Open Access News

From 6-8 June, I was lucky enough to be able to attend a scholarly symposium at UCLA in sunny Southern California: the UCLA/Getty Storage Symposium. Preservation and Access to Archaeological Materials. I live blogged it on the IW&A Blog. ... [O]ne issue that reoccurred several times was how to deal with copyright inside a very specialised, niche academic discipline.

... The silver standard for [a career in archeology] is the peer-reviewed article, the gold one being the monograph ... Some symposium speakers reiterated their support for web-based publications. The advantages are well known: faster publication time, ability to include tons of photos in colour, accessibility creating higher use, reduction in cost, etc. But the fact remains that when a young professor is trying to get tenure, a peer-reviewed paper output still is what matters. The web is still seen by many in the "old guard" as a hobby, not serious scholarship. The paradigm is slowly changing though. Several scholarly online-only, open access publications now exist: see my iCommons.org article Archaeologists Coming Out of the Cold.

At the symposium, the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egytology (UEE) was introduced. It is meant to replace and improve upon the old bulwark of traditional paper publishing: the Lexikon der Ägyptologie (7 tomes, 1975-1992). There will be free public access to core UEE materials and functionality, and an "enhanced" access to members who support the UEE financially. This is how some of the qualms of potential contributors are being addressed ...

One of the surprises when indexing the huge array of literature available on the web is that many major names, that is the ones who are associated with the traditional closed model, pop up as by far and away the biggest contributors to open access works (defined here as those that are downloadable in their entirety free of charge or other barrier such as login giving away substantial personal info).

American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (100,000+ free articles)
Royal Society of Chemistry (70,000+ free articles) ...
National Academy of Sciences of the USA (50,000+ free articles) ...

As the regulator for public sector information re-use, we know that people can encounter problems from time to time getting hold of the information they need in the formats they want. Difficulties can include problems with charging, licensing or the data standards that public sector information is provided in.

These problems aren't about access (which is dealt with under Freedom of Information legislation), but all the other issues which can occur when you want to do something with public sector information - copy it, remix it with other data or add value and republish it. If you are trying to re-use some public sector information, but the data you need is locked-up, this service is for you. ...

... Open Source Software (OSS) ... is software which allows the public to view and edit the code that makes it work. The guts of the machine are allowed to be examined and perhaps tinkered with to make improvements or modifications, as the user sees fit. Most people these days use software that is at least somewhat open source, such as the Firefox web browser, or Wordpress (the software that runs this blog). ...

Open Access, the movement to remove price barriers from consumers of scientific knowledge, shares some philosophical roots with Open Source Software. Both aim to take something which has largely been controlled by for-profit corporations and held as proprietary in some way and open that up to a broader audience/participatory culture. The great thing about Open Access is that there is already a lower barrier to participation than there is for OSS. You don’t have to be well-versed in a programming language to contribute. You can go rate a PLoS article, go add a protocol to OpenWetWare, or contribute to any of the other great web-based projects from your own desk in a matter of minutes. ...

Most people I’ve come across don’t really care about whether or not their software is Open Source. ... These people don’t worry so much about the philosophical reasons for making the code open source in the first place, and are even less likely than I am to worry about looking at the programming innards for themselves. A similar group of people will be critical for the widening acceptance of Open Access. People like family members of someone who has been diagnosed with an illness and wants to read the latest research. They don’t really care about the fundamental navel-gazing that is OA vs. subscription firewalled, but they just want some solace and information on their loved one’s condition. ...

.. There is a lot of potential information about any given gene—its name, sequence, position on a chromosome, the protein(s) it encodes, other gene(s) it interacts with, etc. and presenting this information is referred to as 'gene annotation.' As information may come from many different researchers working independently, it is important that resources exist to collect the information together. Existing annotation libraries include Gene Portals and Model Organism Databases—however, the information stored in these is considered to be definitive, which requires constant updates by specific experts and formal presentation of information. The work reported in this week's PLoS Biology is intended to allow a much more flexible, organic accumulation of science, with all readers also able to edit and add to the Gene Wiki pages.

In order to stimulate the development of this Wikipedia based resource, Andrew Su and colleagues developed a system that automatically posts information from existing databases as 'stub' articles on Wikipedia. A computer program downloads information from one system, formats it according to Wiki formatting and the 'stub' template that the authors have designed, and—if a page does not already exist for that gene—posts the information on Wikipedia. The authors are confident that their stubs will seed the posting of more detailed information from scientists who encounter them on Wikipedia—and they report that, so far, they appear to be succeeding: the absolute number of edits on mammalian gene pages has doubled.

The presentations from ICSTI 2008, New Frontiers for Scientific and Technical Communication (Seoul, June 11-12, 2008), are now online.

Stevan Harnad, Automatic search for OA versions of cited articles, Open Access Archivangelism, July 8, 2008.  Excerpt:

Matt Cockerill (publisher of BioMed Central) makes the following comment on "The #1 Myth About Open Access":

You take issue with Mike Dunford's comment: "Just what is open access?... In an open access journal, there's no charge for reading articles..." and note that you feel that author deposit of manuscripts in open access repositories, in parallel to the existing subscription-based pay-to-access journals, is a faster and surer way to achieve open access.

But do you not agree that when a reader of an article spots an interesting item in a reference list, and clicks to follow a link to the article concerned, it does not "feel" like open access when they are faced with a publisher's pay-wall asking for a subscription or per-article fee to view the article. Of course, there are several ways they may be able to view a version of the article without paying. The would-be reader could search the net to see if they can track down a free copy of the article in a repository; they can send an email request to the author (who is hopefully not on holiday and has a legally sharable electronic version to hand); or they can try their luck down at their local library. Fair enough. But you must have some sympathy with a reader who would prefer simply to click a link and get straight to the article concerned, without being challenged to provide credit card details. It's not such a bad definition of open access.

That's exactly why Mike Jewell created Paracite. It would be a piece of cake to set up a bit of software that automatically transformed text that one highlights in a reference list into a Paracite or Google Scholar query. The only reason no one has yet bothered to create that piece of software is that most of that potential content is not yet OA. But Green OA self-archiving and mandates will take care of that...

Comment.  Paracite is great and I'm glad Stevan had a chance to remind everyone that it exists.  (It hasn't gotten much notice recently.)  But I'd answer Matt's question differently.  Matt is right that facing a pay-per-view screen means you didn't click on a link to an OA copy of an article, even if there is an OA edition of the same article elsewhere.  And he's right it would be very useful to click on a citation in a reference list and go straight to an OA copy of the full-text.  That's a reason to publish in OA journals. But it's also a reason to link to OA repository copies when they exist, even when we also link to TA copies in TA journals, and it's a reason to deposit all our paper in OA repositories.  We could shift the question to the relative strategic priorities of gold and green OA, but we don't have to.  Giving priority to gold OA is not a reason to change the definition of OA to exclude green OA, any more than giving priority to green OA is a reason to change the definition of OA to exclude gold OA.  That was the original question.  Let's pursue green and gold OA in parallel and hold to the definition of OA which embraces both.

Isabella Meinecke, Eine Verbindung mit Zukunft: Bibliotheken, E-Journals und Open Access, a slide presentation at Deutscher Bibliothekartag (Mannheim, June 3-6, 2008). 

The sponsors of the Workshop on Using Open Access Models for Science Dissemination (Trieste, July 7-16, 2008) are posting videos of the presentations as they occur.  (Thanks to Leslie Chan.)

Here are some blogged notes on the RIOJA meeting, Emerging publishing models: exploring new ventures for delivering science publishing (Cambridge, July 7, 2008):

• From an anonymous blogger with the U of Sussex Repository
• From Owen Stephens and/or Damyanti Patel:  1, ,2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Nature Publishing Group to archive on behalf of authors, a press release from the Nature Publishing Group, July 8, 2008.  Excerpt:

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is pleased to announce the initiation of a free service, launching in 2008, to help authors fulfil funder and institutional mandates.

NPG has encouraged self-archiving, including in PubMed Central, since 2005. Later in 2008, NPG will begin depositing authors’ accepted manuscripts with PubMed Central (PMC) and UK PubMed Central (UKPMC), meeting the requirements for authors funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), The Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council and a number of other major funders in the US, the UK and Canada who mandate deposition in either PMC or UKPMC. NPG hopes to extend the service to other archives and repositories in future....

For eligible authors who opt-in during the submission process, NPG will deposit the accepted version of the author’s manuscript on acceptance, setting a public release date of 6-months post-publication. There will be no charge to authors or funders for the service....

NPG has been an early mover amongst subscription publishers in encouraging self-archiving. In 2002, the publisher moved from requesting copyright transfer for original research articles to requesting an exclusive license to publish. In 2005, NPG announced a self-archiving policy that encourages authors of research articles to self-archive the accepted version of their manuscript to PubMed Central or other appropriate funding body's archive, their institution's repositories and, if they wish, on their personal websites. In all cases, the manuscript can be made publicly accessible six months after publication. NPG’s policies are explained in detail [here].

Comments

• What's interesting here is not that NPG will automatically deposit peer-reviewed manuscripts by NIH-funded authors in PMC.  In fact, 366 journals already do better than that:  they deposit the published editions, not just the peer-reviewed manuscripts.
• What's interesting is that NPG is willing to accommodate university mandates as well as funder mandates, and deposit in institutional repositories as well as disciplinary repositories like PMC.  I asked NPG's Grace Baynes about this, and she gave me permission to quote from her reply:

  NPG do hope to eventually deposit directly into institutional repositories in line with institutional mandates. In order to do this we will need institutional repositories to accept automated deposits by publishers on behalf of authors, preferably using a similar batch upload service to that offered by PubMed Central and now UK PubMed Central. Once this is possible we anticipate extending the service to institutional repositories. We hope that other repostitories mandated by funders will make that functionality available as well. In all cases, NPG would need these repositories to set a public release date in line with NPG's self-archiving policy.

  As far as I know, NPG will be the first publisher willing to make direct deposits into institutional repositories.

Update.  Also see Stevan Harnad's comment:  "...If Nature really wants to help OA, then dropping its access embargo would be a lot more helpful than saving authors from having to do a few keystrokes...."

David Wiley has officially announced the launch of Open Education News, July 7, 2008.  Excerpt:

The young field of open education is gaining momentum and energy. As additional projects, foundations, universities, and other participants join the movement, the need increases for a single source to gather, sort, analyze, synthesize, and disseminate news related to open education. As a field, open education is now where the field of open access was a few years ago. Peter Suber’s wonderful Open Access News provides an invaluable service to the OA community, and we intend to replicate this service with Open Education News....

Open Education News is essentially a group blog. A number of individuals from the US, South Africa, and eventually other locations daily monitor the internet for news related to open education. We then aggregate these items and publish them individually with minor commentary. Occasionally we’ll publish bigger pieces of our own authorship; analyses and such. If you know of some open education news we should write about, contact David Wiley at david.wiley@gmail.com....

Open Education News is graciously supported by the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation.

This presentation focuses on peer review and version identification of digital objects as a means for Open Access scientific outputs to finally enter the "exclusive world" of research evaluation and assessment, as well as for OA repositories to become part of research assessment workflows. Some versioning projects are presented, in the frame of Italian and British research assessment situations.

The University of Crete has launched an institutional repository, E-Locus.  (Thanks to Vangelis Banos.)

SPARC Europe and DRIVER sign Memorandum of Agreement, a press release from SPARC Europe, July 7, 2008.  Excerpt:

As part of the LIBER 37th Annual Conference held at the Koc University Suna Kirac Library, Istanbul, from 1 to 5 July 2008, SPARC Europe and DRIVER have agreed to work closely together on promoting repositories, signing a Memorandum of Agreement to take this collaboration forward.

SPARC Europe and DRIVER today confirmed a need for cooperation in order to progress and enhance the provision, visibility and application of European research outputs through digital repositories, in systems providing access to texts, data or other types of content.

DRIVER is a joint initiative of European stakeholders, co-financed by the European Commission, setting up a technical infrastructure for digital repositories and facilitating the building of an umbrella organisation for digital repositories. DRIVER relies on research libraries for the sustainable operation of repositories and provision of high quality content through digital repositories. SPARC Europe and DRIVER share the vision that research institutions should contribute actively and cooperatively to a common, pan-European data and service infrastructure based on digital repositories.

In recent years, research libraries have been pressed to improve scholarly communication by establishing digital repositories to expose institutional research outputs to the world. Networks of individual repositories and overarching information services for aggregation, retrieval, share and re-use are being built on the basis of institutional national and regional location, or by subject areas.

Collaboration between SPARC Europe and DRIVER is framed by their joint support for an Open Access model for repositories in research institutions. They will present a common lobby at a national and international level to leverage change through the scholarly community within respective institutions and countries. Their reciprocal support will ensure wider access to standards for interoperability between repositories, and the adoption of emerging technical standards to facilitate open archiving. This agreement demonstrates their joint commitment to promote a European network of repositories offering access to research outputs across institutional and national boundaries....

Columbia University is looking for a Digital Repository Coordinator.

PS:  If this is of interest, then you should follow the OA-related job postings on OAD.

India's publicly-funded project to support OA repositories at Indian universities has now launched 10 pilot repositories:

One of the objectives of this project is to help the academic and research institutions of national importance to set up their interoperable, open access repositories. For the present, the following pilot IRs have been set up by with the initial technical support of the project team. Several other institutions have been contacted and we are hopeful that few more repositories will come up in the near future.

• Using ePrints:
  1. ePrints@IAS, Indian Academy of Sciences
  2. ePrints@NIAS, National Institute of Advanced Studies [Screenshot]
  3. Open Access IR of Bangalore University, Bangalore [Screenshot]
  4. ePrints@UAS(B), University of Agricultural Sciences, GKVK Campus, Bangalore.[Screenshot]
  5. ePrints@KU, Kuvempu University, Shimoga [Screenshot]
  6. ePrints@IFIM-An Open Access Repository of Institute of Finance and International Management, Bangalore [Screenshot]
  7. ePrints@IIMB-An Institutional Repository of Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
  8. ePrints@AIFD-Army Institute of Fashion and Design, Bangalore [Screenshot]
• Using Dspace:
  1. BHELSpace@epd, Electroporcelains Division, Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd. (BHEL), Bangalore [Screenshot]
  2. DSpace@BVBCET, B.V. Bhoomaraddi College of Engineering and Technology, Hubli [Screenshot]

The project is not new, but I notice that I've never blogged background information on it.  It's funded by India's Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) and carried out by the National Centre for Science Information (NCSI) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc).  It includes the CASSIR cross-archiving search engine for Indian repositories, which launched in February 2007.  I can't find a home page for the project, at least under what appears to be its official name, Development of OAI-Based Institutional Research Repository Services in India, but here's a description of it from the DSIR page on the Technology Information Facilitation Programme (last revised April 28, 2008):

There has been a growing realization that with the growth of internet use, the printed journals may no more be able to survive as a primary means of scholarly communication. The electronic medium offers faster, wider and cheaper means of communication as compared to the printed medium. It is therefore proposed to support Open Archive Initiative of journal articles published in India. Academic and Research Institutions would be encouraged to set up institutional or national open archives in particular disciplines - covering disciplines in which India has strength like mathematics, statistics, and geo-science, etc....

Isabel Galina and Joaquin Gimenez, An Overview of the Development of Repositories and Open Access in Mexico.  A paper presented at ElPub 2008 (Toronto, June 25-27, 2008).  Excerpt:

The paper presents an overview of the current landscape of repositories in Mexico and focuses on the work being done at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Finally, we offer specific recommendations for the further development of repositories and Open Access, with particular focus on the needs and possibilities of developing countries....

Ten Mexican repositories were identified. This is quite a small number considering the size and academic importance of the country.  Repositories were reviewed and classified...This was followed by a case study of 3R, a repository development project at the UNAM, the national university that produces over 50% of the country’s research....

One of the most important aspects to work towards is making university administrators and national policy makers more aware of the need to promote, fund and develop repositories. Although repositories are still not ubiquitous in all developed countries academic institutions, their importance is acknowledged and discussed at policy-making level. So although Mexico is a subscriber to the Open Access movement, real steps have to be taken towards its implementation.

It is also important to gather information from the more advanced repositories that exist in Mexico, together with work being done with 3R, to develop an important body of literature and experiences in Spanish. This would allow us to build a framework so that universities can work together to develop and promote repositories and bring this to the attention of a larger group of people, in particular university authorities, national policy makers and funding bodies.

Stevan Harnad, The #1 Myth About Open Access, Open Access Archivangelism, July 6, 2008.  Excerpt:

"Just what is open access?... In an open access journal, there's no charge for reading articles... Yes, that's pretty much all there is to the definition."

No, unfortunately that is not the definition of OA (which actual means free online access), it is just the definition of Gold OA publishing, one of the two ways to provide OA (and not the fastest or surest way).

The single most important reason OA is not yet growing anywhere near as quickly as it could and should is this persistent perpetuation of the myth that OA is just Gold OA....

Comment.  Stevan is right to correct the impression that all OA is gold OA (through journals), and to remind everyone of green OA (through repositories).  But "free online access" is itself only part of the story.  Stevan links from that phrase to a more complete discussion.  But because he doesn't elaborate in his post, I'll elaborate a little.  The term "OA" is now used in at least two ways:  (1) to remove price barriers alone ("free online access" or gratis OA) and (2) to remove both price and permission barriers (libre OA, which includes BBB OA).  The gratis/libre distinction is not the same as the gold/green distinction.  The former is about rights or freedoms, and the latter is about venues.  Gold OA can be gratis or libre, and green OA can be gratis or libre.  Just as we can't afford to forget green OA, we can't afford to forget libre OA.

To help researchers gain an accurate picture of the health of a watershed, Microsoft Research collaborates with the Berkeley Water Center—located on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley—and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to build a "digital watershed."

The project goal: acquire and curate existing hydrologic data to understand historic conditions on key watersheds in California. ...

To cite just one example of immense data collection, in California, regional water quality boards, the California State Department of Water Resources, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the Environmental Protection Agency each collect different sets of water quality measurements.

Says Deb Agarwal of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: "People assume that once they have their source of data, it’ll be great, and they can do whatever they want. But the data can be frustrating. I knew one researcher who spent three months trying to get the data set he wanted from an environmental database." ...

The data cubes allow simple browsing of datasets for data availability, data quality, and data relevance along "dimensions" such as location, variable time, or time period. The use of data cubes helps researchers who don’t have programming skills to add their own data. ...

By combining publically available data, digital watershed researchers such as Dr. James Hunt of the Berkeley Water Center hope to create models and forecasts that can be used by a wide range of water interests in a manner that has not previously been possible. ...

June was a surpisingly busy month, especially in terms of content expansion. We have now reached 600,000 works listed on RePEc, and it took only 10 months to add the last 100,000. Traffic was also heavy for the season, reaching 584,843 downloads and 2,803,705 abstract views.

The following institutions joined RePEc with an archive: World Scientific Publishing, Queens College (CUNY), GEFRA, Kobe University, Institut für Angewandte Wirtschaftsforschung (IAW), Université d’Auvergne, Universtät Freiburg, Società Italiana degli Economisti. Finally, here are the thresholds we reached this month:

140,000,000 cumulative abstract views
100,000,000 cumulative abstract views on IDEAS
45,000,000 cumulative abstract views for articles
600,000 listed works
350,000 articles listed
300,000 online articles listed
240,000 working papers listed
180,000 working paper abstracts
150,000 items with references
120,000 article abstracts
20,000 NEP reports

• The African Journal of Paediatric Surgery converted to OA on July 1. It is a peer-reviewed, no-fee journal. Articles are available under a license similar to the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. Back issues are available to 2004.
• The Asian Journal of Pharmaceutics is now managed by Medknow. It is a peer-reviewed, no-fee OA journal published by TIFAC-CORE in Green Pharmacy and B R Nahata College of Pharmacy. Articles are available under a license similar to the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.
• CytoJournal moved to Medknow from BioMed Central on June 23. It is a peer-reviewed OA journal published by the Cytopathology Foundation. Article processing charges are $1500 per article, subject to discounts and waivers. Articles are available under a license identical to the Creative Commons Attribution license.

... The question of “Who owns science?” is therefore a crucial one, the answer to which will have broad-reaching implications for scientific progress and for the way in which the benefits of science are distributed, fairly or otherwise. Two of the most pressing issues concern equity of access to scientific knowledge and the useful products that arise from that knowledge. ...

The second issue we wish to highlight is that of access to science itself. The ideal shared by almost all scientists is that science should be open and transparent, not just in its practices and procedures, but so that the results and the knowledge generated through research should be freely accessible to all. There is a broad consensus in the scientific community that such openness and transparency promotes the advancement of science and enhances the likelihood that the benefits of science are enjoyed by all. For more than a hundred years, these principles have been the bedrock of academia and the scientific community.

We call upon all interested in the future of science to join with us in an active and open-ended search for answers.

The Open Access Directory (OAD) is pleased to announce that its list of Publisher policies on NIH-funded authors is now open for community editing and enlargement.

The list starts with 204 links to publisher policies and 26 annotations.  We've very grateful to Arta Dobbs (University of Connecticut Health Center), Molly Keener (Wake Forest University Health Sciences), and P. Scott Lapinski (Harvard Medical School) for their hard work in developing this foundation on which the public can now build.

OAD is a wiki  and we encourage all users to help keep it comprehensive, accurate, and up to date.  We especially encourage publishers with a policy on NIH-funded authors to make sure that their policy is included on the new list. 

Labels: Hot

After seven years of TA publishing, Science and Technology of Advanced Materials converted to no-fee OA with its January-March issue.  From Teruo Kishi's editorial in that issue:

Welcome to the first issue of the new-look Science and Technology of Advanced Materials (STAM) journal which is being published by [Japan's] National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in partnership with IOP Publishing.

STAM is sponsored by NIMS and is a web-based, open-access source of the latest information on international developments in materials science. The contents are free to read, there is an 'author friendly' copyright policy, and there are no publication charges. [The costs are covered by NIMS.]  By employing this publication model, NIMS hopes to contribute to the research activities of materials scientists worldwide....

Further, to give greater worldwide visibility to our authors, we will distribute copies of the journal free of charge at international conferences and the STAM website will feature regularly updated news and research summaries of important developments....

The Open Access Directory (OAD) list of Data repositories is now open for community editing.

OAD is a wiki, and you can help the cause by adding or revising entries to its lists.

Labels: Hot

This week BMJ started publishing its articles online as soon as they are ready.  (All research articles in BMJ are OA.)  For details, see the BMJ FAQ.

Mike J. Smith, Open Access Journal Publication: Implementation, Copyright and Dissemination, Using the Journal of Maps as a Case Study, forthcoming in the proceedings from Digital Mapping Techniques '07, Columbia, South Carolina, May 20-23, 2007.  Excerpt:

...This article explores the broad implementation of OA journals, issues pertaining to copyright and the distribution of (geospatial) research data....

The Journal of Maps was established against the backdrop of a perceived decline in the publication of research based maps. With the movement of print published journals towards a standardised A4 copy format, large maps are not easily publishable. The inclusion of “inserts” (folded or stitched) into journals appears to have declined over the last century and, with the high cost of colour printing, there is an apparent decline in research map publication. Maps are also rarely seen as a research goal in their own right, with the focus of journal publication often upon the communication of research results. JoM was therefore founded as a charity with the specific remit of publishing research maps....

John Buckman, Short film about Creative Commons Business Models, buckman's magnatune blog, June 30, 2008.  Excerpt:

Frances Pinter and David Percy have made an excellent documentary film about business models in the publishing world that use Creative Commons licenses.

Frances has been heading a CC-based publishing project in Africa. It is the Publishing and Alternative Licensing Model of Africa (PALM Africa), is based in Uganda, and South Africa, and she tells me the Ugunda project is going especially well. She also tells me she'll be soon expanding this idea into other publishing spheres, which is very exciting.

Percy is an award-winning film-maker, and so the production quality of the film is quite high. The film is 30 minutes long, with three 10 minute interviews (to fit into Youtube's ten minute max)....

The three 10 minute interviews are with John Buckman, Tom Reynolds, and Timo Hannay.  Here's the full 30 minute video.

Stéphane Goldstein has blogged some notes on the eScience Institute workshop, Data Sharing in the Biosciences : a sociological perspective (Edinburgh, June 26, 2008).  Excerpt:

...[T]here wasn't quite as much sociology as I expected, but the discussion provided lots of insights into varied practices regarding the management and sharing of data, and the cultural factors that  underpin this.

In this vein, the meeting explored the relationship between research culture and technology. It was attended by about 25 participants from various perspectives:
biomedical researchers (biologists, geneticists and proteomicists especially), sociologists, bioinformaticians, research funders... There were presentations highlighting data sharing practices in genetics and proteomics, citing examples from the RNAi Global Consortium and the European Bioinformatics Institute. I was particularly interested in a talk from Sabina Leonelli, from the London School of Economics, who pointed to the tensions that make the effective sharing of data so challenging; for instance, behavioural tensions between protectionism and the need to share resources with regard to dissemination, and the different sorts of tensions between the stability of classification categories and the dynamism/diversity of research practices.

It was also keen to take part in the session that covered the issue of rewards and incentives for researchers who create and disseminate data (a key issue, incidentally, in the RIN's recent report on publication and quality assurance of research data outputs). There was an understandable consensus that data are an important research output in their own right, but that conventional methods of reward and recognition do not properly address data creation. There was less agreement, however, about the best means of incentivising researchers: carrot or stick? One way or the other, the role of research funders is crucial....

Arthur Eger, Database statistics applied to investigate the effects of electronic information services on publication of academic research – a comparative study covering Austria, Germany and Switzerland, GMS Medizin - Bibliothek - Information, June 26, 2008.  (Thanks to MedInfo.)

Abstract:   In this study, estimations of the effects of electronic information services on academic research as made in 2004, are confronted with the actual situation. For this purpose database statistics on session length per user session, the role of “Referrers” and number of Full Text Articles requested per user session are analysed. The effect of a larger content offering is studied by analysing the relationship between subscribed titles and Full Text Articles requested. Finally a possible relationship between R&D spend, subscription spend and article publication is sought. This study found that time spent on Browse/scan and Search is increasing, possibly caused by a broader penetration amongst less trained users. This study further clearly showed that a larger content offering coincides with a dramatic increase in Full Text Article requests, and an increase in Full Text Article requests, after about 2 years, coincides with increased article publication.

From the body of the paper:

This study further clearly showed...that the contribution of Back File material to the total number of Full Text Article requests is modest.

Comment.  I see two implications for OA:

1. When users have more online content accessible to them (whether OA or pre-paid by their institution), they click through for full-text "dramatically" more often, showing a rough correlation between breadth of access and research productivity and depth.
2. Demand for older articles is "modest" compared to demand for new ones, showing that publishers do not need lengthy embargo periods before releasing their backfiles to OA.  Eger's data don't show how short an embargo period period could be for a given journal.  But in estimating the shortest viable length for an embargo, remember that we're not looking for the moment when the demand reduces to zero, but for the moment when the benefits to the journal from offering OA to the backfile (visibility, usage, and citation impact) outweigh the loss of income from access fees.

'Open access can vastly help Indian science', India PR Wire, July 4, 2008.  Excerpt:

Can India make the most out of its investments in scientific research to spur its growth and promote domestic talent through the Open Access route, a global expert in the field says.

India could easily make its scientific research widely accessible for greater impact at very low costs, thus helping take its research forward, Open Access proponent Steven Harnad has said....

His comments came in the respected Bangalore-based Current Science journal, widely influential among the scientific community....

'There are plenty of institutional repositories in India, and they are cheap to create because the software is free. But they are mostly empty, because self-archiving has not been mandated,' Harnad contended....

Proponents of Open Access argue that prices of scholarly journals have risen sharply, particularly over the last decade. So, most universities, also in the affluent West, can no longer afford subscriptions to all of the journals that their academics need....

Harnad argued that universities, research institutions and research fund providers 'the world over' are at last beginning to require researchers to deposit on-line drafts of articles for their peer-reviewed journals in their institutional repositories.

Such deposits of academic journals would not result in costs or copyright issues, he noted.

This, he suggested, would make available all of India's research output to the rest of the world, and, in exchange, India would have open access to 'the research output of the rest of the world'.

Current Science had recently suggested in an editorial that Indian academic institutions are finding it 'exceedingly expensive' to have a well-stocked library of science journals.

The editorial termed the pro-Open Access argument 'compelling', saying it was a 'new wind' blowing over the 'turbulent world of science publishing'....

Comment.  Apparently Stevan's piece isn't yet online.  The most recent issue of Current Science online is from June 25.  See the update below.

Update.  Stevan's piece was published in the May 25 issue:   How India can provide immediate open access now.  (Thanks to D.K. Sahu.)  It's a letter to the editor responding to the editorial of P. Balaram in the April 10 issue.   (Also see my comment on Balaram's editorial.)  From Stevan's letter: 

Balaram’s editorial devotes most of its space to the problem on research accessibility and usage being restricted by costs and copyright. It briefly mentions, but does not clearly explain the simple, proven solution: mandated self-archiving....

Universities, research institutions and research funders the world over are at last beginning to require researchers to deposit on-line drafts of their peer-reviewed journal articles in their IRs. Deposit itself is neither a cost nor a copyright issue, nor is it complicated. All institutions and funders need to mandate deposit of the final refereed electronic draft, the ‘postprint’, immediately upon acceptance for publication.

Sixty-two per cent of journals are already ‘green’: they have already formally endorsed making the postprints open access (OA) immediately upon deposit. For the remaining 38% of journals that embargo access, the postprints can be deposited as closed access, and the IRs have a button that allows users worldwide to semi-automatically request a postprint and authors to semi-automatically provide a single copy to the requester with one keystroke....

Journal cost-recovery models and copyright policy are irrelevant [to OA archiving]....

Barbara Malina (ed.), Open Access Opportunities and Challenges:  A Handbook, the German UNESCO Commission, July 2008.  A 144 pp. collection of articles on OA by 38 authors.  (Thanks to Napoleon Miradon.)

This is an English translation of Open Access: Chancen und Herausforderungen - ein Handbuch, which the German UNESCO Commission published on June 6, 2007.

PS:  The German edition includes a short section by me on OA in the US, an abridgement of my longer piece in Neil Jacobs (ed.), Open Access: Key strategic, technical and economic aspects, Chandos, 2006.  The English edition includes an abridgement and update (as of September 2007) of the same longer piece. 

Comment.  Also see Canessa and Zennaro's Science Dissemination using Open Access, which I blogged this morning.  That makes two books on OA in one day.  If you count Kylie Pappalardo's Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment:  A Guide for Authors, which I blogged on Tuesday, then that's three books on OA in three days.

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The final projects from Heather Morrison's course on open access (University of British Columbia, Spring 2008)  are now online.  Heather says the projects include "subject guides to open access resources for the environment, chemistry, environmental and occupational health, HIV/AIDS, Media Studies, a tutorial on preservation issues, and a draft research projects on OA mandates."

Hybrides Publizieren: Gemeinschaftsprojekt von Verlag und Bibliothek der Bauhaus-Universität, a press release from Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, July 1, 2008.  (Thanks to Klaus Graf.)  Read the press release in German or Google's English.

At Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, the press and library are working together to publish a series of dual-edition (OA/TA) monographs, and just published their first title, Die Realität des Imaginären. 

E. Canessa and M. Zennaro (eds.), Science Dissemination using Open Access, a new book published under a CC-NC-ND license by the Science Dissemination Unit of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, July 2008.

The book knits together pieces from many sources into a single narrative.  (Disclosure:  some of the pieces are mine.)  It's available as a downloadable PDF (4.74 MB, 196 pp.) or an online edition in an ebook viewer with turning pages.

From today's announcement:

The book is a compendium of selected literature on Open Access, both on the technical and organizational levels, and was written in an effort to guide the scientific community on the requirements of Open Access, and the plethora of low-cost solutions available. The book also aims to encourage decision makers in academia and research centers to adopt institutional and regional Open Access Journals and Archives to make their own scientific results public and fully searchable on the Internet. Discussions on open publishing via Academic Webcasting are also included.

The book is an effort by ICTP-SDU (Italy) in collaboration with CERN (Switzerland) enabled by the support of INASP (UK).

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E-LIS has passed the milestone of 8,000 deposited documents.  (Thanks to Andrew Waller.)

Videos of the presentations at New Communication Channels for Biology (San Diego, June 26-27, 2008) are now online.  (Thanks to Bora Zivkovic.)

Chris Rusbridge, Research Repository System persistent storage, Digital Curation Blog, July 2, 2008.  Excerpt:

This is the seventh and last of a series of posts aiming to expand on the idea of the negative click, positive value repository, which I'm now calling a Research Repository System. I've