Open Access News

Abstract: The ongoing paradigm change in the scholarly publication system (‘science is turning to e-science’) makes it necessary to construct alternative evaluation criteria/metrics which appropriately take into account the unique characteristics of electronic publications and other research output in digital formats. Today, major parts of scholarly Open Access (OA) publications and the self-archiving area are not well covered in the traditional citation and indexing databases. The growing share and importance of freely accessible research output demands new approaches/metrics for measuring and for evaluating of these new types of scientific publications. In this paper we propose a simple quantitative method which establishes indicators by measuring the access/download pattern of OA documents and other web entities of a single web server. The experimental indicators (search engine, backlink and direct access indicator) are constructed based on standard local web usage data. This new type of web-based indicator is developed to model the specific demand for better study/evaluation of the accessibility, visibility and interlinking of open accessible documents. We conclude that e-science will need new stable e-indicators.

Update. This article is also self-archived at E-LIS.

Abstract: Purpose – Aims to provide a broad overview of some of the issues emerging from the growth in Open Access publishing, with specific reference to the use of repositories and Open Access journals.
Design/methodology/approach – A viewpoint paper largely based on specific experience with institutional repositories and the internationally run E-LIS archive.
Findings – The Open Access Initiative is dramatically transforming the process of scholarly communication bringing great benefits to the academic world with an, as yet, uncertain outcome for commercial publishers.
Practical implications – Outlines the benefits of the Open Access movement with reference to repositories and Open Access journals, to authors and readers alike, and gives some food for thought on potential barriers to the complete permeation of the Open Access model, such as copyright restrictions and version control issues. Some illustrative examples of country-specific initiatives and the international E-LIS venture are given.
Originality/value – An attempt to introduce general theories and practical implications of the Open Access movement to those largely unfamiliar with the movement.

I’m probably the wrong person to ask whether open access will fly. Still --I think the world will change in our direction. Utopia, certainly not. An entirely open-access landscape, certainly not. A world where many more people have unfettered access to much more research and scholarship --yes. I think we’ll get there. Here’s why I think that.

We have the (largely US- and Europe-based) for-profit publishers, who hate and fear open access to the point of telling flat-out lies about it. We have librarians and a few visionary researchers, who want it desperately. And we have the slumbering behemoth, the vast quantity of researchers who don’t understand the system and don’t care, but will do what they are told and act in what they perceive to be their self-interest.

The for-profit publishers are fighting on a lot of fronts right now --too many. Too much legislation and other government action in too many countries. Sure, they’ve stopped some of it; they gutted the NIH proposal. But they have to win every single fight to maintain their position without ceding anything. They can’t. This isn’t going away. Even some of their wins are turning out rather Pyrrhic --the NIH victory was a dagger in the heart of open-access policy based on voluntary action by researchers.

One big legislative win in a developed country will blow this wide open, I firmly believe. I can’t predict when that win will happen, because that’s like predicting lightning --but I’d be honestly shocked to see nothing pass in the US or Western Europe within ten years. The big publishers simply aren’t an important enough lobby to stop it --especially when the arguments (and, to be blunt, the lies) they choose are so pitifully transparent much of the time. Nor does it help the publishers when developing nations climb on the open-access bandwagon (as they are, speedily); arguing against it paints publishers in a dreadful light indeed....

Slowly but surely, the environment is changing in an open-access direction. That’s what I see. I don’t see what can stop it. And as the environment changes, more and more researchers will make independent self-interest-based decisions to play along.

Despite our internal squabbles and frustrations --even our occasional moments of despair-- the ranks of pro-open-access librarians and researchers are growing. Even just since I started my job, which I’ve been in for less than a year, I hear more voices than I did, more inquiries, more interest. I see more experiments, more projects happening in parallel, more public statements drawing lines in the sand. This suggests to me that we’re not building air-castles here; we’re starting to envision and build the infrastructure that the changed system will require.

Our biggest stumbling-block, we both say and are told, is the slumbering behemoth: the researchers. Frankly, I think their absence from the struggle is a neutral or even slightly hopeful sign. If the slumbering behemoth were violently opposed to open access, we’d have an insuperable problem. If the slumbering behemoth had ranged itself behind the publishers, we’d be outright dead in the water.  But the slumbering behemoth slumbers on, letting us change its sleeping-space behind the scenes. The publishers daren’t disturb it --for example, by aggressively hunting down e-reserves programs or institutional repositories-- for fear that it will turn on them when it wakes. Sure, the behemoth isn’t using its current power (and it has quite a lot, in the form of unremunerated labor) to force change, nor is it actively changing. It won’t use its power to resist change, either, and I do think that may just be good enough, the way the world is moving....

Comment. Like Dorothea's Wednesday post on gatekeeping, this one was hard to excerpt; it's all so good. My reading agrees with hers. Any candid and comprehensive look at the landscape gives OA proponents grounds for hope. We have a large number of small successes, a small number of large successes, good prospects for more, good momentum, good technology, good policy arguments, good answers to the objections, and good people working hard worldwide to build the OA infrastructure. OA is far from the default today for scholarly communication, but it will be.

At a meeting of the British Computer Society Electronic Publishing Specialist Group, the motivation for authors to get published and be seen in particular journals was described [by Stevan Harnad] as being primarily to “reach the eyes of their colleagues.” Here the publisher has a role to play not just in ensuring a fast and efficient publication process and maintaining a journal’s reputation but also in dissemination, ensuring findings are rapidly accessible to the research community....

Publishers in the electronic era are the guardians of content, guaranteeing 24/7 access to articles today and into the future. Elsevier’s investment in ScienceDirect, offering 25% of the world’s STM full-text scholarly articles and seeing 36 full-text article downloads per second on a typical workday, has been substantial. Such a service is no small feat to maintain....

As well as delivering the latest research findings to users in the most immediate way, through online publishing and value-added services such as personalized alerts, publishers today must ensure these findings are forever accessible....

Today’s learned journal publishers are serving as much more than a traditional vehicle by which research findings are published. Today’s publishers are making a huge contribution to the ways and means in which content is delivered to research communities. If a publisher is innovative, invests in development of content technologies and is a leader in cross-industry initiatives, the value added is immense. In such a context the publisher and researcher community benefit from a mutually reinforcing relationship — expanding knowledge and increasing access to it.

Comment. I've always acknowledged that publishers add value, and even praised Elsevier (at some cost among my colleagues) for its green policy and experiment in free online access. But some of Lankester's claims are clear and ironic exaggerations. It's ironic that Elsevier would boast about making research "rapidly accessible" in "the most immediate way" and "increasing access" to it when, by these measures, open access is superior to toll access. If Lankester meant that, and intended to boast about Elsevier's green policy, she forgot to mention it. It's ironic that she would invoke Stevan Harnad's criterion for meeting author needs and then fail to show that Elsevier fulfills it as well as the OA that Harnad clearly had in mind. It's ironic to boast about ScienceDirect when evidence shows that customer satisfaction with it has been declining for years. It's ironic to boast that Elsevier helps make content "forever accessible" when long-term preservation requires making copies to migrate content to new formats and media to keep it readable as technology changes --something permitted by OA but blocked by the Elsevier licensing agreement. Finally, it's ironic that Elsevier would boast about being "guardians of content" when researchers are looking for ways to remove the guardians of content.

(BTW and much appreciated, Elsevier's Library Connect Newsletter, where this article appeared, is OA.)

All research papers by faculty and students, MTech (Research) and Ph. D. thesis is to be self-archived in Dspace@nitr or it should be submitted to the librarian for archiving, so that others interested may benefit by referring to these documents. The Administration may use this archive for assessment of faculty performance when needed.

PS: Kudos to all at NIT who brought this about. NIT's is the sixth worldwide university-level OA mandate and the first from India. For the other five, see the institutions with asterisks by their names in ROARMAP.

7. What business models are needed in the era of mass digitization? How will the open access movement affect the economics of digitization? The business model for access to valuable information that has evolved is not “pay-per-view”—what has evolved instead is either free or advertiser-supported information. This model appears to be continuing with the Google and other mass digitization projects. Open access is another model promoted by some, but others question the sustainability of that model.

• Isaac Mankita, Ellen Meltzer, and James Harris, A Handful of Things: Calisphere's Themed Collections from the California Digital Library
• Katherine Kott and five co-authors, Digital Library Federation (DLF) Aquifer Project
• Peter Verhaar, Digital access to the special collections of Leiden University Library
• Frank Scholze and Susanne Dobratz, Institutional Repositories and Enhanced and Alternative Metrics of Publication Impact: Report of an International Workshop held at Humboldt University Berlin, 20-21 February 2006

Ordinarily, a study with negative results...wouldn’t see the light of day in a medical journal --at least not a top-tier one. But the Public Library of Science (PLoS) aims to be different. It’s using the LOTIS study [showing that certain interventions do not slow the onset of age-related disabilities] to launch its new journal, PLoS Clinical Trials, which begins publishing on 19 May. The journal’s credo is simple: Disappointing results can still be good news. Its editors have explicitly stated that all clinical trials submitted --regardless of outcome or significance-- will be published, as long as they are methodologically sound. The policy takes aim at a pervasive problem in the clinical trials literature: a heavy skew toward studies with positive outcomes. Some say there’s a “black hole” where studies with negative or ambiguous outcomes should be. This bias can cost lives....

A proposal to require federally funded scientists to make their accepted papers freely available online within 6 months of publication has reignited a bruising battle over scientific publishing. The bill [FRPAA], introduced last week by senators John Cornyn (R–TX) and Joseph Lieberman (D–CT), would make mandatory a voluntary National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy and extend it to every major federal research agency, from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to the Department of Defense. Supporters argue that so-called public access should extend beyond biomedical research. “The ramifications for the acceleration of science are the same,” says Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, which represents libraries. Many publishers disagree, saying that there is no evidence of an unmet public demand for nonbiomedical papers. They warn that extending NIH’s policy to other disciplines could seriously harm societies that rely on journal subscription and advertising revenues to run their organizations....

Some publishers argue that there’s no evidence the public is as interested in, say, high-energy physics papers as in health research. “You’re just expanding this willy-nilly on the assumption that there’s the same clamor,” says Allan Adler, vice president for legal and governmental affairs for the Association of American Publishers. Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, argues that if the bill became law, it could be especially damaging to “small niche area” journals in disciplines such as ecology that have not yet experimented much with open-access journals that recoup publication costs from authors rather than subscribers. Observers don’t expect the bill to be passed this year, but they anticipate a push to make the NIH policy mandatory. The 6-month deadline is also controversial: NIH Director Elias Zerhouni recently testified that he is sympathetic to publishers’desire for a 12-month delay. In the meantime, NSF plans to add citation data to the Web-based descriptions of each award in response to a February report by its inspector general that said “other science agencies have done much more than NSF” to tell the public what it gets for its money. The report said NASA and the Defense Department already make available the full texts of some journal articles.

Comments. A few quick responses.

• "Some publishers argue that there’s no evidence the public is as interested in, say, high-energy physics papers as in health research." Publishers who say this are trying to divert attention from the primary purpose of the bill, which is access for researchers.
• "Many publishers [say] that there is no evidence of an unmet public demand for nonbiomedical papers." Ditto. Publishers who say this are referring to the lay public, not the academic community, where the demand is great.
• "Martin Frank...argues that...the bill...could be especially damaging to 'small niche area' journals in disciplines such as ecology that have not yet experimented much with open-access journals...." This is from left field. The bill does not presuppose that journals have experimented with OA, does not force or even ask authors to publish in OA journals, and does not regulate journals or force them to convert to OA.

The single protein lookup in ProteinCenter Open Access is a small subset of the full functionality provided by the commercial version of ProteinCenter, which...[enables] comparison of data sets with thousands of proteins in minutes, with advanced clustering and filtering to quickly reach biological conclusions....ProteinCenter Open Access is a free service intended for interactive use - scripting is therefore not allowed.

From today's press release:

Lookup protein accession codes and peptides in a global database with more than 22 million protein accession codes. One single resource for lookup of any protein accession codes and identifiers from: GenBank, Refseq, EMBL, UniProt, Swiss-Prot, Trembl, PIR, IPI, PDB, Ensembl etc, Including many of the outdated accession codes.

The executive summary breaks the results into Publishers' views, Authors' views, and the future. From the publishers' views:

• By publicly endorsing the open access publishing activities being undertaken by the participating publishers, the JISC’s funding initiative provided valuable impetus to these endeavours.
• The JISC’s involvement had the effect of raising awareness of open access publishing among the UK author community through the promotional activities of publishers.
• The funding lent a degree of short-term financial stability to open access publishing projects, giving publishers breathing space to focus on refining operational processes.
• The funding provided a timely opportunity for publishers to develop and experiment with different economic models.
• The only negative effect reported is that the funding has, for the time being, insulated UK authors from the cost of publishing in open access form.
• The impact of the funding on publishing performance is perceived to have been generally positive.
• Although the present funding initiative is due to end this year, all the participating publishers remain committed to their open access publishing projects, though there is some uncertainty as to whether UK authors will be prepared or able to find funds to pay the open access publishing charges.

From the authors' views:

• A survey collected the views of 124 authors who have benefited from fee waivers or discounts under the JISC’s open access funding initiative.
• The top five reasons for choosing to publish in particular journals are: prestige; principle of free access for all readers; impact factor; citations; size of readership. Two of these reasons are directly linked to publishing in open access form.
• The decision by 38% of authors to publish in one of the funded journals was positively influenced by the JISC’s funding initiative.
• 23% of authors would not have published in one of the funded journals had it not been for the fee waiver or discount.
• 78% of authors said that given their experience of publishing in one or more of the funded journals they are more likely to publish in open access form again.
• Authors do relatively little themselves to disseminate their open access papers.
• Authors are influenced by the monetary level of publishers open access fees; this may be the basis for the development of a new form of inter-publisher competition for the best authors and papers.
• 48% of authors think open access fees should be paid by Government agencies and 42% says money should be found from research grants.

From the section on the future:

• On the basis of the evidence presented in this report the JISC’s open access funding initiative is shown to have been successful on a variety of counts. Publishers and authors have moved forward in their understanding of open access publishing.
• Any future iteration of the funding initiative may benefit from a degree of fine tuning to account for the progress that has been made since the initiative was conceived.
• Ideas for such fine tuning include: transitional funding that exposes authors to a proportion of publishers’ open access publishing charges; assigning a portion of each grant to enable publishers to identify, analyse and report the quantitative impact of the funding; a requirement for authors to deposit a copy of their postprints in an appropriate repository to align the outcome of the funding with the JISC’s investment in the repository aspect of its Information Environment.

Update. See JISC's press release on the report, May 16, 2006. Excerpt:

JISC’s open access funding initiative - which provided £384,500 over three years to publishers to explore open access models of publishing for their journals - has given “valuable impetus” to thinking around open access and “has had the effect of raising awareness among the UK author community,” says a report published today. Provided as “seed money” to publishers to experiment with alternative publishing models, the funding has, says the report, provided publishers with “a timely opportunity to develop and experiment” with open access publishing, with all participating publishers remaining committed to their open access projects after funding has ceased.

Authors too have found the experience positive...The results show that not only was the JISC funding influential in encouraging authors to publish in this way, but that 78% of them were likely to choose to publish in an open access form again.

The findings corroborate earlier studies which show that authors respond positively to publishing in open access journals, valuing the principle of free access to all readers and the consequent wider readership that open access enables. These, says the current study, are two of the five main factors influencing authors’ publishing decisions, the others being prestige, impact factor and citations. The initiative has, the report concludes, provided “a catalyst for change in authors’ perceptions and behaviour in relation to publishing in an open access form.”...

(1) Ian Rowlands and Rene Olivieri, Journals and Scientific Productivity: A case study in immunology and microbiology Publishing Research Consortium, May 12, 2006. From the executive summary:

[1] The biggest single productivity issue facing biomedical researchers is funding: not just a lack of adequate resources but an increasingly short-term, `stop-go’ funding culture that makes forward planning and staff retention very difficult (pp. 10-12). [2] Other major issues impacting upon their productivity are problems in recruiting suitably qualified research staff, a lack of seed corn funding to help get risky new ideas off the ground, a lack of autonomy in terms of the research that they would like to do but which does not fit in with funders’ priorities, and too much time spent in filling forms and other non-productive bureaucratic tasks (pp. 10-12). [3] In comparison, researchers do not consider that problems in accessing the journal literature are a significant barrier to their work: this aspect is ranked in 12th place (of 16) (pp. 11-12)....[6] Immunologists and microbiologists are generally satisfied with their level of access to the journals system and a large majority, 83.7% agree that major improvements in journal accessibility have been made over the past five years (pp. 6-7). [7] Those researchers who voice dissatisfaction with the journals system are more likely to be involved in interdisciplinary work and to be struggling with research funding and time pressures. They are also much more likely to be found in smaller European countries, suggesting perhaps that there are some supply-side issues that need to be tackled (p.15)....[9] Our survey work confirms earlier studies: desktop access to high quality published information results in significant time savings for researchers and they feel that this has helped them to be more effective knowledge workers (p.10). [10] The linkages between information consumption (reading) and information production are barely examined in the scientific literature. This is a serious gap in our knowledge, especially in the context of the current debate about new publishing models in the scholarly arena. [11] The key policy implication of this research is that Europe could improve its biomedical research performance by listening more carefully to its scientists. There is little evidence here, for example, that greater moves towards reader open access will make any significant difference. The really important issues are much more mundane and could be tackled relatively inexpensively.

(2) Overcoming the Barriers: A case study in immunology and microbiology. This appears to be a longer report, but I can only bring up the splash page. The link to the full text isn't working for me right now.

Also see the PRC press release. Excerpt:

The single most important issue obstructing the productivity of biomedical scientists today is the culture of research funding. This finding challenges the belief of some that the lack of "open access" to journal content is a major barrier to scientific productivity....[The result is based on a] survey of 883 biomedical scientists – in Europe and North America - commissioned by the Publishing Research Consortium....Conversely, the study found that 90% of respondents reported access to publishers' online content had increased their productivity by saving them significant time in locating research articles and enabling them to become more effective researchers. "This study reinforces the critical role that publishing plays in advancing research and scholarship," says René Olivieri, CEO, Blackwell Publishing [and co-author of one of the documents]. "Major improvements in journal accessibility over the last few years have not only improved research productivity but they have also helped to maximize return on investment in scientific research."

Comment. I'll be able to comment better after I can read the long report. But it looks like one of the chief results is that easy online access to the literature helps research productivity ("90% of respondents reported access to publishers' online content had increased their productivity"). The PRC clearly wants to spin this in favor of conventional priced access. But it can be spun both ways. Where priced online access is adequate or improving, the productivity benefits can be used as an argument for priced online access. But where priced online access is inadequate, decreasing, or unsustainable, the lost productivity can be used as an argument for OA. Even where priced access is adequate, it's not hard to argue that OA would be superior (because it supports search engine indexing, mash-ups, text-mining, and other forms of processing by machines that need DRM-free access), that OA and TA can coexist through self-archiving, and that paying skyrocketing subscription fees is a very inefficient way to procure easy online access to peer-reviewed research literature. Finally, of course, the fact that funding problems rank ahead of access problems is no argument that access problems shouldn't be solved.

Update. Gunther Eysenbach makes a good point:

Now, Olivieri is CEO of Blackwell. How come he is "author" on a study "carried out by independent researchers"? Either the study was really "independent" meaning that Olivieri was not involved in the study, in which case he should NOT be listed as author, or he was involved, in which case authorship is deserved, but the study can't be called "independent".

Nearly a decade ago, in an insightful and valuable work, MIT professor Janet H. Murray discussed her vision for the future of the newly burgeoning World Wide Web. She wrote of “a single comprehensive global library of paintings, films, books, newspapers, television programs, and databases, a library that would be accessible from any point on the globe. It is as if the modern version of the great library of Alexandria, which contained all the knowledge of the ancient world, is about to rematerialize in the infinite expanses of cyberspace.”...[S]ince Murray’s book a number of voices have been raised decrying the barriers to the utopian vision represented by the economics of the publishing world and such “market forces.”

Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig complain of “the balkanization of the web into privately owned digital storehouses,” and the fact that “the most important commercial purveyors of the past are…global multibillion-dollar information conglomerates like ProQuest, Reed Elsevier, and the Thomson Corporation, which charge libraries high prices for the vast digital databases of journals, magazines, newspapers, books, and historical documents that they control.” Indeed, Cohen and Rosenzweig have challenged the economics of traditional publishing by concurrently releasing the text of their digital history guide in a freely accessible and readably formatted web version, as well as in the traditional paper form for sale published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. In their words, “Academics and enthusiasts created the web; we should not quickly or quietly cede it to giant corporations and their pricy, gated materials. The most important weapon for building the digital future we want is to take an active hand in creating digital history in the present.”...

Perhaps the representation of digital publishing as a binary opposition between “multibillion-dollar information conglomerates” and “academics and enthusiasts” does not exhaust the possibilities. Alas, those of us in the humanities who look to the government for succor are likely to be jilted. Greg Crane, a professor of classics at Tufts University, points out the ambiguous position of the humanities when it comes to government sources of funding for academic technology. He writes, “The biggest government funders of academic technology are the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation whose aggregate funding ($20 billion and $5 billion respectively) exceeds that of the National Endowment for the Humanities ($135 million requested for 2003) by a factor of 185.”...

PS: For more on the differences between government funding for the sciences and government funding for the humanities, and how it affects OA, see my January 2004 article, Promoting Open Access in the Humanities.

[Damian] Steer is taking part in an attempt to map the Isle of Wight's roads in one weekend for OpenStreetMap.org, a website that helps create maps free for anyone to use for any purpose. If Ordnance Survey [OS] and other national agencies will not make their data freely available, then OpenStreetMap, developed over the past two years, will re-collect it from scratch.

The weekend drew around 40 people. By Monday, OpenStreetMap's founder Steve Coast estimated that more than 90% of the island's roads had been recorded. When asked if volunteers used OS maps, Coast says: "No. It's a taboo." Someone who did pull out an OS map was told to put it away immediately.  Instead, Coast distributed older, out-of-copyright maps to aid navigation. [Although publicly-funded,] OS maps are covered by Crown copyright, which lasts 50 years from the end of the year of publication....

But OS has all [the geospatial information] up to date, so wouldn't it be better to campaign for OS to open up its data rather than rebuild it? "Freeing certain scales of data would be good, but the best way to make it happen [is] to go and do it," replies Coast. "There's no reason for OS to [free the data] because it has a monopoly. There's no economic incentive - until we produce one."

OpenStreetMap's aim is to produce maps such as that for Weybridge where someone using the name 80n has turned GPS tracings and research into a fairly detailed map of the town. Next weekend OpenStreetMap will attempt to map the centre of Manchester, with the aim of producing a free-to-use map of venues for the city's Futuresonic 2006 arts festival in July. "They can't get it from OS without spending vast amounts of money," says Coast. The "Mapchester" event is getting space and support from Manchester Digital Development Agency, a public-sector organisation. "We very much endorse it," says Dave Carter, its head. "We see it as a map version of open source. It might not work, but ... we're funded to promote innovative research and development, which is why we're supporting this."

Charles Arthur puts this in perspective on the FreeOurData blog:

Is it only me who finds it faintly ridiculous that a public sector organisation is endorsing a public movement to create open-source maps for the public’s use when there’s already a public sector organisation that creates very good maps - but which neither the other public sector organisation or the public wants to tangle with?

Comment. This is fascinating. A taxpayer-supported agency of the UK government collects high-quality map data, which it sells to the public rather than giving away. OA activists are volunteering their labor and time to make high-quality maps of their own, and giving them away, in order to compete with the publicly-funded, government-sold maps. It should shame the UK government that this is even happening. But the activists are thinking that economic pressure is more powerful than shame, and maybe it is. Will it free up publicly-funded mapping data in the UK? Stay tuned.

1. Over 550 journals in 11 languages are using Open Journal Systems, its open-source journal management system optimized for OA journals.

2. PKP has started a complete rewrite of its companion package, Open Conference Systems, expected to launch in January 2007. From the site: "OCS will allow you to: [1] create a conference Web site, [2] compose and send a call for papers, [3] electronically accept paper and abstract submissions, [4] allow paper submitters to edit their work, [5] post conference proceedings and papers in a searchable format, [6] post, if you wish, the original data sets, [7] register participants, [8] integrate post-conference online discussions."

Abstract: This research in progress investigates how technological protection measures shape how authorized users access and make use of digital collections of licensed scholarly resources. It seeks to ascertain the range and variation in access and rights restrictions, and whether observed restrictions were described in acceptable use statements and resource licenses.

Humboldt-University recommends its scientists and researchers to publish their articles in Open Access Journals and to publish their monographs on Open Access platform. Postprint versions of already published articles should be deposited on the Document and Publication Repository of Humboldt-University. The edoc server will also host preprint versions.... Humboldt-University encourages emphatically all scientists to insist on keeping the copyrights during the conclusion of author contracts.

PS: Kudos to all involved at Humboldt. Universities everywhere should consider adopting a similar policy. Look at the other OA policies registered at ROARMAP for precedents and ideas.

PS: The ATA fights for open access to publicly-funded research in the U.S., and is now fighting for a mandate at the NIH, the CURES Act, and the FRPAA. If you work for or with a U.S.-based non-profit, urge it join the ATA.

The objective of this survey is to gather comments on the recent study financed by the EC. Members are invited to give their opinion on the recommendations as well as their proposal/analysis on the topic they address. For each recommendation, you're invited to indicate, on a scale, the degree of pertinence, how difficult it is to implement, the degree of priority, whether there is a role for public authorities. Any other information or reactions on "scientific publications" issues are also welcomed. The results of this consultation will provide an invaluable input to the design of the EC policy in the field.

A Senate bill that would require federally funded scientists to post their research papers freely on the Internet is drawing fire from many journal publishers and scientific societies. The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (S 2695), introduced last week, mandates that scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other agencies make their research results available without charge within six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal....

Not-for-profit research societies generally depend on journal subscription revenue to support peer review, scientific outreach, and other activities. Many fear that if articles become freely available too early, they might lose significant revenue, impacting their ability to conduct peer review. For-profit journals also argue that they need subscription fees to survive.

The bill unfairly puts authors "between the agency that funds the research and the publisher" should the latter refuse to grant republication rights, said Martin Frank, coordinator of the DC Principles Coalition, a group of more than 100 scholarly and not-for-profit journal publishers that supports wide dissemination of research findings. Frank is also executive director of the American Physiological Society, which publishes 14 journals.... 

[C]ompliance [with the NIH policy] has been extremely low -- less than 4% of eligible articles have been added to PubMed Central during the first eight months of the policy enactment, said NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni in a January 2006 report to Congress. Peter Suber, director of the Open Access Project at Public Knowledge, a public-interest advocacy group, suggested that authors just didn't bother because the policy was not mandatory. "It's not as if the grantees thought it was a bad idea; they just have other things to do with their time," he said....

Howard Garrison, public affairs director for the Federation of American Scientists for Experimental Biology (FASEB), whose 21 member scientific organizations publish dozens of journals, critiqued this portion of the plan, arguing that Web sites and search engines from the private sector already catalogue publicly accessible papers. Stanford University's HighWire Press, for instance, links to more than 1.3 million full-text journal articles, most of which are available 6 months to a year after publication. Another free Internet site, patientINFORM, provides links to full text peer-reviewed biomedical journal articles as soon as they are published. "In times of scarce funding, we're not sure that duplication of effort really makes a lot of sense," Garrison said.

But the proposal has also drawn praise. "It's a very good piece of legislation," said Open Access Project's Suber. "It will vastly increase the return on U.S. investment in research by getting it into the hands of everybody who can build on it. Right now [the research] is locked up in subscription journals. By making research openly available, it makes it more usable," Suber told The Scientist....

Comments. Three quick responses.

• Martin Frank's objection would carry more weight if publishers who disliked the FRPAA refused to publish federally-funded research. But he is a publisher and he's not refusing. So far, none of the publishers he represents on the DC Principles Coalition is refusing. So far no publishers anywhere are refusing. Until they do, authors have no dilemma.
• BTW, I used the "author dilemma" argument myself as an objection to the NIH policy. The problem is that the NIH policy is a request, not a requirement. Hence, authors (grantees) are under pressure from their funding agency to comply, and to do so as soon as possible, but also under pressure from their publisher not to comply or to do so as late as possible. FRPAA avoids this problem by mandating compliance and imposing a firm deadline. Moreover, FRPAA uses a government license as the legal basis for disseminating the OA copies, not publisher consent. This is also part of the solution, since it reduces the publisher's bargaining power with authors. Publishers who dislike the policy gain nothing by pressuring their authors; they have to defeat the bill or refuse to publish federally-funded research. If Frank really wants to spare authors from the funder-publisher dilemma, he should aim the objection at the NIH policy and join the call for a mandate.
• On Howard Garrison's argument that the FRPAA is a wasteful "duplication of effort", let me use the same reply I used when the AAP's Brian Crawford called it "duplicative": "The claim...is simply false. Some publishers are providing OA to some content when it's sufficiently old. But this is a far cry from providing OA to virtually all federally-funded research within six months of publication. If publishers are saying that over time their voluntary efforts will approach what FRPAA would mandate, then they have to give up their claim that this will harm journals. They can't have it both ways."

The Academy of Science of South Africa has urged the country’s scientific journals to create open-access internet editions in a bid to significantly increase their visibility worldwide, reports SciDev.Net. The academy called for action this week after it published a report showing that in the last 14 years, one third of South African journals have not had a single paper quoted in their international counterparts....

The Department of Education currently pays universities 84,000 rands (US$14,000) every time a government-accredited journal publishes a paper by one of their academics, regardless of the journal’s international standing. Gevers believes funds should be diverted from the subsidy to allow journals to establish and fund online and open-access editions.

The report was greeted positively by South Africa’s science establishment. Dan Ncayiyana, editor of the South African Medical Journal – one of the few to rank in international databases – said the report “captures the situation very well and I think it’s good for South African science publishing”. Adi Paterson of the Department of Science and Technology, welcomes the findings of the report as a foundation for improving "incentives to support high-quality research publications" and to "forge a low cost open-access approach to the publishing of publicly funded research".

PS: I posted some comments on the academy recommendations on Tuesday.

The public-access policy of the National Institutes of Health marked its first anniversary last week, and all involved in the debate agree that it has failed to create free online access to the biomedical literature.  Open-access proponents are rejoicing because that failure has created new momentum to strengthen the policy. That momentum further worries the policy's early detractors -- mostly publishing groups that fear a loss of revenue if the contents of their journals are free online. They are lobbying to keep things just as they are.

"All we've seen this year," said Peter Suber, director of the Open Access Project at Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group in Washington, "is one step after another to strengthen" the policy....The NIH estimates that fewer than 4 percent of eligible manuscripts were uploaded [to its OA repository in the past year]. "It's an abysmal failure," said Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition....In November the majority of an NIH working group suggested that the policy be made mandatory....In February, the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine, which is part of the NIH and runs the repository, recommended the same changes to Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the NIH. At a Congressional hearing in April, Dr. Zerhouni said: "It seems like voluntary is just not enough of an incentive."...

Observers expect the NIH policy to become mandatory, but the publishers hope to keep the maximum delay at 12 months. Such a plan, said Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, "gets the system to work without jeopardizing a very important component of the dissemination of scientific information: the journals." He says that some publishers have already lost subscriptions after experimenting with a six-month model. Oxford University Press, for example, examined the number of subscribers between 2002 and 2003 for 28 journals. Two journals that put their contents online free after six months lost 6.1 percent of their subscribers; those that did so after a year or longer lost fewer subscribers.

Gary Ward, an associate professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at the University of Vermont, says that figure does not mean much. "If you look at industry averages" of circulation decline, he said, the 6-percent decrease "is well within what's been happening to other journals." Mr. Ward is treasurer of the American Society for Cell Biology, which publishes the research journal Molecular Biology of the Cell, and he also serves on the NIH working group. In 2001 the journal made its contents free online two months after publication....The gamble proved a wise one, he said: Subscriptions have increased since 2001. Individual subscriptions have increased sharply, and institutional subscriptions -- the all-important library presence -- have increased at about the same rate as they did before the open-access decision, Mr. Ward said.  Mr. Suber, of Public Knowledge, commented: "The evidence today suggests that the fears are not justified."...

Momentum continues to build outside the NIH, and outside the United States, for mandatory posting of manuscripts in centralized free online repositories. In April, the European Commission released a report calling for a "guarantee" of free access to all publicly sponsored research (Chronicle News Blog, April 19). But that report was not binding; nor was a draft policy of Research Councils UK, an umbrella organization of Britain's public research institutions, which called for mandatory participation last June (The Chronicle, June 29, 2005).

Then, in early May, came a stateside whopper: Two senators introduced a bill that would require every federal agency that sponsors more than $100-million annually in research to establish an online repository and make its grantees deposit their articles within six months of publication (Chronicle News Blog, May 3). The bill, which is sponsored by Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, would apply to 11 agencies, including the NIH, the National Science Foundation, and NASA.

"It's very depressing -- it's huge!" said Ms. Schroeder. Of course, open-access proponents are delighted. Passage of the bill would also help answer questions about how open access affects subscriptions.  "The only way to get empirical evidence outside physics is to stimulate high-volume open-access archiving [outside physics] and monitor the results," Mr. Suber said. "Let's do that and be prepared to make changes if we see harm."

The traditional products of academic research - peer-reviewed journal articlels, chapters from books, works in progress, seminar and conference papers, theses and dissertations - are increasingly being made available online in open access journals and repositories and publishers' own websites. But at present humanities disciplines are lagging behind the sciences in the creation of subject-based repositories; works on historical subjects are scattered across the web and often difficult to locate. This page is intended to facilitate access to full-text academic publications and postgraduate theses on early modern topics.

From an accompanying blog post by Sharon Howard, the force behind the new directory:

Early Modern E-prints is now up and running. At the moment it’s very small, but I have plenty more entries to add over the coming months.  You can help out if you know of examples of the following, on any early modern (ie, c.1500-1800) topic:  [1] Research papers and publications archived at academics’ personal webpages, which can be particularly hard to track down.  [2] Articles, chapters, papers and so on from sources (journals, books, e-seminars, etc) that aren’t specifically devoted to early modern history (this may include graduate student journals, as long as they’re peer-reviewed).  [3] Free samples (book chapters, issues of journals) from publishers’ websites.  [4] Postgraduate theses and dissertations....

I hope that eventually there will be full-scale open access repositories for history and this resource will no longer be needed. But in the meantime it should help to facilitate access to good quality academic research for people who are studying early modern history but don’t have access to well-stocked university libraries, and it may also encourage the development of open access publishing/archiving by historians.

Is it fair for the government to fund scientific research, only to have that research locked up in a US$300 academic journal? Senators Cornyn (R-TX) and Lieberman (D-CT) don't think so, and they've got a plan to change the current system. That plan is the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (PDF), a new bit of legislation making its way through the senate. The bill mandates that most federally funded research be freely published online after publication in an academic journal.

The bill contains a few caveats, though: such publication won’t take place until at least six months after an article appears in a journal, and it won’t necessarily be an exact copy of the journal article. If the publisher refuses to allow for a copy from the journal, the author’s own copy of the paper’s final version will be used instead....

It doesn't take a college graduate to imagine that journal publishers don't like the idea. Brian Crawford, who chairs the Professional Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers (that must be one wide business card), says of the plan:

Mandating that journal articles be freely available on government Web sites so soon after their publication will be a powerful disincentive for publishers to continue these substantial investments.

Not surprisingly, the plan is quite a bit more popular with universities and libraries, who now pay journal subscription fees that sometimes border on the obscene....

[T]his is an issue near and dear to us [as grad students] --and we are of two minds about it. On the one hand, it hardly seems right for the government to fund research, then to pay a private company for access to that research (which is what happens at most public universities). There’s an argument to be made that if taxpayers foot the bill, they should have access to the product. On the other hand, the journals do provide some valuable services. One of their most important functions is to coordinate the peer review process, one of the cornerstones of contemporary academic research. But they're also useful because they sort information; one soon learns what to expect from, say, English Literary History. By throwing all of their research into a big pile, government-run web sites might make it difficult to find articles of interest and value. And the argument about "the government paid, so it should be free!" breaks down when we consider analogous situations. Just because your local government funded that new baseball stadium, for instance, doesn't mean they're going to give you free tickets-or even a discount. It's also worth pointing out that federal funding often doesn't cover the entire cost of the research, and it certainly doesn't pay the journal's real editorial and printing expenses.

Comments.

1. The bill (FRPAA) doesn't impose a minimum six month embargo on the OA edition. On the contrary, it says that six months is the maximum embargo.
2. The bill would not replace peer-reviewed journals or steer publicly-funded research away from them. On the contrary, the bill only applies to articles that have been published in peer-reviewed journals.
3. These articles will still be discoverable through the usual channels (the journals themselves, standard indices in different fields). But the OA editions will also be discoverable in new and useful ways. For example, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Scirus are all indexing the OA repositories where these articles will be on deposit, and so will the OAI harvesters like OAIster. Discoverability will be considerably better, not worse, than it is now.
4. The publicly-funded baseball stadium isn't a good analogy to publicly-funded scientific research. The stadium is rivalrous --use by some excludes use by others. But knowledge is non-rivalrous. It can be shared with everyone without diminishing use, possession, or consumption by anyone. Digital texts are non-rivalrous for the same reason. There is a huge difference, therefore, between giving taxpayers free access to a publicly-subsidized building with finite capacity and giving taxpayers free access to publicly-subsidized knowledge.
5. For my response to Brian Crawford and the AAP's criticism of bill, see the 10-point rebuttal I posted yesterday.
6. For an assessment of the bill's chances of passing, see my article on it in the May issue of SOAN.

Arthur Amman, President of Global Strategies for HIV Prevention, tells the following story:

I recently met a physician from southern Africa, engaged in perinatal HIV prevention, whose primary access to information was abstracts posted on the Internet. Based on a single abstract, they had altered their perinatal HIV prevention program from an effective therapy to one with lesser efficacy. Had they read the full text article they would have undoubtedly realized that the study results were based on short-term follow-up, a small pivotal group, incomplete data, and were unlikely to be applicable to their country situation. Their decision to alter treatment based solely on the abstract’s conclusions may have resulted in increased perinatal HIV transmission.

Amman’s story shows the potentially deadly gap between the information-rich and the information-poor. This gap is not the result of lack of technology or of money, but of a failure of imagination. We live in the most information-rich era of history, when the Internet allows immediate global dissemination of crucial health information, and the inter-linking of online information creates an integrated, living body of information...What is preventing such a living web? For scientific and medical information, two obstacles are vested interests and traditions. Central to these traditions is the role of copyright...

The Internet provides the means to revolutionize publishing in two crucial ways. First, it makes it possible to disseminate health information at no charge to anyone in the world with online access. Although it costs money to peer review, edit, produce, and host an online article, this is a one-time, fixed cost. If research funders are willing to pay this cost, then the published work can be made freely available to all readers worldwide, and there would be no need for journal subscriptions. This is one way of financing an open-access model of publishing.

Second, because the Internet allows not just ease of access but ease of reuse, an article’s usefulness is limited only by a user’s imagination. To allow this,...authors can retain copyright and grant the public the right to creatively reuse their work. Licences such as those developed by the Creative Commons, which facilitate rather than prohibit reuse, are used by the open-access publishers Public Library of Science (PLoS) and BioMed Central (BMC). The result is that: “… copyright can be used for what it is meant to in science, not to make the articles artificially scarce and in the process restrict their distribution, but instead, to ensure that their potential for maximum possible dissemination can be realised.”

The potential benefits of such a change are vast. No longer will physicians have to base their practice on half truths. Instead, everyone from patients to policy-makers can read for themselves the evidence on which crucial science and health policy decisions are made....It may be uncomfortable for those with interest in the status quo, but by regaining control of copyright the medical and scientific communities could ensure that publishing is no longer driven by the interests of publishers, but rather by the needs of society.

The new blog Carrollogos...dissects the claim that open access is harmful because lay readers do not have the training or experience to interpret research articles. (See the New York Times for examples of this argument, lest anyone think homines straminei are what’s at stake here.)  Carroll’s counter-arguments are good, and so are the comments, but I have another angle on the issue. Simply put: when did gatekeeping become part of publisher mandate?

If you ask a researcher or a librarian what publishers are for, “keeping knowledge out of the hands of inexperienced readers” is not going to appear on the response list. I don’t know any publishers who attract submissions because they promise fewer readers!  Indeed, I suspect the majority researcher response to the inexperienced-reader question, if it were posed outright, would be a bewildered stare and “If they’re willing to wade through it, why would I stop them?” I grant that a substantial minority response would be the snobbish “They can’t possibly care or understand,” but even in that case, I doubt the researcher would want the publisher deciding who is or isn’t a qualified reader!

Do publishers really act as gatekeepers now? Do they vet all their subscription requests for competence in the related field of inquiry? (I can just see it: “No, this community-college library may not subscribe to the Journal of Incomprehensible Results! They’re not worthy!”) Do eighteen-year-old undergraduates, who have the full run of their libraries, really count as “qualified” readers? Does it bother publishers that lay readers can walk freely into a great many academic libraries (though, sadly, fewer than in days of yore) and read their journals? 

And what about reprint requests, or pay-per-downloads? What competency controls do publishers maintain on those? Yes, I’m laughing too. This is all about the money. We know that, publishers know that; let’s everybody cut out the nonsense....

RP: ...[Many]scholarly publishers - including large commercial publishers like Elsevier, Springer and Blackwell - agreed to participate in a number of low-cost or free access schemes - schemes like HINARI, AGORA, and OARE. Have these not resolved the access problems faced by Indian researchers?

SA: No. In fact, although India’s per capita GNP is less than the $1,000 figure below which free access to journals under HINARI and AGORA was supposed to be triggered, the publishers participating in the schemes have proved unwilling to provide Indian researchers with free access, on the plea that they enjoy a sizeable subscription income from India.

RP: So while paying lip service to equality of access, in practice scholarly publishers are only willing to help developing countries if doing so will have no impact on their revenues?

SA: Exactly. They are only providing free access to developing countries that do hardly any science. As a consequence, they are getting undue credit for their philanthropy....[B]oth WHO and FAO should have negotiated a better deal with the publishers. As it stands, they have not protected the interests of India; and they have not protected the interests of the other developing countries whose per capita GNP is below $1,000 and yet who are denied free access to the HINARI and AGORA journals.  What organisations like WHO and FAO should do now, however, is devote their time and energy to promoting Open Access throughout the world....The aim now should not be simply to provide Indian researchers with access to a few more journals, but to level the playing field in terms of information access; and in my view OA is the only effective way of doing that. The fact is that scientists in developing countries have the most to gain from OA, since they are currently the most deprived of access to scientific information....

RP: Finally, what’s your message to researchers and research institutes, both in the West and in the developed world?

SA: My message to all researchers in the world is this:

• Adopt OA whole-heartedly; it can only do you good
• Never give away the copyright in your work to publishers, especially if your research is funded by the public
• Don’t fall prey to the blandishments of publishers when they offer you membership of an editorial board, or ask you to guest edit a special issue, if the journal is not Open Access.

And my message to research institutions is this:

• Set up an interoperable institutional archive and mandate archiving as soon as possible
• Provide high bandwidth Internet access to your scientists, and always try to take advantage of advances in technology
• Remember that the purpose of all science is ultimately to benefit the people. Be proactive in sharing your institution’s knowledge with the rest of the world.

The key point is that science and society can only progress if we all share knowledge, and build partnerships. We increasingly talk about e-Science and the information commons, but what is even more important is inclusive science - science in which no one is left behind.

American legislators have proposed that scientific research paid for by US taxpayers should be freely available online to everyone. Analysts described the move as a "potential banana skin" for established scientific publishers such as Reed Elsevier, Springer and Informa. The proposed new law comes after an independent report for the European commission last month recommended that research funded by European taxpayers should also be available free on the web. In the UK, meanwhile, public funders of research are still considering whether to recommend so-called "open access" to research, despite support for the idea from a committee of MPs. Charitable funders such as the Wellcome Trust have already come out in favour.

The Federal Research Public Access Act - introduced by senators John Cornyn, a Texan Republican, and Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat - would require all federal departments and agencies that invest $100m (£54m) or more in research to demand that articles be put online within six months of publication in a subscription journal. "It will ensure that US taxpayers do not have to pay twice for the same research - once to conduct it and a second time to read it," Senator Cornyn told Congress....

Peter Willis, Liberal Democrat MP and chairman of the science and technology select committee, said the proposed US law should serve as a warning to the government this side of the Atlantic that the current model needs to be changed. "This is yet another example of the dissemination of research moving into the 21st century and the UK must not be left behind," he said. "To cling on to what are basically 19th-century principles of publishing research seems to me a rather bizarre concept in the 21st century."

In a note on the proposed law, Panmure Gordon pointed out that Reed Elsevier's academic publishing division accounts for