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Friday, July 01, 2005

Playing catch-up: June 25 blog postings

Here are the major blog postings I made by email to SOAF while OAN was down last week. June 25, 2005:

Editorial endorsing OA. Barun K. Nayak, Humanity's Quest for Knowledge - Open Access- The IJO Initiative, Indian journal of ophthalmology, April-June, 2005. An editorial. Excerpt: 'Unfortunately, till now, access to [scientific research] was difficult because most research work was controlled by institutions and publishers who restricted it to only those who were able to pay for it. With Internet use becoming more common and overall costs of dissemination of knowledge falling significantly, the logical question that arose was - why should access be restricted when the research itself is conducted from taxpayers' money? This paved the way for an initiative known as the Open Access (OA) initiative, which is a means of making scientific literature digital, online and available free of charge to readers, while also cutting the delay inherent to the print medium....OA is here to stay and we all have something to gain from it. So, how do we overcome this hurdle posed by the Author Pay model? Is there a middle path between the unaffordable Reader Pay and unregulated Author Pay models? Fortunately, there is. It is in this context, that journals like the Indian Journal of Ophthalmology (IJO) have a major role to play. The cost of publication being borne by the journal and the parent association from its own resources, the IJO can afford OA. The IJO relies on its formidable team of reviewers to ensure that the reader gets authenticated peer-reviewed material. Similar efforts will have to be made by other publishers to ensure that their literature is not flooded with unregulated and repetitive material. All said and done, the IJO model of OA is workable and helps authors receive instant and wide readership. As a case in point, take the example of the Journal of Postgraduate Medicine (JPGM), published from Mumbai, India. Its commitment to the OA policy has not only increased the number of submissions, but also the citations. I would ask you all to support the OA initiative by adhering to the following points: [1] Publish your paper only in peer-reviewed journals that provide OA. [2] Serve as an editor or reviewer in journals committed to OA. [3] Ask for research funding to cover costs of publishing in the above. [4] If you publish in a non-OA journal, retain the copyright to your work and offer in its place the right of first print and electronic publication.'
More on the Santorum bill. Thomas Claburn, Reining In The National Weather Service, Information Week, June 23, 2005. Excerpt: 'Critics charge that S. 786 is an attempt to silence NWS. "If enacted, S. 786 would prohibit the National Weather Service from providing any service, including marine, public and aviation forecasts (other than severe weather warnings) to either the public, the media, academia, or state and local emergency management officials if private sector weather companies are or could provide a similar service for a fee," Richard Hirn, general counsel for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, wrote in a letter to Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C. The National Weather Service is silent on the issue. As a government agency, it is unable to offer comment about proposed legislation that might affect it. But a spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration notes that NWS isn't actively competing with the private sector. "There's no incentive for us to compete," he says. "No one has come to us and said this competes with our service."...[Steven Root, president of the Commercial Weather Service Association] says otherwise. "In fact, they're getting more and more into providing specialized, customized value-added products and services," he says. "They're doing it for free."...Commercial weather providers typically augment NWS data with additional sources of their own and tailor it for sale....Of course, it all comes down to profits. As a 2001 presentation from National Weather Service notes, "Taxpayer-funded government information --from corporate data from the Securities and Exchange Commission to patent data from the Patent and Trademark office-- is contributing to the spectacular growth in the information retrieval and database industries."...Efforts to control public information that profits the private sector are hardly new. Commercial providers of patent and trademark information opposed making the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database available online, a fight they lost in 1998. And in 1993, responding to pressure from public interest groups, the Securities and Exchange Commission made its Electronic Data Gathering and Retrieval System available online free of charge, a service Mead Data (subsequently purchased by Reed Elsevier and renamed Lexis-Nexis), under government contract, previously offered for a fee. Legislation designed to prohibit government-funded municipal wireless networks can be seen in a similar light. Those following S.786 note that the bill has not received much support and that it's currently languishing in committee. Sobien says the bill has a good chance of becoming law if it gets attached to other legislation, noting that a recent effort to attach it to an appropriations bill failed. He says he expects those backing the bill will try to attach it to an upcoming authorization bill for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.'
More on the trade embargo on science and literature. Christopher Byrd, Iranian Stories, The American Prospect, June 24, 2005. Excerpt: 'The U.S. Treasury Department tried to block an Iranian anthology. Then they got sued. Here's a look at what's between the covers....While a "general license" was granted to the publisher to "freely engage in the most ordinary publishing activities" with nations on America's "enemies list," it's vexing to note that such a license was required at all. Not to mention that it was only granted after a lawsuit had been filed against the U.S. government by Arcade, PEN American Center, the Association of American University Presses, and the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division.'
More on the French response to Google. David Reid, French answer to Google library, BBC News, June 24, 2005. Excerpt: 'The French are far from relaxed about their creative treasures, and especially the contents of La Biblioth�que Nationale de France (BNF), their National Library. It is an asset that France's rulers believe is under-represented on the internet. With the Google Print project planning to put 4.5 billion pages of English onto the web, France has decided to do something similar with French, though on a smaller scale. In fact, France started digitalising parts of its national collection as long as 13 years ago, and in 1997 they began to put this collection online. Catherine Lupovici, head of the digital library department at the BNF, says: "It was a project with the new library to create a network that would be available for scholars, representing an encyclopaedic French library of French culture." The project they call Gallica has already put some 80,000 works and 70,000 images online, and it is currently working its way through the BNF's basement of 19th century newspapers....Jean-No�l Jeanneney, director of the BNF, believes it is only natural that Google Print should present an Anglo-Saxon or American view of history and the world. "I have no reproach; this is normal", he says. "But this will require a counterpart on our side of the ocean." This counterpart, or counter-attack, to what the French press calls "omnigooglisation", would be organised on a different basis to Google. Rather than using Google's famous algorithm, Mr Jeanneney proposes a panel of experts to rank works. He says: "I am not confident in the power of the market, when it works along profit-making alone, to organise the best page-ranking or hierarchy of knowledge. "I think this is dangerous. Culture is not chaos. Culture is a way of putting things together. A book helps to know another book and to understand it."...Google is the first port of call for 74% of French people doing a web search. If the BNF's aim is not just to preserve but also to proliferate French culture, they may well choose to go with Google.'
Is OA coming to Tanzania?. Juma Thomas, Govt to allocate more resources to research - Mkapa, IPP Media, June 25, 2005. Excerpt: 'President Benjamin Mkapa [of Tanzania] said yesterday that his government would allocate more resources to research and development as a result of the growth registered in the economy. Mkapa said that, currently the country was spending about 0.3 per cent of its gross national product (GNP) on research and development....The president was speaking at the launch of the Tanzania Academy of Science (TAAS), a scientific, non-political and non-profit making body established, among other things, to promote science and technology for socio-economic development. He said that, according to Unesco and the World Bank, if a country wished to retain its human capital, especially scientists, it must spend at least one per cent of GNP on research and development....Openness to trade must go hand in hand with openness and access to knowledge and technology, without which, he said, the capacity to compete in a global or regional market could not be built, the president said.'
More on publishers v. Google. Jean Bedford, Google Print: Indexing vs. Copying and the Future of Scholarly Books, Commentary (the Shore Communications blog), June 24, 2005. Excerpt: 'In a thoughtful post to the [LibLicense list] at Yale University, Chuck Hamaker, a librarian at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, expresses his concern that book content is not as visible to students and scholars as articles, primarily because journal articles are indexed widely, have the context of snippits and are available full text in electronic format through some service. By contrast, books remain stuck in print silos, with the exception of some emerging book databases such as ebrary and safari. As Hamaker observes, "Massive indexing of monographs which is what I see Google Print actually doing, is critical for survival--the survival as usable text, of the book, to keep it from becoming nothing more than an interesting artifact of civilization." The current controversy between the Association of Academic Publishers (AAP) and Google Print focuses on legal definitions of copyright, which were developed long before the electronic age. The value of indexing and assisting the scholar in finding knowledge has been ignored....Journal publishers found that indexing, particularly in Google Scholar, has increased usage of their journals and improved their electronic revenues. By contrast, scholarly books have abysmally low actual usage by library patrons, hence the question of the value of continuing to spend scarce budget resources on this type of material. Improving usage should be the major concern of book publishers, not throwing up roadblocks to wider access; it's time to think marketing and moving into the twenty-first century.'
Paying for OA journals: mostly funding agencies, not universities or authors. Andy Gass, Paying to Free Science: Costs of Publication as Costs of Research, Serials Review, May 12, 2005. Abstract: 'Many proponents of open access to journal articles online view costs of publication as an essential yet minor component of the cost of conducting research in the life sciences. Author-side charges for publication in open-access journals in those fields should, therefore, be paid principally by the agencies and foundations that fund research. Recent analyses of the potential cost-to-institution of a widespread transition away from purchasing subscriptions to scholarly journals and towards paying open-access publication fees on behalf of affiliated faculty must be amended to reflect the reality that third-party funding agencies already pay the bulk of such fees in the life sciences, and will likely continue to do so.' (Thanks to Issues in Scholarly Communication.)
Data sharing in education. Data Sharing Breakthrough for Education Bodies, an unsigned news story from the UK eGov Monitor, June 23, 2005. Excerpt: 'A cluster of over 20 government departments and agencies in the education sector have established a landmark framework for sharing data between their organisations and potentially the wider public sector. The Department for Education and Skills initiated the project back in 2002 in a bid to standardise the way that public bodies exchange management information about students and learning providers. Its research found examples where attempts at 'joined-up working' had fallen foul of the legal minefield of data sharing or led to inconsistent practice....The new data sharing framework document, made public on 22 June, now provides a set of guidance and principles relating to how the 20-plus participating organisations will share data. Members include the Department for Work and Pensions, Becta, OfSTED, the Learning and Skills Council, Ufi and the DfES itself.' (Thanks to Paul Miller.)
Comment on OA to social science data. If you have thoughts on OA to data in the social sciences, then read the two papers on that subject presented at the recent JISC-funded virtual conference, Social Sciences Online: Past, Present and Future (June 20-24, 2005). The best comments posted before July 1 will be collected on the conference blog. For details, see the JISC press release soliciting comments.
International Creative Commons Conference. Paul Reyes has written a preview of the first International Creative Commons Conference, starting today at Harvard Law School (June 25-26).
Computational biology needs OA to data. Philip E. Bourne, Steven E. Brenner, Michael B. Eisen, PLoS Computational Biology: A New Community Journal, PLoS Computational Biology, June 2005. The editorial in the inaugural issue of PLoS' newest OA journal. Excerpt: 'Computational biology thrives on open access to biological data....The vision we have for PLoS Computational Biology as a community journal is first and foremost to support the dissemination of our science in a way that draws attention to the quality, depth, and scope of our best work. That this is an open-access journal is an integral part of this vision. Open access ensures not only that everything we publish is immediately freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world, but also that the contents of this journal can be redistributed and reused in ways that increase their value. Computational biology thrives on open access to DNA sequences, protein structures, and other types of biological data�it is high time that we apply the same principle to our papers and unleash our creativity to develop new and exciting ways to use the scientific literature.'

Posted by Peter Suber at 7/01/2005 11:52:00 AM.