Open Access News

Disabled persons, especially blind, partially sighted and other print disabled people have to rely on exemptions within copyright law allowing them to effectively use assistive technologies even in cases where the content is protected by TPMs. The three articles dealing with this subject make us aware of the troubles still existing, but also of the solutions at hand. When talking about this subject it is important to have in mind that blind and visually impaired people are consumers like you and me, and that improving accessibility is not only to the benefit of this group, but for all of us.

Why all the fuss about electronic journals? That was the question raised by Michael Gorman, the outspoken president of the American Library Association (ALA), at a session on Future of Libraries at the recent Online Information Meeting in London. What we want is articles, said Gorman, calling the idea of putting them together in things called journals irrelevant. We dont need e-journals, said the controversial Gorman. Articles should be put together by our interests, not the editors. The real problem, according to Gorman, is that there is no viable economic model. Buying all articles (including those no one reads) is not sustainable. The comments got me thinking about the containers in which we package information. When the entire text is digitized and searchable through various search engines, traditional containers might not matter anymore. The concept of a journal may not matter now that we have article e-print servers and institutional repositories....I conduct surveys to find out how faculty, students, and others use scholarly information. All find relevant scholarly articles by searching databases, the web, and e-print servers, but a journal often delivers value greater than the sum of its article parts. For current awareness, readers in many disciplines browse through entire print or electronic issues of journals. They select journals they trust, based on past experience and such factors as the journals affiliation, prestige, and reputation with scholars in their discipline. An issue devoted to a special topic or a bundled collection of related articles in a journal can guide readers to related material that they might not read otherwise. Even when searching for articles on a specific topic, readers often find the journal title indicates its scope and quality. In health-related fields the stamp of peer review plus journal prestige is vital.

Comment. There are two kinds of added value to keep distinct. One is the kind added by peer review, especially peer review by a known editorial board with its particular disciplinary orientation and standards. The second is the kind added by clustering articles together. OA is compatible with both, but some OA proposals would preserve the first without preserving the second.

We know that many people are upset about this decision, and frankly, we understand their point of view. This wasn't an easy choice, but in the end, we believe the course of action we've chosen will prove to be the right one. Launching a Google domain that restricts information in any way isn't a step we took lightly. For several years, we've debated whether entering the Chinese market at this point in history could be consistent with our mission and values. Our executives have spent a lot of time in recent months talking with many people, ranging from those who applaud the Chinese government for its embrace of a market economy and its lifting of 400 million people out of poverty to those who disagree with many of the Chinese government's policies, but who wish the best for China and its people. We ultimately reached our decision by asking ourselves which course would most effectively further Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally useful and accessible. Or, put simply: how can we provide the greatest access to information to the greatest number of people? Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world's population, however, does so far more severely. Whether our critics agree with our decision or not, due to the severe quality problems faced by users trying to access Google.com from within China, this is precisely the choice we believe we faced. By launching Google.cn and making a major ongoing investment in people and infrastructure within China, we intend to change that. No, we're not going to offer some Google products, such as Gmail or Blogger, on Google.cn until we're comfortable that we can do so in a manner that respects our users' interests in the privacy of their personal communications. And yes, Chinese regulations will require us to remove some sensitive information from our search results. When we do so, we'll disclose this to users, just as we already do in those rare instances where we alter results in order to comply with local laws in France, Germany and the U.S. Obviously, the situation in China is far different than it is in those other countries; while China has made great strides in the past decades, it remains in many ways closed. We aren't happy about what we had to do this week, and we hope that over time everyone in the world will come to enjoy full access to information. But how is that full access most likely to be achieved? We are convinced that the Internet, and its continued development through the efforts of companies like Google, will effectively contribute to openness and prosperity in the world. Our continued engagement with China is the best (perhaps only) way for Google to help bring the tremendous benefits of universal information access to all our users there. We're in this for the long haul. In the years to come, we'll be making significant and growing investments in China. Our launch of google.cn, though filtered, is a necessary first step toward achieving a productive presence in a rapidly changing country that will be one of the world's most important and dynamic for decades to come. To some people, a hard compromise may not feel as satisfying as a withdrawal on principle, but we believe it's the best way to work toward the results we all desire.

The African Union (AU) has backed plans to create a scientific and cultural branch modelled on the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)....Among its aims, the proposed African Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (AFESCO) intends to boost the continent's scientific capacity, promote international cooperation and protect African cultures. "It is a wonderful window of opportunity for all African countries to share their knowledge, skills and experiences while promoting the scientific collaboration that is vital for building common interests and mutual understanding between the peoples of Africa," says Awatif Elegam of Sudan's National Centre for Research....The Sudanese newspaper Alray Alaam reported on 23 January that the International University of Africa in Khartoum would host AFESCO.

Comment. The announcement doesn't mention open access, though it does talk about knowledge-sharing. Insofar as AFESCO is modelled on UNESCO, it should support OA and may plan to do so. See the UNESCO endorsement of OA in its November 2005 Amendments to the Draft Programme and Budget for 2006-2007. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who can describe where AFESCO is likely to stand on OA or recommend effective ways to influence its future position.

Forty-eight university libraries in Taiwan and Hong Kong have purchased more than 50,000 OCLC NetLibrary eBooks under an extraordinary cooperative agreement that crosses geographical boundaries. Under the agreement, the English-language NetLibrary eBooks in Biology and Life Sciences; Business, Economics and Management; History; Literature; Technology, Engineering and Manufacturing; and many other subject areas will be available electronically anytime, anywhere through the NetLibrary eBook platform. The eBook collection is the largest and most comprehensive of its kind in the Asia-Pacific region. "This agreement goes beyond territorial borders and brings together people and institutions interested in providing electronic resources to meet the needs of all libraries in the region. Together, we have created a comprehensive program of innovation and service to libraries—for all library users," said Prof. Hsianghoo Steve Ching, University Librarian at the City University of Hong Kong...."The Super eBook Collection demonstrates the power of cooperation among university administrators and library directors," said Jay Jordan, OCLC President and CEO. "Working together, leaders at these 48 institutions are changing the ways that libraries support research, teaching and learning. We at OCLC are proud to be part of this exciting collaborative effort." "Sharing information in an electronic world offers increased relevancy and increased access to more content," said Rich Rosy, Vice President, OCLC Content Management. "eBook resources can be searched more quickly and efficiently than printed materials. High-demand titles can be viewed more frequently. And eBooks can be accessed and read online instantaneously, with no need to house or ship borrowed print materials. This commitment to NetLibrary eBooks is an excellent example of how libraries can extend their investments in monograph collections."

(PS: Access to NetLibrary books is free for users who have library privileges at participating libraries, but providing access is not free of charge for the libraries.)

Author manuscripts for published articles were added to PubMed Central (PMC), NIH digital archive of life sciences journal literature, beginning in July 2005 (see article: PubMed Links to Author Manuscripts in PMC...). A new status tag, [PubMed - author manuscript in PMC], will appear on PubMed citations for articles that would not normally be cited in PubMed because they are from journals that are a) not indexed for MEDLINE or b) do not participate in PMC. This small number of citations can be retrieved using the search: pubstatusnihms. As these citations are processed, the status tag will change as appropriate, with a final designation of [PubMed]. To retrieve all citations in PubMed for which author manuscripts are available in PMC, use the search: author manuscript.

OpenDOAR - the Directory of Open Access Repositories – has released a listing of open access archives holding research papers, conference papers, theses and other academic materials that are available as "open access". This means that anyone with an internet connection has access to this information without paying any charges. Open access to information has grown rapidly as researchers and scholars increasingly put their work on the web for free in these repositories. Some of these archives hold material on a single subject; others are based in universities and hold information from across many different subjects. Leading universities in the UK, Sweden, Germany, France and across Europe, Australia, India, the USA and worldwide have built an expanding international network of archives. Repositories have been built by research funders, like the US National Institutes for Health or the UK-based Wellcome Trust. There are now large numbers of archives of different sizes, composition and scope and new repositories are regularly established. Keeping track of these repositories and the range of information that they hold is a challenge. Although most open access repositories have been designed to allow information about themselves to be gathered automatically, discrepancies can creep into the system. Therefore, each of the OpenDOAR repositories has been visited by project staff to check the information gathered. This in-depth approach gives a quality-controlled list of repository features. In addition, while reviewing these archives, project staff are building a picture of the worldwide development of open access repositories, noting new features and directions. This information is being analysed to create the next version of the listing, with further information and categories being noted for each repository. In the meantime, the newly released list will continue to grow as new repositories are added.

The software to allow EPrints and DSpace institutional repositories to be used for RAE 2008 is now available in Bronze release form. This means that it has been adopted internally on the test institutions and has undergone some months of testing. It is now being made avalable to the UK academic community for repository managers to gain the experience of fitting it into their Institutional RAE processes. Support for this software is provided through the IRRA mailing list in the first instance. To sign up, please add your details to the IRRA wiki.

Update (1/30/06). Make that five: The Conference of the Universities of Applied Sciences (CUAS) just signed.

For researchers or OA advocates (or detractors!) who are interested in the current state, growth rate and distribution of Open Access Repositories (or Archives) worldwide, ROAR, the Registry of Open Access Repositories (created by Southampton doctoral student Tim Brody as part of his thesis, and for the Eprints and OpCit projects) allows anyone to generate growth charts by archive type, or by individual archive. It can also rank-order archives by the number of OAI records they currently contain (i.e., their size). ROAR is a gold-mine of current, cumulating data, ripe for anyone enterprising enough to want to report an up-to-date quantitative analysis of how OA IRs are progressing today, and where. I also take this opportunity to remind all OA Archives and OA IRs to please *register* with ROAR so you too can be counted, and your content growth tracked. The size and growth data are classified by the type of Archive: (i) Distributed Institutional/Departmental Pre-/Postprint Archives (275), (ii) Central Cross-Research Archives (69) (iii) Dissertation Archives (e-theses) (62), as well as (iv) database Archives (e.g. research data) (10), (v) e-journal/e-publishing Archives (53), (vi) demonstration Archives (not yet operational) (24), (vii) "other" Archives (non-OA content of various kinds) (79). The archives can also be classified by country, and by the software they use.

[F]air use has been carrying a heavy load lately, and it’s starting to show its limitations. Over the last few decades and especially amid the recent “copyright wars,” a powerful new philosophy has emerged: Rather than seeing copyright as a careful balance between the interests of private owners and the public, powerful content industries have argued that robustly protecting private interests is always the best way to serve the public....While most of us in higher education are little content industries ourselves, we should not be seduced into forgetting our role first and foremost as the keepers, distributors, and developers of our society’s body of public knowledge. We must fight for the promise copyright made to the public: All these economic rights are only in the service of intellectual progress....[The lawsuits against Google over its Library Project] will live or die not on the question of the value of such a database to users, but on the narrower legal question of whether Google has the right to scan the books to begin with....Let’s give fair use a break by sending in a legislative relief pitcher, one that can better allow for the role search engines play in facilitating the circulation of digital information. If fair use has been protecting both ‘transformative’ and ‘distributive’ uses, today we need a statute that can cover the kind of “indexing” uses that Google is after. If we recognize that the Internet offers us the chance to make much more of our society’s culture and knowledge available to more people, and we recognize that to make this massive resource most useful requires ways to navigate and search it, and we further recognize that search engines like Google need to make copies of that work in order to make it searchable, then we have a genuine and reasonable public interest in ensuring that that they and others can do so. At the same time, we should also ensure that doing so doesn’t undercut the possibility of selling these works, and ideally should help their sales....Waiting for fair use to shield this expanding range of uses is slowing the innovation in information, knowledge, and culture the Internet seems ready to facilitate. And every time it does, we risk a court setting a retrograde precedent that cements digital culture into place for good. We need a new statute that acknowledges and accommodates the common sense recognition that search is good, that it requires incidental copying, and that it should not be left to individual, competing publishers to make their work part of the public trust. In a moment when we are handing content owners much more control not only over the use of their work but over access to it, we need to make a parallel commitment to ensuring and expanding access of a different kind, as an aggregate collection of all things thought and written that can be easily explored. And, we need to let fair use protect the activities it’s designed to protect, instead of letting it fray as it stands in as the only protection against a locked and licensed digital world.

As a worker in Elon's campus bookstore for two and a half years, senior Molly Steinberg said she's seen a student pay as much as $1,000 for textbooks in a single semester. The amounts that students pay for textbooks each year may drastically decrease over the next few years due to a new textbook company that is out to sell a new type of textbook: free ones. "With the cost of college skyrocketing and with aid not keeping pace, we want to see as many students as possible have free textbooks," said Tom Doran, CEO and founder of Freeload Press. "(Textbooks) are too important to go without . . . we're seeing textbook purchases declining as tuition increases." Freeload Press, which was created in St. Paul, Minn., gave its downloadable college textbooks a test run this past fall. Fifty-one instructors from 20 colleges used the company's e-books, and because of the positive feedback from both students and professors, 175 colleges and universities are registered to use them for the spring 2006 semester. Elon University finance professor, Wonhi Synn, will be the first professor in North Carolina to provide free textbooks to his students next semester. "The reason I'm trying this out for my section is because the textbook I'm using is good quality," he said. "I would not adopt something that is sub-quality just because it's free." Students in Synn's Fundamentals of Financial Managing class will download their e-books using Adobe Acrobat format from Freeload Press' Internet Portal...If they would rather have a hardcopy, the company also offers paperback e-books with advertising, which are sold for 60 percent less than the original cost of the textbook. "We debated about using a browser base, but students want a sense of ownership," Doran said. "They want the information right on the laptop or desktop so they can have at it any time they want without worrying about being connected."...Freeload Press is currently using 10 corporate sponsors. When businesses sponsor Freeload Press, they are able to put advertisements in the front of the printed book and in chapter openings of e-textbooks....So what's the possibility of every student getting all of their textbooks for free in the next couple years? Doran said it may be a longer project than we may hope. But he also said that these first steps made by Freeload Press are meant to cause a reaction and make an example for other companies to follow. "That's our goal," Doran said. "We're trying to show other publishers that we work, we can get sponsors and we can get academics to use the commercial textbook."... Freeload Press is the first media and publishing company to adopt the idea of using commercial sponsoring to reduce the price of textbooks.

The purpose of this website is for legal academics and others to share our copyright experiences with law journals and other legal publishers. As academics, we have an interest in ensuring the widest dissemination of our work. Law Journals tend, however, to use standard-form copyright agreements that reqire a copyright assignment, and impose unreasonable restrictions on our rights to share and re-use our own work. Some law journals, however, are more enlightened. Others, when pushed, will also see the light. Due to the transitory nature of student-run law journal staffs, still others are actually unaware of their own past practices. This site will allow you to learn what other people have been able to persuade law journals to accept. On the pages linked from here, legal writers describe their copyright experiences. The information is as good or bad as what you contribute to it.

Comment. I like this idea. It goes beyond the SHERPA and Eprints databases on journal access policies by letting authors describe what negotiations they've tried at which journals with what success. Every law journal has (or will have) a separate page in the wiki for community annotation.

I've been doing quite a bit of research on DSpace and other repository tools lately, and a thought has just occurred to me. At the moment, a fair proportion of our received Inter-library loan requests are actually held by us, sometimes as paper copies, but regularly as part of online subscriptions. With the proliferation of open-access repositories, more and more journal articles, theses, book chapers etc. are going to become freely available online. How about an Inter-Library loan system that automatically took request details and processed them through some kind of metadata filter, and then on to relevant search facilities? This could then offer users the option to look at any possible results, before deciding whether or not to still submit their request. It would obviously depend on the details they provided, but if it worked it could hugely reduce the time taken for these people to find their requests, and the staff time spent working on Inter-library loans. Unfortunately my skills aren't quite up to creating something that could do this...yet!

Comment. This is a great idea. Until it can be automated, patrons and librarians can run their ILL requests through OAIster, the most comprehensive search index of OA repositories worldwide. This will save time, save money, and spread the message about OA. Here's an idea for Phase 2. When Professor X submits an ILL request for an item already OA in an repository, the ILL librarian sends back a note with a URL to the item, a short explanation of what OA repositories are, perhaps with a link, a list of Professor X's non-OA journal publications, and a pointer to the institutional repository.

[I]magine a hypothetical situation where a young, single mother of two growing children, living in a remote area of Canada, learns of a recurrence of her cancer. In extremis, she makes a phone call to a hospital librarian. This is an extreme and graphic example of the importance of open access to evidence-based information. Imagine how this problem is compounded by the challenges of waiting lists and poor health care coverage! Fortunately, there are a number of excellent consumer information tools and websites - view them directly or search for them using a search engine - that will help this female patient....Finally, it must be stressed, that health librarians are important allies for physicians in providing evidence-based care. We are trained to lead the patient to the most pertinent information based on our knowledge of sources and our ability to interpret the patient"s clinical question. When at a distance, easy open access to information is humane.

Aside from the plaudits, Reed has also made enemies. Some factions regularly rail at its sheer size in the academic world, even though it has only 20% of the market to supply lofty titles like Tetrahedron and Cell to university libraries. The threat of researchers posting their papers straight on the internet has receded and Reed still makes its fattest profits in science and medical.

Comment. "The threat of researchers posting their papers straight on the internet has receded." If this means that researchers are self-archiving less, then it's false. Researchers are self-archiving more. If it means that Reed Elsevier no longer feels threatened by self-archiving, then it's true but misleading. Elsevier has given blanket permission for self-archiving since mid-2004. To describe self-archiving as decreasing and to describe it as a threat to Elsevier are equally mistaken. I suspect that Davis made both mistakes and that Ashton simply followed along.

The DARE project NARCIS (National Academic Research and Collaborations Information System) has recently lauched the beta version of its website; the gateway to Dutch scientific research information. NARCIS offers central access to Dutch research information. Information produced by Dutch universities, research institutes, KNAW and NWO is gathered and searchable here. In addition NARCIS is the entry par excellence for scientists, policy makers, intermediary organisations, journalists and the public for obtaining a survey on ongoing research in the Netherlands. The NARCIS website uses (among others) these information resources: [1] information from the digital academic repositories (DARE), [2] the Dutch Research Database (NOD), [3] public information from university METIS systems, [4] research information from NWO, [5] news sites from academic and research institutes, [6] information from outside universities through intelligent harvesting), [7] datasets. NARCIS offers research information in the broadest sense of the word and has therefore a wider focus than DAREnet has. Searching for material that is directly available when found, DAREnet is the place to be. Searching for information about research, researchers or (ongoing) research projects NARCIS gives insight without having to know in with information source to look. When full content results are available, NARCIS links through to the publication. Because NARCIS and DAREnet have similar functionalities, the two services might be combined in the future.

OpenDOAR - the Directory of Open Access Repositories - is pleased to announce the release of its primary listing of open access archives....Some of these archives hold material on a single subject: others are based in universities and hold information from across many different subjects. Leading universities in the UK, Sweden, Germany, France and across Europe, Australia, India, the USA and world-wide have built an expanding international network of archives. Repositories have been built by research funders, like the US National Institutes for Health or the UK-based Wellcome Trust. There are now large numbers of archives of different sizes, composition and scope and new repositories are regularly established. Keeping track of these repositories and the range of information that they hold is a challenge. Although most open access repositories have been designed to allow information about themselves to be gathered automatically, discrepancies can creep into the system. Therefore, each of the OpenDOAR repositories have been visited by project staff to check the information that is gathered. This indepth approach gives a quality-controlled list of repository features. In addition, while reviewing these archives, project staff are building a picture of the world-wide development of open access repositories, noting new features and directions. This information is being analysed to create the next version of the listing, with further information and categories being noted for each repository. In the meantime, the newly released list will continue to grow as new repositories are added. The aim is to create a bridge between repository administrators and the service providers which "harvest" repositories. A typical service provider would be a search engine, indexing the material that is held. General search often brings back too many "junk" results. Information from OpenDOAR will enable the search service to provide a more focussed search by selecting repositories that are of direct interest to the user - for example, all Australian repositories, or all repositories that hold conference papers on chemistry. Bill Hubbard, the joint OpenDOAR manager said: "We are very pleased to launch the initial list of OpenDOAR. The range and number of repositories we are seeing coming on-stream is inspiring. We are working to classify these and produce information for search-providers, funding agencies and others, which will benefit scholars and researchers around the world. We would like to thank all of the contributors that have sent in information and suggestions." OpenDOAR is a joint collaboration between the University of Nottingham in the UK and Lund University in Sweden.

I have the pleasure to announce that the Faculty of Humanities at Lund University has decided to award to Ingegerd Rabow, [senior librarian in Lund's] Library Head Office...a honorary doctorate for her work in Scholarly Communication and Open-Access. As project manager for the ScieCom - Swedish Resource Centre for Scientific Communication (www.sciecom.org), one of the driving forces behind the Nordic Conferences on Scholarly Communication (www.lub.lu.se/ncsc2006) and her work as an Open Access advocate within Sweden, the Nordic countries and elsewhere Ingegerd has contributed significantly to the movement for open access to research results. The Lund University OA-policy, the signatures to the Berlin Declaration by the Swedish Association of Higher Education and the Swedish Research Council has a lot to do with Ingegerd's work.

Comment. I believe this the first honorary doctorate in any country for work to advance OA. All who have attended the Nordic conferences on scholarly communication or tried to get a university, professional association, or government agency to commit to OA will acknowledge Ingegerd's ability to bring people together to bring about institutional change. We need more effective advocates like her and in more countries. Congratulations to Ingegerd and kudos to Lund University for recognizing and supporting her contributions.

2. [With openness] intelligence is distributed rather than centralized: the knowledge is spread out in many locations....
4. We are better off casting wide rather than narrow
-- don"t know where the info is much of the time
5. Open access to creativity, knowledge -- benefits are greater the more people are involved
-- when people learn more, we learn more.. it"s anti-rivalrous
6. Be very hesitant to filter who belongs to community
-- don"t keep people out
7. People act better the more info they have....
11. Systems that allow people to give ideas and innovation a piece at a time are interesting, because lots of people contribute. Prediction markets and prices work this way.
12. Can profit from an open content system.. leave everything open and free and then make money from talking about this stuff.
13. People find pleasure from the value of competition
-- from contributing to the growth of the pool of knowledge
14. Many of these systems are inefficient, because in a strict sense, they are redundant, but the point is that even though this is the case, if we expand our ideas of efficiency, it"s tremendously efficient....

(PS: Surowiecki is the author of The Wisdom of Crowds.)

Once upon a time, the courses of our colleges and universities were the primary repositories of post-secondary curricular content. Today, initiatives like OpenCourseWare provide content seekers from around the world with a legitimate alternative source of curricular materials. Once upon a time, the university library was the primary repository of research like peer-reviewed journals and monographs. Today, initiatives like the Public Library of Science and pre-print services like Arxiv.org provide individuals from around the world with a legitimate alternative source of research findings. Once upon a time, a college or university’s faculty was the primary repository of technical and academic expertise in a community. Today, technologies like email and instant messaging put seekers of expertise in touch with faculty at many universities as well as professionals, “pro-am” hobbyists, and others from around the world almost instantly....Higher education must continue its efforts to become digital and mobile, while working to become significantly more open, connected, personal, and participatory....I believe that the movement toward greater openness in education, as exemplified by programs like the OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiatives at MIT, Johns Hopkins, Tufts, Notre Dame, and Utah State universities, the Foothill-De Anza Community College, and the Utah College of Applied Technology, is one of the truly great innovations in teaching and learning that has occurred in the last several decades. In the context of my remarks to the Commission, I believe that openness is the gateway to connectedness, personalization, and participation. Openness is a catalyst for further innovation. A few examples: As a faculty member, if I want to connect my course materials to prerequisite materials from classes students have already taken in order to create review opportunities or provide remediation, this connectivity is possible only if both I and the students have access to these materials. Without this openness, there is nothing to connect to, and the level of connectivity my students expect is not attainable....The time will come when an OpenCourseWare or similar collection of open access educational materials will be as fully expected from every higher education institution as an informational website is now. The United States can be either the leader in this innovation, as we were with the previous generation of higher education websites, or we can follow the rest of the world. There are already active consortia of universities engaged in OCW projects in China, in Japan, and in South America, as well as efforts at individual universities in Europe and other parts of the world. In terms of the total number of universities actively involved, the U.S. is already behind. Our first mover advantage in this area, and our subsequent ability to attract top students, will not last long....I believe that openness is the key to enabling other innovations and catalyzing improvements in the quality, accountability, affordability, and accessibility of higher education. It is my recommendation that the Commission do everything within its power to promote a commitment to openness within higher education.

A federal district court in Nevada has ruled that Google does not violate copyright law when it copies websites, stores the copies, and transmits them to Internet users as part of its Google Cache feature. The ruling clarifies the legal status of several common search engine practices and could influence future court cases, including the lawsuits brought by book publishers against the Google Library Project. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) was not involved in the case but applauds last week's ruling for clarifying that fair use covers new digital uses of copyrighted materials. Blake Field, an author and attorney, brought the copyright infringement lawsuit against Google after the search engine automatically copied and cached a story he posted on his website. Google responded that its Google Cache feature, which allows Google users to link to an archival copy of websites indexed by Google, does not violate copyright law. The court agreed, holding that the Cache qualifies as a fair use of copyrighted material. "This ruling makes it clear that the Google Cache is legal and clears away copyright questions that have troubled the entire search engine industry," said Fred von Lohmann, EFF senior staff attorney. "The ruling should also help Google in defending against the lawsuit brought by book publishers over its Google Library Project, as well as assisting organizations like the Internet Archive that rely on caching."

Comment. The Google cache returns full-text while the Google Library Project returns only short snippets. If anything, then, the Library Project has a stronger argument for fair use than the cache did.

Exchange of information about biodiversity is mandated by the legally binding international Convention on Biological Diversity, as are monitoring and benefit sharing. Yet researchers in the developing world, where most of the biodiversity is found, are unable to access much of this information. This impedes the monitoring of biodiversity: monitoring depends on the proper identification of species, and this is hindered by a lack of both specialists and access to relevant taxonomic information. The number of online publications with taxonomic content is increasing, and online tools are becoming available to mash up taxonomic with other information, for example at ispecies.org (see "Mashups mix data into global service" Nature 439, 6–7; 2006). But copyright and high costs put this information beyond the reach of many in the developing world — which is home to more than 95% of species whose descriptions have been published. More than half the 1,600 descriptions of new ant species published in the past ten years are copyrighted, for example, but none are in journals published in the developing world (see [AntBase]). This seems little better than biopiracy: taking biodiversity material from the developing world for profit, without sharing benefit or providing the people who live there with access to this crucial information. A simple solution would be to treat species descriptions as we do gene sequences, and have them openly accessible. Open-access descriptions of new species could then be a mandatory factor in making them valid under the various codes of biological nomenclature. A recent Commentary by Andrew Polaszek and colleagues ("A universal register for animal names" Nature 437, 477; 2005) describes how the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature proposes to facilitate this process for animal descriptions, through a register called ZooBank. However, present copyright laws prevent the mandatory inclusion of what would be an immensely useful piece of information, the actual description of the species.

Update. See the summary of Agosti's letter in SciDev.Net for January 27, and the summary in SIPPI for January 31.

While it is not an entirely new phenomenon, the open access movement is worth discussing as an example of modifying business models to take advantage of new technological innovations. In the past, the vast majority of scholarly journals have used a subscription-based model that was relatively expensive for individuals to afford, a tab that institutions, firms and libraries were expected to pick up or subsidize. To bypass this cost prohibitive nature of accessing journals, organizations such as the acclaimed Public Library of Science, charge the author alone for publication costs rather than other users. The prospective research still undergoes the scrutiny of the scientific peer-review process; however a twist is that upon publication, it also becomes immediately and freely viewable to the public at-large under an open content license. Conditions permitting, this experimental development may fizzle out. However by certain statistical/empirical measures this effort could be deemed a budding success if compared to its competition. Originally launched in October 2003, after only 3 months of existence, PLoS Biology was assigned a high impact factor of 13.9 — "placing it above such established journals as EMBO Journal, Current Biology, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In fact, in ISI"s category of general biology journals, PLoS Biology is ranked number 1. In 2004, PLoS Biology articles were downloaded more than 1 million times."...While the jury is still out, both open-access along with open-review have the potential to drive down the costs and eliminate altogether another barrier to scholastic participation; professional and amateur alike.

A coalition of journal publishers and university libraries is starting an experimental archive of online journals that will be held in reserve in case a journal's publisher goes out of business or is otherwise unable to continue providing online access to its journals. The pilot program uses peer-to-peer archiving software developed at Stanford University, called Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe, or LOCKSS. The journal archive is called Controlled Lockss, or Clockss. Participating university libraries are at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland; the University of Virginia; Indiana University at Bloomington; and Rice and Stanford Universities. The New York Public Library also is participating. The publishers that will provide journals for Clockss are the American Medical Association, the American Physiological Society, Blackwell Publishing, John Wiley & Sons, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, Sage Publications, Springer Publishing, and the Taylor & Francis Group. Elsevier is contributing funds but not journal articles. In Clockss, each university library will maintain two computer servers, each of which will contain complete copies of all electronic journals from the participating publishers. Having copies of the archive on so many different servers is meant to ensure that at least one copy will always be available even in the wake of a technical problem or disaster. The archives will remain "dark" -- hidden and unavailable for use -- so long as the journal publishers continue to provide access to their online material. The Clockss system will automatically detect whether a publisher has stopped providing online access. Once a journal's material has been unavailable online for at least six months, the archiving system's governing board, made up of representatives of the participating organizations, will discuss the case and determine whether the material should be considered "orphaned." If so, the governing board will authorize release of its electronic copy of the journal....During the experiment, the governing board will test its procedures with a fictitious scenario for considering whether a particular journal should be considered orphaned. That exercise will illuminate whether the libraries and publishers would use different standards for deciding that the archive should be opened up, she said.

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 increased citation of an author's work.

ACE is published by Resilience Alliance, which also publishes the OA journal, Ecology and Society, and offers its peer review and publishing services to other groups wishing to launch OA journals.

The UNESCO National Commission of the Philippines, the Commission on Information and Communication Technology, and the Asian Institute of Journalism and Communication are holding a one-day workshop on Public Domain Information. [PS: I can't find a web site for this workshop.] The workshop will address barriers to access, examine needed policy framework and resource requirements towards the goal of achieving information for all. The current state is that much of what we call public domain information or PDI (information generated by government, international development agencies, academic institutions, online information on Internet), is available for free by the public but it is not maximally utilized. Too, much of PDI has been privatized or commercialized for market sale. But many are not aware that even information under copyright may be made available through permissive licenses from copyright holders under the "fair use" agreement as long as it is used for non-commercial purposes – teaching, development information to benefit greater public, news reporting, and providing information to the disabled and marginalized. But for various reasons, there is little awareness of the above. One is the absence of a policy framework that is agreed upon through a consultative process with multistakeholders. This would spell out the legal framework and needed action – advocacy, areas of application (corresponding to mandates of each government department), and responsibility centers in the management and implementation of an Information Plan emanating from the framework.

Proposition 71 was approved by California voters who were promised that a $3 billion bond issue would yield breakthrough medical therapies and cures while paying back the state's investment in stem cell research....Keeping Proposition 71's promises (See Appendix 2) means the organization it created, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), and its oversight committee, must put the interests of taxpayers and patients ahead of private biotech companies who have a financial stake in the outcome....[T]hree principles are essential to ensure Proposition 71 benefits all Californians: [1] Affordability --Cures and treatments must be priced so all Californians can afford and benefit from them, not just a wealthy few. [2] Accessibility --Not only do all Californians deserve access to Proposition 71-funded therapies, but stem cell researchers need access to the results of other Proposition 71-funded research to develop the widest range of cures. [3] Accountability --Policies must ensure that grantees and licensees fulfill their obligations when benefiting from public money....Research institutions that get CIRM funds should pay the state at least 25 percent of net royalties in excess of $100,000 received for any invention or discovery developed with Proposition 71 funds....CIRM would create a patent pool that would include all patents resulting from research it funds....CIRM would be able to tell an applicant that no patent is possible for a particular project if it determines that keeping the expected results in the public domain best promotes further research. CIRM could bar any discovery from being licensed exclusively when it determined nonexclusive licenses would best promote development of a treatment or therapy. Any California-based researcher would be able to use the results of CIRM-funded research for further research without paying a licensing fee.

Also see the press release (January 23, 2006).

Comment. This is an excellent set of recommendations except that it stops short of calling for OA to this body of publicly-funded research. Why? Is it because the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights has never heard of OA? That would be surprising. The U of California Academic Council urged state policy-makers to mandate OA to California-funded stem-cell research in a public letter on April 4, 2005, and Robert Dynes, the President of the UC system, followed-up with a specific appeal to the research oversight committee in a public letter on May 17, 2005. On top of these efforts, individual advocates like Dave Shatto have called for OA to California-funded stem cell research --as I have in this blog. The right to use the research without paying licensing fees is a good step, but it doesn't insure that digital copies of the research are online and available for use free of charge. I urge the FTCR to add this final plank to the platform.

The Vatican has been accused of trying to cash in on the Pope’s words after it decided to impose strict copyright on all papal pronouncements. For the first time all papal documents, including encyclicals, will be governed by copyright invested in the official Vatican publishing house, the Libreria Editrice Vaticana. The edict covers Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, which is to be issued this week amid huge international interest. The edict is retroactive, covering not only the writings of the present pontiff — as Pope and as cardinal — but also those of his predecessors over the past 50 years. It therefore includes anything written by John Paul II, John Paul I, Paul VI and John XXIII. The decision was denounced yesterday for treating the Pope’s words as “saleable merchandise” and endangering the Church’s mission to “spread the Christian message”. A Milanese publishing house that had issued an anthology containing 30 lines from Pope Benedict’s speech to the conclave that elected him and an extract from his enthronement speech is reported to have been sent a bill for €15,000 (£10,000). This was made up of 15 per cent of the cover price of each copy sold plus “legal expenses” of €3,500. Vittorio Messori, who has co-authored works with Pope Benedict and John Paul II, said that he was “perplexed and alarmed . . . This is wholly negative and absolutely disastrous for the Vatican’s image.” A pope’s words should be available to all free of charge.”...The Union of Italian Catholic Publishers and Booksellers said that it had not been consulted, and that the edict “flies in the face of what we do — spreading the Pope’s message to the world”....Officials said that newspapers would be free to publish extracts from papal documents without charge once they were officially released, but only by “prior agreement”.

Comment. Not only is the Vatican abandoning free access and distribution for papal documents. It's abandoning any equivalent of "fair use" and it's doing all this retroactively as well as prospectively. It's hard to believe that the Vatican will gain more than it loses from this. I predict not only ridicule and dissent, which have already started, but litigation and a huge increase in pirated editions --roughly in the way that a prohibition on flag burning would stimulate flag burning. And does the Vatican really need money more than impact?

From Redfearn:

Digital data, when made freely and openly available, can benefit education and research by encouraging others to re-use that data. However, legal, technical and cultural barriers exist to prevent the free sharing of data which might otherwise promote further educational and scientific advances....In these and other research areas, too much data is produced for the original researchers to exploit. New ways are needed to make data available and accessible for others – but this raises cultural and practical issues. Do I want to share the data I went to such pains to collect? How do I make my data available to others in a way that is meaningful to them? If I do some further analysis, how do I record the new results and ensure they are identified as separate from other results or from the raw data? eBank is a JISC-funded project that is addressing some of these issues for a branch of chemistry....SPECTRa is developing open source automated tools for identifying, extracting and archiving high-volume data, initially in chemistry but with applicability to other sciences. Claddier is achieving similar aims in the environmental sciences by linking publications held in institutional repositories with data at the British Atmospheric Data Centre. This is becoming more pressing as digital repositories become established in universities....There are considerable benefits to having both research papers (e-prints) and the data which support those papers openly available, not least because they can then be linked in ways which are not necessarily possible with printed journals....[Some OA data issues] are subject specific. Many social scientists, for example, want links from data to published articles, rather than the other way round, to see what research has been done on that data. StORe is investigating the different requirements of six subject areas to ensure that the automated tools developed for linking data with journal articles meet users’ needs. Another major issue concerns safeguarding the intellectual property rights associated with data derived from original raw data. GRADE is investigating this issue for the re-use of geospatial data, such as data collected from mapping surveys and remote sensing by satellite.

From Slingo:

Joanna has done some work on the biology of seawater off the coast of Cornwall....On completing her analysis, she publishes a paper that cites [her] datasets and lodges the paper in her institutional repository. She also deposits her datasets in appropriate data repositories like the Southampton Oceanography Centre data archive, and the British Oceanographic Data Centre. The archives holding the datasets and publications she cites are notified that a paper citing them has been submitted, and the information about those datasets and publications is updated to reflect the citations. Links are established between the records held in the publication repository and in the data archives. It turns out that Joanna’s work can be used to help calibrate a global earth system model. Fred, at Reading University, finds Joanna’s paper and data, either via citations or directly from publication repositories. As part of his work he checks back through the other datasets cited as inputs to Joanna’s data because, before he uses her data, he suspects her work could be recalibrated by using later, better quality, meteorological re-analyses. Meanwhile Joanna, and all the dataset authors, will be pleased that the citation of not only the publication, but also the datasets, will be reflected in the 2012 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).

A new movement in academic publishing is gaining steam, and Penn is right in the thick of it. Open access, the idea that publicly funded research should be publicly available, has seen increasing success since the 2004 launch, with Penn support, of the Public Library of Science. The oldest of the public-access journals, PLoS Biology, "has the highest citation ranking in biology ... essentially twice as high as the next journal," said Linda Rosenstein, the Biomedical Library's associate director for information resources. Penn has been involved from the beginning. In 2001, 34 Penn researchers signed a PLoS Open Letter calling for unrestricted access to scientific journal articles. Penn's library has been an institutional member of the public library almost since its inception. Penn expects long-term financial benefits from aiding the library. Traditional journal publishing essentially "is taking money out of the pockets of undergraduates in order to fund the research in the university," said Legal Studies and Business Ethics professor Dan Hunter....According to Hunter, open access can break that cycle [of rising journal prices]. He said that academics "not only provide all the content, we provide all the editorial function, and we also are the people that are buying the journals." Calling the public library membership "an investment in an initiative" which may slow the annual price increases seen in traditional journals, the library's Director of Public Services Sandra Kerbel is "pleased that ... this experiment has worked so well."...Penn authors...receive a 50 percent discount [on PLoS processing fees] because Penn's library system pays $5,500 per year for membership. The School of Engineering and Applied Science's head librarian Mary Steiner anticipated that, as the library adds new journals, "we'll only get more bang for our buck." That so-called "bang" comes not only financially, but in spreading Penn research more widely. According to Kerbel, the public library "really does disseminate Penn's research."

(PS: Just one correction. PLoS Biology is probably the best-known and most influential OA journal, but it's far from the oldest.)

This morning i got a rare piece of snail-mail: production prints from this year's Society of Cartographers Bulletin, of the essay that i was honoured to contribute on the subject of Open Geodata, Free Software, and Civic Information. It talks about why we wrote "Mapping Hacks", and why UK based geo***kers are finding it hard to make interesting Google Maps hacks because of a lack of supporting culture of open access to state-collected geospatial information. I only got prints of my own article, but i know the bulletin contains pieces by Steve Coast about progress and plans for openstreetmap.org, and another by Richard Fairhurst of geowiki.co.uk on how he replaced a multi-million-pound proprietary GIS that used to run waterscape.com with a web map made in his free time using free software, that actually works better. The talk that Richard gave during the Society of Cartographers half-day session on Public Access to Maps/Data back in September, pretty much brought the house down.

IBM today announced it has made new open source technology available that seeks to enhance knowledge discovery capabilities across multiple industri