Open Access News

A Web site sponsored by the French government that features a detailed aerial map of France went live Friday, rivaling a similar service offered by Google, owner of the world’s largest Internet search engine. Geoportail.fr was created by the French National Geographic Institute and features aerial maps of mainland France and of all the country’s overseas territories. It is competing with Google Earth, the virtual globe program that carries images obtained from satellite and aerial photography....

Geoportail reflects President Jacques Chirac's view that Anglo-Saxon culture is omnipresent on the Internet and threatens to overwhelm other cultures. The French National Library has put more than 80,000 books and newspapers clips online since early 2006 on a portal called Gallica, in response to Google Book Search....That database, and the French National Library's, will soon be followed by Quaero, a European search engine created by France and Germany and designed to compete with Google and Yahoo.

I want to put forward what I believe is one compelling use case for a standard ingest API/Interface/Protocol (call it what you will). We use DSpace here at [Oregon State University], and as everyone knows, one of the biggest barriers to faculty submitting materials into an institutional repository (i.e. not DSpace-specific) is the amount of metadata they need to enter when submitting a resource. Now, say a faculty member has a large set of related (such as they are all part of a series) images that they are trying to submit into the repository - with DSpace (and other repository software, I’m sure), they are required to re-enter, for every image, every metadata field value, even if it is the same value for each image....Now, DSpace does indeed have one way of doing this - by setting up a default template for a collection. Unfortunately, this isn’t an acceptable solution, as we would need to create a new collection every time a new, unique series of resources was to be submitted. What would be better is if we could build a user interface that provided the user an option to "carry-over" their metadata from their previous submission.

In order to accomplish this "carry-over" feature, there are at least two approaches. The first approach would be to dive into the DSpace code, and enhance the software to do what we want....The second approach would be to create a separate web app that allowed us to easily create a custom UI / workflow particular to the problem we are attempting to address, and then have that app automatically submit the resources into our repository. The plus-side here is that we aren’t needlessly monkeying around with the DSpace code, we can use whichever programming language / framework that is comfortable to us (such as Ruby on Rails), and we don’t have to upgrade this system every time DSpace is upgraded - unless the method of submitting items into DSpace changes.

 And this brings us to the point: If DSpace defined a standard, consistant ingest interface (or API or protocol...), then this would allow us to build these types of apps quite easilly. And, if there were a standard ingest that was implemented by all scholarly repositories, then if we were decided to step away from DSpace, or wanted to deposit items into more than one repository, we could - without needing to re-program our app.  To me, that's a fairly convincing use case for a standard ingest interface for scholarly repositories.

Geoffrey Van Orden MEP, Conservative Defence Spokesman, commented: "I am very concerned that, in spite of Conservative opposition..., the Parliament has passed amendments that allow for unlimited public access to certain spatial data including oceanographic survey data. From this it would be possible to identify trends in sea areas that are being surveyed and the timescales involved. Analysis of such information over time could lead to conclusions about naval patrol routes. This has clear implications for the safety of Royal Navy vessels, including the nuclear deterrent force....The British government must now put a stop to this in the EU Council."

Summary: The new Director General of France's large, distributed national research network, the CNRS, has reiterated his predecessor’s recommendation to all CNRS researchers to deposit their articles in HAL, the CNRS's nationwide institutional repository. Unfortunately, recommendations alone do not generate much more Open Access self-archiving than the spontaneous worldwide baseline of about 15%. To accelerate CNRS self-archiving toward 100%, the recommendation must be transformed into a requirement. The only obstacle to adopting an OA self-archiving requirement is the perception that it could contravene copyright agreements with publishers, so the simple, certain solution is to make it an immediate deposit requirement (no exceptions, no delays), with Open-Access-setting merely a recommendation rather than a requirement. (For the 31% of postprints that might have a Closed Access embargo interval, the semi-automatic EMAIL-EPRINT request feature of the institutional repository softwares can provide for all would-be users' access needs during the embargo.)

The Royal Society, UK, is trialling a hybrid author-pays/reader-pays publishing model. The RS has been a stern critic of open access publishing in the past, and says there is an absence of evidence to support the author-pays model.

Using the hybrid model, authors are offered a choice: they can pay £300 per A4 page to make their paper freely available immediately; or they can pay nothing and wait 12 months for their paper to become freely available (the current model). Papers written by authors who choose the first option, called ‘EXiS Open Choice’, will be placed in the PubMedCentral repository.

The RS was prompted to test the hybrid model after frustrations that its call to the publishing sector to produce a study of different models was ignored, said a spokesperson for the society. In November 2005, the RS was critical of commercial open access publishers for profiting from publicly-funded research (see Chemistry World, January 2006, p6). ‘We haven’t changed, we’re in the same position,’ Bob Ward told Chemistry World. ‘We’ve always recognised the potential benefits of OA, but we’re also aware that there are some potential drawbacks.’...

Sally Morris, chief executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers applauded the ‘very sensible’ move by the RS. The only way to test open access is to give researchers the choice, Morris told Chemistry World. ‘Open access isn’t the complete answer,’ she said. She predicts a collective ‘racking-of-brains’ by publishers to come up with other imaginative publishing models.

Comment. I don't think it's true that the RS will routinely deposit its Open Choice articles in PubMed Central. The first Open Choice article was deposited in PMC, but it was funded by the Wellcome Trust, which requires PMC deposit. An automatic deposit policy, at PMC or any other OA repository independent of the RS, would be very welcome, but the RS hasn'tn announced such a policy yet.

Along Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, scientific explorers are trying to turn over a new leaf for a storied institute — the National Biodiversity Institute, or INBio....Created in 1989, INBio, based in a suburb of the capital San Jose, became an early symbol for how developing nations might participate sustainably in the biotechnology revolution. World-class researchers joined with Costa Rica’s well-trained academics, hoping to save the nation’s biodiversity — 4% of the world’s total — by making money from it....Today, other developing nations look to INBio as an example of how to achieve the goals of the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, which encourages sustainable development worldwide....

Advocates hope [that sustenance for INBio] will come from the Fogarty International Center at the US National Institutes of Health, which is giving the new bioprospecting team $3.5 million over four years....Led by chemist Jon Clardy of Harvard Medical School, the five-year project includes researchers from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the Broad Institute — a joint venture of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — and the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts....The current project is designed...to be as open as possible about any potential new drug candidates. With the earlier grants, any compounds of interest left Costa Rica, disappearing behind the proprietary walls of corporate science. Clardy, who was part of the earlier ICBG when at Cornell, says he didn’t want the new programme making the same mistakes....[T]he data will be publicly accessible, in a database containing information such as where the compounds were collected and under what conditions. Clardy foresees an eventual library with some 5,000 to 10,000 compounds collected during the project. The database could even contain details on how compounds respond in various screening tests against pathogens, information that is usually considered proprietary. Clardy’s group would get first shot at studying any promising disease-fighting compounds. But eventually the data would enter the publicly accessible ChemBank.

The Royal Society is to charge authors £300 per page to use its new open access journal service. EXiS Open Choice will offer authors whose work is accepted by Royal Society journals the opportunity to make their articles immediately available online. Initially authors will be charged a discounted rate of £225 per A4 page, but that will later be increased to £300.

Bob Ward, a spokesperson for the Royal Society, said that the fee represented the real cost of publishing online, because it included the cost of peer review. “Some open access providers have been subsidising the costs to authors. We don’t believe that’s a sustainable model in the long run,” he said.

Ward acknowledged that some researchers, such as those in the mathematical sciences, might find the costs too high, and said the Royal Society would be monitoring the takeup of the service in different disciplines, earlier this year the society warned against open access adoption.

PS: There seem to be some words missing from the last sentence.

This is the first public announcement of ExOME - Excellence in Online Medical Education....Initially, it will be open-access and online only with the option to go paper-based in the future.

I've also been reading lots about problems with peer-reviews and the cost to open access journals. Our solution is to have it community led. When articles are submitted, they will be held in a queue. This queue will last a minimum amount of time (say 2 weeks) and a maximum of 12 weeks. In this time, all members of the community will be able to criticise and review the article. This can be done anonymously (except to editorial staff who might need to moderate in case of ad hominem attacks) and votes made on the quality of the article. If the article reaches a minimal level of approval, the authors have a choice. They can withdraw and resubmit the article with corrections (and go through the review process again), or they can publish the article with or without corrections made from the reviews....

Ten years ago, Kahle founded the nonprofit Internet Archive, with the goal of preserving the hitherto ephemeral pleasures of the Net for posterity. But, unsatisfied with limiting himself to the saving of Web sites, Kahle decided to broaden his scope and include existing collections of books, television programs, movies and music in the archive's massive digital repository....

Kahle enthusiastically discusses his ambitious plan to build, make freely accessible and preserve what he calls--in reference to the legendary lost library of the ancient world--the "Library of Alexandria, v.2."  "Let's have a library system that is in the great traditions of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Carnegie and the Library of Alexandria," he says while showing a reporter around the Internet Archive's offices in San Francisco's Presidio. "If we are able to build that library again with the vision of the Greeks but the technology of the modern era, that's something to be proud of."...

Kahle relishes his role as Internet archivist. The staggering volume of material to digitize--centuries of historic media, and new data appearing by the minute--doesn't daunt him. Commercial interests whose monetizing efforts threaten free universal access do. So he readily takes up the cause to fight for freely accessible information.  "If we lose (the library of human knowledge) to a corporate interest, I would have screwed up. Having it go to corporate hands is my worst nightmare," he says. Which brings us to the Open Content Alliance, a joint effort by the Internet Archive, Yahoo and Microsoft to digitize library collections, including those of the University of California system and The University of Toronto....

"Some would like to control (information) so fewer people make money and have access. This is not right," Kahle says. "I really want the Enlightenment-era ideal of universal education....I’m not against people making money. In fact, it’s absolutely essential," he says, adding that there’s plenty of money to be made off services related to the distribution of free information....

Despite some hurdles, Kahle is an optimistic man. The pieces are in place to accomplish his dream, he says: Internet technology to digitize and distribute content; ideals of universal education; and political will. "With those, I believe we can build a great library of humankind’s thoughts and dreams," he says.

From Jonathan Eisen:

I generally think that the Nature piece misrepresents many of the issues relating to Open Access publishing and of the costs of publishing. To say that PLoS faces a "looming financial crisis" simply because it has not broken even in the time line that the Nature reporter thinks they should have is disingenuous. My reading of the data presented in the article is that PLoS is a start up organization that has not figured out exactly what its costs of doing business are. That is a far cry from a looming crisis.

In addition, I personally think that the "break even" issue is not the critical issue here. The real issue to me is that scientific and medical research should be freely available for it to most benefit humankind. That the system for Open Access publishing is still being worked out is a minor detail in a bigger picture.

I view this issue much like I view the National Parks here in the US. The National Park Servive is still exploring ways to get parks to come as close to breaking even as possible. This is done through entrance and camping fees and various other revenue generating systems. But few would argue that Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon and Yosemite should be turned over to developers simply because it costs a bit more to manage them that is brought in by fees. That is not to say the managers of the parks should not continue to explore ways to recover their costs and reduce their expenses. But the parks benefit the entire country....[The money needed to pay PLoS' bills] could easily be provided if one took the funds being used to pay the high fees of many journals and redistributed them to Open Access journals. That way the literature would be available and no extra taxpayer money would be spent. In fact, most likely, taxpayer money would be saved by doing this.

From Stephen Ellner:

I have published in Nature and refereed for Nature, but I'm also on the PLoS Biology editorial board and an open-access supporter, so the artcle “Open-access journal hits rocky time” made me see red. Yes, PLoS needs external support still. But so does Nature, in the form of manuscript reviews that we do for free while the publisher profits from the papers that we have worked to improve. It would be interesting to compare the amount of support PLoS is getting against the value of all the anonymous "pro bono" work that the scientific community does for Nature Publishing Group.

From Musa Mayer:

As a patient advocate in the United States who closely follows the emerging scientific literature in breast cancer, and helps to educate women with advanced and metastatic breast cancer about their treatment options, the open access movement has been more than welcome. Many advocates like myself have watched with dismay over the last fifteen years as one valuable journal after another has adopted a subscription-only policy.

The PLoS journals, PubMed Central and the open access movement have been beacons in that gathering darkness. This is not a small matter for advocates like myself, who do not have institutional and academic access to the journals that we follow, nor personal resources to pay for multiple subscriptions. If we wish to read anything more than abstracts of uneven quality, we are reduced to paying exorbitant per-article prices, begging authors for reprints, visiting medical libraries open to the public, or arranging time-consuming and sometimes costly interlibrary loans. To me, it has always seemed unconscionable that research paid for in whole or in part with public funds, using patients who give so unselfishly for the advancement of medicine and science, should be unavailable to those very patients and to the public.

That a prestigious journal like Nature should all but gloat at the unremarkable start-up struggles of the Public Library of Science feels unseemly to me. I would think that even at a subscriber-supported journal, there would be those who believe in open access to the biomedical literature. And when did philanthropic support become a sign of weakness? Perhaps your editorial focus ought to be on ways to liberate scientific knowledge from the marketplace.

To Sally Morris's post on the SOAF list saying that she has "difficulty envisaging how the 'no-fee' OA model, dependent on (conscious or not) institutional or other subsidy, could possibly scale", Matt Cockerill responded:

"I think a reasonable analogy here would be to ask: can a road system scale without charging tolls? I think it is clear that road systems can scale without tolls. But on the other hand, tolls can certainly play a role, and play a bigger role in some countries than others. Non-toll roads can't be written off simply as 'unsustainable'...." End of quote.

We could take this road analogy further. Roads are not paid for by tolls at every turn, as that would disrupt the flow of traffic (though the technology to introduce just that via satellite tracking is advancing fast). So tolls are only used for 'premium' roads (and tunnels, bridges, et cetera). Instead, the vast majority of the road infrastructure is usually paid for by state subsidies, which in turn, we must assume, are funded by road taxes and fuel excise taxes. These excise taxes are interesting, because it means that there is already an element of 'user pays', as more road usage means more fuel consumption means more excise tax paid. But that user-related charge is just part of the road payment structure. Every potential road user also pays via road tax, levied on the owners of cars whether they use them or not. They pay for access.

Would something like that work in science publishing? And would it be desirable?  To a degree, and in a way, the road tax simile is already there. Institutions pay for subscriptions for potential users. It's a 'just-in-case' provision. They pay for access, not usage. It is often said that payment for usage would be fairer. But we have to be very clear as to what usage and who the user actually is. It's certainly not just the reader. It's definitely also the author, who uses publication in a journal to give his article the formal status he needs for career advancement and impact. And it's also the institution itself, depending for recognition and reputation on the formal publication record of its research population.

So it would be fair were they all to pay their share....Could the reader-side charge and the author-side charge perhaps be rolled up into a single charge, on an institutional level?...Would it be possible to come up with a charge that reflects the total usage of a journal, by its readers as well as its authors, in a given institute? A way to sustain the formal peer-reviewed journal literature that balances the need to publish (publish or perish) with the need to have access (read or rot)? Or would it be a road to nowhere?

Comment. I like Jan's question and don't have an answer. But I do have my own road analogy to throw in. One objection to OA mandates for publicly-funded research is that it's wrong to spend public money on goods used by only a subset of the population. My response: On this argument, it would be wrong to spend public money on roads, since most citizens never drive on a given mile of any road. (Likewise, most citizens never visit any given post office, public library, national park, or Senatorial bathroom. Most never check out a given book from any public library.) The fact that most citizens will never drive on a given mile of a given road is not a reason to withhold public funding from the road or to stop mandating "open access" to every mile of it. If a road will be useful at all --ruling out the pork-barrell roads to nowhere--, then every citizen is a potential user of every mile and it's good policy to serve all who find that they need service. When this argument prevails and the road is publicly-funded, then every citizen has prepaid the tolls and deserves access rights, whether or not they exercise these rights. Moreover, I benefit when people across the country from me can get where they need to go, just as I benefit when my doctor has access to literature that I don't read or wouldn't understand. Finally, open access for everyone is even less expensive to provide than the tollbooths and authentication machinery needed to provide open access to some and toll access to others.

It's not surprising that the article's tone is so harsh (and that its bias is readily apparent), since Nature and the other commercial publishers have resisted the open access movement, something that threatens to undermine their profit making ability. Although PLoS is still trying to get up off the ground and reach the break-even mark, it has only been publishing for less than three years, and it has largely been a success, with its flagship journal PLoS Biology already earning the impressive impact factor of 14.7.

Still, it's worrying to see such a large gap between PLoS's earnings and expenses, and it's important that PLoS takes decisive action to address this situation, since all of academia's eyes are watching every up and down of the tangible symbol of the open access movement.

PLoS began with incredibly ambitious goals. Although the idea of forming a successful open access publishing organization would have surely been intimidating enough, PLoS went a step further by trying to compete directly with the top scientific journals in various fields. So far the results have been positive, but there's a long way to go to prove the staying power of open access.

PLoS has quite a bit working against it, and, unfortunately for PLoS, there's little room for failure, as Nature's response shows.

Abstract: The transition of academic libraries from print to electronic resources is well underway and for most scholars non-engagement with the digital environment has ceased to be an option. The demands placed on the computing skills and understanding of the main features of this environment are considerable, however, and a significant proportion of researchers either fail to take advantage of it or are in fact impeded in their work by their minimal skill sets. We examine the barriers to use of the technology and describe our own experience in training university academics to become more fluent users of electronic information resources. A higher level of engagement by both library and computing staff in training and advocacy is suggested.

Comment. The authors don't specifically discuss self-archiving, but I wonder whether some of the problems they identify might help explain the low rate of self-archiving. The fact that self-archiving is easy doesn't rule this out. Using many electronic resources is even easier. If part of the problem is discomfort with digital technology as such, then it would apply in both domains.

This Nature News item, published online 6.20.06, focuses on publicly available information about the income and expenses at PLoS from 2003-2005. There seems little that’s surprising in a piece about a recent publishing venture taking time to break even. I’m not even sure it’s newsworthy.

As PLoS continues to grow and innovate, of course we will require outside financial support to develop our business. We started a completely new publishing venture from scratch at the beginning of 2003, and our first journal - PLoS Biology - is still less than three years old. In May we launched our sixth open access journal and a radical new publishing forum for the web 2.0 era is also under development.

Our revenue from publishing is building, but we still have a way to go. Our major funders remain committed to PLoS - they have invested heavily in the organization because they strongly support our mission to make the world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource.

PLoS is also more than a publishing organization. We are actively involved in advocacy, as part of our effort to drive forward our mission to transform scientific publishing. It’s therefore not possible to judge the economic success of open access publishing on the basis of the broad financial picture at a single organization such as PLoS. Paul Peters of the Hindawi Publishing Corporation has made this point on the Nature Newsblog.

Furthermore, PLoS is but one organization within the landscape of scientific and medical publishing. The success of open access, whether or not it is supported by a publication fee business model is critically dependent on the actions and policies of other stakeholders, such as research institutions and funding agencies. That’s why our advocacy efforts are so important....

As the publishing landscape and funding environment continue to move towards open access, which they inevitably must, PLoS will adjust its own open access model so that research literature is accessible and preserved for future generations.

If you would like to show your continued support of PLoS, why not add your voice to those currently commenting on the Nature Newsblog.

It seems that open access journal publishing, known as the "gold" version of OA, isn't paved with gold. In an eye-opening analysis in the journal Nature, the Public Library of Science (PLoS), which launched its first open access journals in 2003, is said to be facing a "looming financial crisis." According to Nature, which analyzed the non-profit PLoS's publicly available records on file with the Internal Revenue Service, PLoS ran a deficit of almost $1 million last year, and its total income from fees and advertising currently covers just 35 percent of its costs. While revenue is increasing slightly, spending is increasing at a greater clip, up to $5.5 million from $1.5 million for the past three years combined. In response, with its grant funds being steadily depleted, PLoS has announced that it will raise author fees, effective July 1, for its open access journals from $1500 to $2500 for flagship journals PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine; and to $2000 for its community journals PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, and PLoS Pathogens.

In a release, officials from the non-profit PLoS said that, with three years of operational experience to draw on, it was "time to adjust this model so that our publication fees reflect more closely the costs of publication." Still, even with the increased fees, Nature reports that PLoS will have to rely on "philanthropy" to survive for the foreseeable future, including its funding from the Sandler and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundations. PLoS director of publishing Mark Patterson downplayed the financial situation, noting that the fledgling publisher is only in its fourth year. Still, more than a few commercial publishers may be saying "I told you so." In the early days of open access publishing, commercial publishers repeatedly suggested that author fees for PLoS, at $1500, and for-profit open access publisher BioMed Central, then $500, were unsustainably low. Last year, BioMed Central increased its author fees, from $525 to as much as $1700. Commercial competitors, meanwhile, including Springer, Blackwell, and most recently Elsevier, have begun offering open-access-like publishing options, for fees closer to $3000.

Abstract: Purpose: To review the current literature and discussion on institutional repository (IR) and open access (OA) issues, to provide examples from the Information Systems (IS) literature, and to propose the use of IS literature and further research to inform understanding of institutional repository implementations for library managers. Methodology/Approach: Recent literature is reviewed to provide the background to, and current issues in, the development of institutional repositories to support open access to refereed research output. Practical implications: Existing research is identified, as are areas for potential research. Brief examples from IS literature are provided which may provide strategies for libraries and other organisations to speed up their implementation of IR to provide access to, and management of, their own institutions refereed research output. Value of paper: The paper brings together recent opinion and research on IR and OA to provide librarians and other information managers with a review of the field, and proposes research on IR and OA building on existing IS as well as information management and librarianship research. Keywords: Open access, institutional repositories, libraries, information systems Article type: General Review.

Summary: The Royal Society is a green publisher, giving its authors the green light to provide immediate Open Access to their articles by self-archiving them in their own institutional repositories in order to maximise their usage and impact. The Royal Society is now also an optional gold publisher, offering its authors the "Open Choice" of providing Open Access on their behalf, for a fee. But all of this is outweighed by the fact that this most venerable of Learned Societies, contrary to the wishes of at least 64 of its (unconsulted) members, has put its substantial prestige and gravitas behind a vehement -- and so far successful -- lobby against the Research Councils UK proposal to mandate author self-archiving by its fundees, as recommended by the UK parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology as well as the U.S. Federal Research Public Access Act, and the European Commission. In this respect, the Royal Society is deporting itself exactly like the crassest of commercial publishers, and is putting a sad blemish on its proud record in the history of Learned Inquiry and the dissemination of its fruits.

Can open access (OA) be financially viable, not just in the sense of making enough revenue to cover costs, but also generating a surplus? What are the views of researchers, librarians and funding agencies? What effect does OA have on usage and citations? These questions formed the focus of the Oxford Journals event, and while there are still no firm answers, the initial research findings presented on OUP’s experimentation with the OA model make a useful contribution to a debate that is crying out for more solid data. Findings were presented relating to three different open access business models operated by OUP - full open access, optional open access and sponsored open access.

Martin Richardson, Managing Director, Oxford Journals, and Claire Saxby, Senior Editor, Oxford Journals, provided insight into the success of the models so far from a financial viability perspective. The publisher has one full open access journal, Nucleic Acids Research (NAR), which adopted the model at the beginning of 2005. Although NAR print subscriptions were already declining steadily before full open access was introduced in 2005, after that time they dropped rapidly. The rising income from author charges did not compensate for loss of revenue from print and online subscriptions, and average income per article dropped from USD4,647 in 2004 to USD3,622 in 2005. As a result, the journal has had to introduce cost-cutting measures. OUP was surprised that fewer institutions than expected took out institutional membership to enable authors from their institutions to pay discounted author fees for NAR....Martin Richardson accepted that author’s expectations of the publishing process might change when they are paying for it, and expects that authors will gradually develop a more consumer approach....

OUP's Oxford Open programme, which allows authors to choose whether they want to publish in a particular journal under an open access or a traditional subscription model, was launched in July 2005 and there are now 49 OUP journals participating in total, across a range of disciplines. Between January and April 2006 there has been 7% uptake of the OA option from authors, but the large variation between subject areas is noticeable, with 11.3% uptake in Life Sciences, 4.8% in Medicine and 2.2% in Social Sciences & Humanities. So far, there has been no attrition in subscriptions for these journals, probably because OUP has dropped the pricing of the journal subscription according to the amount of OA content that is included....

PS: Oxford's full report of the results should be released next week. In the meantime you can find more details in the presentations from the Oxford Open Access Workshop (London, June 5, 2006).

With the United States federal government spending over $130 billion annually for research and development, ways to increase the productivity of that research can have a significant return on investment. It is well known that all scientific advancement is based on work that has come before. Isaac Newton expressed this thought most eloquently in 1676, when he wrote, "If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

The process by which science knowledge is spread is called diffusion. It is therefore important to better understand and measure the benefits of this diffusion of knowledge. In particular, it is important to understand whether advances in Internet searching – such as simultaneous, ranked searching of distributed digital collections made broadly available via the Internet – can speed up the diffusion of scientific knowledge and accelerate scientific progress. Near-term opportunities continue to emerge to further speed up knowledge diffusion. To help craft a strategy for converting opportunities to reality, research is needed on the impact such speeding up of knowledge diffusion has on the advancement of science.

This article discusses these issues and describes research being conducted by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) of the United States Department of Energy (DOE) under its strategic initiative, Innovations in Scientific Knowledge and Advancement (ISKA).

PS: Also see my June 9 post on this OSTI project, Science Accelerator.

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and ARL (Association of Research Libraries), with support from ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries), today announced the re-launch of the Create Change Web site, a popular resource on scholarly communication issues. The site has been updated to provide faculty with current information, perspectives, and tools that will enable them to play an active role in advancing scholarly information exchange in the networked environment.

The new Create Change Web site...is based around the idea that the ways faculty share and use academic research results are changing rapidly and irreversibly. By posing the question, “Shouldn’t the way we share research be as advanced as the Internet?” the site outlines how faster and wider sharing of journal articles, research data, simulations, syntheses, analyses, and other findings fuels the advance of knowledge. It also offers practical ways faculty can look out for their own interests as researchers....

The Create Change Web site includes sections on digital scholarship and new modes of communication; examples of change in diverse fields; and ways to stay informed on new developments. It offers tailored guidance for researchers who play many roles in their professional lives - as researcher, author, reviewer, editor, editorial board member, society member, faculty member, or teacher. The site features selected news items; an ongoing series of interviews with scholars from different disciplines; and scores of links to other Web sites and resources.

From the front page of the new site:

In the age of the Internet, the ways you share and use academic research results are changing — rapidly, fundamentally, irreversibly. There’s great potential in change. After all, faster and wider sharing of journal articles, research data, simulations, syntheses, analyses, and other findings fuels the advance of knowledge. It’s a two-way street — sharing research benefits you and others. But will the promise of digital scholarship be fully realized? How will yesterday’s norms adapt to tomorrow’s possibilities?

This website will help you understand the changing landscape and how it affects you and your research. It also offers practical ways to look out for your own interests as a researcher.

A scholarly revolution is underway. It enables you to get a greater return from your research. All you have to do is share it.

The OA journals from Hindawi Publishing charge per-page processing fees. The amounts and even the formulas differ from journal to journal. For example, the EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking charges €80/page. The Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology charges €60/page. Differential Equations and Nonlinear Mechanics charges €40/page for the first 16 pages and nothing for any remaining pages. The EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems charges nothing for the first six pages and €100/page for each remaining page. Ahmed Hindawi tells me that the different models will probably converge to just one in the coming year.

If there are other OA or hybrid OA journals charging processing fees by the page rather than the article, I'd like to hear about them.

Meantime, the CharteringLibrarian wonders why a journal would charge per-page fees rather than per-article fees.

Update. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics is another OA journal charging per-page processing fees. (Thanks again to Ahmed Hindawi.) The fees vary depending on which of six editorial services the journal provides for a given paper.

Britain’s Royal Society dipped a cautious toe into the waters of open access publishing this week, allowing authors whose papers are accepted by any of its seven journals to pay a fee and have their work made freely available on the web.

The society’s officials have expressed serious doubts about open access on several occasions in the past. Although they are still concerned by a lack of evidence about the sustainability of the model, they hope the experiment will ultimately be a success, spokesman Bob Ward told The Scientist. “It’s a toe in the water, but it’s not based on an expectation that it will fail -- we expect that it will succeed,” he said. “We are also hoping that this will allow us to gather some evidence that the whole sector can use.”...

Peter Suber, director of the Open Access Project at Public Knowledge, also welcomed the society’s decision to try out a “hybrid” model -- combining open access with the traditional publishing system. “The Royal Society is trying the hybrid model for the right reasons,” he said in his blog, “to see how well it works, to answer critics, and to measure the demand.”  But Suber said the plan was also flawed, pointing out that the society will not waive its fees in cases of economic hardship, will not apparently let authors choosing the new option retain copyright, and will not apparently deposit its open access articles in a repository.

The fees for the new service are higher than those charged by open access publishers. Authors who choose to pay to make their papers immediately available on the web will be charged £200 ($370) per journal page for Proceedings A, Phil Trans A, and Notes and Records, or £300 ($550) per journal page for Proceedings B, Phil Trans B, Biology Letters, and Interface.  For a 10-page article like [Neil] Roach’s [the first paper published under the RS's new OA program], that adds up to £3000 ($5500). This is more than double the fees at US open access publisher Public Library of Science, which charges up to $2,500 per article for its flagship journals.

Ward said the fee was an accurate reflection of the cost of publishing a paper. “People need to understand the cost of doing this,” he said. Still, the society remains concerned that the costs of open access publishing will be prohibitive for some researchers, he noted.

Abstract: The changing landscape of scholarly publication and increasing journal costs have resulted in a need for proactive behavior in libraries. At Johns Hopkins, a group of librarians joined forces to bring these issues to the attention of faculty and to begin a dialog leading to change. This commentary describes a comprehensive program undertaken to raise faculty awareness of scholarly communications issues. In addition to raising faculty interest in the issues at hand, the endeavor also highlights an area where library liaisons can increase their communication with the units they serve.

From the body of the paper:

Scholarly communication is approaching a crossroads. If the current system is unsustainable, as many believe, and if technology has changed the landscape of publishing, then a time for serious decision-making is at hand. There is a role for the libraries and librarians in this enterprise - continuing to support authors and to disseminate scholarly communications information until there is an economically sustainable system that provides the widest possible access to scholarship. The goal of the Hopkins’ scholarly communications initiative has never been to undermine the world of scholarly publishing. It is not necessary to make everything free for libraries or to put publishers out of business. Indeed, our goals are to ensure that Hopkins authors know what their rights are, that they manage their own work in a way that benefits science as well as their own needs, that they understand the business plans and philosophy of the journals they work for, and that they take control of their own publishing destinies.

It's as if a pay-per-view article were so important that would-be readers could tap a network of willing donors for the fee. I don't expect to see this model spread to scholarly publishing, but who knows? It has a family resemblance to other OA business models: those with an interest in disseminating useful results (authors, funders, universities, governments) pay the costs so that readers/viewers needn't pay. Kudos to Eric Pan for coming up with the idea and organizing the network of donors. (BTW, the network is accepting donations.)

Here's an excerpt from Jan Velterop's comment on Declan's blog. Jan is the Open Access Director at Springer and the former publisher of BioMed Central.

The fact that the PLoS is not breaking even at this stage is not surprising. There seems to be a consensus in the publishing world that new journals - at least in the traditional subscription model - take about seven years to reach break-even. I personally think it’s more like 10 years; if ever. And here we are talking not just of new journals, but of new journals published in a new publishing model. The PLoS has done remarkably well, given all that.

But even if the top two PLoS journals don’t reach break-even, that’s not the end of the story. There is a well-known phenomenon in business that’s know as ‘loss-leaders’. It is quite conceivable that these two PLoS journals fulfil that role, pushing the PLoS brand reputation to great heights, and then enabling the organisation to capitalise on that brand with smaller, subordinate journals (’specialist’ or ‘community’ titles), which do make the surplus needed to sustain not only themselves but also the flagship loss-leaders.

The aim of this survey, carried out in December 2005, was to investigate trends in Japanese researchers’ research activities, their use of databases, their awareness of new Open Access (OA) possibilities such as open access journals (OAJ) and self-archiving, and their concerns about this form of publishing. 613 faculty members (researchers) at National University Corporations or Inter-University Research Institution Corporations responded to the queries. The results of the survey suggested that Japanese researchers are, in general, still hardly aware of or prepared to cope with OA, although their counterparts in developed countries are knowledgeable about OA.

29% replied that they were aware of OA, while according to A. Swan’s JISC Report (2004), over 60% of those who have not published through OAJ were aware of the concept. This evidences that Japanese researchers do not have enough knowledge concerning OA. Only 17% of the respondents answered they have plans to publish through an OAJ in the next three years. The primary reason for more than half of those respondents who choose an OAJ is a belief that the principle of free access to research information is important. In contrast, those who answered that they do not plan to publish through an OAJ (21%) stated that the most important reason for not doing so is that they are not familiar enough with OAJs in their fields to be motivated to submit to them. These findings are consistent with the tendency reported in A. Swan’s JISC Report (2004).

Most researchers feel that the author’s fee should be subsidized by research grants. More than two thirds (69%) of the respondents said that, if publishing their work in an OAJ were a condition prescribed by the contract with grant-awarding bodies, they would accept the condition. About 20% of the respondents expressed concern about the possible breakdown of the conventional scholarly communication system which the proliferation of OA might bring about, while over 40% stated they could not make any judgment concerning this subject.

Regarding researchers’ self-archiving, only 20% of the respondents have self-archived at least one article during the last three years....A. Swan’s 2nd report (2005) states that almost half (49%) of the author population has self-archived at least one article in the past three years. Most Japanese researchers are still unaware of the possibility of providing open access to their work by self-archiving.

Abstract: In this report we examine the change in citation behavior since the introduction of the arXiv e-print repository (Ginsparg, 2001). It has been observed that papers that initially appear as arXiv e-prints get cited more than papers that do not (Lawrence, 2001; Brody et al., 2004; Schwarz & Kennicutt, 2004; Kurtz et al., 2005a, Metcalfe, 2005). Using the citation statistics from the NASA-Smithsonian Astrophysics Data System (ADS; Kurtz et al., 1993, 2000), we confirm the findings from other studies, we examine the average citation rate to e-printed papers in the Astrophysical Journal, and we show that for a number of major astronomy and physics journals the most important papers are submitted to the arXiv e-print repository first.

PLoS Biology offers six kinds of value for the money that the Royal Society does not:

1. Freedom from additional fees. The RS levies color charges on top of the article processing fees.
2. Professionally written lay synopses of each article
3. A higher impact factor
4. A standing policy to let authors retain copyright
5. Assurance of long-term OA by depositing in PubMed Central (insurance in case the journal later changes its access policy)
6. Fee waivers in cases of economic hardship

In a different category of value, PLoS Biology offers OA to every article it publishes, making subscriptions unnecessary and freeing library funds for other purposes. For the same reason, it has a stronger interest in making its OA option attractive to authors. It can't make up for low author uptake with subscription revenue.

And of course, even after the fee hike, PLoS Biology charges less than the Royal Society (for a paper five pages or longer) and less than Springer and Elsevier (for any paper).

But having said this, I do worry that the PLoS Biology fee will deter authors --or that it would deter authors but for the PLoS waiver policy. BTW, PLoS Director of Publishing Mark Patterson shares this concern.

Finally, I only criticized the RS, Springer, and Elsevier fees for being so high as to generate a low level of author uptake. I didn't criticize them for unduly exceeding the costs of publication, since I don't know whether they do. If the PLoS fee reduces author uptake, then I'll criticize it too. If the RS, Springer, and Elsevier fees don't generate a low level of author uptake, then I'll gladly withdraw my criticism and stand corrected.

E-reserves, original digital scholarship, and how the Net Generation learns were some of the most-talked-about topics at the 2006 conference of the Association of American University Presses, which ended here on Sunday. Some 500 people registered for the four-day meeting, which focused on Transformational Publishing: Lessons, Tools, and Strategies for Scholarly Publishing in the 21st Century....

At Friday's plenary session on "Changing Systems of Scholarly Communication," Stephen Rhind-Tutt, president of Alexander Street Press, described the new online environment -- the world of open access, and of Web communities like Flickr and MySpace.com -- which he characterized as more participatory, interactive, and democratic than earlier versions of the online world. He cautioned the audience that "tomorrow's students aren't going to care about the printed artifact the way we care about it" and that "if you hold onto your content tightly ... you will be shut out of this economy of links."

Abstract: Almost without exception, students produce theses and dissertations in electronic formats, and it would seem that an institutional electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) program would be the rule and not the exception. In the United States, however, ETD programs have been slow to gain ground; other countries are far ahead in implementing comprehensive strategies for the creation of and access to ETDs. The focus of this bulletin is on the development of institutional policies to address ETDs and the changes needed in academic culture to implement robust ETD programs. The value of ETDs as institutional intellectual assets is also explored.

Summary: Nature reports that Open Access (OA) journals are having trouble making ends meet. This is because institutional publication funds are currently tied up in subscription costs. What is urgently needed now is OA, to maximize research usage and impact. Immediate 100% OA can be reached via OA self-archiving mandates. If/when 100% OA self-archiving should ever generate institutional subscription cancellations, those same institutional windfall savings will be the natural way to pay for institutional OA publication costs. If/when there are signs that that is approaching, then would be the opportune time for journals to convert to OA publishing. Right now, there are no such signs, and it is OA that we need, urgently.

Summary: Some publishers have suggested that because a 6-month embargo on Open Access self-archiving by authors is too long for researchers and too short for publishers, the FRPAA should instead pay publishers to provide the Open Access immediately. This is fine if the research funders have the extra cash to pay whatever price publishers are currently charging for this (it varies from under $500 to over $3000 today) or to impose a standardized cap on the price and pay that. But otherwise it makes more sense for authors to self-archive for themselves, at no cost, now, exactly as proposed by the FRPAA, and to allow the market to decide the price, if and when subscription revenues should ever prove unsustainable. There is no evidence at all of subscription revenue decline yet, as a consequence of self-archiving, even after 15 years in the fields where self-archiving has been practised the longest and effectively reached 100% years ago. The FRPAA should mandate that the deposit of all articles must be immediate (upon acceptance for publication), with only the Open-Access-setting (vs. Closed Access) open to embargo (capped at 6 months) from the 6% of journals that do not yet endorse immediate Open-Access-setting. Semi-automatized email-eprint requests made possible by the institutional repository softwares can provide for the needs of the researchers during the embargo period for articles in those journals.

Science is experiencing revolutionary changes thanks to digital technology, with computers generating a flood of valuable data for