraries and
academia are all under pressure, often competing but sometimes
complementary. So I see this service as likely to be under continuing
pressure. I’m just glad that as things stand, LSERO offers us an
excellent service here.
This piece originally appeared on the LSE Library Blog and is reposted under CC BY 4.0
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the
position of the Impact of Social Science blog, nor of the London School
of Economics. Please review our Comments Policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.
About the Author
Professor Sonia Livingstone teaches and researches in the department of Media and Communications (@MediaLSE) at the LSE. She can also be found on Twitter @Livingstone_S
Impact of Social Sciences – Five Minutes with Professor Sonia Livingstone on the benefits of open access and institutional repositories.
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