The revolution will not be in open data

By Duncan Edwards

I’ve had a lingering feeling of unease that things were not quite right in the world of open development and ICT4D (Information and communication technology for development), so at September’s Open Knowledge Conference in Geneva I took advantage of the presence of some of the world’s top practitioners in these two areas to explore the question:

How does “openness” really effect change within development? 

Inspiration for the session came from a number of conversations I’ve had over the last few years.

My co-conspirator/co-organiser of the OKCon side event “Reality check: Ethics and Risk in Open Development,” Linda Raftree, had also been feeling uncomfortable with the framing of many open development projects, assumptions being made about how “openness + ICTs = development outcomes,” and a concern that risks and privacy were not being adequately considered.

We had been wondering whether the claims made by Open Development enthusiasts were substantiated by any demonstrable impact. For some reason, as soon as you introduce the words “open data” and “ICT,” good practice in development gets thrown out the window in the excitement to reach “the solution”.

A common narrative in many “open” development projects goes along the lines of “provide access to data/information –> some magic occurs –> we see positive change.” In essence, because of the newness of this field, we only know what we think happens, we don’t know what really happens because there is a paucity of documentation and evidence.

It’s problematic that we often use the terms data, information, and knowledge interchangeably, because:

• Data is NOT knowledge 
• Data is NOT information 
• Information is NOT knowledge. 

Knowledge is what you know.

It’s the result of information you’ve consumed, your education, your culture, beliefs, religion, experience – it’s intertwined with the society within which you live.

Understanding and thinking through how we get from the “openness” of data, to how this affects how and what people think, and consequently how they might act, is critical in whether “open” actually has any additional impact.

Can applying a Theory of Change help us answer this question?

At Wednesday’s session, panellist Matthew Smith from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) talked about the commonalities across various open initiatives. Matthew argued that a larger Theory of Change (ToC) around how ‘open’ leads to change on a number of levels could allow practitioners to draw out common points. The basic theory we see in open initiatives is “put information out, get a feedback loop going, see change happen.” But open development can be sliced in many ways, and we tend to work in silos when talking about openness. We have open educational resources, open data, open government, open science, etc. We apply ideas and theories of openness in a number of domains but we are not learning across these domains.

We explored the theories of change underpinning two active programmes that incorporate a certain amount of “openness” in their logic.

Simon Colmer from the Knowledge Services department at the Institute of Development Studies outlined their theory of change of how research evidence can help support decision-making in development policy-making and practice. While Erik Nijland from HIVOS presented elements of the theory of change that underpins the Making All Voices Count programme, which looks to increase the links between citizens and governments to improve public services and deepen democracy.

Both of these ToCs assume that because data/information is accessible, people will use it within their decision-making processes. They also both assume that intermediaries play a critical role in analysis, translation, interpretation, and contextualisation of data and information to ensure that decision makers (whether citizens, policy actors, or development practitioners) are able to make use of it. Although access is theoretically open, in practice even mediated access is not equal – so how might this play out in respect to marginalised communities and individuals?

What neither ToC really does is unpack who these intermediaries are. What are their politics? What are their drivers for mediating data and information? What is the effect of this? A common assumption is that intermediaries are somehow neutral and unbiased – does this assumption really hold true? 

What many open data initiatives do not consider is what happens after people are able to access and internalise open data and information. How do people act once they know something?

As Vanessa Herringshaw from the Transparency and Accountability Initiative said in the Raising the Bar for ambition and quality in OGP session, “We know what transparency should look like but things are a lot less clear on the accountability end of things”.

There are a lot of unanswered questions. Do citizens have the agency to take action? Who holds power? What kind of action is appropriate or desirable? Who is listening? And if they are listening, do they care?

Linda finished up the panel by raising some questions around the assumptions that people make decisions based on information rather than on emotion, and that there is a homogeneous “public” or “community” that is waiting for data/information upon which to base their opinions and actions.

So as a final thought, here’s my (perhaps clumsy) 2013 update on Gil Scott Heron’s 1970 song “The Revolution will not be televised”:

“The revolution will NOT be in Open data,
It will NOT be in hackathons, data dives, and mobile apps,
It will NOT be broadcast on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube,
It will NOT be live-streamed, podcast, and available on catch-up
The revolution will not be televised”

Heron’s point, which holds true today, was that “the revolution” or change, starts in the head. We need to think carefully about how we get far beyond access to data.

This blog was originally published as an Open Knowledge Foundation blog. Duncan Edwards is ICT Innovations Manager at the Institute of Development Studies. Follow Duncan on Twitter. 


Other blogs by Duncan on Impact and Learning: 

•  Open data and increasing the impact of research? It's a piece of cake!

Open Access futures?

by Rachel Playforth

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

I’ve heard this Gandhi quote applied to open access advocacy before, and the Open Access Futures conference I attended yesterday was an interesting indicator of where we are in that process.

Is it a good sign that the open access community feels able to argue endlessly about ‘Green’ or ‘Gold’ and the fine detail of Creative Commons licenses? Have we won the war and all that remains is to quibble over the spoils? Or have the commercial journal publishers turned out to be the real winners, yet again, while we fight each other over the correct pronunciation/transcription of ‘CC By’?

By making themselves major players in the open access market and (to be fair, often constructively) engaging in the debate, publishers have cleverly deflected attention from the unpalatable fact which accelerated the OA issue into public consciousness in the first place: their grossly inflated profit margins (close to 40% in some cases[1]) and the resulting ‘serials crisis’ that threatened the ability of libraries to perform their core function of providing information.

These profit margins have not decreased, as far as I can tell, but we seem to have tacitly agreed to stop mentioning them while publishers convince us that they care about open access.

In fact, so powerful is the publishing lobby that a huge part of the open access discussion now centres around protecting these very profits (embargo periods, a free APC market, etc). Should we accept this and work to find pragmatic solutions in what we’re told is a ‘transition’ period – or is it really just a transition from one source of income for publishers to another? Has the radical potential of open access been squandered? What would real disruptive change look like?

The conference did offer some hope that change on a grander scale is happening, mainly through the passion and energy of young academics who take the DIY approach - with a sensibility borrowed from hacker culture and open source technology. They are creating new platforms for scholarship that don’t just fill a gap for researchers priced out of the commercial OA market, but take disciplines in new directions and question the whole process of academic publishing. See eLife, Alluvium, the Open Library of Humanities.

Is grey literature the next frontier for Open Access?
Image is CC0 licensed

Other areas are also opening up outside academic institutions, with charities, independent institutes,

government agencies and NGOs not only benefiting from open access content, but creating their own. In most cases there is nothing to stop these organisations from making their publications freely available, and indeed many have been doing so through websites and self-publishing for years, but by adopting the norms and principles of open access we can share our content so much more effectively. Free from the stranglehold of commercial publishers, I believe that grey literature of all kinds is the next big unexplored area for open access.

A recent Thesis Whisperer blog post explored the frustrations of a researcher on the distance we still have to go, but by developing our institutional repository and working with international partners on exposing their own grey literature through open access, IDS is heading in the right direction.

---

[1] Of goats and headaches’, The Economist, 26 May 2011 http://www.economist.com/node/18744177/ 

Other blogs by Rachel on Impact and Learning:

• As good as gold? How and why publish open access research

Digital repositories – reaching the parts other websites cannot reach

By James Georgalakis

If you write a blog about what’s trending on Twitter or the latest website design fad you normally get some good engagement. If you write about Open Access to research you can normally get a debate going.

But when you start writing, or talking for that matter, about institutional repositories people’s eyes tend to glaze over. This is unfortunate because a key, perhaps essential, element of an innovative digital communications strategy that promotes Open Access to research is the use of a repository. Perhaps it is the name that puts people off or they simply assume this is the sole preserve of librarians.

Whatever the blockage is we need to get over it and fast.

Many research funders have long expected to see repositories host outputs they have funded. Universities have long been fully equipped in this area but many members of the development research community from think tanks to NGOs are simply publishing their outputs onto a traditional website.

This week, which is also Open Access Week 2013, IDS announced that it is in the process of digitising and publishing onto OpenDocs, its open access repository, its entire back catalogue of almost 2,000 research reports, working papers, practice papers, and other IDS Series Titles.

I will attempt to explain why I believe digital repositories are essential if you are serious about open access publishing and research uptake.

What is a digital repository, anyway?

Repositories are built on software that is international and interoperable, facilitating data exchange and re-use. In other words, they are highly compatible with other systems! The full text of each archived document is rapidly indexed by search engines and securely stored for the long term. In this way a repository like OpenDocs hugely increases the discoverability of IDS and our partners’ research through search engines such as Google scholar. This means more citations and hopefully more uptake and influence.

At IDS we have a good publications search area on our website which is one of our most popular pages. What you may not notice is that most of the documents you download are actually hosted on our repository. This is because OpenDocs adds value, securing additional hits from searches made from outside the IDS site as well as those done within the site. We also provide the links to all our partners’ and projects’ websites so that the research outputs they appear host all get downloaded directly from OpenDocs, which is crucial for our monitoring systems.

Many institutions use repositories to profile special collections or archives. This can result in large numbers of downloads where there are topical themes or big name academics involved. Perhaps not surprisingly, the very early days of IDS’ repository were marked with the launch of a Robert Chambers archive. Many repositories have built in analytics so that you can view downloads of specific publications or whole collections. Again, due to the wider reach of repositories, this gives you a far fuller picture of usage than the google analytics reports you may have been producing on your own website’s page views and downloads.

Of course repositories vary hugely and some can do quite different things to others. IDS uses a software package called DSpace which represents a different approach to digital collections management compared with other popular systems like Fedora.

IDS’ repository actually hosts two completely distinct collections:

1. One is rather obviously the IDS Research Community  collection
2. the other is the BLDS Digital Library of over 2,000 full-text publications from research organisations in Africa and Asia. 

Presently OpenDocs is mainly populated with text-only material but over time it may include datasets and multimedia content as well.

Warning: Digital repositories do not automatically meet all open access mandates

Open Access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Clearly repositories, with their ability to make research more widely available should form a crucial part of any open access strategy.

However, just because publications and other outputs are freely downloadable from repositories it does not mean they are free of all licensing restrictions. This means they may not meet the open access requirements of some funders. Every effort is now being made at IDS to ensure material in OpenDocs has a Creative Commons Attribution license.

So, if you are amongst those whose research and knowledge is not supported with a digital repository, you need to ask some hard questions. Does your institutional website offer the same benefits and if not what are you going to do about it? Failure to invest in this technology and promote its use across your networks may be undermining your potential reach.

Find out more about IDS' approach to open access publishing.

  
James Georgalakis is Head of Communications at the Institute of Development Studies. Follow James on Twitter. 


Previous blogs by James on Impact and Learning:

• Has Twitter killed the media star? (Or how I stopped worrying and learned to love social media)
• How can we make research communications stickier?
  

Open data and increasing the impact of research? It's a piece of cake!

By Duncan Edwards

I talk to a lot of friends and colleagues who work in research, knowledge intermediary, and development organisations about some of the open data work I’ve been doing in relation research communications. Their usual response is “so it’s about technology?” or “open data is about governance and transparency, right?”. Well no, it’s not just about technology and it’s broader than governance and transparency.

I believe that there is real potential for open data approaches in increasing the impact of research knowledge for poverty reduction and social justice. In this post I outline how I see Open Data fitting within a theory of change of how research knowledge can influence development.

Every year thousands of datasets, reports and articles are generated about development issues. Yet much of this knowledge is kept in ‘information silos’ and remains unreachable and underused by broader development actors. Material is either not available or difficult to find online. There can be upfront fees, concerns regarding intellectual property rights, fears that institutions/practitioners don’t have the knowhow, means or time to share, or political issues within an organisation that can mean this material is not used.

What is “Open data”? What is “Linked Open Data”? 

The Open Knowledge Foundation says “a piece of content or data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and/or share-alike.”

The Wikipedia entry for Linked Data describes it as“a method of publishing structured data so that it can be interlinked and become more useful. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP and URIs, but rather than using them to serve web pages for human readers, it extends them to share information in a way that can be read automatically by computers. This enables data from different sources to be connected and queried…. the idea is very old and is closely related to concepts including database network models, citations between scholarly articles, and controlled headings in library catalogs.”

So Linked Open Data can be described as Open Data which is published in a way that can be interlinked with other datasets. Think about two data sets with country categorisation – if you publish these as linked data, you can then make the link between related content between different datasets for any given country.

For more definitions and discussion on data see Tim Davies post "Untangling the data debate: definitions and implications".

Why should Open Data be of interest to research producers? 

The way in which the Internet and technology has evolved means that instead of simply producing a website from which people can consume your content, you can open up your content so that others can make use of, and link it in new and exciting ways.

There are many theories of change which look to articulate how research evidence can affect development policy and practice. The Knowledge Services department at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) works with a theory of change which views access to, and demand for, research knowledge, along with the capacity to engage effectively with it, as critical elements to research evidence uptake and use in relation to decision-making within development. Open Data has significant potential in relation to the ‘access to’ element of this theory of change.

Contextualisation and new spaces 

When we think about access to research knowledge – we should go beyond simply having access to a research document. Instead we must look at whether research knowledge is available in a suitable format and language, and whether it has been contextualised in a way which makes sense to an audience within a given environment.

I like to use a Data cake metaphor developed by Mark Johnstone to illustrate this - if we consider research outputs to be the data/ingredients for the cake, then we organise, summarise and catalogue this (i.e. add meta-data) to ‘bake’ into our information cake. We then present this information in a way in which we feel is most useful and “palatable” to our intended audiences with the intention they will consume it and be able to make use of new knowledge. It’s in this area that Open Data approaches can really increase the potential uptake of research – if you make your information/ content open it creates the possibility that other intermediaries can easily make use of this content to contextualise and present it to their own users in a way that is more likely to be consumed.

Essentially by opening up datasets of research materials you can reduce duplication, allow people to reuse, repurpose, remix this content in many more spaces thereby increasing the potential for research findings to be taken up and influencing change in the world.

While I see significant benefits in researchers making their outputs available and accessible in an open manner we must redress the dominance of knowledge generated in the global North. We need to continue to invest in the strengthening of intermediaries at local, national, and international levels to make use of research material and Open Data to influence positive change.

Duncan Edwards is the ICT Innovations Manager at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) - you can follow him on Twitter: @duncan_ids

NOTE: an admission on Open Access - The original article this post is based on, “Davies, T. and Edwards, D. (2012) 'Emerging Implications of Open and Linked Data for Knowledge Sharing in Development', IDS Bulletin 43 (5) 117-127”, published in the IDS Bulletin: “New Roles for Communication in Development?”. Ironically, considering it’s subject matter, is only partially open access (two free articles per issue). But you can access this article as green open access in Open Docs - http://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/123456789/2247

Open Access? Make It So

Lin Kristensen [CC-BY-2.0] 
via Wikimedia Commons

By Alison Norwood

There’s an episode in Star Trek where Captain Picard has a copy of a printed book, opened reverently, under a glass case. In his future, printed books are rare. And therefore precious.

In our own real-world future printed books will probably be equally as rare, but whatever physical way a book manifests itself – on paper or an electronic screen – it is the content which is the most precious component.

Which is why, say the advocates of Open Access, content should always be available to everyone, everywhere, for good or evil. Immediate access
to online material can enhance more quickly the progress of medical science (for instance), with the concomitant risk of research work being
copied unacknowledged or passed-off as someone else’s.

DFID’s announcement, earlier this year, that their funded projects must be Open Access (OA) by 2014 has focused the minds of those previously pondering OA practicalities.

What do we want? – Open Access! – When do we want it? – Now!

It could be really simple.

To post articles into an institutional repository, such as IDS’ OpenDocs, satisfies the immediate need to get research online and available. But to also publish in a respected academic journal – whether an established ‘print’ one or a newer platform specifically created for OA – is a more considered process.

To transition from the known peer review quality-control channels to new models should be straightforward and would be essential to ensure citations – keep the peer review system in place so that the submitted article version to a journal is the most rigorous that it can be and then, at that point, focus on the most prestigious or most far-reaching OA vehicle, dependant on the author’s priorities.

And their funding. Currently, we are still in a financially-driven publishing industry, so if the reader is no longer expected to pay for their books and journals, then the author has to pay to publish instead. How they source that funding is the current dilemma, ideally with publication written into research outputs from the start of a project. Even the most basic forms of OA publishing will need time and funds for the quality-control basics covering the services of copy-editors, designers and the lack of royalties.

The rise in numbers of OA academic journals over recent years proves the appetite for spreading research as widely as possible. The era of communication and accountability is upon us, with academic writing moving beyond a few elite bookshelves. Subsidising academic books for research has gone on for years, with some authors more evangelical and practical about this than others; now there seems general widespread willingness for author- or institutional-subsidy, or at least the theory of it. Worldwide economic recession conditions, and emphasis from funders for successful outcomes to research projects, concentrates attention on the kind of content that will in future be published from scant financing to spread across all social science disciplines.

Some OA advocates suggest moving away from ‘traditional’ publisher journal models to an in-house approach, but it should be remembered that the basic advantage that an established big-name publishing house brings to the deal is their marketing reach. Without that, if an article sits in OpenDocs and there are no resources to advertise it, who will know it is there?

Debates around OA will continue no doubt, but the move towards it seems inexorable, and a challenge that everyone concerned with publishing academic research is going to have to find their own best solutions.

Does "everything online" make for accessible research?

The OA ideology is sound – research freely available to all at one click – but at this time we need to consider carefully the transition from old ‘profit’ models to new ‘altruistic’ ones at a realistic level. It should for instance be remembered that as much as developing countries have mobile phone access and/or limited internet access, it may still be more feasible for a while longer to keep producing those precious printed copies for that particular market. Not as museum pieces in glass cages, but continuing as a useful resource.

This is a time of big shake-up for the publishing world, but it will be resolved, and perhaps in the future we may look back and wonder what all the fuss was about.


Alison Norwood is Production Editor in the Central Communications team at the Institute of Development Studies

Open for Development... what are the implications for research communication?

By Alan Stanley

The EADI Information Management Working Group (EADI IMWG for short!) is a long-standing working group whose annual meeting has been a regular event in the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) calendar for well over 20 years. This year’s meeting was held in the beautiful surroundings of the University of Antwerp and hosted by the impressive Institute of Development Policy and Management (IOB).

The topic was “Open for Development” and explored how the linked movements of Open Access, Open Data and Open Content are relevant to our work and how to make the best use of these innovations in the development context in which we work - that is knowledge-brokering and research communication.

Open Access has been a recurring theme for the group over the years but there have been significant developments in the last 18 months. A high profile global boycott of academic publisher Elsevier and the publication of the Finch report in the UK have caused unprecedented debate on Open Access issues in the broader academic community. Similarly DFID’s new Open and Enhanced Access Policy has forced many in the development community to sit up and take notice.

At the same time new technical innovations and increasing access to the internet have led to growing interest in the potential application of Open Data and Open Content (Open Educational Resources) for sharing knowledge and learning in international development.

A key question for the development community to address is to understand:

• Who is driving these innovations? 
• Do they really reflect the needs of research producers and consumers in developing countries?
• Or could they actually be adding to existing information inequalities across the digital divide?

To help answer this IDS was pleased to be able to support the attendance of Eve Gray from the Scholarly Communication in Africa programme at the University of Cape Town to give the opening keynote presentation “Open Access is 2012 –a developing country perspective”.

Eve highlighted some startling inequalities and the dominance of what she called the “English-speaking global North” in the current academic publishing models and, more pervasively, the indicators and rankings used to assess research quality, and ultimately, academic performance. This is exemplified by this map World Map of Science Research Publication 2001 (SASI, 2006), published on WorldMapper - Eve's comment being that this has not changed significantly in the last few years.

© Copyright SASI Group (University of Sheffield) Downloaded from www.worldmapper.org

She also highlighted some notable success stories in Open Access publishing models such as peer-reviewed open access journal, Plos One, and Brazil's Scientific Electronic Library Online, SciELO.

But fundamentally Eve was calling for a move from “Open Access” to “Open Research” which embraces the emerging Open Data movement and broader changes in how research is conducted and communicated. She presented a vision for the future where we focus less on journal publishing and move to less competitive and more collaborative models. The case for these becomes more apparent if we look beyond the divisive Impact Factor to measure the reach and influence of research based on "alternative metrics" (altmetrics).

Alan Stanley is Senior Thematic Convenor with IDS Knowledge Services. 


Altmetrics is something we are looking into here at IDS...What are your experiences of using altmetrics to measure reach and influence?

Eve Gray talks about why Open Access is crucial for research from the global South

By Emilie Wilson

We were delighted to welcome Eve Gray to IDS on two occasions this year - in person in September; and virtually, as a panel speaker at an IDS seminar live-streamed during Open Access week (22-28 October), entitled "Open Access: are southern voices being stifled?"

On the first occasion, I jumped on to the opportunity to be able to talk to Eve, and catch some of her thoughts on camera... watch the video below



Read more about the African Commons Project

Follow Eve Gray's blog

As good as gold? How and why to publish open access research

By Rachel Playforth

 The scholarly publishing revolution that has been steadily building for the past decade may now have reached a tipping point - the UK Government has pledged that all publicly funded research will be open access by 2014; the World Bank, UNESCO and many other major international organisations and funding bodies are backing open access; and a new set of recommendations updating the original Budapest Open Access Initiative is due out this year. But the corresponding media interest in open access hasn’t necessarily increased understanding – we’re all talking about it but do we really know what it is, what it’s for, or how to do it?

What is open access?

Image from: http://openreflections.wordpress.com/

The free and irrevocable availability of research outputs on the public internet, permitting any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of these outputs, without financial, legal, or technical barriers.


What is not open access?
Content that requires registration or is offered free for a limited period only. Formats that prevent downloading, saving, printing or copying. Arguably, content where text mining or indexing by web crawling tools is prevented.



Why open access?
Because removing access barriers will enrich and accelerate research. Because scholars in poorer institutions and poorer countries shouldn’t be excluded. Because publishers shouldn’t make huge profits from research, peer-reviewing and editing work done by academics for free. Because we shouldn’t have to pay twice for publicly funded (and potentially vital) research, once through our taxes and once through subscriptions and fees paid to commercial publishers of scholarly journals.

Why else open access?
Because many funding bodies, including the Wellcome Trust, RCUK and DFID, require it as a condition of funding. Even if you are half-hearted about the ideology, you may have to embrace the reality.


Gold or green? 
There are two routes available to researchers who want (or need) to make their work open access, known as ‘gold’ and ‘green’. The costs of publishing in peer-reviewed journals are currently met by the reader (probably via their library), though subscription charges and pay-per-view fees.

Gold open access shifts the cost to the author, who pays (probably via their research funding or their institution) to publish in an open access journal. This was the approach most strongly recommended by the recent Finch report on expanding access to published research findings, and is the ultimate goal of the UK government. Based on the idea that full gold OA will eliminate the ‘paying twice’ problem with subscription journals, it’s been estimated that it could lead to whole system savings of around £80 million per year.

The other route is known as green open access, represented by research repositories. The majority of commercial scholarly publishers allow some form of ‘self-archiving’ in subject or institutional repositories, usually but not always with an embargo period to protect their revenues for the first few months after publication. If all journals were open access, there would of course be no need for embargo periods, and arguably, no need for repositories. (The Finch report sees their role shifting more towards preserving/sharing research data and grey literature). But in the current transition period where the subscription model coexists with the OA model, repositories are working successfully with both.

Repositories also offer advantages to researchers and institutions beyond open access policy compliance:

1. Impact: research shows that open access articles tend to be more cited than comparable material behind paywalls 
2. Discoverability: the protocols used by repository software are international and interoperable to facilitate data exchange and reuse, and the metadata standards mean the content is quickly indexed by Google and repository indexes. 
3. Preservation: the repository can store copies of research for posterity in a way that is independent of the original format (which may become obsolete). 
4. Reputation: a repository provides both an accurate record of, and shop window for, an institution’s (and an individual researcher’s) intellectual output. 
5. Flexibility: repositories can contain all forms of work including peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, working papers, presentations, images, audio, and data. 

But what about my intellectual property? 

True open access is compatible with protecting copyright and intellectual property – the one restriction on reuse is that the work should be properly attributed. There are various Creative Commons licences that can help make this explicit. An author who retains their copyright and makes their work open access has more control over that work than if they had transferred the copyright or given exclusive rights to a publisher, as is standard in many publishing contracts.

And my impact? 

Many researchers worry about diluting the impact and credibility of their research by taking the open access route. The number of established open access journals is currently too small to rival the impact factors of the major subscription offerings, it’s true, but this will change as open access is mandated more widely. As for repositories, self-archiving a copy of your article does not necessarily have an adverse effect on citations of the published version. It will certainly increase the number of times it is read, and many repositories provide a DOI and specify that the published version should be cited.

More information 
Find open access repositories on OpenDoar
Find open access journals on DOAJ 
Check journal self-archiving policies on SherpaRomeo  

Rachel Playforth is Repository Coordinator at the British Library for Development Studies, based at IDS. To find out more about the IDS Repository, hosted by OpenDocs, contact Rachel.