Open Access News

DRM should respect the public domain. That means [DRM on copyrighted works] should automatically expire, leaving the content freely accessible, on the date when the work enters the public domain....When a work is in the public domain, companies wishing to claim copyright in the design, formatting, typography, layout, and graphics they include in something like an ebook should be required to make it plain in their clickwrap licenses that the public domain work is not included in the copyright, and should be required to design the product so that the raw text may be copied or circulated freely....Circumventing DRM should not be a crime (as of course it is under the US's Digital Millennium Copyright Act) in and of itself.

Comment. Most OA literature lacks DRM. If there's an exception, it's for what could be called "harmless DRM" that doesn't block access or authenticate users but merely measures anonymized traffic. (Some wouldn't even classify this as DRM.) Hence, most copyright holders who consent to OA thereby consent to dispense with DRM. Grossman's principles are for the other copyright holders. Her principles are intended to restore user rights repealed by unbalanced laws or violated by overreaching technologies. Hence their uptake should not depend on copyright-holder consent (though that would be nice) but should be legislated and enforced. A good start. Now, which party really wants to represent consumers?

MedPix is a free online Medical Image Database, provided by the Departments of Radiology and Biomedical Informatics, Uniformed Services University, Bethesda, MD. All public content is peer-reviewed by an Editorial Panel. All contributed content may be copyrighted by the original author/contributor. MedPix provides the indexing, storage service, and bandwidth as a public education service. Individuals as well as institutions may participate. Our primary target audience includes resident and practicing physicians, medical students, nurses and graduate nursing students and other post-graduate trainees. The material is organized by disease category, disease location (organ system), and by patient profiles. The database can be searched through multiple internal text search engines. In addition, search formulations can be sent directly to PubMed, or to other outside search engines with just ONE CLICK. Registered users may browse the image database through a "slide sorter" module. Contributed content may be copyrighted by the original author/contributor and is used with their permission.

A Canadian organization is building an archive infrastructure to allow researchers and educators in developing countries a better chance of sharing their work with the world. The International Development Research Centre, a Canadian Crown corporation, is following the model established by MIT and Canadian universities like U of [Toronto] by setting up an open source database of articles. In the case of those universities, the database is designed to hold content written by local faculty and scholars. The IRDC’s Open Archive project will provide a venue for researchers who may, in the past, have found it difficult to get their work published. These researchers live in what the IRDC deems “southern countries,” mostly in Africa, South America and parts of Asia. “Southern researchers are pretty much cut off from northern scholarly channels, so the whole idea is to break down all those mainly geographic, social and economic barriers to getting your work out there,” said Marjorie Whalen, director of research information management service for Ottawa-based IRDC....IRDC is looking at two alternatives for the Open Archive, both open source: DSpace, developed by HP and MIT, and Eprint, developed by the University of Southampton in the U.K. These two applications have emerged as the front runners for numerous scholarly archiving projects....The biggest challenges around institutional archives aren’t technical but cultural, said Kathleen Shearer, a research associate with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, whose members include more than two dozen universities. “It’s quite a new role for libraries, because libraries are usually bringing in new content for researchers rather than collecting content that’s created at the institution,” said Shearer. “The biggest challenge with these types of projects is actually getting the researchers to deposit their content.”...Some university scholars may be concerned with the copyright issues around open publishing, said Devakos, but most journals already contain a clause that allows for content to be published online in an archival context. Generating international submissions for the IDRC’s Open Archive won’t be a problem, said Whelan. There is already a huge demand for this type of service in nations that lack publishing resources. Political restrictions are also becoming less a problem, she added. “For the most part, those barriers are coming down. The problems are not so much government monopolies and government barriers, but there are definitely problems with bandwidth. That’s sort of the last frontier,” she said.

The Registry contains records for projects that include digitized copies of publications originating from the U.S. Government. The projects may or may not be Federally funded. They are from libraries, government agencies, or other non-profit institutions. The projects in the Registry are either entirely composed of digitized, U.S. Government publications or include a substantial number of them. Access to the digitized material must be free. In the rare case where a publication includes an element that is copyrighted, e.g. an image, the metadata in the Other Information section of the Registry entries will indicate that distinction.

From Alzheimer's and diabetes to cancer, schizophrenia and even baldness, the list of ailments that elude cure marches on. The crisis in "translational science," or turning basic discoveries into therapies, has been brewing for years, but it hit a depressing nadir in 2005, when just 20 new drugs won approval from the Food and Drug Administration....[T]he three-year-old Myelin Repair Foundation...requires that the five biologists it supports share results in real time. Because they don't keep discoveries under wraps until publication, they can build on each other's work sooner....The foundation's insistence that its scientists exchange results every two months is a sea change from the standard every-two-to-five-years progress report. "This has been one of the most difficult transitions, getting scientists to understand accountability in the short term," says Robert Miller of Case Western Reserve University.

Update. Also see the Slashdot thread on this story.

This report addresses the question of how to increase giving for research through foundations in Europe. Until now, relatively little attention has been paid by the EU institutions to the role played by foundations that fund research activities in boosting Europe’s overall level of investment in R&D. These organisations however represent an important source of funding for some research activities, and could potentially be an important element in the EC strategy to create a European Research Area. In addition, research foundations have a qualitative impact on the direction and nature of research that is undertaken in Europe....Foundations...are private entities serving public goals and their distinctive characteristics allow them to add value to European research activities and add dimension to research funding. Their role needs to be seen in a broader context of social and political change in Europe whereby in today’s advanced civil society the state is no longer considered the only guardian of the public interest. This is why it is increasingly accepted that foundations have a role in promoting public benefit research.

Also see today's press release announcing the report:

The role of philanthropy to fund research has been analysed by an expert group set up by the European Commission. The group considers in the final report “Giving More for Research in Europe” that too little attention is paid to the role of foundations and other philanthropic bodies in the field of research. Their potential to raise and channel additional funds for research should be better exploited. To this effect, the group makes a series of recommendations addressed to foundations themselves as well as to public authorities at national and EU level. This report is a first step in the work towards placing research at the heart of philanthropic activities....[T]he report proposes to establish a “European Forum of Research Foundations” to share experience, review best practices and promote co-operation among foundations funding research.

Also see the upcoming conference where the report will presented and discussed, Conference On Giving More For Research In Europe (Brussels, March 27-28, 2006).

Comment. Currently, the Wellcome Trust has the strongest OA policy of any research funder in the world, public or private. The policy Congress asked the NIH to adopt was equivalent in strength but diluted by lobbying. The policy the House of Commons recommended and the RCUK initially drafted was equivalent in strength but is now, apparently, being diluted by lobbying. (The final form of the RCUK policy has not yet been announced.) The argument for OA to publicly-funded research is clear and compelling, but in practice private foundations may find it easier than public agencies to mandate OA to funded research. We should support the EC drive to persuade more private foundations to fund research. We should talk directly with the major foundations about putting OA conditions on their grants, as the Wellcome Trust does. As the EC collects best practices for private funders of research, we should be ready to demonstrate that OA promotes the interests of the foundations, researchers, and the public.

Abstract: This is a revised version of David Goodman, "Open Access: What Comes Next." Learned Publishing 18(1):13-23 (2005) The present revision adjusts the figures, their corresponding legends, and discussion to match the Note added in proof in the published article. The published article itself has the Note added in proof only, since it was not practical to adjust the figures. The changes here are sufficiently great that the author considers this version independent, and has consequently given it an altered title. This article examines the effects that present decisions about Open Access (OA) will have over the next ten years. It will be shown that the consequences are affected both by deliberate choices of policy by librarians and publishers, as well as by the adoption of various alternatives by scientific authors. The eventual result could be excellent, or quite otherwise.

Abstract: This is a presentation delivered at the "Issues in Scholarly Communication: Electronic Publishing, Open Access, and JELIS" panel at ALISE 2006 Annual Conference, January 16-19, San Antonio, Texas. Key findings from two studies, ALPSP and CIBER, on the funding models for open access journals and a survey of authors are reported.

This is a preprint of a paper submitted to the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. The well-documented limitations of journal impact factor rankings and perceptual ratings, the evolving scholarly communication system, the open access movement, and increasing globalization are some reasons that prompted an examination of journal value rather than just impact. Using a single specialized journal established in 1960, about education for the Information professions, this paper discusses the fall from citation grace of the Journal of Education for Library and Information Science (JELIS) in terms of impact factor and declining subscriptions. Journal evaluation studies in Library and Information Science based on subjective ratings are used to show the high rank of JELIS during the same period (1984-2004) and explain why impact factors and perceptual ratings either singly or jointly are inadequate measures for understanding the value of specialized, scholarly journals such as JELIS. This case study was also a search for bibliometric measures of journal value. Three measures, namely journal attraction power, author associativity, and journal consumption power, were selected; two of them were re-defined as journal measures of affinity (the proportion of foreign authors), associativity (the amount of collaboration), and calculated as objective indicators of journal value. Affinity and associativity for JELIS calculated for 1984, 1994, 2004 and consumption calculated for 1985 and 1994 show a holding pattern but also reveal interesting dimensions for future study. A multi-dimensional concept of value should be further investigated wherein costs, benefits, and measures for informative and scientific value are clearly distinguished for the development of a fuller model of journal value.

From the body of the paper:

[O]pen access to the literature is changing scholarly communication in many ways. Digital repositories, for example, are tools to innovate scholarly communication by supplementing publishing; however, they are also increasing information overload since not all papers that are relevant to the topic can be cited. Familiarly known as the citation bias phenomenon, the extent to which the citation measures impact becomes even more debatable and ambiguous. Did the author really read all the articles and choose the best one? Impacts studies of open access databases and services such as Citeseer (Opcit, 2005) demonstrate the validity of newer measures for impact as well but further call into question the function and role of journals in the scholarly communication system of a discipline and add to the need for holistic measures of various aspects of a journal. An examination of scholarly journal value rather than performance or quality is thus timely.

Abstract: The Saarland University and State Library (Saarlaendische Universitaets- und Landesbibliothek SULB) runs the Special Subject Collection Psychology which is part of an information system for the supra-regional literature supply in Germany. With the increasing opportunities for electronic information the following question emerged for the Special Subject Collection: how can a contribution to the availability and preservation of electronic documents particularly with regards to grey literature be made? Giving an answer SULB established the repository PsyDok in autumn 2002. PsyDok is one of the few subject-specific digital repositories in Germany. It is a registered data provider of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and certified by the German Initiative for Networkinformation (DINI), which developed a variety of standards digital repositories have to comply with to achieve this mark of quality. PsyDok offers many interfaces to disciplinary and multidisciplinary retrieval and information systems. The allocation of Uniform Resource Names (URN) guarantees persistent availability and citeability of the documents. Several services and mechanisms guarantee not only a maximum of visibility and a rapid and global scientific exchange and flow of information stored on PsyDok but also its long term availability and its scientific utilization. PsyDok fits the principles of "Open Access": Many different document types may be published, but PsyDok focuses particularly on diploma theses, dissertations, professorial dissertations and grey literature. Regarding aspects of visibility, information exchange and scientific utilization producers of scientific literature benefit from PsyDok.

The Government of India [including DST, DSIR, CSIR, DBT, DoD, DAE, DRDO, ICAR, ICMR, UGC, IITs, IISc, and NITs] expects authors of research papers resulting from publicly-funded research to maximise the opportunities to make their results available for free. To this end the Government:

• Requires electronic copies of any research paper that has been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, and is supported in whole or in part by Government funding, to be deposited into an institutional open access repository immediately upon acceptance for publication.
• Encourages Government Grant Holders to publish in a suitable Open Access Journal where one exists; the Government will cover the publication costs, if any.
• Encourages Government Grant Holders to retain ownership of the copyright of published papers where possible.

The session was co-chaired by P.M. Bhargava and Subbiah Arunachalam and the speakers were Alma Swan (keynote, need for OA in developing countries), D.K. Sahu (OA increases visibility and circulation of journals), A.R.D. Prasad (how Indians can improve OA software), V. Balaji (plans for OA in the CGIAR system), S. Srinivas (plans for OA in CGIAR), Naina Pandita (OpenMed, IndMed and MedInd), B. G. Sunder Singh (What DSIR has done so far to support OA in India).

Comment. Congratulations to all involved. Is it reasonable to hope that a conference recommendation like this will be taken up through channels and adopted by the government? A February 2005 conference recommendation that the Ukraine mandate OA to publicly-funded research became a December 2005 parliamentary resolution to the same effect. Yes, it can happen.

Update. See the version of the Indian recommendation that includes an FAQ.

Today, two key information solutions providers involved in enabling the open-access movement announced an initiative that will provide greater access to institutionally created research. The Thomson Scientific Web Citation Index will index ProQuest’s Digital Commons open access material. This new initiative means Digital Commons-hosted work will be more broadly discoverable....“We are very pleased to be working with ProQuest, given the number of scholarly institutions that have chosen Digital Commons since its introduction last year [said James Pringle, Vice President of Development, Thomson Scientific]. The Web Citation Index already includes repositories based on a variety of platforms. Adding significant content from ProQuest’s service will make it even easier for users around the world to discover pathways to material that includes preprints, post-prints, technical reports, dissertations, proceedings, and other gray literature.”...Web Citation Index is the multidisciplinary citation index of scholarly content from institutional and subject-based repositories. Web Citation Index transcends the capabilities of traditional Web search engines, providing users with a robust citation-based discovery vehicle for content hosted on institutional repositories. Thomson Scientific content editors select only those Web repositories deemed scholarly. This ensures Web Citation Index delivers only the highest-quality, most-relevant content.

Google has a technological knack for making a fortune out of almost everything it does, and who can blame the publishers for wanting a cut of that? But this fight is also about a bigger issue that affects the rest of us as well — namely, the pace at which new ideas can change people's lives. The publishers cast their case as a principled defense of intellectual property rights, but they haven't offered much to back it up....For works still under copyright, the Google library search will provide the bibliographic information found in a library card catalog, along with a few sentences or paragraphs that use the key words from the original search. It's hard to find the threat to any writer's intellectual property rights in those rules....[The AAP] argument seems to have it all backward. In the Google library project, what prevents potential copyright infringements is not a publisher's decision to "opt out" or not, but whether Google provides more than a snippet without a publisher's permission....Economic and social progress is the essential element of the Google library project, regardless of what money may be at stake. In the end, publishers should be agitated not by the Google project, but by how the Internet has changed their business in ways that don't favor them....Google is at the forefront of a transformational technology — the Internet. The Internet has changed the way we buy airline tickets, purchase music and even make telephone calls. The publishers' association is at a vital crossroads. It can try to resist the changes everyone else is embracing, with litigation and lobbying, or it can join the rest of us. By harnessing the technology developed by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others, the publishing industry can exponentially expand their authors' exposure and give consumers much greater access to great literary works. Google is successful because it delivers what everyone wants and needs — information. Shouldn't every publisher want to be part of that?

[A]s academic scientists increasingly accept industry funding and engage in commercial activities such as patenting, the concern is that biomedical research will suffer as rights holders refuse to share their materials and information. Patents, however, may not be the issue, according to two recent surveys and a new report by the National Academy of Sciences. "The problem is not patents per se," says John P. Walsh, associate professor of sociology at the University of Illinois-Chicago. "It's a combination of scientific competition, wanting to publish first, and commercial interests more broadly." Additionally, he points out, many academic scientists tend to largely ignore patents anyway. In a survey of biomedical researchers conducted in late 2004, Walsh and colleagues found that only 5% of academic bench scientists regularly check for patents on work related to their research. More often, difficulties arise when scientists ask for tangible research inputs, such as materials and data, and are rebuffed. In the survey, 19% of biomedical researchers reported their most recent request for material was denied. This is resulting in a greater number of people having to abandon projects, says Walsh...."Academia seems less affected by patenting than industry when it comes to gaining access to knowledge, perhaps because it continues to maintain the more traditional and informal channels of how it has historically shared intellectual property," says Stephen A. Hansen, project manager of the AAAS Science and Intellectual Property in the Public Interest (SIPPI) program.

This afternoon, I went to the best seminar of the year. Sure, it's just January 19, but I'm confident that I won't attend a better seminar this year, as it was among the best I've ever attended....Why did I enjoy the seminar so much? First, [Roberts] began with a bit of a sermon about the importance of open access journals. That if you're anywhere but Hopkins (and a few other places), it's extremely difficult to get access to the literature. He also made the important point that: wouldn't it be great if the entire scientific literature, ever, was accessible online for searching? It's easily within our power. There are so many interesting papers that are languishing in dust. If they could all be online, and if the full text were free for searching, wouldn't everything be so much better? I was completely on his side from the start.

Here are few sensible answers from a blog posting yesterday on Outsell Now:

What these companies do is clear today: They charge companies (and non-profits) $225 and up for issuing releases. They'll deliver those releases right away, of course. It's the increasing list of value-added services that is driving the business and attempting to ward off Web 2.0 direct-distribution disintermediation, like RSS. Value-added means many things, including: [1] targeting releases within industries, to relevant analysts and journalists; [2] translating into any relevant language globally; [3] including video and multimedia; [4] tracking response and measuring impact.

Comment. I was struck by the analogy between publishing journals and distributing press releases. There are clearly similarities and differences. Without overemphasizing the similarities or oversimplifying journal publishing, I wonder how far the lessons from press-release distribution carry over to journal publishing, esp. for journals that want to offer OA to the basic full-text peer-reviewed articles and earn revenue from other layers of added value.

Google is grinding through various library collections for every book it can scan, without asking for permission. I, for one, think that's great. I see that my last book, Online! The Book, is in the collection, but this doesn't bother me, because I am apparently one of the few out there who has used Google Book Search. I found it anything but a threat to book sales or anything else to do with publishing. The fuss over this book-search initiative is idiotic and naïve. It's not as if Google is printing books, or that any of these books are readable as complete editions on Google: They are not. With many of the books, whole sections are removed and unavailable. You can thumb through a few hard-to-read pages, but that's it....This is a research tool and a public resource most of all, and it is no threat to writers or publishers. It's too bad that this supposedly intellectual crowd doesn't understand this—it indicates how far down the societal pecking order they have fallen during the rise of the technological society. The sad part is that this database will actually enlarge the fortunes of the publishing industry and writers alike by improving the accessibility of lesser-known works. Joe Schmo will get due credit for his early remarks about a topic rather than simply being ripped off by other writers....Too bad writers can't see the benefits of universal access to their works. It's possible to increase sales if people actually know you exist. Apparently writers would rather live and die in obscurity than have their books scanned and available for sampling....When Google began this, I surmised that it was just another way to boost ad revenues with more page views. But now I'm guessing that if there is any mercantile angle, it's to sell the books themselves. And you can be sure that book sales would increase with this mechanism in place, a reality ignored by the protesting writers and publishers. They bank on the superstition that this will somehow hurt sales. "It's stealing!" Shades of the RIAA. In fact, I suspect that this won't even be a money-maker for Google; it's probably a loss leader. Meanwhile, Google is creating a new public resource that should be given a Nobel Peace Prize.

Here is a quick summary of points of agreement and disagreement with the University of California (UC) view of Open Access (OA) and Institutional Repositories (IRs) as described by Catherine Candee (CC in her interview by Richard Poynder (RP) in Changing the paradigm [PS: excerpt blogged here on Wednesday]: (1) UC considers publication reform to be the goal, OA merely a means: I would consider OA to be the goal and publication reform merely a hypothetical possibility that might or might not follow from OA. (2) UC considers providing OA to postprints (i.e., final drafts of published journal articles) a lesser priority for IRs, I think they are the first priority. (3) UC moved away from Eprints and postprint self-archiving because of the extremely low level of spontaneous uptake by UC faculty, assuming it was because it was "too difficult." It is far more likely that the low uptake was because UC did not adopt an institutional self-archiving mandate. Those institutions that have done so have dramatically higher self-archiving rates. (4) UC instead outsourced self-archiving to an expensive service that, being a secondary publisher, needs to expend a lot of resources on following up rights problems for each published paper; the result so far is that UC's eScholarship IR is still not self-archiving more than the c. 15% worldwide self-archiving baseline for postprints. (5) The other reason UC moved away from Eprints and postprint archiving is because of its publishing reform goals, including university self-publishing (of journals and monographs). I think monographs are (for the time being) a separate matter, and should be handled separately from journal article OA, and that peer review needs to be implemented by a neutral 3rd party, not the author or the author's institution. The immediate priority is postprint OA.

The genetics community is increasingly concerned that patents might lead to restricted access to research and health care. We explore various measures that are designed to render patented genetic inventions accessible to further use in research, and to diagnosis and/or treatment. They include the often-recited research or experimental-use exemption, conventional one-to-one licensing and compulsory licensing, as well as patent pools and clearing-house mechanisms. The last two alternatives deserve special attention in the area of human genetics.

For the average biologist, hands-on literature mining currently means a keyword search in PubMed. However, methods for extracting biomedical facts from the scientific literature have improved considerably, and the associated tools will probably soon be used in many laboratories to automatically annotate and analyse the growing number of system-wide experimental data sets. Owing to the increasing body of text and the open-access policies of many journals, literature mining is also becoming useful for both hypothesis generation and biological discovery. However, the latter will require the integration of literature and high-throughput data, which should encourage close collaborations between biologists and computational linguists.

The Minority Health Archive...is an online archive of print and electronic media related to the health of the four nationally recognized racial groups (Blacks/African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics/Latinos, and Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders). The Minority Health Archive provides the opportunity not only to research and gather various documents in a variety of subject areas, but also a resource to deposit other related materials not already posted to the archive.

MHA is sponsored by the Center for Minority Health at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. For more details, see Alan Aldinger's story on it in the January 17 issue of the PittChronicle. Excerpt:

The MHA was publicly launched Jan. 8 at the National Leadership Summit on Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health in Washington, D.C. “Unfortunately, much of the history of minority health is recorded in federal documents, foundation reports, legislation, and organizational proceedings, which are not readily available to the general public and may be missed by academic programs training the next generation of health professionals,” said Stephen Thomas, CMH director and the Philip Hallen Professor of Community Health and Social Justice in GSPH, who will serve as executive editor of the archive. “The Minority Health Archive is our contribution to address this problem....It is the open access that represents a critical breakthrough in advancing the flow of communication and knowledge needed to advance minority health in the 21st century.”...The MHA is made possible by EPrints software, a tool for building collections of digital documents. Through its “author self-archiving” feature, the software provides an easy way for registered users to deposit a digital document in a publicly accessible Web site at no cost and in less than 10 minutes through a simple Web interface. Scholars can use this software to disseminate research results rapidly and to foster subject-specific collaborative global research communities.

Nancie G. Marzulla, president of Defenders of Property Rights, today submitted a letter to members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees asserting that opponents of the Google Book Search program are seriously misrepresenting the facts about this emerging breakthrough in intellectual research. She went on to outline the technology's clear compliance with the "fair use doctrine." In her letter (see text below), Ms. Marzulla called on Congress to question critics' claims that the Google Book Search project violates copyright law, and urged the congressional committees to protect the importance transformative technologies like the Google Book Search project have on our economy's growth and development. As one of the nation's most well-respected property rights attorneys, Ms. Marzulla does not see any violations in the case of Google Book Search. "As an attorney who specializes in the constitutional protection of intellectual property rights, I am a close observer of emerging technologies which, when misused, represent a threat to property rights. Google Book Search does not represent such a threat to property rights, as it only allows users to view "snippets" of information -- not even a whole page of text," said Ms. Marzulla. She continued, "When one takes a close look at Google's new tool, one would realize that far from diminishing the value of a book, the search tool actually enhances a book's value by drawing it to the attention of readers who have a higher than average interest in buying it, having seen firsthand how the book contains information relevant to their inquiry," said Ms. Marzulla.

As a faculty member at a mid-sized, underfunded public university, I certainly appreciate the suggestions for gaining access to materials through alternative means. After seven years spent attempting to get access to a number of databases I'd only seen advertised because my university couldn't afford hundreds of thousands of dollars in access fees, I was lucky enough to spend 5 weeks last summer participating in an NEH seminar at Brown. I was astonished to discover that in only a few weeks with access to databases my institution can't afford, I could complete research that would have taken me months or even years to accomplish through travel and interlibrary loan. What amazed me was not only the exponentially greater access I had at Brown, but also the sheer acceleration of the research process available to those at more generously funded institutions. Until I visited Brown, I (perhaps naively) didn't realize what a difference access makes and how much the gap had widened since I completed my graduate program.

[T]he fact that OA and OAI were the source of IRs might just have something to do with what IRs should be used for (as a matter of first and urgent priority). It is not that storing and preserving every digitised object under the sun is not a good idea. It is just a question of priorities. For universities and research institutions, the immediate priority is this: Scholarly and scientific research usage and impact have been needlessly lost, cumulatively, since paper publication first began, because paper costs and distribution necessarily meant that many would-be users could not afford to access and use most research output. This has always meant a great loss of potential research impact and hence research progress to researchers, their institutions, and to research itself. Ever since the creation of the Internet, however, with FTP, the Web, and now OAI-compliant OA IR software and IRs, this annual research-impact bleed can in fact be stanched. Yet the bleed is still being stanched spontaneously for only about 15% of the planet's annual research output today; 85% of it is still being lost, daily, and cumulatively. This continuing bleed is hence a needless loss to the planet's research institutions, the primary consumers of research findings, whose daily bread (pardon the messy, mixed metaphor!) is research impact and progress (and funding), as well as to the planet's teaching/learning institutions, the secondary consumers of research knowledge and progess, and of course each nation's tax-payers, the tertiary consumers of research applications and benefits, who also happen to be the funders of much of the research....Let us stanch the bleeding immediately, as a matter of priority, and then get on with the generic digital preservation agenda.

John Willinsky's new book begins - quite effectively - by describing how rising prices and a fluctuating currency have forced the Kenya Medical Research Institute to cancel most of its subscriptions to medical journals. The true shame, the institute's librarian told Mr. Willinsky, is that that the five titles the library could still afford did not include any leading journals on the institute's prime research focus, tropical diseases. Libraries, publishers, and the contributors to the journals, Mr. Willinsky argues in "The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship" (MIT Press, 287 pages, $35), are at the center of a global economic struggle that may determine the influence of scholarship on the world. Access to research and scholarship is in decline, as for-profit publishers drive up the cost of scholarly journals, forcing libraries to decimate their subscription lists.

Update. I've now seen the full text. Excerpt:

Mr. Willinsky cites a study showing that Reed Elsevier, the largest publisher of academic journals (with 1,800 titles in its portfolio), cost the University of California half its budget for online publications in 2002, though its titles accounted for only a quarter of journal use....The problem, Mr. Willinsky argues, is that these corporations have figured out a way to increase their profits even as their journals' circulation declines, by "bundling" less popular titles with those that libraries cannot afford to cancel....Mr. Willinsky contrasts these market mechanisms with what he claims is a basic human right - the "right to know" - a right that "stands with other basic rights, whether to life, liberty, justice, or respect." He attempts to defend that right as a philosophical truth (relying on such strange bedfellows as Kant, Derrida, and political scientist Richard Pierre Claude). In this, he fails, as nontheistic arguments for the absolute existence of rights so often do....He is on much firmer ground in his argument that scholarship - often funded in large part by public money and conducted at nonprofit institutions whose purpose is to further public knowledge - should be publicly available. "With so much scholarly activity funded by public money," he writes, "it is only natural to ask whether there is now a way to distribute the resulting research in ways that make it open and available, as a global public good." There is: The Internet, which eliminates the cost of printing, binding, and shipping journals, allows as many readers to view a work as can find their way to a computer. Many can't, Mr. Willinsky acknowledges, but why wait until the technology gap is closed to start providing the information to which the Internet can grant access? The subtitle to this book is somewhat misleading, as "The Case for Open Access" takes up only a portion of the book....[H]is book is thoughtful, informed, and thought-provoking, and his account of the role of the Internet and an incipient open-access movement is genuine news.

Update. Here's the Royal Library press release, in Swedish (January 23, 2006).

Access Copyright has been lobbying hard to oppose the best solution to the problem of textbook pricing and potentially illegal copying of textbooks. Access Copyright is an administrative body for a largely outdated business model, namely the collecting of royalties for any copying of literary works. While this model made sense in the past when copying was more expensive, with photocopiers and the Internet there are far better solutions. There is a movement in many circles, including academia, towards something called "Open Access". With this model you resource the development of the material once, often in collaboration with many institutions, and then allow all the potential audiences to freely copy the material without additional per-copy fees. This model is being adopted by a growing number of journals, and textbooks are a very logical area to move into....Access Copyright, seeing the threats to their antiquated way of doing business, has been very busy in lobbying the government to make modern alternatives either impossible or impractical. They are attacking the Internet where many authors are intending their materials to be redistributed royalty-free, with Access Copyright trying to claim the right to collect royalties from any use of material on the Internet.

Abstract: A free-market model is proposed which follows the current file-sharing trend to its logical conclusion. This model both preserves profits for the content publishing industry and, paradoxically, serves to reinforce the standard business model. This is accomplished by dispensing entirely with the notion of intellectual property rights and allowing the price of content to be determined naturally by market dynamics. All users of content have equal rights to distribute the content, and to profit from distribution. It is shown that this situation creates healthy profit for the content creator, with asymptotically diminishing returns for distributors on progressively lower rungs of the distribution network. At the bottom of the distribution network are the end users, who necessarily pay a fair price for content. This process is illustrated by way of a computer simulation.

(PS: The primary example in the article is music, but Donis argues that the concept applies just as well to "scientific research results, and other kinds of data.")

Comment. While Communiqué will itself be OA, nothing in the roadmap suggests that it will push for OA to the primary literature and data themselves. But nothing in the roadmap rules that out either. European scientists may want to send comments to AlphaGalileo pointing out that OA to research would advance all the goals of the new service, including the press coverage of the same research. For a good example of how OA to research helps science journalists, not just scientists, see yesterday's blog posting on Steve Jones' story in the Telegraph.

The vision is a shared European heritage network. The aim of the European Commission Information Society Technologies Programme is to ensure better access to resources by fostering European partnerships and increasing the participation of new member states in EU research activities. A recent survey of new member states under TEL-ME-MOR looked at how well the new member states national libraries are achieving or can achieve this goal....The survey revealed what makes it difficult or impossible for National Libraries to be actively involved in research and development programmes. The issues range from intellectual, financial and organisational to the management experience of digitised and born-digital content, the size of digital collections, application and adoption of international standards and technological infrastructure. The result is that only 4 of the 10 libraries surveyed had significant amounts of digitised content....National libraries have a huge role to play in the preservation and accessibility of our cultural heritage. They are often the custodians of legal deposit and the national cultural heritage. To fulfil their role in the vision of a shared European heritage the survey concludes that libraries should find a more prominent role in their national R&D programmes; that more resources need to be digitised and new funding models uncovered and that more effective systems for the management of research need to be put in place. The European Commission should help create the conditions needed for international collaborative networks and sharing knowledge and expertise....The report of the “Questionnaire for Analysis of Research Activities and Needs of National Libraries of the New EU Member States” can be downloaded here.