Open Access News

Erik Engstrom's job [as Elsevier CEO] is to soften Reed Elsevier's image problem. The electronic publishing giant is successful enough as a business, but it runs into controversy amid accusations that it operates a stranglehold on the scientific community. The fresh-faced Swede, who speaks with an American accent, runs the Elsevier division, the world's largest scientific and medical publisher, and his message is that once you stop worrying about prices, his business can help to change the world for the better. Engstrom joined Elsevier, home to the 183-year-old medical journal The Lancet, two years ago, at a crisis point. Libraries, the main customers, were complaining that the company planned to jack up subscriptions above the rate of inflation at a time when their budgets were squeezed. Political hostility and a House of Commons inquiry led to Ian Gibson, chairman of the science and technology committee, accusing publishers such as Reed of "ripping off the academic community". Two years on, the critics are muted. Engstrom has managed to take some of the heat out of the issue--and starts by offering sympathy: "We understand that libraries face significant budget challenges as research output has been rising faster than library budgets. In response to this, we have redoubled our efforts to work with libraries to develop flexible purchasing options." That kind of vague, well-intentioned talk won't, in isolation, convince anybody, but the company has realised that there is plenty of growth to be achieved by means other than price rises. And here, old age is critical. Elsevier's health sciences division, which accounts for 45 per cent, grew by 6 per cent last year, while the science arm--the balance of the business--improved by plus 5. "We are fundamentally in a growth market. The ageing population in the Western world is driving an increase in spend on tools to help professionals."...Engstrom's strategy appears to make sense and, once you get past the pricing argument, Elsevier is producing a valuable service to the world. It is, after all, questionable whether it is the group's job to worry about pricing when its main responsibility is to its investors.

It is time to rethink the idea of the copyright collective, for a number of reasons. In Canada, the copyright collective is called Access Copyright. According to the Access Canada website, "The agency now represents a vast international repertoire along with more than 8,000 Canadian creators and publishers".  With the world wide web, it is possible for virtually everyone to publish their own works, and a very great many of us do. What exactly is the point of a copyright collective representing only 8,000 Canadians? In a country with a population of 32 million, surely there are millions of creators, not thousands?

I myself am an example of a creator who interests are not at all represented by Access Copyright. On the contrary, as an academic I am disadvantaged by this collective. Academic institutions pay the copyright collective; this takes monies away from the educational and research functions of the universities. This makes no sense at all! Universities are major creators of intellectual content - if those who create intellectual property are to be reimbused through collectives, the cheques should be flowing to the universities, not from them. I'm not suggesting that this happen; merely, that it would make more sense.

This situation is rapidly becoming much more obvious, as university libraries take on an expanded role in serving the interests of their own creators, through the OA academic presses and open access archives....

1. With Kristin Antelmann: "In this 22 minute recording, I'll sit down with Kristin Antelman, Associate Director for Information Technology @ the North Carolina State University Libraries to get a feel for what shaped their selection of Endeca’s Information Access Solutions.   If you haven't seen their new catalog, you've got to check it out!  We'll also chat a bit about the potential for social software, the final report of the University of California’s Bibliographic Services Task Force (PDF), and the use of  Segway Human Transporters at the library."

2. With Denise Troll Covey: "In this 28 minute recording, I sit down with Denise Troll Covey, Principal Librarian for Special Projects at Carnegie Mellon University.  Tune-in as she shares some thoughts about her work covering the Orphan Works debate, insights on fair use and DRM, and close with some thoughts on social software."

3. With Paul Ginsparg: "In this sixty eight minute recording, I sit down with Paul Ginsparg, physicist, scholarly communications pioneer, and the latest recipient of the Paul Evan Peters Award.  We'll chat about the history of arXiv, social computing, peer review, and a number of  other topics related to scholarly communication."

4. With Cliff Lynch: "In this 67 minute recording, I sit down with CNI's Cliff Lynch for a wide ranging discussion about interesting activities at CNI, gather some thoughts about large scale digitization projects, net neutrality, and microformats.  We'll hear about advances in the research community, talk about a number of federal policy issues, and we'll hear some thoughts about opportunity costs associated with decisions affecting the scholars and librarians of today.   We'll also chat a bit about NCSU's deployment of Endeca and the final report of UC’s Bibliographic Services Task Force (PDF)."

5. With Don Waters: "In this 23 minute recording, I'll sit down with Don Waters, Program Officer for Scholarly Communication at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  Among other things, we'll talk about broadly about their activities relating to digital library initiatives, Mellon's call for Urgent Action to Preserve Scholarly Electronic Journals, and the undercurrents of open access."

At the same time, we are seeing an ever-more self-conscious adoption of commons-based practices as a modality of information production and exchange. Free software, Creative Commons, the Public Library of Science, the new guidelines of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on free publication of papers, new open archiving practices, librarian movements, and many other communities of practice are developing what was a contingent fact into a self-conscious social movement. As the domain of existing information and culture comes to be occupied by information and knowledge produced within these free sharing movements and licensed on the model of open-licensing techniques, the problem of the conflict with the proprietary domain will recede. Twentieth-century materials will continue to be a point of friction, but a sufficient quotient of twenty- first-century materials seem now to be increasingly available from sources that are happy to share them with future users and creators. If this socialcultural trend continues over time, access to content resources will present an ever-lower barrier to nonmarket production....

Bits are a part of a flow in the networked information environment, and trying to legislate that fact away in order to preserve a business model that sells particular collections of bits as discrete, finished goods may simply prove to be impossible....globe. The rise of commons-based information production, of individuals and loose associations producing information in nonproprietary forms, presents a genuine discontinuity from the industrial information economy of the twentieth century. It brings with it great promise, and great uncertainty. We have early intimations as to how market-based enterprises can adjust to make room for this newly emerging phenomenon—IBM’s adoption of open source, Second Life’s adoption of user-created immersive entertainment, or Open Source Technology Group’s development of a platform for Slashdot. We also have very clear examples of businesses that have decided to fight the new changes by using every trick in the book, and some, like injecting corrupt files into peer-to-peer networks, that are decidedly not in the book....We have an opportunity to change the way we create and exchange information, knowledge, and culture. By doing so, we can make the twenty- first century one that offers individuals greater autonomy, political communities greater democracy, and societies greater opportunities for cultural self-reflection and human connection.

Update. Here's Lawrence Lessig's short, strong review: "Yochai Benkler’s book, The Weath of Networks, is out. This is - by far - the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years. If there is one book you read this year, it should be this. The book has a wiki; it can be downloaded as a pdf for free under a Creative Commons license; or it can be bought at places like Amazon.  Read it. Understand it. You are not serious about these issues - on either side of these debates - unless you have read this book."

An NIH advisory panel charged with implementing a public-access policy has reaffirmed its November 2005 recommendation that all NIH-funded research be made publicly available via PubMed Central no later than six months after publication.  The panel, Public Access Working Group (PAWG), reissued its call for a mandatory, six-month public-access policy at a meeting on April 10. NIH's current policy in this area was issued last May and calls for voluntary posting of agency-funded work on PubMed Central within a year of publication....[The] low rate of participation supports the need for a mandatory policy, public-access advocates say.  Several groups, such as the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), the American Cancer Society, and the New England Journal of Medicine, have expressed their support for a mandatory policy with a six-month posting deadline.  "We are very pleased that PAWG has reaffirmed its original recommendations for a mandatory policy and a maximum six-month embargo period," said ATA's Heather Joseph. She added that to achieve the agency's stated goals related to public access, a mandatory policy is needed.  Ultimately, the decision on public access falls to NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, who is in the process of considering revisions to the current policy, which are expected to be announced this year.

NIH is in active discussions with Elsevier and a group of non-profit publishers over agreements that could ensure 100% particicpation in the National Library of Medicine's public access program for agency-funded research contained in those publishers' journals....[In the year since the policy took effect] many of the publishers that initially opposed the policy have moved to a more cooperative stance....Motivating the shift in attitude, in part, has been concern that if participation rates in the program do not improve, NIH will make the program mandatory or Congress will intervene with a push for more stringent rules....The currrent discussion focuses on the possibility of Elsevier making "bulk," or "batch," submissions to NLM....One of the central issues that remains to be worked is determining which version of articles would be submitted....The group of non-profit publishers that is negotiating with the agency consists of seven members [of the DC Principles Coalition]....Discussions with the seven non-profits are focusing on the possibility of the publishers submitting final articles to PMC....NLM would be able to access the articles immediately for its own portfolio management needs, and could post the full text on PMC as soon as the embargo date expired....Althoug Elsevier and many of the non-profits differ on their willingness to provide NLM with the final version of studies, both sides appear to be very troubled about the prospect of moving the embargo period to six months.

I must declare both a personal and professional interest. Until recently, I was vice president of the Royal Society and lead officer for its publishing activity, which depends for its income on the subscription model. I am also president of the Institute of Physics (IOP), which, as with many other learned societies, uses the profits from its publishing activities to promote and support its discipline, both within the United Kingdom and beyond. In addition, I am a paid adviser to the IOP’s publishing company and therefore have a strong interest in the sustainability of any new business model for scholarly journals. I inwardly groaned when I was asked to review John Willinsky’s The Access Principle....I suspected that here was another polemic pointing out the iniquities of publishers....In fact, my fears were unfounded. Willinsky, the director of the Public Knowledge Project at the University of British Columbia, offers a well-researched and scholarly account of the issues surrounding the publication of research. The book is both balanced and fair in its discussion of the various models and responses to concerns about the accessibility of publicly funded research. Perused in conjunction with the research report of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) on open-access publishing, it makes important reading for publishers, research funders, politicians, and senior policy-makers....[O]nce it is recognized that access to reliable information will have a cost, the question arises as to who will pay for validation and dissemination. Willinsky does not duck this issue and points to the many different business models that he categorizes into “ten flavors of open access.” For example, the Health Inter-Network Access to Research Initiative and International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications projects deliver free or heavily discounted journals to developing countries. Some publishers make material available after a delay, typically six months or one year. The IOP puts all its journals on the Web free of charge for 30 days. Others charge the authors either at submission or at publication....I actually think that the growth of the open-access movement and the publishers’ response to it reflect the fact that market forces will, in the end, lead to a variety of models, each well suited to particular disciplines. I am therefore uneasy about the prospects of funding organizations imposing new rules on authors because these could lead to unforeseen distortions. I would much prefer to see encouragement to use the new freedoms generated by the Web and by the more relaxed view of copyright that many publishers are now adopting (as Willinsky explains in detail)....The irony is...[that Willinsky's book] is available to those who pay....I can see no moral argument for the cost [of science journals and his book] to fall on the producer rather than the consumer (and neither does Willinsky), but there may be powerful arguments involving public engagement and support of science that need to be considered.

Comment. (1) Why are skeptics so surprised to hear an OA advocate admit that peer review and publishing have costs? What have they been reading? Does this unfamiliarity with the literatuare explain some of their skepticism? (2) Enderby's thoughts on what funding agencies should do are welcome, but in a short review like this one they take space from his evaluation of what Willinsky recommends. (3) While The Access Principle was originally available only in a priced/printed edition, MIT has since released an OA edition.

Abstract: The Protein Circular Dichroism Data Bank (PCDDB) is a new deposition data bank for validated circular dichroism spectra of biomacromolecules. Its aim is to be a resource for the structural biology and bioinformatics communities, providing open access and archiving facilities for circular dichroism and synchrotron radiation circular dichroism spectra. It is named in parallel with the Protein Data Bank (PDB), a long-existing valuable reference data bank for protein crystal and NMR structures. In this article, we discuss the design of the data bank structure and the deposition website. Our aim is to produce a flexible and comprehensive archive, which enables user-friendly spectral deposition and searching. In the case of a protein whose crystal structure and sequence are known, the PCDDB entry will be linked to the appropriate PDB and sequence data bank files, respectively. It is anticipated that the PCDDB will provide a readily accessible biophysical catalogue of information on folded proteins that may be of value in structural genomics programs, for quality control and archiving in industrial and academic labs, as a resource for programs developing spectroscopic structural analysis methods, and in bioinformatics studies. Chirality, 2006. © 2006 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Abstract: The movement for open access to the scholarly and research literature emerged as a response to the enormous, unsustainable increases in the price of journals and journal bundles for academic libraries. When the internet made possible the dissemination of information for near-zero marginal cost (over the cost to package the information in the first place), both researchers and librarians began questioning the necessity of cost barriers to access. Educators who are not themselves researchers or librarians have not been active in the open-access movement or the debates surrounding it as yet. Third-world access to research, higher impact factors, faster research dissemination, relieving overstrained library budgets while restoring selection decisions to librarians --all these concern researchers and the research libraries they use. Institutions whose primary focus is teaching can expect little change one way or the other. Or can they?

There is wide coverage of Microsoft's launch of the Beta for Windows Live Academic Search (WLAS), the new search portal that includes content from many major scholarly publishers....Free and premium scholarly content is served up via the OpenURL and DOI link resolvers of partners, providing consistent references for researchers requiring stable citation information.  The interface is quite nice, if a little quirky. Glide your cursor over a given search result and an article abstract pops up in the left-hand portion of the display, as well as BibTex and EndNote data tabs, further facilitating citation for researchers. The abstract panel can disappear easily if necessary. The search results themselves scroll in a sub-window of the page rather slowly, which is a little annoying if you're trying to find a result that's not near the top of the stack. My assumption is that this "user friendly" feature is probably a way to provide an interface that will work consistently on both PCs and mobile devices.

There are other nice little touches in the interface that add up to something that is tangibly different from Google Scholar; it's a tool for researchers rather than search results for researchers. Still missing is metadata on purchasing that's already available in Google results - only a warning message "The search results contain freely available and access-restricted content from peer-reviewed journals." appears in a banner above WLAS search results (premium content as a danger sign...?). Also missing is consistent navigation: at least in this early Beta version there's no tracking back to the Academic search box. But the proof of the value of this service will be in the search results themselves, which is a little difficult to judge in an offhand test with the very esoteric topics covered in the service. In general WLAS appears to rely a little more on the cataloging metadata from partners to provide relevant content in high-level category searches....The WLAS facility offers a lot of promise as a tool, but it will do little to ease many underlying issues faced by publishers trying to define their own online futures via an expanding array of search partners. If WLAS succeeds it will take some share of the market for online scholarly content search: others such as Google and Yahoo will take their own part as well, but it's a given that none of these will ever "own" the market for scholarly content searching. In short time this will require scholarly publishers to provide a more consistent cross-platform approach to content licensing that will empower content subscribers to use whatever search tools work best for them at the moment. Pay-per-view access alone as a solution in these environments is not likely to suffice for many of their targeted users.  This new entry from Microsoft is sure to heat up the competition for effective scholarly content search services online with its distinct and useful features, but it is far from solving the many commercial issues that scholarly publishers must address to thrive in an online search-driven world.

It was a year of competing realities: the buying and selling of electronic journals continued apace, while the posting and crawling of every kind of free content on the web captured the imagination of the scholarly world. The former was overshadowed by the latter, and no wonder. Rival projects to digitize entire libraries full of books dominated headlines and spun off copyright arguments worldwide. Robust growth of open access repositories and the drift toward author self-archiving combined to populate the web with a surprising amount of free content that was initially available only through subscription...The Open Access (OA) movement again occupied center stage in the journals marketplace in 2005, eclipsing issues of price, publisher mergers, and big deals. Public policy measures involving open access were taken up in venues all over the globe. Debate was vigorous and contentious in the United States and Britain, where sweeping initiatives were proposed. Even the Vatican weighed in, though on the side of restricting access, declaring that all Papal writings, old and new, were copyright protected and would no longer be openly accessible. It went so far as to send a bill for $18,500 in copyright fees to an Italian publisher that printed portions of Pope Benedict's writings. Negative responses to the loss of access resonate with the language of OA, albeit with an evangelical twist. Journal publishers responded to mounting interest in open access in a variety of ways-some friendly, some not. The American Chemical Society tried to persuade Congress to defund PubChem, an open access database established by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), claiming that free government information constitutes unfair competition; Congress denied the request. A number of STM (scientific, technical, and medical) publishers initiated author-select models of OA, and experimentation continued with delayed OA, advertising, sponsorships, and other methods of expanding access to scientific output without jeopardizing the financial stability of publishers...The academy is slowly embracing open access, both in principle and in practice. A Center for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) study released in October showed a significant increase in the number of scholars who know about OA. The study found that 29% of researchers surveyed had published in an open access journal, a jump of 18% over the year before. In a separate report from Key Perspectives in May, Alma Swan and Sheridan Brown indicated that 81% of authors surveyed would willingly archive their research in an OA repository if their funding agency or university mandated it. Only five research institutions currently mandate faculty to provide open access to their published scholarly output-none are in the United States.

Given that Windows Live Academic Search’s content is limited to computer science, electrical engineering, and physics journals and conferences, a direct comparison of it with other search engines is somewhat difficult.  Although its limitations should be clearly recognized, the following simple experiment in comparing the number of hits for Google Scholar, OAIster (a search engine that indexes open access literature, such as e-prints), and Windows Live Academic Search may help to shed some light on their differences. (Note that OAIster does not typically include content directly provided by commercial publishers, although it does include e-prints for a large number articles published in academic journals.)

The search is for: "OAI-PMH" (entered without quotes).

"OAI-PMH" being, of course, the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. This is a highly specific search, where many, but not all, hits should fall within the subjects covered by Windows Live Academic Search....To get a better feel for the baseline published literature about OAI-PMH, let’s first do some searching for that term in specialized commercial databases.

• ACM Digital Library (description): 51 hits.
• Engineering Village 2 (description): 66 hits.
• Information Science & Technology Abstracts (description): 36 hits.
• Library Literature & Information Science Index/Full Text (description): 13 hits.

Now, the search engines in question (the links for the below search engine names are for the search, not the search engine):

• Google Scholar (search limited to engineering, computer science, and mathematics): 542 hits. (1,500 hits if the search is not limited.)
• OAIster: 180 hits.
• Windows Live Academic Search: 74 hits.

So, what have we learned? Windows Live Academic Search has a somewhat higher number of hits than the selected commercial databases and, if adjusted downward for publisher versions only (see below), is on the high end. This suggests that it covers the toll-based published literature well. However, it has a significantly lower number of hits than OAIster and Google Scholar, suggesting that its coverage of open access literature may be weaker than Google Scholar and it is quite likely weaker than OAIster....Of course, this simple experiment tells us nothing about the presence of duplicate entries for the same work in search result sets, which could be important for a meaningful open access comparison....

TRANSIT...is the first online, interdisciplinary journal dedicated to critical inquiry of travel, migration, and multiculturalism in the German-speaking world. TRANSIT is a web-based, multimedia production that pushes boundaries: both of traditional scholarship and of print publication. TRANSIT publishes one issue over the course of a year with a specific thematic focus-- for 2006: Translation and Mobility. The issue appears in three rounds allowing for new submissions to it during the year. Each issue also contains an open forum for experimental work and review essays on relevant books. This issue format utilizes the features of electronic publishing to rapidly increase the ability of scholars to respond to one another's work....TRANSIT unites the academic rigor of the traditional scholarly review process with the benefits of open-access publication. Timely publication and distribution are ensured by the University of California’s eScholarship Digital Information Repository.

Since they were enacted in 1998, the “anticircumvention” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), codified in section 1201 of the Copyright Act, have not been used as Congress envisioned. Congress meant to stop copyright infringers from defeating anti-piracy protections added to copyrighted works and to ban the “black box” devices intended for that purpose. In practice, the anti-circumvention provisions have been used to stifle a wide array of legitimate activities, rather than to stop copyright infringement. As a result, the DMCA has developed into a serious threat to several important public policy priorities:

The DMCA Chills Free Expression and Scientific Research. Experience with section 1201 demonstrates that it is being used to stifle free speech and scientific research. The lawsuit against 2600 magazine, threats against Princeton Professor Edward Felten’s team of researchers, and prosecution of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov have chilled the legitimate activities of journalists, publishers, scientists, students, programmers, and members of the public....Bowing to DMCA liability fears, online service providers and bulletin board operators have begun to censor discussions of copy-protection systems, programmers have removed computer security programs from their websites, and students, scientists and security experts have stopped publishing details of their research....Following the Felten and Sklyarov incidents, a number of prominent computer security experts curtailed their legitimate research activities for fear of potential DMCA liability. For example, when Dutch cryptographer and security systems analyst Niels Ferguson discovered a major security flaw in Intel’s HDCP video encryption system, he declined to publish his results on his website on the grounds that he travels frequently to the U.S. and is fearful of “prosecution and/or liability under the U.S. DMCA law.”...Some foreign scientists have advocated boycotting conferences held in the United States, and some conference organizers have decided to hold events in non-U.S. locations. Russia went so far as to issue a travel advisory to Russian programmers traveling to the United States....Notwithstanding the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press, the district court permanently barred 2600 from publishing, or even linking to, the DeCSS software code. In November 2001, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court decision. In essence, the movie studios effectively obtained a “stop the presses” order banning the publication of truthful information by a news publication concerning a matter of public concern—an unprecedented curtailment of well-established First Amendment principles.

Years of experience with the “anti-circumvention” provisions of the DMCA demonstrate that the statute reaches too far, chilling a wide variety of legitimate activities in ways Congress did not intend. As an increasing number of copyright works are wrapped in technological protection measures, it is likely that the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions will be applied in further unforeseen contexts, hindering the legitimate activities of innovators, researchers, the press, and the public at large.

A key advisory panel to the National Institutes of Heath (NIH) has reaffirmed its continued support for reforms to the NIH Public Access Policy. At its meeting on April 10, the Public Access Working Group (PAWG) – a balanced panel of stakeholders appointed by NIH Director Elias Zerhouni to provide guidance on implementing a successful public access policy – reaffirmed its November 2005 recommendation that the policy be made mandatory and that all NIH-funded works must be made publicly available in PubMed Central within six months of publication. The PAWG’s original recommendation was ratified in January by the National Library of Medicine's Board of Regents, which said in a letter to Dr. Zerhouni, "the NIH policy cannot achieve its stated goals unless deposit of manuscripts becomes mandatory."

"It's becoming quite clear that unless these much-needed changes are made, the board of regents' warning will hold true," said Heather Joseph of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA). "We are very pleased that the PAWG has reaffirmed its original recommendations for a mandatory policy and a maximum six-month embargo period." At the most recent PAWG meeting, representatives of the American Cancer Society, the New England Journal of Medicine, the American Society for Microbiology, and numerous other organizations voiced their continued support for a mandatory policy for NIH-funded investigators, with a six-month cap on withholding articles from public availability in NIH’s PubMed Central online archive.

The issue of public access was emphasized at a recent House Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee hearing at which Congressman Ernest Istook (R-OK) asked Dr. Zerhouni what needed to be done to "stimulate" the NIH policy. In his answer, Dr. Zerhouni conceded that the poor participation rate of less than 4 percent (to date) indicates that "voluntary is just not enough of an incentive."

A campaign by The Guardian newspaper to make public-funded information freely available has uncovered some embarrassing government double standards.  The Free Our Data campaign by the newspaper’s technology supplement is calling for government data held by taxpayer-funded public bodies such as the Ordnance Survey (OS) to be made available to companies and members of the public without charge.  “The aim is simple: to persuade the government to abandon copyright on essential national data, making it freely available to anyone,” said Charles Arthur, editor of Technology Guardian. Arthur said that the current restrictions placed on government information were holding back innovation and limiting the number of information services.  A campaign blog has generated a lively debate, including the revelation by civil servant Chris Hancox that British citizens pay repeatedly for the same OS data when applying for planning permission.  Hancox has revealed a complex web of payments whereby taxpayer funded local government bodies pay for OS map information as part of planning applications, with planning authorities paying again for similar OS map data. In all, eight different payments are made to the OS, according to Hancox.

There has been little response to the campaign from the government. A Cabinet Office spokesperson told IWR that the government welcomed the discussion, but was not reviewing its public sector information policy.  However, an Office of Fair Trading investigation into public sector information is in progress....The Office of Public Sector Information, which is responsible for overseeing re-use of public information, has just widened the click-use licence scheme for public organisations. “Now seemed to be the right time to launch the campaign, especially with Andrew Gowers - the former FT editor - reviewing copyright law,” Arthur told IWR. “This is an important subject. Data is becoming more valuable all the time.”

I’m glad to announce that the Repository UM team at Minho University has finished the development of a new Add-on to DSpace, that we called “Request Copy” (but others may call “Request Eprint” or “Email Eprint”, etc.). This first version of the Add-on (see description below) is available [here]. As we plan to release a new version...in the coming weeks, we will welcome comments and suggestions from early adopters or testers. Please send your comments and suggestions to: repositorium@sdum.uminho.pt.

What is the DSpace Request Copy Add-on? It was recently suggested by Stevan Harnad that we develop a "request eprint by email" feature for DSpace, similar to one that has recently been implemented in GNU Eprints for deposits whose full-text access privileges are set to Restricted Access (RA) rather than Open Access (OA), in order to tide over any RA period with facilitated email access. The Request Copy Add-on is this feature developed for DSpace 1.3.2. The purpose of this feature is to increase both the content deposited in Institutional Repositories (IRs) and its immediate usability by providing a way to accommodate the (frequently unfounded) worries of authors and their institutions about copyright infringement during any publisher embargo periods on public self-archiving, by creating a semi-automated mechanism whereby would-be users can request and authors can email an individual copy of a full-text deposited with access set as RA. This feature will be very important for advancing OA if universities and other research institutions adopt the Generic Model for an Open-Access Self-Archiving Mandate. In this model, depositing immediately (upon acceptance for publication) is mandatory whereas setting deposit immediately to OA is merely encourages, leaving the decision up to the author.

PS: See my comment on the same innovation in Eprints. I'm delighted that both the leading archiving packages now offer this feature.

In The Access Principle, John Willinsky argues that since the knowledge conveyed in these publications is a public good, access to it should be broadened as far as possible....[Quoting Willinsky:]

In reviewing the case for open access, it makes more sense to focus readers' attention on ways of increasing access, rather than holding to a strict line on whether a journal article, a journal, or a publisher, for that matter, is open or closed. This may set me off somewhat to the margins of the open access movement....So my approach to open access is to hold to an access principle that could be put this way: A commitment to the value and quality of research carries with it a responsibility to extend the circulation of such work as far as possible and ideally to all who are interested in it and all who might profit by it....

However, Willinsky's argument on behalf of the ultimate goal of open access - the free availability of information online - falls short because it fails to weigh the benefits of such access against the costs in terms of other public goods....[His] definition, evidently more focused on a general spirit and direction than on the precise shape of the end result, places Willinsky in stark contrast to others in the open-access movement. These advocates are so dogmatically focused on promoting the purest form of open access that they dismiss any approach that falls short of their ideal. (According to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, research literature should be available free on the Internet, "permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.") Such single-mindedness has fostered an us-versus-them fundamentalism that could undermine the efforts of publishers to make content available according to their individual business and publishing models....

In 2004, a group of nonprofit publishers, including the American Physiological Society, founded the Washington DC Principles Coalition for Free Access to Science to express our commitment to innovative and independent publishing practices and support for the release of journal content on the basis of individual business and publishing needs. Some of these publishers make the electronic version of published articles freely available immediately, and most support making content available within 12 months after print publication. We also participate in efforts such as the Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative to provide access to research literature in the developing world, and we provide patients with access to articles on request....

The more extreme advocates of open access believe that the scientific literature should be free to the reader, but Willinsky recognizes that there is a cost associated with publishing. The question thus becomes how to recover this cost in a way that satisfies the need for access.

Willinsky believes that PLoS Biology, an open-access journal published by the Public Library of Science, has solved this problem. Its authors pay a $1,500 fee to have an article published, but this charge is a fraction of the real cost of publication. The remainder is covered by foundation grants from supporters of open access and by institutional membership fees....It is unlikely, however, that sufficient philanthropy exists to make up the difference between $1,500 and the true cost of publication for the more than 5000 journals indexed by PubMed. Consequently, in a world in which authors pay to publish, most journals will have to ask authors to contribute the full cost of publication, which for many will be more than $3,000....

The NIH asserted that its policy would avert the need for journals to move from subscriptions to "author-pays" publishing. Efforts are now under way, however, to make deposit mandatory within six months and require that grantees deposit the final published copy of their articles....The ready availability of content on PubMed Central could lead to subscription cancellations and accelerate the transition to an author-pays publishing model, the economic implications of which are not adequately evaluated by Willinsky.

A study at Cornell University estimated that author-pays publishing would increase that institution's expenses by $1.5 million annually....Spending some $200 million in support of open access should give Congress pause, particularly since the NIH budget has been cut this year for the first time in 36 years. At a time of shrinking budgets for biomedical research, does it make sense to spend scarce dollars on publication costs instead of on research to develop treatments and cures for disease? Willinsky makes the case for access to research literature as a public good, but the advancement of medical knowledge through research is also a public good. When there is not enough money to go around, the question facing us is this: How should we decide which public good is preferable

Comment. Six quick comments. (1) Frank tries to position Willinsky as a moderate and most other OA advocates as radicals. But we agree about almost everything. In any case, Frank doesn't agree with Willinsky either, say, about PLoS. What Frank is really trying to do is frame the question so that he can dismiss most OA advocates with name calling rather than answer their arguments. (2) I'm not very concerned to preserve my own moderate credentials. For it it's "extreme" to want research literature to be free for readers, as Frank says, then I'm proud to be extreme. Remember we're talking about articles that authors voluntarily publish without expectation of payment and, in most cases, with support from public funding. But for the record I've praised Frank's organization, the DC Principles Coalition, for the kinds of free online access that it supports and only challenged it to go further. I also make it a rule to praise steps toward wider and easier access even if they fall short of open access. (3) No responsible OA advocate has ever said that OA journals were costless to produce. The question is not whether scholarly literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than by charging readers and creating access barriers. (4) There are many reasons to think that the NIH policy will not undermine subscriptions. But if the compliance rate increases significantly, say, because of a mandate, then we don't know what will happen. If medicine is like physics, subscription-journals will thrive alongside high-volume OA archiving. If it's not like physics, subscriptions may suffer. But even in that case, it is justified to put the public interest in public access to publicly-funded research ahead of the interests a private-sector industry. (5) Frank relies on the discredited Cornell calculation, which assumes that all OA journals charge author-side fees and that all fees would be paid by universities. (6) Frank overstates the amount the NIH spends on its public-access policy more than one-hundredfold. In fiscal 2005, the agency spent only $1 million administering the program. Compare that to the $30 million/year that the NIH spends on subsidies to subscription journals like those published by Mr. Frank.

Update. Don't add the weight of the New England Journal of Medicine to Frank's opinion. I've just learned that the NEJM editor in chief, Jeffrey Drazen, in his capacity as a member of the Pubic Access Working Group, has voted to strengthen the NIH policy and make it mandatory.

Microsoft has rolled out Windows Live Academic Search, a targeted search service focused connecting students and researchers with peer-reviewed scholarly information....Although search results are free, users must either have a subscription to a journal or pay on a per-article basis to access the full text of journal articles appearing in search results.  Unlike Google Scholar, which crawls the web for academic content, Windows Live Academic Search works closely with publishers and uses structured feeds to build its index. As such, all content accessed through the service comes directly from a trusted source --namely, the publisher of a scholarly journal.

The new service addresses two needs of the academic community that have traditionally been under-served, according to Danielle Tiedt, general manager of Windows Live Premium Search. Academic users want tools to help them fine tune search results, and are interested in getting more information on a search result before clicking off to specific article.  To address these needs, Windows Live Academic Search includes a number of features not found in traditional web search results. Notably, search results are presented in a split-pane view, with article titles and other information on the left, and a preview pane on the right that displays an abstract from an article when the mouse is hovered over an article title.  Users also have the ability to group and sort results by author, journal, conference and date. There's also citation support for two major bibliographic formats making it easy for a user to quickly compile a list of citations.

Tiedt said that Microsoft is collaborating with Lee Giles and his team at Penn State, who've created a specialized search tool called CiteSeer that I've raved about in the past. Windows Live Academic Search borrows a terrific feature from CiteSeer called "author live links" that will automatically connect to the search results of articles associated with a particular author by simply clicking on the hyperlink of the author's name.

The new service also provides support for Microsoft’s recently introduced "macros" tool that allows you to finely tune search results and create RSS feeds that can be used as alerts when new information on a topic or author you’re interested in becomes available....

Microsoft has issued a press release announcing the launch of Microsoft Live Academic Search....Ten CrossRef member publishers are participating in the beta service and CrossRef is providing metadata and DOIs from these ten publishers (however, Microsoft is indexing the full text directly with the publishers). In addition, CrossRef coordinated setting the standard terms and conditions for publisher participation. The long term goal is to open participation in the service to all CrossRef member publishers on standard terms and conditions. In the short term, Microsoft will be adding publishers and content in stages based on subject areas. CrossRef will provide more information about this soon.

Microsoft is introducing a new search tool today that will help people find scholarly articles online. The service, which will include journal articles from prominent academic societies and publishers, puts Microsoft in direct competition with Google, which offers a similar service called Google Scholar. The new free search tool, which should work on most browsers, is called Windows Live Academic Search. For now, it includes eight million articles from only a few disciplines -- computer science, electrical engineering, and physics. "We will be expanding this over time to cover all the areas where there are scientific journals," said Danielle Tiedt, general manager of content acquisition for Microsoft. "We started in the place where there is the most highly structured metadata, which is these three hard-sciences areas."

People at Microsoft and at other technology companies, such as Google, have seen academic searches as an increasingly valuable sector. Some at Microsoft have estimated that the academic-search business could be worth $10-billion by 2010, although Ms. Tiedt said that others cite figures both higher and lower. Ms. Tiedt pointed out that academic users perform six times as many searches as other people. "Obviously, getting the power searchers is important to us," she said, adding that an academic-search tool fits into Microsoft's strategy to court the academic community generally. Despite the potential for making money off power searchers, Ms. Tiedt said that there is currently no business model for Microsoft's academic-search tool. "For us this is really a loyalty game," she said. "We're putting this product out to try to get a lot of loyalty in the [academic] community."...

The scholarly organizations that have signed up to work with Microsoft on the new search tool include societies like the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, and the Institute of Physics. Also cooperating are major publishers -- such as the Taylor & Francis Group, Blackwell Publishing, Elsevier, the Nature Publishing Group, and John Wiley & Sons -- and library organizations, including the British Library and OCLC Online Computer Library Center....

This article presents the Open Access publishing experience of researchers in an academic research institution, in a developing country, Trinidad and Tobago, namely at the University of the West Indies (UWI) St. Augustine Campus. It considers UWI researchers' knowledge of Open Access, their access to the scholarly literature, Open Access Archives/Repositories at UWI and related issues of Research and Library funding and Information Communication Technology (ICT) Infrastructure/ Internet connectivity. The article concludes that whilst Open Access publishing yields some obvious and well-documented benefits for developing country researchers, including free access to research articles and increased impact and visibility of "published" Open Access articles, there are some disincentives that militate against developing country researchers fully contributing to the global body of knowledge via Open Access. It finds that Open Access Journals are beneficial for scholars who consume information but are of little benefit for developing country scholars wanting to publish in these journals because of the high cost of page charges. Inadequate and unreliable ICT infrastructure and Internet connectivity also often limit access to information. It concludes that because of technical, financial, human and infrastructural limitations, Open Access via the Green Road of self-archiving is also often not an option for developing country researchers. These researchers are therefore unable to reap the real benefits, of making their research Open Access, that of increased impact and visibility. This study is to develop and evaluate methods and instruments for assessing the usability of digital libraries. It discusses the dimensions of usability, what methods have been applied in evaluating usability of digital libraries, their applicability, and criteria. It is found in the study that there exists an interlocking relationship among effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. It provides operational criteria for effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction, and learnability. It discovers users' criteria on "ease of use," "organization of information," "terminology and labeling," "visual attractiveness," and "mistake recovery." Common causes of "user lostness" were found. "Click cost" was examined.

Comment. The authors are apparently unaware that the majority of OA journals do not charge author-side fees, and that the percentage in developing countries approaches 100%. Their skepticism about the green road in developing countries is thoroughly rebutted by Leslie Chan, Barbara Kirsop, and Subbiah Arunachalam, Open Access Archiving: the fast track to building research capacity in developing countries, SciDev.Net, 2005.

Fully open access scientific journals will not exist until the full review process is made available to the readership and reviewers are identified.

Comment. I must disagree. If open forms of peer review are better than closed forms (on which I have no opinion), then by all means adopt them ASAP. But do not confuse removing access barriers with reforming peer review. These are independent projects. OA is a kind of access, not a kind of quality control. It's compatible with every kind of peer review, from the most conservative to the most innovative. Tying OA to just one model of peer review doubles the difficulty of persuading institutions to endorse OA.

It is tempting to think that references to "open content" have a meaning similar to those for "open source". It is equally tempting to want to make use of 'open content' in an open source project. Do not yield to temptation! [The term] Open content...is used to refer to a broad range of licensing schemes, including Creative Commons (CC) and AESharenet, which are overwhelmingly open source incompatible. Using "open content" in an open source project is, in most cases, likely to result in the project ceasing to be open source because of licence restrictions on the content. The most popular of these restrictions is the so called "noncommercial" restriction of the CC licences - a discriminatory provision which is anathema to the open source definition. Unfortunately there are other more subtle problems which may render even apparently unobjectionable CC licences - such as BY (Attribution) and BY-SA (Share Alike) - open source incompatible....Knowing that something is "open content", or even "Creative Commons" does not assist in determining whether the content can be used in an open source project.

Quick notes on this beta release. Like all things search, it's going to be some time before we know just what type of product this will really be.

1) Academic Live contains material direct from publishers (how much of each journal in the database is available via the service is unknown) coupled with some material from OAI-compliant repositories. What are the plans for articles that are available via a publisher and on the open web. Will preprints, uncorrected versions, etc. be marked?

2) Kudos to MS for providing a journal list (GS [Google Scholar] doesn't offer one and we've asked several times). However, for a journal list to be really useful we need to no more than the title. What issues/volumes of the publication are in the index?

3) No information about how often the database is updated. Hourly? Daily? Weekly? Monthly?

4) Preview pane to view abstracts on results page. Good idea. Saves clicks and user time.

4) At launch MS Academic Search ONLY contains material in three disciplines: Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Physics....

Academic Live documentation mentions that Citeseer content is included in the database. One big difference however, Citeseer offers citation searching and Academic Live doesn't at the present time. Citeseer also offers acknowledgment searching, Academic Live does not. Citeseer also offers many other features (document conversion, caching, direct links to the authors home page....

5) Microsoft says they are "not ready" to offer a "detailed timeline" when content from other disciplines will be available. OK, that's fine but how about a rough outline? When can we look for something new? Will new content be added during this version of the beta?

6) Material from OAI compliant repositories will be included. At launch, material from ArXiv.org is in the database.

7) Fast Facts and Questions:
+ No advertising on results pages. What is MS's business plan for the product? Do they have any plans to make this a revenue generator? If so, how? Will content from the MS Live Book Search be included in the database in future releases?
+ Open URL is available via vendors. "In a subsequent release, we will add in the functionality for the user to choose his/her affiliation from a list of institutions."
+ No advanced search functionality in this release however results pages allow the user to sort results (via a pull-down), "by author of paper, journal, conference, date published or releance [sic]."
+ Get article info by hovering over title on a results page.
+ Keyword-based RSS feeds available. Good idea. Question. What will trigger a new article? Your keywords and those words in the Title? Author Field? Abstract? Full-Text?

8) From SearchDay, "The beta service is available in English versions in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Australia. Additional markets, and content in additional subject areas will be added throughout the beta period."

8) From the FAQ for Librarians, "which, in turn, will increase your libraries' value to your members." Excellent point but come on Microsoft. If you're going to write a document for the librarian how about using terminology that librarians use. While it's true that some libraries offer memberships, we've rarely heard of library patrons/users/remote users/visitors referred to a members.

9) Confusing. We've seen several articles quoting MS officials saying that material comes only from peer-reviewed journals. Also, note this banner from a results page. However, documentation also points out (see the home page) that material also comes from repositories like ArXiv.org with more repositories on the way. For example, note the citation in this screen cap. It doesn't list a journal and the article itself sits on a server at San Jose State. It's also not a peer-reviewed article. We're have no issues with this type of content being included but the documentation needs to be clearer about what is available.

[The launch of Microsoft Academic Search marks] the beginning of a fierce battle for control of billions of dollars, and the future of the info-economy.

Hyperbole, you say. Major academic abstracting and indexing (A&I) services are sitting up and taking notice since Microsoft's announcement....The implications of two or more free academic search engines are considerable, and could easily destablize the traditional A&I vendors such as Dialog, OVID, EBSCO and even Web of Science.

Why are they taking notice now, you ask? First, most academics start their research - somewhere. And that somewhere is on the open Web. The open web (for its supposed limitations for scholars) is a rich, dynamic environment of intellectual capital. Increasingly, peer-reviewed content is being made open access, or at least partly viewable, for those who seek to uncover it. Browsing is how academics do their research, and whose information seeking behaviours have always included "seeing what’s just come in" on the new booktruck. Now, scholars have the Web, too, and two academic search tools to leverage for wayfinding.

Will commercial vendors be affected by the rise of search titans Microsoft and Google, Yahoo and Ask? Most likely. We've seen destablization in the for-profit publishing area due to open access; search vendors will be thrown into a very unstable and potentially precarious situation, for a time. Smaller colleges and libraries will not be as inclined to buy their tools, opting instead for ease of use and access to the free tools. The humanities indexes will fare better than the science ones, at least in the short term.

My recommendation to the vendors: 1) make parts of your search tools free; 2) offer free, brief bibliographic data; 3) build products to include open access content; and 4) bring much-needed valued-added aspects to your tools by indexing free content - as in indexing and controlled vocabs....Your survival - and the future of academic research - depends on it.

Windows Live Academic is now in beta. We currently index content related to computer science, physics, electrical engineering, and related subject areas. Academic search enables you to search for peer reviewed journal articles contained in journal publisher portals and on the web in locations like citeseer.

Academic search works with libraries and institutions to search and provide access to subscription content for their members. Access restricted resources include subscription services or premium peer-reviewed journals. You may be able to access restricted content through your library or institution.

We have built several features designed to help you rapidly find the content you are searching for including abstract previews via our preview pane, sort and group by capability, and citation export. We invite you to try us out - and share your feedback with us....

Frequently Asked Questions

Why don't you have content from all fields?

Academic search has launched in a beta version so we can receive feedback from our users - ultimately allowing us to introduce a product that will provide the best possible user experience. We understand that for researchers to have a productive search experience, they need to search a comprehensive index in their field of study. Therefore, we decided to launch our beta version with journal content from Computer Science, Engineering (mostly electrical and electronics), and a good selection of Physics journals. We believe that our deep index in these chosen fields will serve the needs of our users well, so they can give us the feedback we need to improve the search experience. After launch, we will add content in phases from more subject areas. Our goal is to have the most comprehensive, largest academic index possible.

How do you determine relevance? Are you using citation counts in the relevance ranking?

We are determining relevance based on the following two areas, as determined by a Microsoft algorithm: [1] Quality of match of the search term with the content of the paper, [2] Authoritativeness of the paper. Currently, we are not using citation count as a factor in determining relevance. Among the many reasons that led us to this decision was the fact that we wanted to have an accurate and credible citation count to be used in the relevance ranking. User trust of the relevance ranking algorithm requires a very credible, trusted citation count, and we will revisit the inclusion of Microsoft derived citation count in the relevance ranking algorithm at a later date as our technology improves further....

What about open source repositories? Do you have content from them in your index?

Academic search has implemented the Open Architecture [sic] Initiative (OAI) protocol for indexing OAI-compliant repositories. For example, we indexed the content present in ArXiv.org for the launch. We will continue to index more repositories after the launch....

Have you implemented OpenURL?

Yes. We have implemented functionality that utilizes the OpenURL standard. You will be able to click on the link to your library Open URL resolver to determine the availability of full text access....

What is your commitment to improving this product?

Microsoft believes that the academic community is of high importance. We have several initiatives where we are working with and helping to address the needs of the academic community. Consistent with this practice, we are committed to continuing to invest in improving Academic search.

Also see Microsoft's press release (4/11/06) and the growing news coverage.