Open Access News

What do you foresee happening in the arena of Open Source development and online access to chemical databases in the next few years?

I see databases being replaced by open publication into the Web environment and this is already happening in bio- and other sciences. In principle, this can happen in chemistry if the attitude is right. There is always going to be a formal need for reference such as patent data but for current awareness Google is likely to be more valuable than conventional human-created databases. Open source acceptance is purely cultural. Most sciences welcome it. In the library world and bioscience it is assumed that all new developments are open source. But in chemistry there are entrenched attitudes such as, "If it's free it can't be good,"...

San Diego based eMolecules Inc has launched what one might consider to be the chemical equivalent of the Google search engine - "Chmoogle". The company describes Chmoogle as the world's leading free open-access chemistry search engine and its mission is to discover, curate, and index all of the public chemical information in the world, and make it available to the public.... The language of chemistry is chemical structures. Chmoogle makes the world's chemistry searchable by structure. Just draw a molecule using your favorite structure drawing tool and hit Go!"... Before Chmoogle, there was no free Internet resource of this nature. It provides a genuine cheminformatics system that anyone could use to find information using a substructure search. A number of academic institutions have searchable databases, but they're usually focused on their particular field of science, and their search systems are often primarily for organizing only their data. Chmoogle's goal is to be the search system to index all of the world's publicly available chemical information....

(PS: Bloom does not attempt to answer any of the objections to the DCPC proposal or to consider the reasons why the NIH is willing to link to publisher sites in addition to, but not instead of, hosting its own OA copies.)

James Love, A UN/WIPO Plan to Regulate Distribution of Information on the Internet, Huffington Post, November 30, 2005. Excerpt:

What is proposed is as follows. Any web page operator who makes any combination or representations of “images or sounds . . . accessible to the public . . . at substantially the same time,” would be granted a new right, to authorize or prohibit anyone from copying the data, or republishing or re-using the information in any form. This may sound like copyright, but it’s not. This new “webcaster” right is something that would apply to public domain material, and it would apply to works that are copyrighted, even if the webcaster is not the copyright owner, and does not even have a license to use or to restrict access to the copyrighted work. What this means is this. If you download a file from the Internet, you would have to get the permission of the web page operator before you could republish the data elsewhere. This permission would be in addition to any permissions you would need from the actual copyright owner, and it would even be required if you are seeking to publish something that was either in the public domain under copyright law, or that had been licensed for distribution under something like a creative commons license. This new “webcaster right” would be automatic, and come also with a whole set of new requirements to enforce technological protection measures (TPM) and digital rights management (DRM) schemes on Internet transmissions. The webcaster would have an ownership right in the information for 50 years, and the 50 year term would start new with every transmission of information....Academics like Jamie Boyle from Duke note that the co-existence of different legal regimes in different countries provides for a natural experiment. Is the Rome "broadcasters' right" needed to stimulate investment in broadcasting? Obviously not, he notes, given the health of broadcasters in countries like the US....WIPO will convene meetings in April and June to debate this issue, and then decide by September 2006 if a diplomatic conference on the new Rome+ broadcaster treaty will be scheduled, and if they will consider treaty provisions for “webcasting.”...In the words of the treaty critics, the treaty proponents are guilty of piracy of the knowledge commons. They are seeking to claim ownership rights in works they did not create, and which today they do not own. They want something different from copyright, and different from the legal regime that exists in any country. They want to own what they simply transmit. And this will be quite harmful to the Internet.

For more details, see the CPTech page on the broadcasting treaty.

Herbert Van de Sompel (Los Alamos National Laboratory) opened up the main session with "What's new from the OAI?" In a nutshell, Van de Sompel reviewed the success of the OAI-PMH protocol, and he advocated the protocol be used to harvest not only meta-data, but data itself....Eric Lease Morgan (University of Notre Dame) described how us Ockham-ites used various open source tools and "light-weight" protocols to create MyLibrary@Ockham....If I understand [John] Bollen's conclusions correctly, the ISI impact factors for particular journals match rather closely with the results of his statistical analysis. I believe Bollen's presentation has affected my thinking regarding the implementation of the University Libraries of Notre Dame institutional repository. If I can demonstrate to authors that their impact factor increases through the use of open access publishing techniques, then I think I will have an easier time convincing authors to contribute. Tim Brody (University of Southampton) advocated the use of OpenURL's to the output of OAI responses to improve retrieval of described records as well as to facilitate the implementation of additional services against the content....Alma Swan (Key Perspectives, Ltd.) was a consultant who provided a very good overview of the open access movement....I then attended another workshop. This one was called "Our authors are central" and it outlined steps in the creation of an institutional repository. True to the title, it advocated user-centered design in the creation of repositories. Save their time. Create publication lists for them. Make their content more visible. Do not describe the repository as a solution to the librarian's serials pricing crisis problem because that is a non-issue for authors. It was in this workshop where I first articulated for myself, "institutional repositories are not replacements but a supplement to scholarly communication and ArXiv is a good example." Jennifer De Beer (Stellenbosch University) described the open access publishing efforts taking place in South Africa. Bill Hubbard (SHERPA) described OpenDOAR as a directory of open access institutional repositories. It is analogous to DOAJ, the Directory of Open Access Journals. He described OpenDOAR as a tool for many types of users: administrators, funders, IR managers, service providers, open access advocates and stakeholders....Most importantly, I learned about some of the challenges of creating and maintaining institutional repositories. The issues are not necessarily technical but rather social, legal, and political. I sincerely believe open access publishing through things like institutional repositories can supplement and enhance the scholarly communications process. The goal is not to remove traditional print publishing, but to increase the sphere of knowledge in the most effective means possible. Geneva was beautiful.

Britain's Royal Society has published a position statement warning of the potential costs of mandating free access to journal articles. The independent scientific academy says a hasty shift to open-access publishing could reduce learned societies' ability to support scientific activities, kill off some existing journals, and even “hinder rather than promote the exchange of knowledge between researchers.” The society does not oppose open access. In fact, it provides free access to its journal articles 12 months after publication. But the society says some research funders, particularly in biomedicine, are lobbying for an “increase in the pace at which Web-based open-access journals, repositories, and archives are being developed, with the emphasis on immediate open access.” The society “believes that there is a lack of consideration of the potential impact” of such changes. Part of the support for free access is coming from the Wellcome Trust, the U.K.'s largest nongovernmental funder of biomedical research. In October, the trust began requiring its grant recipients to deposit their research papers in the open-access PubMed Central article repository for release within six months of publication. Research Councils UK, whose member councils are Britain's leading public funders of science, is due to update its stance on open access in late December or early January. RCUK published a preliminary policy in support of open access in June.

(PS: My comments on the RS statement are summarized in the December issue of SOAN.)

Last month marks a year since the Journal of Medical Internet Research was re-launched under its new framework. A website launch is a scary, exciting event: things can go horribly wrong, things you had never anticipated happen, and occasionally, things work out right....It's amazing to look back and see how it has grown and changed during that time - JMIR has doubled by almost all metrics, and even tripled (or more) in a few. For example:

* unique monthly visitors have increased from 11,000 to 31,000
* monthly hits have gone from under 200,000 to over 630,000
* monthly visits were a constant 15,000 in 2004, growing to 56,000 in 2005
* registered readers (9,508), authors (2,000), and peer reviewers (909) have all doubled
* 25 institutions and 236 people bought memberships in the first year on average, every 4 seconds, someone is viewing a page of the journal

...Aggregate statistics tell part of the story, but what's particularly noteworthy is that the new people who are visiting JMIR are staying longer, reading it more, and regularly checking it:

* average visit duration increased from 230 seconds to 334 seconds
* twice as many visitors (8%) are staying for longer than 30 minutes
* unique visitors returned 1.79 times on average, up from 1.37 times
* RSS feeds account for over 25% of traffic (meaning many people are using them)
* the number of people adding JMIR to their bookmarks tripled from 5% to 14%
* traffic from bookmarks/RSS increased from 61% to 77%

Not bad for an independently-published, specialized, (predominantly) online-only, non-profit, Open Access journal. Perhaps the Royal Society's recent statement on Open Access doesn't stand up to the reality of journals like JMIR. In fact, the quality and quantity of research published by JMIR has only increased (33 articles in 2003, 49 in 2004, almost 60 in 2005 - while maintaining the same acceptance rate of around 45%). At the same time, agreements with CrossRef, ISI, and PubMed Central...all serve to increase the visibility and dissemination of high-quality academic research published in JMIR. When I think of this evidence as to the incredible potential of Open Access publishing models, I'm reminded of the journal's acknowledgement statement:

The Journal of Medical Internet Research is a non-profit academic project, by eHealth researchers for eHealth researchers, without involvement of any major publishers. We are convinced that the Internet opens novel ways to publish and peer-review scholarly work independently from any of the large publishing houses, and this Journal is a living example. We also think that research work should remain the property of the creator and be distributed under an Open Access model (as opposed to researchers signing away the copyright of their work).

The revolution, it would seem, is succeeding.

Collex is a set of tools designed to aid students and scholars working in networked archives and federated repositories of humanities materials: a sophisticated collections and exhibits mechanism for the semantic web. It allows users to collect, annotate, and tag online objects and to repurpose them in illustrated, interlinked essays or exhibits. Collex functions within any modern web browser without recourse to plugins or downloads and is fully networked as a server-side application. By saving information about user activity (the construction of annotated collections and exhibits) as “remixable” metadata, the Collex system writes current practice into the scholarly record and permits knowledge discovery based not only on the characteristics or “facets” of digital objects, but also on the contexts in which they are placed by a community of scholars. Collex builds on the same semantic web technologies that drive MIT’s SIMILE project and it brings folksonomy tagging to trusted, peer-reviewed scholarly archives. Its exhibits-builder is analogous to high-end digital curation tools currently affordable only to large institutions like the Smithsonian. Collex is free, generalizable, and open source and is presently being implemented in a large-scale pilot project under the auspices of NINES....We began work on Collex under the auspices of NINES and in the midst of collaboration with the UVA Library’s “Sustaining Digital Scholarship” initiative, an exploration of methods for preserving and offering open access to digital tools and scholarly resources through federated repository systems like FEDORA....We began work on Collex under the auspices of NINES and in the midst of collaboration with the UVA Library’s “Sustaining Digital Scholarship” initiative, an exploration of methods for preserving and offering open access to digital tools and scholarly resources through federated repository systems like FEDORA.

I'm probably among the least radical people I know, but I'm starting to feel like one more and more, especially after listenting to Stephen Downes' keynote "On Being Radical" from last month (slides here.) I've learned much from his thinking over the past few years....[Quoting Downes:] "We're now in an enivronment where the knowledge and our lives depend on the connections we create between people, and for those connection to work, there has to be a free flow of information and that means open access." That's a huge shift, especially for people who make their living creating content. But it's happening because it can't not happen at this point, save some controlling authority stepping in. And it's also why it is so crucial that every single person be provided access to the information. Right now, it's like intellectual health care. We need to make it happen.

Michael Hart conceived of electronic books (e-books) back in 1971. Most pundits agree that in the history of knowledge and scholarship, e-books are as important as the Gutenberg press, invented five centuries ago. Many would say that they constitute a far larger quantum leap. As opposed to their print equivalents, e-books are public goods: cost close to nothing to produce, replicate, and disseminate. Anyone with access to minimal technology or even the oldest computers can read e-books. Hart established Project Gutenberg - a repository of tens of thousands of public domain texts, freely available online. It is the largest and most comprehensive of its kind and has spawned numerous imitators, emulators, and mirror site. E-books became a mainstream item with giant commercial enterprises - from Microsoft through Yahoo and Amazon to Google - entering the fray. "Now that e-books are becoming mainstream, the giant commercial enterprises such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon and Random House are attempting to co-opt the e-book world from its 'Unlimited distribution' origin to the old 'Limited Distribution' paradigm of the common business plan." - says Hart....

As the man who pioneered e-books, how do you feel about Google Print Library, MSN Book Search, Wikibooks, and Yahoo's Open Content Alliance? Do you feel vindicated - or unjustly ignored?

Actually both, and quite thoroughly in both cases....

How do you feel about e-book piracy? Is it partly a reaction to overly onerous copyright laws? Does PG work with intellectual property lawyers?

I used to mention in my emails that there were thousands of "Pirates' Coves" online, but not one of them did eBooks, and that we would know when eBooks had finally "made it" when such things came into existence, just as the sales of the first million selling book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, were largely due to pirated editions. Anyone who says the publishers' history doesn't include piracy, just isn't looking....

Do you think that Project Gutenberg - the largest online repository of public domain and copyrighted books - threatens the publishing industry's and media conglomerates' vested interests?...

The publishers want to be the ONLY source of information, and to make it available on a "pay per" basis, so the greatest effect of these copyright extensions is not to have MORE books in bookstores, but FEWER [in the public domain]....But copyright laws are enacted quietly and behind smokescreens. The US Copyright Act of 1998 was passed in the same 24 hours as President Clinton was impeached, and behind closed doors - I tried to testify - with a voice vote only so there would be no voting record. Thus, a common person would never have heard about it. Even I, who was trying to go testify, didn't learn about it for three weeks....We have been threatened with a number of lawsuits, mostly by lawyers who seem to know very little about copyright. After we explained what we are doing, under which laws, it turns out they were just "blowing smoke" at us, trying to make us honor rights they don't have....[W]ill there someday be a world in which the promise of new technology is not reined in, or reigned over, by an old system designed to preserve the separation between the Haves and the Haves-not?

Brazil and Chile's calls for a series of public interest exceptions to be entrenched in a future treaty on the rights of broadcasting organisations took centre stage during negotiations at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) from 21-23 November. Many countries have expressed concerns that the future treaty, which seeks to update the rights of broadcasters in light of technological advances in recent decades, could pose restrictions on access to knowledge....The Chilean proposal (SCCR/13/4 and 5), dated 22 November, warned that a future treaty could pose obstacles to the development of social initiatives such as public libraries, distance education, and programmes for disabled people, particularly in developing countries. It thus suggested exempting several potential uses of broadcasts from the rules of the future treaty, including...scientific research purposes....The same day, Brazil made a proposal (SCCR/13/3) calling for a general public interest clause, a broad copyright limitation and exception clause, and a minimum list of exceptions to be present in a future treaty. The general clause would specify that "nothing in this Treaty shall limit the freedom of a Contracting Party to promote access to knowledge and information and national educational and scientific objectives, to curb anti-competitive practices or to take any action it deems necessary to promote the public interest in sectors of vital importance to its socio-economic, scientific and technological development."...The Civil Society Coalition (CSC), a group of 28 public interest non-governmental organisations (NGOs), welcomed the Chilean proposal, and issued a statement indicating that the limitations and exceptions are essential to ensuring that the copyright system is consistent with the public interest, human rights and the promotion of new creativity. On the other hand, some groups representing publishers, authors, composers, and broadcasters expressed concerns that limitations and exceptions might be excessive.

For anyone who has been in this profession for longer than about 10 minutes, it’s become abundantly clear that an asteroid has collided with the academic publishing industry --that its dustclouds have already nearly extinguished our old systems for producing and distributing scholarship in the humanities. The traditional models simply aren’t viable any more, so the question KF and others are asking is...what should replace or supplement them? Both [KF] and John Holbo have envisioned an electronic imprint of freely licensed content that is managed in a cooperative fashion. Beyond that details are hazy–necessarily so at this stage....The consensus seems to be that the monograph reconceived should preserve the function of the book but incorporate some of the social aspects of blogs, the self-regulating properties of Wikipedia, and the open-access values of creative commons licensing....[Jimmy Wales] expressed his wish that one day we would think it odd that anyone would publish content that had been peer-reviewed by only two or three readers, as opposed to hundreds or thousands.

Comment. We've recently seen major statements from Canada (November 17), the EU (November 22), and the UK (November 24) on the importance of coordinating national and international digitization projects. I support coordination frameworks of this kind, especially when they leave room for bottom-up decisions. But a good wiki can supplement them and I hope that this one can do so. For this purpose a "good wiki" is one that's really used.

VTLS Inc. is pleased to announce the availability and delivery of VITAL 2.0. VITAL is used by institutional repositories to manage their digital collections. The Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW) Project, led by Monash University has just completed the acceptance testing of VITAL 2.0. This acceptance of VITAL 2.0 paves the way for the software to be installed at Monash University, University of New South Wales, National Library of Australia and Swinburne University. These installations are in progress. Other Australian universities are negotiating to acquire and install the software early in 2006....Other VITAL customers include National Libraries (National Library of Wales and Slovak National Library), universities (Princeton University, University of Delaware) and research organizations (Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research.)

Abstract: Open access may well be a turning point for the scholarly communication system, but not on the basis claimed by its advocates. As opposed to the claim that open access means a less costly system, in reality it entails redundant expenditures and inflationary pressures. The true significance of open access, involving processes of institutional development of the system, has not entered into the public debate. Such processes are chiefly twofold: the adjustment of the open-access movement to the different needs and cultures of the various stakeholder groups, and the advent of a more complex system architecture that facilitates research productivity and scholarly innovation.

Can a Creative Commons license be applied to a database?
What kinds of things can be licensed under a Creative Commons license? [...]
How will people know that they can use the factual information in a database?
If I apply a Creative Commons license to my database, does this mean people can replicate the database?
How does a database provider make sure it has the necessary authority to apply a Creative Commons license to a database?
What legal issues do Creative Commons licenses not cover?
I understand everything above and want to apply a Creative Commons license to my database. How do I go about doing that?

Note the Nature editorial today on using Creative Commons licenses for data (blogged immediately below). John Wilbanks, Director of Science Commons, wants researchers to use CC licenses for their data but also to realize that there are some complexities not raised in the Nature editorial.

Upload and share your raw data, and have a high impact factor for your blog — or perish? That day has not yet come, but web technologies, from personal publishing tools such as blogs to electronic laboratory notebooks, are pushing the character of the web from that of a large library towards providing a user-driven collaborative workspace....A decade ago, for example, astronomy was still largely about groups keeping observational data proprietary and publishing individual results. Now it is organized around large data sets, with data being shared, coded and made accessible to the whole community. Organized sharing of data within and among smaller and more diverse research communities is more challenging, owing to the plethora of data types and formats....Various sorts of data are increasingly being stored in formats that computers can understand and manipulate, allowing databases to talk to one another. This enables their users quickly to adapt technologies to extract and interpret data from different sources, and to create entirely new data products and services. In biodiversity research, for example, rather than creating centralized monolithic databases, scientists could tap into existing databases wherever the data are held, weaving together all the relevant data on a species, from its taxonomy and genetic sequence to its geographical distribution. Such decentralization also helps to solve the problem that databases are often the fruits of individual or lab research projects that are vulnerable to the vagaries of funding, and to people and labs moving on to pastures new. Although discipline-specific databases have an indisputable role, science also needs to capitalize on large common repositories for data, whose preservation is guaranteed, and where the data can easily be used by anyone. If that sounds utopian, consider OurMedia, a service created by the Internet Archive and the Creative Commons, which allows anyone to store and share permanently and free of charge any digital work — even their videos and holiday photos. And last month Google launched Google Base, which also allows anyone to upload anything to its massive platform. Such services will also require new thinking on open data. Web services are dependent on computers being able to freely access data in real time. Although GenBank and many large databases allow unhindered access to their data, many research organizations still cling to obsolete manual data permission policies, which prevent their data being used by web services. Scientists may be justified in retaining privileged access to data that they have invested heavily in collecting, pending publication — but there are also huge amounts of data that do not need to be kept behind walls. And few organizations seem to be aware that by making their data available under a Creative Commons licence, they can stipulate both rights and credits for the reuse of data, while allowing its uninterrupted access by machines. As web services empower researchers, the biggest obstacle to fulfilling such visions will be cultural. Scientific competitiveness will always be with us. But developing meaningful credit for those who share their data is essential, to encourage the diversity of means by which researchers can now contribute to the global academy.

Swoyer, Chris. Critical Reasoning: a user's manual.

[T]his Web site will include details of conferences, seminars, brown-bag lunches, faculty meeting presentations, mailings, and every other form of outreach that you or your colleagues have found successful - or not. Your willingness to share what you have learned in creating educational programs will be a great help to other universities as they traverse the planning process. In addition to giving you the chance to review what others are up to, this site will ask you some basic questions about your Institutional Repository (IR) and any open access programs you have put in place. We invite you to contribute as much additional information as you like. The richer the detail, the easier it will be for others to build on your successes....[Y]ou may come back to edit it at any time.

(PS: A great idea, long needed. Visit the site for helpful ideas and help others by adding your own ideas and experience.)

DSpace and related projects are building web-based collections of 'open content' in the public domain. While land grant [colleges and universities] routinely post 'open content' for extension, the DSpace partners led by MIT have bet the farm. Should other land grants join DSpace? What are the global uses of open extension content?...[I]n the absence of other changes, most farmers will not be reached by the web in the short-term. There are many variables that impact farming that we cannot control; we can control the creation of information banks to help farmers deal with the variables. There is no global agricultural library in a strong sense, and there could be....On-line documents grew rapidly at many extension web sites in the 1990's, but these were often posted haphazardly, without meta-data and on different servers, or hidden from search engines in databases. Extension services are now taking steps to create digital libraries of their content. It is wise to consider needed document management strategies such as meta-data and archiving early in your efforts. Distributed digital libraries are a key goal for the coming decade, allowing farmers to transparently search for resources across multiple extension sites, and effectively creating a world-wide library of food, agricultural and natural resource information....Online agricultural outreach is exploding in land grant universities but with little coordination. For example, there is no master web index of available full text information to browse and no effective way to search online holdings....The problem...is the absence of an open content respository for farmers. For example, there still is no central index for browsing content from the land grants or a search function to discover it....We also have not yet seen the emergence of researcher communities in agriculture that build repositories of open content, as the physics community did....New initiatives of any kind are less likely and especially those that have significant start-up costs and no revenue model. MIT tells us that their project offers content " for the good of mankind. There is no revenue model." But revenue models are more and more important at land grants today. One can speculate that publicly funded colleges will follow MIT in the long run anyway. The land grants face an even greater impetus to do so since it is part of their mission to disseminate knowledge. Federal funding in the future could very well include mandates that publically funded content be posted and deposited into a national repository. Can the process be speeded up?

Following the lead of the Helsinki University Library -- the National Library of Finland, which implemented ENCompass for Digital Collections this past spring -- nine Finnish university and polytechnic libraries are now in the process of implementing ENCompass for Digital Collections: The National Library of Finland; Helsinki University; Jyvaskyla University; Abo Akademi University; Helsinki Polytechnic Stadia; Lappeenranta University of Technology; Jyvaskyla Polytechnic; Tampere Polytechnic; Kemi-Tornio Polytechnic; and the University of Art and Design Helsinki....Several of the collections administered by these institutions are already operational thanks in part to ENCompass and can be searched directly through the Doria portal. These collections include: [1] UKK Collections -- 4,500 records including the collected writings of Urho Kekkonen, former president of Finland, [2] Archives of the Dept of Cultural Studies, University of Helsinki, [3] 2,500 records; mostly photos from field trips, archaeological sites, etc., [4] ELEKTRA -- 11,000 records plus articles from Finnish scholarly journals, [5] TATU -- Tampere Polytechnic diploma works, [6] RAITA -- oldest (copyright-free) Finnish sound recordings, plus metadata from others. Additional collections are in the planning stages or have been slated to enter production with ENCompass for Digital Collections in the coming months, including [ETDs from four Finnish universities].

Internet Archive and many individual contributors created a comprehensive list of websites documenting the historic devastation and massive relief effort due to Hurricane Katrina. The sites were crawled between the dates of September 4 - October 17th. This collection, containing more than 25 million searchable documents, will be preserved by Internet Archive with access to historians, researchers, scholars and the general public.

Abstract: OBJECTIVE. Articles published in print journals with limited circulation are cited less frequently than those printed in journals with larger circulations. Open access (OA) has shown to improve citation rates in the fields of physics, mathematics and astronomy. The impact of OA on smaller biomedical journals has not been studied. We assessed the influence of OA on citations rates for a small, multi-disciplinary journal which adopted OA without article submission or article access fee.
DESIGN. The full text of articles published since 1990 were made available online in 2001. Citations for these articles as retrieved using Web of Science, SCOPUS, and Google Scholar were divided into two groups - the pre-OA period (1990-2000) and the post-OA period (2001-2004). Citations for the articles published between 1990 through 1999 during these two periods were compared using unpaired t test or Mann-Whitney test.
RESULTS. Of the 553 articles published between 1990 through 1999, 327 articles received 893 citations between 1990 and 2004 (Table). The 4-year, post-OA period accounted for 549 (61.5%) of these citations, and 164 articles (50.1%) received their first citations only after OA was provided in 2001. For every volume studied (1990 through 1999), the maximum number of citations per year was received after 2001. None of the articles published during 1990-99 received any citation in the year of publication. In contrast, articles published in 2002, 2003 and 2004 received 3, 7 and 22 citations respectively in the year of publication itself.
CONCLUSIONS. Open access was associated with increase in the number of citations received by the articles. It also decreased the lag time between publication and the first citation. For smaller biomedical journals, OA could be one of the means for improving visibility and thus citation rates.

Charles W. Bailey, Jr. is the Assistant Dean for Digital Library Planning and Development at the University of Houston Libraries (Houston)....In 1989, Bailey established PACS-L, an early mailing list about public access computers in libraries. This work led to Bailey's founding and editorship of the Public-Access Computer Systems Review, an open access journal, in 1990. Bailey served as editor until 1996. At that time he began to produce the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, a compendium of "selected English-language articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet." Bailey continues to update this bibliography every two weeks, and cumulates it periodically. Within the past year Bailey has published two specialized bibliographies of timely topics. The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals (2004) defines key concepts of open access and lists over 1,3o0 resources. The bibliography is 129 pages, and is open access. (Printed copies are also available for purchase from the Association of Research Libraries). In 2005, Bailey produced the Open Access Webliography with Adrian K. Ho. Bailey has also compiled a bibliography about the Google Print (now Google Book Search) controversy, which was current as of October 2005. This bibliography was published in DigitalKoans, Bailey's latest initiative. DigitalKoans is a Weblog that features commentary on scholarly electronic publishing and digital culture.

With funding from the IST programme and the US, the CHLT project developed morphological analysers, citation databases, visualisation and clustering tools, and combined them with dictionaries to aid experienced scholars, students and the general public alike. It also unified several important digital library collections – such as Isaac Newton's manuscripts in the Newton project - and early modern scientific texts, as well as creating new digital library collections of Old Norse sagas. It's a vast achievement....CHLT used leading edge techniques from computational linguistics, natural language processing, and information retrieval that enables researchers to conduct new types of scholarship. "It was a remarkably successful project between the National Science Foundation in the US and EU institutions. It generated results beyond expectations, and illustrated how essential it is to work together to create an integrated global infrastructure for scholarly research," says CHLT’s European coordinator Dolores Iorizzo from the Newton Project and the London e-Science Centre....The team wanted to find the most effective ways to use technology to interpret digitised, historic manuscripts. CHLT responds to the challenges faced by teachers, students and scholars who are working with texts written in Ancient Greek, Mediaeval and Early-Modern Latin, and Old Norse. The number of primary texts – arguably the most important resource for historians and linguists – is staggering. Hundreds of important texts and manuscripts, consisting of millions of words have been integrated into the CHLT open access repository that can also be viewed within the oldest and largest cultural heritage database in the world at the Perseus Project in Tufts University, Boston. CHLT created new text collections written in Early-Modern Latin and Old Norse. It integrated those new books and manuscripts with well-established digital texts, and it created a digital library environment that allows for high-resolution images of pages from rare and fragile printed books and manuscripts. These are presented alongside transcriptions so that the originals can be viewed alongside diplomatic and normalised versions of the material. "The early modern printed texts can be scanned to create automatically generated hypertext, but manuscripts such as those in the Newton Project must be transcribed and XML text encoded by hand which makes it very slow and painstaking," says Iorizzo....The project successfully developed a host of powerful language analysis tools that will help readers to understand texts written in these difficult languages by offering parsers, which automatically determine the grammatical identity of a word....What's more, these parsers were integrated into a digital library reading environment that automatically generates hypertext links. So a user can click on a word, register its identity and look it up in a dictionary. CHLT also built a multilingual information retrieval tool that allows users to enter queries in English and search texts written in Greek and Latin...."CHLT is a political statement. We've lowered the barrier for access to primary texts, so now it's no longer the academic elite who have access and can read these historically important manuscripts," says Iorizzo. Users can even upload their own texts for parsing and analysis. Those texts will then be added to the library so the collection will grow organically over time....CHLT supports Open Access and Berlin Declaration policies, and has negotiated a free open-access agreement with Cambridge University Press for an electronic edition of the Greek-English lexicon to be published online simultaneously with the print edition; it has also explored ways that these tools can be used and shared across cooperating digital libraries.

CrossRef, the independent cross-publisher linking service, announced today two forthcoming initiatives that will enhance the way search engines index scholarly content: CrossRef Web Services and the Search Partner Program. CrossRef Web Services will create an easy-to-use tool for authorized search and web services partners to gather metadata to streamline web crawling. The CrossRef metadata database contains records for the more than 18 million items from over 1,500 publishers, the majority of whom are expected to choose to participate in this optional new service. The CrossRef Search Partner program provides standard terms of use for search engines, libraries, and other partners to use the metadata available from CrossRef Web Services....CrossRef Web Services also...functions as a notification, or “ping”, mechanism for the publication of new content. Alerting crawlers to new or revised content to be indexed greatly reduces the need for ongoing re-crawling of publisher sites. “Search engines want better ways to gather standard, cross-publisher metadata to enhance their search indexes. Publishers want to streamline the way they provide metadata to a growing number of partners. CrossRef Web Services and the Search Partner Program fill this void,” said Ed Pentz, Executive Director of CrossRef. “With CrossRef repurposing parts of its metadata database and using common protocols like standardized XML and OpenURL (and SOAP, RSS and other protocols in future), these services can significantly enhance indexes.” Mr. Pentz continued, “Just as the core CrossRef linking service removes the need for bilateral linking agreements among publishers, the Search Partner Program removes the need for bilateral agreements covering use of metadata between search engines and publishers. Libraries, search engines, publishers, and researchers will all benefit as the high-quality structured metadata collected by CrossRef becomes an easily available web resource with template terms and conditions of use.” These new services from CrossRef will improve search results by enabling the use of the digital object identifier (DOI), in all search results....More information will be forthcoming in early 2006 when these exciting new services launch.

"I think there are also serious financial barriers [to information access]," Deb continued. "We in the U.K., complain terribly about the cost of [print] subscriptions and online subscriptions, because they are eating into our declining budgets dreadfully . . . But then when you go to what we now call the South --the developing world-- and you realize what they’re trying to wrestle with, I think it’s rather obscene for us to complain . . . I think the whole publishing model is a barrier to open access to information." She called Open Access publishing a "very interesting" development. "It’s got some way to go, and it’s a long game," she observed. "But if you and I were talking even five years hence, I think the whole publishing model will have changed. I have to believe that, because, otherwise, there will be real barriers to knowledge, which will compromise everything. If you don’t have the information to do the research, you can’t do it."

[T]he new organisation aims to develop closer working relationships in order to increase the return on national investment in ICT infrastructure, services and projects. The founder members of the Knowledge Exchange are JISC, the SURF Foundation (Netherlands), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Germany) and Denmark’s Electronic Research Library (DEFF). With the international dimension increasingly important both in education and research and in the use of ICT, these organisations will work together under the umbrella of the Knowledge Exchange to share information, increase the profile of national research and development activities, and where appropriate work towards a common infrastructure based on international standards....Bo Öhrström, Deputy Director to the Danish National Library Authority and host for the Knowledge Exchange office welcomes this opportunity: “DEFF look forward to a closer co-operation with prominent, national organisations in the digital learning, teaching and research areas in order to secure a common infrastructure environment for all partners. Another key aim of the new body is to inform European policy....

(PS: The KE has no specific mission to promote OA. But its role in advising on ICT policy in research and education, and the OA-friendliness of its founding members, make it an important player in European OA policy. For example, the KE could help persuade the emerging European Research Council to mandate OA for ERC-funded research.)

Patrice McDermott, Deputy Director of Government Relations for the American Library Association, plans to send a letter to the Congressional Joint Committee on the LOC, calling for OA to the WLB. Excerpt:

We are writing to request that you encourage, if not direct, the Law Library of Congress to publish the World Law Bulletin on the World Wide Web for unrestricted public access. The World Law Bulletin, produced monthly by the Law Library of Congress, is a unique and uniquely valuable publication. It provides an unparalleled survey of legal developments abroad, along with focused analysis on topics of special interest. It is based entirely on open, published sources. Although it reflects the considerable expertise of its authors and contributors, the World Law Bulletin has no advisory content whatsoever. Therefore, to make it widely available to the public would not implicate congressional deliberations in any way. We are attorneys, librarians, scientists, academicians, and others who would like to be able to obtain, on a timely basis, no-fee access to the World Law Bulletin, which our tax dollars support. We respectfully urge you to help the interested public to gain access to this exceptional congressional resource.

If you would like to add your signature to her letter, send your name, title, and organization to pmcdermott@alawash.org before December 9.

The number of institutional repositories worldwide is reaching significant levels, at least in some countries. SHERPA manager Bill Hubbard reported that there are now 57 repositories in the UK (some departmental, some institutional and some subject-based) and 153 in the US. The Netherlands has a policy that all academic research institutions must run their own repository and now boasts 17; China and India are making their mark with 13 and 5 respectively, and surprisingly Brazil has 30. While there have been claims that repositories are expensive to run...Hubbard claims that the cost to Nottingham University of running its repository equates to one technician working three days a week over the course of a year. Policies are now appearing from research funding organisations, institutions and departments either requesting or mandating that researchers place content in repositories. Key Perspectives' data showed that 81% of academics would willingly comply with a mandate, 14% would comply reluctantly, and 5% would not comply. However, where organisations request rather than mandate deposit, this has had little effect: the National Institutes of Health policy requests and strongly encourages deposit of content in a repository, but in October only 2.73% of relevant articles were deposited as per this request....At the latest NIH committee meeting, members voted 9-3 in favour of making deposit mandatory, and this is likely to come into force in the summer of 2006. Jenny Pickles of Emerald Publishing expressed the fear that research funder mandates of this sort forced publishers to introduce embargoes, and saw this as a retrograde step for the open access movement....Key Perspectives' Alma Swan laid out the reasons behind academics using repositories - the most important was to communicate their results to their peers. Other reasons included career advancement, personal prestige, to attract funding and for financial reward (a distant last). However, only 15% of academics surveyed had added preprint material to an institutional repository, while 20% had added postprint content....John Haynes of IOPP reported a near 100% overlap in high energy physics and astrophysics between what is published in journals and what is held in the renowned arXiv repository, which has become so well-used that for some physicists it is a "daily destination point". IOPP policy allows deposit of postprints in arXiv because this increases visibility, and even allows authors to submit articles by simply sending in an arXiv e-print number. IOPP has found that where journals have a strong degree of overlap with arXiv, then articles are predominantly read on arXiv rather than on the publisher site, although the journal remains valued for prestige and citations.

[R]evolutions are rarely bloodless and this one could soon get ugly. In the United States authors and publishers are squaring up against Google for a legal fight over copyright. Opinion is divided over whether the scanning projects being implemented by companies such as Google and Amazon...will hand control of the world’s literature to private enterprise — and, if so, what this could mean. And with several independent scanning projects under way, it is still not clear how much of the information will be freely available, or where and how it can all be coordinated and accessed....Assets such as searchability have prompted the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, Virginia, to get involved in an open-access enterprise called the Million Book Project. This is an international scanning effort with many participants, including Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Since the project began in 2002, about 600,000 out-of-copyright books have been scanned, although only about half of them are currently available online. The scanning takes place in India and China, with books being shipped there temporarily from libraries around the world....[Amazon's] ‘search inside the book’ feature increases sales by 8%, the company says. Scientific publishers, such as the US National Academies Press also see increased print sales when they allow their books to be viewed online....Google’s plan has shaken up the digitalbook world in other ways too [beyond triggering lawsuits]. For one thing, many believe that its size and resources mean Google can pull of this feat — so large-scale repositories of digital books seem a more realistic and immediate prospect than ever before. Google has also galvanized its competitors, both public and private (see graphic) to redouble their efforts, and has placed a question mark over the future of libraries and librarians. “I think Google is in a class by itself because of the quantity of money and the level of centralization,” says Daniel Greenstein, librarian of the California Digital Library in Oakland, California. “Google has paved the way, created the appetite for this kind of activity, and anxiety on the part of li