Open Access News

Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has just released its Project Grants Funding Policy for funding commencing in 2008 (undated).  The new NHMRC policy is to encourage open access for the research it funds:

16.2 Dissemination of Scientific Results

To maximise the benefits from research, findings need to be disseminated as broadly as possible to allow access by other researchers and the wider community. The NHMRC encourages researchers to consider the benefits of depositing their data and any publications arising from a research project in an appropriate subject and/or institutional repository wherever such a repository is available to the researcher(s). Any research outputs that have been or will be deposited in appropriate repositories should be identified in the Final Report.

Unlike the Australian Research Council (ARC), which announced a similar OA policy last week, the NHMRC does not (yet) require non-complying grantees to justify their non-compliance, an extra obligation that effectively converts the ARC encouragement into a mandate.  However, Colin Steele writes:

Miranda Crean from the NHMRC research policy section emailed me on 8 December to say: "The IT system supporting our Final Reports does not currently allow an area for applicants to justify why they will not be despositing. However, once the new system is up and running (approx. 18 mths) the words "If a researcher is not intending to deposit the data from a project in a repository within a six-month period, he/she should include the reasons in the project's Final Report." will be included in the policy.

For this reason, I consider the NHMRC policy to be as much a mandate as the ARC policy. 

PS:  Kudos to the NHMRC.  There are now two Australian OA mandates from public funding agencies (ARC and NHMRC) and two from universities or departments (the Queensland U of Technology and the U of Tasmania School of Computing).

Pakistan has launched the first stage of a program to provide free online access to the country's laws (statutes and case decisions) for the country's bar associations.

PS:  There seems to be no plan to provide free online access for citizens.

On Thursday, Stevan Harnad wrote a blog post on the metrics for the UK Research Assessment Exercise.  I asked him to elaborate on the OA connection and here's his response: 

Peter Suber: "If the metrics have a stronger OA connection, can you say something short (by email or on the blog) that I could quote for readers who aren't clued in, esp. readers outside the UK?"

(1) In the UK (Research Assessment Exercise, RAE) and Australia (Research Quality Framework, RQF) all researchers and institutions are evaluated for "top-sliced" funding, over and above competitive research proposals.

(2) Everywhere in the world, researchers and research institutions have research performance evaluations, on which careers/salaries, research funding, economic benefits, and institutional/departmental ratings depend.

(3) There is now a natural synergy growing between OA self-archiving, Institutional Repositories (IRs), OA self-archiving mandates, and the online "metrics" toward which both the RAE/RQF and research evaluation in general are moving.

(4) Each institution's IR is the natural place from which to derive and display research performance indicators: publication counts, citation counts, download counts, and many new metrics, rich and diverse ones, that will be mined from the OA corpus, making research evaluation much more open, sensitive to diversity, adapted to each discipline, predictive, and equitable.

(5) OA Self-Archiving not only allows performance indicators (metrics) to be collected and displayed, and new metrics to be developed, but OA also enhances metrics (research impact), both competitively (OA vs. NOA) and absolutely (Quality Advantage: OA benefits the best work the most, and Early Advantage), as well as making possible the data-mining of the OA corpus for research purposes. (Research Evaluation, Research Navigation, and Research Data-Mining are all very closely related.)

(6) This powerful and promising synergy between Open Research and Open Metrics is hence also a strong incentive for institutional and funder OA mandates, which will in turn hasten 100% OA: Their connection needs to be made clear, and the message needs to be spread to researchers, their institutions, and their funders.

(Needless to say, closed, internal, non-displayed metrics are also feasible, where appropriate.)...

Researchers and discovery services:  Behavior, perceptions, and needs, Research Information Network, November 2006.  A major study (113 pp.) commissioned by the Research Information Network (RIN) and undertaken by Rightscom. From the full report:

1.3 Key findings...

1.3.2 Users cannot always access the resources they have discovered

The main frustration is not with the research discovery services themselves but with the problem of subsequently accessing identified sources and materials. The 'last mile' of the process which actually delivers the document or other source that has been searched for is the focus of concern, with lack of access to journal articles because of a subscription barrier being the most frequently-expressed difficulty experienced. Librarians agree with researchers that the key problem is accessing online journals rather than problems with the discovery tools themselves. (Section 4.2.9)...

4.2.9 Satisfaction with resource discovery tools

Many researchers are satisfied with the resource discovery services available to support their research....The most generally-expressed concern was about securing access to source materials found by these discovery services. A regularly expressed frustration is the difficulty in seeing articles and other materials because an institution does not have access to the required journal or source.

IBM, GT Continue Intellectual Property Reform, a press release from Georgia Tech, December 7, 2006.  Excerpt:

IBM and seven leading U.S. universities today announced several new open software research projects under a program designed in conformance with the Open Collaboration Research Principles, a set of guidelines announced previously to help promote an open approach to overcome university-industry intellectual property challenges.

Under IBM’s new Open Collaborative Research program, project results developed between IBM Research and top university faculty and their students will be made available as open source software code and all additional intellectual property developed will be openly published or made available royalty-free.

Universities participating in the program include Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Purdue University, Rutgers University, University of California at Berkeley, and the University of California at Davis....

The research aims for major advancements in the development of defect-free software, new healthcare solutions for better decision making by doctors and nurses, new technology to protect a person’s identity and secure a company’s data from thieves, and advanced mathematics to optimize methods for how we live and work everyday....

These research projects demonstrate continued benefit from the Open Collaboration Principles announced by the University & Industry Innovation Summit Team in December 2005....The IBM program is intended to accelerate the innovation and development of open software across a breadth of areas, thus enabling the development of related industry standards and greater interoperability, while managing intellectual property in a manner that enhances these goals.

EPA Scrubbing Library Website To Make Reports Unavailable, a press release from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), December 8, 2006.  (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)

In defiance of Congressional requests to immediately halt closures of library collections, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is purging records from its library websites, making them unavailable to both agency scientists and outside researchers, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). At the same time, EPA is taking steps to prevent the re-opening of its shuttered libraries, including the hurried auctioning off of expensive bookcases, cabinets, microfiche readers and other equipment for less than a penny on the dollar.

In a letter dated November 30, 2006, four incoming House Democratic committee chairs demanded that EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson assure them “that the destruction or disposition of all library holdings immediately ceased upon the Agency's receipt of this letter and that all records of library holdings and dispersed materials are being maintained.” On the very next day, December 1st, EPA de-linked thousands of documents from the website for the Office of Prevention, Pollution and Toxic Substances (OPPTS) Library, in EPA’s Washington D.C. Headquarters.

Last month without notice to its scientists or the public, EPA abruptly closed the OPPTS Library, the agency’s only specialized research repository on health effects and properties of toxic chemicals and pesticides. The web purge follows reports that library staffers were ordered to destroy its holdings by throwing collections into recycling bins.

“EPA’s leadership appears to have gone feral, defying all appeals to reason or consultation,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, noting that Congress has yet to review, let alone approve, the library closures. “The new Congress convening in January will finally have a chance to decide whether EPA will continue to pillage its library network.” ...

“One big irony is that EPA claimed the reason it needed to close libraries was to save money but in the process they are spending and wasting money like drunken sailors,” Ruch added, noting EPA refuses to say how much it plans to spend digitizing the mountains of documents that it has removed from library shelves....In spite of its pleas of poverty, EPA is spending millions on a public relations campaign to improve the image of its research program....“No one believes that EPA is closing libraries and crating up irreplaceable collections for fiscal reasons,” Ruch concluded. “Instead, the real agenda appears to be controlling access by its own specialists and outside researchers to key technical information.”

OFT says more competition for public sector information would generate £1 billion extra annually, Free Our Data: the blog, December 8, 2006.  Excerpt:

[The UK] Office of Fair Trading...has just published its...report into the commercial use of public sector information.

And it thinks there should be more, and that there should be less competition from the public sector information holders (PSIHs).

The key comment comes from John Fingleton, OFT Chief Executive, who said:

‘This is ground-breaking work for the OFT, looking at hidden markets in the economy. These monopoly public sector bodies cost the UK economy £500 million in lost opportunities. Our recommendations will help to make this valuable public asset more easily available for commercial uses which will benefit the economy and consumers.’

£500 million? The taxes on that would easily cover the £50 million in private sector funds that the Ordnance Survey needs, wouldn’t it? ...

Update. Michael Cross has more details on this OFT report in the December 14, 2006, issue of The Guardian.

Stevan Harnad, 4th Australian Mandate (7th Funder, 9th Institution, 16th Worldwide, Open Access Archivangelism, December 8, 2006.  Excerpt:

On the good authority of Arthur Sale (and Peter Suber), the classification of the Australian Research Council (ARC) self-archiving policy in ROARMAP has been upgraded to a mandate.

There are now 16 self-archiving mandates worldwide, 4 of them in Australia: A departmental and university-wide one at U. Tasmania, a university-wide one at QUT, and a funder mandate at ARC, soon to be joined by another funder mandate (NHMRC) and reinforced by the Research Quality Framework (RQF) (the Australian counterpart of the UK Research Assessment Exercise, RAE).

Congratulations to Australia and the Archivangelist of the Antipodes, Arthur Sale (and also to Tom Cochrane, Paul Callan and Colin Steele)!

Harvesting Knowledge in the Americas, a press release from University of New Mexico, December 7, 2006.  Excerpt:

Not long ago scholars wanting to conduct in depth research about indigenous cultures in Latin America, for example, would have to travel to the region and visit different libraries and repositories. Maybe the researcher would be lucky enough to find needed documents, photos, books and resources critical to his research. But maybe the materials couldn’t be located, were unavailable or the library was closed. The days of time-consuming, expensive research in Latin American topics may soon be over, thanks to the Latin America Knowledge Harvester and Portal (LAKH).

The Harvester for Creating Knowledge Streams in the Americas Project, coordinated by UNM’s Latin American and Iberian Institute, addresses the challenge of identifying and maintaining stable and reliable Internet access to library and institutional collections and digitized archives in and about Latin America....

Cynthia Radding, director, Latin American and Iberian Institute, and Johann van Reenen, assistant dean, University Libraries, are co-PIs on the grant.

The idea for the harvester came from the Open Archives Initiative established in Santa Fe in 1999....

“The intent of the grant is to find new avenues of access to foreign information, preferably in translation and in a digital format,” van Reenen said. He added that the biggest challenge of the pilot project is creating a trilingual search engine and organizing the streams of information in the portal....

He said that LAKH allows for “harvesting” data from any intellectual asset that meets the standard anywhere in the world. By harvesting meta-data, information can be drawn from seemingly unalike repositories. “It will create easy interdisciplinary research. Essentially, it will allow users to mine information from sources not even thought about before,” he said.

LAKH resides at UNM as part of the institutional repository....

Oren Sreebny has blogged some notes on John Willinsky's talk at ECAR 2006.  Excerpt:

...We need to move beyond something like sustainability - as a guitarist he notes that you have to work your fingers to keep the sustain, not just wait. Sustainability is just the status quo - but we know in our hearts that's not what this is about - we need to be very conscious of the values we want to sustain. And in access to knowledge the status quo is not working - we have degradation in that access.

Sustainability speaks to a business model - which in his business as an academic is the evil twin - what would Socrates have said when asked for a business model? ...

Google has changed the equation in terms of access to knowledge. Google has offered to digitize all back issues of journals, with the journals maintaining the copyright ownership and only showing ads when the journals ok it, and sharing the revenues with the journals when they do. Only one journal in Canada has taken them up on the offer.

The situation is one of corporate concentration. John Wiley just offered to purchase Blackwell. This creates a publishing house of 1200 journals. Reed-Elsevier, 2000 journals, etc. 6000 titles owned by four corporate entities. Libraries are having to buy in bundles of titles, having to sign non-disclosure agreements on the pricing. Only very few of those bundles allow you to cancel single titles.

The effect is on academic freedom - the ability to start, subscribe to, and stop new journals is at the heart of academic freedom....

What does it mean when a journal goes corporate? 45% of journal titles are in corporate hands. When an association's journals go corporate, the price goes up. The scholarly societies don't see a choice - they need support for the electronic distribution of knowledge, and the publishers have very sophisticated mechanisms for that. Ted Bergstrom at UCSB has done work on comparing prices for non-profit vs. commercial journals. He has measured price per citation - in non-profit sector it's $15, in commercial it's $90. The commercialization is increasing cost, and unless budgets are rising that means a reduction in the access to knowledge. But this is in an era where the cost to disseminate knowledge is decreasing....

The principle is to increase access - anything that increases access to knowledge adds to the public good....

Publishers agree that authors have the right to put articles in institutional repositories or faculty web sites. Repositories are the first step - but how do we get people to fill them? Most faculty think publication is the end of the process. But it's to the advantage of the faculty, department, and institution to have the article in the repository - it will increase your citation rate. There are figures that suggest a 40% increase in readership from appearing in open access repositories....

Instead of sustaining the future, we want to envision a better future. We should be willing to create futures that increase access to knowledge.

The Sacramento News and Review recently ran a cover story on Jonathan Eisen's research on glassy winged sharpshooter symbionts, leading Jonathan to blog this comment about the publicity:

[T]hey were able to use a figure from my paper since of course, the paper in fully Open Access. So my work gets some extra exposure that might have been more difficult for the paper to pull off if it was published in a non Open Access journal. In essence, Open Access publishing is the gift that keeps on giving. As long as I keep getting credit for it, it is great for me that people do not have to get permission or pay a fee to use figures from my papers.

Anthony Mao has translated the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing into Chinese.  (Thanks, Anthony!)

Joseph C. McDonald, Open Access, Radiation Protection Dosimetry, November 15, 2006.  An editorial.  Only the first three and a half sentences are available to non-subscribers, at least so far.

Update. I've learned that this one-page editorial merely introduces readers to the Oxford Open program, in which the journal participates. (Thanks to Mel DeSart.)

Gary Price, History and Overview: Microsoft Live Book Search (Beta) Now Online, ResourceShelf, December 6, 2006.  The best account I've seen of the background to this initiative.  I can't excerpt it without cutting most of the details that make it valuable.

Heather Morrison, Open Access Magazine Collection for CUFTS, a letter to the British Columbia Electronic Library Network (BC ELN), December 7, 2006.  Excerpt:

Several open access collections are already available in CUFTS, such as the Directory of Open Access Journals and the SFU Library Open Access Collection. BC ELN partner libraries have expressed an interest in developing another open access collection, which may include magazines as well as peer-reviewed journals. Once this list is developed, libraries will be able to include the list, or selected titles from the list, within their services.

To view the discussion, go to the reSearcher Software Forums.

To add titles, you need to register. This is a very simple process which only takes a couple of minutes. Please have available: the title, ISSN, fulltext start date, and the journal URL. From the initial post, click "post reply" to add a message to this thread.

While this initiative is the inspiration of BC ELN partner libraries, participation and benefits are available to all reSearcher libraries. If there is interest, a team may be formed to facilitate the work of coordinating the list.

PS:  CUFTS describes itself as "an open source (GPL) OpenURL link resolver designed for use by library consortia."  The acronym doesn't stand for anything.

A fair share, Nature, December 7, 2006.  An unsigned editorial.  Excerpt:

In psychology there is little tradition of making the data on which researchers base their statistical analyses freely available to others after publication. This makes it difficult for anyone to independently reanalyse research results, and prevents small data sets from being combined for meta-analysis, or large ones mined for fresh insights or perspectives.

Psychologists need to rethink their reluctance to share data....

The need for more data sharing has just been amply demonstrated by Jelte Wicherts, a psychologist specializing in research methods at the University of Amsterdam, who tried to check out the robustness of statistical analyses in papers published in top psychology journals.

He selected the November and December 2004 issues of four journals published by the American Psychological Association (APA), which requires its authors to agree to share their data with other researchers after publication. In June 2005, Wicherts wrote to each corresponding author requesting data, in full confidence, for simple reanalysis. Six months and several hundred e-mails later, he abandoned the mission, having received only a quarter of the data sets. He reported his failure in an APA journal in October (J. M. Wicherts et al. Am. Psychol. 61, 726–728; 2006).

Researchers often have valid reasons for constraining access to their raw data, such as the privacy of research subjects. But data from most studies based on confidential information can be coded in a way that will guarantee their subjects’ anonymity. The few cases where this is not possible can be exempted from the move towards data sharing.

A second factor deterring openness is a natural desire to retain exclusive access to data that took years of care and attention to collect....

The APA’s editors and publishers are now planning their response to Wicherts’ report. One result should be the acceleration of moves, already under discussion, to require the deposition of data as supplementary electronic material in APA databases. Where the APA leads, other psychology journals are likely to follow.

Granting bodies must also play a part. In 2003, the US National Institutes of Health introduced rules requiring the public sharing of data in psychology studies for grants exceeding $500,000, allowing exemptions where confidentiality issues cannot be circumvented. Other agencies should follow suit. And university departments need to do more to teach the basics of note-keeping and data presentation, to prepare their students for an era in which data sharing will increasingly become the norm.

Comment.  Kudos to Nature for this call for open data (and for appropriate exceptions).  I hope that the APA will take the arguments to heart.  Sharing data can improve research without compromising confidentiality.

John Timmer, Trolling the arXiv for plagiarism, Ars Technica, December 6, 2006.  Excerpt:

In a subscription-only report on an upcoming conference presentation, Nature spills the beans on what may be our best handle yet on plagiarism in the world of academic science. Most research into this area has been limited by the inaccessibility of many of the peer-reviewed journals, which require subscription access. As such, it's hard to build a global picture of the literature. In physics and astronomy, however, many publications appear in the arXiv database, which typically hosts them in advance of publication.

Researchers created an arXiv crawler, and had it parse each paper into seven-word pieces. After throwing out common phrases (such as acknowledgments of support and affiliation), the program then looked for high numbers of shared text fragments. Plagiarism was defined as cases where there were high amounts of shared text, but no shared authors. Here, the news appears good: out of over 280,000 publications scanned, only 677 possible cases were identified. A detailed examination of 20 of these showed that just three were cases with serious, paper-wide duplications....Considering that arXiv manuscripts are often not in their final form, the real rate of problems may be even lower than that seen by the authors, as more citations may be added later in the preparation process....

Computing Reviews from the ACM is the latest peer-reviewed journal to launch a blog.  (Thanks to STLQ.)

Jim Till, Distributive justice and open access, Be Open Accessible or Obscure, December 7, 2006.  Excerpt:

Some of the more powerful ethics-based justifications for open access continue to be ones based on the concept of “distributive justice”. These justifications can also be regarded as ones based on concepts of “fairness”, or “equitable-access”. An eloquent example of a justification of this kind was provided by Jean-Claude Guédon, in a presentation to the May 2001 meeting of The Association of Research Libraries, entitled: In Oldenburg’s Long Shadow.... He wrote: “Librarians can (and ought to) help create a navigable, worldwide ocean of knowledge, open to all; and, like Odysseus, they will know how to help negotiate the tricky ebbs and eddies, the vortices and the undertows of chaotic knowledge flows that necessarily accompany the development of a distributed intelligence civilization - a civilization open to all that are good enough (excellence), and not only to those who can afford it (elites)“....

Justifications based on concepts of distributive justice are especially relevant in relation to access to health-related information. An example has been provided by an article entitled Equitable access to scientific and technical information for health, in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization 2003(Oct); 81(10), by Hooman Momen (Editor, Bulletin of the WHO)....An excerpt: “Health is perhaps the area of most intense demand for greater access to scientific and technical information, partly because failure to obtain it can be literally fatal“. Thus, the “global health” justification for open access is based on the “distributive justice” justification. An eloquent summary, by Barbara Kirsop, of the “global health” justification for open access is included in a message that she sent to the American Scientist Open Access Forum on 2 January 2004, on the subject Re: Free Access vs. Open Access.

Excerpt: “Scientists (and patients with malaria) in the developing world need the information now, asap, in any format that can best be provided, don’t wait til everything is perfect, just do it. And science in the developed world equally needs the highly relevant research from the developing regions now - though it mostly doesn’t recognise this knowledge gap“....

Mark Chillingworth, US elections delay open access articles bill, Information World Review, November 30, 2007.  Excerpt:

The mid-term elections in the US are likely to delay the introduction of the Federal Research Public Access Act, with the bill having to be re-introduced to the US Senate in 2007. Despite the delay, the volume of support for the bill grows ever louder....

“It is likely the bill will have to be re-introduced,” said Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resource Coalition (SPARC)....

“Scholars and the public are on the right side of this matter. FRPAA should become law,” said David Shulenburger, vice president for Academic Affairs at the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges (NASULGC). He backed up his call: “We now have significant experience with journals that have voluntarily permitted articles they published to be made available for free after delay periods… evidence is not consistent with an apocalyptic collapse of the subscriber base.” Shulenburger added that those journals which have volunteered to make content freely available have not seen a collapse of their subscriber base.

Duane Webster, executive director of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), said: “The research library community vigorously advocates passage of FRPAA. This legislation is an essential step towards broadening access to widely needed information resources.”...

The UK government has released the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property (December 2006) and all the research, testimony, evidence, and public comments collected by the Gowers commission during its review of UK IP law.  From the report:

Recommendation 1: Amend section 60(5) of the Patents Act 1977 to clarify the research exception to facilitate experimentation, innovation and education....

Recommendation 3: The European Commission should retain the length of protection on sound recordings and performers’ rights at 50 years.

Recommendation 4: Policy makers should adopt the principle that the term and scope of protection for IP rights should not be altered retrospectively....

Recommendation 8: Introduce a limited private copying exception by 2008 for format shifting for works published after the date that the law comes into effect. There should be no accompanying levies for consumers.

Recommendation 9: Allow private copying for research to cover all forms of content. This relates to the copying, not the distribution, of media.

Recommendation 10a: Amend s.42 of the CDPA by 2008 to permit libraries to copy the master copy of all classes of work in permanent collection for archival purposes and to allow further copies to be made from the archived copy to mitigate against subsequent wear and tear.

Recommendation 10b: Enable libraries to format shift archival copies by 2008 to ensure records do not become obsolete....

Recommendation 13: Propose a provision for orphan works to the European Commission, amending Directive 2001/29/EC....

Recommendation 30a: The Patent Office should publish and maintain an open standards web database, linked to the EPO’s esp@cenet web database, containing all patents issued under licence of right.

Recommendation 30b: The Patent Office should publish and maintain an open standards web database, linked to esp@cenet containing all expired patents....

Comments.

• All the report's recommendations that bear on research are good for research, even if the report omits other recommendations that would have been good or better.  The overall thrust of the report is to restore balance to copyright and patent law, not to continue the trend of giving IP maximalists all that they want.  That's good.  But while the commission was wise and courageous to refuse to lengthen the term of copyright for sound recordings, for example, I can't understand why the same reasoning didn't apply to writings.
• I used to cover copyright law in detail, at least insofar as it affected scholarly research and publication.  But as news of hard-core open access developments has grown in volume, I've had to narrow my scope, and copyright is one issue I've had to prune.  So I won't be covering the aftermath of this important report except where there is a clear OA connection.

Judea Franck, Who should have access to federally funded research? Inside the 2006 Federal Research Public Access Act, Library Connection (from Colorado State University), Fall 2006.  (Thanks to Jennifer McLennan.)  Excerpt:

Who should have access to federally funded research? Researchers? Professors? Students? Taxpayers? Should research findings be freely available on the Internet? What would be the impact if colleagues in all fields could exchange information with the click of a mouse and without the barriers of membership, subscriptions, or dues?  These questions have recently been brought to the forefront by the introduction of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)....

After his experiences on the battlefields of World War I, Alexander Fleming made a shocking discovery—bacteria could be an even deadlier force than enemy artillery. In the startling conditions of trench warfare, infection caused 15 percent of war-related fatalities, or roughly 5.5 million out of 37 million total deaths. Fleming returned to his London laboratory driven to find some way to prevent these deaths. His pursuit eventually led to the discovery that mold, specifically penicillin, could kill bacteria....[W]hen Fleming published his findings in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology in 1928, his work raised little interest and was nearly lost to scientific obscurity. It was not until 1938, ten years later, that British scientist Ernst Chain and Australian scientist Howard Florey rediscovered Fleming’s article....

[I]n today’s world, with information increasingly at one’s fingertips, it is amazing to note that some of the very same barriers that resulted in the ten-year delay of penicillin research and countless other discoveries still exist....

Just imagine if Fleming could have sat down at a computer and told colleagues in England and beyond about the miracle mold that could knock out staph bacteria. In fact, the number of visitors to digital content on Web sites so far outnumbers traditional journal circulations that the potential to broadly, widely, and immediately impact the scientific community via publishing online is nearly limitless. Take, for example, the journal Science. Science is one of the most commonly cited journals and boasts 130,000 print subscriptions. Yet its Web site, which contains a mix of free and subscription-required portions, receives 1.8 million weekly visits....

[There] is a growing movement to grant taxpayers access to research that is funded with taxpayer dollars. Led largely by the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, an organization in which CSU is a founding member, the movement insists on developing open, online access to federally funded research. Its main advocates include universities, libraries, consumer groups, and perhaps most notably a long list of patient advocate groups including the Genetic Alliance, a coalition of 600 disease-specific organizations that advocates for better healthcare treatments.

Sharon Terry became the coalition’s president after she and her husband encountered astounding barriers to research literature that would help them understand the debilitating genetic disorder from which both of their children suffered. The Terrys worked around those barriers by volunteering at a hospital and gaining access to the hospital’s library. Armed with the research that they were first denied, the Terrys became experts on their children’s disorders and, working with a network of scientists, became co-discoverers of the gene responsible for the disorder.  Although it is uncommon for lay individuals to make such a significant impact in the research community, 80 percent of taxpayers, according to a recent Harris interactive poll, support a right to “open access” and have a strong desire not necessarily to view research findings themselves, but rather to feel the real-world benefits reflected when their own doctors, pharmacists, and other practitioners have better access to cutting-edge discoveries....

PS:  This is one of the best articles I've seen on the public interest (as opposed to the self-interest of researchers as authors and readers) in OA and FRPAA.

John Battelle reports that Google scientists don't present their research at conferences as often as Microsoft or Yahoo scientists.  (Thanks to Doug Caverly.)

Fred Stoss, ALA and the EPA National Library Network, Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, Fall 2006.  Excerpt:

Last February, the nonprofit group, PEER -- Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility -- sent out a press release that shocked the library world: The proposed budget submitted by the Executive Office of Management and Budget included a reduction in the fiscal year 2007 budget for the EPA Libraries of roughly 80 percent. $2.0 million would be cut from a $2.5 million operating budget for the U.S. EPA National Library Network (27 regional, laboratory, research, and other libraries), along with an additional reduction of $500,000 (roughly 50 percent) in the agency's subscriptions....

Since the FY 2007 budget was passed retaining the drastic cuts to the EPA Libraries, several regional libraries have closed (Dallas, Chicago, Kansas City, and New York City, which has replaced its Region 2 Library web site with a series of environmental quotations). Others have greatly reduced services to EPA research, regulatory, policy, and enforcement staff (Boston, San Francisco). EPA Headquarters Libraries have closed or are in the process of closing, and nearly all public access to the EPA Libraries has ceased....

Could ALA and others have prevented these closings and the catastrophic losses associated with what was most likely the world's largest environmental library and information network?  I doubt it....

What could have been a shining example of transforming a 35-year old, time-tested, and battle-hardened National Library Network for the Environment, has become just one more example of the actions of a presidential administration that has been one of the most hostile to its own library, information, and data resources....

PS:  For more background see my blog postings on the EPA library closings.

Laura Cohen has sketched her idea of the Ideal 2.0 Scholarly Portal.  (Thanks to Richard Akerman.)

Swivel was founded last year (December 2005) but I just ran across it (thanks to Glyn Moody).  Although it's a year old, it's still in preview mode and should launch next week.  From the site:

We built Swivel because we wanted a Web site for data.

Like many business folks, we had spent a bunch of time editing spreadsheets, reading other people's spreadsheets and emailing spreadsheets back and forth. We had learned a bunch of macros, shortcuts and tricks for editing data. However, when it came time to share data with other people - so they could explore the data themselves - it was...less good. We, unfortunately, had to freeze the data in the form of a document or presentation because only other power users could really go nuts exploring the data....

[W]hen we say Swivel is a Web site for data we're talking about those three things:

• we use farms of powerful computers and algorithms at the Swivel data centers to transform a lonely grid of numbers and letters into hundreds - sometimes thousands - of graphs that can be explored and compared with any other public data in Swivel
• we have ratings and comments and publishing shortcuts for bloggers, so folks can share ideas, talk about insights and understand data together
• we transform the sometimes tedious task of reading someone else's spreadsheet into a fun experience of clicking through a Web site full of images, graphs and color.

How are we going to pay the bills?...The rules will be simple:

• If you upload data for the public, Swivel is free.
• If you upload data and choose to keep it private and secure, there will be a fee....

Swivel lets you explore data and share your insights with others. Swivel has data about politics, economics, weather, sports, business and more....

Once you find an interesting graph, share it. Swivel makes it easy to post great graphs to your blog or link to a graph through email. When other folks see your graph it's not just a dull image —no way! People can click it and start their own cycle of exploring, comparing and sharing.

• Post a graph on your blog
• Email a graph link to your friends and colleagues.
• Have folks click on your graph and explore and compare the data themselves.
• Keep track of how many times people have viewed and clicked on your graphs.

Swivel is designed for sharing....

Here's Michael Arrington's description from TechCrunch:

Swivel Co-founders Dmitry Dimov and Brian Mulloy start off by describing their company as “YouTube for Data.” That’s a good start for someone trying to understand it, because the site allows users to upload data - any data - and display it to other users visually. The number of page views your website generates. Or a stock price over time. Weather data. Commodity prices. The number of Bald Eagles in Washington state. Whatever. Uploaded data can be rated, commented and bookmarked by other users, helping to sort the interesting (and accurate) wheat from the chaff. And graphs of data can be embedded into websites....

But then the real fun begins. You and other users can then compare that data to other data sets to find possible correlation (or lack thereof)....And better yet, Swivel will be automatically comparing your data to other data sets in the background, suggesting possible correlations to you that you may never have noticed.

Academic types are going to go nuts over this. I spent a summer in college running regression analysis models on economic data. Being able to simply upload data to Swivel and then begin to slice and dice the data would have saved a lot of time. And being able to compare our data to what others were doing in related fields could have yielded results that we would never have aimed for....

Look for Swivel to launch later this week after a year of quiet development....

Comment.  Swivel isn't just a home for OA data.  It's a tool to automate the process of comparing data, turning data into active or clickable graphs, sharing data, and rating, discussing, and analyzing data.  I hope OA-minded scientists will try Swivel for their scientific data and that science-minded OA activists will try Swivel for their data about OA.  I have two reasons:  I want to *use* data about OA in this easy and flexible way, and I want OA data to become so transparently useful that it will inspire others to make their data OA as well.

The presentations from the Open Knowledge Foundation Forum on Civic Information No. 2 (London, November 28, 2006) are now online.

SPARC has named Melissa Hagemann of OSI the latest SPARC Innovator.  From yesterday's announcement: 

SPARC has selected Melissa Hagemann, the Program Manager of the Open Access Initiative at the Open Society Institute (OSI), as the newest SPARC Innovator.  Hagemann was chosen in recognition of the new possibilities that now exist for scholars, institutions, and the public since the introduction of the Open Access movement and in honor of Hagemann's seminal role in launching the movement with her OSI colleagues.

For Hagemann, the Open Access movement is the realization of an ideal that can benefit thousands of institutions and millions of people, including those in transitional and developing countries who would otherwise have to do without the benefits of critical research findings.  To achieve her goal, Hagemann has worked closely with OSI colleagues, deploying critical resources to launch the Open Access movement.  Most significantly, OSI convened the December 2001 gathering in Budapest that culminated in the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Since that landmark meeting, OSI has funded about $3 million in individual and institutional grants related to Open Access.

Despite the grant and funding assistance, however, Hagemann's contributions to the Open Access movement are not primarily financial. Her intellectual creativity and far-reaching vision led her to strategize on a way forward within OSI to unify the Open Access movement by linking together open access journals with open archiving strategies, an idea conceived by the participants in Budapest.

"Melissa's recognition in 2001 that the time was right to bring people together to create the Open Access movement was critical," said SPARC Director Heather Joseph.  "The initial BOAI gathering set out the principles of OA to foster change on a systemic level, rather than on a journal-by-journal basis.  Her clear focus was on defining this new concept, and then supporting education to plant the concept of OA around the world.  Open Access would simply not have had the tremendous impact it has had so far without this crucial first step."

"It is an immense honor to be profiled this way, along with my colleagues at OSI and those who participated in the meeting in Budapest which lead to the BOAI," Hagemann said.

Hagemann's strategic, behind-the-scenes planning on behalf of the Open Access movement during the past five years set in motion a series of events that have affected scholarship around the globe.  To read the complete SPARC Innovator profile detailing Hagemann's role, please see [this page].... 

Individuals can nominate potential SPARC Innovators at [this page].

Comment.  This honor is much-deserved.  I'm especially glad to see it because Melissa's many contributions have been behind the scenes and are not widely known.  To appreciate them, do see SPARC's longer account of her role in the OA movement.  (Disclosure:  I gratefully acknowledge that I'm funded by OSI and that the funding decisions have been Melissa's.)

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has archived more than 85.8 billion web pages, all of them OA.  For details, see yesterday's announcement.

Oxford University Press has tweaked the policy for its Oxford Open hybrid program.  The following is new as of yesterday or today:

Oxford Journals asks authors to state the source of funding used to pay the Open Access publication charge, after having a manuscript accepted. This provides transparency for readers, funding bodies, and the publisher. If appropriate the information will be added to the Acknowledgement section of the article. It is not compulsory to provide this information, but we encourage all authors to do so.

PS:  Oxford Open is the first hybrid program to adopt such a policy.

The Journal of Medical Case Reports is a new OA journal from BioMed Central.  From yesterday's announcement:

BioMed Central, the leading open access publisher, today announced the launch of Journal of Medical Case Reports, the only journal in the world that is devoted purely to case reports. An online, open access peer-reviewed journal, Journal of Medical Case Reports is expected to publish its first articles in early 2007. The journal is now accepting submissions....

"Case reports that expand the field of medicine are of interest and value to clinicians. Publishing case reports helps fulfil the need to gather more comprehensive data about individual cases. This potentially valuable resource is currently neglected by many medical journals, so Journal of Medical Case Reports will provide an important outlet for these studies." says Professor Deborah Saltman, BioMed Central’s Editorial Director for Medicine....

Steve Hitchcock, Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Co-existence or Competition?  Eprints Insiders, December 5, 2006.  A useful compendium of listserv comments on the report by Chris Beckett and Simon Inger, Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Co-existence or Competition? An international Survey of Librarians' Preferences, Publishing Research Consortium, October 26, 2006.

Comment. This is not only a helpful companion to the Beckett/Inger report, but a good idea that should spread to other major reports and studies.  Even though listserv postings are open access and remain online indefinitely, they are rarely cited, quickly fade from memory, and are very hard to collect retroactively.  I hope this idea catches on, much like the now-common practice of blogging conference presentations.

The Declaration of Mexico was issued at the close of the meeting Open access: an alternative of access to scientific information (Fifth International Conference on University Libraries, Mexico City, October 26 - 27, 2006)  (Thanks to Rick Luce.)  It's short, so here it is in full:

Informed and aware that "guaranteeing that research results may be freely available for everyone is the best way of maximizing their usefulness" and that "Open access is good for science, for the research community, and for humanity" we who sign permit ourselves to recommend to all Latin American institutions, and especially to our national governments, the adoption of Open Access policies and the inclusion of Open Access resources in the mechanisms of institutional evaluation of academic and scientific performance, as a means of stimulating the free generation of knowledge.

This group promises to create and maintain a network of research, exchange, promotion, diffusion, digital preservation and formation of personnel in the technological tools required to carry out the stated mission as well as the creation of a union catalog of contributions. We invite and open the doors so that all institutions may join this effort signing this declaration.

In Mexico City, Mexico, Friday, October 27, 2006.

Agents of the Declaration:

Of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Alberto Castro Thompson
Of the Ibero American Science & Technology Education Consortium, Henry Jerez
Of the São Paulo State University, Mariangela Fujita
Of the Colombian Ministry of National Education, Alvaro Arias
Of the University of the Andes, Venezuela, Jacinto Dávila
Of Emory University, Richard Luce

Margaret Pickton and Cliff McKnight, Research students and the Loughborough institutional repository, Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 38, 4 (2006).  Excerpt:

This article investigates the potential role for research students in an institutional repository (IR). Face-to-face interviews with 34 research students at Loughborough University were carried out. Using a mixture of closed and open questions, the interviews explored the students’ experiences and opinions of publishing, open access and the proposed Loughborough repository. As both authors and readers, students were most interested in access to complete theses, postprints and conference papers. The ability to disseminate their work and to receive feedback and commentary were the most important motivators to students depositing work in the IR, closely followed by the principle of open access. The greatest deterrents were the risk of being unable to publish elsewhere later, the ownership of copyright and plagiarism. Appropriate recommendations are made for the implementation of an institutional repository.

Update. Also see Pickton and McKnight, Is there a role for research students in an institutional repository? Some repository managers' views, a preprint forthcoming from the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science. (Thanks to Steve Hitchcock.)

Abstract: Although a number of studies have investigated the attitudes of published academic authors with respect to open access (OA) publishing and institutional repositories (IRs), none have considered the views of other institutional stakeholders. Research students, in particular, are a group that could make a major contribution to an IR, both currently and in their future careers. But how acceptable is their work to those responsible for IRs? The project described here investigates the views of repository managers. A short email survey was carried out, comprising questions about student use of the repository, advocacy undertaken and attitudes toward research student content. Responses were received from representatives of 35 universities in the UK and abroad. Repository managers were overwhelmingly in favour of permitting the deposit of research student work, albeit under specified conditions. One half of the respondents mentioned allowing, or even encouraging, the deposit of theses and dissertations. The relative newness of many repositories meant that advocacy to student authors was limited, although a number of managers were including the repository as an information source in routine research training sessions. The paper concludes that there is a need for clear guidance on the quality of repository content; that evidence of use should be sought, and that IR policy should accommodate the needs of all stakeholders.

Steve Hitchcock also points out that both the above are apparently based on Pickton, Research students and the Loughborough institutional repository, Loughborough University Institutional Repository, MSc dissertation, 2005. From the abstract:

This dissertation investigated the potential role for research students in a new institutional repository at Loughborough University. The project began with an extensive search for information concerning stakeholders’ attitudes towards open access publishing and institutional repositories. It was apparent from this review that no previous research had focused on the needs and potential contribution of research students in this area. Two studies were therefore carried out. The first, an email survey of managers of existing institutional repositories, investigated student use of their repositories, advocacy undertaken, and attitudes toward research student content. Responses were received from 35 universities in the UK and abroad. The second study comprised face-to-face interviews with 34 research students at Loughborough University.

The December issue of Transitions is now online.  It links to OA-related blog posts.  None will be news to readers of OAN, but the TOC is a good recap of some recent developments:

Author Addenda (for Retention of Copyright): An Examination of Five Alternatives
Report on the ARL Workshop on Stewardship of Digital Data Sets
Publishing Research Consortium Studies What Prompts Journal Cancellations
Harnad: PRC Open Access Study Flawed
Open Access Journal Business Models
Society Journals Superior in Price and Quality to Commercial Journals, but Should Still Consider OA
Hybrid Journal Program from the Royal Society of Chemistry
Math Society Journal Converts to Open Access
New Kind of Online Journal Opens Planning Web Site
Anthropology Steering Committee Endorses FRPAA, Rebukes Leadership
Co-Founder of Wikipedia Starts Spinoff With Academic Editors
What is Open Data?
Survey on academic publishing
Publishers Criticize Professors for Copyright Violations

Rufus Pollock, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database: Is It Going to be Made Open?  Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog, December 4, 2006.  Excerpt:

Over a four year period in the mid-1990s a team of scholars centred on the Du Bois institute at Harvard compiled a comprehensive database of transatlantic slave-trading voyages. Over 27,000 individual journeys were recorded for the period 1650-1867 covering more than 2/3 of all voyages that took place. The data includes extensive demographic (and mortality) information for the African slaves as well as similar information for the crew, details of the ship and durations of the voyages. This was an amazing feat of collaborative scholarly effort resulting in a dataset of immense value in furthering our understanding of an incredibly important (and terrible) historical episode.

So what happened to this data, was it made open, free for all, scholars and public alike, to use and reuse? Sadly not. Instead it was published on CD-ROM by Cambridge University Press priced at $250.00....

Fortunately, change seems to be in sight. A look at the database’s home page on the Du Bois Institute’s website reveals that The project directors are now working to make the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database part of an open-access web site. Their goal is to create a dual-tier interface to accommodate a range of aptitudes for the internet, and, in addition to the open access feature, it offers the novel prospect of being constantly up to date in perpetuity....

PS:  Thanks to the Du Bois Institute for sharing their hard work.

Update. Emory University has grants from the NEH and Du Bois Institute to create the OA edition of this database. See Emory's July 2006 press release. (Thanks to John Russell.)

Kumiko Vézina, Libre accès à la recherche scientifique : opinions et pratiques des chercheurs au Québec, Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, 1,1 (2006).  Read it in French or Google's English.

Eric Kansa, Open Context: Community Data-sharing and Tagging, Academic Commons, December 4, 2006.  Excerpt:

The Alexandria Archive Institute is now “beta-testing” Open Context.

Open Context is a free, open-access online database resource for archaeology and related fields. It is a highly-generalized tool that pools and integrates individual researcher datasets and museum collections....

Open Context has a variety of demonstration datasets now available for exploration and testing. These include field archaeology contextual records and finds registers, geo-archaeological samples, and a variety of zooarchaeological analyses. We are also adding museum and reference collection datasets....

To help make sense of this widely varying body of material, we have developed a user folksonomy system. Individual users can add value to the pooled content by identifying and annotating items of interest using a tagging system....

We are working toward interoperability with other systems and developing partnerships to assist in OAI standards compliance and support from institutional repositories. We are also working with the Science Commons to find "some rights reserved" frameworks that create incentives for sharing primary data.

We would also like to see some of this framework incorporated into institutionally-backed digital repository systems. Thus, we are eager to partner with other related initiatives. We already have an established a partnership with the University of Chicago OCHRE project....