Open Access News

This is the first substantive post in this blog....

I have been interested in Openness for many years, and believe that knowledge and science can now only flourish in an Open environment. I believe that close commercial interests (publishers, aggegrators, software developers and industrial customers such as the pharmaceutical industry) stifle innovation in information-driven science. IMO that is why biosciences, with an Open ethic are about 10 years ahead of the chemical sciences in their use of information....

[M]y stance will sometimes be strong, as in the current post where I take issue with Peter Gregory’s comments on Open Access publishing in chemistry. There are very few Open Access journals in chemistry and PeterG was commenting on the launch of Chemistry Central from the BMC stable (reviewed in Peter Suber’s...OA blog...).

My campaign is for Openness in:

• Access. I am least vocal on this, leaving it to established champions such as PeterS, SPARC, Stevan Harnad, Steve Heller and many others. However I support the formation of Open Access in chemistry and would endeavour to publish there is appropriate journals exist. (Before Chemistry Central there were no Open journals that supported chemoinformatics).
• Source. Without openness of code it is difficult for academic groups to distribute and enhance. Some groups manage some innovation in some areas (e.g. quantum mechanics codes) but in informatics the lack of Openness is a serious problem.
• Data. I believe that scientific data belongs to the commons, not to publishers or secondary aggregators which is why I supported the continuation of PubChem last year in its struggle against Chemical Abstracts.
• Standards. Science is bedevilled by lack of interoperability, often promoted by software companies and instrument manufacturers to create lock-in and closed markets. That is why Henry Rzepa and I have developed Chemical Markup Language as a core technology for interoperability and why we are members of the Blue Obelisk movement....

I have issues with primary publishers (such as the ACS) and secondary aggregators (such as the CCDC) who add copyright statements to primary scientific data. I regard this as counter to copyright practice and law as I believe that author’s moral rights and the freedom of factual information cannot be overridden by publishers. This is not an oversight by the publisher - as far as we know Henry Rzepa and I are the only authors to have published supplemental (factual) data in an ACS journal without surrendering copyright - and we understand this was not a right, but a one-off privilege.

I have also been publicly criticised on two occasions as being immoral in publishing Open Source programs in chemistry. The argument of the critics is that Open-ness undercuts responsible developers and destroys their market leading to loss of support for science and poor quality code. This may or may not be true, but I do not see it as immoral....

We have much anecdotal evidence that most scientific data (80+%) supporting primary publications are lost for ever. Many publishers do not support supplemental (factual) data and those that do, do not support its capture in semantic form (PDFs destroy information very effectively). True, we are exploring with several publishers how to tackle this, but they can currently make no strong ethical claims for current practice....

There is nothing intrinsically laudable in publishing scientific material that looks visually the same as it did 120 years ago....

PS: Peter Murray-Rust is a leader in the open data movement and moderator of the SPARC Open Data discussion list.  I'm glad to welcome him to the blogosphere.