Open Access News

(PS: If you're wondering why this is presented as journalism rather than an unpaid advertisement, the answer seems to be that the January issue will give equal time to the Google position.)

Once upon a time, academic research was locked down very tightly. Only subscribers could get hold of journal articles and conference papers. Then along came the open access movement, with its belief that the results of scientific research should be available to anyone, without charge. Backed by scholars and librarians, the movement seeks to get as much research as possible into the public sphere. Since taxpayers funded research, their argument went, taxpayers should also have access to it. To facilitate open access, some academics began depositing their work openly on the Web. This benefits business, general practitioners and medical specialists, students, government, engineers – anyone who needs to access new research. Collections online range from archives of working papers and technical reports to the full text of theses, conference papers and journal articles. The best tool to find them is OAIster. This acts as a search engine for all the different open access collections registered with the tool. At present, there are 572, but the numbers grow daily. The service has doubled in size in the past 12 months. It now indexes more than six million items.

[A]s president of the New York Public Library, which is in the process of scanning into computer form as many of its books as possible, Dr [Paul] LeClerc can see a future when he will never have to leave his office and travel across the world to get what he needs. "All the paradigms are shifting at the speed of light because the way of delivering information is changing so fast - it's a revolution as profound as the invention of the printing press." It is all because of a global battle to turn the web into a vast book repository that was sparked last year when Google announced a deal with some of the world's great libraries, including the NYPL, Harvard and Michigan universities to "digitise" books. The European Union, which baulked at the idea of an American company acting as librarian to the world, announced its own plans for an online library and last month Microsoft said it had struck a deal with the British Library to make digital copies of some of its world-famous holdings. This week the US Library of Congress raised the stakes further with plans, again with the support of Google, to build a World Digital Library of books, video, photographs and other media that can be replicated digitally.

From a November 18 posting on the CustomizeGoogle blog:

CustomizeGoogle 0.38 makes it easy to removes [sic] image copying restrictions in Google Book Search.

Thanks to Gary Price in yesterday's Search Engine Watch. Here's more from his story:

I don't believe this feature allows you to print Google Book Search content by just clicking and selecting print. When I tested, I didn't see pages from a book but only the material surrounding the actual page. However, using the right-click menu (now easily enabled for CustomizedGoogle) and placing a cursor on a page from a book, I was able to quickly isolate the page (as a JPEG file) and then print, save, convert, etc. I was also able to isolate direct urls to book pages and send them via email. You can even save book pages as wallpaper on your PC....Of course, limits about how many in-copyright "Sample Pages" you can view are still in place and the "copyrighted material" text is still visible on each page. Google Book Search does offer the full view of public domain materials. It will be interesting to see how (if at all) Google and participating publishers respond to this new option since it's coming from such a highly lauded software program.

While [the Royal Society] declares that "Funders should remember that the primary aims should be to improve the exchange of knowledge between researchers and wider society" in the same breath they state "We think it conceivable that the journals in some disciplines might suffer. Why would you pay to subscribe to a journal if the papers appear free of charge?". Why? Wake up. Why should I pay for it, in the first place? First of all, scientists publish their papers for prestige (fame) first, to get their data to the scientific community second, and for personal profit a distant third....It's the journal publishers who are profiting, not the authors, and definitely not the public. Paying for a journal made perfect sense in the print and paper media....Money saved from publishers greedy hands can be used either to make content cheaper and more accessible to everybody....Second, isn't science supposed to serve humanity?...So if you really want to 'improve communication between scientists and the wider society', stop charging for your articles - especially since the primary contributors don't care either way....Sure, some business model is needed - but there are many choices 'to have the cake' and 'eat it', as long as you don't think of publishing a journal as a profit enterpise....I see no problem at all with in the scientific industry moving to free content. In such a move, everbody wins - well, everybody except the publishers. They were needed and did their job before the advent of the net. Now it is time to thank them for their job and tell them goodbye. From a useful tool they have become a parasitic relic of the past - and the sooner academic publishing realises it, the better for all of us. Let's hope Royal Society stops looking into the past and does something more useful then trying to see who if Einstein is more popular then Newton (and they call this 'science'? sheez). Definitely not a proud day for the Royal Society.

Arguing the need to sustain the Royal Society's now-outmoded publishing model despite its inferiority at advancing science relative to PLOS and others (like BioMed Central) is an embarrassment to the Royal Society. The five-hundred-year Dark Ages were a period when alchemists labored in secret. Every alchemist jealously guarded his research outcomes, so whenever an alchemist discovered the hard way that drinking mercury was poison, that knowledge died with him (literally). The Enlightenment accomplished real alchemy: converting research into knowledge through the application of full disclosure. Once alchemists began to share their research outcomes, they became true scientists, and the hundred years that followed made more progress than the half-millennium that preceded it. Open Access science publishing is the latest installment in the saga of the Enlightenment: the evolution of a sustainable publishing model that makes research outcomes available to every single researcher in the world, gratis, without prejudice or burden. The Royal Society should respond to this by adopting the Open Access publishing model, not by fearmongering.

ideologi (pronounced "ideology") is an Internet-based system that facilitates ad hoc brainstorming sessions (called Exchanges) that individuals and organizations around the world can join. Users (called Participants) of ideologi can either submit answers to a countless number of active Exchanges, or submit their own questions to initiate an Exchange within ideologi....Each participant is involved in judging and scoring the answers submitted from her fellow participants. In order to expedite the process of review (called the Discovery Process) participants score a fraction of the entire pool of answers in a series of Discovery Phases. The units of credit used for scoring for each Exchange are called Ions. Once an answer is awarded the high score in an Exchange (which is then given the title of Prime Directive), each user receives a percentage of the financial reward (if any) established by the Initiator. The portion of the reward given to each user is based on the number of Ions they accumulate in an Exchange relative to the total number of Ions accumulated by all of the other participants. Although there is only one winning answer in an Exchange, there’s never a single winner in terms of Ions or financial rewards. Since participation in a basic Exchange does not require participants to risk anything other than their rank in Ideologi, participants can answer an unlimited number of Exchanges at any time.

Recent advances in communications technology [have] drastically reduced the marginal cost (cost per additional unit) of production, reproduction and distribution of creativity. Peer-to-peer methods make the reproduction and distribution costs so close to zero to not be worth metering. This economic reality split the creative industries between the beneficiaries of established ways of doing businesses (incumbents), and those who wish to harness this change to use competitive and new methods of production, distribution and funding of their creativity (innovators).

Abstract: This is the instrument of the complete 68 questions used in the dLIST 2005 study of LIS scholarly communication behaviors, specifically those related to self-archiving. It is being made available here, in an attempt to help improve the comparability of open access/self-archiving studies. That is, studies of self-archiving in other disciplines or about the use/non-use/value of specific archives and repositories can also use it. Note: Sections are conditional depending on whether participants had self-archived in dLIST, self-archived anywhere, or not self-archived at all (thus participants did not have to answer more than 50 questions). Besides non-use, there is also a section of questions about the value/use of dLIST.

'The worst-case scenario [according to the Royal Society] is that funders could force a rapid change in practice, which encourages the introduction of new journals, archives and repositories that cannot be sustained in the long term, but which simultaneously forces the closure of existing peer-reviewed journals that have a long-track record for gradually evolving in response to the needs of the research community over the past 340 years. That would be disastrous for the research community.' Dr Astrid Wissenburg, who co-ordinated the [open-access] consultation for RCUK, said: 'The priority for the Research Councils is to ensure the availability and accessibility of the outputs of research funded by the taxpayer. This broad principle, together with concern for value for money, long-term preservation of research and maintaining quality assurance through peer-review, has been supported by nearly all of the submissions to the consultation.'

Google has acknowledged that it cannot digitise copyright material from European libraries, according to the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). ALPSP chief executive Sally Morris said that at a meeting with Google last month --also attended by the Publishers Association (PA), the International Publishers Association and the Association of American University Presses-- the search giant agreed it was "absolutely the case that it is not allowed to [digitise in-copyright material from libraries] in Europe". The American "fair use" law, which Google has used as a justification for its scanning of in-copyright material from libraries in America, is, Morris said, broader than its European equivalent, "fair dealing". Google is currently embroiled in lawsuits in the US with both the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over its actions. Morris said Google's acknowledgement meant that if it wanted to digitise copyright books from European libraries, it would need to find a solution - even if it successfully defends the US lawsuits. She now plans to devise a system that will make it easy for Google - or any other organisation digitising books, such as the Open Content Alliance and Microsoft - to get the permissions they need. She told the Bookseller : "The fact Google recognise they can't do this without permission in Europe gives us a threshold to work out a way for them to get permission. In America, they have the law on their side. Here, they accept they don't." Her suggestions, put to Google at the meeting, include a Canadian model whereby, if it proves impossible to locate a copyright owner, a licence is granted so the material can be used legally. "We are waiting for them to come back to us on these issues," added Morris, "but they said they were interested."

Leaders of Canada’s major research libraries held a national summit at Emerald Lake, BC, November 1-3, 2005. The summit outlined plans for online access to Canada’s recorded heritage. At the conclusion the participants declared their commitment to a coordinated and sustained program to digitize Canada’s information and knowledge resources - with 2006 as the catalyst year. “Our vision is that Canadians will be able to know themselves through their heritage and the world will have the opportunity to better know Canadians” declared CARL President John Teskey. “Our common aim is to provide easy online access to the extraordinary wealth of written and other records by and about Canadians.” The Emerald Lake participants included members of the library, archives and museum communities. The group strongly endorsed ‘Open Governance’ for the initiative.... [Said Ernie Ingles, Vice-Provost and Chief Librarian, University of Alberta, and the Chair of the CARL Planning Committee:] “There will be an open invitation for everyone who is willing and able to come and play their own unique part in developing our collective Canadian online memory. We would like to hear from local history societies, archives organizations, genealogists and others across the country.”...The Open Canada Digitization Initiative will act in concert with the Canadian digital information strategy presently being developed by Library and Archives Canada CARL calls on governments and funding bodies to support this initiative, to ensure that Canadians will know themselves and that the world will know Canada - now and for generations to come.

In just a handful of years, an enormous amount of richly detailed and flexible digital material has been amassed in the UK as technology has expanded to make it possible: a conservative estimate suggests £130 million of public money has been spent on the creation of digital content since the mid-1990s. Nevertheless, this growth has been as unstructured as it has been phenomenal, and the material has accumulated in the absence of a UK framework for digitisation to advise on content, standards and sustainability, rather than in response to one....Moreover, digital projects have tended to be driven by supply rather than demand, spurred by opportunity instead of actual need. A wealth of material in museums, libraries, archives and journals remains undigitised, despite the pressing need to sustain the momentum, to continue to create resources of increasing value and comprehensiveness for the end user. The very existence of powerful search facilities is changing users’ behaviour and expectations. Future digitisation programmes must respond to this and need to be more clearly informed by researchers’ needs....In 2005, JISC and the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) commissioned Loughborough University to undertake an in-depth investigation into the current state of digitisation in the UK, and this document draws on its findings....Loughborough’s research uncovered deep fragmentation in all components of the digitisation infrastructure: the records of available material, the provision of e-resources for different disciplines, the metadata and standards used, the advisory and support services, the availability of funding, the differing priorities of funders, and variable hosting, delivery and authentication methods. Yet the very interconnectedness of the elements of the digitisation process, where each impacts on the other, makes it both easier and more essential to place them within a framework which can make formal links that resonate across all operations. All shortcomings identified in Loughborough’s study can therefore begin to be addressed, from inadequate metadata to lack of collaboration, by uniting the various sectors through a UK framework for digitisation. A UKwide strategy would assist in filling gaps in provision, cut across the efforts of individual funders and digitising organisations, reduce overlaps between support services and assist in the provision, take up and use of resources. Fears that any such ‘nationalisation’ might stifle local innovation can be allayed by emphasising the flexible nature of the framework we envisage; one which would issue clear guidelines rather than prescriptive demands, which would draw up ‘gold standards’ to be regularly reviewed. Such a framework, then, should be coordinated and distributed, rather than centralised, and ensure effective networking of expertise across different sectors.

Exact Editions has been steadily gathering momentum over the last six months and has been conducting private trials since September. The time has now come to gradually take the wraps off our system and see what the world at large can make of it. The first magazines available from the Exact Editions service are two Open Access science magazines from the Public Library of Science. Exact Editions is now working with thirty of the UK's leading consumer publishers and welcomes inquiries from magazine publishers large and small. Daryl Rayner, one of Exact Editions' founders, welcomed the PLoS magazines to the service: 'We have chosen to experiment with these two outstanding, freely available, open access magazines because we wish to demonstrate the usefulness of our delivery platform as an additional access route. Most of the magazines we are working with are consumer offerings and will only be available to their subscribers. But all magazines benefit from the company of others and we hope to offer titles from all specialist consumer interests'. There is a feedback form on the site and we look forward to hearing from you!

The Royal Society, Britain's national academy of science, yesterday joined the debate about so-called open access to scientific research, warning that making research freely available on the internet as it is published in scientific journals could harm scientific debate. The Royal Society fears it could lead to the demise of journals published by not-for-profit societies, which put out about a third of all journals. "Funders should remember that the primary aims should be to improve the exchange of knowledge between researchers and wider society," The Royal Society said....Open access proponents said the Royal Society position statement confuses open access publishing...with author self-archiving. The latter, which has already been carried out in some disciplines for years, relies on academics publishing on the internet articles that have been accepted by journals. A spokesman for the Royal Society said: "We think it conceivable that the journals in some disciplines might suffer. Why would you pay to subscribe to a journal if the papers appear free of charge?"

(PS: Does the RS want "to improve the exchange of knowledge between researchers and wider society" or does it want to subordinate this improvement to the financial interests of the publishing industry? I have more comments in yesterday's blog postings.)

Abstract: Interview by Knud Böhle with Jens Redmer, Google Book Search Europe. The interview makes the essence of Google Book Search clear: an innovative and powerful Online Public Access Catalogue integrated into Google’s overall index and search service for the Internet. Due to the focus of the INDICARE Monitor questions centre on content protection, usage limitations, and copyright.

Abstract: The journal article reviewed here (Holtgrewe 2005) attempts to explore the changing boundaries and interrelations of information markets and the public domain in the light of digital technology, digital goods and changing intellectual property regimes. The music sector and scientific publishing are the cases studied in more depth. The concepts used are derived from a sociology of knowledge understood as an “interactionist” and “constructivist” endeavour.

The philosophy behind open access is that publicly funded research should be freely available to all as soon as is practicable. Whilst this is a very laudable aim, the requirement has forced learned journals to consider how best to respond to the challenge of this new environment. What is clear is that the traditional model of free authorship and the reader paying is no longer tenable for journals with a significant authorship holding such grants. We at Rheumatology have taken a very proactive attitude in responding to this challenge. We analysed our submitted and accepted manuscripts during 2004, demonstrating that 38% of accepted papers with a declared source of funding had funding from one of the major UK and USA funding agencies which have either already adopted, or are expected to adopt, an open access deposition policy. Loss of these manuscripts would pose a very real threat to the quality of the journal. Financial modelling indicates that continuing the traditional model is not viable in the long term. We have, therefore, been forced to consider alternative business models, including partial or full open access and publishing the journal online only. We have decided to adopt a partial or optional open access model since this will enable those authors who must, as a condition of their grant, place post prints in an open archive/repository to do so, whilst also enabling those who do not wish to do so to continue to submit and publish papers in the traditional manner. Our publishers, Oxford University Press, have developed an optional open access model for their Press-owned journals, called Oxford Open, and our system will be very similar. Rheumatology will, we wish to reassure our authors and readers, continue to be published both in print and on-line. We are therefore delighted to announce that, commencing 1 January 2006, authors wishing to publish using an open access system will be able to do so in Rheumatology....Authors will be offered the choice of using open access once their manuscript has been accepted. Thus, the editorial decision process will not be affected by open access. The charge for open access in 2006 will be £1500 ($2800) per article, or the discounted rate of £800/$1500 per article for authors whose institutions have an online subscription. There will also be discounts available for authors from developing countries. Further details of submitting and charges for open access publication can be found via the journal website.

(PS: In general I applaud this step. I can't tell, however, whether Rheumatology will demand payment in order to let its authors live up to their prior agreements with funders. If so, I cannot approve. These authors have an obligation to their funding agencies and should not have to pay a third party in order to fulfill it. Moreover, these authors may not want OA publication in a journal, merely OA deposit in a repository. If the journal really expects to be paid in these circumstances, then I recommend that authors look for another journal.)

OK - imagine for one crazy moment that I am in charge of Elsevier and I was about to embark upon a mission to make our journals the most attractive place to publish for computer scientists. What qualities would that journal (or journals) need to have? Having spoken to many people in the last year, I have come to the conclusion that the following points are (more or less) important. If I have missed any, please let me know.

FREE ACCESS - at least at the point of use. Subscribers access the journal for 1 year, then all articles are available to everyone who wants them? ...
UPDATEABLE ARTICLES - following the example of versions on arXiv, authors should be able to update their articles whenever new date or results are available. Old versions remain available as well....
SOME PROFIT - a commercial company needs to make a profit to survive. What would be an acceptable level of profit to make (after tax)? Any excess could go to reducing the costs of the journal subscriptions....
RAW DATA - all articles to have raw data available on the web in an open, interchangeable format....

Leonard is the Elsevier Publishing Editor responsible for theoretical computer science journals. He played a role in the experiment with free online access at Elsevier's Information and Experimentation announced in August.

The Center for History and New Media is building an open-source package of tools for libraries and museums that will work right in the web browser, where most research is now done. We are calling the project SmartFox: The Scholar's Web Browser, and it will enable the rich use of library and museum web collections with no cost --either in dollars, or probably more importantly, in secondary technical costs related to their web servers-- to institutions. This set of tools will be downloadable and installable on any of the major open-source browsers related to the increasingly popular Firefox web browser....SmartFox will enable users, with a single click, to grab a citation to a book, journal article, archival document, or museum object and store it in their browser. Researchers will then be able to take notes on the reference, link that reference to others, and organize both the metadata and annotations in ways that will greatly enhance the usefulness of, and the great investment of time and money in, the electronic collections of museums and libraries. All of the information SmartFox gathers and the researcher creates will be stored on the client's computer, not the institution's server (unlike commercial products like Amazon's toolbar), and will be fully searchable. The Web browser, the premier platform for research now and in the future, will achieve the kind of functionality that the users of libraries and museums would expect in an age of exponentially increasing digitization of their holdings.

Update. SmartFox is a stand-alone browser based on the Firefox source code, not a Firefox plug-in.

A freely accessible Web site, the MEDLINE/PubMed Baseline Repository (MBR), developed by staff in NLM's Lister Hill Center is now available. The MBR...contains various resources derived from or pertaining to the MEDLINE/PubMed baseline files which are produced after the records have undergone annual maintenance. One MBR resource, the MBR Query Tool, is restricted to use by NLM's registered MEDLINE/PubMed licensees. MEDLINE/PubMed licensees may prefer to search the baseline files via this Web-based Query Tool rather than, or in addition to, locally mounting all the baseline files obtained from NLM's ftp server....Researchers have expressed interest in having access to MEDLINE citations in the state they were at a given moment in time. The MBR was set up to provide this capability. NLM has stored the end of year baseline MEDLINE/PubMed database for each year maintained with MeSH vocabulary for the upcoming year starting in 2002 along with a selection of the associated MeSH Vocabulary data files. The 2006 baseline files will be available in December 2005.

The world's oldest scientific society has warned that the spread of open access journals — as well as open archiving — could have a "disastrous" impact on scientific publishing, possibly forcing some peer-reviewed journals to close. Proponents of open access deny this claim, saying there is no evidence to support such alarmist statements, and that its authors have confused various strands of the open access debate.

Recent technological advances are leading to dramatic changes in the exchange of knowledge, and particularly the publication of journals. One of the most important changes is the publication of articles and papers on the world wide web, rather than solely in the form of printed journals. Most journals now have electronic versions on the world wide web and this has increased access to scientific papers....The Royal Society welcomes the exploration of these new developments where the aim is to improve the exchange of knowledge between researchers and with wider society. At present, all papers appearing in Royal Society journals can be accessed free of charge 12 months after their publication. However, the Society believes that the approach of some organisations to the 'open access debate' is threatening to hinder rather than promote the exchange of knowledge between researchers. This is partly because some participants in the debate appear to be trying to pursue another aim, namely to stop commercial publishers from making profits from the publication of research that has been funded from the public purse. While some companies do appear to be making excessive profits from the publication of researchers' papers, this should not be the primary factor guiding future developments in the exchange of knowledge between researchers....Among the potential dangers are that researchers will stop submitting papers or subscribing to existing journals, particularly if they choose only to deposit papers in repositories and archives....Any viable new open access model must adequately cover the costs of high quality, independent peer review....Furthermore, models in which researchers are charged to submit or publish papers introduce a new disincentive to the exchange of knowledge. Such financial barriers will be more acute for researchers with the least amount of funds, such as those at the very early or late stages of their careers or in developing countries....To inform discussion, the Royal Society recommends a thorough study of proposed new models, including an assessment of the likely costs and benefits to all. Funders should resist the temptation to act before being informed by such a study, and should not introduce policies that force researchers to adopt new models that are untried and untested.

For more, see (1) the Royal Society's press release on today's position statement, (2) its previous position statement on the RCUK policy from July 2005, and (3) its written testimony to the House of Commons Scientific and Technology Commmittee inquiry into scientific publications and OA from June 2004.

Comment. Five quick comments. (1) OA is compatible with publisher revenue, even profit. For example, BMC is for-profit OA publisher. The RS misunderstands the purpose of OA, which is to improve access to science, not to harm publishers. As I put it in my OA Overview, "The purpose of the campaign for OA is the constructive one of providing OA to a larger and larger body of literature, not the destructive one of putting non-OA journals or publishers out of business. The consequences may or may not overlap (this is contingent) but the purposes do not overlap." (2) There is no danger that researchers will stop submitting their work to peer-reviewed journals and submit them only to repositories that perform no peer review. The professional rewards of research attach to peer-reviewed publication, not to unrefereed archiving. The OA movement has always been about OA to peer-reviewed research, not about bypassing peer review. It's possible that authors will stop submitting their work to non-OA peer-reviewed journals, and prefer OA peer-reviewed journals, but that's a very different and very welcome development. (3) The objection that OA journals discriminate against indigent authors has always been weak and was recently made even weaker by the discoveries that fewer than half of OA journals even charge author-side fees and that many more non-OA journals do so than OA journals. (4) The RS call for a study is oblivious to the many studies of OA that have already been undertaken. The draft RCUK policy in particular is based on the extensive hearings and evidence-gathering process conducted by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee in 2004 and summarized in its report, Scientific Publications: Free for All? The RS should know about this; it submitted a lengthy brief to the committee. (5) For my response to the RS objection that OA archiving will endanger journals, see my comment, earlier this morning, on the Australian news story on the RS statement, which I saw and blogged before I saw the RS statement itself.

The Royal Society's statement (below, with comments) is not only ill-informed, failing even to grasp what either Open Access or the proposed RCUK policy is about and for, but it is a statement for which the Royal Society (RS), a venerable and distinguished institution, will have profound reason to be ashamed in coming years. The RCUK proposed to require RCUK-funded -- i.e., publicly-funded, tax-payer-funded -- research journal articles to be made freely available online to all those would-be users world-wide who cannot afford access to the journal in which they were published. This is called Open Access (OA) self-archiving; it is a supplement to -- not a substitute for -- the existing peer-reviewed journal publishing system. And it has already been practised, and has co-existed peacefully, with the journal system for over a decade and half now (for researchers have been self-archiving their articles for at least that long), even in certain areas -- notably some branches of physics -- in which 100% of the articles are being self-archived immediately upon publication or even earlier, and have been for years. The physics publishers -- the American Physical Society and Institute of Physics Publishing -- have both reported publicly that they have detected no subscription decline at all as a result of self-archiving....This crucial distinction [between OA archiving and OA journals] is completely clouded over in the RS statement, and the self-archiving mandate keeps being treated as if it were an OA publishing mandate. The result is a large number of rather shrill and intemperate non sequiturs that do the RS no credit.

The scientific body that was a pioneer of peer-review journals says moves to provide immediate and free online access to research could have "disastrous" consequences for science. The UK's Royal Society warns against "hasty" adoption of plans by public agencies to require scientists they fund to deposit research in large online "open access" databases. The Society, which publishes seven peer-reviewed journals, says the proposed new models for open access publishing are "untried and untested" and there is no evidence they are economically viable. It says the proposed move could stop researchers submitting papers or subscribing to existing peer-reviewed journals, which could cease to exist and leave researchers with lower-quality services. The Society also says that a drop in journal subscriptions could also stop learned societies from running conferences from the profits raised by selling journal subscriptions. One example the Society opposes is a Research Councils UK (RCUK) proposal to make future grant recipients ensure their published peer-reviewed research papers are made publicly available at or around the time of publication. Professor Stevan Harnad of the University of Southampton in the UK, who first recommended this particular model, argues it will supplement, not substitute, existing peer-reviewed journal publishing. He says there is a difference between open access journals (peer-reviewed journals that provide free and immediate access to their content) and open access archiving (where researchers put conventional journal articles into open access online archives). He says the RCUK is not proposing to mandate that researchers publish in open access journals, merely that they provide open-access to their existing peer-reviewed articles.

Comment. Two quick replies. (1) The Royal Society, like so many others, misunderstands the draft RCUK policy. The policy mandates deposit on OA repositories, not submission to OA journals. Harnad's reply is on point. (2) The claim that OA archiving harms journal subscriptions has been answered many times, but the RS shows no sign of following the argument. There's evidence that deposits in OA repositories reduce a journal's downloads but no evidence that they reduce a journal's subscriptions. The RCUK policy protects journal subscripitions by not requiring deposit of the published version of an article but only the final version of the author's manuscript. It also allows publishers to impose an embargo on the OA edition if they wish. Some non-OA journals report that OA after a very short delay actually increases submissions and subscriptions. In physics, where OA archiving is most extensive and where high-volume OA archiving has coexisted with non-OA jornals for 15 years, journal publishers report no harmful effect on subscriptions. It's time to turn down the static, see what is being proposed, and take advantage of the benefits of OA for scientists as authors, scientists as readers, all who fund them, and all who benefit from their work.

Thomson Scientific is releasing a single tool for searching and accessing online open access content. The Web Citation Index (WCI) from the abstracting and indexing (A&I) specialist will become part of its ISI Web of Knowledge platform and connect together pre-print articles, institutional repositories and open access (OA) journals, IWR can exclusively reveal. WCI uses the same technology as the Web of Science and provides users with general search and citation search engines, alerts, search history and linking services. At the heart of WCI is technology that crawls the internet searching for research documents that are freely available. Once the software has located the document it indexes it, locates the citations within the document and automatically links these to the cited document. This technology is the result of a partnership between Thomson and electronics giant NEC, who provided their CiteSeer scientific library system. "We married their technology with the ability to index citations, combining algorithmic and editorial processes," said Jim Pringle, Thomson vp of development, government and academic. Thomson has formed an editorial team to assess the material being indexed. All content will be judged on a set of criteria that includes; who hosts the archive and is it well maintained, what selection process does the archive have, document formats and whether full text is available. "The goal is to index all repository material, but it has to conform to scholarly standards," Pringle said, "It brings a consistent resource for pre-prints are difficult to find and brings them into professional research." Pringle said the OA and institutional repository community needed a serious index and search tool to make their content more "discoverable". Although a shot in the arm for the OA community, Pringle was quick to back traditional publishing models. "Peer review journal literature continues to have an important future; I don't see the repository movement calling that into question. This is part of the process by which repositories are finding their way."

(PS: It really looked like the ISI folks got it until Pringle implied that one must support "traditional publishing models" in order to support peer review.)

The spat over the Google Print Library Project shows that Google needs to wise up, publishers need to wake up, and copyright needs a shake up. Indexing the world's books so that they are as searchable as web pages will be seen by our descendants as one of the great achievements of this generation. At last light will fall on the darkest recesses of the world's libraries, and wisdom that has been visible to almost no one will suddenly be only a click or two away from a large and growing proportion of humanity. But though the promise is sublime, the process by which it is being fulfilled verges on the ridiculous, and none of the main players is blameless....Start with Google, though it is perhaps the most blameless of all. Google has a logo that looks like it belongs in a toy store and a motto that says, "don't be evil", but it also has a $100 billion stock market capitalization and effectively controls access to a large and increasing proportion of human knowledge. Like Tom Hanks's character in the film Big, it is a child that woke up one day to find itself in the body of adult. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the gung-ho way that Google has pursued the indexing of library book collections. In particular, its failure to engage properly with copyright holders until forced to do so by letters of complaint and lawsuits seems downright dumb – it surely could have had many publishers on side if only it had been more adroit at handling the politics and psychology of the situation. That it failed to do so is a disservice not to publishers, but to Google's own users and shareholders....

Yet far more than being angry with Google about the Library Project, publishers should be furious with themselves for not having already spotted and exploited the same idea. It took Apple to show the reluctant and clueless music industry how to sell its back catalogues online, and now Google is leading book publishers – kicking and screaming – down the same path. Both episodes are to the great shame of those industries, which don't deserve to prosper if they remain blind to such huge opportunities when they heave into view. Whatever the current legal arguments, the full-text indexing of books is inevitable. This is not because Google (or their rivals) want it, but because readers want it. Publishers' slowness to recognise this has weakened them strategically because they will be less able to define and control whatever services eventually emerge. But instead of ruing past mistakes, publishers should concentrate on future opportunities, which could still be substantial. Despite their protestations, Google Print, including the Library Project, has the potential to greatly enhance most publishing businesses – if only they don't let this opportunity go to waste. At a stroke, thousands of old and obscure titles that used to be worth precisely nothing will start to appear before the eyes of millions of potential buyers. Providing that publishers can come up with ways to satisfy the resulting demand, which will be spread thinly across large numbers of titles, this 'long tail' might collectively be worth as much as the far smaller numbers of titles that are currently in print. Contrary to popular belief, many publishers understand this. Their locking horns with Google over the Library Project is...really...an attempt to reassert control over 'their' content with an eye to the longer-term risks of disintermediation....

Current copyright laws were designed for a world in which it was infeasible either to restrict what a reader could do with a book after he purchased it, or for that reader to make and distribute countless pristine copies. The system worked well because the very limitations of existing technologies assured a degree of balance between the two extremes of overbearing control and widespread piracy. The digital world has increasingly made both extremes possible, resulting in a monumental battle over which one will prevail. While this plays out, we see each side come up with competing absurdities: as content vendors spend money to reduce the value of their products to paying customers (e.g., by restricting where a DVD can be played), search engines systematically flout copyright law by delivering cached copies of third-party web pages. If we had enlightened and forward-thinking legislators, they would have long since stepped in to redefine this balance and to clarify fundamental issues that have been left unresolved: Is it legal to make a full-text index without the copyright-holder's explicit permission? What about distributing copies of other people's web pages? Thanks to Google and its peers, everyone from the schoolchild to the scientist has come to depend on these activities, and hundreds of billions of dollars of commercial value has been built on them. Given this, it is insane that their legal status is still open to question. Have legislators been deaf to the questions that are still being asked a decade or more after the web entered everyday life?...So while Google has to mature, it is publishers and politicians who still have the most to do. They must adapt their businesses and laws to work in a new, unfamiliar land edging into view on the horizon, a place that our children are already colonising. This is a world in which our abilities to find, reinvent and share are being set free from the limits of the physical world. The future is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

[E]xperience with one or more of the following standards: Dublin Core, METS/MODS, OpenURL, OAI-PMH, TEI, or others. Experience with creation and/or management of digital objects in various text, image, sound, and/or video formats. Knowledge of institutional repositories and open access publishing....

With more than 80 million speakers in East and Central Africa, Swahili is the most widely spoken language in Africa, though a fully updated dictionary of the language has not been produced for 30 years. [Martin Benjamin, a visiting assistant professor of Swahili at Wesleyan University] aims to change that with the Kamusi (Dictionary) Project, an effort to document and produce a comprehensive guide to Swahili using the Internet....Benjamin compares his project to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia drafted largely by a band of worldwide literati. He emphasizes, however, that, unlike Wikipedia, he vets every entry for accuracy, sometimes within minutes, before he posts them....By spring 1995, Benjamin had entered 21,000 words into the database, and the Kamusi Project went live. It was one of Yale's first academic websites.

President A P J Abdul Kalam wants all libraries in schools, colleges and universities to be digitised within the next four years. At the valedictory of Mahabharata Utsav, organised by the Mahabharata Research Foundation, here on Monday, the President said the digitisation of books has to be in regional languages. Knowledge has always been the prime mover for prosperity. It is important to take up the mission of integrating all forms of knowledge and culture into our digital library....The President unveiled a state-of-art Digital Mobile van to document, conserve, digitise and disseminate manuscripts. He suggested that the mobile digital library can become a partner of the Digital Library of India portal, a project aimed at providing free-to-read searchable collection of one million books.

To be able to climb the shoulders of the scientific giants of Newton's time, access to a limited corpus of written sources, letters, journals and books in libraries and archives was sufficient. Finding your scientific way in the expanding universe of our contemporary global science system requires capacities and facilities of quite another order. Since the brain capacity of researchers has not increased, climbing the ladder to the shoulders of science's giants now calls for access to ever more extensive and complex ICT facilities : giant databases, mega repositories of scientific journals, colossal archives and the contiously expanding Internet to connect researchers with information....[T]he next step in physics demands a Large Hadron Collider that will produce 12 to 14 Petabytes of digital data per year, the full capacity of about 16 million CD ROM's, to be analysed by some 6.000 researchers, scattered around the world, but tightly knit by the Grid computer-network of our global science system. In this way use of ICT has made collections of scientific data in many respects comparable to musical scores: to be used time and again for a diversity of performances by a diversity of artists for the different audiences of society. Optimum access to research data should enable researchers from all over the world to compose the full score for our knowledge based international society. Consequently, access to the gold mine of research data has become quickly a major issue in international science policy and research management. The traditional exchange arrangements between scientific colleagues no longer suffice to guarantee the necessary openness of access to digital data resources. Optimum access requires formal agreements on the conditions of access on the national and international levels....At the meeting at ministerial level of OECD's Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy on January 30, 2004, the ministers responsible for science policy endorsed a Declaration on Access to Research data from Public Funding including a draft set of principles and Guidelines. The Declaration will be an important step towards further international scientific co-operation.

The issue of access to raw or fundamental scientific data must be distinguished from the one of access to Scientific Literature....Our position on this matter is unambiguous: the fact of making digital data accessible would allow a better peer review while offering to other scientists, who are not able to duplicate the same experiments or same calculations, the possibility of taking part in an inclusive way to the world research dynamical movement, while, of course, fully acknowledging former works. It means that Open Access to scientific articles as well to raw data, shall be guaranteed to all, whenever the data and scientific information being disclosed in articles, as is very often the case, are the result of research works supported by public or philanthropic funds....The online publication cost is very low, and printings costs have kept decreasing. Paradoxically, the very prices of subscriptions to scientific journals, have kept increasing as librarians are denouncing. It is thus not astonishing that the large scientific publishing organizations are reporting considerable profits. Who thus pay the bills? All the society ! Not only the scientific community which must repurchase freely donated material, but also all the private and association sector which should be entitled to freely benefit from this aid from public authorities and philanthropic institutions. Why should this situation be allowed to continue to exist ? Would historical inertia not be held responsible ? Fortunately, a movement exists, a movement in the true direction of History, the Open Access movement which is represented during the WSIS by the Working Group on Scientific Information, and which proposes various solutions to get out of this current situation as fast as possible....One may also recommend Open Access journals, without publication charges, and which would be subsidized or implemented by national and international organizations. Another solution, nonexclusive of the others, would be, as some are preaching it, to access, in Open Archives, to the preprints or reprints of articles published in subscription journals?...It is clear that financially handicapped scientists, fighting for their intellectual survival, cannot and shall not accept to be considered as second class researchers, and to have free access only to six months old archives. More inclusive and innovating policies should and could be implemented....Open Access is an essential condition of an evolution towards a society of shared knowledge, and this is not a concern only of intellectual or philosophical nature, because the consequences of the current system are quite simply dramatic, even tragic. The current system goes against the efforts of all governments, whoever they are and wherever they are, to reinforce their economies, which, everywhere, are struggling at the beginning of the third millennium....In economical terms, the Keynesian multiplier effect is seriously dampened, and public expenditures are playing a much less effective role than has been forecast. The current system, if it were to persist, would be some sort of a forced rent or toll on scientific information, and would constitute also in this way a forced contribution from all innovating entrepreneurs whose researchers are also freely donating the contents of their publications as members of the scientific community. In countries in the "South", the damage is even larger, because the access cost to this costly information becomes an annihilating factor, and then we find before us a digital divide at the content level which adds up to the digital divide at the level of access means.

(PS: The RCUK policy is based heavily on the July 2004 report, Scientific Publications: Free for All? by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. It's possible that many MPs want to reassert their support for a strong OA policy in the face of intense lobbying by publishers.)

Update (11/24/05). I've confirmed with the secretary for the committee that the debate will take place on schedule whether or not the RCUK announces the final version of its policy by the 15th.