Open Access News

The journal challenges readers to consider the changing nature of education in a globalised environment, and the impact that conceptions of educational integrity have on issues of pedagogy, academic standards, intercultural understanding and equity. Articles of interest to the IJEI readership may include but are not limited to the following areas as they relate to educational integrity: plagiarism, cheating, academic integrity, honour codes, teaching and learning, university governance and student motivation. Submissions may include original research (including practitioner research), theoretical discussions and review papers....This journal provides open access to all of its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. Such access is associated with increased readership and citation levels. The journal uses open source software, developed by the Public Knowledge Project, to help make open access economically viable, as well as to improve the scholarly and public quality of research.

Abstract: In 2001, Lawrence found that articles in computer science that were openly accessible (OA) on the Web were cited substantially more than those that were not. We have since replicated this effect in physics. To further test its cross-disciplinary generality, we used 1,307,038 articles published across 12 years (1992-2003) in 10 disciplines (Biology, Psychology, Sociology, Health, Political Science, Economics, Education, Law, Business, Management). We designed a robot that trawls the Web for full-texts using reference metadata (author, title, journal, etc.) and citation data from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) database. A preliminary signal-detection analysis of the robot's accuracy yielded a signal detectability d'=2.45 and bias = 0.52. The overall percentage of OA (relative to total OA + NOA) articles varies from 5%-16% (depending on discipline, year and country) and is slowly climbing annually (correlation r=.76, sample size N=12, probability p < 0.005). Comparing OA and NOA articles in the same journal/year, OA articles have consistently more citations, the advantage varying from 25%-250% by discipline and year. Comparing articles within six citation ranges (0, 1, 2-3, 4-7, 8-15, 16+ citations), the annual percentage of OA articles is growing significantly faster than NOA within every citation range (r > .90, N=12, p < .0005) and the effect is greater with the more highly cited articles (r = .98, N=6, p < .005). Causality cannot be determined from these data, but our prior finding of a similar pattern in physics, where percent OA is much higher (and even approaches 100% in some subfields), makes it unlikely that the OA citation advantage is merely or mostly a self-selection bias (for making only one's better articles OA). Further research will analyze the effect's timing, causal components and relation to other variables, such as, download counts, journal citation averages, article quality, co-citation measures, hub/authority ranks, growth rate, longevity, and other new impact measures generated by the growing OA database.

Fans of Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, have proposed the creation of Wikiversity, an electronic institution of learning that would be just as open. It's not clear exactly how extensive Wikiversity would be. Some think it should serve only as a repository for educational materials; others think it should also play host to online courses; and still others want it to offer degrees. On a Wikiversity Web site, Cormac Lawler, a doctoral candidate in education at the University of Manchester, in England, says the mission of Wikiversity is to use the open-source model -- based on software that anyone is free to modify -- to develop learning materials, teach, conduct research, and publish. Collaborative learning would be stressed, and students themselves could determine course content and activities. Mr. Lawler, who is a lead proponent of Wikiversity, says he wants the project to focus on original research....The Wikimedia board last month asked proponents to clarify the project. It decided that Wikiversity would not be a host for online courses or promote itself as a degree-granting institution. But many hope the board will eventually reconsider its decision about courses. In the meantime, about 15 people have already created online courses on the Wikibooks Web site.

(PS: For a US equivalent, see Wex from Cornell.)

With much regret I have to inform you that Marco Marandola, an Italian copyright expert and electronic licencing consultant suddenly passed away last week....He was a consultant for many international organizations of libraries and museums, including IFLA, EBLIDA, and ICOM. For more than ten years he was a strong advocate of the special position of libraries in copyright legislation and lobbied on copyright issues within the European Parliament, the European Commission and the World Intellectual Property Organization. Recently he became quite involved in the Open Access Movement, especially in Spain where he moved to live. He was well known not only in the Italian library community but also abroad. He was very much appreciated for his competence, generosity and gentleness. Marco will be greatly missed by all the people who had the chance to know him or to work with him.

(PS: I can add a personal note. Marco offered to translate my newsletter into Spanish, and finished the July 2005 issue before other obligations made it impossible for him to continue. I am profoundly saddened to lose such a committed friend and colleague at such a young age.)

The NASA Technical Report Server (NTRS) is an Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) compliant aggregator, harvesting from 17 repositories. When NTRS was created, there were few scientific, technology and medicine (STM) OAI-PMH repositories, so non-NASA STM repositories were included: arXiv.org, BioMed Central, Energy Citation Database, and the Aeronautical Research Council (the UK equivalent of NASA's predecessor, NACA). In NTRS's simple search mode, only NASA repositories are searched. Advanced searches have the option of including non-NASA repositories in their search. Thus users never receive non-NASA results unless they explicitly requested. We examined 13 months of NTRS log data. NTRS is instrumented to record when a user requests a download for the full-text content. Despite a large number of records, The Energy Citation Database, BioMed Central and arXiv.org contributed few downloads. ARC represents a significant number of downloads. This indicates users will select non-NASA repositories from the advanced search interface (logs show the advanced search is used 2X as simple search), and the prominence of both NACA and ARC suggests an interest in historical aeronautical publications. The subject matter of ARC is similar to the NASA repositories, suggesting NTRS remains aerospace-focused and the presence of other STM materials has yet to expand its user base. arXiv.org is the most well-known OAI-PMH repository and is harvested by many OAI-PMH service providers, but its presence did not guarantee its use in NTRS.

Over the last two years, the Digital Library Research and Prototyping Team of the LANL Research Library has worked on the design of the aDORe repository architecture aimed at ingesting, storing, and making accessible to downstream applications an ever growing heterogeneous collection of Digital Objects. The aDORe architecture is highly modular and standards-based.

The Debate held on 15 December in the UK Parliament on the Report on Scientific Publications by the Science and Technology Committee (HC399) was disappointing and depressing. Disappointing because so many of the old myths about open access re-surfaced and depressing because the Junior Minister present took 20 minutes to say that the UK Government intends to do nothing. Nine Members of Parliament attended the Debate, not a large number but par for the course for a supposedly non-controversial topic. The full three hours allocated were used, and one disappointing feature was that (subjectively) around 85% of the time was spent on open access publishing, only about 10% on open repositories, and about 5% on trivia such as the fact that one MP has published in "Nature" while another has only published in Royal Society of Chemistry journals....The HC399 Report is a great tribute to the quality of the UK parliamentary system; the Debate on the Report did not live up to the quality of the Report.

The Debate opened well with the best speech of the afternoon from Phil Willis MP, the new Chair of the Science and Technology Committee. He outlined the Committee's work on scientific publications, accurately identifying the key points in the HC399 Report, noting that the Government had ignored the advice from JISC in their Response to the Report, and laying down some questions for the Minister to answer at the end of the Debate. Three Members who signed off last year's Report spoke: Ian Gibson MP, Brian Iddon MP, and Evan Harris MP. They did support the Report's recommendations but with more qualifications than they expressed last year, and certainly they did not speak with the kind of passion necessary to make the Government take any notice of their words. For example, Evan Harris MP mentioned the information obtained by David Prosser about Lord Sainsbury's meetings regarding scientific publications, the kind of information which MPs would use to go for the Government jugular on other topics, but the information was only mentioned in passing and not commented on by anybody else. Brian Iddon MP said that he thought the RCUK policy would "incentivise" deposit in repositories, and pointed to the need to develop tools for the world-wide searching of repositories, but said that RCUK were already reaching agreement with publishers on embargo periods of 6 or 12 months. Evan Harris MP said that he had doubts about the "headlong rush" into repositories when no quality kitemarks were present.

Two Members of Parliament spoke almost entirely about open access journals. Edward Vaizey MP for Wantage gave a speech that sounded as though it was written for him by an Oxford publisher. He spoke of the threats to the jobs of many of his Oxfordshire constituents from open access publishing, made a number of dubious statements (e.g. that only 3% of research publications arise from government funding), cast doubts upon the quality of open access journals, and said that Government should not "nationalise" research by intervening in the publications market. Charles Hendry MP (background in public relations) also said that the Government should not interfere because the publications market is working well. He listed the "benefits" in the present system, amongst which was the fact that copyright is protected, and his speech was full of quotes from the recent Royal Society statement.

Finally there was 20 minutes left for the Government to reply in the person of Barry Gardiner MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Competitiveness at the DTI. He followed the existing Government line on the need for a "level playing-field". He did say that funders should be able to provide open access publications charges to authors if they requested it, but later appeared to go back on that statement. He spoke of the benefits of repositories for long-term archiving but said that each institution has to make its own decisions. He ducked a question from Phil Willis MP about the need for Government to encourage the linking of repository content....And he also ducked a question on the importance of Government action to support the communication of UK research to developing countries through open access, another theme which came up at various points in the afternoon and one of many serious issues on which the Debate resulted in a sense of disappointment.

Five library associations voiced their support for the use of OpenDocument (ODF) in Massachusetts this week, sending a letter to William Galvin, the Commonwealth's Secretary of State. In it, the groups say the open source format is the best choice, as everyone has access to its specifications...."An important aspect of fostering access to information is ensuring that future generations will be able to read government information created today," the letter reads. The groups argued that although digital technology is creating new ways to access more information, it has made libraries' preservation role more difficult. Now, not only do these libraries have to store documents, but also ensure they have backwards-compatible applications to view them. The letter was backed by the American Association of Law Libraries, the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, the Medical Library Association and the Special Libraries Association. The five groups together represent over 139,000 libraries in the United States employing 350,000 librarians.

Abstract: We analyzed the effect of providing 'Open Access' (OA; free online access to research articles) on their 'citation impact' (how often they are cited). Using a subset of the ISI CD-ROM database from 1992 - 2003, we compared, within each journal and year, articles to which their authors had (OA) or had not (NOA) provided open access by self-archiving them on the web. The number of OA and NOA articles and their respective citation counts were calculated within biology, business, psychology and sociology journals. The percentage of OA articles varied from 5-20% (mean and median, 12%). The citation counts (OA-NOA/NOA) showed a consistent OA advantage (mean 96%, median 73%) for all four fields and 28 subspecialties tested, varying from 25% to over 250%. An OA impact advantage has already been reported in the physical sciences and engineering (physics, computer science), but there was uncertainty about whether the same thing happens in other disciplines. Our data now show that both the biological and the social sciences show the OA advantage, and are hence likewise losing substantial amounts of potential impact for the 80-95% of their articles that are not yet self-archived. These results confirm that a mandatory self-archiving policy on the part of research institutions and funders would greatly enhance the impact of research results in all disciplines.

Abstract: This is a second signal-detection analysis of the accuracy of a robot in detecting open access (OA) articles (by checking by hand how many of the articles the robot tagged OA were really OA, and vice versa). A first analysis, on a smaller sample (Biology: 100 OA, 100 non-OA), had found a detectability (d') of 2.45 and bias of 2.45 and 0.52 (hits 93%, false positives 16%; Biology %OA: 14%; OA citation advantage: 50%). The present analysis on a larger sample (Biology: 272 OA, 272 non-OA) found a detectability of 0.98 and bias of 0.78 (hits 77%, false positives, 41%; Biology %OA: 16%; OA citation advantage: 64%) An analysis in Sociology (177 OA, 177 non-OA) found near-chance detectability (d' = 0.11) and an OA bias of 0.99 (hits, 9%, false alarms, -2%; prior robot estimate Sociology %OA: 23%; present estimate 15%). It was not possible from these data to estimate the Sociology OA citation advantage. CONCLUSIONS: The robot significantly overcodes for OA. In Biology 2002, 40% of identified OA was in fact OA. In Sociology 2000, only 18% of identified OA was in fact OA. Missed OA was lower: 12% in Biology 2002 and 14% in Sociology 2000. The sources of the error are impossible to determine from the present data, since the algorithm did not capture URLs for documents identified as OA. In conclusion, the robot is not yet performing at a desirable level and future work may be needed to determine the causes, and improve the algorithm.

This summer, Hugh McGuire was searching for free audio books online from his home in Montreal. He didn't find very much. So McGuire launched LibriVox by recruiting amateur readers to create audio files of works of literature. The project now includes almost two dozen complete works, including Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, Jack London's The Call of the Wild and other classic novels and poems....Like Project Gutenberg, which inspired McGuire to launch the project, LibriVox employs volunteers from around the globe to participate in recording works. Each book is divided up into chapters, and each person records one chapter, which usually ends up being about 20 or 30 minutes of audio. The files are hosted on Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive and are available in MP3 and OGG formats.

(PS: There's another connection to the Internet Archive. LibriVox is working with the Open Content Alliance to produce OA audio editions of the OCA's OA text editions.)

The AUCC chose to ask essentially the same question in nine different ways. That question - how much are you prepared to spend on higher education? Now that is an important question and I' m glad that the AUCC is putting the funding issue on the national agenda. But it cannot be the only question. The education community must also use its position to focus on copyright reform, open access, the use of technology for distance education, digital libraries, and countless other issues that strike at the heart of teaching and research at universities across the country. The failure to raise even one of these issues is embarrassing.

In writing my recent article about the Royal Society's position statement on open access I contacted a number of Fellows of the Society, including some of those who had written an open letter objecting to the "largely negative stance" taken in the statement. After publishing the article I received an e-mail from Professor Richard Roberts, chief scientific officer at New England Biolabs. Professor Roberts, who signed the open letter, had been travelling when I e-mailed my questions to him, so I was unable to incorporate his views into the article.... Professor Roberts is a Nobel Laureate, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a research editorial board member for the open access journal PLoS Biology, and senior executive editor of the journal Nucleic Acids, published by Oxford University Press.

Q: Why did you sign the letter to the Royal Society?

A: I signed the letter because it expressed my own sentiments perfectly. I am a strong advocate of open access, and write about it and speak in favour of it whenever possible. I was appalled when I first read the Royal Society's statement.

Q: The Royal Society says that the open letter is based on a misunderstanding, since the Royal Society's position statement is only a re-statement of views it published on 24th November, and that these views were arrived at after extensive discussions that took place in February 2004. At that time these views were also approved by the Council for the Royal Society. Were you aware of those discussions? Did you take part in them? Did you object at the time?

A: The first I heard of this was when BioMed Central's Matt Cockerill sent me the statement. I had personally contacted the Royal Society about this issue several years ago and had spoken with Lord May [the former president of the Royal Society] about it. I was basically brushed off. However, I was not consulted or even forewarned of this statement. In fact, I first drew the attention of this matter to the Royal Society in January 2001 (almost five years ago). At that time I had written an editorial piece for PNAS about open access and was lead author, and main protagonist, of a letter to Science about the issue. Now they call for a study — just 5 years too late!...

Q: The Royal Society says that the letter has been signed by just "a small number of the 1,274 Fellows." Is it fair to view the letter as representing only a minority view amongst Royal Society Fellows?

A: We won't know if it is a minority view because the Society has never been polled on this issue. Furthermore, I am still surprised that many scientists, and I suspect many Fellows of the Royal Society, are not even aware of the issue, or have not given it any real thought — so for such a poll to be effective there would need to be some education of the participants....

Q: Has the Royal Society lost touch with its Fellows on this issue?

A: I think that the Royal Society has not only lost touch with its Fellows on this issue, but is out of touch with the pace of the younger scientists whose interests it should be looking after. Most young scientists don't even know where the library is these days. If they can't access the literature from their computer then it might as well not exist for them. So much for seeing farther by standing on the shoulders of giants! This is a real tragedy.

Q: The Royal Society's approach to open access is in stark contrast to that of the Wellcome Trust (which has mandated its funded researchers to make their papers open access). Why do you think that is? And what does the contrast signify?

A: This question gets to the heart of the matter. The Wellcome Trust has been bold and imaginative, and is to be applauded. I would note that they have no financial interests in opposing open access. The Royal Society by its own admission makes some profits from its publications, as do many scientific societies. If you really want to know why people do things I always think that one should follow the money first.

A year [after the launch of Google's book-scanning project] we still don't know much more about [its] procedures....By contrast, a similar initiative was recently announced about which we already know much more. Maybe that's why it's called the Open Content Alliance (OCA), put forward by the Internet Archive, Yahoo!, and a number of large libraries, including my employer, the California Digital Library. Microsoft shortly thereafter announced support as well, and additional libraries likely will join. Yahoo!, Microsoft, and the libraries themselves are paying the Internet Archive to digitize materials at 10¢ a page --an excellent price for nondestructive scanning. The resulting files will be made available at the Internet Archive web site and likely at other locations....Since the OCA is focusing on out-of-copyright material, it is dodging the legal fight that Google is taking head-on. This means that all OCA content will be viewable in its entirety online. But the project goes further. The digitized files and their associated metadata will be available for complete downloading, thereby allowing anyone to create singular presentations of this material....The importance of this becomes clearer by visiting the Open Library site, where the Internet Archive has mounted a few dozen of the books already digitized. The method closely resembles paging through a physical book. Although this presentation may seem compelling, some potential drawbacks soon become apparent. It's difficult to jump to a particular chapter, for example, and other features such as searching and the all-important ability to magnify the page don't work yet. Still, if you do not like this orientation, you can create your own. Clicking on “Details” while viewing an Open Library book pulls up a small window giving some core metadata about the title and a link to the Internet Archive site that allows anyone to download a PDF or DjVu format of the book, or even the entire package of digital files from which these presentations were created. These books, in other words, are as open and accessible as possible....It's unclear whether the OCA project will rival the Google Library project in size. Since it is easier for organizations to participate, the OCA will easily have more participants, but the Google project may lead in the number of digitized volumes if it fulfills its promise. Only time will tell. In any case, more digitized content is likely a better thing overall....Collaborations among participating libraries are also likely, if for no other reason than to minimize duplication. There are other opportunities for collaboration and not just among OCA libraries but with the “Google Five” and many other institutions involved with digitizing content. Open digitized content, after all, is a growing boon to all of our libraries and the users we serve.

Abstract: With the cost of college textbooks up 62% over the last decade, pressure is building for an alternative model of publishing: the free book. Five years ago, an author had to be very persistent --- maybe even a little crazy --- to try the new approach. But now a whole new infrastructure is springing up to make it easier.

From the body of the article:

Five years ago, people looked at me funny when I expressed my enthusiasm for free books. You mean like Project Gutenberg? Downloading Hamlet for free? No no, I explained, I was talking about books intentionally set free by their authors. Huh? You know, like Linux. Open-source books. You mean like that party game where you sit in a circle, and everybody takes turns making up the next part of the story? No no no, I'd explain, serious tomes on weighty subjects: calculus, Proust, cell biology.

[p. 26:] Without the promotion of a new ethics of knowledge based on sharing and cooperation, the most advanced countries’ tendency to capitalize on their advance might lead to depriving the poorest nations of such cognitive assets as new medical and agronomical knowledge, and to creating an environment that impedes the growth of knowledge. It will therefore be necessary to find a balance between protecting intellectual property and promoting the public domain of knowledge: universal access to knowledge must remain the pillar that supports the transition to knowledge societies....[p. 116:] [C]ost-free access is in no way equivalent to costfree production of the knowledge in question....While researchers are bent on access and publishers on control, everyone has an interest in making the production of scientific publications both abundant and diversified....[pp. 169-70:] UNESCO has undertaken to “promote free and universal access to public domain information for the purposes of education, science and culture” and adopted to that end, in 2003, the Recommendation concerning the Promotion and Use of Multilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace....Knowledge itself, as an inexhaustible commons available to all human beings, is, if not a global public good(cf. Box 10.5), at least a “common public good”. For not only can knowledge not be regarded as a marketable good like others, but also knowledge only has value if it is shared by all....[p. 172:] If we accept that scientific knowledge is a “public good”, it follows that scientific data and information should be made as widely available and affordable as possible, since the benefits for society will be a function of the number of people able to share them....Scientists are worried that the excessive privatization and commercialization of scientific data and information is undermining the traditional sharing ethos of science by shrinking the public domain and threatening open access to global public goods, with a consequential loss of opportunity at both the national and international levels. What would the consequences have been for global health research if the human genome project had been commercialized, for example? Initiated by the United States Government in the late 1980s, the project was threatened by a corporate rival in 1998. At that point, the Wellcome Trust, a United Kingdom charity, teamed up with the United States Government, increasing massively its investment in the project so that its own Sanger Institute could decode one-third of the 3 billion “letters” that make up “the code of life”. Today, the completed sequences are freely available to the world’s scientific community....Whereas there has been a strong focus on new commercial opportunities using digitalized information and on the intellectual property rights issue, comparatively little attention has been devoted to the importance of maintaining open access to the source of upstream scientific data and of information produced in the public domain for the benefit of all downstream users....How do you preserve and promote access to public science without unduly restricting commercial opportunities and the legitimate rights of authors?...[p. 173:] ICSU and CODATA have established a joint ad hoc Group on Data and Information. This Group drafted a core set of principles in June 2000 to support full and open access to data needed for scientific research and education (see Box 10.6)....Like private publishers, professional societies are searching for an optimum balance between open access and financial viability. Some professional societies and other groups have embraced the open access model, although the majority still tends towards a more protective approach....[p. 174:] ICSU’s core principles in support of full and open access to data:...Scientific advances rely on full and open access to data. Both science and the public are well served by a system of scholarly research and communication with minimal constraints on the availability of data for further analysis. The tradition of full and open access to data has led to breakthroughs in scientific understanding, as well as to later economic and public policy benefits. The idea that an individual or organization can control access to or claim ownership of the facts of nature is foreign to science....Legislators should take into account the impact that intellectual property laws may have on research and education. The balance achieved in the current copyright laws, while imperfect, has allowed science to flourish. It has also supported a successful publishing industry. Any new legislation should strike a balance while continuing to ensure full and open access to data needed for scientific research and education....[pp. 175-176:] Innovative models for low-cost access to online scientific information and data:...[on PERI, HINARI, eJDS, DATAD, Ptolemy Project, OAI, AGORA, and UNESCO's Virtual Laboratory CD-ROM Toolkit, PLoS, and JPGM].

• The issue has five articles on the Archiving, Ingest and Handling Test (AIHT), which asks an institution to ingest a digital archive from one institution, export it to another, and migrate the content from one form to another. I won't list them separately but recommend them for those working on large-scale archive manipulation and preservation.

• Anita Coleman and Joseph Roback, Open Access Federation for Library and Information Science: dLIST and DL-Harvest. Abstract: "Self-archiving, the practice of depositing one's works in an OAI-compliant archive, is a key strategy for innovating scholarly communication and achieving open access. DL-Harvest, a subject service for Library and Information (LIS), based on the aggregation of OAI-PMH compliant metadata from both institutional and disciplinary digital repositories, including dLIST, is described. Additionally, results from two studies that explored LIS journal publishers' stances towards self-archiving as expressed in copyright transfer agreements (CTAs) and the scholarly communication behaviors of LIS scholars, with regard to self-archiving and searching, are presented and some implications for the development of federated subject services are highlighted."

• Anne Robertson, Investigation into How Digital Repositories Can Encourage the Reuse of Geospatial Data. On JISC's GRADE program (Geospatial Repository for Academic Deposit and Extraction).

Soras are unobtrusive birds. A bit smaller than a robin, and a bit bigger than a bluebird, they generally spend their time hidden deep in dense marsh vegetation and are tough to get a look at. As such, they are not an obvious symbol of openness and visibility in the world of ornithology. Nonetheless, the Searchable Ornithological Research Archive has taken its name from the ready-made acronym provided by this small bird, and is set to become an important resource for anyone interested in the scientific study of birds. SORA is the avian contribution to the open-access movement, which makes scientific journal articles accessible over the Web, where anyone can can read them. The project results from collaboration between the leading ornithological societies in North America and the University of New Mexico to create an archive of research published in the top bird journals. And unlike the real soras, the electronic library is easy to find on the [internet]: [here].

• John Cox, Re-engineering the scholarly publishing process – lessons from elsewhere. No abstract.
• Mary Waltham, Learned society business models and open access: overview of a recent JISC-funded study. Abstract: "A summary of the findings of a study which included an in-depth exploration of journal business and pricing models of nine learned societies in the context of their requirements and of the open access (OA) business model. Detailed information on current trends in revenue costs and surplus is included. The article considers whether and how OA can be adopted by the representative sample of STM publishers."
• Ian Rowlands and Dave Nicholas, The changing scholarly communication landscape: an international survey of senior researchers. Abstract: "This survey reports on the behaviour, attitudes, and perceptions of 5,513 senior journal authors on a range of issues relating to the scholarly communication system."
• Steve Probets and Celia Jenkins, Documentation for institutional repositories. Abstract: "The documentation of seven academic institutional repositories (IRs) was compared and contrasted. This was followed by semi-structured interviews with six practitioners experienced in the set-up, management and maintenance of IRs, including representatives of three JISC FAIR projects. The aim was to identify the requirements of policy documentation provided by IRs. Although many issues were found to be handled differently, several common factors emerged. These included the importance of developing documentation in collaboration with academics, departments and senior management. Policies should be formulated only when the aims of the IR have been clearly defined and the documentation itself should be concise and understandable, with the rights and responsibilities of stakeholders clearly presented."
• Sally Morris, When is a journal not a journal? A closer look at the DOAJ. No abstract, but see the excerpt I blogged from a preprint on November 18.

Since a couple of years there is a strong voice for open access – that is unrestricted free online access to research articles for everyone. By presenting a typology of open access, we discuss the realization of open access journals using various combinations of business models. There are high expectations, but as business models are still in flux, new challenges arise for libraries dealing with "institutional memberships" and stagnating serials budgets.

Update (12/26/05). The article is now online and OA. Excerpt:

A revolution is taking place in the world of scientific publishing. In the traditional model of publishing scientific articles, the author raised money to conduct the research project, then submitted the paper to a scientific journal for consideration for publication; if the manuscript survived the brutal peer review process, the author would be required to assign copyright to the publisher and pay ‘page charges’ for publication of the article. Finally, the author (as reader) had to pay a subscription fee to the publisher of the journal in order to have access to his or her published paper! Authors, members of the public and funders of research are understandably in revolt against this apparent exploitation of authors and readers by traditional publishers who extract substantial profits from the production of scientific knowledge through the efforts and investments of others. This unfavourable situation has led to the rise of the ‘open access’ movement in scientific publishing....The winds of change are also sweeping through the South African Medical Journal and its publisher, the Health and Medical Publishing Group. The first step, taken several years ago, was to drop the page charge costs to authors. More recently, the full text of articles published in the Journal has become available on MEDLINE immediately on publication, free of charge to all readers. The SAMJ’s modernisation into a ‘free to publish’ and ‘free access’ publication has already had a noticeable impact on the quality, quantity, and international reach of papers submitted for publication....The SAMJ’s impact factor has been rising continuously over the past five years....The SAMJ is ranked number 1 among peer-reviewed medical journals in Africa, number 2 among comparable journals from Australasia (Medical Journal of Australia – impact factor 2, and New Zealand Medical Journal – impact factor 0.554), and number 44 among the 103 journals grouped in the ISI Medicine, General and Internal list.

I recently noted, on another site, that a recent study by the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) in England found that 96.2% preferred the "closed source" process of peer review over the "open source" process of open access, when evaluating the worth of academic papers. Rather than throw things on the Web and let a consensus emerge, in other words, researchers prefer having a few known authorities inspect the work before it's published by a known press. The credibility of authority, both the reviewer and the journal, are seen as more valid than the credibility of consensus. But look inside that study again.

Nearly half believed that open access (OA) publishing would undermine the current system, with 41% saying that would be a good thing.

Despite the spin being placed on these numbers, in other words, the barbarians are truly at the gates, they're inside the wall, and they might be having a drink at the next table. The fact is that while "open source has no quality control," as the headline writer put it in David Coursey's recent column, authority is no longer all it's cracked up to be. Authority can be corrupt. Authority can be an excuse for not thinking. Authority may say there are weapons of mass destruction or that oral sex isn't sex. Letting the light in is not anarchy. A demand of consensus is not mob rule. It's the scientific method in action.

(PS: I appreciate that Blankenhorn is defending OA, but he perpetuates a harmful misunderstanding of OA by giving the impression that OA rejects peer review or that it entails peer-review reform and favors informal methods like those at Wikipedia. First, OA is about removing access barriers to peer-reviewed research, not about bypassing peer review. Second, removing access barriers and reforming peer review are independent projects. OA is compatible with every kind of peer review, from the most new and innovative to the most conservative and traditional.)

Update. Blankenhorn continues his defense of OA in a December 14 posting to Moore's Lore, this time without touching on peer-review issues. Excerpt:

Academic journals cost very little to print or distribute. They are produced, in fact, by researchers who agree to be part of the peer-review process. They are a bottleneck through which knowledge must pass before the rest of us get a crack at it. Yet these same journals are owned by for-profit publishers, who keep raising their prices, forcing universities to pay for them, often with government money....When private companies are allowed to gain monopoly profits, often paid-for by government funds, and act as a bottleneck to knowledge, something is clearly very wrong. With apologies to Bergstrom and McAfee there are, in fact, several things schools could do: [1] They could create competitors to the privately-run journals. [2] They could demand payment for their professors' work on those journals, as the authors suggest. [3] They could create a new method, acceptable to them, for creating peer-review products that are published online. That unavailable Library Journal article is a Clue. If you want to restrict access to academic journals, either before or after they've edited and approved a paper, you can do that. The Internet provides a highly flexible system, with a highly flexible set of business models, for doing that. Just stop making this refusal to consider "open access" and continue the present system as some kind of stand on principle. It is an economic issue. You're coddling monopolists.

Talk in open access circles of late has centred around the true costs of setting up and maintaining an institutional repository. The only accurate answer to this question, in my opinion, is: it depends - on a number of factors. At the low end of the cost range is the completely free institutional repository. An individual can easily download free software, such as gnu eprints, using computing and internet facilities already in place for other purposes at work. The amount of volunteer labor involved also depends on how the IR is set up. Are authors allowed to deposit their own works, or is there a central vetting process?...Even with no budget at all, we can easily get an institutional repository up and running with what we have. In fact, this might be easier and simpler for the smaller and poorer library. Decisions, for example, are easier, when one has fewer options to contemplate. This is another example of the Delightful Irony of open access; that the poor can afford, what the rich cannot (or claim that they cannot)....The highest single per-repository cost would come with a central system housing a variety of different types of information for a large university. This operation may well require a fair bit of hardware, connectivity, security and authentication arrangements, staff, and space to house the computers and staff - plus adminstrative overhead, of course....To sum up, when we look at the wide variety of costs reported for institutional repositories - from practically nothing to $6,000, to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and ask: which of these costs estimates is correct? There are two correct answers to this question: all of the above, and it depends - how much money do you have, and what are you willing to spend?...[F]or more on this perspective, see my SOAF posting on this topic.

Two weeks later, on 7th December, 42 disgruntled Fellows of the Royal Society — including James Watson, the scientist who discovered the structure of DNA, and Sir John Sulston, who headed the British end of the human genome project — responded by sending an open letter to the president of the Society, Lord Rees of Ludlow. Expressing disappointment that it had taken a "largely negative stance on open access", the letter urged the Society to support, rather than seek to delay, the RCUK policy. In its turn, the Fellows' letter elicited a reply from Lord Rees. "We certainly do not, as your letter implies," he wrote to the dissident Fellows "take a 'negative stance' to open access. We are simply concerned that open access is achieved without the risk of unintended damage to peer-review, quality control and long term accessibility of the scientific literature." Lord Rees went on to list a number of specific issues he had with open access, and concluded that before the proposed RCUK policy was introduced "[W]e believe that a study should be commissioned to assess the relative merits of the various models that have been proposed under the rather broad banner of 'open access'". OA advocates were quick to point out that since the RCUK was proposing self-archiving, not new publishing models, the Royal Society's stance was based on a misunderstanding. "[M]ost of the RS doubts focus on the viability of OA journals even though the RCUK proposal mandates deposit in OA archives, not submission to OA journals," commented a frustrated Peter Suber, on his blog Open Access News. "I can't count the number of times this misunderstanding has been corrected." On the American Scientific Open Access Mailing List (AmSci), meanwhile, OA advocate Stevan Harnad was reminding list members that physicists have in any case been posting their papers into arXiv.org for fourteen years without any negative impact on journals. For that reason, he said, any further studies would be redundant, and would unnecessarily delay open access. "If 14 years of evidence of peaceful co-existence between self-archiving and journal publishing is not evidence enough, what is?" he asked. Calls for more evidence, however, have become a mantra that no self-respecting supporter of the existing system can resist. Speaking to the BBCs' John Sudworth, for instance, the president of the Institute of Physics (and former vice president of the Royal Society) Sir John Enderby, said: "What the Royal Society has said — which seems to me to be blindingly obvious — [is] that before we abandon an economic model which has served us terribly well over the years we should make sure that any replacement is sustainable." Once again, Sir John was clearly focused on economic models, not self-archiving.... What was new in the discussion, however, was a greater vehemence. After asking the Royal Society for a comment on the Fellows' letter, for instance, I received a surprise e-mail from the Royal Society's senior manager of policy communication, Bob Ward. Apparently convinced that he was unmasking the real villain of the piece he wrote: "[Y]ou may be interested to learn that the open letter from Fellows of the Royal Society on open access appears to have been at least partly co-ordinated by BioMed Central, a commercial publisher of open access journals. Matthew Cockerill, the publisher of BioMed Central, registered the domain name of the web page at which the open letter was posted for signature."..."It is no secret that BioMed Central and others helped to co-ordinate the letter (for example by registering the domain name that was used)," responded [Grace] Baynes [of BMC], adding indignantly: "Given that many of the FRS's concerned are on our boards, or edit our journals, it was in no way inappropriate for us to do so."...By now OA advocates were also keen to turn the allegation around, pointing out that the Royal Society had far more to gain from sinking the RCUK policy than BMC had from supporting it. "The Royal Society has a financial interest in maintaining subscriptions," commented Suber on his blog. "I believe that its subscriptions are not threatened by the RCUK policy. But if it wants to argue that its fears are justified, then it has to start by admitting its financial interest, which is much stronger than BMC's." In his usual colourful way, Harnad speculated that the only people in the Royal Society who actually had a problem with open access were those working in its journal publishing division. "I'll bet this is not really the voice of the RS at all: It's just the pub-ops tail wagging the regal pooch."...[David] Prosser [of SPARC Europe] asked the DTI [via the UK Freedom of Information Act] how often the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Science and Innovation for the UK, and head of the DTI, Lord Sainsbury of Turville had met with publishers and researchers in the past two years. This time the unmasking was far more interesting — for what Prosser learned is that Lord Sainsbury has a special place in his heart for Sir Crispin Davis, the CEO of the world's largest STM publisher Reed Elsevier. As Suber explained on his blog, the FOIA request shows that "Lord Sainsbury met with OA opponents roughly twice as often as with OA proponents, and met with the Reed Elsevier CEO three times more often than with any other stakeholder." The FOIA documents also show, adds Suber, that "DTI apparently undertook no analysis of its own on OA." Far from being level, it seems, the playing field is heavily tilted in favour of rich and powerful publishers.

Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries....[A]n expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica's coverage of science — suggests that such high-profile examples [of Wikipedia errors] are the exception rather than the rule. The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three. Considering how Wikipedia articles are written, that result might seem surprising. A solar physicist could, for example, work on the entry on the Sun, but would have the same status as a contributor without an academic background. Disputes about content are usually resolved by discussion among users. But Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia and president of the encyclopaedia's parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation of St Petersburg, Florida, says the finding shows the potential of Wikipedia. "I'm pleased," he says. "Our goal is to get to Britannica quality, or better."...In the study, entries were chosen from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica on a broad range of scientific disciplines and sent to a relevant expert for peer review. Each reviewer examined the entry on a single subject from the two encyclopaedias; they were not told which article came from which encyclopaedia. A total of 42 usable reviews were returned out of 50 sent out, and were then examined by Nature's news team. Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively....[T]o improve Wikipedia, Wales is not so much interested in checking articles with experts as getting them to write the articles in the first place. As well as comparing the two encyclopaedias, Nature surveyed more than 1,000 Nature authors and found that although more than 70% had heard of Wikipedia and 17% of those consulted it on a weekly basis, less than 10% help to update it.

In its accompanying editorial Nature endorses Wikipedia and asks scientists to help it out:

So can Wikipedia move up a gear and match the quality of rival reference works? Imagine the result if it did: a comprehensive, accurate and up-to-date reference work that can be accessed free from Manhattan to rural Mongolia. To achieve this, Wikipedia's administrators will have to tackle everything from future funding problems — the site is maintained by public donations — to doubts about whether enough new contributors can be found to increase the quality of the mushrooming number of entries. That latter point is critical, and here scientists can make a difference. Judging by a survey of Nature authors, conducted in parallel with the accuracy investigation, only a small percentage of scientists currently contribute to Wikipedia. Yet when they do, they can make a significant difference. Wikipedia's non-expert contributors are, by and large, dedicated to getting things right on the site. But scientists can bring a critical eye to entries on subjects they study, often highlighting errors and misunderstandings that others have unintentionally introduced. They can also start entries on topics that other users may not want to tackle. It is no surprise, for example, that the entry on 'spin density wave' was originated by a physicist....Nature would like to encourage its readers to help. The idea is not to seek a replacement for established sources such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but to push forward the grand experiment that is Wikipedia, and to see how much it can improve. Select a topic close to your work and look it up on Wikipedia. If the entry contains errors or important omissions, dive in and help fix them. It need not take too long. And imagine the pay-off: you could be one of the people who helped turn an apparently stupid idea into a free, high-quality global resource.

PS: I made a similar point in SOAN for July 2005:

If you're an expert on a certain topic, then make sure that Wikipedia includes the fruits of your expertise....You may not have a high opinion of Wikipedia, but there are two reasons not to let that stop you. First, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If experts add or enhance articles to reflect their expertise, then Wikipedia will deserve respect to that extent. Second, Wikipedia is an increasingly common first stop, and probably last stop, for non-academic users looking for information. If you want to be visible to non-academic users, then it's an eyeball destination that you can easily join....Don't give up your standards, but don't judge this resource from mere presumptions without firsthand knowledge.

Update. Wikipedia has a page collecting the independent reviews of its accuracy, and the page now includes the Nature study. Nice touch: the page reports that all the errors noted in the Nature study have been tagged and will soon be corrected. Can Encylopedia Britannica do that?

Researchers poring over brain scans may soon have an easier time integrating that data with information about the genes and proteins that make brain cells tick. A software vendor and a nonprofit group are teaming up to create NeuroCommons.org, a free, shared repository of data and other tools to speed research on brain function and disease. Informatics company Teranode will provide an infrastructure and means to store disparate data in common formats. Science Commons, a project of the nonprofit corporation Creative Commons, will develop a community of users and experts, plus work to help create an intuitive interface to find and analyze content....There's a real need for a shared platform in neurology, said John Wilbanks, executive director of Science Commons. Separate research foundations exist to fund different rare diseases, but they cannot share information without running afoul of technical and legal complications. One hope is that researchers can gather preliminary evidence for their hypotheses using other researchers' datasets. NeuroCommons.org should also allow researchers to readily compare proposed mechanisms about what, how, and when various genes and proteins interact. Neurologists would use an interface much like a Web search engine, but instead of finding relevant Web sites, they would be able to find other researchers' datasets and protocols, as well as working models of how genes, proteins and brain regions interact. Even better, NeuroCommons.org could automate such tasks and analyze the results. Researchers would not need to spend days doing literature searches or hunting with several available databases for useful data, said Matthew Shanahan, CMO for Teranode. That's especially important as the number of proteins and genes associated with diseases swells. "The thought that a scientist can do that manually efficiently doesn't make sense; you really need the aid of software now."...Neurocommons.org is set up to be maintained by its community of users. Researchers will be able to annotate each others' data. Wilbanks hopes that, eventually, researchers will see contributing information to the semantic Web as part of their scientific duty, much like peer review. But he admits that it isn't yet part of scientific culture. "It's hard to get someone to take the time to say, 'I'm going to make my data reusable by someone that doesn't know me.' "

Also see Paul Krill, Semantic Web eyed for life sciences data, InfoWorld, December 9, 2005. Excerpt:

The Semantic Web involves a concept in which data from multiple sources and ontologies can be integrated into a single information space. Experiment design automation (XDA) software vendor Teranode, which focuses on software for life sciences, plans to collaborate with Science Commons to build a neurology repository for the Semantic Web. Called Neurocommons.org, the project will provide a free repository of neurology-related data, tools and pathway knowledge for use by public and private researchers. Science Commons is an effort launched to promote the free flow of scientific information. Teranode believes life sciences represents an ideal test case for the Semantic Web because life sciences data comes from a variety of sources, including brain images, robot-arrayed gene chips, machines sorting materials cell-by-cell and gene sequencers. Science Commons will use the Teranode XDA infrastructure for Neurocommons.org. All content will be available in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) format, allowing for participating foundations to use a shared repository of research.