Open Access News

Bonnie Shucha has blogged some notes on the Back to the Future of Legal Research conference (Chicago, May 18, 2007).  Excerpt:

...The morning session has been very thought provoking. We heard from Mary Alice Baish of the American Association of Law Libraries who spoke about efforts (or lack thereof) of state and federal governments to provide official, authentic legal materials in the digital age. Although no states have any type of authentication program in place, she was encouraged that many have begun to consider the implications.

Ian Gallacher of Syracuse University College of Law outlined his proposal that a consortium of law schools make all common law freely available on the Internet. He lamented the fact that publishers seem to be moving away from print resources making access much more limited to those who cannot afford systems such as Westlaw and LexisNexis. This was one of the issues he raised in his presentation on why an open access legal research system is needed rather than how to go about implementing it.

Evangelia Papadavid and Matthew E. Falagas, World Wide Web resources of open access, educational dermatology clinical image quizzes and databases, Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, June 2007.  Not even an abstract is free online for non-subscribers, at least so far.

OpenSourceScience launched on May 17.  From the site (a wiki):

OpenSourceScience is a public space for managing controversial scientific experiments in a way that provides open access to of all phases of the research. We provide a centralized resource for scientific collaboration, and help underwrite scientifically rigorous experiments that may contribute to an improved understanding of human consciousness.

The essence of the open source model is the rapid creation of innovative results within an inclusive and collaborative environment. At OpenSourceScience, we bring together the skeptical community, controversial science researchers, and interested laypeople to help design and facilitate high-quality scientific experiments. Our community encompasses multiple points of view joined together by a commitment to "follow the data". This spirit of cooperation promises to improve the long-term viability of our results....

From the press release:

...The website offers a variety of tools for managing scientific experiments and lets site visitors discuss and participate in the research process. Besides promoting scientific collaboration, OpenSourceScience offers financial grants to researchers working within the areas featured on the website.

According to Alex Tsakiris, one of the sites creators, the open source model is well suited for this task: “The open source model has proven to be a powerful enabling technology because it promotes collaboration. When you look at some of the controversial areas of research, like whether our consciousness is separate from our brain, there has been very little collaboration between researchers and those with opposing views. Everyone seems to agree that collaboration is necessary, but until now, it just hasn’t happened.”

OpenSourceScience suited for scientifically-minded skeptics as well as those interested in controversial subjects such as parapsychology and human consciousness....

Peter Murray-Rust, Avoiding Mass Extinction with OpenData, A Scientist and the Web, May 17, 2007.  Excerpt:

A very impressive talk yesterday by Gavin Starks about the challenge of Climate Change. If you ever have the chance to hear or meet him, do. The talk has been blogged by the indefatigable Talis/Nodalities (Paull Miller and (in this case) Rob Styles) as

Climate Change isn’t about saving the planet

Gavin’s message was simple - a necessary condition for saving the planet (and ourselves) is to have a consistent approach to using the available data. That means Open Data and Open Standards for using it.

As simple as that. How will future generations (if there are any) judge those people or organisations who did not share data?

Explore Gavin’s Avoiding Mass Extinction Engine [AMEE]...a technical service that features

• Measurement:  Access to standardised co2 data and calculations (including the official UK Government figures)
• Profiling:  Store and retrieve personal footprints
• Sharing and Transparency:  Help develop, extend, share and collaborate on the measurement of energy consumption....

Pam Baxter has blogged some notes on the IASSIST 2007 conference, Building Global Knowledge Communities with Open Data (Montreal, May 15-18, 2007).  Excerpt:

Your trusty blogger attended Data Access Questions:  Open and Shut (session D3)....

Susan Cadogan, member of the acquisitions team at the UK data archive, opened with a review of the archive from 1967 to date, its expansion and a review of the legal framework for data deposit, maintenance, and dissemination.  Access to deposits is governed by one of three access conditions:  completely open access for researchers, access with the archive acting on behalf of the depositor, and use dependent on permission of the depositor (the last only on request).  The remainder was a discussion of relations with depositors in general and development of the requisite agreements governing access and use as they’ve changed over time.  Although the goal is to make data available as widely as possible, it’s also governed by requirements of the end-user license.  Over time, the collection has expanded in scope to include datasets with a greater degree of detail and wider geographic coverage, both of which can correlate with
increased disclosure risks....

Keit Bang was lead presenter of When Data Aren’t Open....

Robert Downs, senior digital archivist, represented CIESIN presenters on the topic of the Creative Commons licensing movement and the combined goals of  allowing people to  use and redistribute their data, document use, provide appropriate attribution, and track provenance.  Traditional data licensing is, of course, challenging, fraught with time-consuming paperwork, records maintenance hassles, and others too numerous to detail here....There are two parts to permissions issues for CIESIN:  getting permissions from data providers (including identifying ownership, not easy in the case of researcher collaborations), requesting non-exclusive rights for CIESIN, avoiding use restrictions whenever possible, requesting permission to permit 3rd party redistribution.  The second component concerns what can be called the user or distribution end:  establishing use and re-distribution, determining what parts may be copyrighted versus freely distributable....

Tanvi Desai, database manager at LSE Research Laboratory, supports about 200 academic researchers.  She shared her experiences regarding procedures to gain access to Eurostat products....

Here's another Pam Baxter post on a different session:

An overriding theme of the A1 session, Self-Archiving or Self Storage, was empowering data producers to participate in creating and providing metadata for their materials. Another way to describe it: involving researchers in these processes by meeting them where they’re at with the most flexible tools possible. I must also mention that this was an extremely popular session, drawing a standing-room-only crowd....

Ken Miller and Graham Pryor discussed the background of StORe (Source-to-Output Repositories), generally envisioned as a mechanism to link literature to its underlying data. The most recent phase extended the concept to non-social science disciplines and involved surveying the practices of about 3,000 researchers. There is an overriding opinion that although open access to data is great for consumers, producers still rely on well-established professional networking to learn about and access specialized data. Based on the concept of institutional repositories, a middleware gathers essential study-level metadata elements from researchers (in a reasonably painless fashion!). Its goal is to be simple; permit searching to replicate the browsing experience; be reasonably “unbureaucractic;” permit data self management; and provide researchers with latitude to determine such elements as which items will be public, who has access to the data products, and how long data would be embargoed. For further information, see the extensive StORe wiki.

Marion Witenberg and Rutger Kramer of DANS presented on the EASY initiative. Again, the focus is on providing a relatively painless mechanism for researchers to deposit datasets themselves using a flexible and customized tool.....As a unit, DANS is responsible for storing and providing access to research data in the social sciences and humanities. EASY was designed so that depositors supply core metadata with a minimal intervention from a data archivist, if desired.....

Charlie Thomas represented UC Berkeley’s SDA team. SDA 3.1 was released a few weeks ago and includes an application for loading datasets. Said application, an “archiver,” employs a graphical web-based interface and requires three files (ascii data, metadata in DDL format, and a grouped variable list). The archiver is highly customizable....The presentation handout can be viewed here....

Adam Mathes, Google Book Search becomes more comprehensive, Google blog, May 17, 2007.  Excerpt:

Google Book Search allows you to instantly search the full text of over a million digitized books, but we thought that wasn't quite enough. Now when you search you'll get both digitized book results as well as records for millions of other books that still just exist in the analog world.

When you view these new added book records, you can often read reviews, a summary, or see what other people had to say about the book around the web. Since these books haven't been digitally indexed yet, you can't preview the text online, but if you've discovered something great, we offer links to buy the book or find it in a library near you.

We're doing this because we want to offer users the most comprehensive book search in the world - whether it's a book you can read online now, preview samples, see a few snippets, or just read what others have written about the book. We're still very busy digitizing millions more books, but want to make as much discoverable as possible today.

To find out more, check out our post on Inside Google Book Search.

Michael Cross, Free groundwater information dries up, The Guardian, May 17, 2007.  Excerpt:

The [UK] Environment Agency this week admitted imposing charges on businesses wishing to download information vital for protecting the safety of groundwater. The consequences, according to one expert, could be catastrophic....

Ordinary citizens can look up the maps by entering their postcode in the excellent "What's in your backyard?" section of the agency's website....

Originally, the same free data were also available to companies in the business of preventing pollution. However, professionals say they are now being asked to pay. One consultant says he has been quoted £750 for an annual licence to access data on source protection zones. The agency confirmed that it charges business users....

One professional who has encountered the charges is Karl Daines, a geographical information expert with an environmental consultancy . He says he finds the change "surprising" - especially as one of the main uses of the data is to produce reports that are then submitted to the Environment Agency itself.

Charging for data will inevitably reduce the extent to which it is disseminated, with possibly disastrous consequences, says Daines: "Removing the data from the public domain is going to hinder the spread of people's understanding of groundwater issues, and in instances where the data is required, the cost may be prohibitive or the data not referenced, and as a result recommendations may be made which ultimately put an source protection zone at risk of pollution."

Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign, which argues that all impersonal electronic data collected by the government in the course of its public duties be made available free to all comers, agrees. Apart from the direct risks arising from data not being available, there is also a chilling effect to the wider knowledge economy: innovative ways of disseminating these data may never be developed if it remains controlled by government.

There is also a practical issue: does the revenue from licensing to conscientious professionals (for unscrupulous ones may find their own sources) really outweigh the cost of administering and policing the charging regime? And is there an overall benefit beyond any (undemonstrated) financial one? With data held on a web server, issues of scarcity do not exist; unlike a well, a server will never run dry of the necessary 0s and 1s to make a copy of a dataset. Yet the Environment Agency is seeking to impose an artificial constraint on the supply of this data without any evidence that such a constraint is necessary....

What's new in The European Library version 1.5, launched yesterday?  From the front page:

• Simplified navigation menu
• Broader Virtual keyboard interface
• Improvement of initial loading
• New Mini Searchbox lay-out alternatives
• FAQ's introduction in English
• New content and services:
  • PL - National Digital Library Polona and its 9 sub-collections (OAI-PMH)
  • DA - 9 Danish collections (SRU gateway)
  • HR - General Catalogue of the National and University Library of Croatia (SRU gateway)
  • PT - Portuguese OpenURL resolver
• Records of following catalogues point now to their native interface ("Availability at library"):
  • FR - BN-OPALE PLUS, the catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France
  • DA - All Danish catalogues and collections
• Open access to The European Library Handbook & Metadata Registry.

The Public Knowledge Project has released Open Conference Systems 2.0.

Celia Jenkins and three co-authors, RoMEO Studies 8: Self-Archiving: The logic behind the colour-coding used in the Copyright Knowledge Bank, Program: electronic library and information systems, 41, 2 (2007) pp. 124-133 (accessible only to subscribers, at least so far).  Abstract:

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to show how the self-archiving of journal papers is a major step towards providing open access to research. However, copyright transfer agreements (CTAs) that are signed by an author prior to publication often indicate whether, and in what form, self-archiving is allowed. The SHERPA/RoMEO database enables easy access to publishers' policies in this area and uses a colour-coding scheme to classify publishers according to their self-archiving status. The database is currently being redeveloped and renamed the Copyright Knowledge Bank. However, it will still assign a colour to individual publishers indicating whether pre-prints can be self-archived (yellow), post-prints can be self-archived (blue), both pre-print and post-print can be archived (green) or neither (white). The nature of CTAs means that these decisions are rarely as straightforward as they may seem, and this paper describes the thinking and considerations that were used in assigning these colours in the light of the underlying principles and definitions of open access.

Design/methodology/approach – Detailed analysis of a large number of CTAs led to the development of controlled vocabulary of terms which was carefully analysed to determine how these terms equate to the definition and “spirit” of open access.

Findings – The paper reports on how conditions outlined by publishers in their CTAs, such as how or where a paper can be self-archived, affect the assignment of a self-archiving colour to the publisher.

Originality/value – The colour assignment is widely used by authors and repository administrators in determining whether academic papers can be self-archived. This paper provides a starting-point for further discussion and development of publisher classification in the open access environment.

Jon Udell, Motivation, context, and citizen analysis of government data, Jon Udell's blog, May 18, 2007. 

Matt McAlister heard “crackling firearms” in his San Francisco neighborhood and wrote a wonderful essay on a theme that was central to my keynote talk last week at the GOVIS conference: how citizens can and will work with governments to diagnose social problems and develop solutions. When the District of Columbia’s DCStat program rolled out last summer, I was delighted by the forward thinking involved. Publishing the city’s operational data directly to the web, for everyone to see and analyze, with the explicit goal of making the delivery of government services transparent and accountable, was and is an astonishingly bold move. And as Matt found when investigating crime in his neighborhood, it’s still part of the unevenly distributed future:

I then found the official San Francisco Police Department Crime Map. Of course, the data is wrapped in their own heavy-handed user interface and unavailable in common shareable web data formats.

Access to data is good, and access to data in useful formats is better, but these are only the first steps. We need to make interpretations of the data, compare and discuss those interpretations, and use them to inform policy advocacy....

Here’s another glimpse of what’s to come: I took a snapshot of the DC crime data, uploaded it to Dabble DB, built a view of burglary by district and neighborhood, and published it at this public URL. There are two key points here. First, discussion can attach to (and will be discoverable in relation to) that URL. Second, the data behind the view is also available at that URL, in a variety of useful formats, so alternate views can be produced, pointed to, and discussed....

Update.  Citizen Crime Watch builds on McAlister's essay and Udell's blog post to argue that OA to geocoded crime data would help citizens help police reduce crime in New Orleans.

Global-e is a new peer-reviewed OA journal of global studies jointly sponsored by the Center for Global Initiatives at the University of North Carolina, the Center for Global Studies at the University of Illinois, the Global Studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Center for International Education at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  The inaugural issue is now online.

Registry of Clinical Trials: BIREME announces that journals in LILACS and SciELO should follow the WHO orientations, Virtual Health Library Newsletter, May 18, 2007.  (Thanks to Abel Packer.)  Excerpt: 

The debate concerning transparency of clinical trials began several years ago, peaking in 2005, when the World Health Organization (WHO) defined a policy for their public registry (read full article here), which is supported by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME)....

The BIREME/PAHO/WHO participated in the discussions regarding this policy....

[T]his week BIREME is launching a recommendation to health-related scientific journal editors indexed at the Scientific Library Electronic Online (SciELO) and LILACS (Latin American and Caribbean Literature on Health Sciences)....

[T]he WHO has just launched a portal - WHO Clinical Trial Search Portal....

From the BIREME recommendation:

This is to inform all editors of health journals indexed in LILACS and SciELO databases that, starting in August 2007, BIREME will require that journals which publish randomized controlled trials and clinical trials include in the "Instructions for Authors" the recommendation for prior registration of all trials published in their journals and to require the correspondent identification number for accepted manuscripts....

BIREME suggests the following text to be included in the Instructions for Authors:

"Journal XXX follows the policies of the World Health Organization (WHO) and of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) for clinical trial registration, recognizing the importance of those initiatives for international dissemination of information on clinical research, in open access.  Accordingly, only articles of trials previously registered in one of the Clinical Trial Registries that meet WHO and ICMJE requirements will be accepted for publication, starting in 2007.  The list of registries accepted by WHO and ICMJE is available in ICMJE site.  The trial registration number should be published at the end of the abstract."

PS:  I wrote to BIREME for clarification and learned that, while it has no authority to require journals to change their editorial policies, it does have authority to decide which journals are indexed in LILACS and SciELO.  Its new document is a recommendation to all journals and a requirement for journals that wish to be indexed in LILACS and SciELO.

Public Resource is a new US-based non-profit "dedicated to the creation of public works projects on the Internet." 

In its first act, it sent a memo (dated today) to the Smithsonian Institution protesting its restrictions on a collection of public-domain images, reminding it of the law, and informing it that Public Resource had downloaded all 6,288 images and uploaded them to Flickr.  (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) 

The news coverage has just begun.

Update. Also see Peter Hirtle's reflections on policy (which favors removing restrictions on public-domain art) and law (which might still protect what the Smithsonian had been doing).

The DSpace Federation has launched a Google Co-op search engine which apparently searches all DSpace repositories.

The EU's eContentPlus program has issued its 2007 Work Programme.  It endorses OA and calls for funding proposals in areas that include OA.  (Thanks to Francis Muguet and his page for WSIS-SI on the EU and OA.)

In Section 5, the Work Programme calls for OA:

To signal the importance of and launch a policy process on access to and dissemination of scientific/scholarly information and strategies for the preservation of such information across the Union, the Commission further issued a communication on scientific information to the European Parliament, the Council and the European Economic and Social Committee....The eContentplus programme will support the creation of the European Digital Library by achieving interoperability between national digital collections and services (e.g. through common standards) and ensuring that these will be accessible through the multilingual European Digital Library service as being developed by TEL. It further aims to improve the spread of European research results through experiments with open access.

For these purposes, best practice networks for digital libraries as well as targeted projects for digital libraries and for scientific/scholarly content will be funded in 2007.

In Section 5.3, it describes some specific funding goals:

5.3.  Targeted projects for scientific/scholarly content

Objective:

Improve the spread of European research results through conclusive experiments with open access to digital libraries of scientific/scholarly content. The latter refers to organised collections of published results of scientists' or scholars' research work in the EU Member States or other countries participating in the programme and includes both articles, papers, conference proceedings, monographs, textbooks and other similar publications and the related underlying datasets.

Conditions:

In addition to the common requirements for Targeted Projects, proposals should meet the following conditions:

• Carry out conclusive experiments on new models and processes involving different types of relevant stakeholders, i.e. academic community, libraries, institutional repositories, scientific publishers and the funding bodies.
• The needs of the users (i.e. researchers) should be taken into account, ensuring the right balance between the desirable dissemination of research results and the equally necessary protection of IPR.

Note that these are only part of the Work Programme's Planned call for proposals 2007.  The final version will be published in June.  But if you're planning to apply for funds, it wouldn't hurt to start drafting a proposal now.

Hilmar Schmundt, For Science Journal, Web Is 'Second Nature', Spiegel Online, May 18, 2007.  An interview with Nature's Timo Hannay on Nature's online experiments, including blogs, podcasts, a Second Life campus, a trial run with open review and plans to try another.

Add NPR and Iowa Public Radio to the list of broadcasters who will lift licensing restrictions on their broadcasts of presidential debates.  (Thanks to the Iowa Public Radio blog.)

The Publishing Research Consortium has released a new report, Do Open Access Articles Have Greater Citation Impact? A critical review of the literature, May 17, 2007.  The authors are Iain D. Craig (Wiley-Blackwell), Andrew M. Plume (Elsevier), Marie E. McVeigh (Thomson Scientific), James Pringle (Thomson Scientific), and Mayur Amin (Elsevier).  See the summary paper and press release, May 17, 2007.  From the Executive Overview (in the summary paper):

1. The last few years have seen the emergence of several Open Access options in scholarly communication which can broadly be grouped into two areas referred to as ‘Gold’ and ‘Green’ Open Access (OA). In this article we review the literature examining the relationship between OA status and citation counts of scholarly articles, and take no position on the relative value or sustainability of these communication models.
2. Early studies showed a correlation between the free online availability or OA status of articles and higher citation counts.
3. The authors of many of these studies implied that this correlation was causal, without due consideration of potential confounding factors.
4. More recent investigations have applied sophisticated bibliometric methods to dissect the nature of the relationship between article OA status and citations.
5. Three non-exclusive postulates have been proposed to account for the observed citation differences between OA and non-OA articles: an Open Access postulate, a Selection Bias postulate, and an Early View postulate.
   • The Open Access (OA) postulate suggests that authors are more likely to read, and thus cite, articles that are made available in an OA model.
   • The Selection Bias (SB) postulate suggests that the most prominent (and thus most citable) authors are more likely to make their articles available in an OA model, and that they are more likely to do so with their most important (and thus most citable) articles.
   • The Early View (EV) postulate relates only to articles posted before final journal publication, and suggests that the period between the early posting of an article (either pre-print or post-print) and the appearance of the cognate published journal article allows for earlier accrual of citations. Failing to account for this effect must necessarily give a biased result.
6. The most rigorous study to date, conducted in the field of condensed matter physics, showed that after controlling for a clearly demonstrated Early View postulate, the remaining difference in citation counts between OA and non-OA articles is explained by the Selection Bias postulate. No evidence was found to support the OA postulate per se; i.e. article OA status alone has little or no effect on citations.
7. As citation practices vary widely by discipline, further studies using a similarly rigorous approach are required to determine the generality of this finding in other fields of research. Such studies must account for the heterogeneous distribution of citations across any group of articles and establish the date of earliest availability of each article in the study, as citation accumulation is time sensitive.

Comments. 

1. I'm not ready to evaluate this study.  But I'd point out that any attempt to identify the "most rigorous" studies to date would have to include Chawki Hajjem, Stevan Harnad, and Yves Gingras, Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact, IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, December 2005, and Gunther Eysenbach, Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles, PLoS Biology, May 2006.  Their results confirm the OA impact advantage and disentangle it from other interpretations of the OA-citation correlation.  To decide for yourself, see Steve Hitchcock's comprehensive annotated bibliography of the studies.
2. This excerpt from the study's conclusion shows a strained attempt to deny the role of OA in citation impact:

   Assuming that citation differences are due solely to the free availability of an article implies that many scholars working in a given discipline are currently totally unaware of important, relevant literature in their field and are unable to read and cite it. This further suggests that authors will limit their citations to those works that are readily available in favour of citations to works that are of the highest relevance. This view of citation behaviour dismisses any contributing role from long-established and robust means of scientific and scholarly communication – namely, all mechanisms of peer communication, the influence and availability of cited references, and the inherent value a given researcher will place on the content of a paper, independently of the mechanism by which it might have been retrieved.

   The authors bend over backwards to reject the more natural interpretation here:  that scholars fail to cite important, relevant literature when they don't know about it or can't access it.  It's just sloppy to say that this interpretation "dismisses any contributing role" of peer communication, existing citations, and the researcher's own estimation of a paper's quality and relevance.  All these factors undoubtedly play a part.  But after they've had their effect, we shouldn't be surprised to see that good relevant literature that is easier to find and retrieve is cited more often than good relevant literature that is harder to find and retrieve.  Or, if a careful study concluded that this view is false, then one might expect it to be more careful in summarizing the reasons why.

Dorothea Salo, Disciplinary culture, libraries, and IRs, Caveat Lector, May 17, 2007.  Excerpt:

I cannot take entire credit for the insight in this post. It came out of a three-hour meeting today on the topic of research computing....

The natural constituency of institutional repositories as they are generally envisioned is the STM world —scientific, technical, medical. That’s where the serials crisis is most acute. That’s where funders are starting to mandate open access to research results and the underlying data used to generate them. That’s where the digital revolution in scholarly communication has made the most progress.

That’s also the group least invested in academic libraries, especially in their traditional image as The Book Barn....

[S]urveys have shown that because the access technology is the same —that is, the web browser— [these users] simply cannot distinguish between a resource on the free web and a resource that their libraries have paid dearly for....Books? They don’t use books. The OPAC? Is irrelevant to them, because they don’t use books. Reference service? They don’t use it much if at all, and (as a rule) they don’t send their students to it. Instruction? Typically has the least penetration into these disciplines....

These researchers do not see the library, do not go to the (physical) library, do not care about the library, do not think about the library. So insofar as institutional repositories are a library service (and as I have repeated ad infinitum, they are that nearly everywhere they exist, at least in the United States), they are just as invisible as every other library service....

The arts and humanities tell a different tale. The library is a major locus of arts and humanities research, with librarians a major part of the faculty’s working lives, both as scholars and as teachers.  This means in practice that librarians often play a key role in introducing arts and humanities faculty to technologies that can help them —...yes, [including] the institutional repository....

I need to think about this situation some more before I can formulate a coherent response to it. My first impression, though, is to follow an instinct I’ve had for a while and market to STM departments’ local IT staff, who are both less contemptuous of the library than those they serve and more likely to see the IR as a solution to genuine problems they have.

University of Illinois Aims to Digitize the Humanities, a press release from the University of Illinois, May 18, 2007.  Excerpt:

The University of Illinois, home to one of the world's biggest libraries, the nation's top-ranked library and information school, a nascent Center for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, a supercomputing center and key scholars, is poised to become a leader in the effort to "digitize the humanities." ...

In the last year, John Unsworth, the dean of Illinois' Graduate School of Library and Information Science, has secured two major technology grants from the Mellon Foundation to lead multi-institutional projects in the digital humanities.  He also chaired the national commission that produced the recently released report, "Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences," on behalf of the American Council of Learned Societies....

In January...the Mellon Foundation announced that Illinois would receive a two-year $1 million grant for a text-mining collaboration called "Metadata Offer New Knowledge" (MONK)....MONK will create "an inclusive and comprehensive text-mining and text-analysis tool-kit of software for scholars in the humanities," Unsworth said....

In March, Michael Welge, of NCSA, won a $1.2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, for an infrastructure project, with Unsworth serving as one of the co-principal investigators. SEASR, or Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research, begins in June.
According to the project's online report, SEASR seeks to deliver "a means of addressing the challenges of transforming information into knowledge by constructing the software bridges that are required to move from the unstructured and semi-structured data world to the structured data world." ...

Unsworth also is co-principal investigator, with the U. of I. Library's Beth Sandore, of a $2.6 million project, the ECHO DEPository, a digital preservation research and development project at Illinois in partnership with the Online Computer Library Center and funded by the Library of Congress....

At North Carolina State, Unsworth and some junior faculty colleagues wanted to start a journal on postmodernism, but the school couldn't cover the printing and mailing costs, "so the director of the library suggested that we visit the people in campus computing and explore a new software package called 'Listserv,' which is how we ended up publishing the first peer-reviewed electronic [and open access] journal in the humanities, by e-mail, three years before the advent of the Web." ...

Unsworth said that even at Illinois, one of the most wired and digitally active campuses in the world, "junior level faculty in the humanities who have interesting ideas and good skills for mounting digital humanities projects hold off until they are tenured."

"That's too bad -- and it should underline the need for department heads and senior faculty members to make digital humanities safe for junior faculty."

The INIST Libre Accès blog reports that earlier this week HAL transferred a batch of papers to PubMed Central.  This was the first exercise of a transfer option negotiated by Inserm and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).

Tom Cech, A Standard for Openness, HHMI Bulletin, May 2007.  Cech is the President of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  (Thanks to Mark Patterson.) 

On the HHMI data-sharing and OA policies, including HHMI's March agreement to pay Elsevier for deposits into PubMed Central.

I'd blog an excerpt but HHMI locked the PDF and turned off cutting and pasting. (Why?)  For my take on the HHMI-Elsevier agreement, see my article in the April SOAN.

Julian Hunt, Expand free journal project so poor countries can share their valuable climate data, Nature, May 17, 2007 (accessible only to subscribers).  A letter to the editor.  Hunt is a professor of Earth Sciences at University College London.  Excerpt:

I warmly approve your Editorial ‘Millennium development holes’ (Nature 446, 347; 2007) about the lack of weather data from Africa and other developing countries. A further problem is that when measurements have been taken they are often not disseminated to interested organizations within their own country, let alone beyond it.

Both aspects became very apparent at the second international conference on coastal zones in sub-Saharan Africa held in Ghana in 2005 (see [here]). Excellent data taken by Ghana’s meteorological service along the coast, showing steadily rising temperatures and declin[in]g rainfall over 20 years, are not widely known even at the African Centre of Meteorological Application for Development at Niamey in Niger. I found a similar situation in the West Indies....

There is currently no financial or other incentive to share these data. African colleagues complain that, even if they send the data to international centres, they cannot benefit, as they do not receive current issues of the journals and bulletins where the results are published.

One way forward, which I have been pursuing by lobbying UK ministers and others, is to ensure that the latest publications of such literature are sent, at no cost, to the regional and national meteorological services that are providing data in developing countries. The UN Food and Agricultural Organisation is already providing current literature to some agricultural centres in the world’s poorest countries, through its AGORA programme. The OARE programme, launched last November, has similar arrangements for the environmental-science literature, including weather and climate journals — and more countries are being included in the programme next year....

The media organizations that focus on ghoulish pictures of climatic devastation around the world might also contribute.

Comment.  Yes, AGORA and OARE could help.  But they only provide free or discounted online access to subscription journals within developing countries.  To make climate data available to all climate researchers, including developing countries "too rich" for AGORA and OARE, like India, and to distribute datasets that are not published along with the articles analyzing them, we need straight OA.

A Blogger bug has made the three most recent weeks of the OAN archive disappear.  I hope the problem is temporary.

If you look at the list of archive files in the sidebar, you'll see that it stops at April 21.  I've blogged every day since April 21, but Blogger is not listing the newer archive files.

This is a good place to stop reading unless you're a Blogger wizard and want to help.  I don't want to bother anyone else.

I re-published the whole archive, but that didn't solve the problem.

With an FTP app I found that the three unlisted files were all on the right server in the right directory. Hence, the problem seems to be with Blogger's ability to find and list them. For a moment I thought that Blogger might have a limited data structure for holding the list of archive files and that I hit the limit a few weeks ago. But this seems unlikely, since Blogger still lists 267 of my archive files, a very "unround" number. This theory would make more sense if the list stopped at a number like 256.

In any case, the unlisted files were listed as recently as two days ago, when I used them for some research.  It appears that Blogger had the ability to find and list 270 files but somehow hiccupped and lost it.

I've posted the problem to the Blogger Help Group and hope for the best.  But in the past, the group has not proved to be very helpful.  Hence I post the problem here.  I'd appreciate any tips or ideas.

Mila Ramos has blogged some notes on yesterday's meeting on open access in Los Baños, Laguna, in the Philippines, sponsored by ACE Philippines (Association for Communication Excellence in Agriculture, Natural Resources and Life and Human Sciences) and IRRI Philippines (International Rice Research Institute).  I can't find a URL for the meeting itself.

The blog for the Southern Tagalog Region Librarians Council of the Philippines Librarians Association has posted the slide presentation by Fides Lawton, Promoting research and scholarship through open access and e-publishing.

Dorothea Salo, Paying for OA, Caveat Lector, May 16, 2007.  Excerpt:

Arthur Sale nails it again:

[The institution] recognizes that author-side fees are now a significant requirement, and moves to re-align its ‘acquisitions budget’ to become a ‘research journal budget’. A fraction of the journals budget is reserved for supporting alternative funding models, and the institution commits to monitoring and adapting its expenditure to match the change in the industry and the activity of its authors.

Yes. This needs to happen. It will not, however, be an easy sell —serials librarians and collection developers are going to scream bloody murder. If budget reallocation to support of open access is to happen in spite of the screaming, library top brass must back it.

I’ve said before that academic librarians are sadly ignorant about open access; our discipline’s research literature lags well behind others in progress toward OA. Sale’s eminently sensible and logical proposal is unfortunately liable to run aground on that very same ignorance, that very same apathy.

“What about print?” many of them are going to say...

“Bah, that OA stuff —it’s all vanity-published trash,” some of them will say....

“We can’t trust that digital stuff; nobody’s preserving it,” some of them are (still!) going to say....

“Open access isn’t something we can control; it’s all in faculty hands,” still others will say....

And finally, there’s the ever-popular, “You’re destroying my budget!” When I say “scream bloody murder,” this is what I mean. Serials librarians and collection developers are not going to welcome anything that makes them cut more subscriptions. They aren’t thinking ten, twenty, or fifty years in the future. They’re thinking about the angry faculty they’ll see next week....

[F]aculty are hazy on where their journals come from to begin with. They don’t know enough about scholarly publishing to think about coming to libraries for OA author-fee money. Even if a few of them do, they won’t be talking to librarians like me who can and will advocate for them—they’ll be talking to liaisons and collection developers, who are (I say again) clueless about OA when they’re not active doubters. [And] per Vivian Siegel, how many faculty are even aware of a journal’s OA status when they publish in it? How many libraries that set up such a fund are going to be besieged by faculty wanting to pay page charges in toll-access journals? ...

How do we cure academic-librarian ignorance of OA? I wish I knew, and I’m open to suggestions. It might help if OA advocates reminded themselves daily that librarians and libraries exist. A mantra, of sorts: Libraries exist; libraries matter; OA would not exist without libraries....

Helen Smith and eight co-authors, Access to electronic health knowledge in five countries in Africa: a descriptive study, BMC Health Services Research, May 17, 2007.  Provisional abstract:

Background.  Access to medical literature in developing countries is helped by open access publishing and initiatives to allow free access to subscription only journals. The effectiveness of these initiatives in Africa has not been assessed. This study describes awareness, reported use and factors influencing use of on-line medical literature via free access initiatives.

Methods.  Descriptive study in four teaching hospitals in Cameroon, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda plus one externally funded research institution in The Gambia. Survey with postgraduate doctors and research scientists to determine Internet access patterns, reported awareness of on-line medical information and free access initiatives; semi structured interviews with a sub-sample of survey participants to explore factors influencing use.

Results.  In the four African teaching hospitals, 70% of the 305 postgraduate doctors reported textbooks as their main source of information; 66% had used the Internet for health information in the last week. In two hospitals, Internet cafes were the main Internet access point. For researchers at the externally-funded research institution, electronic resources were their main source, and almost all had used the Internet in the last week. Across all 333 respondents, 90% had heard of PubMed, 78% of BMJ on line, 49% the Cochrane Library, 47% HINARI, and 19% BioMedCentral. HINARI use correlates with accessing the Internet on computers located in institutions. Qualitative data suggested there are difficulties logging into HINARI and that sometimes it is librarians that limit access to passwords.

Conclusions.  Text books remain an important resource for postgraduate doctors in training. Internet use is common, but awareness of free-access initiatives is limited. HINARI and other initiatives could be more effective with strong institutional endorsement and management to promote and ensure access.

Update. From the summary in Research Information:

Medical researchers and doctors in training regularly use online journals, even if they have to do so from their local internet cafe, according to new research published in BMC Health Services Research....

Users also reported problems with getting passwords from their librarians in order to use HINARI and other password-controlled services. The use of PubMed without a password was popular.

The authors...added that power interruptions and inadequate computing facilities continue to limit online journals’ use in Africa and awareness of free access to journals remains variable.

Jim Till, Niche journals and self-archiving, Be openly accessible or be obscure, May 17, 2007.  Excerpt:

Browsing through the SHERPA/RoMEO database of publishers’ self-archiving policies can yield some interesting information. I was looking for niche journals that are intended for members of particular disciplines in a specific geographic area (in my case, Canada)....

In 2005, the quarterly journal Healthcare Policy was launched by "Longwoods Publishing,..."

When I looked for this journal in the SHERPA/RoMEO database, neither the journal title, nor the publisher, were listed....

For example, for the first 50 journal titles that contain the word “Canadian”, I found information about self-archiving policies for only five....Thus, information about self-archiving policies is currently available in the database for only about 10% of these Canadian journals.

Similarly, of 28 journal titles that contain the word “Canada”, I found information about self-archiving policies for only one....

Is this lack of information a result, at least in part, of the SHERPA/RoMEO database currently being incomplete? Probably, yes. And, efforts to improve the database are under way. See, for example, Copyright Knowledge Bank - Database....

However, the main reason for the lack of information about self-archiving policies for these Canada-oriented journals is probably because they do not yet have such policies. How best to deal with this issue, from the perspective of authors/researchers/scholars? ...

One response is to make an effort to retain copyright on an individual, article-by-article, basis. An addendum can be added to the conventional copyright agreement....

But, what to do if the publisher refuses to accept such an addendum? An alternative approach is one that’s been advocated vigorously by Stevan Harnad: ID/OA (Immediate-Deposit, Optional-Access), paired with a “Fair Use” Button. See, for example, Blackwell Instructions for self-archiving manuscripts, by Stevan Harnad, 17 April 2007....

SPARC and Science Commons have announced a consolidation and enhancement of their author addenda.  From the announcement: 

Today, Science Commons and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) announce the release of new online tools to help authors exercise choice in retaining critical rights in their scholarly articles, including the rights to reuse their scholarly articles and to post them in online repositories. 

The new tools include the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine, an online tool created by Science Commons to simplify the process of choosing and implementing an addendum to retain scholarly rights. By selecting from among four addenda offered, any author can fill in a form to generate and print a completed amendment that can be attached to a publisher's copyright assignment agreement to retain critical rights to reuse and offer their works online.

The Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine will be offered through the Science Commons, SPARC, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the Carnegie Mellon University Web sites, and it will be freely available to other institutions that wish to host it.  It may be accessed [here]....

Also available for the first time is a new addendum from Science Commons and SPARC, named "Access-Reuse," that represents a collaboration to simplify choices for scholars by combining two existing addenda, the SPARC Author Addendum and the Science Commons Open Access-Creative Commons Addendum. This new addendum will ensure that authors not only retain the rights to reuse their own work and post them on online depositories, but also to grant a non-exclusive license, such as the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial license, to the public to reuse and distribute the work. In addition, Science Commons will be offering two other addenda, called "Immediate Access" and "Delayed Access", representing alternative arrangements that authors can choose.

"The Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine will enable authors to maximize the reach of their work," said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. "It's a significant leap forward in making it easier for authors to effectively manage their publication rights."

In addition, MIT has contributed to this effort by including its MIT Copyright Agreement Amendment in the choices available through the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine.  The MIT Copyright Amendment has been available since the spring of 2006 and allows authors to retain specific rights to deposit articles in MIT Libraries' DSpace repository, and to deposit any NIH-funded manuscripts on the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central database. 

"The cumulative nature of scientific discovery makes it imperative that unnecessary barriers to the timely sharing of results of research should be eliminated wherever possible," said Ann Wolpert, Director of Libraries for MIT. "The MIT Libraries applauds Science Commons for its development of tools such as the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine, which enables authors of scholarly articles to ensure that they can later reuse their works and make them widely accessible to other researchers and the public...."

SPARC offers a suite of materials...that introduce the topic of author rights on campuses and complement the new SPARC-Science Commons "Access-Reuse" addendum....

"This is about authors' rights," said John Wilbanks, Vice President of Science Commons - a project of Creative Commons. "Right now, authors trade the most important rights - like the right to make copies of their own scholarly works - to traditional publishers. That trade has led to an imbalanced world of restricted access to knowledge, skyrocketing journal prices, and an inability to apply new technologies to the scholarly canon of knowledge. Our Scholar's Copyright project addresses this imbalance. Working with libraries and universities, we are providing the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine so that scholars can retain rights to make copies of their own writings available on the Web."

Comment.  There are several welcome developments wrapped up together here.  Author addenda can be customized for individual articles; a customized addendum can be generated automatically; new addenda options are now available; and formerly separate addenda are consolidating, simplifying the process for authors.

Update. Science Commons has posted instructions for other sites wishing to host the Addendum Engine.

Judy Redfearn, Facing the data deluge, JISC Inform, Spring 2007.  An interview with John Wood, chair of JISC's Support of Research Committee and the JISC Scholarly Communications Group.  The interview is also available as a podcast.  Excerpt:

...The JISC Scholarly Communications Group, which Professor Wood also chairs, is working to make data more readily available through online publications. It is also investigating alternative models of publishing which would enable readers to access research results free of charge, known as Open Access publishing. ‘The future challenges for the group are linking data to publications and what form of Open Access do we want. The work that is going on between JISC, the Research Councils and others to review the impact of different Open Access models is very, very valuable,’ he says....

Tracey Caldwell, Reaping the Rewards, JISC Inform, Spring 2007.  Excerpt:

JISC is supporting institutions as they establish and develop digital repositories to host a wide range of online content....

The UK is raising its research profile as universities increasingly showcase their research content in digital repositories.

A third of universities now have repositories at some stage of development. They are looking to reap the return on their investment in a number of ways, including improving research efficiency, raising institutional profile and easier recruitment of top class academics.

JISC has stepped in to maintain the momentum of repository development, supporting a number of projects aimed at underpinning repository development in large institutions and kickstarting development in small or specialist institutions.

Within the JISC Repositories and Preservation programme there are a number of strands of funding, including the Start-up and enhancement strand, which is providing £4 million of development funding, matched by investment from institutions themselves. Alongside this JISC has set up the Repositories Support project, a two and a half year project funded to the tune of over £1.3 million from HEFCE and HEFCW to support repository development in England and Wales.... 

[Amber Thomas, programme manager for Start-up and Enhancement] adds, ‘The benefits to universities include a greater visibility to business and improved knowledge transfer, allowing universities to justify their place in society by making their output more visible. Also they gain increased standing in the research community through greater visibility for their research and their researchers.’ ...

Bill Hubbard, [Repositories Support Project ] project manager, says: ‘For existing institutions with repositories we are trying to give them what they need to help them to grow the repository: standards for interoperability, providing advocacy material, briefing papers targeted for different audiences from senior managers to academics.’ ...

Stevan Harnad, Should a Viable Journal Convert to Green or to Gold Today?  Open Access Archivangelism, May 16, 2007. 

Summary:  Replies to (anonymized) queries about whether journals should convert to Green or Gold today:
(1) Going Green means endorsing immediate (unembargoed) self-archiving by authors.
(2) Going Gold means either:
(2a) making the entire online edition free for all and continuing to sell the hard copy edition by subscription, as now, or
(2b) charging an extra fee per article to author-institutions for making their individual article free online on their behalf, on the publisher's website (optional Gold "Open Choice"), or
(2c) abandoning the subscription model and the hard copy edition entirely, and charging the author-institutions for publishing in the online (and only) edition.
   Going Green carries some risk to subscriptions, but that is unlikely to be significant till after 100% Green self-archiving is being reliably practised by all authors for all journals. Going Gold via (2a) would be far riskier, needlessly, because Green OA grows anarchically, article by article, whereas Gold OA is total and immediate for the journal. Going optional Gold via (2b) would essentially be to levy a gratuitous extra author charge for self-archiving; while continuing to sell the hard copy edition for subscriptions this would be a highly retrogressive step -- indeed, a Trojan Horse -- except if it was also coupled with going Green (1), in which case it would be fine). And (2c) would be needlessly to jettison the hard copy edition and subscription revenue pre-emptively, for no particular reason.
    Journals wishing to do something to help Open Access (OA) should go Green and then wait to see what happens. Green might eventually propel all journals to (2c). (Going Green (1) and hybrid Gold, (2b), is also a reasonable option, though there will not be many takers for optional Gold, with or without mandates, unless the asking price is negligibly low.)

The entire run of the Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, 1847-2007 is now digital and OA in the institutional repository of Trinity College Dublin.  The journal is still alive and kicking, and new issues will also be OA through the IR.  Hence, this is not just a digitization project but also a journal conversion.  (Thanks to the Trinity College Digital Services' Librarian blog.)

For more details, Trinity College recorded yesterday's symposium celebrating the completion of the project and has now made it available in a two-part podcast (one and two).

PS:  Kudos to project manager Niamh Brennan and all the back-up provided by the Trinity College library, and kudos to the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland for its consent and cooperation. 

Pronetos ("Professor's Network") is a new academic networking site and repository.  It hasn't quite launched yet, but it's online and its blog will keep you up to date on its progress.  From the site:

Pronetos will soon become the premier gathering place for scholars to collaborate, network, and publish their ideas.
We provide an intuitively designed, real-time, web based community platform that facilitates mass collaboration and democratizes content for global distribution among academics with the ability to archive and search that content. With Pronetos, ideas are shared at the speed of thought, and those who create them control them.

Pronetos is home to communities of every academic discipline – a global think-tank of the leaders in your field. We’re making it easy for you to stay connected to your colleagues, wherever they may be. Pronetos is a place for you to network, and build and share ideas with the greatest minds in your field.

What can you do with Pronetos? Publish your life’s work. Share an idea with colleagues, and get real time feedback. Post messages. Start a blog. Upload podcasts of your lectures. Post your curriculum materials. Use Pronetos as a repository for papers in your field – they’ll be indexed, searchable, publicly available and secure. You create, edit, and moderate the community and the content and we provide the technology – free. This site is by scholars, of scholars, and for scholars....

Switzerland's University of Lausanne has joined the Google Library Project, making it Google's 15th library partner and the fourth from a non-English speaking country.

Today the Library of the University of Lausanne announced it is the latest partner to join the Google Book Search Library Project. This is great news for the preservation of Swiss cultural heritage and for Francophones like myself, who are thrilled about the addition of even more public domain French books to the index....

During the last century, the University of Lausanne has been one of the pioneers in library automation in Switzerland as well as the rest of Europe. In fact, the idea of opening up the library's collections to the world (thousands of books in the public domain) has been entertained for many years by the director and his staff. Today, in 2007, through a shared vision with the government of the Canton de Vaud (who supports this major cultural initiative) and a broad partnership with Google, this dream becomes a reality....

The British Heart Foundation has released its OA policy.

Like the UK Department of Health (DH), whose OA policy I just blogged two days ag