Open Access News

Since World War II, we have seen a proliferation of scholarly materials. In particular, there has been a tremendous growth in the size and cost of the primary journal literature. With prices continuing to rise at a rate greater than the general price index, the current scholarly communication system is becoming more and more unaffordable. The rise in the cost of serial subscriptions has forced academic libraries over the last several decades to cancel existing serial titles, add fewer and fewer new serial titles, and buy fewer and fewer books. In is apparent, that the crisis in the scholarly communication system not only threatens the well being of libraries, but also it threatens our academic faculty’s ability to do world-class research. With current technologies, we now have, for the first time in history, the tools necessary to effect change ourselves. We must do everything in our power to change the current scholarly communication system and promote open access to scholarly articles.

PS: Most of the sections are well-done and I commend Haschak for his work. But I have a few nits to pick. He includes my Guide, which I stopped updating in mid-2004 (conspicuously declared on the front page), and BMC's Open Access Now, which ceased publication in late 2004. On the other side, he excludes Open Access News, which I update every day, even though he has a section devoted to blogs and news.

Dr. Jurgen Renn (Max Planck Gesellschaft, MPG) gave his opening address on behalf of the MPG President Peter Gruss. He reflected on the current scientific journal, the MPG’s role and attitudes towards the current academic publishing process. Costs for the dissemination of scientific information have become research costs. He saw “open access” as a paradigm shift (of the order of Internet and the Web) and contrasted it with “toll access” currently practised by publishers. New media haven’t been optimally used by academic publishers, and examples of systems developed and run by scientists themselves were suggested as alternatives. He stressed that people need to look for new models. If we keep mapping existing structures to a new medium, we will create and not cross boundaries. Dr. Renn stressed that “open access” is not directed against publishers but is rather a transformation process towards a better infrastructure which publishers can also exploit. The development of “open access” should focus on long-term preservation and quality control....

Vitek Tracz (Chairman of the Science Navigation Group) had his address read by Dr. Matthew Cockerill: it started out by stressing the necessity of academic publishers to reinvent themselves. Offering added value has to become the focal point. In order to do this, standardisation will be necessary. The new generation of Internet companies like Skype, eBay, etc. illustrate that information can float freely while you can exploit higher level services. It has to become recognised that paper-based and the emulation of paper-based publications are not the future. Knowledge structuring, tools for knowledge evaluation, collective knowledge of communities, semantic enrichment, mining tools, were all seen as fair game for the future publisher....

Dr. Johannes Fournier (Deutsches Forschungs Gemeinschaft -DFG, representing Dr. Gudrun Gersmann, Library Committee of DFG) explained, that this Committee has increased its mandate to include research information and the building of digital research resources. It is part of the mission of DFG to supply the necessary German and international information to German scientists, and during the past years an amount of 27M Euro has been spent on national licences. Open access was seen as a way to reduce the costs for information. Scientists will determine the future developments of academic publishing: electronic publishing is only a part of the general changes in the research area. DFG will assist in the establishment of new publishing organisations, but can only supply initial funding and not maintenance. The speaker saw collaboration with publishers necessary and desirable. Freely available information could form a basis to be used by publishers, and sold at their own risk to a broader public.

Dr. Matthew Cockerill (Publisher, BioMedCentral Ltd., London) presented his company’s route to become a profitable enterprise. This would be based on open access to its publications – whereby the authors or their employers/funding-agencies are required to pay a fee per article published. A fee of around 1000 Euro is seen as adequate at this time, and some 400 institutes, paying for 69% of the currently published articles, are currently supporting the company. 65 funding agencies were recently contacted for a survey, to which 23 so far have responded – mostly favourably. The speaker also mentioned other companies employing the “authors-pay” principle, with comparative prices, and suggested that at a level of 1-2000 Euro per article such efforts could become sustainable....

The general debate in the closing panel was largely driven by the issue of Open Access. The pros and cons in the lively discussion showed a wide spectrum of opinions. The base for the discussion was Dr. Renn’s demand to publishers to allow an open access model. Renn explained that open access is the wish of the customers, the scientists, and that it is the enabler for new form of science. The discussion was continued by Jan Velterop (Springer) who pointed out that it is very easy to make information freely available. Therefore, Velterop claimed, there are no good arguments against open access. In this context, Renn emphasised that not only information is closed up currently, but that publishers invest to close up information. Mathew Cockerill (BioMed Central), supporting Renn’s initial argument, explained that open access is “the only way to allow the full resources of academia to throw that creativity at finding the best ways to discover content and put that content in context”.

Dr. Ian Gibson has written the foreword to Neil Jacobs (ed.), Open Access: Key strategic, technical and economic aspects, Chandos Publishing, forthcoming 2006 [PS: blogged here yesterday].  A scientist and British MP, Ian Gibson's role in the Open Access (OA) movement has been a remarkable one, and he will certainly get the historic credit for having shepherded-through the landmark UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology’s recommendation to mandate OA self-archiving.  Historians and sociologists of science will find it especially interesting that Ian has done what he has done despite the fact that much of his admirable populist rationale for OA will prove to have been completely wide of the functional mark (though perhaps not of the practical, political mark).

In the PostGutenberg Era, OA will be seen clearly to have been a research community objective and a research community benefit, in making research accessible to all researchers who need to use it, not just to those whose institutions can afford the journal in which it happens to have been published (as in the Gutenberg Era). OA may or may not eventually lead to publishing reform, but in and of itself it will become clear that OA was not and would not have been provided by researchers merely or primarily in order to reform publishing, nor in order to make journals more affordable....

The idea that OA is needed in order to break journal publishers' "monopoly" may hence prove to have been one of OA's actual intermediate selling points, in inspiring indignation and action, but it will also prove to have been a specious point.  Missing the mark too is the notion that OA is needed to feed a "hungry" public with the content of peer-reviewed research journals....It is through researchers using, building upon and applying the fruits of research that the general public benefits from OA, not through reading it through for themselves....[N]o researcher's institution anywhere can afford all the journals that could contain articles that any researcher might ever need, and, a fortiori, none can afford all the peer-reviewed journals there are (24K). And this would still be true (please note carefully!) even if all journals were sold at cost (zero profit, hence no point blaming monopolists and price-gougers).

And Ian is even off the mark insofar as "free-riding" is concerned. His own committee's (spot-on) recommendation was that all researchers should be required to self-archive their own published research article output in their own institutional repositories, free for all. Publishers have filled Ian's ears, no doubt, with apocalyptic alarms about the possibility of rival publishers free-riding on and underselling that free content: Utter nonsense, because based on a profound misunderstanding of the Web, of OA itself, and of what comes with the territory:  For if/when all articles are available free for all on the web, it is absurd to imagine that any free-riding rival publisher will be able to sell them, to anyone!...

So let [everyone] keep fighting for (or against) OA on the grounds of journal affordability, public accessibility, or what have you, if they like. Just as long it is Ian's own remedy that the proponents promote: mandated self-archiving in the researcher's own IR.

Imagine if tire manufacturers lobbied against filling potholes so they could sell more tires. Or if private emergency services got local agencies to cut funding for fire departments so people would end up calling private services first. And what if private schools pushed to reduce public school money so more families would flee the public system? Or what if taxicab companies managed to get a rail line placed just far enough from an airport to make public transportation prohibitively inconvenient?...

[T]his one, unfortunately, is true. In 2005, the state of California conducted an experiment. Hoping to make paying taxes easier, it launched a pilot program [called ReadyReturn] for people who were likely to file "simple returns."...Praise for the program [from taxpayers who used it] was generally over-the-top....Soon after ReadyReturn was launched, lobbyists from the tax-preparation industry began to pressure California lawmakers to abandon the innovation. Their opposition was not surprising: If figuring out your taxes were easy, why would anyone bother to hire H&R Block? If the government sends you a completed form, why buy TurboTax? But what is surprising is that their "arguments" are having an effect. In February, the California Republican caucus released a report highlighting its "concerns" about the program - for example, that an effort to make taxes more efficient "violates the proper role of government." Soon thereafter, a Republican state senator introduced a bill to stop the ReadyReturn program.

Inefficiency has become a virtue in government - and not just in California. Last year, the US Senate passed a funding bill with an amendment prohibiting the IRS from developing its own "income tax electronic filing or preparation products or services."...[I]ncreasingly, the [Republican] party - as conservative columnist Bruce Bartlett says of George Bush in his book, Impostor - is "incapable of telling the difference between being pro-business and being for the free market." It favors specific competitors rather than favoring competition....Such pro-business and anti-efficiency policies will continue to prevail until someone in our political system begins to articulate principles on the other side....Free markets aren't pro-business - they don't favor incumbent companies if upstarts do the job better. Competition is good wherever it comes from - even the government - so long as it lowers social costs and increases wealth. And efficiency is good regardless of who it might hurt; it is especially good if it hurts those who feed off inefficiency. Thus, lawyers are good, but a world that needed fewer of them would be much better. Doctors are great, but that's no argument against better health. And TurboTax is fantastic, but it shouldn't prevent the government from making paying taxes easier.

Update. Stevan Harnad also liked this Lessig column. Here's the way he draws the conclusion for OA: "Distributed institutions [like universities] have the advantage of not being fixed lobbying targets, the way governments are....[U]nlike governments, the world-wide network of universities and research institutions need not heed the lobby from interests vested in preserving the restricted-access status quo at the cost of needless research access-denial and impact-loss to research, researchers, their institutions, and the public that funds them. They can mandate immediate self-archiving immediately."

As part of the Third Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication: Beyond Declarations - The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication held in Lund, Sweden, the Wellcome Trust was presented with the first SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications.

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) Europe initiated the Award to recognise the work of an individual or group within Europe that has made significant advances in our understanding of the issues surrounding scholarly communications and/or in developing practical means to address the problems with the current systems. In making the Award to the Trust the judging panel noted the Trust’s truly groundbreaking work in scholarly communication, from the commissioning of incisive research into the market, through to the formulation and implementation of clear policy in support of the widest dissemination of the research outputs funded by the Trust.

Dr Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust said ‘We are very honoured to receive this award from SPARC Europe which recognises our activities in the promotion of the ‘open-access’ model of science publishing. Ensuring that the outputs of research are freely available and shared as widely and as rapidly as possible is vital in order to facilitate the translation of research into practical improvements in health.’

Dr Bas Savenije, Chair of the SPARC Europe Board, praised the Wellcome Trust’s ‘major contribution in implementing strategies for open access towards the widespread availability of research. They have shown the way for funding bodies and we hope that others internationally will emulate them.’

Following the success of the first Award, SPARC Europe has decided to make this an annual event and it is expected that the second Award will be presented at the CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communications (OAI5) to be held in Geneva in 2007.

The reasons for the University of Southampton’s extremely high overall web-metric rating are four:

(1) U. Southampton's university-wide research performance

(2) U. Southampton's Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) Department's involvement in many high-profile web projects and activities (among them the semantic web work of the web's inventor, ECS Prof. Tim Berners-Lee, the Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) work of Prof. Nigel Shadbolt, and the pioneering web science contributions of Prof. Wendy Hall)

(3) The fact that since 2001 U. Southampton's ECS has had a mandate requiring that all of its research output be made Open Access on the web by depositing it in the ECS EPrints Repository, and that Southampton has a university-wide self-archiving policy (soon to become a mandate) too

(4) The fact that maximising access to research (by self-archiving it free for all on the web) maximises research usage and impact (and hence web impact). This all makes for an extremely strong Southampton web presence, as reflected in such metrics as the "G factor", which places Southampton 3rd in the UK and 25th among the world's top 300 universities or Webometrics,which places Southampton 6th in UK, 9th in Europe, and 80th among the top 3000 universities it indexes.

Abstract: In this chapter Alma Swan draws from the surveys undertaken by Key Perspectives Ltd into researchers attitudes toward open access. She describes the context in which researchers work, and how this leads to them valuing (or not) the potential of open access. Based on this evidence, she outlines a range of practical moves that can be made to configure open access as a solution to researchers’ very real needs and concerns.

Free textbooks. No, it’s not too good to be true. Ever since a St. Paul-based internet company began offering downloadable textbooks that contain advertisements, the concept of kicking costly textbooks to the curb seems within reach. Freeload Press offers about 20 accounting and finance textbooks, study guides and worksheets, which can be downloaded from the company’s Web site, freeloadpress.com, as free Adobe PDF files. Tom Doran, founder and CEO of Freeload Press, said the company came out with its first textbooks for class use this academic year. While no MSU professors currently use online textbooks in their curriculum, Doran said several MSU students have discovered the site on their own and downloaded textbooks. “[Students] love it,” Doran said. “We’re getting rave reviews. I’ve been in publishing for 25 years and I’ve never seen anything like it. Not only do we look pretty good in the students’ eyes, but so do the instructors.” Advertisements in the textbooks, which include fast food restaurants and photocopying services, are limited to 50 ads per 600-page textbook. Doran said the placement of the ads is “really subtle,” as they are embedded in the text in what he calls “study breaks” at the end of chapters.

Dr M S Randhawa Library of Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) has decided to digitize all the available data in dissertations abstracts, research reports and research articles on CD archives. The digital data will also be put online shortly for easy and quick access....The library has the largest collection of agricultural books and periodicals in the region, numbering over three lakh.

While the eighties of the last century were a time of local automation for libraries and the nineties the decade in which libraries embraced the internet and the WWW, now is the age in which the big search engines and institutional repositories are gaining a firm footing. This heralds a new era in both the evolution of scholarly communication and its agencies themselves, i.e. the libraries. Until now libraries and publishers have developed a digital variant of existing processes and products, i.e. catalogues posted on the Web, scanned copies of articles, e-mail notification about acquisitions or expired lending periods, or traditional journals in a digital jacket. However, the new OAI repositories and services based upon them have given rise to entirely new processes and products, libraries transforming themselves into partners in setting up virtual learning environments, building an institution’s digital showcase, maintaining academics’ personal websites, designing refereed portals and – further into the future – taking part in organising virtual research environments or collaboratories. Libraries are set to metamorphose into ‘libratories’, an imaginary word to express their combined functions of library, repository and collaboratory. In such environments scholarly communication will be liberated from its current copyright bridle while its coverage will be both broader - including primary data, audiovisuals and dynamic models - and deeper, with cross-disciplinary analyses of methodologies and applications of instruments. Universities will make it compulsory to store in their institutional repositories the results of research conducted within their walls for purposes of academic reporting, review committees, and other modes of clarification and explanation. Big search engines will provide access to this profusion of information and organise its mass customisation.

PS: The same issue of LQ contains a report by Raf Dekeyser on The LIBER Workshops on the “Open Archives Initiative” at CERN, Geneva. But it doesn't even have a free abstract online, or not so far.

Update. Waaijers published the same paper in the December 2005 issue of First Monday. (Thanks to Kimmo Kuusela for pointing this out.) I don't know the explanation.

Purdue Libraries and Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP) are collaborating on an initiative that includes innovative software developed on campus to help researchers store, sort, archive, retrieve and manage large-scale data and information. The Distributed Institutional Repository is a Web-based data portal that provides tools and systems to manipulate large data sets and to help users understand the origins of data and learn about additional research applications using the same data. "The DIR is an architecture Purdue Libraries developed which utilizes a unique approach to pulling access together from a number of distributed repositories," said Scott Brandt, professor of library science and associate dean for research for Purdue Libraries.

Most institutional repositories use a single system within a single software environment. In addition to data repositories built by ITaP and the Libraries, the DIR will access a wide variety of information systems, including electronic dissertations e-prints and archival special collections...."The Libraries have always supported research through building and organizing collections," Brandt said. "With a distributed repository, we hope to enhance discovery and use of data across campus."

An institutional repository is necessary to meet the growing need to house massive amounts of data and to make it usable for users across the academic environment, Brandt said....Purdue added its own twist through software developed by Michael Witt, senior research systems administrator for Purdue Libraries, that can interface between SRB [Storage Resource Broker] and standard OAI-PMH software (open archives initiative-protocol for metadata harvesting), which allows repositories to talk to each other...."We need to be able to access this data wherever it resides," Brandt said. "This gives us different ways to test that access and discovery." Part of the overall initiative is to work with Purdue's Cyber Center to address issues related to interoperability of data -- representing and combining data in new ways to generate knowledge. In addition to providing a home for researchers' massive data sets, the repository project also will spur decisions about data-rights management, sharing of intellectual property and length and format of data archival storage.

The DIR developers are giving a public talk about it at Purdue on May 2.

The era of open access is dawning and it could not come a moment too soon. The rapid development of the internet and its increased use across the globe has meant that there is a wide and growing audience that is hungry and in some cases, desperately in need of information that traditionally few have been able to access.

The idea of open access is highly controversial and divisive. If one were to politely mumble the phrase at a dull gathering of academics, publishers and policy makers, one would be sure to instantly divide the room and instigate a heated debate. This book is therefore an important introduction for those who know nothing of a debate that has been raging in academic circles for a long time. And for those with seemingly entrenched positions, this book will most certainly change some minds.

In science, my own area of expertise, the issue of open access has been making troublesome waves in the last few years. The 2004 House of Commons Science and Technology Committee inquiry 'Scientific Publications: free for all?' which I chaired, looked into a number of issues; such as whether the market for scientific publications was working well, the trends in journal pricing, the impact of new publishing trends on the scientific process, the integrity of journals and so on. What we found was not pleasant.

The commercial publishing world has an increasingly harmful monopoly on a number of prestige journals which are essential to disseminating new ideas and research. This monopoly over knowledge has been one factor underlying an increase in the price of subscriptions, leaving some academic libraries with no choice but to cancel subscriptions as they can no longer afford to pay for a full range of journals.

I believe the current situation is highly unethical. As vast amounts of public money is used to fund research, it should follow that such research should be freely available to the public to boost up their knowledge and appreciation of science, instead of increasing the profit margins of a few publishing houses. One therefore would be hard pressed to deny the ethical case for open access. Indeed one only has to think of the need to make new research readily available to developing countries which do not have the resources to purchase such information and yet face some of the world's most devastating problems.

However, better ethical conduct is only one of the many objectives of the open access project as this excellent collection of essays will show. I do not deny that there are legitimate fears about the implications of open access. It is one thing to make information readily available for the public who through taxation fund such research, and developing countries who need access to life-saving ideas; but it is quite another matter to make knowledge available for those who will free ride their way through improved access to profit themselves. But these are problems I believe can be overcome with a bit of creativity as some of the authors in this collection show. Turn the page and start reading.

EPrints repositories can be part of the Semantic Web in a real and practical way thanks to Nature Publishing Group and its free Connotea online reference management service. This service enables users to publicly bookmark and tag articles from within EPrints repositories with remarkable potential to expand the visibility and findability of those articles....Here is how it works, and our take for those responsible for managing EPrints repositories.

When journal readers, say, find an article they want to cite they have to record in a conventional reference form at all the metadata necessary to identify and locate that item. If that article is online the user can create a bookmark, although that simply records the URL...Further, that bookmark is stored in the user's browser and is not shared with other potential readers of the article. Connotea formalises the bookmark as a reference and can share the data publicly. To do this it needs to identify information about the article - its author, title, etc. - and to identify the source data....Connotea can do this for a number of journals, and now it can do the same for any EPrints repository using its OAI-PMH interface. Connotea has discovered this information for some EPrints repositories. To learn more and see if your repository is included, and to find out what to do if it isn't, go to http://www.connotea.org/news#2006-01-31 ...

The potential for overlaying the Semantic Web on the cited content in repositories and improving the findability of this content arises from another feature of the service: tagging. As well as producing a citable reference, the user can supplement the reference with keywords that describe the referenced item. Librarians, indexers and cataloguers have long done this. So have authors of online pages, by virtue of Web links. The power of indexing is here massively extended by enabling all users to become indexers by tagging cited articles with keywords....Supplied with this information the Connotea database can make all sorts of connections between articles and present these as links. Serendipity never had it so good!...

Tagging and bookmarking can now be applied within EPrints....To provide this interface for your users all you have to do is download and install the TaggingTool code to your EPrints repository, which can be located from this description....

We know that findability is enhanced by exposing data to Web search services, also that on average open access increases the citation impact of papers. Now we have a different type of citation service - Connotea bookmarking - allied to tagging. Repositories based on EPrints are uniquely able to take advantage of all three means of enhancing retrieval and citation of their papers. Don't let anyone tell you that content in repositories is less easy to find than sources indexed in more formal current awareness services. For open access content in EPrints repositories the opposite is fast becoming the case.

To get new information to the right people at the right time requires knowledge producers to break down many different barriers. The barriers to the flow of information are not just geographic. A fissure can be found between universities and private companies, which tacitly means between scientific knowledge and product knowledge....Knowledge becomes significant only when it is expressed in practical terms, such as product development and other applications. However, information becomes knowledge and applicable only when built upon the ever-growing body of basic knowledge, which is discovered in the academic inquiry of the university. To achieve such a complementary fusion of knowledge, those interested in the creation and application of knowledge need to find ways to scale the fences that might separate them. Such fences involve the languages (both cultural and terminological) of the fields of expertise, the different social rules and forms of expression between and within organizations, a lack of trust, and varying goals and interests, to name a few, which create barriers to effective communication and the quality use of knowledge. One possible means of bridging the gap between these distinct cultures is through open access scientific publishing.

Open access journals make knowledge and discovery freely available for those who need it. As search technologies gradually improve, knowledge seekers shall undoubtedly find it much easier to surface the pieces of knowledge needed from among a great variety of available information. Open access journals allow those who seek information to find those whose prior seeking has resulted in new perspectives, new data, new knowledge. For this reason alone open access journals are an essential part of communicating about scientific research findings and knowledge. And it seems that open access publishing is an especially natural way for university research to be distributed for the greater good. The salaries paid to university researchers normally come from public money, by extension from the taxpayers. Ethically, it seems a good principle that knowledge generated through the support of the general public should be equally available and, perhaps beneficial, to all the members of society....

If universities keep the new knowledge behind their walls or offer limited access to it, then they have overlooked their duties to society. And if government officials, who make decisions regarding university funding for research and dispersal of research knowledge, do not see that new scientific innovations must be easily and effectively offered for the use of society, then the barriers to innovative use of new ideas slow down the availability of knowledge to those who need it and who have paid through their taxes to create it. The time seems right to give up the old images and practices regarding research, knowledge, and innovation. Open access publishing makes it possible, but also necessary, to look at the role of basic knowledge within society and the roles of university research in the webs of innovation management in a new way.

Instead of the publicly perceived definition of DRM ? mainly as a measure used by publishers to restrict access and control usages ? Mark Bide (Rightscom) pleaded for an understanding of DRM as an essential element of a trustworthy network computing environment. He also suggested talking about “Digital Policy Management” instead of Digital Rights Management, since not all digital policies are based on intellectual property rights. In his view, Digital Policy Management is about defining, describing, communicating and enforcing policies, which control access to and use of networked resources. This would be needed unless one would believe that all networked resources should be available for anyone to do anything they want. Thus, Digital Policy Management will be fundamental for the trusted identity of resources, people and organisations, and for the certainty in defining ways in which resources may be used. He saw this necessity for the future management of the network even in an era of “open everything” including open access, open archives etc....

In public debates the terms ‘DRM’ and ‘open access’ are often treated as oppo-site models of scientific publishing. In the following, however, the question is raised what role DRM can play in Open Access publishing models. One opinion on the careful and limited use of DRM in Open Access models was brought in by Ulrich Pöschl from the Max-Planck Institute for Chemistry and from the Open Access journal ‘Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics’. From his perspective (mainly as a researcher), DRM for scientific publications especially from publicly-funded research can be desirable and acceptable only to a very limited extent, for instance, to assure authenticity as well as correct referencing of documents and sources of information. He warned that, by no means, the successful and future development of Open Access should be inhibited by DRM....

Furthermore, in discussions of the workshop another DRM application in open access was mentioned: in ‘green road’ models of open access authors can choose the open access condition for single articles. Thus, it is no longer possible to use common licensing agreements for the whole journal, but the licensing and use rights has to be specified for individual articles. Therefore, there could be a need to attach rights information to single documents, what is understood here as digital rights management....

To mitigate the [many problems caused by DRM, Manon Rees from] CPTech propose[d] the registration of DRM systems and TPMs before their implementation in practice. Within registration it should be checked if DRMs meet with public standards such as regarding to the ex-haustion of copyright protection, enabling private copying or archiving. DRMs should not be protected by law from circumvention unless they meet public standards.

Another issue explored during Professor Zittrain’s lecture, was the potential of the Internet for scholars and students around the world. He argued: ‘Universities should encourage or even require their faculties to publish in open access journals and to publish working papers ahead of final drafts, so that their work is not locked up by some journal copyrights which are increasingly testing the budgets of libraries who wish to subscribe.’

Comment. I applaud Zittrain for endorsing OA in his inaugural lecture. However, universities should require deposit in OA repositories not publication in OA journals (although they should encourage publication OA journals). (1) There aren't enough OA journals today and there won't be for some time. OA journals can easily grow in size but cannot as easily grow in number or scope. (2) Even when there are enough OA journals and they cover every research niche, a requirement to publish in OA journals would limit the freedom of authors to publish in the journals of their choice. (3) If the goal is OA, then universities needn't steer faculty away from subscription journals, at least when these journals consent to the OA archiving of peer-reviewed postprints, as about 70% of them do today. By contrast, (4) OA repositories are available today; (5) they scale quickly and easily; (6) they are compatible with the survival of conventional journals; and (7) they are compatible with author freedom to submit their work wherever they like. These are the reasons why all the OA mandates by funding agencies (public and private) focus on OA repositories, not OA journals.

Welch Professor of Computer Science Stuart M. Shieber ’81 made a presentation to the Council about reducing the cost of providing scholarly publications in the Harvard libraries. “The [scholars] are doing the writing, the editing, the reviewing, and they’re doing the reading,” Shieber said. “There’s a market failure that has resulted in this system.” Shieber suggested that open-access journals might provide a new option for scholars, although many options are still being discussed. “Printing and distribution in the day of the Internet can be done in a completely different way,” Shieber said. “Access can be done at essentially zero marginal cost to anyone.”

Citizens for Open Access to Civic Information and Data (CivicAccess) is a group of citizens which believes all levels of government should make civic information and data accessible at no cost in open formats to their citizens. We believe this is necessary to allow citizens to fully participate in the democractic process of an "information society."

Objectives: [1] To encourage all levels of governments (county, municipal, provincial, federal) to make civic data and information available to citizens without restrictions, at no cost, and in useable open formats. [2] To encourage the development of citizen projects using civic data and information

If you're interested, join the mailing list.

Few repositories of public sector information contain more political dynamite than those in NHS data sets. This week it was NHS staff numbers; next week it could be surgeons' death rates. Earlier this year, the official custodian of the NHS's data raised eyebrows by announcing a special relationship with a commercial firm. At least one competing business has questioned whether a level playing field is possible under the new arrangement. The case provides an example of the potential conflicts created by the government's policy of earning commercial returns on public sector information - a policy challenged by Guardian Technology's Free Our Data campaign....

Locus, a body set up to represent businesses relying on public sector information, said any exclusive supplier deal was a cause for concern. Richard Pawlyn, the chairman of the Locus Association, said: "This is symptomatic of the lack of clear guidance from government. The Office of Public Sector Information advocates fairness, transparency and common sense, yet other parts of government promote exclusive supplier deals and create new natural monopolies such as this." He said the association would be asking the Office of Fair Trading, which is investigating the market in public sector information, "to get a hold of these anomalies so the private sector can invest with confidence rather than be wrong-footed and excluded".

The University of California at Berkeley is making audio and video recordings of many course lectures available free to anyone -- on campus or off -- through Apple Computer's popular iTunes music store, campus officials announced on Tuesday. The university has already posted lectures from almost 30 courses, including seminars on computer science, psychology, and cyberculture, to the online store. iTunes users can download the lectures individually, or they can subscribe to semester-long podcasts, which transfer new sessions to their MP3 players when they connect those devices to their computers. Berkeley's project is the latest evidence of colleges' growing interest in offering podcasts of course material -- and in using iTunes to deliver those recordings....But Berkeley is unique among those universities distributing through iTunes in making its podcasts free to the public instead of restricting them to students and alumni.

There are a very great many good reasons why researchers and practitioners across many disciplines are enthusiastically embracing the potential of the internet to create, as the Budapest Open Access Initiative describes it, an unprecedented public good: open access to the scholarly literature that was never produced for the creator's profit.  Today, my request is that the American Psychological Association give some thought to the potential of open access to help the helpers.

Many, if not most, of us, are involved in helping relationships at various points in our lives. A few of us have the advantage of professional training and resources to allow us ready access to the scholarly literature, such as the professional clinical psychologist practicing in the research hospital.  A very great many helpers, however, do not have access to these resources. Consider, for example, the social worker in the inner city. Many social workers work long hours, and without much pay. Having to travel to a university, or pay to read research is a real barrier for someone like this. Ready access to the scholarly literature in psychology could make the difference between a practice that is evidence-based, and one that is not. What a difference this can make - for the social worker and clients alike.  Or, what about the parent struggling to understand an autistic child?...How about all of the other caregivers - of family members with dementia, major or minor mental illnesses, or all the volunteers who help the caregivers?  Or, for that matter, the professional health care workers? Picture the doctor, or psychologist in a rural practice - no university library nearby. Couldn't open access make a world of difference to these people?...Or, let's think about all the people involved in various areas of crime and delinquency - our police and correctional officers? Wouldn't ready access to the latest in psychology help to inform their practice - and wouldn't open access be the optimum way to provide this?

If, like me, you believe that the science and art that is psychology truly matters to the world - because what, after all, could be more important than understanding ourselves - surely you will agree that our knowledge of psychology - all of it - should be shared, as openly as possible. There is a time for each discipline and profession to consider its own commitment to open access. Psychologists - it is your turn.

The Society of American Historians, a group that promotes excellence in historical writing, has suspended Smithsonian Books from its ranks in protest over the Smithsonian Institution's "increasingly commercial approach to its mission." The suspension itself will have little impact, but it is the latest symptom of friction between the Smithsonian's top managers and many of the nation's scholars. The latest criticism follows a month of public debate over partnerships the Smithsonian made with commercial businesses and the change in policy about access to its archives. In a resolution passed by the historical group's executive board yesterday, the society raised questions about the deal with Showtime Networks to create a series of 100 programs a year based on the Smithsonian collections and experts. But the historians also raised questions about a second contract, this one a publishing pact with HarperCollins....

In recent weeks, the Smithsonian has come under attack from writers, historians and filmmakers. The primary issue is how much access that researchers and producers not affiliated with Showtime will have to Smithsonian archives and the appearance of "right of first refusal" awarded Showtime for any project that has more than "incidental" use of Smithsonian materials. "The Smithsonian is an institution that involves public money and public trust and is a public archives," said Elizabeth Adkins, president-elect of the Society of American Archivists. "It should follow the general guidelines of equal access. We are distressed." The exact nature of the agreements are secret. The Smithsonian contends they are proprietary and not subject to freedom-of-information laws that require most federal contracts to be available for public inspection. However, a Smithsonian directive states that "the institution follows the intent and spirit of the [FOIA] as a matter of policy."...Last week, about 215 filmmakers and historians asked the Smithsonian to reconsider the deal. Ken Burns, one of the country's best-known documentary filmmakers, called the Showtime terms a mistake. The Society of American Archivists also asked the Smithsonian to reconsider the Showtime arrangement. "We urge the Smithsonian to revisit the agreement and to abandon those portions that limit either access to the archives or distribution of a researcher's final results," said the society's president, Richard Pearce-Moses....The American Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries asked the Smithsonian for a copy of the contract with Showtime. The two organizations argued that the "mission of the Smithsonian militates toward full disclosure of this document." They argued that as a public institution, the Smithsonian had a responsibility to let the taxpayer know about its business dealings. "The public interest in disclosure here is clearly high in light of the unique nature of the agreement and its potential impact on public accessibility of Smithsonian resources," said the organizations in a letter to the Smithsonian.

The UK -- which had the undisputed leadership of the world in setting Open Access policy -- may now be losing that lead, allowing itself instead to get needlessly side-tracked and bogged down in irrelevant diversions and digressions, designed solely to delay the optimal and inevitable (and obvious, and already long overdue).  Peter Suber's comments are spot-on, and say it all. The ball, already fumbled by NIH in the US and perhaps now by the RCUK in the UK too, will now pass to the European Commission and -- more importantly -- to the distributed network of individual universities and other research institutions worldwide. The leaders now are the institutions that have not sat waiting for national funder mandates in order to go ahead and mandate OA self-archiving, but have already gone ahead and mandated it themselves, for their own institutions.

What we should remind ourselves is that if the physics community -- way back in 1991, and the computer science community from even earlier -- had been foolish enough to wait for the outcome of the kind of vague, open-ended study now planned by RCUK with RIN, instead of going ahead and self-archiving their research, we would have lost 500,000 (physics) plus 750,000 (computer science) OA articles'-worth of research access, usage and impact for the past decade and a half.

The Wellcome Trust has had the vision and good sense to go ahead and mandate what had already empirically demonstrated its positive benefits for research with no negative effects on publishing on the basis of 15+ years worth of objective evidence.

The RCUK seems to prefer endless open-ended dithering...

He takes the thread further in second post today on How to test whether mandated self-archiving generates cancellations. Excerpt:

There is always still the possibility of a miracle, which is a formal open statement by RCUK that the RIN study is not going to delay the long-overdue RCUK announcement, that the RCUK policy announcement is imminent and in no way contingent on the outcome of the RIN study....But I doubt that is quite the case, or that RCUK will straight-forwardly say so....[I]n reality, RCUK are being intimidated into commissioning this joint RIN study in the vague hope that it will yield a more credible basis for drawing the unconscionable delay out still longer....

If there were any honest wish to collect objective data on whether a self-archiving mandate will generate cancellations, the only way to collect such data is empirically: By adopting the RCUK self-archiving mandate and then seeing, objectively, whether it does generate any cancellations....

This is all the more unfortunate as the RCUK has been repeatedly advised that there is a simple, natural way to implement the mandate that completely avoids all publisher contingencies, namely, to mandate only the immediate deposit of the full-text, and merely to encourage (not mandate) the setting of access to Open Access, leaving it entirely up to the author....With the deposit mandated immediately upon acceptance in every case, semi-automated eprint-emailing, done voluntarily by each author if/when they choose to, would give OA the real chance it deserves to show its benefits....

No nontrivial empirical outcome can possibly come out of this RIN study on the objective effects of a national mandate when the mandate has not been empirically tested! Hence the best that can be done is to wrap up this non-study as soon as possible and get back to facing the existing empirical facts, which are that (1) self-archiving is highly beneficial in terms of usage and impact, but (2) it is only done spontaneously (unmandated) by 15% of researchers, except (3) in a few subfields -- such as some areas of physics -- where it has been at or near 100% for some time now, and that (4) in those 100% OA subfields it has not led to cancellations, as already attested to publicly by the publishers in question (APS and IOPP).  Or to announce that the RCUK policy is not to be contingent on the outcome of the RIN study, and to go ahead and announce the (long, long overdue) policy at last!

I think the adoption of the ‘non-commercial’ restriction is a big mistake. Removing the restriction would deliver significant gains in terms of greater freedom for reuse, demonstrating a commitment to full ‘openness’, and prevention fragmentation of the ‘commons’. At the same time the downside of doing this would be minimal.

First, a by-sa license is clearly ‘freer’ than a by-sa-nc in that it places fewer restrictions on the use of the work. In general this is a good thing since it means fewer occassions on which people have to /ask permission/. The Open Knowledge Definition following the approach of the F/OSS community prohibits discrimination against fields of endeavour (article eight) including restrictions on commercial use. Just as for open source I think it is important to have commercial users join the community. Furthermore this kind of restriction not only adds further complexity (what exactly counts as ‘commercial’ use?) but also is the basis for the introduction of a whole panopoly of further cases of ’special treatment’ (for developing nations, against military use, etc etc) leading rapidly to a fragmenting of the ‘commons’. I’d therefore go as far as to say that a license which incorporates ‘nc’ type provisions should not be described as ‘open’ and should be avoided wherever possible.

Second is all commercial usage bad? I know someone who made a documentary about Chavez and distributes it for free. At the same time he has received payments when it has aired by commercial tv stations (they often pay even when they don’t need to). This would make his work ‘commercial’ but it seems a far cry from, say, use in a coca-cola advert. Do you really want to prevent that kind of usage? If you do you’ve just cut out most of the main avenues for ’serious’ reuse of your work - ultimately most documentary makers would like to see their stuff get out to as wide an audience as possible and that means broadcast on a commercial network.

Third for the types commercial usage that I imagine you would most object to (e.g. adverts) the share-alike clause should be a sufficient obstacle - the makers of a major ‘brand’ advert probably do not want to have ‘reshare’ their work. They would need to come and relicense from you and at that point you are in the same position as with an nc license.

Update. Rufus has posted a follow-up (May 2, 2006).

One of the biggest challenges for academic librarians is getting faculty to deposit their articles into the university's institutional repository (IR), assuming there is one, of course. There are numerous reasons why faculty don't or won't deposit their articles, and there are numerous strategies, some more effective than others, for convincing them to do so. John Willinsky (UBC professor, and author of The Access Principle) believes the key is to appeal to their ego. Faculty love to see their work widely disseminated, read, praised and cited. It feeds their ego, they're human. But what's the hook? John suggests putting a section on the university website homepage that advertises the IR and the university's research output with a feature called "Faculty Article of the Day" (or week, if daily seems too arduous), with a link to the article in the IR. He claims that many faculty check their institution's homepage regularly to see what's new and which faculty member's work is getting attention. It won't take long before faculty realize that if they want their research featured on the homepage, they'd best find a way to deposit it in the IR. Why not go a step further and add the same feature to the university library homepage? Double-boost those egos, and increase access and exposure while you're at it?

PS: The Dutch take this idea a step further with Cream of Science, which showcases to the whole country --or, actually, the whole world-- the best work on deposit in Dutch OA repositories. The strategy has been very successful both in attracting readers and stimulating deposits.

2. You also mention “non-monetary” incentives. What are those?

There is something of a joke in the very posing of the question on a business site. Nonmonetary motivations are what make you stop on the street for a moment to answer a stranger who asks you for the time or directions; what makes you travel five hundred miles to be with you family for the holidays, and what makes you tell a friend a joke, or listen to it. They are also the motivations that lead some of the world’s leading minds to work for what, by comparison to other lines of business in which they could succeed, is a pittance-to satisfy their curiosity, for fame, or because of the sheer fun.
These are motivations on which all of us act many times a day, but which have been shunted to the periphery of the economy throughout much of the industrial period. What we see now, as the two core inputs into information production have become widely distributed in the population (that is, computation and communications capacity, on the one hand, and human creativity, experience, and wisdom, on the other hand), these same motivations have moved from the domain of the social and personal to occupy a larger role smack in the middle of the most advanced economies in the world today....

5. Can copyright block these open forms of collaboration - how?

Certainly. Copyright blocks access to the inputs into information production that are copyrighted....Annotated books, illustrated editions, updated guide books, so many other things that are much easier to imagine, once one looks at wikipedia or sites like tripadvisor provide a much more immediate sense of how much is lost because of copyright. Now, that doesn’t mean that we should get rid of all of copyright immediately. It is merely to offer an example of how copyright dampens the possibilities of social production, because it increases the costs, and often simply blocks completely, access to the raw material of any information production activity --existing information. More threatening still is not copyright proper, but the steady assault that the copyright industries have been mounting on the free information ecology through statues like the digital Millennium Copyright Act and the efforts to pass a regulatory requirement that all equipment capable of rendering digital media be designed so that it will behave predictably in the hands of its user, and that users will not be able to do things --like implement new pieces of software or copy files-- that might threaten the tightly controlled distribution pipes of copyrighted material. These acts threaten the very foundations of the networked information ecology, because they seek to change the basic instrumentalities of social production and the free and easy flow of information across the network that makes it possible.

6. There is a tricky economic question when it comes to free (as in beer) distribution of media - books, text, music, film - how can, in this environment, artists be remunerated?

I think here the answer is different for different forms of expression. In general, thinking at the broad abstract level of “copyright” and “information” leads to excessive concern with copyright....Much of text publication has long been outside the needs of copyright: --newspapers and magazines have long been based on advertising and attention brokerage, not on copyright. Books are different, and the current solution --which is that people habits of reading books are still allowing free distribution online to be couple with sales may not be long lived....

A pilot service providing subject resource discovery across a variety of digital repositories of interest to the engineering learning and research communities has been released by the JISC-funded PerX project.  Although the repositories included in the pilot are relevant to engineering, the cross-searching methods and interface used, plus the range of repository types included, should be of interest to many as a demonstrator of one method of resource discovery across multiple digital repositories. Twenty-eight repositories are currently cross-searched by the pilot whose basic search interface and advanced search interface enable cross-searching of the repositories, and allow filtering by resource type: articles, theses and dissertations, technical reports, books, learning and teaching resources, key websites, industry news and new job announcements. Overall, more than 1.5 million resources are cross-searched by the pilot service.  Access to the full text of items found is available from many of the repositories. In a few cases, the full items consist of details of books, articles, learning objects or websites, and in some others the full text may be available to subscribing institutions or by pay-per-view.

An important purpose of the PerX pilot is to help scope a possible future cross-search service.  With this in mind, feedback on the Pilot would be much appreciated by project staff. A 60 second survey is available and those providing feedback will be entered into a draw to win £100 of Amazon vouchers.

[O]ne of open education's most critical questions --how can open education's tools and resources demonstrably improve education quality?-- [is] rarely mentioned [at conferences on open education]....The main tenet of open education is to make educational assets freely available to the public. This is becoming easier and less expensive as network and multimedia technology evolves....But several obstacles may stand in the way of using these and other powerful tools and resources in ways that will actually improve the quality of education.

First, although the tools and resources are readily available, transferring practical knowledge about how to use them is not easy. Indeed, this kind of pedagogical know-how is notoriously hard to make visible and portable....[T]he vast majority of this kind of practical kn