Open Access News

All researchers must deposit their metadata (for articles) in FRIDA, UiO's research documentation system. It is as yet only compulsory to deposit metadata, not full-text. DUO is UiO's full-text institutional repository. In the near future DUO and FRIDA will be integrated so that UiO researchers can self-archive their full-texts (postprints) through FRIDA. The metadata and full-text will be transfered to DUO. Submission of theses will shortly be mandatory: From 2007 it will be compulsory for all postgraduate students to submit their theses electronically. DUO - Digital publishing at UiO - has been developed by the University Center for Information Technology (USIT) and the Oslo University Library (UBO) as a system for the net-based archiving of publications by UiO authors. It provides support for depositing, archiving and searching in diverse formats. Today DUO includes electronic versions of theses, special research papers, etc. and a growing number of scientific publications. The goal is to archive the whole spectrum of the research output (journal articles, books, reports, series, research documents, videos, etc.) published by UiO authors.

Medical research funding body the Wellcome Trust has invited tenders to find a supplier to host, manage and develop a UK version of PubMed Central, the US National Library’s free database of medical research papers. Potential suppliers have been asked to express interest by 8 March. The WellcomeTrust and its UK partners,which include the Department of Health, Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation, hope to make a decision by late July. The Wellcome Trust was expecting applications from a mix of suppliers,said Robert Kiley, head of systems strategy at the Wellcome Library ( click here for more news on Wellcome Trust), including publishers and experts at hosting large databases or running manuscript submission systems. The UK version of PubMed Central would be launched early in 2007,said Kiley, and consist of three systems: a mirror of data already held in the US version (500,000 articles), a manuscript submission and tracking system, and an authenticated login enabling people to deposit articles. Kiley said the trust wanted to make publicly accessible the research it funded, to evaluate its impact and ensure the long-term digital preservation of research papers. “All papers will be held in a standard XML format, thus ensuring that the record of biomedicine is preserved, irrespective of changes in software and hardware platforms,” Kiley said. From October 2006, Wellcome Trust grant holders must ensure peer-reviewed articles are deposited in the UK or US version of PubMed Central within six months, either by themselves or the journal publisher. “If the publisher cannot accept these conditions, grant-holders will have to publish elsewhere,”Kiley said. “Our preferred route is open access.”

The HELIN Library Consortium, made up of ten academic libraries in Rhode Island and Massachusetts - including Bryant University, has received funding to create a digital repository. The grant was received from the Davis Educational Foundation established by Stanton and Elisabeth Davis after his retirement as chairman of Shaw's Supermarkets, Inc. The goal of the Digital Repository will be to preserve and archive historical and current materials held by each member institution, and make these materials accessible to students, faculty and staff at all of the HELIN Library Consortium schools to enhance teaching and learning. The Digital Repository will use ProQuest's Digital Commons platform as the technology for storing, searching and accessing the digital materials, including papers, images, and videos created by the students and faculties of the HELIN member institutions....The HELIN Consortium includes nearly all the academic institutions in the state of Rhode Island, including both public and private colleges, and its digital repository would reflect that same broad inclusiveness.

They are at it again, it seems all the EU wants to do is suck every penny they can out of us, this time they want to pass a directive that ensures we pay twice for data, first with our taxes and second to view the data, see publicgeodata.org for more information....Now I'm usually against US policy, but this time I have to say they are far ahead of us in Europe, by allowing US and non-US citizens to access high resolution data of their country for free they shame the rest of the world, and show our governments to be money grabbing and selfish.

Stevan Harnad posted a glowing encomium for Poynder’s article to the JISC-REPOSITORIES mailing list. This is no surprise. What surprised and gratified me were two cogent, politely critical responses, which Harnad has as yet not answered....Let me be clear: what Poynder said about librarian open-access efforts was offensive and shortsighted, and he could do worse than apologize for it on his weblog. Harnad’s enthusiastic response to Poynder tars him with the same brush, and he could stand to apologize also. But just for fun, let us play out a Harnadian scenario, in which libraries use IRs for their own projects and OA happens somewhere else entirely....Harnad’s own vision (based on his email, which is repeated at this post to his blog) appears to be small departmental faculty-spurred and faculty-owned fiefdoms, which would then be aggregated at the university level for harvesting and dissemination purposes. This would indeed carry some advantages: faculty evangelizing their colleagues is the best OA marketing there is. Also, such a fiefdom often requires consulting departmental administration, which is a sensible opening to lobby for a mandate.

My first question is this: If faculty cannot even drag themselves to deposit material into IRs where the library has done all the tech work for them up-front, how will they be convinced to start them? It is assuredly technically simple to do, but the complexity of the technical process is not and has never been the problem. The complexity of the social process is the problem, and I fail to see how Harnad’s proposal solves it....My second question concerns coverage. To achieve his stated goal of 100% OA to the peer-reviewed journal literature via departmental repositories, Harnad will have to convince every department and research unit on every college and university campus everywhere containing faculty who publish in the peer-reviewed journal literature to open a repository....This is a tall order....My third question concerns unnecessary duplication of effort. Though the technical and staff requirements of setting up and maintaining a digital repository are quite small, they are not zero. What is Harnad’s justification for duplicating the necessary effort and machinery across thousands of departments?...Still, I entirely favor Harnad pursuing this angle; there may be advantages to it I am not considering, and I stand to learn a lot about outreach to the faculty at MPOW should he succeed....[T]he rising tide would float my boat as well as Harnad’s; I should be insane to object....My sense still is that OA needs academic libraries and academic librarians.

Postgenomic collates posts from life science blogs and then does useful and interesting things with that data. For example, you can see which papers are being cited most often by neurologists, or which stories are being heavily linked to by bioinformaticians. It's sort of like a hot papers meeting with the entire biomed blogging community. Sort of.

Science 2.0. Postgenomic's primary purpose is to act as an open access repository of literature reviews and conference reports. A review in our case is an analysis of - or a piece of useful information concerning - a scientific paper. Feel free to look through the papers cited by life science bloggers recently or to browse the reviews already collected. If you own a blog, you can mark any of your posts as a review using some very simple HTML code. If you don't own a blog, you can submit reviews directly.

Comment. As serious blogging grows in biomedicine, the usefulness of this site will grow exponentially. Long term, its usefulness could become both a cause and effect of that growth in blogging. Every field should have an equivalent.

This is perhaps a good juncture at which to make it explicit that there is "small-p preservation" and "large-P Preservation." Of course GNU Eprints, like everyone else (including ArXiv since way back in 1991) is doing small-p preservation, and will continue to do so: Open Access is for the sake of immediate access, today, tomorrow, and into the future -- and this, in turn, is for the sake of maximising immediate usage and impact, today, tomorrow, and into the future. Hence small-p preservation is a necessary means to that end.  But big-P Preservation, in contrast, is Preservation as an end in itself...So it is absurd to imagine...that Eprints is either oblivious to small-p preservation or that its contents are one bit more or less likely to vanish tomorrow than any other digital contents that are being conscientiously preserved and migrated and upgraded today, keeping up with the ongoing developments in the means of preservation....Why is it so important to make it crystal clear that Eprints and OA are not for Preservation projects? that their primary motivation is not to ensure the longevity of digital contents (even though Eprints and OA do provide longevity, and do keep up with whatever developments occur in the means of long-term preservation of their contents)?  Because OA's target contents are 85% missing! The pressing problem of absent content cannot be its Preservation!...What has been (and continues to be) lost for the 85% of annual OA target content that has not been (and is not being) self-archived, is access, usage, and impact. That is the true motivation for Eprints and OA self-archiving....[T]hat content will never be self-archived by its authors for the sake of Preservation, because it need not be: its Preservation is already in other hands than its authors (or its authors' institutions), as it always was, and for the foreseeable future will continue to be. The mission of authors and their institutions was not, is not, and should not have to be the Preservation of their own published journal article output....The OA problem, in other words, is not Preservation tomorrow, but Provision today. Hitching today's Provision problem to tomorrow's Preservation problem is yet another recipe for prolonging the non-Provision of 85% of OA's target content.

In addition to subscription and open access electronic journals, LOCKSS Alliance members are collecting and preserving government documents, electronic thesis and dissertations, websites, in-house image collections, and, soon, books and blogs....Through the manifest page mechanism, publishers give permission to authorized libraries to preserve their content. The use and access restrictions of subscription-based content are governed by the original license agreement. If a publisher’s terms and conditions are fairly stable across customer bases, we urge them to put rights and restrictions on the LOCKSS publisher manifest page so this information is bundled with and preserved with the content. A manifest page is not always required. The LOCKSS system ingests content from websites that support OAI-PMH with permission but without the need for a manifest page full of links. For open access publishers, we encourage use of an appropriate Creative Commons license. This machine-readable license is then preserved with the content, making clear current and future rights. Also, in response to community requests, we are currently working on methods to preserve blogs. We expect that in most cases this will be done via RSS. Other ingest mechanisms may also be implemented, such as Google SiteMaps.

Access Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency and Creative Commons Canada, in partnership with Creative Commons Corporation in the US, today announced the development of a Canadian public domain registry. The ground-breaking project – the most comprehensive of its kind in Canada – will create an online, globally searchable [and OA] catalogue of published works that are in the Canadian public domain. “Canada has a rich cultural heritage of literature, music and fine art that is in the public domain just waiting to be freely enjoyed,” said Marcus Bornfreund of Creative Commons Canada, a non-profit organization that works in collaboration with Creative Commons US. “The problem until now was that there was no easy way to identify whether or not works are in the public domain. This registry will change that.” There is currently no one place where information about the public domain is collected. The registry will make published works in the Canadian public domain easily identifiable and accessible in an online catalogue. The project will develop in two stages – first, a comprehensive registry of works by Canadian creators that are in the public domain will be established. Eventually, the reach of the registry will expand to include the published works of creators from other countries. The public domain registry will be a non-profit project and freely accessible to the public online....The Wikimedia Foundation, developers of the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, will supply software that will allow the public to contribute information to the registry. "The public domain is our shared cultural heritage, and the best ground for the great new ideas of the future," said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. "Without access to the public domain, we are cut off from our past, and therefore cut ourselves off from our future."...Individuals will be able to use the registry to determine whether a published work is in the public domain. The registry will also link to digital versions of the work, and provide information about where a paper copy of the work can be purchased. “Quick and easy access to legally available content is vital as we move further into the digital age,” said Roanie Levy, Access Copyright’s Director of Legal and External Affairs. “The public domain registry has limitless possibilities and will place Canadian cultural content at the leading edge of the public domain.”

Comment. Because legislators (in Canada and elsewhere) have frequently extended the term of copyright, it's non-trivial to figure out when a work is in the public domain. If the new registry is comprehensive, it will be useful for lifting this burden from ordinary users who don't want to risk liability, err on the side of non-use, or spend time and money tracking down copyright holders when it's no longer necessary. By adding links to OA versions of PD works, it will be even more useful. It should bring about one other consequence of great importance: heightened public awareness of the value of the public domain and the urgency of protecting it from further encroachments.

The Internet of Things has evolved into a nascent conceptual framework for understanding how physical objects, once networked and imbued with informatic capabilities, will occupy space and occupy themselves in a world in which things were once quite passive. This paper describes the Internet of Things as more than a world of RFID tags and networked sensors. Once “Things” are connected to the Internet, they can only but become enrolled as active, worldly participants by knitting together, facilitating and contributing to networks of social exchange and discourse, and rearranging the rules of occupancy and patterns of mobility within the physical world. “Things” in the pervasive Internet, will become first-class citizens with which we will interact and communicate. Things will have to be taken into account as they assume the role of socially relevant actors and strong-willed agents that create social capital and reconfigure the ways in which we live within and move about physical space. To distinguish the instrumental character of “things” connected to the Internet from “things” participating within the Internet of social networks, I use the neologism “Blogject” — ‘objects that blog.’...[B]logjects in the near-future will participate in the whole meaning-making apparatus that is now the social web, and that is becoming the "Internet of Things." The most peculiar characteristic of Blogjects is that they participate in the exchange of ideas. Blogjects don’t just publish, they circulate conversations. Not with some sort of artificial intelligence engine or other speculative high-tech wizardry. Blogjects become first-class a-list producers of conversations in the same way that human bloggers do — by starting, maintaining and being critical attractors in conversations around topics that have relevance and meaning to others who have a stake in that discussion....A Blogject can start a conversation with something as simple as an aggregation of levels of pollutants in groundwater. If this conversation is maintained and made consequential through hourly RSS feeds and visualizations of that same routine data, this Blogject is going to get some trackback.

Comment. I didn't blog this article because it's about OA. I blogged it for what the underlying idea can do for OA. I see this potential falling into two categories.

1. Blogjects can help monitor OA progress. Imagine OA repositories blogging their deposits --either through raw tallies, showing their growth, or through metadata about the new articles themselves, showing what's going in. Imagine OA repository registries or directories (like OpenDOAR and ROAR) blogging the world growth in repository deposits, broken down by country and discipline. Imagine OA journals blogging their new TOCs. Imagine book-digitizing projects blogging their progress. Few of these feeds would be directly interesting to human readers. But they could be inputs to software monitors or feed aggregates that give human readers an instant and up-to-date overview, something like OA by the numbers but not limited to numbers, not confined to a small number of sources, and not slowed the need for human updates. (Of course the same technology could tell us about non-OA research but here I'm focusing on what it could do for OA.)

2. Blogjects can help disseminate OA data about anything. Some scientists want to keep their data to themselves until they publish, but others are willing to (sometimes compelled to) share their data in real time as it is generated. For scientists in the second camp, blogjects could feed data to all who care to plug in and process it. Imagine blogjects feeding weather and pollution data, geospatial data, census data, crime data, economic data. Because blogject feeds automatically contain their own histories, they lend themselves just as much to longitudinal studies as to instanteous sampling. In many of these areas we have the equivalent today --but for the XML mark-up and standardization of the feeds, which permit RSS, mash-ups, aggregations, trackbacks, pings, and the other information connectors introduced with the blogosphere. One of the many network nodes monitoring a blogject data stream could be a LOCKSS system, capturing it for long-term preservation. Blogjects could not only accelerate research, but inform actions (weather prediction, pollution control, investment) and improve policy-making in all areas that depend on real-time open-access data feeds.

As documents and services are increasingly transformed from paper to electronic form, there is growing recognition that governments and their constituents may not be able to access, retrieve and use critical records, information and documents in the future. A broad cross-section of associations, academic institutions, industry and related groups today joined together to form the OpenDocument Format Alliance (ODF Alliance), an organization dedicated to promoting open solutions to this problem. As technologies rapidly evolve, documents are created by public sector agencies using different applications that may not be compatible with one another today, let alone into the future. Through the use of a truly open standard file format that can be implemented by numerous and varied applications, the Alliance seeks to enable governments and their constituents to use, access and store critical documents, records and information both today and in the future, independent of the applications or enterprise platforms used for their creation or future access. Specifically, the ODF Alliance supports the use of the OpenDocument Format (ODF), an open XML-based collection of office document formats, including text, presentation and spreadsheet formats. ODF, the only established open standard document format, enables the retrieval of information and exchange of documents between different applications, agencies and/or business partners in a platform and application independent way. "With a broad cross section of support, the ODF Alliance will work to enable governments around the world to have greater control over and direct management of their documents, now and forever," said Ken Wasch, President of the Software & Information Industry Association, a leading member of the Alliance and the principal trade association of the software and digital content industry. "There's no doubt that the momentum of ODF is gaining traction worldwide as more people every day are discovering that it's a better way to preserve and access documents."...The Alliance is building support globally for use and recognition of ODF, and all organizations that share its goals are welcomed to join the effort. Organizations can join [here]....In recent months, jurisdictions such as the State of Massachusetts in the United States and others around the world are leading the way, by embracing open document formats. According to recent press reports, 13 nations globally are considering adoption of the OpenDocument format.

It is especially disappointing that these budget cuts to the EPA Libraries follow the good faith efforts of their staff over the past few years to analyze their network and develop a vision for centralized and coordinated services to improve their operations. The findings, recommendations and action plans in three important reports—Business Case for Information Services: EPA’s Regional Libraries and Centers (January 2004), Transforming EPA Libraries: Creating a national capacity for information management and retrieval (June 2004) and EPA Library Network: Challenges for FY 2007 and Beyond (November 2005)—have been all but ignored by the Agency. They provide new models for information services to reduce duplication, cut costs and improve the national capability of the EPA. If implemented, these proposed new models would align resources with an optimal structure for leveraging investments, staff and vision.

Eight of the world’s major natural history and botanical libraries are working together to develop a strategy and operational plan to digitize the published literature on biodiversity that they jointly hold and make it freely accessible to all on the Web. The project, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, will establish a major corpus of publications drawn from each of their collections. Much of the published literature is rare or has limited global distribution and is available in only a few select libraries. From a scholarly perspective, these collections are of exceptional value because the domain of systematic biology depends --more than any other science-- on historic literature.

The eight participating libraries have more than 2 million volumes of biodiversity literature collected over 200 years to support scientists and students throughout the world. Until now, this body of biodiversity knowledge effectively has been unavailable for wide use in a broad range of applications, including research, education, taxonomic study, biodiversity conservation, protected area management, disease control and maintenance of diverse ecosystems. The participants are:

• Smithsonian Institution Libraries and the National Museum of Natural History, Washington
• American Museum of Natural History, New York
• Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge, Mass.
• Harvard University Botany Libraries, Cambridge, Mass.
• Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis
• The Natural History Museum, London
• The New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, N.Y.
• Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Surrey

The participating organizations will work with the global taxonomic community, rights holders and other interested parties to ensure that their collective historical heritage is available to all who seek it. Web-based access to the collections will provide a substantial benefit to people living and working in the developing world who have not been able to benefit from the information held in these collections.

IOP is launching a new journal, Environmental Research Letters (ERL), and companion website focused on environmental studies and science. The journal will feature short, focused articles on genuine advances in environmental understanding, and interdisciplinary pieces that transform our knowledge of the linked social, technical and environmental systems in which we live. The website will feature specially written and commissioned content as well as selected highlights from the journal, and other information of interest to the environmental science community. The whole site will be available free as a service to the community and the journal will be the first Open Access journal in the field.

Excerpt from the journal site:

The 2006 article charge for publishing in ERL is $1750. You should send your payment to Institute of Physics Publishing, and you may pay in UK pounds sterling (£1000), Euros (EUR1450) or US dollars. We send invoices for payment after articles are accepted for publication....Members of the Institute of Physics pay $1500 (£850; EUR1250). Institute of Physics Publishing is currently in the process of seeking sponsors from research foundations and funding agencies to cover the article charge for publishing in ERL.

Abstract: Libraries have developed methods and processes for collecting, processing, providing access to, and preserving paper publications. As publishing shifts from printed to digital form, libraries need to rethink and revise systems to handle the ever-increasing flow of digital publications. These challenges are being addressed by the State Library of North Carolina as it attempts to manage digital state government publications, which have characteristics similar to most gray literature now produced on the Internet. This article discusses changes in cataloging and workflow designed to accommodate the increased amount of digital information and presents a model for managing digital publications in the context of state government publications. The conceptual model covers six aspects of a publication's management: creation, collection, description, storage, access, and preservation.

The French Publishers Association and several publishers are likely to file a lawsuit against Google during the Paris Book Fair later this month for digitising hundreds of French books without permission...France would be the first European country to take action against Google, following in the footsteps of the Association of American Publishers...The French titles that Google is scanning--the most recent of which were published in the 1970s--come from Michigan University under an agreement with the search engine. The university has 500,000 French language titles. Google has yet to respond to the French Publishers Association's (Syndicat National de l'Edition) demand to withdraw the titles. It has offered an opt-out arrangement, but this is unacceptable to the SNE, which accuses the company of infringing copyright law.

Comment. Fair use law in the US probably favors Google but I have no idea how Google might fare under French law. Note, however, that when it looked as if Google wouldn't digitize French books, it was savaged by the country's president and national librarian, and when it looked as if it would digitize French books after all, it was threatened by French publishers. I'm glad that publishers and governments don't always see eye to eye, but maybe French people should tell their publishers that they're not acting in the interests of French readers or French authors.

The British Library (BL) became a directly linked resource for scientific and academic information on the Google Scholar search engine following a deal between the two parties today. Search results in Google Scholar will now feature – if the article is in the national collection – a BL Direct tag alongside the cache and citation links (click here to see). The Google Scholar search engine will now match its results against the holdings of the British Library Direct document delivery service which provides researchers, students and academics with electronic scans of journal articles. A direct link will appear in the results giving users the option of instantly purchasing knowledge online. Greater integration between the BL Direct and Google Scholar services allows Google to search BL collections and order form fields containing bibliographic details will already be filled out, making the e-commerce experience faster and easier. The British Library is describing the service as a "discovery-to-desktop-delivery process". "Linking up with partners like Google is the way forward," said Matt Pfleger, BL Head of Sales and Marketing, adding, "They get richer search results and content and we get to make our collections more easily available."...This is the second deal the BL has inked with a major online services provider in the last four months....In December 2005 the library announced a deal with the software giant which sees 25 million pages of out of copyright book titles digitised and placed on MSN BookSearch, an online book searching service to rival Google Book Search, also launched last year.

I've emailed [Bernd Sebastian] Kamps to suggest a small donations system for individuals to donate towards a 'running bounty' for any book of their choice. I'd happily donate 50 euros knowing that it would contribute towards the development of a high-quality, open-access psychiatry, neurology or neuropsychology textbook. If you'd like the opportunity to do something similar, contact the project and suggest the same. It seems like many small donations could create large bounties in a relatively small amount of time.

UPDATE: Good news! I just got the following back from Bernd Sebastian Kamps:

Thank you for your suggestion: Your idea is brilliant (I had never thought of asking for small contributions). We'll open the PayPal account next week and by the end of the month, everything should be in place. I'll keep you informed.

Comment. This will not only raise more money for OA medical books but help create books that respond to unmet needs. For example, it could be very helpful to the world of orphan diseases.

Kudos to RSC for taking this commendable step. RSC will not lose much, if any, potential revenue, but will surely generate goodwill and good science, the latter of which is a core mission of the society. In fact, the core mission of scientific societies (RSC, ACS, AIP, APS, IoP, AGU, etc) is to promote the advancement of their science and its understanding by society at large. Society publishers can easily be understood arising from this core mission. From the RSC charter:

The RSC's original Charter was granted in 1848. The RSC's Royal Charter, granted in 1980, states that: "The object for which the Society is constituted is the general advancement of chemical science and its application and for that purpose: 1. to foster and encourage the growth and application of such science by the dissemination of chemical knowledge;..."

I cannot fathom how anyone can justify this heritage and trust being held hostage by a profit motive, by a desire to extract continuing revenue at the cost of advancing the science which is supposed to be the fundamental purpose of the organization....The challenge to ACS to live up their charter and begin to provide access to a portion of the world's chemical heritage which they control is apparent....

SEC. 2. That the objects of the incorporation shall be to encourage in the broadest and most liberal manner the advancement of chemistry in all its branches; the promotion of research in chemical science and industry; the improvement of the qualifications and usefulness of chemists through high standards of professional ethics, education, and attainments; the increase and diffusion of chemical knowledge; and by its meetings, professional contacts, reports, papers, discussions, and publications, to promote scientific interests and inquiry, thereby fostering public welfare and education, aiding the development of our country’s industries, and adding to the material prosperity and happiness of our people.

The European Commissions’ plan to promote digital access to Europe’s heritage is rapidly taking shape. At least six million books, documents and other cultural works will be made available to anyone with a Web connection through the European Digital Library over the next five years. In order to boost European digitisation efforts, the Commission will co-fund the creation of a Europe-wide network of digitisation centres. The Commission will also address, in a series of policy documents, the issue of the appropriate framework for intellectual property rights protection in the context of digital libraries....By the end of 2006, the European Digital Library should encompass full collaboration among the national libraries in the EU. In the years thereafter, this collaboration is to be expanded to archives and museums. Two million books, films, photographs, manuscripts, and other cultural works will be accessible through the European Digital Library by 2008. This figure will grow to at least six million by 2010, but is expected to be much higher as, by then, potentially every library, archive and museum in Europe will be able to link its digital content to the European Digital Library. This European Digital Library is a flagship project of the Commission’s overall strategy to boost the digital economy, the i2010 strategy.

The Conference of European National Libraries (CENL), which sponsors TEL, issued its own press release. Excerpt:

The Conference of European National Librarians, CENL, welcomes with enthusiasm the European Commission’s plan to promote digital access to Europe’s heritage through the European Digital Library by co-funding the creation of a Europe-wide network of digitisation centres and by addressing the issue of the appropriate framework for intellectual property rights protection in the context of digital libraries. CENL shares the vision of a European Digital Library and has been working towards this goal by creating TEL, The European Library, which received European Community funding in its early stage. CENL is honoured and pleased by the Commission’s intention to build the European Digital Library upon the TEL-infrastructure. The European Library is the webservice of the 45 CENL members providing access to the catalogue records and digital collections of currently 15 European National Libraries. By the end of 2006 the number of European National Libraries fully participating in the service will be enlarged by the ten new member states of the European Union which prepare to join The European Library in the European Community funded project TEL-ME-MOR, and by all remaining EU and EFTA member states....CENL especially welcomes the European Commission’s plans to expand this collaboration among the national libraries to archives and museums to create a true European Digital Library. CENL will embrace any moves to deepen existing contacts to groups of European archives and museums and to discuss the roadmap towards a European Digital Library.

• Matthias Liebig, Einleitung
• Jan Neumann, Auf dem Weg zu einem Open-Access-Geschäftsmodell
• Oliver Passek, Open oder Close Access?
• Lambert Heller, Wissenschaftliches Publizieren mit Wikis – Möglich oder sogar wünschenswert?

Abstract: As serial prices rise exponentially and budgets plummet, serials aficionados can still increase access to information by adding bibliographic records for open access journals to library catalogs. Anna Hood shared procedures and practices on how she is adding value to her library's catalog by adding such records. Bridging the gap between users and open access journals in such a manner allows for true openness. An open access journal is not truly “open” unless we take the time to unrestrict and make them available to all.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) is pleased to announce sponsorship by the California Digital Library (CDL) on behalf of the ten campuses of the University of California. This represents a full commitment by all of the libraries in the UC system, eight of whose campuses offer degrees in philosophy....Edward Zalta, Principal Editor for the SEP, notes “We are very grateful to receive significant support from the CDL and the University of California. With this pledge, the SEP tops the $1 million mark in commitments from libraries worldwide. This cooperative effort ensures that philosophical scholarship is widely available and accessible to all. The broad-based support from institutions (even some without degrees in philosophy) demonstrates that the SEP is valuable for students and faculty of diverse subjects such as mathematics, religion, law, medicine, and science.” Tom Sanville, spokesperson for the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC), notes that “With libraries world wide working collaboratively we are creating and preserving open access to a vast body of philosophical scholarship. This pioneering effort illuminates a unique and revolutionary approach to achieve open access. It’s a technique we hope the library and academic communities can utilize again.”

Comment. The SEP is an authoritative OA encyclopedia. For a couple of years now it's been pursuing an unusual but promising method to build an endowment so that it can cover its costs without having to abandon OA. I hope it succeeds: the SEP deserves to survive and endowments are a perfect fit with the needs of OA.

Richard Poynder, the astute, eloquent chronicler of scholarly communication in the online era has done it again, with a shrewd, original and insightful review of the short history of the institutional repository movement. His conclusions are surprising, but (I think) very apt. His analysis, among other things, goes some way toward explaining why on earth a "Repository Comparison" such as the one Rachel Heery cites [by Thom Hickey]..., would have left the first and most widely used Institutional Repository (IR) software (GNU Eprints) out of its comparison.  The answer is simple: Eprints is and always was very determinedly focused on the specific goal of 100% Open Access (OA), as soon as possible; it can of course also do everything that the other IR softwares can do (and vice versa!), but Eprints is focused on a very particular and urgent agenda: generating 100% OA to each institution's own research article output. Those who prefer leisurely fussing with the curation/preservation of arbitrary digital contents of any and every description will of course have plenty to keep them busy for decades to come. Eprints, in contrast, has an immediate, already-overdue mission to fulfil, and it is becoming clearer and clearer that -- with some prominent and invaluable exceptions -- the library community has found other rows to hoe.  Richard has accordingly proposed that it might be time for a parting of paths between the Generic Digital Curation/Preservation IR movement and the OA IR movement, and he might be right. One has a diffuse, divergent goal, the other a focused, convergent -- and urgent and immediately reachable -- goal, a goal that might now be hamstrung if it is subordinated to or subsumed under the diffuse, divergent goal of the other....I think the optimal strategy is latent in Richard Poynder's very timely and perspicacious article. We should especially recommend using Eprints modularly, at the departmental level, via computing-services and/or library support, along the lines CalTech are doing it with CODA:  Instead of building one monster-archive, Dspace/Fedora style, and then partitioning it top-down into "communities", CalTech have made natural and effective use of the OAI interoperability to create lots of Eprints modules, all harvested and integrated bottom-up into CODA. The rationale to be stressed in this is that this easy, light modularity can be used to get OA-specific archives going even in institutions that are slogging away at their own monster-archive, in parallel.

Scientific, technical and medical publishers called today for an increase in communications to science and medical authors in light of a new survey that finds low understanding of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Public Access Policy for posting peer-reviewed articles to PubMed Central (PMC), NIH’s online database. The online survey, conducted in January of this year by the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC), shows that although most authors are aware of the NIH policy, many authors do not post on PMC because they do not understand the process, nor do they identify clear benefits for posting their work. Of the NIH-funded authors who responded to the survey, 15% have never heard of the policy and a further 23% have heard of the policy, but know nothing about it. The survey found awareness of NIH-funded authors is only marginally higher than of all life sciences and medicine authors. “As publishers, we are committed to working with the NIH in improving dissemination of and enhancing access to scientific and medical research,” Robert Campbell, Chairman of the PRC. “Publishers remain willing and prepared to work with the National Library of Medicine to advance the goals of the NIH’s Public Access Policy as currently construed, and to aid the NIH in facilitating voluntary compliance by NIH-funded authors.” The PRC survey also revealed authors have limited understanding of the benefits of the NIH policy for the scientific research community, the public or existing journals. However, approximately 42% of survey respondents reported that they intend to post in the future and just 3% responded that they are not planning to post.

Comment. Those who want to strengthen the NIH policy and those who want to keep it weak or even repeal it agree that the compliance rate is dismally low. Just last month the NIH reported to Congress that the rate was below 4%. I interpret the PRC report as an attempt to boost voluntary compliance and head off mounting pressure on the NIH to adopt an OA mandate. This pressure is coming from the NIH's own Public Access Working Group and the NLM Board of Regents, not to mention the original directive from Congress and the pending CURES Act. Whether or not the NIH adopts a mandate, I support the call for greater outreach to grantees and education about the policy. (I was going to link to a 12/9/05 message I posted to the SSP list, showing that I support this kind of outreach, but it seems to have disappeared from the archive.) However, I strongly support a mandate and do not believe that the NIH policy can meet its goals or the goals of Congress without one.

[In] scholarly publishing...advocates of free (as in both beer and freedom) online access to research papers are still fighting the battles that open source won years ago. At stake is nothing less than control of academia's treasure-house of knowledge. The parallels between this movement - what has come to be known as “open access” – and open source are striking. For both, the ultimate wellspring is the Internet, and the new economics of sharing that it enabled. Just as the early code for the Internet was a kind of proto-open source, so the early documentation – the RFCs – offered an example of proto-open access. And for both their practitioners, it is recognition – not recompense – that drives them to participate.

Like all great movements, open access has its visionary – the RMS figure - who constantly evangelizes the core ideas and ideals. In 1976, the Hungarian-born cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad founded a scholarly print journal that offered what he called “open peer commentary,” using an approach remarkably close to the open source development process....Harnad has long had an ambitious vision of a new kind of scholarly sharing (rather as RMS does with code): one of his early papers is entitled “Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge”, while a later one is called bluntly: “A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing.” Meanwhile, the aims of the person who could be considered open access's Linus to Harnad's RMS, Paul Ginsparg, a professor of physics, computing and information science at Cornell University, were more modest. At the beginning of the 1990s, Ginsparg wanted a quick and dirty solution to the problem of putting high-energy physics preprints (early versions of papers) online. As it turns out, he set up what became the arXiv.org preprint repository on 16 August, 1991 – nine days before Linus made his fateful “I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones” posting. ...Beyond self-archiving - later termed “green” open access by Harnad – lies publishing in fully open online journals (“gold” open access). The first open access magazine publisher, BioMed Central – a kind of Red Hat of the field – appeared in 1999. In 2001 the Public Library of Science (PLoS) was launched; PLoS is a major publishing initiative inspired by the examples of arXiv.org, the public genomics databases and open source software, and which was funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (to the tune of $9 million over five years). Just as free software gained the alternative name “open source” at the Freeware Summit in 1998, so free open scholarship (FOS), as it was called until then by the main newsletter that covered it - written by Peter Suber, professor of philosophy at Earlham College - was renamed “open access” as part of the Budapest Open Access Initiative in December 2001. Suber's newsletter turned into Open Access News and became one of the earliest blogs; it remains the definitive record of the open access movement, and Suber has become its semi-official chronicler (the Eric Raymond of open access - without the guns).

Comment. There's more, but read the whole thing. We all know large and small parallels between the two movements, not to mention actual overlap, but Moody is remarkably specific about matching up counterparts. A thumbnail of his map:

• Harnad → Stallman
• Ginsparg → Torvalds
• Suber → Raymond
• BOAI → Freeware Summit
• Soros → O'Reilly
• BioMed Central → Red Hat
• Elsevier → Microsoft

Update. Also see Glyn's blog posting to follow-up the article.

Following a highly successful beta launch, Freeload Press, Inc. (“FP”) announced today the expansion of its unique free textbook initiative. The company plans on providing one million free downloads of college e-textbooks and study aids--all supported by commercial sponsors. Staffed by experienced academicians, entrepreneurs and former textbook publishers, FP developed a breakthrough model providing students with free e-book versions of textbooks. Students download free e-books from FP’s distribution web site, freeloadpress.com. The e-books, which are in Adobe’s PDF format, contain sponsors’ advertising or marketing messages. Corporate sponsors, among them FedEx Kinko’s, pay FP to place unobtrusive messages in e-books at natural breaks in the text and layout. Paperback versions of the e-books, with advertising, can also be purchased for 65% less than comparable textbooks for the same courses. Halfway through the beta launch season, FP model has been used for 75 courses in over a dozen colleges, including U of Texas, Georgia Tech and U-Mass Lowell. The company estimates its beta list of books will save students over $500,000 in textbook costs this year. College instructors at over 350 colleges are registered and reviewing FP’s offerings for next year’s courses with users.... “The student survey data is trending at more than 97% approval rate of the model,” said Ivancevich. “and the instructor approval rating is north of 80%--which is well beyond the original forecast we conducted to launch the business. Instructors are more concerned with the high price of textbooks than we anticipated.”

An interesting story in eWeek.com. Larry Brilliant, newly-appointed head of the Google.org philanthropic foundation, wants to set up a dedicated search engine that will spot incipient disease outbreaks. The planned name is INSTEDD: International Networked System for Total Early Disease Detection - a reference to the fact that it represents an alternative option to just waiting for cataclysmic infections - like pandemics - to happen. According to the article:

Brilliant wants to expand an existing web crawler run by the Canadian government. The Global Public Health Intelligence Network monitors about 20,000 Web sites in seven languages, searching for terms that could warn of an outbreak.

What's interesting about this - apart from the novel idea of spotting outbreaks around the physical world by scanning the information shadow they leave in the digital cyberworld - is that to work it depends critically on having free access to as much information and as many scientific and medical reports as possible. Indeed, this seems a clear case where it could be claimed that not providing open access in relevant areas - and the range of subjects that are relevant is vast - is actually endangering the lives of millions of people. Something for publishers and their lawyers to think about, perhaps.

Comment. Exactly. As I've said before, the more knowledge matters, the more OA to that knowledge matters.

I always thought that the most important thing in any scientific paper was supposed to be the data and how they were obtained. Everything else is window-dressing, because it's filtered through the lens of subjectivity. The background, the discussion - these are somebody's opinions. If the experiments have been done carefully and analyzed thoroughly, the data are the only facts in the paper, the only thing that can be trusted. They're what I want to read and understand. The people who obtained the data have the right to tell me what they think it all means, and I often find their opinions useful, but I also have the right to decide for myself. Yes, I can still do that if I dig out the supplementary material, but I shouldn't have to dig. If our priorities are straight, the methods and the data should be the centerpiece. And in the modern era, there's no reason not to put them there.

Thanks to Alf Eaton for pointing to Petsko's piece, for this excerpt, and for setting up an example (based on OJS) of what Petsko might have had in mind. Excerpt from Eaton's description:

[In this example,] as much of the data as possible is embedded directly in the article, so that when the page is saved, the media should be saved with it. The 'supplementary data' will be linked to directly from the page as well, ideally with a useful rel attribute so that it can be automatically fetched along with the rest of the page. This should make things much easier, rather than having to go to a separate page and click links to see each microscopy movie, or open and scroll around tiny pop-up windows for every table or figure.

This signature is the 150th for the Berlin Declaration.

Algorithms for Molecular Biology - Fulltext v1+ (2006+); ISSN: 1748-7188.

Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases - Fulltext v1+ (2006+); ISSN: 1750-1172.

Radiation Oncology - Fulltext v1+ (2006+); ISSN: 1748-717X.

Here's an example from the world of access. Proctor & Gamble is making news for the progressive idea of guaranteeing its researchers access to their own data.