Open Access News

Free access to medical information is now standard for a variety of services (PubMed, Amedeo, Free Medical Journals). However, publication of top quality medical textbooks with free and anonymous access (i.e., Influenza Report 2006, HIV Medicine 2005) is still in its infancy. [The] Amedeo Challenge aims to change this situation by awarding prizes to physicians who write and publish free medical textbooks. A total of 12,500 Euro has currently been allocated for this purpose....The topics listed below [PS: only tubercuclosis today, but presumably more to come] have been included in the first round of the Amedeo Challenge Awards and we invite medical teams from all over the world to participate in one of the contests. The first three groups to publish a textbook on each of the topics will win 80 %, 16 %, and 4 % of the corresponding award, respectively. For more details, please check the application page.

For more of Amedeo's position on OA medical textbooks, see its philosophy page:

HIV Medicine 2005, a medical textbook freely available over the Internet, will be downloaded more than 50,000 times in a year. At a cost of 52 € per copy, global savings (for those who otherwise would have bought the book) or added value (for those who would not have bought it) will exceed 2,500,000 €. The free Internet publication of Influenza Report 2006 will result in even more important savings and/or added value....Time is ripe. The medical community has begun to realize that it is surprisingly self-sufficient in distributing the information that it produces. A doctor who publishes his own textbooks can earn many times what he would be paid in royalties by a publishing house. In addition, a doctor who writes and publishes wants his texts to be read by as many colleagues, students and patients as possible. The best way to achieve this is through free parallel publication of these texts on the internet....Just imagine, if there were not only textbooks on HIV, influenza and SARS , but also on other subjects, such as hepatitis, immunology, rheumatology, cardiology, antibiotic therapy, tropical medicine. Or - why ever not? - even for every possible medical field (see the list at the end of How to become a sponsor). In an instant, we would have an extensive virtual library with all the relevant information needed for day-to-day use. 100 books, 50,000 pages, free of charge, updated yearly. 99% of the questions which crop up in our daily medical routine would be covered. Would this be a contribution to the improvement of medical care? - Yes, indeed it would.

Bernard Barrett opened the 4th conference of IHLG, saying, in introducing the first session on open access that it was up to us to change things. Mary Burke of UCD chaired the session and referred to the words of the Budapest declaration on open access on combining old traditions and new technology. She introduced Arne Jakobson, President of EAHIL. Arne spoke on open access and institutional repositories (IRs). EAHIL supports both, he said, but he was going to concentrate on IRs He referred to the Budapest and Berlin statements, and to RCUK's, though also to the controversial Royal Society statement. He gave some figures on numbers of IRs based on ePrints, OAIster and OpenDOAR. He introduced the audience to the distinction between pre- and post-prints. He listed a number of benefits of IRs: [1] increased visibility of an institution's research, [2] no delay, [3] better availability, [4] secure and sustainable storage. Libraries are the natural hosts for IRs; storage and software costs are low. The challenges are cultural. Arne then illustrated his point by describing the development of the Oslo repository, DUO. They will require all postgraduate theses to be submitted electronically from 2007. For electronic journal articles they have a sister project, FRIDA, and deposit is mandatory for scientific staff. Nationally they have NORA, the Norwegian Open Research Archive. He concluded that a strategic plan was important, and that it was difficult to change scientists' and postgraduate's behaviour. Questions: who adds metadata? Arne said that researchers do so on submission, using a simplified set of subject headings. What abut peer review? Items in FRIDA are peer-reviewed by definition, because they all post-prints. What's the biggest block to compliance? Researchers' time is short and workload heavy. Arne is considering offering financial incentives for submission. Funding bodies are not yet insisting on deposit in IRs. Citation counts? The database will contain citation to journals. It's clear open access increases visibility.

In the New York Times this morning, Edward Wyatt quotes representatives of the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP), who believe the Perfect 10 decision helps their separate lawsuits against the Google Library project. Excerpt:

"I think it takes the wind out of their sails," Jan Constantine, the general counsel for the Authors Guild, said of the Perfect 10 decision. The guild and the Association of American Publishers brought copyright infringement lawsuits against Google over its Book Search program. Michael Kwun, litigation counsel for Google, disagreed, saying that the case "will affect only searches related to Perfect 10, and will not have any effect on other Google products."...Allan R. Adler, a vice president for governmental and legal affairs at the Association of American Publishers, said the California court's willingness to rule against the Arriba Soft precedent under a different set of facts was encouraging to the publishers' group, as was the judge's statement that the public benefit of Google's search engine does not necessarily outweigh the rights of copyright holders. "Google is going to have a difficult time arguing that there isn't a marketplace for publishers to license their works" given the Perfect 10 decision, Mr. Adler said. Neither the Perfect 10 case nor the Arriba Soft case are direct precedents for the Book Search lawsuits, which were filed in Federal District Court in New York. But Mr. Adler said that even if the publishers do not assert that there is currently a market for the few lines of text displayed by Google Book Search, the fact that a market exists for the digital copies created by Google could work in the publishers' favor. Ms. Frank agreed. She noted that the judge in the Perfect 10 case further differentiated that case from Arriba Soft by noting that Google's AdSense program allows it to generate revenue from its search technology.

By contrast, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) emphasizes the narrowness of the judge's ruling and the principles within it that support search indexing and even the permissionless display of low-res thumbnail images. Excerpt:

[The ruling] will be remembered as a little bad for Google, but a lot good for the Web....First, the court firmly rejected the notion that in-line linking of images directly infringes a copyright owner's public display right. That's a huge victory for the World Wide Web, which has long relied on in-line linking. Had Perfect 10 won on this point, every in-line link could potentially trigger automatic liability unless you got prior permission for the link....Second, the court rejected Perfect 10's secondary liability arguments. Basically, Perfect 10 argued that because Google "created the audience" for infringing websites, it should be held responsible for the infringements on those sites. Imagine that -- because you help someone find a site, you're held responsible for what happens on that site? That would have been a catastrophe not only for search engines, but for linking generally....Third, the court reasoned that merely visiting a website that includes infringing material does not make you an infringer. When you visit a website, your browser makes a copy of images in its cache. According to Perfect 10, that means every person who views a webpage that includes an infringing image becomes an infringer....The court rejected that argument, pointing out that most people don't treat their browser cache as a repository for infringing goodies, and concluding that copies made automatically by your browser are probably fair uses. So that's three major victories for the Web at large. Now what about the bad fair use ruling? While I don't agree with the court's analysis, let's start by examining how narrow it really is. First, the court is not condemning all thumbnails created by image search engines. In fact, the court can't do that because the Ninth Circuit (whose precedents bind the district court here) has already approved that practice as a fair use in the Kelly v. Arriba Soft decision. So the court's ruling only tells us that there is a line out beyond Kelly v. Arriba Soft that search engines may not cross. Second, the court did not announce any new fair use legal principles....So the fair use ruling really boils down to one fact-bound question: what distinguishes Google's thumbnails from Ditto's (the search engine in Kelly v. Arriba Soft)? Two things, according to the court: (1) Google's ability to share ad revenues from the infringing sites, thanks to AdSense, and (2) Perfect 10's deal with Fonestarz to provide low-rez images for cellphones.

Oxford University Press's Open Access programme is a model of pragmatic experimentation, and repositions the publisher as the intermediary of choice who picks the publishing and revenue models most appreciated by the widely differentiated sub-sector markets of STM - and social sciences and humanities....The difference between fundamental research and work on research technique can be demonstrated by a willingness in the former to pay the access bill, and in the latter to go for conventional publishing. These are the type of symptomatic lessons that Oxford are learning through a steady process of experimentation since 2003....In some areas of molecular biology some 30-40% of submissions in some journals are author-paid, and Oxford has accepted around 1,000 articles on these terms. It is probable that only BioMed Central have accepted more. Oxford's tariff is a moderate one: UKP800 (USD150) for authors based in a subscribing institution, UKP1,500 (USD2,800) where the author is based in a non-subscribing institution. As 'free' articles mount in the journal's portfolio, so subscription levels fall. OUP have successful journals where OA author-paid articles are 30% of content, and subscription pricing has declined pro rata.... It seems likely that the first result will be a demonstration of the complexity of the market - some OUP journals will be 100% OA one day - others will never get underway. Oxford Open will prove the poverty of generalisation.

Whether it’s e-research in Australia, cyberinfrastructure in the USA, the grid in Europe, or e-science in the UK, a transformation is occurring in research practice, a transformation that will have a profound impact on the roles of researchers and information professionals working in higher education....Arguably technology is the easy part; harder is the human dimension. The matter of connecting people (researchers) to resources is not only an international issue but also a national, regional, and local issue. Linking people to resources – researchers to scholarly materials – has been the role of the librarian for centuries. Libraries have traditionally been central to the research endeavour, managing and preserving resources increasingly in digital form and making these resources accessible to the researcher, often through collaboration and partnerships with other libraries. Hence, libraries have know-how not only in managing, making accessible and preserving scholarly resources but also in forming federations and collaborations to share published scholarly work. But the nature of scholarly commu­nication is changing, with researchers ­wanting access to primary research data, often in digital form. No longer is scholarly communication a final discrete publication that is to be managed, made accessible, and preserved. Libraries may even risk fading from existence if they don’t respond effectively to the changing environment. In e-research, it is the primary research data that must often be managed, made accessible, and curated....But who will take responsibility for the longer-term curation of and access to this data?

PS: This article first appeared in Educause Review for November/December 2005.

Who could possibly be upset with the Mozilla Foundation for giving away its Firefox browser? One of my roles at the Mozilla Foundation relates to copyright licensing. I'm responsible for making sure that the software we distribute respects the conditions of the free software licences of the underlying code. I'm also the first point of contact for licensing questions....A little while ago, I received an e-mail from a lady in the Trading Standards department of a large northern town [in the UK]. They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them. I wrote back, politely explaining the principles of copyleft – that the software was free, both as in speech and as in price, and that people copying and redistributing it was a feature, not a bug. I said that selling verbatim copies of Firefox on physical media was absolutely fine with us, and we would like her to return any confiscated CDs and allow us to continue with our plan for world domination (or words to that effect). Unfortunately, this was not well received. Her reply was incredulous: "I can't believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case?" she asked. "If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted." I felt somewhat unnerved at being held responsible for the disintegration of the UK anti-piracy system. Who would have thought giving away software could cause such difficulties?...In a world where both types of software exist, greater discernment is required on the part of the enforcers. I hope this is the beginning of the end of any automatic assumption that sharing software with your neighbour must be a crime.

I'll advocate for open access to university research and journals, work to expand library digitization projects, promote open source software and open file formats....As far as I know, I am the first student to make open access an electoral issue.

He's the first as far as I know too. His candidacy and position could make a difference: At UF, the Student Senate controls an $11 million budget, the third largest in the US. Go, Gavin!

Note to students elsewhere: learn about open access and what you and your university can do to promote it. Take your commitment into your research and future career. But in the meantime, take it into your student government!

Palaeontologia Electronica has taken two major steps this past year: contributors have been actively probing the potential of the World Wide Web to further paleontology, and ISI began indexing the journal in its Science Citation Index and Web of Science.

In our editorial pages, Warren Allmon (2004) recently reported that he located research information with Google that he could not have found by any other means: he learned about seven fossil localities yielding turritelline-dominated assemblages that had not been reported in standard research literature. The clues came from pictures on museum websites, from fossils-for-sale sites, from the site of a public park in Germany, and from geological field trip guides....In a subsequent editorial, Johnson, Filkorn and Stecheson (2005) described how to harness the power of search engines to make institutional information, such as collections catalog data, accessible through the same searches. By engineering web-based links, they made the catalog of paleontological collections in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County accessible to search-engines....These are insightful developments, harnessing the expertise of specialist users and adding to the value of the output of inevitably limited curatorial staff.

Since its inception, Palaeontologia Electronica has tried to position itself within the world of Internet searching. PE is an academic research journal, but one whose pages are all freely accessible to academics, the public, and search engines. If we repeat Allmon’s experiment today, Googling Turritella brings up Allmon’s own editorial as the fourth hit. Putting quality research information into the public domain is increasingly important as politically motivated attacks on science, especially evolution and historical geology, mount (the University of California Museum of Paleontology and the US National Science Foundation were recently named in a lawsuit aimed at their evolution website, for example). Misinformation on these subjects dominates the Internet, a situation that could easily lead astray those people who try to use the web to come to their own informed opinions....

[Y]oung researchers are increasingly conscious of impact factors when choosing where to submit their papers. This is bad news for the field of paleontology. In order to have an impact factor, much less a high one, a journal must first be indexed by ISI. In 2004, only thirty-two paleontology journals, in the broadest sense, were indexed by ISI....In 1992, vertebrate paleontology papers were published in 244 journals, of which only 37, or 15% are now indexed by ISI....85% of paleontology journals are not indexed and do not have impact factors, forcing them into second-tier status as venues for publishing new work. Irregularly appearing publications, such as monograph series, also have no official impact factor, although monographs would frequently count as citation classics had they been indexed. The many publication series that do not have ISI impact factors are having increasing difficulty getting quality submissions, while the manuscript backlog in journals with impact factors has been growing phenomenally. This situation has at least three negative effects on the field: it is more difficult to get work published in “quality” journals (i.e., those with impact factors), thus decreasing the apparent productivity of individual paleontologists; it causes non-indexed journals to fail because of lack of submissions or subscriptions, thus further reducing the number of possible venues for publishing paleontology and potentially concentrating those that remain in the hands of commercial publishers rather than professional academic societies; and it decreases the total volume of paleontology papers published and the length of time between submission and publication, which has a negative effect on the impact factors of those paleontology journals that are indexed....[T]he vast majority of citations to paleontological work are not considered by ISI in their calculation of impact factors for paleo journals. All things being equal, we can expect from these statistics that paleo impact factors would increase dramatically if all of our journals were considered.

• Peter Linde, Bottom(s) up to a Top down approach. Abstract: "It is comparatively easy to build and structure an institutional repository. The difficulty lies in filling it with content. This very trivial observation is not uncommon among repository administrators and I certainly agree. At Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) we have followed a Bottom up approach, which now, almost ten years later, hopefully will lead to a Top down policy. The two strategies complement each other and maybe a two-front approach can be part of an answer on how to get submissions going."

• Eva Müller, Open Access, the next steps at Uppsala University. Abstract: "The insistence of the scientific community and the general public that publicly financed research should be widely and quickly accessible without barriers is known as the Open Access movement. This is supported by new technologies and new economic models which are helping to create a greater diversity of complementary possibilities for the dissemination of scholarly work."

• Staffan Parnell and Ultuna Aina Svensson, Stick or carrot - how to fill an institutional repository. Abstract: "SLU (Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet – Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences) has four main campuses, situated in different parts of Sweden. SLU employs 3200 people and has ca. 3300 undergraduates and 800 postgraduate students. Roughly half the staff are concerned with teaching and research. The main subject areas are agriculture, forestry, veterinary medicine and environmental protection. About 150 doctoral and licentiate theses are produced annually in the postgraduate programmes and about 7-800 undergraduate theses in the undergraduate programmes."

Implementation research is the scientific study of methods to promote the systematic uptake of research findings and other evidence-based practices into routine practice, and, hence, to improve the quality and effectiveness of health services and care. This relatively new field includes the study of influences on healthcare professional and organisational behaviour.

Implementation Science - Fulltext v1+ (2006+); ISSN: 1748-5908.

Bioinformatics.Org is proud to present the 2006 Benjamin Franklin Award in the Life Sciences to Michael Ashburner of Cambridge University. As expressed by his nominators, Prof. Ashburner has made fundamental contributions to many open access bioinformatics projects including FlyBase, the GASP project, the Gene Ontology project, and the Open Biological Ontologies project, and he was instrumental in the establishment of the European Bioinformatics Institute. He is also known for advocating open access to biological information.

The Benjamin Franklin Award in the Life Sciences is a humanitarian award presented annually by Bioinformatics.Org to an individual who has, in his or her practice, promoted free and open access to the materials and methods used in the life sciences. The Award is named for Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), one of the most remarkable men of his time. Scientist, inventor, statesman, Franklin freely and openly shared his ideas and refused to patent his inventions, and it is the opinion of the founders of Bioinformatics.Org that he embodied the best traits of a scientist....The ceremony for the presentation of the Award will be held at the 2006 Bioinformatics.Org Annual Meeting (BiOAM), held in conjunction with the Life Sciences Conference and Expo, Boston, Massachusetts, April 3 to 5, 2006. The presentation will be made April 5 at 10:00 AM, and it is open to all attendees. It involves a short introduction, the presentation of the certificate, and the laureate seminar....Past laureates of the Benjamin Franklin Award in the Life Sciences include Ewan Birney (2005), Lincoln Stein (2004), James Kent (2003) and Michael Eisen (2002).

Teresa Hackett of Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL) had another point of view. She argued that protection of electronic works can make access for libraries difficult and this constitutes a double burden for libraries in developing countries which may not be able to afford the extra costs incurred, such as licence fees and rights clearance. In order to lessen the digital divide between north and south, eIFL is working in more than 50 developing and transition countries to negotiate discount prices and new business models with publishers for access to electronic resources, she said. Hackett said that the copyright agenda is increasingly driven by multinational mass entertainment industries, which have particular and legitimate concerns. These are however not directly applicable to other situations such as not-for-profit education and research, yet libraries find themselves in this “digital marketplace.” According to the WIPO Copyright Treaty, “exceptions and limitations” in copyrights may be extended to digital works, but libraries have met with strong opposition from rights holders when they have tried to implement this, she said. Finally, she cited a problem with technological protection measures (TPMs) which she said may jeopardise public access to works and about which the British Library recently expressed concern during a hearing of the UK All Parliamentary Internet Group. TPMs provide ways of controlling access and use of copyrighted material which, it has been estimated, have an average life cycle of three to five years. One possible solution might be to provide libraries “clean” copies of works with no TPMs, she said. Hackett said eIFL supports the work on a development agenda at WIPO. The group also welcomes a Chilean proposal that suggests studies be conducted on the impact of intellectual property rights on issues such as education in developing countries. “Why not give developing countries the same flexibilities that developed countries had when they developed?” Hackett said.

The American Library Association is deeply concerned about the very negative impact on public access to environmental information that will result if theproposed 80 % cuts to funding for the Environmental Protection Administration’s (EPA) libraries are made.  ALA has a long-standing commitment to promoting free public access to government information and we are troubled by what seems to be an accelerating trend in increased restrictions on access to government information. Individuals and communities need to be able to find high quality, accurate information about issues that concern them, such as the health and safety of their families and communities. EPA has, since its creation in the early 1970s, been a key source of such information. We fear that the drastic budget cuts proposed in the FY 2007 EPA budget will have severely deleterious effects on the ability of the EPA libraries to continue their essential role in ensuring public access to critical health and safety information. We encourage members of Congress to maintain the funding necessary to support key government information programs such as the EPA libraries and to ensure adequate future funding for this purpose.

Initially, the mission of World Knowledge Platform is to connect and network the R&D Institutions, Universities and Industries using fiber broadband from the partner nations on selected R&D Missions. The underground fiber cable infrastructure already exists between the many partners. It is only waiting to be lighted up with state-of-the-art optical networks and to ignite the minds of the knowledge workers. This knowledge GRID will support multitude of seamless connections supporting both synchronous and asynchronous communication, carrying either text or audio or video. We can then use this network in the academic environments to teach courses online and share expensive equipments remotely....The components of the vision [for IISc] are:...(f) Be a partner in the World Knowledge Platform to promote world class knowledge creation, knowledge dissemination and knowledge sharing among all partner countries....(i) Create an IISc-Virtual Education Hub - so that the quality education from IISc can reach out to the entire nation. It should also act as a Virtual Collaborative Hub, which will become the platform for the scientists, researchers from IISc, world wide scientists and Nobel laureates to share their knowledge among the students and faculty across India.

Comment. I've only excerpted the parts most relevant to OA above. But the whole speech is worth reading if only to see how an educated President can speak, in case you've forgotten. If you're not from India, try to imagine your head of state speaking these lines. "It is reported that gene differences between humans and most animals are very nominal. More than 90% of our DNA is similar. This property is a boon to researchers since animal models can be subsequently used for curing human diseases based on trial data." "When I think of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, I...[think of] Mr. Richard Feynman...Mr. Eric Drexler...[and] Prof CNR Rao." "The era of wood and bio-mass is almost nearing its end. The age of oil and natural gas would soon be over even within the next few decades. The world energy forum has predicted that fossil based oil, coal and gas reserves will last for another 5 - 10 decades only." "I would like to discuss the latest research in the area of photo-voltaic cells using Carbon nano tubes which can give an efficiency of over 45%, nearly three times the efficiency which the present technology can offer."

Update (7/13/07). The Royal Society awarded President Kalam its King Charles II Medal. The award is limited to heads of state who make extraordinary contributions to the promotion of science. It has only been given once before, in 1998 to Emperor Akihito of Japan.

The battle between publishers and Google over the Internet-search company's project to digitize library books has heated up with an announcement this month by Google that it was starting a campaign to dispel misperceptions about the project. In an e-mail message posted online and addressed to "Google Book Search supporters," two Google officials said they were creating a "fact-checking brigade" about the company's digitization effort. And they proceeded to rip apart a column in Newsday by the writer Susan Cheever, in which she accused Google of stealing authors' works....Google says its project is permissible under copyright law's "fair use" exemption. But Ms. Cheever disputes the point in her column, stating that fair use allows people to distribute only a set amount of words from a work. "The amount of words that constitute fair use varies according to court case," she writes. "At present, it is 400 words." Taking aim at that statement, Alexander Macgillivray, a Google lawyer, and Jen Grant, a marketing manager for the company, say Ms. Cheever "fundamentally misstates copyright law and misleads readers about Google Book Search." The Google employees say that there is no word limit associated with fair use and that some courts have ruled that republishing an entire work is fair use. They made the statement in a February e-mail message to supporters of the Google project. The message also urges people to "help clear the air when misleading articles like this one are published."

Abstract: The number of scientific journals has become so large that individuals, institutions and institutional libraries cannot completely store their physical content. In order to prioritize the choice of quality information sources, librarians and scientists are in need of reliable decision aids. The "impact factor" (IF) is the most commonly used assessment aid for deciding which journals should receive a scholarly submission or attention from research readership. It is also an often misunderstood tool. This narrative review explains how the IF is calculated, how bias is introduced into the calculation, which questions the IF can or cannot answer, and how different professional groups can benefit from IF use.

Excerpt from the body of the text. Note the sentence I've put in bold.

Given the rapid growth of electronic publications, the online availability of articles has recently become an important factor to influence the IF. Murali et al. determined how the IF of medical journals is affected by their online availability. In that study, a document set obtained from MEDLINE was classified into three groups, namely FUTON (full text on the Net), abstracts only and NAA (no abstract available). Online availability clearly increased the IF. In the FUTON subcategory, there was an IF gradient favoring journals with freely available articles [PS: emphasis added]. This is exemplified by the success of several "open access" journals published by BioMed Central (BMC) and the Public Library of Science (PLoS). Open access journals publish full-text online papers free of subscription fees. BioMed Central (BMC) is an "open access" publisher in business since 2000. BMC hosts over 100 biomedical journals ranging from general interest to specialized research. More than twenty journals published by BMC are currently tracked by the ISI and over half of these have IFs available for the recent years. BMC Bioinformatics was assigned its first IF for 2004. At 5.4, it places the journal second in the field, only marginally below the traditional competitor Bioinformatics (IF = 5.7), which has a 20-years' publishing history and is connected to a major learned society within this field of research (International Society for Computational Biology). PLoS (Public Library of Science) is another example of a successful "open access" publishing strategy. It started publishing two open access journals in biology and medical research in 2003 and 2004 respectively. PLoS Biology was assigned its first IF of 13.9 for 2004. In the ISI subject category "biology", it is thus placed at the number 1 position of 64 in its first year of reporting an IF. FASEB journal at position 2 has an IF of 6.8, but has been in circulation since 1987. Similarly, in the other SCI subject category ("biochemistry and molecular biology")in which PLOS Biology is listed, it ranks at position 8 out of 261. Monitoring the development of such journals' IF will inform the determination of the online-availability bias in the future. This effect will increase in the future with the availability of new search engines with deep penetration such as Google Scholar, allowing researchers to find relevant articles in an instant, and then choose those with immediately and freely available content over those with barriers, economic and otherwise.

Why can’t downloaded academic papers be managed in the simple and effective manner in which digital music files are managed? We make the case that the answer is different treatments of metadata. Two key differences are identified: Firstly, digital music metadata is standardized and moves with the content file, while academic metadata is not and does not. Secondly digital music metadata lookup services are collaborative and automate the movement from a digital file to the appropriate metadata, while academic metadata services do not.

Two days ago, Alf Eaton took a whack at solving this problem by proposing a way to manage metadata for Academic PDFs.

This paper seeks to raise awareness about the importance of managing IP to facilitate humanitarian use and applications. Our goal is to identify intellectual property approaches that can promote access to and use of health and agricultural product innovations by poor and disadvantaged groups, particularly in low-income countries. The paper encourages more public-sector IP managers to understand and employ strategies that will accomplish these goals. Humanitarian use approaches should become the norm, and we seek to help private-sector licensees understand the rationale and potential benefits behind such strategies. This paper focuses on the pharmaceutical and agricultural sectors, but the principles noted could potentially be applied to other areas as well. There are key moments when technology managers can improve the likelihood that their IP will benefit people in need: when they decide 1) who will receive a license, 2) whether the license will be exclusive, 3) what types of applications will be covered, and 4) how long the duration of the license will be....We acknowledge that improved IP management cannot by itself solve the access crisis. Even if technology managers adopt humanitarian IP management strategies, they will need to connect with development partners who can utilize the protected technologies. In some cases, these partners may not yet exist. But when partners are found, it will be important to establish simple, efficient ways for them to identify technologies that public sector institutions are willing to share. We believe that the number and variety of technologies being managed with humanitarian goals in mind will continue to increase, and so the SIPPI project plans to explore ways to increase the transparency of license terms covering these technologies, thus making this information more widely available to potential beneficiaries.

Paul Ginsparg, physicist and Internet scholarly communications pioneer, is the latest recipient of the Paul Evan Peters Award, announced today by the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and EDUCAUSE. The award will be presented on April 3, 2006 at the CNI Membership Meeting in Arlington, VA, where Ginsparg will deliver the Paul Peters Award lecture at the opening plenary. A professor of physics, computing and information science at Cornell University, Ginsparg has distinguished himself as the visionary behind arXiv, an Internet e-print archive for articles in the sciences, which allows scholars to circulate and comment on research prior to publication in traditional peer-reviewed journals, thereby significantly reducing the amount of time it takes for an article to be available to researchers. Started in 1991 as a service for preprints in physics, arXiv eventually expanded to include mathematics, computer science and quantitative biology. Today, the resource boasts open access to over 350,000 articles.

"Paul Ginsparg's accomplishments as a theoretical physicist, alone, distinguish him as a superb scholar, but his innovations in scientific publication, for which the Paul Evan Peters award honors him, truly places him in the annals of history as a transformative figure who has changed the landscape of scholarly communication forever," remarked Ronald Larsen, Dean of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh and a member of the award search committee. "This is a richly deserved award," Larsen continued, "that honors the legacy of Paul Evan Peters." Commenting on how Ginsparg's brainchild has revolutionized science publishing, in the October 2005 issue of Sky & Telescope, author Richard Tresch Fienberg reports that papers published in more than a dozen major astronomy journals are twice as likely to be cited by other researchers if they have also appeared on arXiv. He observes, "Clearly, professional astronomers are gravitating toward [arXiv] as their primary - perhaps even exclusive - reference source." Expressing this view directly as part of the 2001 UNESCO Expert Conference Electronic Publishing in Science, Ginsparg wrote, "The essential question for 'Electronic Publishing in Science' is how our scientific research communications infrastructure should be reconfigured to take maximal advantage of newly evolving electronic resources."...In 2002, Ginsparg was named a fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Upon announcing the award, the foundation stated that, "Ginsparg has deliberately transformed the way physics gets done - challenging conventional standards for review and communication of research and thereby changing the speed and mode of dissemination of scientific advances." Commenting on the impact Ginsparg's work has had on scholarly communication, CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch said, "Paul's work has shown how technology can fundamentally change the patterns of flow and the pace of scientific communication and has challenged scholarly disciplines to reconsider their practices." Ginsparg joins previous award recipients Brewster Kahle (2004), Vinton Cerf (2002) and Tim Berners-Lee (2000).

Congratulations, Paul!

Update. Also see the 3/7/06 story in Cornell's ChronicleOnline.

The rapidly evolving debate over free online scholarship drives right to the heart of some of the most fundamental questions about research....Worldwide, there are about 24,000 scholarly journals, but only three to seven percent of them are considered to be “open access” – OA for short – meaning that they make their research papers available for free on the Internet. But the rapidly evolving debate over open-access scholarship extends well beyond academic journals like the [new] one at www.econtheory.org, and drives right to the heart of some of the most fundamental questions about research: Do publicly funded universities and granting bodies have a democratic – indeed a moral – obligation to ensure that academic scholarship is available on the Internet? What kinds of public and institutional policies are needed to make such wide-ranging dissemination both possible and useful? And what are the implications for publishers, research libraries, copyright, and for scholarship itself? Few self-respecting researchers argue with the idea per se. “It’s easy to get people to sign off on a principle,” says Stevan Harnad, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science at Université du Québec à Montréal. “It becomes interesting and substantive when you take a practical policy.” Since the mid-1990s, Dr. Harnad has been at the centre of an international campaign to promote open access. But it’s only in the last three or four years – since the George Soros Open Society Institute orchestrated a 2002 summit of OA activists in Budapest – that granting bodies and universities have begun to look hard at how to translate open access from a feel-good cyber principle into something entrenched in the way academics do business – either by encouraging them to patronize open-access journals or urging them to routinely upload all their published research papers to a growing network of institutional repositories. “The right to know is at the forefront [of OA],” says John Willinsky, a language and literacy education professor at the University of British Columbia who heads the Public Knowledge Project, a research initiative that asks whether and how online technologies can improve the quality of academic research. “The critical point we’re at now is mandated access. We’re seeing a momentum build.” The epistemological benefits are difficult to dispute. Dr. Harnad refers to studies showing that citations can more than double for articles that are freely available on the web. Accessible online papers benefit academics in poor countries where universities have few resources. And research libraries see institutional electronic repositories as one way of ensuring the preservation of digitized online material that is highly vulnerable to the problem of disappearing URLs....In the past few years, large research councils in the U.S. and U.K. have grappled with the mechanics of applying the OA principle to publicly funded research. In Canada, in late 2004, the board of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council approved OA in principle; council staff are preparing recommendations based on public consultations....But open-access advocates contend that universities must now step up to the plate and adopt policies that compel faculty to “self-archive.”...Tim Mark, executive director of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, describes...the “absurd” situation whereby academics working for publicly funded institutions give up their intellectual property rights to commercial journal publishers, who turn around and sell the fruits of their labour right back to those institutions in the form of costly journal subscriptions....The potential of the OA movement, [Harnad] argues, doesn’t begin with policy conditions aimed at altering the operating conditions for a small subset of journal publishers [to make them convert to OA]. Rather, it needs a much broader-based effort to make institutional self-archiving a routine and unquestioned part of the work of scholarship – as basic as including bibliographies and reference lists at the end of any paper. OA advocates say the pieces for such a cultural change are beginning to fall into place. There are now numerous open-source software and “harvesting” systems that allow institutions to create searchable, indexed and networked electronic repositories....But, as Dr. Harnad observes, the availability of user-friendly archiving software is necessary but not sufficient. That’s why, in 2005, OA activists approved the Berlin 3 institutional policy commitment. It calls on universities and research institutions to establish policies requiring academics to self-archive, as well as encouraging them to publish in open-access journals....So far 17 universities and research institutions – including the University of Zurich, Portugal’s University of Minho, and the University of Southampton, where Dr. Harnad taught before joining UQAM – have signed the 2005 Berlin commitment. No Canadian universities are signatories. How do academics feel about self-archiving? “Authors haven’t picked it up,” says Dr. Willinsky at UBC. “It has a lot to do with the fact that the focus of [academics’] work is getting published, not getting circulated.” Indeed, a U.K. survey of scholars showed that about half of the respondents had self-archived at one point, mainly on personal websites, but many didn’t do it routinely. Yet 95 percent said they’d be prepared to self-archive if their university required it as a condition of tenure or employment. What’s become increasingly apparent is that copyright issues aren’t a roadblock for the OA movement....While journal publishers, from giants like Elsevier to upstarts like Econtheory.org, will continue to work out a sustainable online business model, the OA policy ball has now landed squarely in the university sector’s court.

• The Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) was formerly called the Institutional Self-Archiving Policy Registry.

• The ROMEO Journal/Publisher Self-Archiving Policy Directory was formerly called Journal Policies - Self-Archiving Policy By Journal.

If you remember, the Eprints Institutional Archives Registry was renamed the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) back on January 26, 2006.

Scholarly Communications. What are the issues? What are the options? What are the leadership issues?...Scholars are the supply and the demand. Research has to be distributed, through print, e-format, open access, repositories, self-publishing, even blogs. Who is in the middle, mediating scholarly discussions? Societies, reviewers, publishers - for profit and nonprofit - aggregators, librarians, provosts, administrators, the Internet....Digital scholarship: only way to integrate disparate content, allows new research and scholarship, encourages using material in new ways, creates new fields and communities of practice, creates new knowledge. CLIR call to action: tells publishers that librarians want independent, third party preservation of your content. "The academic community is built upon a sham. More and more you don't own your content - you're paying rent." What impedes open access? The academic reward system. Tenure requires publishing in "the right journals." Scientists can put open access fee into their budgets. But in the humanities, you don't get that kind of funding. PloS.org won't work for most humanities scholars....Where are we now? We pay a lot of money. Most institutions are paying 24% for digital serial journals in their collections budget. Libraries each pay large fees to access the same material. Meanwhile, libraries are digitizing their own special, unique materials.

The Blue Obelisk Movement is the name used by a diverse Internet group promoting reusable chemistry via open source software development, consistent and complimentary chemoinformatics research, open data, and open standards. We outline recent examples of cooperation in the Blue Obelisk group: a shared dictionary of algorithms and implementations in chemoinformatics algorithms drawing from our various software projects; a shared repository of chemoinformatics data including elemental properties, atomic radii, isotopes, atom typing rules, and so forth; and Web services for the platform-independent use of chemoinformatics programs.

Open access publishing, in addition to all the other benefits it has, also keeps the cost of scientific literature in line with research spending. This isn't, of course, proven yet, let alone scientifically. But how would one prove it without doing it in the first place? The proof of this pudding, I'm afraid, can only be in the eating, as the saying goes.

Comment. Exactly right. How do we respond to those who want the proof in advance? I'm thinking of those who want proof that OA publishing costs less before doing it, as well as those who want proof that high-volume OA archiving won't harm journals --at least outside physics, where we already have proof of both harmlessness and synergy. Part of the answer is that the subscription model, with annual price increases above inflation, could never have gotten off the ground if it had to provide proof prior to experience. (Nor could it justify its continued existence if it had to prove its continuing sustainability.) No innovation could get off the ground if it had to answer all skeptics in advance. There's a nice generalization of this observation by Ronald Bailey in the February 17 issue of Reason, Culture of Fear: Dealing with cultural panic attacks. Excerpt:

Earlier this week, the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, held a remarkably interesting conference titled "Panic Attack: The New Precautionary Culture, the Politics of Fear, and the Risks to Innovation."...[I]t looked at how many Western countries are losing their cultural nerve, as evidenced by the increasing cultural acceptance of the so-called precautionary principle. The strongest versions of the precautionary principle demand that innovators prove that their inventions will never cause harm before they are allowed to deploy or sell them. In other words, if an action might cause harm, then inaction is preferable. The problem is that all new activities, especially those involving scientific research and technological innovation, always carry some risks. Attempting to avoid all risk is a recipe for technological and economic stagnation.

Virginia Tech and Villanova University researchers have received a $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to extend the benefits of its free, online library by developing technology that will allow college students and professors to conduct flexible and customized information searches directly from course Web sites. The project is directed by Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, Virginia Tech assistant professor of computer science. Other team members are: Weiguo Fan, assistant professor of accounting and information systems, and Edward Fox, professor of computer science, both at Virginia Tech, and Lillian Cassel, professor of computing sciences at Villanova University. "Our goal," Pérez said, "is to get content from the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) closer to its intended audience." The project's target beneficiaries are students and professors in all areas of computing....The NSDL has a vast collection of resources for education and research in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics....As its collections grow, the NSDL is placing more emphasis on user services and higher-level functionality, Pérez said. But in helping to expand the library's usefulness, he adds, researchers must not assume that a "feature-rich" Web site -- with browsing, searching, recommendations, and discussion forums -- would be enough to draw users. That would be like "building a large library with lots of facilities, but placing it at the outskirts of campus -- few teachers and students will interrupt their daily routine to use the new facilities." The project focuses on course Web sites, he said, as they are "the most commonly used application in today's educational environment, typically providing access to a course syllabus, schedule, assignments, grades, and discussion forums." The technology that the researchers will develop will allow a course Web site to be the entry point into the NSDL's collections. The product would be "a flexible and personalized information interface that supports both exploratory and focused searches and provides the ability to obtain context-sensitive services at various levels of interaction."

We've certainly lengthened the term [of copyright] perhaps -- I won't even say perhaps -- too long a term. I think it is too long. I think that was probably a big mistake.

The statement comes 68 seconds into this video of the talk (AVI link, MP4 link, MPG link). (Thanks to Cory Doctorow.)

Comment. This admission comes very late in the game. I'd love to see Congress shorten the term of copyright, but I know that the political obstacles are nearly insuperable. (These are the same political obstacles that make the length of the term of copyright into a ratchet that always goes up, never down.) But Peters' admission is nevertheless extraordinary and helpful. It shows that the U.S. Copyright Office sees encroachments on the public domain as harmful to all of us, even if helpful to one wealthy industry. It shows that the boneheaded Bono extension of 1998 might be the last. It shows that the Copyright Office might take a more balanced approach to other large copyright issues in the future, as it recently did with its guidelines on orphan works.

Hindawi Publishing Corporation is pleased to announce a major expansion in its Open Access publishing program through the immediate conversion of over a dozen journals into the OA model. The converted journals are the following:

    * Abstract and Applied Analysis
    * Advances in Difference Equations
    * Boundary Value Problems
    * Discrete Dynamics in Nature and Society
    * Fixed Point Theory and Applications
    * Infectious Diseases in Obstetrics and Gynecology
    * Journal of Applied Mathematics
    * Journal of Applied Mathematics and Decision Sciences
    * Journal of Applied Mathematics and Stochastic Analysis
    * Journal of Automated Methods and Management in Chemistry
    * Journal of Inequalities and Applications
    * Mediators of Inflammation
    * Sarcoma

All current and back volumes of these journals are immediately available free of any subscription or registration barriers on the Hindawi web site. All new articles in these journals will be published under the "Creative Commons Attribution License" which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This conversion furthers Hindawi's position as one of the leading Open Access publishers, with more than 25 OA journals in the fields of Mathematics, Engineering, Biology, Medicine, and Chemistry. Hindawi is currently the only OA publisher with journal titles spanning such a large number of STM fields.

Comment. This is the largest bulk-conversion of non-OA journals to OA in the history of OA. It's especially welcome because journals that convert to OA bring their readership, reputation, impact factors, and prestige with them, unlike new OA launches, which have to develop these from scratch. Note to other publishers: Hindawi's direct experience with OA publishing is leading it to accelerate its expansion into OA rather than to retreat.

University of Sydney library manager of innovation and development Ross Coleman told the conference: "We're moving from the technical to the community."...The Queensland University of Technology has begun a project that academics hope will make knowledge free to all, from members of the public to top-tier researchers. QUT school of law professor Brian Fitzgerald has $1.3million and two years to develop the Open Access to Knowledge Law project, which aims to remove barriers to the use of information on university websites....Open repositories were "probably not a threat to large publishers, though some people like to think [they are]", Mr Coleman said. "Some of the journals allow authors to put their work in the local repositories, but that's not the final, edited copy. "The large publishers are still getting their heads around this."

One can see a parallel between the telecenters and the open access archives. Both of them are using advances in technology to include the excluded and making available much needed information at a low cost through the "public commons" approach. Both of them are overcoming a serious problem by intelligently marrying technology and the public commons approach. Both of them are about sharing and caring. Both of them are eminently suited to increase the overall productivity of the world as a whole and lead to greater collective happiness. It sounds almost utopian. But many publishers, including some scientific societies, are working to stall the progress of the open access movement, as they see it as a potential threat to their business interests. On the other hand many donor agencies, such as the Wellcome Trust, who fund scientists to perform research are avid supporters of the movement. In the area of scientific data, as distinct from full texts of research papers, organizations such as ICSU (and CODATA) are promoting the culture of open access. Even Celera Genomics Corp., the for-profit company that sequenced the human genome simultaneously with the public-funded Human Genome Project, has stopped selling subscriptions for access to its sequence/data and would donate the data to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, USA. As Francis Collins of the National Human Genome Research Institute put it "data just wants to be public." Scientists in developing countries need particular attention, says Bruce Alberts, former President of the US National Academy of Sciences. In his 1999 presidential address [30] to the National Academy of Sciences, USA, he suggested "Connecting all scientists to the World Wide Web, where necessary by providing subsidized Internet access through commercial satellite networks," and "taking responsibility for generating a rich array of scientifically validated knowledge resources, made available free on the Web, in preparation for a time when universal Internet access for scientists is achieved in both developing and industrialized nations." ...Unfortunately digital technology al