University libraries as active agents for change. The BitViews Project : how University librarians can turn all journals green and clear the path to open science

Abstract

There can be no open science without Open Access (OA). This paper is a call to arms to individual University librarians to make a decisive move towards open access. The short-term objective of OA is defined as the immediate, cost-free, online access to the content of all peer reviewed scientific, medical, and scholarly articles. This amounts to unrestricted access to the author’s approved manuscripts (AAMs) deposited in institutional and other repositories. Even in the current academic publishing ecosystem, largely directed and managed by a few oligopolistic commercial publishers, 80% of peer reviewed articles can be deposited as AAMs, but only a small minority of researchers choose to do so. The reason for this failure is that currently there are no individual incentives for researchers to promote their AAMs, as the main currency of academic recognition and esteem (the citation count) resides with published articles. The author has described elsewhere how an open-source blockchain application (BitViews) can collect, validate, and disseminate at minimal cost online usage data of all AAMs available on institutional repositories. The resulting public ledger of usage data can be used to arrange discipline-specific non-citation research impact measures thereby providing the incentive for more authors to deposit their AAMs in a virtuous circle. The green OA thus achieved allows researchers in the global South to enter scholarly communication not only as consumers but also as producers of peer-reviewed knowledge. BitViews Project allows individual university libraries to be catalysts for change. The paper explains how a novel application of game theory (conditional crowdfunding) will empower individual libraries to spread the relatively miniscule costs of setting up BitViews using a two-stage mechanism that minimises free-riding and offers a no-risk opportunity to libraries to deploy their institutional repositories not just as stores of information, but as active tools to achieve open access.