Open Access News

Abstract: We describe an electronic journal publication infrastructure that allows a flexible publication workflow, academic exchange around different forms of user submissions, and the exchange of articles between publishers and archives using a common XML based standard. This web-based application is implemented on a freely available open source software stack. This publication demonstrates the Dermatology Online Journal's use of the platform for non-biased independent open access publication.

Comment. The volume of proceedings is toll-access only and I don't have access. Does anyone know which web-based, open-source journal management package this article is talking about? If anyone can send me a URL for the software, I'll post it here.

Unfortunately, the Dermatology Journal Online web site doesn't say anything about the journal-management software it uses. It does, however, provide OA to its articles through eScholarship, the U of California institutional repository.

There are dozens of large collections of texts (or of links to texts) available online, but only a few of them is of very high quality. Most of them you might find through a Google search are full of broken links, and have few or no notes as to who transcribed the texts, or how, or from what source.

If anyone has a source of texts that is (1) free, (2) comprehensive (contains a large part of “the canon” of Western literature at least), and (3) well-documented and constructed according to a reliable method, I will update this post with a link to the source.  The best I know of are these:  [1] The Online Books Page, [2] Project Gutenberg (of course), [3] Internet Archive: The Open-Access Text Archive....

The Open-Access Text Archive (archive.org) has the potential to become the best because it scans the original book, which (I think) usually provides all the information a scholar might need. The problem with its offerings is the idiosyncratic selection and the sometimes spotty proofing. In my own use of the resource I’ve come across several texts that were incomplete and had no indication of why. But that’s really being nit-picky. I expect great things from the Open Content Alliance, which manages this project.

The Text Outline Project has the potential to be a magnet for high-quality texts, however, because, unlike all of the above websites, it has a mission that requires texts that are credible to scholars. For me, as a scholar, there is no other way forward....The texts that we collate must be credible texts. If we must essentially create new editions, then so be it....Imagine, if you will, an entire library placed into a single database in which you can choose from a wide variety of categories to search. Imagine that you can search not just the texts of books (something not very hard to do now-there are many tools available), but outline headings, and text chunk summaries (this is Textop jargon) as well; imagine that you can return either text references (as a concordance or index does), or just outline headings, or text chunks; and imagine that you can do this all in multiple languages from the same interface (this last assumes we solve the hard problem of internationalization). Quite aside from the value of the outline itself, the value simply of having credible texts viewable and searchable all in one place, in multiple languages, as part of a single database, would be tremendous for scholars.

A quick look through [the latest draft] seems to indicate the text was amended as the ENVI committee had recommended and that most of the really bad stuff from the Council version was taken out (see examples below) so three cheers for the Parliament (and the Commission!)....

Amendment 21....[1] Member States shall ensure that: (a) the services referred to in point (a) of Article 11(1) are available to the public free of charge....

PS: Congratulations to Public Geo Data for this significant victory.

Mashups illustrate the proposition that data need to not be too dependent on any single application. Typically, the phrase “data interoperability” is used to describe this, and several methodologies such as SOA attempt to address this issue. However, I will go one step further and suggest that recombinant data must be captured and defined in a way that is “application independent,” being free of any application formatting biases so that it has value on its own....Data should have strong value even for future applications that were not considered when the data was created, a property referred to as “re-usefulness.”...

Science Commons...executive director John Wilbanks hopes that by adding the ability to tag the legal use and distribution of knowledge and data, Web-based science resources can be guaranteed to be openly available for both academic and commercial R&D, and thereby promote innovation in science by lowering the legal and technical costs of the sharing and reuse of scientific work. Science Commons’ vision fits very well to the goals of Public Library of Science (PLoS), which aims to empower the science community by making published knowledge more accessible. Since rights cover data as well, it can also take full advantage of the RDF model for its representation. Such an experiment has been initiated for Science Commons’ NeuroCommons project....

Where is this taking us? Well we have hardly explored how to do a scientific mashup or what it means to take advantage of it. One thing is clear: If it is based on recombinant scientific data, a data description language such as RDF is necessary. Otherwise, the mashups will result in mush, unusable piles of unparsable data with unknown provenance! One of the project areas people are currently discussing is around a Neuroscience Mashup, where complex sets of data could all be co-joined by tissue locality as defined by a brain coordinate system. Data about neurological disorders, neurotransmitter receptor-types, neural functions, nerve fiber projections, and gene expression could all be co-registered for very powerful analyses and viewing. This scientific mashup would allow collaborating researchers to ask: “What genes are affected in responsive neural cells targeted by p38 inhibitors, and do these same cells go on to form amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s-affected individuals?” Conceivably, this could have astounding benefits for research and medicine, but we’ll need to begin with a few incremental yet provocative demonstrations.

In the 108 page report, Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets in Europe, the recommendations are on pp. 11-13. For a summary, see my SOAN story from May 2 or my blog posting from April 3. Note especially recommendation A1, which would mandate OA for publicly-funded research.

Send your comment to rtd-scientific-publication@cec.eu.int. Even a short comment in support of recommendation A1 would be better than no comment at all. The door may not be open much longer.

Update. Also see John Martin's report, Conclusions of the Workshop. (Thanks to Richard Hardwick.) Key excerpt: "Recommendations for FP7:...Open access publication mandated for publicly funded research."

Abstract: The Human Protein Atlas is a comprehensive database that provides the protein expression profiles for a large number of human proteins, presented as immunohistological images from most human tissues. This review provides an overview of the contents of the atlas, discusses the project strategy and highlights the importance of open access for data validation and quality. Essential procedures that are implemented during antibody production and image generation, such as the use of protein epitope signature tags (PrEST) antigens, monospecific antibodies, tissue microarrays and thorough quality validation, are also discussed. The Human Protein Atlas is related to four other expression atlas initiatives, including, in particular, an upcoming protein atlas developed by the Sanger Institute.

Abstract (provisional): A large investment is required to develop, license and deploy a new antimalarial drug. Too often, that investment has been rapidly devalued by the selection of parasite populations resistant to the drug action. To understand the mechanisms of selection, we need detailed information on the patterns of drug use in a variety of environments, and the geographic and temporal patterns of resistance that result. Currently, there is no publically accessible central database that contains information on the levels of resistance to antimalaria drugs. This paper outlines the resources that are available, and the steps that might be taken to create a dynamic, open access database that would include current and historical data on clinical efficacy, in vitro responses and molecular markers related to drug resistance in P. falciparum and P. vivax. The goal is to include historical and current data on resistance to commonly used drugs like chloroquine and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, and on the many combinations that are now being tested in different settings. The database will be accessible to all on the Web. The information in such a database will inform optimal utilization of current drugs and sustain the longest possible therapeutic life of newly introduced drugs and combinations. The database will protect the valuable investment represented by the development and deployment of novel therapies for malaria.

The Wellcome Trust has completed the first million pages of its project to digitise nearly 200 years’ worth of medical journals. The project, which started in 2004, is creating a digital archive that will offer free access to medical journals via PubMed Central, the online medical service from the US National Institutes of Health. The earliest archived journal dates from 1809, but the archive will also encompass current and future journals.

“It’s a living archive,” said Robert Kiley, head of systems strategy at medical research funding charity Wellcome Trust. He added that participating publishers have agreed to make all future content freely available online within 12 months of publication. “Once we’ve digitised a journal, if the publisher wants a copy itself for its own website, it can do that,” he said.

As well as digitising the content, the project, funded jointly by the Wellcome Trust and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), is creating a PDF file for every article in the archive. All the text is also being put through an optical character recognition process, making it possible to carry out free-text searches.

Kiley said that the project had been “subject to heavy and sustained use”. The Biochemical Journal has had more than one million articles downloaded in an eight month period, he said. The next journal to be digitised will be the British Medical Journal, a source of several ground breaking studies.

A House spending panel last week endorsed a flat budget for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) --but told the agency...to make mandatory a voluntary program in which grantees submit their accepted manuscripts to a free online archive....

The spending bill would...require researchers to post a copy of every manuscript they generate using NIH funds in the agency’s free, full-text PubMed Central archive within 12 months after publication in a journal. The committee resisted calls from open-access advocates to require posting within 6 months, which many scientific societies fear could bankrupt journals that provide funds for their other activities. “The 12 months is a positive step,” says Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society. The bill moves to the floor later this month and then to the Senate....

Mid 2006 finds the academic research community engaged in an ideological and fiscal war related to Open Access publishing. Open Access requires that the full text of publications be made available at no cost to anyone on the open Internet. Recent position and discussion papers in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries, have called for dialogue amongst academics and strongly hinted that research supported by public funds should be made available freely to the general public. The resulting discussion has clearly split the academic community....

IRRODL’s position is, as expected, to be solidly behind all moves to insure Open Access publication. We are proudly listed with the 2,256 other journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals and our publisher, Athabasca University, is a signature to the Budapest Open Access Initiative....From six years of producing IRRODL, we know that editing and reviewing are non-trivial tasks that take time, skill, and creative energy, and we certainly do not subscribe to any notion that devalues this contribution to scholarly life....

I recently performed a quick experiment using Google Scholar to compare the number of citations of articles in five of the most popular distance education related journals. The method by which Goggle spiders find articles is quite obscure, so there is no way of telling if the engine itself has systemic bias. Nonetheless, I counted the average number of citations for the ten most popular articles published by these journals in the past 5 years....The data...shows that the two Open Access journals have higher number of citations than all but the American Journal of Distance Education. Given the wider circulation and much smaller number of articles published in the American Journal of Distance Education, it is perhaps not surprising that they have relatively high citation ratings as well. However, clearly the Open Access journals have (on average) greater number of citations and impact than closed publications. The point I draw from this is that authors wishing to maximize the impact of their research in our field are advised to select Open Access outlets.

At times the online information and publishing industry sounds beset with woe as it faces an ever increasing number of challenges. But the latest financial results from scientific heavyweight John Wiley & Sons refute this. Wiley has broken the $1bn ceiling for revenue in the last financial year; this is an increase of eight per cent over the previous year. Wiley reports that all of its businesses added to this figure. $1bn attracts headlines, and will no doubt add fuel to the open access fire. William Pesce, president and CEO of Wiley puts the figure down to highly regarded brands, "must have content", and the ability to adept to customer's needs. The fact that users around the world have purchased this "must have content" shows there is still a strong demand for high quality information that has been through the respected channels of peer-review and publishing. When all around predict demise for the industry in the face of Wikipedia and other free resources, the bare facts of this financial statement show that a very sizeable number of important people in science, technology and business are prepared to pay for content.

Comment. The idea that these results challenge OA shows several misunderstandings of OA.

1. The OA movement has the constructive goal of providing OA to more and more literature, not the destructive goal of putting publishers out of business. As I put it in my Open Access Overview, "the consequences may or may not overlap (this is contingent) but the [goals] do not overlap."
2. The fact that people are willing to pay for high-quality content is not a blow to OA. On the contrary. OA has expenses too, and we hope that people will be willing to defray them. The essence of OA is not that it costs nothing to produce but that the bills are not paid by readers and therefore do not become access barriers.
3. The fact that people are willing to pay for literature that has "been through the respected channels of peer-review" is not a blow to OA. On the contrary. OA articles (or the kind on which we focus) are peer-reviewed, usually by the very same journals as their non-OA counterparts.
4. Finally, Wikipedia is not the poster child of the OA movement, which focuses instead on peer-reviewed research.

The notion that scientists ‘donate’ their research articles to journals is one that seems fairly widespread...It is an interesting notion indeed, this laudable collective philanthropy. Scientists usually do not expect royalties from journal articles. Two, closely related, questions arise: why do they donate to journals, and why do they not expect royalties? Are they truly that unselfishly concerned with journals?...

Or are they not donating to publishers, but to the world? How can that be a problem? To my knowledge there is not a scientific journal publisher in the world who would dream of standing in the way of a researcher donating his or her research to the world. Publishers are simply not involved if researchers just get on with donating, for instance by publishing their article freely available on the web, such as I’m doing now with this blog entry.

But perhaps it’s not that simple. Research donated that way may not be taken that seriously by the world. And particularly not by tenure-committees and the like. Unless, of course, it has the formal imprimatur of a peer-reviewed journal. In science, publishers are not, strange as it may sound, needed so much for publishing per se. But they are for formal publishing. The formal publishing process makes a potentially worthwhile article an actually valuable one. That’s the added value of publishing....

“We don’t need publishers to keep the peer-reviewed journals going” is a sentiment often expressed, “because we do all the work, such as peer review, ourselves anyway”. The story of the midwife comes to mind. Publishers are no more than the ‘midwife’ in the publishing process. Mark Patterson of PLoS used this analogy to great effect in a few recent presentations, when he pointed out that it would be absurd if the midwife were to restrict access to the child. He’s right. But without stretching the analogy too far, we do need and use the services of midwives widely....Midwives need sustenance, and so do publishers. Those who believe they can do it all themselves, without sustenance, ought to do it all themselves, without sustenance. But please, do make it more than a short-lived hobby-of-the-day. For the sake of science.

Comments. Four quick thoughts.

• Scholars do donate their articles to journals in the sense that they willingly publish in journals without expecting to be paid. Journals do not buy their articles or pay royalties. But this doesn't mean that scholars "are unselfishly concerned with journals" let alone that they believe journals add no value. As Jan says, scholars publish in journals for the sake of the enhancement or added value. These observations are utterly consistent and there's no reason to see any tension between them.
• I've never denied that journals add value. To me the question is not whether a journal's enhancements to a raw manuscript are valuable but how to pay for the most essential enhancements without creating access barriers for readers. The most essential enhancement is peer review. (Prestige is a side-effect of peer review by an editorial board with a reputation for rigor and selectivity.)
• I've always liked the PLoS midwife analogy. Midwives perform a valuable service and deserve to be paid for it. But they shouldn't be allowed to keep the baby or to control everyone else's access to it.
• Jan is right that authors can donate their work to the world, bypassing publishers, and no publishers will interfere with them. For now, authors and publishers see a mutual interest in working together. In the age of the internet, however, authors can do without publishers much more easily than publishers can do without authors. But authors still want the enhancements that publishers have to offer. The challenge to publishers is to provide these enhancements and the benefits of the internet, including open access. Right now, scholars themselves provide the key enhancement of peer review, though they do it with the mediation of publishers. If publishers cannot rise to the challenge, scholars will realize that they can provide the same enhancement without the mediation of publishers. If Jan's only objection to this scenario is that scholars shouldn't do it as a hobby, but find some way to make it sustainable, then we agree in full.

Today [Google] plans to announce a new online product aimed at being a one-stop shop for searching federal government Web sites. The launch of Google U.S. Government Search, http://usgov.google.com, targets federal employees who often need to search across several government agencies....

The government search site joins similar engines that target the same audience. The five-year-old FirstGov.gov, a government-sponsored site powered by Microsoft Corp.'s MSN, is geared to help citizens locate federal, state and local information without sifting through individual agency sites. Other similar search engines include http://govspot.com , http://searchgov.com and http://govengine.com .

[Kevin Gough, product manager for Google U.S. Government Search] said he expects Google’s product to "complement" FirstGov without directly competing with it.

Comment. Check it out. It covers PubMed Central but is not as up to date as PMC's own search engine. I searched for an author manuscript deposited in February as part of the NIH policy, and Government-Google found it. (BTW, vanilla Google found it too.) But when I searched for the most recently deposited article, Government-Google came up dry. (Vanilla Google found the journal copy but not the PMC copy.) Note the time stamp on this blog posting; if you repeat these searches at a later time, your results likely to be better than mine.

Here's a boolean search for "open access" OR "public access".

The best single search engine for OA science sponsored by the US government still seems to be science.gov from the Department of Energy's Office of Scientific and Technical Information.

Starting later this month, South Korean researchers will receive three million won (US$3,000) if they are leading authors of papers published in key journals. The relevant journals will be chosen by a ten-member committee of government officials and researchers, and will probably include Nature, Science and Cell. Researchers will be rewarded if they are first or corresponding authors of a paper.

Similar practices are already widespread elsewhere. In China scientists can receive more than ten times this amount. In Pakistan bonuses have dramatically increased the number of papers that researchers publish, and advocates say the money compensates for low academic wages.

Critics argue bonuses encourage scientific fraud and that rushing to produce as many papers as possible reduces the quality of research (see China must address the roots of scientific fraud). But others counter that the journal's peer review system remains independent so that the system only rewards good work. An accompanying editorial in this week's Nature argues that nations should try to avoid such crude 'cash-per-paper' incentives, and tailor rewards to promote the ethical pursuit of scientific truth.

Comment. Two quick responses.

• When South Africa addressed the same underlying concern, that its research was not sufficiently visible, it decided to recommend green and gold open access. See the May 2006 report of the Academy of Science of South Africa and the key excerpts from it in my blog post for May 9, 2006. This is a much more sensible solution for countries facing the same problem. Second-best would be to pay the article processing fees at the OA journals that charge fees rather than simply to pay authors without any assurance that their research will be more widely accessible.
• See my article from 2003, Open access when authors are paid.

Abstract: On 20 June 2005 the Federal Government of Canada unveiled Bill C-60, An Act to Amend the Copyright Act, ostensibly necessary to modernize copyright for the digital age. The discourse that preceded the tabling of this bill showed a clear bias to extend the depth and breadth of copyright, at the expense of the public’s right to access creative endeavour. In this paper I examine the issue of educational licensing of the Internet. A contentious matter, it was removed from Bill C-60 but appears poised* to return. As Canada sits at the policy crossroads, it would be prudent to draw attention to the environment of the proposal at its inception, rather than be critical after implementation.

The Government’s 2004 Backing Australia’s Ability package included the proposal to develop an Accessibility Framework to improve access to research information, outputs and infrastructure. The Government is keen to ensure that, through the establishment and linkage of electronic digital repositories, national scholarly output and research data derived from Australian Government funding will be available to researchers and the wider community....To date, the Government has provided $33.7 million in funding from the Systematic Infrastructure Initiative (SII) for projects to build the technical information infrastructure to support the creation, dissemination of and access to knowledge, the use of digital assets and their management. These projects have been recommended to the Minister by the Australian Research Information Infrastructure Committee (ARIIC). Four of these projects are working on the development of open access institutional repositories....

Enhanced open access approaches will certainly facilitate the sharing of knowledge between researchers and will provide the possibility of greater access for non-academic users of knowledge. Our desktop research, however, suggests that effective knowledge transfer usually requires the intervention of knowledge intermediaries who are able to translate and contextualise academic knowledge to make it ‘useable’ by non-academic communities....

While it is appropriate for public policy to ensure that the return on public investment in research and higher education is realised through effective knowledge transfer, there are also acknowledged tensions between the push to commercialise knowledge generated through publicly funded research and the increasing emphasis being given to open access and open innovation. It was argued by some stakeholders consulted for this project that the current public policy emphasis on research commercialisation encourages institutions to place a narrow interpretation on what constitutes knowledge transfer, and that knowledge was at risk of being ‘locked away’ rather than transferred for wider application....Public policy needs to walk a fine line between creating incentives for exploiting knowledge with potential commercial value and facilitating the wide uptake of knowledge for national benefit.

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA) strongly supports the U.S. House Appropriations Committee’s provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to require its research grantees to submit an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscript to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central online archive upon acceptance for publication in a journal.

The House Appropriations Committee took this official step, which strengthens the public access policy undertaken by NIH a year ago, as they approved the FY 2007 Labor, HHS, Education, and Related Agencies appropriations measure. The NIH policy, currently voluntary, has resulted in researchers’ deposit of less than five percent of available NIH-funded research. The House Appropriations bill with the new directive will now be considered by the U.S. House of Representatives. The U.S. Senate will consider its Labor, HHS, Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations bill sometime this summer.

“This action is a clear signal from Congressional leaders that they are committed to advancing the cause of science and the public interest,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, an ATA founding member). “The bill is a significant step in acknowledging the profound impact the Internet has on the conduct of scientific research and the need for this research to be shared as widely as possible.”

The bill also stipulates a maximum 12-month window for authors to submit their peer-reviewed manuscripts. The ATA believes this lengthy timeframe will delay important research advances and the dissemination of information to stakeholders who rely on it. “We applaud the House Appropriations Committee for taking this tremendous stride forward,” said Pat Furlong, Founding President & CEO of Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy. “For individuals and families struggling to stay abreast of scientific developments and make informed decisions about their care and their lives, access to credible, reliable, and current information is often the difference between life and death. However, the 12-month delay is too long for us to wait. As the bill moves forward, we urge members of both House and Senate committees to consider adopting a six-month embargo, if not immediate access.”

The appropriations bill strengthens efforts by Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) and Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) to win Congressional endorsement of the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (S.2695). The bill requires federal agencies that fund over $100 million in annual external research to make electronic manuscripts of peer-reviewed journal articles stemming from that research publicly available via the Internet. ATA enthusiastically supports this measure. Details may be found online at [the ATA web site].

Comment. This is big. The House is telling the NIH to adopt an OA mandate, even if it isn't telling it to shorten the permissible delay. The Senate hasn't weighed in yet, but there's only one more hurdle to clear. Effort will now focus on getting the Senate Appropriations Committee to support the OA mandate and shorten the permissible delay. If the House is willing to demand an OA mandate at the NIH, then it may also be willing to adopt the CURES Act and FRPAA, two bills introduced in the Senate that would mandate OA to publicly-funded research within and beyond the NIH. More later.

To provide OA, PLoS journals use a business model in which our expenses - including those of peer review, of journal production, and of online hosting and archiving - are recovered in part through a publication fee to the authors or research sponsors for each article they publish. Now, with 3 years of operational experience to draw on, it is time for PLoS to adjust this model so that our publication fees reflect more closely the costs of publication. From 1st July 2006, the publication fee for our flagship journals PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine will be $2500; for our community journals PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, and PLoS Pathogens it will be $2000. PLoS Clinical Trials is priced at $2500.

The new prices compare favorably with the fees that authors often pay to publish their work in traditional journals (between $1000-$3000 for color charges, excess pages, reprints etc). And, in such journals, distribution is not unlimited as it is for PLoS, but is restricted to subscribers and those whose institutions have paid license fees....

A "no questions asked" fee waiver exists for authors who do not have funds to cover publication fees. In addition, editors and reviewers have no access to authors’ payment information, and hence inability to pay will not influence the decision to publish a paper. These policies ensure that the fee is never a barrier to publication.

Also see these new questions from the PLoS FAQ:

$2500 is a lot to pay to publish an article isn't it?

Not when you consider the cost of the research that led to the article. Publication fees of $2000 or $2500 are a small fraction of the costs of doing research, and it makes sense for funding agencies to include these fees in research grants. Many funding agencies now support this view. They recognize that publishing is an integral part of the research process - and if the work is published OA it will deliver the maximum possible impact, which in turn maximizes the outcome of the funder's investment in research.

Ultimately, the fees that PLoS charge reflect the costs associated with publishing. We are not in this to make a profit - our bottom line is to make the literature a public resource. The administration of peer review, copy editing, production of high-quality tagged electronic files, web hosting, and so on are expensive processes. They are many of the same processes that are used in traditional subscription journals. If the money that currently supports subscription journals can be re-routed to cover publication fees then we will be able to support open access publishing in a fully sustainable way....

Can journals like PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine be supported by publication fees alone?

Possibly not.  These journals are run by professional editors, reject a large proportion of the submitted papers, and publish a great deal of added-value content.  They are therefore very expensive to run, but they are also representative of only the top tier of scientific journals, which includes Nature, Science, and The New England Journal of Medicine - a tiny fraction of the full complement of scholarly journals.  Publication fees provide an important revenue stream for PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine, but this is also supplemented with income from philanthropy, advertisers, sponsors, membership and other parts of the publishing operation.

It’s reasonable to ask why we started our publishing with two journals that present the biggest financial challenge in terms of how to support them.  The answer is that we felt it was critical to the success of open access that we provide journals of the highest standard.  They might not, by themselves, prove the publication fee model for open access publishing, but they provide us with the strongest possible foundation upon which to build our other publications.

Journals such as PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Pathogens, on the other hand, are much more typical of the scholarly literature as a whole.  These journals are run by outstanding academic editorial boards who generously donate their time to support the journals.  It is likely that these journals can be supported by publication fees alone.  We expect these journals to be close to breaking even within the next 2-3 years, which is rapid for any new journal. Our other projects such as PLoS ONE and PLoS Clinical Trials will also be supported mainly by publication fees.

This Journal is fully open access, completely available to anyone, anywhere, as soon as it is published, and in perpetuity. Creative Commons License: read Creative Commons Canada.

Update. I just heard from Jennifer Richard at Acadia University who tells me that the journal will use Open Journal Systems software and be hosted at Guelph University. "Our plans are to be a truly open access journal with no embargos, subscriptions or costs to publish." (Thanks, Jennifer.)

When Meteo Consult, Europe's largest private weather information company, asked the Polish national meteorological office if it could use its forecasting data, it was told there was no licensing procedure. The information was not available to commercial users.

This represents an extreme example of the variation between different governments' attitude to public-sector information: some European countries, such as Britain and Norway, make equivalent data available for free; another charges a licensing fee of €186,000 ($127,000) a year. The differing access and pricing regimes are a nightmare for firms such as Meteo Consult, trying to compete in the global market. Such restrictive practices and prohibitive pricing mean that the European market in weather information is one tenth the size of that in the US, says Jennifer Campbell, Meteo Consult's managing director. "We need a single market for weather data in Europe," she says.

Guardian Technology's Free Our Data campaign has a simple answer to the problem: public bodies should make available freely for re-use all data they collect at taxpayers' expense. They should leave the business of selling value-added products based on the data to the private sector....

The main free dissemination example is the US. Its policy of free access is summed up by a 1996 circular by the federal Office of Management and Budget, which states: "The economic benefits to society are maximised when government information is available in a timely and equitable manner to all." This economic policy is rooted in three sets of principles of US government. These are:

• Legal. Specific laws govern public rights to access to government information and bar public agencies from making exclusive contracts with private firms to exploit public data. The US's Copyright Act forbids the federal government from claiming copyright (though individual states can, and use this to enforce charges).
• Ethical. This principle holds that the public owns the data, having paid for its collection and storage through taxes. Charging again would be wrong in principle.
• Political, as set out in the US constitution's right to free expression. "Closed information policies are a tool of repression and lead to corruption," says Paul Uhlir, director of international science and technology information at the US National Academies....

Comment. Cross is referring to OMB Circular A-130, adopted in 1996. If A-130 were proposed today, would it be trashed as socialist? And why has it been so hard to extend its principles from publicly-funded data to publicly-funded research?

"Open source teaching provides new strategies and opportunities for individuals to engage in the shared investigation of common challenges," shares a Wikipedia entry. For me, this is at the heart of "open source publication," or open access publications. I see blogs and podcasts--and using those to make the writing process more transparent, with writers no longer clutching their manuscripts to their chest for fear others might steal their ideas--as the quickest way to share information with the people who need it the most.

A few of us had a conversation addressing the question of how to publish information and ideas with others. Some people don't want us to provide transparency or easy access to information. The conversation fascinates me because Dr. Maria Kaylor and Dr. JoAnne Ollerenshaw are participating and are a part of "higher education." They both have to consider a different approach to publication. This is scary for folks at the university level, especially when you consider the tenure issue. As you listen to this, what side "of the line" do you come down on?

Great news! Beginning with this issue, the Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association (JCHLA) is being published as an open access journal. Furthermore, the back files of JCHLA online from Vol. 25(1), 2004 to Vol. 27(1), 2006 will be accessible without a password. As librarians we strive to remove the barriers and provide access to information. Using the open access publishing model, JCHLA will be available to a larger audience, and authors can expect their published work to have a greater impact.

PS: Kudos to the JCHLA for this welcome step. I'm probably not the only one wondering what business model it will use to support the new OA policy. The announcement says nothing about article processing fees, for example, and the page of instructions to authors hasn't been updated for more than a year.

Closed peer review works best in scarce environments, where many papers fight for a few coveted journal slots. Open peer review works best in an abundant environment of online journals with unlimited space or the post-publication marketplace of opinion across all work.

Anderson makes this point about "online journals", but seems to mean OA journals. His point doesn't apply to subscription-based online journals, which depend on artificial scarcity to keep their revenue coming in.

PS: Anderson is the author of The Long Tail, originally a long article in Wired and now a forthcoming book.

PMC International (PMCI) is a collaborative effort between NLM [the National Library of Medicine], the publishers whose journal content makes up the PMC archive, and organizations in other countries that share NLM's interest in archiving life sciences literature. The long term goal of PMCI is to create a network of digital archives that can share some or all of their respective locally deposited content with others in the network. There are several reasons for doing this:

• The probablity of an archive surviving over the long term is greater if there are working copies of the archive in regular use at multiple sites around the world.
• A producer or funder of research literature often will be more inclined to make the primary deposit of its material to a locally or regionally affiliated archive, rather than to one operated elsewhere in the world.
• In areas with limited online communications facilities, users will be better served by a national or regional archive in the vicinity....

PMCI sites must use NCBI's portable PMC (pPMC) software, which is an offshoot of the software that runs NLM's PMC system (US PMC). It is designed to manage and provide public access to a literature archive in a manner similar to that of US PMC, including the same presentation styles for articles....Portable PMC (pPMC) is a software package being developed by NLM's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and currently being tested by several prospective PMCI sites. When complete, it will be available for use by any organization or individual wishing to manage and provide access to a collection of journal articles and related material in a manner similar to that of NLM's PMC system....

pPMC is part of set of tools being developed by NCBI [called the Literature Archiving Software Suite, or LASS] to support the creation, management and preservation of electronic literature collections and provide access to them. The other components of LASS are: [1] NLM XML DTDs - a set of DTDs for journal articles, book chapters and related content, [2] NLM XML Authoring Tool - an add-on for Microsoft Word. It lets one use standard MS Word features to create a properly formatted NLM XML document...[3] Portable NIHMS (pNIHMS) - a software package that handles the intake of 'raw' manuscripts (word processor or other text files, image files, PDFs, etc.) and tracks them through the process of conversion to an NLM XML format and eventual deposit in an article repository....The remaining components of LASS will be made available in the public domain when development has been completed. As public domain products, the LASS packages are free for use by anyone for any purpose.

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.

RP: ...[W]hy does the world need PLoS ONE?

CS: Because the system of disseminating scientific research has become extremely inefficient, and the concept of the journal has been eroded by the Internet....The Internet is providing us with all sorts of new tools for communicating science, so simply publishing journals, and distributing them electronically isn’t using the full potential of the Web to make the dissemination of scientific information efficient and effective. It just isn't the best way to do it anymore....[Traditional journals] quickly run up against a boundary question: where, say, does biophysics end and biochemistry begins? You find yourself starting to have to make lots of unnecessary decisions about borders....The boundaries have effectively been imposed as a consequence of the way that journals work, and the way that universities are structured.

RP: So there is no need for such rigid boundaries?

CS: No. At least, not when publishing. Consider, for instance, if you were to have a study that compared the genomes of man and the great apes, looking at a cluster of genes that controls the development of the brain cells associated with language. Now what subject is that? Is it neuroscience? Is it evolution? Is it genetics? Is it genomics? Actually, it is all of these things, so you could classify it in any one of these subject areas....

RP: The criteria for accepting a paper, however, will be different will it not? The PLoS ONE press release, for instance, says that "subjective considerations like 'likely impact,' 'degree of advance,' or 'interest to a general reader' will not play a role in deciding whether an article should be published or not."

CS: That's right. Traditionally a lot of the work that goes into peer reviewing consists of asking questions like: "How significant is this? How surprising are the conclusions?" Essentially, these are subjective questions. A more objective question to ask would be: "Is this properly done science"....What is also different about PLoS ONE, by the way, is that we do not see peer review ending on publication of the paper....We believe that the more subjective questions about how a paper relates to other work, and where it fits into the whole corpus of scientific literature are still important questions — but we feel that these can be better answered via an open peer review process that takes place after the paper has been published.

At first glance, it seems that the research world is united against the Federal Research Public Access Act. Scholarly associations are lining up to express their anger over the bill, which would have federal agencies require grant recipients to publish their research papers - online and free - within six months of their publication elsewhere....Dozens of scholarly groups have joined in two letters - one organized by the Association of American Publishers and one by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. To look at the signatories (and the tones of the letters), it would appear that there’s a wide consensus that the legislation is bad for research....

But a rebellion of sorts is brewing online, where scholars who are, in theory, represented by some of these groups argue that the legislation would help research, that the scholarly associations are selling out their rank and file’s interests to prop up their publishing arms, and that the debate points to some underlying tensions about academic publishing in the digital age. These scholars - with the leaders of this informal movement coming from anthropology - want Congress to know that their associations aren’t speaking for them, and they also want to draw attention to the fact that some scholarly groups didn’t sign on....

In announcing their opposition to the bill, most scholarly associations have focused on the integrity of peer review and the quality of research. But the American Anthropological Association acknowledged that the “underlying concern” it had with the legislation was its impact on the business model being used to sell access to the association’s journals and on “revenue generation.”  Those remarks have led to a series of attacks on the association, in which it is being accused of ignoring the way many of its members would benefit from greater access to research results. On Anthropology.net, the association was taken to task for “ignorant opposition” to the bill. On Savage Minds, the association’s position is called “so, so misguided.” By being honest that it was concerned about its bottom line, it appears that the anthropology group has upset its own members.

Peter Suber, director of [the] Open Access Project [at Public Knowledge], said that these criticisms showed that the anthropology association (and others like it) have a conflict of interest. “They pretend to be speaking in the interests of scholarship, but they are really speaking for the interests of their publishing arms.” Suber, a research professor of philosophy at Earlham College, said that journal subscriptions end up supporting plenty of good things - educational outreach and annual meetings for associations are examples - but that doesn’t justify opposing open access. If associations want to support annual meetings and outreach programs, they need to charge their members, seek foundation support, or develop other strategies, he said, rather than relying on journal revenue....

[A]mong the associations notably absent from any of the letters criticizing the bill is the American Physical Society. Martin Blume, editor in chief for the society, which publishes nine journals, said the physicists’ association has already been functioning under a system in which authors may immediately post versions of their work anywhere that doesn’t charge - without any time lag. “Given what we already allow, we couldn’t really oppose this,” he said....

CiteULike is a free web site that allows you to keep track of your favourite articles, tag them with keywords, and share them with others. A key feature that makes CiteULike easy to use is that it provides a button to add to your web browser. When you click on that button, when viewing any article on a website supported by CiteULike, the bibliographic details for the article concerned will be automatically retrieved and added to your CiteULike library.

CiteULike now supports all 150+ BioMed Central journals, making it easy to add BioMed Central articles with a single click. What's more, the latest articles from all BioMed Central journals are now listed on the CiteULike electronic table of contents page.

Ann Wolpert, Director of Libraries at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),,...and the Vice President for Research and Associate Provost, Alice Gast, are asking publishers to allow MIT researchers to publish their work using a copyright amendment of MIT’s design. The amendment allows the author and institution non-exclusive rights to reuse, reproduce, and archive their published research articles in digital repositories. Although this amendment is now available on the MIT Web site and has been distributed to the MIT faculty, Wolpert is taking the extra step of directly contacting the 30 major publishers with whom MIT faculty publish to finalize appropriate language that will best “accommodate the interests of the academy and those of the publishers,” while supporting the implementation of the NIH policy.

According to Wolpert, the MIT copyright amendment grew out of the faculty’s double-edged response to the NIH policy recommendation: despite “a philosophical groundswell of agreement,” researchers found the demands of work too overwhelming to overcome the logistical obstacles of acting on their beliefs. Focus groups with faculty and researchers generated a series of recommendations to make compliance easier. One important recommendation was to resolve any conflict between copyright agreements and archiving....

At the stage when a manuscript is (finally!) accepted for publication, the last thing a researcher wants to do is to fight over a copyright agreement, especially when this might cause a publication delay. The purpose of creating this amendment and the subsequent direct discussions with publishers is to bring the institution into the negotiations on the side of the author. Faculty, of course, are pleased to have this potential burden lifted. Although its use is not required, the recommended copyright amendment has the endorsement of several academic groups at MIT, including the Faculty Policy Committee, department heads, and Academic Council....

Comments on the EC report and its OA recommendations were originally due on June 1. But the deadline was extended until tomorrow, June 15.

In the 108 page report, Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets in Europe, the recommendations are on pp. 11-13. For a summary, see my SOAN story from May 2 or my blog posting from April 3. Note especially recommendation A1, which would mandate OA for publicly-funded research.

Please send a supportive comment to rtd-scientific-publication@cec.eu.int, today if you can, tomorrow at the latest. You can be sure that OA opponents are sending in their comments.

Even a short comment in support of recommendation A1 would be better than no comment at all, whether or not you live in a European country.