Open Access News

There is no doubt that large commercial publishers’ bundles are a substantial part of research library collections. It is also clear that significant changes in library collections are underway. Cancellation projects are common. Shifts to e-only collecting for journal bundles are proceeding rapidly....Nondisclosure agreements are common, although more so with some publishers than others. Long-term contracts are similarly common. Cancellation of bundled titles has been effectively limited in recent years. Publisher’s archiving arrangements are unsatisfactory to at least a substantial minority of the community. Satisfaction with bundle pricing is decreasing through successive negotiations....With the majority of respondents reporting recent cancellation projects, the inescapable conclusion is that other segments of research library collections have been reduced to a greater extent in compensation for the protection afforded to bundles. This should be of concern to the library community and to publishers without the market power to gain similar protection for their titles. A few libraries believe they have [gained ground in renogotiating contracts], but a nearly similar number believe they are losing ground....

This survey focused on research libraries’ perspectives on journal bundles. It in no way measures publishers’ experiences with these business models. Presumably commercial publishers reporting excellent profitability are not pursing a pricing model that is unsuccessful. Rather, it seems safe to conclude, journal bundling has been working quite well from the perspective of the bundling publishers. With libraries reporting relatively little progress in successive contract negotiations, it seems likely that there is room for concessions from publishers that increase library satisfaction without risk of substantial damage to “the bottom line.”

What does the legislation mean for investigators?

If Congress passes the bill into law, the most significant day-to-day effect on investigators will be improved access to research and increased impact for their own work. A growing number of studies demonstrate that research is cited more often when it is openly accessible on the Web....

What does it mean for higher education institutions?

This legislation will mean enhanced access to federally-funded research articles for researchers and students at your institution. Availability of federally funded research in open archives also will expands the worldwide visibility of the research conducted at your institution, increases the impact of your investment in this research, and aids you in examining related work at other institutions that compete for Government grants and contracts.

Because it will improve access to science, the legislation is supported by various national organizations of academic libraries - including the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries, Association of College and Research Libraries, Association of Research Libraries, and SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)....

Is the legislation a threat to journals and the peer review they perform?

No. The Federal Research Public Access Act contains two key provisions that protect journals and the peer review process:

• A delay of up to six months in providing access to articles via the public archive (versus immediate access for journal readers).
• Inclusion in the public archive of the author’s final manuscript rather than the publisher’s formatted, paginated version preferred for citation purposes.

In some disciplines, freely accessible online archives have proven to be a supplement to journal readership, not a replacement for it. In physics, for example, where nearly 100% of new articles are freely available from birth in the arXiv.org open-access archive created more than a decade ago with US Department of Energy funding, subscription-based journals have continued to thrive. The American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics Publishing are unable to identify any subscriptions lost as a result of arXiv in the 14 years of its existence.  Likewise, in a report to Congress on the results of its Public Access Policy, NIH reported that it “has no evidence to indicate that the Policy has had any impact on peer review.”...

Will this legislation take funding away from research?

Not to any material extent. The National Institutes of Health, for example, estimates that the cost of its public access program would be $3.5 million if 100% of the 65,000 eligible manuscripts were deposited annually. That is a tiny fraction (about 0.01%) of the agency’s $28 billion budget. It is also a small fraction of the $30 million per year the agency spends on page charges and other subsidies to subscription-based journals. The reality is that sharing of research results is part of the research process. Faster and wider sharing of research fuels further advances.

The Washington Post article on the bill [FRPAA] quotes Patricia S. Schroeder, president and chief executive of the Association of American Publishers:

It is frustrating that we can’t seem to get across to people how expensive it is to do the peer review, edit these articles and put them into a form everyone can understand

Schroeder is overstating her case. Publishing has costs, but she should not be so misleading. Finding peer reviewers might cost publishers money, but the process itself is provided free of charge by members of the scientific community. Also, what does she mean by putting articles “into a form that everyone can understand”? Do physicists not understand papers on the arXiv because they are missing the publisher’s input? Do non-experts understand papers published in Physical Review Letters because of the great formatting?

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Cambridge is heading a £11.4 million infrastructure project to provide the scientific community with free and unrestricted access to some of the world’s most important biological databases.

Titled FELICS – Free European Life-science Information and Computational Services – this unique electronic infrastructure project is designed to develop, enhance and interlink many of the most important data resources in Europe and widen their accessibility to the international research community. It will be funded under the Research Infrastructures action of the sixth Framework Programme (FP6) with the largest ever European award for computational infrastructures needed to support biological research....FELICS’ technical coordinator at the EBI, Phil Gardner, said: “Our databases are accessed by many tens or even hundreds of thousands of scientists and are recognised as crucial resources by researchers worldwide....FELICS encompasses many of the EBI’s familiar databases, but will also feature some crucial new activities and the group has been set several tasks and “deliverables” within three main areas: Networking activities; joint research activities; and transnational access activities....Graham Cameron, associate director of the EBI and coordinator of FELICS, said: “Bioinformatics now pervades biology. “Bioinformatics experts no longer sit between biologist and database. Researchers expect to directly access the databases and do real work. “FELICS gives scientists the electronic right to roam the biological knowledge space.”

For more details, see the EBI press release (5/3/06).

PS: Apparently FELICS has no web site yet, but I'll blog the URL as soon as I discover it.

Rather than simply go through the list of contributions and report briefly what was said, we have chosen to pull together some of the overall ideas that were presented and debated....Unfortunately, the research councils and higher education bodies, especially in the UK, appear to be ready to accept the 'author pays' model as the only model worth supporting. Astrid Wissenburg of the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK, was unable to say at the conference what the new research councils' policy on open access is going to be, but rumour has it that 'author payments' built into research grants will be the main instrument. She expressed worries that this might affect those who will be working on a basis other than research grants, and one can predict that those worries will come to fruition. On the international level, the inequalities among countries will be even more striking than at present. Mark McCabe of the Georgia Institute of Technology addressed this issue from an economic modelling standpoint....In response to a question, he also noted that the 'subsidised journal' model, operated, among others, by Information Research, maximises social value and is the model that ought to be supported by the research councils. Research funding agencies, please note!...

Making maximum use of the information available in open access sources was the subject of John Wilbanks's paper on the NeuroCommons. The idea behind the NeuroCommons is that facts in what are, to all intents and purposes, large databases of textual data, can be harvested and compared with one another, using natural language processing software (commercial publishers often ban the use of such software on their sites, hence the need for open access) to create a Semantic Web of neurological research. Thus, rather than needing to dig into the research literature, the neurological scientist would be able to discover from the NeuroCommons, what facts have been shown to be associated in which studies and with what degree of validity and reliability. This 're-use' of data, it would seem, would also maximise social value. This was very enthusiastic and competent presentation that also inspired many members of the audience....

One of the alternatives to open access publishing is open archiving and two speakers addressed this issue: Jean-Claude Guedon proposed that repositories could develop into primary publication sources as authors found that their work was accessible and cited by doing so. He noted that in some fields, with well established repositories (fundamental physics for example), citations to journal articles were now being cited well before the journal actually published the item, because of their appearance in the repository. He suggested that rather than pre-publication peer review operating, process of open post-publication review could emerge in these repositories.

How one persuades people initially to contribute to repositories is a prevailing problem and Alma Swan partly addressed this issue in her presentation. She believed that the mandating of deposition by universities is key to the success of repositories: however, even where mandates exist, those managing the repository (often librarians) are having difficulty in getting acceptance. Swan presented her ideas within an evolutionary science analogy and suggested that the open access model, in its various forms, was likely to emerge successful from the evolutionary battle.

Our goal [at MIT] is to provide free access --in a well-organized, searchable manner-- to materials for the almost 2,000 subjects we teach....OCW [Open Courseware] exists through the generosity of the MIT faculty who choose to share their approach to pedagogy, organization of knowledge, and educational materials in this way. It is a voluntary activity for faculty, and their response has been so positive that we have had no doubt about accomplishing the OCW mission....We know a lot about its use because it is highly instrumented, especially by user surveys that receive remarkably high response rates. Students at peer universities are augmenting their learning by using OCW. A group of unemployed Silicon Valley programmers used OCW to master advanced languages while they were between jobs. A university in Ghana has used OCW to benchmark its computer science curriculum and revise its courses. An underground university uses OCW as a primary resource to educate its 1,000 or so students, who are members of a repressed minority in their country and are not permitted to attend college or university. A professor in Baghdad has based his research on data available in an OCW subject....

In addition, as we had hoped, MIT OCW is contributing to an emerging global open courseware movement. We know of fifty OCW initiatives in the United States, China, Japan, France, Spain, Portugal, and Brazil. Thirty more initiatives are being planned in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Russia, and elsewhere. Consistent with our open philosophy, MIT OCW has actively worked to encourage and assist this movement....[Skipping a short discussion of DSpace and PLoS.]

My view is that in the open-access movement, we are seeing the early emergence of a meta-university --a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced. The Internet and the Web will provide the communication infrastructure, and the open-access movement and its derivatives will provide much of the knowledge and information infrastructure. If this view is correct, the meta-university will enable, not replace, residential campuses, especially in wealthier regions. It will bring cost-efficiencies to institutions through the shared development of educational materials. It will be adaptive, not prescriptive. It will serve teachers and learners in both structured and informal contexts. It will speed the propagation of high-quality education and scholarship. It will build bridges across cultures and political boundaries. It will be particularly important to the developing world. The emerging meta-university, built on the power and ubiquity of the Web and launched by the open courseware movement, will give teachers and learners everywhere the ability to access and share teaching materials, scholarly publications, scientific works in progress, teleoperation of experiments, and worldwide collaborations, thereby achieving economic efficiencies and raising the quality of education through a noble and global endeavor.

Hawkins: In 2005, CNI spent a lot of time exploring institutional repositories. How are institutional repositories currently being deployed in academia? What are the key national policies and strategies that are shaping this deployment?

Lynch: This is an interesting and rapidly changing area. Institutional repositories, at least in the way that I think of them, are services deployed and supported at an institutional level to offer dissemination management, stewardship, and where appropriate, long-term preservation of both the intellectual work created by an institutional community and the records of the intellectual and cultural life of the institutional community. Now, other people hold narrower views of institutional repositories, which they see primarily as places to store and from which to disseminate the traditional published output of institutions: copies or preprints or postprints of material such as journal articles or books or other manuscripts produced by the faculty of an institution. Again, my personal view of institutional repositories is much broader and is driven in part by the implications of e-science and e-scholarship and by our growing ability to capture in digital form various aspects of campus life, ranging from performances and symposia to activities that have historically gone on in the classroom and are now at least partially represented and recorded in learning management systems....

[T]he Netherlands and Germany have very high levels of deployment [of IRs]. The French seem to be pursuing a centralized national repository strategy, which is extremely interesting but quite different from the institutional efforts. In the United Kingdom, JISC and other higher education leaders clearly have an objective to set up a ubiquitous institutional infrastructure, but it still has a considerable way to go in deployment. Of course, in the United States, infrastructure in higher education typically emerges bottom-up, through the sum of many local choices and investments by colleges and universities....

When we talk about national policy with respect to institutional repositories, it’s important to recognize the depth and extent of the national policy debates that are taking place about open access to the scholarly literature and, closely related but really distinct, about whether public research funding should come with an obligation to make reports of the results and underlying data freely available to the public. These debates are happening throughout Europe, the United States, Canada, and many other nations. In the United States, there is a fairly soft mandate that “requests” publications resulting from research funded by the National Institutes of Health be deposited into the PubMed database at the National Library of Medicine within a year of publication. There is also discussion of stronger mandates. In the United Kingdom, there is serious discussion of very strong deposit mandates, and some major private foundations (the Wellcome Trust, for example) are establishing open-access requirements as part of their grants. Things are still fluid in this area, and I don’t want to get into the subject in depth here, since it’s likely the specifics will change by the time this interview is published. I mention it simply because institutional repositories are a natural infrastructure (but not the only one— national-level disciplinary repositories, like PubMed, are clearly another alternative) into which such deposits of publications might be mandated, so they can be viewed as enablers for much broader initiatives.

PS: I had to cut some very good comments on copyright and DRM. Read the whole interview.

Senators have introduced the first bill mandating that taxpayers receive free online access to journal articles containing federally funded research within six months of the articles’ publication. Co-sponsors Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) announced yesterday that the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 would require agencies with annual research budgets of more than $100 million to implement a public access policy granting faster access to research supported by those agencies.

That agency policy would ensure that each researcher, whether partially or completely funded by the agency, submits an electronic copy of the final manuscript accepted for publication. The legislation also details the types of technologies agencies must use to make the information available....Eleven agencies fall under the legislation: the Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and Transportation departments, and the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and National Science Foundation.

"Making this information available to the public will lead to faster discoveries, innovations and cures," Cornyn said. "This bill will give the American taxpayer a greater return on its research investment."

"Taxpayer-funded research should be accessible to taxpayers,” Lieberman said. “Our bill will give researchers, medical professionals and patients in Connecticut and throughout the nation access to scientific discoveries and advancements that can help bring new treatments and cures to the public."

PS: Just one correction: The FRPAA is not the first U.S. bill to mandate OA to publicly-funded research. Sen. Lieberman introduced the CURES Act in December 2005 and it's still very much alive.

This article is based on a study undertaken at CERN Library. After a short introduction to the open access movement, an analysis of some CERN Library open access journals from a number of publishers is presented. Open access publishing models are then applied to some of the most important journal titles in particle physics. The results give a picture of the possible implications and the cost of open access in the current environment. Publishers' open access offerings, CERN authors' reactions to open access and the probable impact for CERN as a research institution are then examined.

Traditional open access is, in my view, a probable (but not certain) prerequisite for the emergence of fully developed large-scale computational approaches to the scholarly literature. It may not be a sufficient prerequisite, particularly if the legal and systems architecture frameworks currently being developed and deployed to support traditional open access are not quickly adjusted to accommodate the needs of open computational access....

The case for the benefits of open computational access to the scholarly literature is also much more complex than the arguments usually marshaled for traditional open access — in part because these benefits are indirect, and in part because they are still considered largely speculative and unproven. They are indirect in that they merely open the way for various players with good ideas to advance the progress of research and scholarship in perhaps new and perhaps more accelerated ways....(Note that, paradoxically, computational access to a scholarly literature for the purposes of indexing may also make that literature more economically valuable in the non-open access case, in that it may increase demand: witness the interest of commercial journal publishers in having their material indexed in search engines.)...

As the scholarly literature moves to digital form, what is actually needed to move beyond a system that just replicates all of our assumptions that the this literature is only read, and read only by human beings, one article at a time?...What is needed to allow the application of computational technologies to extract new knowledge, correlations and hypotheses from collections of scholarly literature? Part of the answer is legal. Clearly we need freedom to copy, rehost, repurpose and compute upon the components of this literature....The other part of the requirement is technical. We need to see provisions in hosting systems for large-scale replication as well as item-by-item downloads of occasional copies of parts of the scholarly literature....

The opportunities are truly stunning. They point towards entirely new ways to think about the scholarly literature (and the underlying evidence that supports scholarship) as an active, computationally enabled representation of knowledge that lives, grows and interacts with its contributors rather than as a passive archive or record. They suggest ways in which information technology can accelerate the rate of scientific discovery and the growth of scholarship. It would be a disgrace if we allowed the inertia of historic scholarly publishing practices and the intellectual property arrangements that underlie these patterns to foreclose such opportunities. Open access offers an important simplification and reduction of the barriers if its development is shaped in a way that is responsive to these opportunities, although it is certainly not a panacea in its current form....The implications of resolving this incompatibility [between scholarship and the traditional intellectual property framework] will ultimately have far more extensive ramifications than what we might today characterize as the "traditional" open access movement; but they will be crucial to the future of science and scholarship.

The Copyright Office is proposing legislation that would make it easier for libraries, universities and archives, including the Library of Congress, to digitize collections that contain “orphan works.” These orphans are the millions of unidentified but copyright works that are in danger of slipping into obscurity because their owners cannot be found....Although the law would apply to any users, universities, libraries and archives have a large stake in the issue because of programs making materials available online. The Library of Congress, for instance, has made millions of maps, photos, recordings and other materials available on its Web site at www.loc.gov. But digitizing and posting copyright material requires the copyright holder’s permission, which is not always easy to obtain. “The collections contain a massive amount of orphan works,” Prue Adler, associate executive director for the Association of Research Libraries, said at a recent seminar hosted by the Progress and Freedom Foundation. “This would be an enormous benefit to making these works publicly available.”

Thomas Jefferson decreed that the reason for government is to protect individual rights of its citizens. These rights were identified as equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness....We would propose that all electronic initiatives should follow the principles of the two learned political philosophers and should incorporate:

• Equality — with a goal of equal access to ICT;
• Protection of property — including cyber security and protection of intellectual property;
• Protection of life — including privacy and protection from cyber crime;
• Liberty — including open access to information content; and,
• Pursuit of happiness — including specific economic, social, and welfare goals to allow the achievement of a healthy, happy, and prosperous life for all.

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the Allen Institute for Brain Science are delighted to announce the launch of the Neuroscience Gateway, a free online resource for cutting-edge neuroscience and genomics research. The first update of the Neuroscience Gateway, which has been developed as a close collaboration between NPG and the Allen Institute, will be available on May 4th 2006 at www.brainatlas.org, and twice a month thereafter. The Neuroscience Gateway will provide a library of the latest papers, up-to-the-minute neuroscience news, and free access to highlights of key articles.

Specially written reviews will feature current research papers important to the neuroscience and genomics communities. Each update will also include a neurotechnique review, highlighting a recent technical advance. Building on the successes of the other NPG collaborations such as the AFCS-Nature Signaling Gateway, and the Cell Migration Gateway, the Neuroscience Gateway will provide free access to highlighted primary research papers from journals in the Nature family. The Neuroscience Gateway will also present direct access to the Allen Brain Atlas, a freely available scientific resource developed by the Allen Institute. The Allen Brain Atlas provides maps of the expression of approximately 20,000 genes in the mouse brain with detailed gene expression data available at the cellular level.

PS: The Allen Brain Atlas was funded with a whopping $100 million donation from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It has been OA since its launch in September 2003.

South Africa is exploring ways of using computing to make education more productive. ‘We intend to contribute to the digital commons,’ said Kim Tucker, a soft-spoken South African....Tucker, 45, is from the Meraka Institute (African Advanced Institute for Information and Communications Technology). The South African Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research manages the institute....South Africans are looking at other global tools [than Wikipedia] for education, including the Moodle, a free, open source learning management system and the Future Learning Environment (FLE3) from Finland. KEWL (Knowledge Environment for Web Learning), also a knowledge management system, is another useful option. ‘It’s much like the Moodle but with a lot of nice features,’ as Tucker puts it. There are some digital library systems, like Koha, and Greenstone, sharable and coming in from diverse parts of the globe. South Africa is also looking at the EXE (the E-learning XML Editor), a tool that makes it easy for educators to create educational content and store it in standards-compliant formats....

As Tucker puts it, the whole stringent copyrights, patents approach is a ‘threatening progress’ in Africa. ‘We’ve got people talking about the African Renaissance, and a New Partnership for African Development (a vision and strategic framework for Africa’s renewal). Some of us feel that we’d make much more progress if we have ‘free knowledge’ policies.’ Tucker considers it important for African communities to be able to create their own knowledge resources, where they can take other free knowledge resources from anywhere in the world...localise them, and share them freely....These initiatives have got some official support in South Africa. Now, they’re looking for ‘partners across the world’ who would ‘buy into the mission and vision’. India and its achievements are high on their radar.

Following on Council’s October 2004 approval in principle of open access --permanent, free, online access to the results of federally-funded research-- staff consulted with the social sciences and humanities community and reported on the options available to make open access a reality. The idea of open access to all research is widely accepted, but presents a number of implementation obstacles, and the community is by and large cautious. Rather than imposing mandatory requirements on researchers to publish via open access, Council chose to increase awareness of open access, pursue discussions with major stakeholders, and gradually incorporate open access provisions in research support programs.

For comparison, here's its position from October 2004:

At the October 2004 meeting, Council endorsed the principles of the Open Access movement-promoting and sharing the results of the SSHRC-funded research with the public.  Council welcomed the news that the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CFHSS) has agreed to work with SSHRC to consult with the research community on the best way to implement Open Access and incorporate its principles into the Council's research support programs. The Council also welcomed the involvement of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, which represents a major stakeholder community, in the consultations.

In this episode, we interview Simon Buckingham Shum --who leads the Knowledge Media Institute component of this newly announced “Open Content Initiative” (OCI) at Open University UK. In the interview, Simon discusses how OCI will be offering a new brand of university course materials freely over the internet (a la OpenCourseWare), and will also engage in several software/research initiatives to bring things like knowledge mapping, peer-to-peer collaboration, and Web 2.0 elements into the Open Educational Resources movement.

RP: In an article you published on Open Access last September in the Asian information newspaper Access you said "papers written by Indian scientists, often with support from Indian taxpayers’ money, are not seen, read or cited by other Indian researchers." What is the problem here?

SA: The issue is quite simple: research performed in India, and funded by Indian taxpayers, is reported in a few thousand journals, both Indian and foreign. Since some of these journals are very expensive, many Indian libraries - including sometimes the author's own institutional library - are not able to subscribe to them. As consequence, other Indian scientists working in the same, or related, areas are unable to read these papers. This is a problem common to all developing countries.

RP: How can Open Access resolve these problems for Indian researchers?

SA: If all these papers were published in OA journals, or if the authors made them freely available on the Web by self-archiving them - either in institutional OA archives or in central archives like arXiv and CiteSeer - then the problem would vanish.

RP: As your answer implies, there are currently two main ways to provide OA to research literature: the Gold Route (in which OA publishers charge researchers, or more usually their funders, to publish papers, and then make those papers freely available on the Web), and the Green Route (where authors continue to publish in traditional subscription-based journals and then self-archive their papers themselves on the Web). In a paper you published with US-based OA advocate Peter Suber in World-Information City last October, you argued that self-archiving is the best route for Indian researchers. Why?

SA: I would point out that not all gold route OA journals charge authors (or indeed their funders) a publication fee. Currently, for instance, not a single Indian OA journal charges author-side fees. But to answer your question: I believe that OA archiving is a better option because it would allow us to achieve 100% OA more quickly. Today there are not many Gold OA journals, so compelling authors to publish their work only in the few OA journals that currently exist would not achieve the same effect, in the short-term at least....[But the choice between green and gold] is not an either or question. Both publishing in OA journals and setting up institutional archives, or repositories, are important for Indian scientists. Moreover, the cost of setting up and maintaining an institutional archive is actually quite low, and certainly affordable for most Indian research institutes and universities....

RP: You say that no Indian OA journal charges author-side fees?...How then do these journals make ends meet?

SA: Almost all of them charge a subscription for the print version of the journal - which, by the way, is always much lower than the subscription prices of journals produced in the West. Some of them also carry advertisements; and some get grants from the government....It is worth pointing out that publishers can also benefit from embracing OA, as my friend Dr D K Sahu [CEO of the Bombay-based private company Medknow Publications] has convincingly shown with the Journal of Postgraduate Medicine (JPGM).

Connotea is our web-based social bookmarking and reference management service. The release of the Web API now allows any developer to create an application or web site that interacts with Connotea's database of references and links.

For those of you who are programmers, we've also released some Perl and Ruby libraries to allow you to get started quickly.

If you want explore what's possible with the Web API in more depth, have a look at the documentation on the Connotea Community Pages, or get in touch with us on connotea@nature.com or via the connotea-code-devel mailing list.

Another bill has been introduced in Congress to make publicly-funded research publicly available. The Washington post coverage portrays this as a rebuke to the lame response thus far to the NIH’s voluntary depository program. It also expands the domain of funded research beyond the biomedical sciences....Peter Suber mentions in his blog the bill’s three chief strengths: it makes open access a requirement, it has a six-month deadline, and does not rely on publisher consent. Needless to say the Association of American Publishers is not happy, but they’re not as quick to update their website as Peter Suber is so, as of this writing, you’ll have to take the Post’s word for it.

PS: Pat Schroeder, President and CEO of the AAP, has weighed in on the bill (the FRPAA) and was quoted in the Washington Post story. But she focused on the cost of conducting peer review and didn't draw the connection to the merits of the FRPAA. If she did, she'd have to argue that the FRPAA would undermine subscriptions at peer-reviewed journals, for which there is fear and speculation but no evidence. So far, the AAP strategy seems to be to make solid but irrelevant claims rather than relevant but unsubstantiated claims.

A late April conference at prestigious Yale University Law School gave new focus and momentum to a growing movement aimed at protecting the public’s right to access knowledge. The effort seeks to slow years of momentum in the direction of ever-stronger and wider-reaching intellectual property rights seen as moving ever-greater amounts of information and knowledge into private hands [PS:  It includes OA but is much wider than OA.]  The 21-23 April Access to Knowledge (A2K) Conference organised by the Yale Information Society Project brought together many of the most-recognised thinkers and practitioners across a variety of fields dependent upon access to information and know-how.

The packed panels - there were more than 100 panelists over three days - worked through every imaginable aspect of how having access can improve or save lives and societies. The range showed how the issue has become infused into local indigenous communities, education, science, food and agriculture, health, media, personal privacy, technology and creativity. It tackled legal issues, morals and ethics, economics, the need for better measurement, and numerous development concerns....A Wiki about access to knowledge was created at the event, which includes blogging from the sessions.

The current buzzwords in electronic information delivery begin with the word “open”: open source, open content, open standards, open access, open archives. The trend towards making content and resources available on the Internet is spreading quickly throughout the academic world....Although the impact of these developments on the Jewish studies community may be minimal, it is growing every day....Jewish studies scholars internationally would benefit from the creation of an electronic repository into which authors can self-archive and make available their output. Israel Scholar Works is a new initiative that seeks to serve as a “digital archive for creative work by the faculty and staff of Israel Academic Institutions and Jewish scholars all around the world.”...As members of the Jewish studies scholarly community, we are in the best position to determine the value and usefulness of these tools [OA repositories, search engines, book digitization, blogs and RSS feeds]. We must take the initiative and familiarize ourselves with new Web-based technologies and services. This will enable us, individually and collaboratively, to expand the presence of easily accessible primary and secondary scholarly and research materials in the digital world.

Abstract: This paper discusses the efforts of the Open Access movement to provide scientific and scholarly information over the Internet. The origin of the movement is described as are the benefits of free access to researchers in the scientific, technical and medical fields.

From the body of the paper:

Despite different philosophies, different management styles, and a different array of products and services, both SSRN and bepress are dedicated to providing scholars with the widest possible audience for their work and with giving their audiences access to that scholarship. They are enterprising, visionary organizations, skillfully harnessing the power of the Internet and successfully persuading scholars that long-standing, entrenched practices, procedures and points of view must be transformed. They are solidly committed to the principles of the Open Access Movement and are actively engaged in promoting the concept of open access within the legal community. These repositories are an underutilized tool for legal research policy. Policymakers and researchers should mine these resources for the gems they offer, free of charge.

On April 24, 2006, a group of academics, administrators, and researchers, all interested in figuring out how to rescue the scholarly book from what has begun to seem its imminent demise, met to spend a day discussing the future of that book in a networked environment. Our particular interest in hosting this meeting was to propose the formation of an all-electronic scholarly press. This document hopes to summarize both the substance of the discussion and the conclusions that we've drawn from it....

Much of this discussion circled around a crucial question, finally articulated by Morris Eaves: are we attempting to develop a peer-review process that will be accepted by existing academic culture, or are we attempting to change that culture? Many of the folks at the meeting came down firmly on the side of acceptance, but many others felt just as strongly about transformation....

Another important aspect of this openness, however, is in the texts' accessibility; most of the meeting's attendees expressed strong interest in and support for the values of open access. Moving the peer-review process into public view and making the texts submitted for, undergoing, and resulting from that process publicly available will, we feel strongly, have important effects on community outreach -- both in terms of helping scholars connect with one another, creating discourse networks that facilitate collaboration and the development of new ideas, and in opening such scholarly discourse to a wider community of intellectuals outside the academy. Moreover, we want to make the systems that we build -- both the software systems and the human networks that support them -- freely available to any groups that would benefit from them....

Public bodies hold a range of information and content ranging from demographic, economic and meteorological data to art works, historical documents and books. Given the availability of information and communication technologies (ICTs) public sector information can play an important role in producing innovative value-added services and goods. Furthermore, these technologies also provide a wider population better access to educational and cultural knowledge. Both commercial opportunities and the wider spread of information have positive economic and social benefits....In some OECD countries access regimes allow commercial re-users have cheap and readily available access to PSI. They then add value to the public data and re-sell it to firms and consumers. Some studies argue that such open access regimes improve competitive market conditions for PSI re-use, stimulate economic growth and create jobs. However there are also arguments that commercial re-users may have low-cost access to data which was costly to create for the government, and that taxpayers may pay twice for the PSI content (once for creation of government content, and the second time when purchasing the content from a commercial re-user, although provided re-use is non-exclusive, users can also go to the original source for the original information, presumably at lower cost, but without value-added services). On the other hand, in other OECD countries, there are access regimes where the public sector holds public sector information for its own use or employs cost-recovery strategies that allow only limited and potentially expensive access. In this scenario there are arguments that potential consumers of this data may have only restricted access to it, and that this approach is more costly to the consumer and for the taxpayer. Moreover, the potential economic gains from development of new commercial activities based on PSI reuse may be foregone. The economic and equity arguments surrounding commercial re-use of public sector information and content are complex and deserve considerably more analysis and policy attention....Scientific information and research data is not included in this analysis as it has been a separate digital broadband content study [PS: September 2005]....

In the United States, public information policy allows open and unrestricted access to public information. A circular by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB, 1996) states: "...government information is a valuable national resource, and...the economic benefits to society are maximized when government information is available in a timely and equitable manner to all." The OMB establishes as guiding principle for federal agencies that i) all public information be actively disseminated without imposing restrictions or conditions, ii) access should involve costs only to the extent that those cover expenses of dissemination and iii) it establishes that advantage should be taken of the various dissemination channels (e.g. private and academic) as well as of available technologies (including Internet, satellite downcast, etc.; Weiss, 2002). In the US the commercial re-use of the data is left primarily to the private sector. In Europe PSI is often seen as an asset to be exploited by the public sector. Access conditions diverge but many European public bodies and governments see the commercial exploitation of PSI as a welcome revenue stream.

A week is a long time in politics. But six years, it seems, is not quite enough time in the civil service to carry out a study into the economic benefits of free data. In the Treasury's Spending Review in 2000, an interesting part discussed the knowledge economy - in particular whether public organisations should charge for their data, and if so, how much. [The report concludes that] some of the data generated is surplus to the running of government; it's simply there to generate profits, to offset the running costs of various departments. "As a result," the authors add, "the government is able, without abusing the dominant position it has in particular markets, to use pricing strategies which enable it to recoup at least some of the fixed costs of production." But that begs an important question that the Free Our Data campaign - which argues that government agencies should provide their data to the public for free - would like to see resolved....

But the authors then admit it's unclear how government-generated data should be priced. After discussing pricing models, they note the suggestion "that demand would grow rapidly in response to lower prices ... and as basic information is repackaged in innovative ways. The issue needs further empirical work." That is, an economist should see whether cheaper data boosts the economy. So, six years on, has the Treasury followed up its own recommendation and done a study on the effect of data pricing? No, the Treasury told us....Perhaps they'll be interested by a new paper produced by the OECD this week examining public sector content, which notes huge disparities in market size and access between the UK, Europe and other countries.

Philosophically, it’s hard to hard to argue with open access. Considering the sizeable investment the public annually makes through its tax dollars, access to the dividends in the form of peer-reviewed scientific literature only makes sense. Currently, as is often pointed out, someone has to pay twice to access the scientific literature....However, it’s just as apparent that open access undermines the prevalent business model of scientific publishers....As the largest purchasers of scientific journals, university libraries stand to gain immensely from open access measures. Due to current budget restraints, many libraries have to pick and choose what journals to carry, limiting the access to the literature of the students and researchers who depend on those libraries. Not being able to access a research article slows down the research process....Paying for open access would require a significant investment of taxpayer money, but only a very small percentage of the population is likely to take advantage of free access to journals....

Understandably, many in the publishing industry are vehemently against such a strong-handed open access measure....Although peer-reviewed journals are arguably much different from popular magazines and newspapers, it would be misleading to say that the models do not exist. Journals can also adapt and save money (and trees) by going to online-only publication, giving them more leeway for a shift into open access models.

A more obscure example of the advantages of open access came in a May 2nd New York Times story on problems with the peer review system in general:

Journals have devolved into information-laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry, say Dr. Richard Smith, the former editor of BMJ, the British medical journal, and Dr. Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, also based in Britain. The journals rely on revenues from industry advertisements. But because journals also profit handsomely by selling drug companies reprints of articles reporting findings from large clinical trials involving their products, editors may "face a frighteningly stark conflict of interest" in deciding whether to publish such a study, Dr. Smith said.

Currently, pharmaceutical companies can, according to this story at least, exert influence on journals through their buying power. In an open access system with flat fees for article publication, though, this advantage is erased, removing one more obstacle to good objective science. This alone is enough of a reason to consider open access, particularly in clinical journals....

The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 is clearly a step in the right direction, but it does not address some of these fundamental issues. A more comprehensive approach would rely also on temporary incentives for publishers to move toward an open access model and would idealistically give the publishing industry plenty of time to adapt. If the act is passed, it is imperative that Congress follow up with these other complementary measures. A multifaceted approach by the government, coupled with an innovative and open-minded approach from the publishing industry, could make true open access a reality, an important precursor to making public participation in science more feasible and desirable.

Comment. I just want to respond to one point: "Paying for open access would require a significant investment of taxpayer money, but only a very small percentage of the population is likely to take advantage of free access...." The justification for OA is to benefit reseachers first and lay readers second, or to benefit researchers directly and others indirectly. There's no assumption that every citizen or internet user wants to read peer-reviewed science. Researchers need access to this literature and all too often lack it because journal prices have been rising much faster than inflation and library budgets for more than three decades. Just as patients benefit when their doctors have access to research literature, citizens benefit when researchers have access to new work on trade deficits, computer security, earthquake prediction, avian flu, and global warming. Finally, of course, most citizens never drive on a given mile of publicly-funded highway, but that's not a reason to withhold public funding from the highway.

I wrote a little about the Guardian's campaign to obtain open access to [UK] Government-generated data (which we pay for), but here's an interesting alternative: generate it yourself.  This weekend, a bunch of intrepid GPS users aims to map the whole of the Isle of Wight, and then to use this information to generate their own detailed maps, which will be in released under a Creative Commons licence.  The overarching project is called OpenStreetMap, and it seems the perfect way to get public mapping data. Rather waiting for the Government graciously to give us our data back, let's take to the streets and do it ourselves: of the people, by the people, for the people.  Now, if only I had a GPS device....

Comment. It's admirable that citizens are doing this, but it's a disgrace that it should be necessary. Taxpayers have already paid for higher-quality versions of the same data and (in the UK) must pay again for access to it. I hope the project achieves two goals: providing the useful data without charge, and shaming the government into changing its access policies. On what other fronts will citizens have to duplicate publicly-funded government labor in order to deliver the service that the government will only deliver for an extra fee? Road building? Vote counting? Public defense?

Cambridge University Press (CUP) is planning to make big advances in the journal publishing market, following a £1m investment in a new back-end journal subscription system. The charity, which is technically the publishing division of the University of Cambridge, also expects to be back in the black in the current financial year, following four years of overall loss-making....

[Most of the changes affect subscription journals, but not all.] Collier [CUP's Business Development Manager for Journals] said CUP was not going to be left behind on the open access front, and would follow in the steps of Springer, OUP and Blackwell. “We’ll be launching 10 journals on the hybrid publishing model in the next year,” he said. “We are also looking at finding more backing for open access along the lines of our free Breast Cancer online journal, which is funded by AstraZeneca.”

Given the uphill battle in the courts and legislatures, Creative Commons licenses (or similar licenses) and open access are particularly promising strategies to deal with copyright and DRM issues. Copyright laws do not need to change for these strategies to be effective....

It is not just a question of libraries helping to support open access by paying for institutional memberships to open access journals, building and maintaining institutional repositories, supporting open access mandates, encouraging faculty to edit and publish open access journals, educating faculty about copyright and open access issues, and encouraging them to utilize Creative Commons (or similar) licenses. To truly create change, libraries need to "walk the talk" and either let the public domain materials they digitize remain in the public domain or put them under Creative Commons (or similar licenses), and, when they create original digital content, put it under Creative Commons (or similar) licenses.

As the open access movement has shown, using Creative Commons licenses doesn't rule out revenue generation (if that is an appropriate goal), but it does require facilitating strategies, such as advertising and offering fee-based add-on products and services.

Update (October 4, 2006). The published edition is now online, though only accessible to subscribers.

The BioMed Central Research Awards recognize excellence in research that has been made universally accessible by open access publication in one of BioMed Central's journals.  Any physician or scientist who publishes original research of major significance in 2006 in one of BioMed Central's 150+ journals will be eligible to be considered for the award.  Two awards of US $5000 will be made - one for biological research, and one for medical research....The winners will be announced, and the awards made, in early 2007....Send details of the article you wish to nominate, including a short justification of why you believe it deserves to be considered, to: researchawards@biomedcentral.com.

In some quarters of the Open Access movement, some confusion has arisen with respect to copyright law and the many iterations through which an article goes. The comments that follow describe how U.S. law looks at "pre-prints" - the version of an article first submitted to a publisher, and "post-prints" - the author's final manuscript incorporating changes made after peer review. I wrote these comments in response to the question whether an author could grant a Creative Commons license to use a pre-print after having signed away all rights under copyright to a publisher. These comments are for your information and are not legal advice.

The short answer is no, an author cannot grant a Creative Commons license in a pre-print after having signed away all rights in the article in a publication agreement. Although technically distinct, the copyrights in the pre-print and the post-print overlap. The important point to understand is that copyright grants the owner the right to control exact duplicates and versions that are "substantially similar" to the copyrighted work. (This is under U.S. law, but most other jurisdictions similarly define the scope of copyright). A pre-print will normally be substantially similar to the post-print. Therefore, when an author transfers the exclusive rights in the work to a publisher, the author precludes herself from making copies or distributing copies of any substantially similar versions of the work as well....

Carroll is a law professor at Villanova University and a member of the Board of Directors at Creative Commons. Carrollogos is his new blog, which will often cover copyright and OA issues. Check it out.

Abstract: Those who value free access to law need to respond to the increasingly global nature of legal research, and the fact that most countries still do not have effective facilities for free access to law. The free access to law movement, centred around University-based Legal Information Institutes (LIIs), is assisting and encouraging the development of free access law facilities in many countries in the developing world. While doing so, it is also creating a global network of interconnected free-access legal research facilities on the Internet. This network is becoming comparable to the global legal research facilities provided by the multinational legal publishers. The free access to law movement is explained: its history, methods of cooperation, and Declaration on Free Access to Law. Public policies to maximise free access to law are advanced to explain why it is not good enough for governments to provide access to law through their own websites. Instead, a 'competitive model' is advanced, stressing the right of others to republish legal information. The task of developing global legal research is explained through categorisation of the elements of the visible and 'hidden' webs of legal information, and the implications this has for tools that LIIs must develop. This helps explain the modestly decentralised global free access to law network which is emerging, based on independent national and regional LIIs, with a smaller number of