Open Access News

• Old URL (now dead)
  http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/statement.pdf
• New URL
  http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/2005statement.pdf

A new book, documenting the major strands and issues of open access, will be published 17th July.

Jacobs, N., Eds. (2006) Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects. Chandos

It covers the rationale, history, economics, technology and culture of open access, views from major stakeholders, updates from around the world, and visions of the future. The following authors have contributed:

Alma Swan, Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Jean-Claude Guédon, Andrew Odlyzko, Michael Kurtz, Tim Brody, Chris Awre, Stevan Harnad, Arthur Sale, Robert Terry, Robert Kiley, Matthew Cockerill, Mary Waltham, Colin Steele, Leo Waaijers, Peter Suber, Frederick J. Friend, John Shipp, D. K. Sahu, Ramesh C. Parmar, Clifford Lynch, Nigel Shadbolt and Les Carr.

Many of the chapters are, of course, available open access on the web.

Abstract: The basics of open access are presented, as a starting point for discussion by librarians in developing countries. Open access is defined; resources for searching are presented, and resources for creating open access archives and publications. Policy development needed for open access is explained, along with what librarians in developing countries can do to promote open access.

Growth [in the second quarter of 2006] continued very strong in both the gold and green roads. DOAJ, today at 2,292 journals, added 134 journal titles, an increase of about 1 and 1/2 titles per day (calendar days, not business days), about an equivalent of a 25% annual increase. More than half a million items were added to an OAIster search, for a total of more than 7.6 million items, or about the equivalent of a 24% annual increase. At the current rate of growth, an OAIster search can be anticipated to encompass more than a billion items before the end of 2007....

Directory of Open Access Journals:
June 30, 2006: 2,292 journals (38 titles added in the last 30 days)
March 31, 2006: 2,158 journals (78 titles added in the last 30 days)
Dec. 31, 2005: 1,988 titles
February 2005 - over 1,400 titles

June 30, 2006: 653 journals searchable at article level -- 101,434 articles in DOAJ total
March 31, 2006: 594 journals searchable at article level -- 92,751 articles in DOAJ total
Dec. 31, 2004: 492 journals searchable at article level - 83,235
This is an increase of 134 journal titles during April - June, 2006; a 6% growth rate, or equivalent of an annual 25% growth rate.

Note that the DOAJ list does not represent all open access journals, only the ones that have met DOAJ standards, and have gone through the DOAJ vetting process. Jan Szczepanski's list is much longer: over 4,705 titles total as of early December 2005.

OAIster
June 30, 2006: 7,605,729 records from 647 institutions
March 22, 2006: 7,040,586 records from 610 institutions
Dec. 22, 2005: 6,255,599 records from 578 institutions
February 2005: over 5 million records, 405 institutions
This is an increase of 565,143 records in a quarter, or an equivalent of over 2 million records annually. By percentage, this is an 8% increase in this quarter, or an equivalent of about 32% annually. The number of institutions has increased by 37 6%, or the equivalent of 24% annually....

arXiv
June 30, 2006: 374,166 e-prints
March 31, 2006: 362,334 e-prints
Dec. 31, 2005: Open access to 350,745 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science and Quantitative Biology.
This is an increase of 11,832 e-prints in this quarter, a 3% increase in this quarter, or the equivalent of 12% annually....

PS: Good idea. This would be especially useful in developing countries where bandwidth is low and CD copies of OA content often work better than online copies.

Summary: The three recent RCUK self-archiving mandates (ESRC, BBSRC, MRC) are extremely timely and welcome, but they still have two serious -- though easily remedied -- flaws. They are vague about both (1) WHEN and (2) WHERE research should be self-archived:
     (1) WHEN: It should be specified that the author's final, peer-reviewed, accepted draft should be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication. Any allowable delay should pertain only to the date at which access to the deposited text is set as Open Access, not to the date at which the text is deposited. It should be strongly recommended to set access as Open Access immediately, but for articles from the 6% of journals that do not yet endorse immediate Open Access self-archiving, access can be set as Closed Access (for a maximum of 6 months). The semi-automatic EMAIL-EPRINT-REQUEST feature of the Institutional Repository software will allow the author to fulfill individual eprint requests from fellow-researchers during a Closed Access embargo interval.
     (2) WHERE: It should be specified that the deposit should be preferentially in the author's own institutional repository. Central repositories may harvest from the institutional repository if they wish, but the optimal practice, and the one that will scale to cover all researchers at all institutions, is to deposit locally; only if the institution does not yet have a repository should the author deposit directly in a central repository.

"Information wants to be free" has been a rallying cry of the digital age. This week three of Britain's public funding bodies, the Medical Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, added their voices, announcing they would require studies they had funded to be placed in open online archives. Although some details remain to be worked out - notably the time lag between journal publication and online archiving - this marks a leap towards allowing free access to the fruits of Britain's scientific research. The three research councils are following in the wake of the Wellcome Trust's decision to require recipients of its medical research grants to make their results available online within six months of publication. This marks a serious challenge to the former middlemen of research, the journal publishers who have enjoyed a profitable business model of being able to charge substantial margins on free content and effectively compulsory purchase. That is a model that cannot not survive long into the digital era, when online publication and distribution see marginal costs disappear towards zero. This newspaper has campaigned for publicly funded data to be made available, and the case is even more compelling for publicly funded research. This maximises the benefits to society and the taxpayers' investment. Information ought to be free and should be helped to escape its chains.

Following the announcement by RCUK earlier this week on its position on access to research outputs, the SHERPA project has launched a new resource which gives information to authors and academics in receipt of grants from UK Research Councils. The resource outlines the respective positions of each of the Research Councils on requirements for the archiving of research outputs.

While the RCUK statement outlines overarching principles, responsibility for policies in this area has been devolved to individual Research Councils. SHERPA’s new resource - known as JULIET - breaks down the differing requirements and simplifies what the policies say has to be done, what authors should archive and where and when they should archive their outputs. The list then categorises the different sets of advice in comparison to an ideal Open Access mandate.

The JULIET list complements the well-known RoMEO list, which summarises publishers' permissions for archiving research articles.

Elsevier announced today that Scirus, its free science-specific search engine, has added the contents of PsyDok, the psychology-based repository, to its index through a partnership with Saarland University, Germany. As part of its Repository Search service, Scirus is also powering the discovery service on the PsyDok site. PsyDok, developed at Saarland University and State Library (SULB), collects and preserves psychology-related journal articles, post prints, prepublications, reports, and dissertations....

“Some of the features we value the most about Scirus are the combined metadata and full-text search capabilities which greatly enhances the discovery of the content available via the PsyDok site, and the possibility to search across other high quality repositories,” said Ulrich Herb, Electronic Publishing, Digital Repositories, SULB. “In addition, Scirus greatly enhances the visibility of the PsyDok content by making it available on Scirus.com, helping to disseminate German-language psychology-related information globally.”

The Scirus index already includes subject-based repositories such as CogPrints (cognitive sciences), RePEc (economics), Project Euclid (mathematics and statistics) and Organic Eprints (organic agriculture) and others, underlining its commitment to increasing the visibility of subject collections. Increasing its involvement with European partners, Scirus continues to be the premiere search engine specializing in indexing all scientifically-relevant information available on the Web.

Open Access proponents praise the untold possibilities the new digital age affords for scholarship but, like Cohen and Rosenzweig, are highly critical of its commerical side. Many of them believe the serials crisis in journal publishing --which is tied to the thirty-year weakening of the scholarly book market with libraries as the chief purchasers of these books-- is due to the “commodification of information” by...powerful conglomerates....Open Access directly challenges the standard economic instrument --price-- used to control and distribute information by promoting free electronic dissemination of research findings....

A study [subscribers only] published in the most recent Journal of Scholarly Publishing (JSP), which analyses data from the Institute for Scientific Information regarding 1,317 scholarly journals in 25 marker fields during the years 1981-2000, found the vast majority of nonopen access journals were reasonably priced and fairly accessible --a conclusion that ought to temper the reformist zeal of the Open Access movement....

The economic reality is that revenue from journal publication is what often keeps a university press’s book divisions afloat. What will likely happen if these publishers lose subscription and advertising revenues, or their editors and authors? There is a symbiotic relationship between the price of a journal, the public estimation of its importance, and the probability that it will be sustainable for decades to come. Open Access journals that are completely free have no mechanism for determining just how much readers value the service it provides....

Comments.

1. Avoiding high price barriers is only one motivation of the OA movement. The primary motivation for researchers themselves is to enlarge their audience and increase their impact. Moreover, even low and moderate journal prices are access barriers to many readers and most of the software that mediates serious research. And individually affordable prices quickly add up to unaffordable totals, preventing libraries from subscribing to the full range of research. Subscriptions just do not scale (for readers, libraries, subscribers) in proportion to the explosive growth in published research.
2. The OA movement focuses (to quote the BOAI) on "literature that...scholars give to the world without expectation of payment" --i.e. journal articles, not books. OA to books is possible and desirable, but secondary.
3. What will happen to journal publishers that now charge subscriptions? They will continue to charge subscriptions and coexist with OA; or they will offer a mix of OA and non-OA articles and journals; or they will permit author-initiated OA (called self-archiving) without providing any themselves; or they will convert to OA; or they will fail. We presently see examples of each possibility except the last.
4. Journal prices are either unrelated to quality or inversely related to quality. As Theodore and Carl Bergstrom concluded from their analysis of journal prices and citation impact (Nature, May 20, 2004), "libraries typically must pay 4 to 6 times as much per page for journals owned by commercial publishers as for journals owned by non-profit societies. These differences in price do not reflect differences in the quality of the journals. In fact the commercial journals are on average less cited than the non-profits and the average cost per citation of commercial journals ranges from 5 to 15 times as high as that of their non-profit counterparts."
5. It's not true that OA journals and repositories "have no mechanism for determining just how much readers value the service [they] provide." They have download numbers and citation counts, both of which demonstrably increase when content moves from toll access to open access. Moreover, in a journal market so distorted by anti-competitive practices and monopolistic concentration, downloads and citations are more accurate measures of what readers value than willingness to pay publisher prices.

It takes a log to make me mad, but a post to the American Scientist Open Access forum managed to do just that today.  The post (which hasn't yet been archived) was written by Lisa Dittrich, a managing editor of the publisher Academic Medicine. I...quote...just the one line that provoked me into blogging about it:

Most scientists, though, with the possible exception of physicists, have been quite content with the "open access" they already have--namely, the ability to easily get content through their libraries, paid for by their library's budget.

WHAT??!! This goes enormously against everything I’ve ever experienced. Before working on the setup of our Repository, I worked on a Library help desk. This Library help desk was located at a Science based university, which, as far as I’m aware, is in the top 3 (if not top 1) in terms of money spent on journal subscriptions in the UK. I’m therefore slightly confused as to why I used to spend by far and away the largest amount of my time, dealing with enquiries/complaints from academics who were not happy that we didn’t hold a subscription to the articles they wanted.... I just can’t believe that a publisher has managed to convince herself that everything is fine and dandy, everyone always accesses what they want, and there is no problem with access to research!

Fortunately there has been some good news on the OA front, with yesterday's announcements from the various research councils regarding OA deposit of funded research (albeit at varying levels of mandate/encouragement).  Perhaps the RCUK announcement will not only help to increase access, but perhaps even more importantly, will begin to increase knowledge and understanding of open access?

Update. Lisa Dittrich's full post is now available on the AmSci OA Forum archive.

The head of a leading online publishing house, the Public Library of Science (PLoS), has defended the financial viability of the venture after an article in Nature last week (2006;441:914) suggested that the author-pays model of funding publications, which PLoS uses, may be in crisis.

“It will not be long before substantial evidence has accumulated to demonstrate the financial viability of the author-pays model,” said Mark Gritton, chief executive officer of the open access publishing group....

The Guardian reports on the long running, life and death struggle to provide free access to medical research on its business pages, which I think is sad. The reports are on the business pages because some very large publishers - like Reed Elsevier - are threatened. Business types need to know whether to buy or sell. But the reports ought to be on the news pages, because this is a story about trying to give the public free access to medical research, the engine that drives health care. Furthermore, the public funds most of the research. Why can't it have access? Why should the public have to pay twice - once to fund the research and once to access the results?

You might already have detected my zeal. I'm on the board of the Public Library of Science, an organisation that exists to make all research available for free to everybody everywhere. (It's an unpaid position.) Traditional publishers are nervous about open access because currently they make their money by restricting access - by charging for subscriptions. If access is open, nobody will pay.

The funders of research are key in this battle. If they require researchers to publish their studies in places where it can be accessed for free, then they will. The Wellcome Trust has led the way after its director, in an apocalyptic moment, was unable to access research that he had funded. Most research is, however, funded with public money, and we have been waiting for a long time for a ruling from Research Councils UK. Yesterday we got it. After a year of pondering Research Councils UK has decided that it supports open access but will leave it to the individual research councils to decide what they want to do.

The Medical Research Council has decided that it will require its researchers to make their research available for free after six months. This is good news for us zealots, but we would prefer that the requirement be for open access from day one. The research councils are, however, responding to pressure from traditional publishers, and they are particularly sensitive to the bleating of learned societies. Big companies can look after themselves, but the councils are made up of people who are members of learned societies. Many societies get a substantial income from publishing science: it's a highly profitable business. Without the profit from the journals their good works - and certainly their ceremonial dinners - would have to be cut back.

But if, for example, you are a learned society devoted to reducing heart disease isn’t there something odd, even unethical, about making money from restricting access to research on heart disease? It’s yet another example of organisations forgetting why they exist in a struggle to stay alive. And open access wouldn’t kill them anyway. If they do things that add value - as they do - then they will find other sources of income. They shouldn’t be making money by subtracting value as they do by restricting access to research.

Bernard Shaw expressed most succinctly the economic value of making research free: "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas." Ideas are our most precious resource in a knowledge economy. Open access to research will come - I and many others believe - but getting there is a tortuous process.

Thanks to Rufus Pollock, who adds this comment on the OKF blog:

This is a great ‘open knowledge’ project in that it combines code and data and has a strong focus on information reuse. The project aims to provide much more than ‘yet another website’ by delivering a solid database of metadata in raw form that can be reused by different projects (for example those working on the public domain, those working on orphan works, those doing bibliography). To succeed in doing this one the most interesting questions is the development of an effective ‘knowledge API’ in the form of persistent identifiers for the underlying works and artists.

Comment. The perverse state of copyright law makes this project very welcome. But in a better world, we'd have a database of works under copyright (with contact info on the rights-holders) and a legal presumption that everything else was in the public domain.

Electronic theses held at Welsh universities can now be automatically deposited at the National Library of Wales thanks to a JISC project – the Repository Bridge - which has successfully completed its work.

As one of the UK’s legal deposit libraries, the National Library of Wales receives copies of all doctoral and research masters level theses produced at Welsh universities. Providing a system which continued this but which exploited the potential for electronic deposit and access was central to the work of the project. Based at the University of Wales Aberystwyth and the University of Wales Swansea, the Repository Bridge is now able to add the theses of other higher education institutions in Wales to the digital repository at the National Library.

With the UK as a whole moving towards the electronic provision of theses, the new system will also provide a regional hub for the UK-wide EThOS project which is looking to create a federated structure for the electronic depositing of the more than 14,000 theses produced in the UK each year. Technical innovations devised by the project have been recommended in a recent national report for wider adoption.

Arwel Jones, head of digital developments at the National Library of Wales, said: ‘The National Library of Wales is very happy with the new system which builds on a 100 year agreement between the Library and Welsh universities. This project will move the national collection of theses into the digital world and will in the future allow researchers to access these theses electronically.’

BioMed Central today welcomed the latest moves by the UK research councils to enhance access to publicly funded research in the UK.

The new policy statements from Research Councils UK (RCUK), and from the individual research councils, contribute additional momentum to the movement towards making all publicly funded research freely accessible. In particular, three research councils (the MRC, BBSRC and ESRC) have announced that they will mandate open access archiving for all the research that they fund. The statement from the Medical Research Council (MRC) is especially important for biomedical researchers, as the MRC is largest public funder of biomedical research in the UK....

The MRC statement strongly encourages grantees "to publish in journals that allow them (or their institutions) to retain ownership of the copyright," and reconfirms the MRC’s policy that funding for open access journal article-processing charges may be included in grant requests....

An important aspect of the RCUK’s overall statement, is the recognition that: "[article processing charges for open access journals] could be part of an institution’s indirect costs under the full economic costing regime." This is highly significant, since it clarifies to institutions that the cost of article processing is seen as a research infrastructure cost, and can be funded as such. This should be of great help in smoothing the transition from the traditional model in which research publishing is paid for through library subscriptions, towards an open access model, under which the cost of publication is paid for as part of the cost of doing research.

For UK-based authors, the new policies from the MRC and BBSRC, in particular, provide additional reasons to publish in BioMed Central’s 160+ open access journals. Not only do authors publishing in BioMed Central’s journals retain the copyright, but the articles are automatically deposited with PubMed Central and made openly accessible immediately on publication, satisfying the research council requirements and reducing effort on the part of the author....

Indonesia has become the hot spot of avian flu, with the virus spreading quickly in animal populations, and human cases occurring more often there than elsewhere. Yet from 51 reported human cases so far — 39 of them fatal — the genetic sequence of only one flu virus strain has been deposited in GenBank, the publicly accessible database for such information.

Yet scientists outside the WHO networks have no access to these data. The problem last year spurred the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create a consortium to sequence and make public thousands of flu strains from humans and birds. Very quickly, this more open approach led to the useful discovery that viruses swap genes with each other more frequently than had been previously thought.

Some political leaders are drawing the appropriate conclusions. Dennis Kucinich (Democrat, Ohio) and Wayne Gilchrest (Republican, Maryland) are circulating a letter in the House of Representatives that calls on Michael Levitt, the US health secretary, to require H5N1 sequences and other publicly funded research data “to be promptly deposited in a publicly accessible database, such as GenBank”.

From the Kucinich letter:

Pandemic preparedness planning demands all the scientific resources we can muster. Yet, access to some critical data on avian influenza is being restricted by countries and a few scientists for various reasons including intellectual property rights. As explained in the attached letter to Secretary Leavitt [Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services or HHS], there are already models of public databases that provide protection for such concerns. Please join me in asking Secretary Leavitt to advocate that data from HHS funded research on avian influenza, and in particular, genetic sequences, be promptly placed in a publicly accessible database....

From Declan Butler's blog posting:

[The belief that prestigious journals will not publish articles whose underlying data are already public is] ill-researched;...[anyone who read] the Dreams of Flu Data editorial [Nature, March 16, 2006]...could rest assured that: “Nature and its associated journals are not alone in supporting the rapid prior exposure of data when there are acute public-health necessities.”...

With respect to animal sequences, the Paris-based World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) this month conceded to pressure and said that they would work with the NIH to sequence H5N1 samples from birds and deposit them in GenBank.

The World Health Organization (WHO), and its member states, are likewise acutely aware that the political pressure is now on for immediate access to human sequence and clinical data on H5N1 cases. There are legitimate issues to be worked out, such as ensuring that the researchers who do the sequencing, and the countries from which the samples are derived, get credit. But these are soluble, through various permutations, for example, of the Creative Commons licences, and other legal safeguards, that allow immediate sharing, while protecting the interests of the producer of the data. But the WHO knows very well that that the diplomatic imperatives that maintained the pre-SARs lack of transparency are no longer an option, and I think we will see leadership from it in the near future, perhaps before the end of summer.

Comment. For background, see my April article on OA to avian flu data.

Note to Nature: Given the topic and urgency, wouldn't it make more sense to provide OA to this editorial than to charge $30 for pay-per-view?

Update (July 6, 2006). Declan Butler reports that 16 members of Congress have signed on to the Kucinich letter.

The normal mechanism [of academic journal publication] is that scientists offer the fruits of their research-- often bankrolled by the taxpayer-- for nothing to publishers. Those publishers then charge money to people who wish to read their journals. Publishers have been making handsome profits from this arrangement. But change is afoot. Open-access publishing, in which papers are freely available immediately upon publication, is sweeping the dusty corridors. The catch is that the sponsors of research will have to fork out more money to pay for it.

The new fashion is to be found on both sides of the Atlantic. In America John Cornyn, a Republican senator from Texas, and Joe Lieberman, a Democrat senator from Connecticut, recently introduced a bill that seeks to compel all federal government agencies “to develop public-access policies relating to research conducted by employees of that agency or from funds administered by that agency”. If it is passed, every American government outfit that commissions more than $100m-worth of research a year will have to make the results free to all-comers as soon as they are accepted for publication.

America's biggest sponsor of medical research, the National Institutes of Health, has already thrown its weight behind such a move. For the past year it has strongly encouraged the recipients of its grants to make their results available on a free archive, called PubMed Central, as soon as they are published elsewhere.

In Britain, meanwhile, the Wellcome Trust (the world’s second-biggest medical-research charity), has gone a step further. Rather than encouraging its researchers to deposit electronic copies of their findings with PubMed Central, it compels them to do so --although they have six months after publication in which to comply....

Other arms of the British scientific establishment are involved, too. On June 28th three of the eight research councils that distribute government money to British scientists announced that, in future, any work they pay for will have to be published freely soon after being accepted for publication by a journal; the other five support the principle but are not in a position to enforce it.

Britain’s Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific organisation, has also got in on the act. Like several other institutions that make at least some of their money from scientific publishing, the Royal Society had opposed open access on the grounds that standards might slip. If each article published brought additional revenue, an organisation might be tempted to run the unworthy as well as the worthy. But now the society has changed its mind, at least in part. On June 21st it launched a service that charges the authors of scientific papers a fee to post their work online as soon as it is accepted for publication by any of the society’s journals. Until now, authors have had to wait for a year before their work became freely available.

The Royal Society's American counterpart, the National Academy of Sciences, is a convert, too. In 2005 its house journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published 565 open-access papers, reflecting the fact that almost one in five authors asked (and paid) for their work to be made immediately and freely available....

There are, however, a few thorns among the roses. Traditional publishers are often sceptical about the business models of their open-access rivals, and they sometimes have cause to be. The Public Library of Science (PLoS), an American organisation regarded by many as the flagship of the open-access movement, lost almost $1m last year. As a result, it is about to increase its charge from $1,500 per article to as much as $2,500, depending on which of its journals an author publishes in. Undeterred, PLoS will, in August, launch an open-access online database called PLoS One....

BioMed Central, a British open-access publisher, has also increased its charges --from $500 to as much as $1,700 per article. It, too, has still to break even. Yet it received some good news this month. Thomson Scientific, a firm that evaluates the impact of journals, looked at citations made in 2005 of articles published between 2003 and 2004. Eleven journals published by BioMed Central received their first such assessment, and nine of them appeared in the top ten highest-impact journals in their fields. Whatever the traditional publishers might hope, open-access does not look in imminent danger of perishing.

Comment. This is a good survey of recent developments. I have just two corrections.

1. "The catch is that the sponsors of research will have to fork out more money to pay for it." This is misleading. When researchers publish in OA journals and sponsors agree to cover the costs, then it's true the sponsors pay more ($500 - $3,000 more per article) than they would if they didn't agree to cover the costs. But when funding agencies encourage or require OA archiving, they pay nothing at all when grantees deposit their work in their own institutional repositories and only a small amount when grantees deposit in the agency's repository. For example, the NIH asks its grantees to deposit in its repository, PubMed Central, and the processing and hosting costs only come to about 0.01% of the agency's budget. Moreover, in all these cases, the cost (small or large) must be set against the agency's increased return on investment by making its research easier to discover, retrieve, and use. Finally, the cost (small or large) is only an increase over a policy not to support OA. Readers should not get the impression that it's greater than the cost of the non-OA alternative, subscription journals, whose prices have skyrocketed almost four times faster than inflation in the past two decades. As subscription journals convert to OA, there will be huge savings for all the stakeholders.
2. The Cornyn-Lieberman bill (FRPAA) does not require immediate OA but permits a six month delay.

The push for open access to publicly funded academic research was boosted yesterday as an umbrella body supported placing subscription journals' articles on the internet for free.  But the body, Research Councils UK, whose eight members grant to academics an annual £2.5bn of public money, appears to have watered down its initial support for open access.

The body’s preliminary proposal, outlined a year ago, suggested making it a condition of the grants that researchers put work into freely available online archives as soon as possible. Yesterday the body backtracked, saying it was up to the eight councils themselves to decide whether or not to demand researchers got involved in open access....

The Medical Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, have all opted to make online archiving a requirement of grants from this October. The Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils said merely that researchers "should" archive. The remaining four councils have yet to rule on the issue.

While the position of the umbrella body was applauded by the Wellcome Trust and by JISC, the body responsible for coordinating IT in higher education, others involved in open access initiatives were less impressed.

Stevan Harnad, from the University of Southampton, in Hampshire, which backs open access, said "The green light to allow individual funding councils to decide for themselves whether or not to mandate open access self-archiving is good and bad". He said: "It is good that individual councils will be able to mandate it if they wish, bad that consensus by all the councils could not be reached."

Update. Wray now has a revised and longer version of this article, same title, same date, same paper, different URL.

A year after releasing a draft policy on open access, the umbrella organization of Britain’s publicly financed research councils has softened its stance. The group, Research Councils UK, originally called for free access to papers resulting from research it financed “at the earliest opportunity” (The Chronicle, June 29, 2005). But now, in a new policy statement released today, the group will allow each of the eight member councils to formulate its own policy.

Thus far, only one research council --the Medical Research Council-- requires free access, according to the blog of a leading open-access advocate, Peter Suber, who is director of the Open Access Project at Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group in Washington.

Nonetheless, the updated policy statement continues to support open access and asserts that “ideas and knowledge derived from publicly funded research must be made available and accessible for public use, interrogation, and scrutiny, as widely, rapidly, and effectively as possible.”

The open-access movement in the United States also seems to be evolving in fits and starts (The Chronicle, May 11).

Correction. In my blog posting yesterday, my quick skim of the eight Research Council web sites led me to overlook the fact that the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) has adopted an OA mandate as strong as that of the Medical Research Council (MRC). Both will mandate OA to the research they fund, effective October 1, 2006. Both will require deposit "at the earliest opportunity", though the MRC adds "and certainly within six months". The MRC requires deposit in PubMed Central while the BBSRC requires deposit "in an appropriate e-print repository". Both apply their policies to agency employees as well as grantees. My apologies for the omission.

MIT OpenCourseWare is looking for African educational institutions to offer mirror sites for its free, Web-based teaching materials....Unfortunately, says MIT OpenCourseWare's Farnaz Haghseta, the OCW materials are largely underutilised in many African regions where Internet connectivity is limited. To overcome this limitation, MIT OCW is looking to collaborate with educational institutions that are interested in hosting a mirror site, or a local copy of the MIT OCW materials.

Through the MIT OCW in a Box programme, MIT OCW has received support to distribute MIT OCW in a Box packages for free to African institutions. Each package includes an external hard drive that contains an copy of the entire MIT OCW Web site (including videos), software tools, user documentation, and marketing material.

Haghseta says the goal of the programme is to have 100 mirror sites installed at African educational institutions by the end of 2006.   Interested institutions should contact Haghseta at farnaz@mit.edu.

(1) The RCUK’s decision today to let individual funding councils decide for themselves whether or not to mandate OA self-archiving is both good and bad.  It is good that the individual councils will be able to mandate it if they wish (and bravo to MRC, BBSRC & ESRC for already doing so: CCLRC is close, and I am sure other councils will be mandating too!), but too bad that consensus by all the councils could not be reached.

(2) The "plans to assess the impact of author-pays publishing and self-archiving on research publishing" are empty nonsense.

First, the most important impact of OA is on research, researchers, and the public that funds them, and that impact has already been tested and repeatedly demonstrated to be highly positive, with OA dramatically enhancing research usage and impact.

Second, the only objective way to assess the impact of mandated self-archiving on publishing is to mandate it and monitor the outcome yearly. So far, spontaneous, unmandated self-archiving remains at about 15% overall, and that's why OA needs to be mandated. So far spontaneous self-archiving has had zero impact on publishing (i.e., subscription revenues), even in the few fields (of physics) where it has been close to 100% for years....

In other words, this call for further studies to "assess impact" before mandating OA self-archiving is merely a cop-out in response to publishing community lobbying, which has already successfully filibustered self-archiving mandates for several years now: In reality, the self-archiving mandates themselves are the only objective test of their own impact.

Let us hope the other individual Research Councils will, like MRC, BBSRC and ESRC (CCLRC is already close) have the good sense to go ahead and conduct the tests, by adopting the mandates.

iCommons is the next stage in the evolution of the movement unleashed by the Creative Commons, whose licenses are now used on more than 145 million creative works. In the course of adapting its licenses to the legal systems of several dozen nations, the Creative Commons has over the past few years attracted some formidable talent -- hundreds of free and open source software programmers, copyright and patent reform activists, bloggers, citizen journalists, indie musicians, Wikipedians, free culture champions, advocates of open access scholarly publishing, scientists seeking to build new knowledge commons, among many others. The CC realized that these folks needed to learn from each other, and collaborate with each other....

...And finally an excellent article in Nature which analyses the financial standing of the most important open access organisation The Public Library of Science. What the article shows is that the 'author pays' model for scientific publishing is likely to be unsustainable without charitable support. I don't think that scientific publishing should be a charitable enterprise. Its innovation and growth has been driven by commercial market pressures to improve which have always been the best guarantee of high-quality service. The alternatives nearly always end in bureaucracy and protection of the status quo.

Comments.

1. The Nature article shows nothing of the kind. PLoS only talked about charitable support for two of its seven journals, and the article didn't even pretend to examine any other OA journals from any other publishers. For example, the Hindawi OA journals are already profitable. --And of course Charkin doesn't compare OA business models to the present subscription model, which the University of California (among others) has called "incontrovertibly unsustainable".
2. Charkin slides from business models to quality without any evidence or argument. He seems unaware that PLoS Biology has the highest impact factor of any journal in ISI's category of general biology.
3. Honestly, who has a stronger interest in protecting the status quo, open access journals or their critics? Who's trying to preserve the status quo right here, right now?

For those who don’t engage in [academic publishing], the deal goes something like this:

• Academics provide the content
• Academics do the reviewing
• Academics often do the editing
• Publishers print it and sell it back to academics
• Authors are often restricted from making their own work publicly available
• Authors receive no payment for the published work

Not an entirely fair system one would have thought, but because journal publication is tied up with academic esteem, promotion and the rather pernicious RAE, it is a process many of us feel compelled to go along with.

Thankfully the tide is turning and there are a number of different models for publishing now, including online journals, open content and err, blogs I guess.

PS: Right. I'd just add that the remedy, or the superior alternative, does not lie in "online" journals as such, which may be guilty of the same practices. It lies in open-access journals, which are online but also free of charge and free of the restrictions that prevent authors from sharing their work as widely as possible. Open-access archives are another part of the solution, giving authors the same benefits even if they publish in conventional, non-OA journals.

One of the best ACRL traditions that occurs at ALA conferences is the reception that follows the ACRL President’s Program. The focus of the reception, other than general schmoozing, is to celebrate the winner of the ACRL Academic/Research Librarian of the Year. The winner of the 2006 award, Ray English, Azariah Smith Root Director of Libraries at Oberlin College, was honored at the reception. The award, sponsored by YBP Library Services, recognizes an outstanding member of the library profession who has made a significant national or international contribution to academic/research librarianship and library development....Congratulations to Ray English on receiving the ACRL Academic/Research Librarian of the Year award.

PS: I whole-heartedly add (or repeat) my congratulations. Ray is not only a librarian's librarian, but a champion of OA. He's the chair of the SPARC Steering Committee, an active member of the Open Access Working Group --and by chance, co-author (with me) of an article published earlier this month on the FRPAA and CURES bills now before the US Senate.

We're delighted that WBG, a German publisher, today decided to drop its petition for a preliminary injunction against the Google Books Library Project. WBG (whose legal action was supported by the German Publishers Association as an industry model) made the decision after being told by the Copyright Chamber of the Regional Court of Hamburg that its petition was unlikely to succeed.

It's our belief that the display of short snippets from in-copyright books does not infringe German copyright law. Today the Court indicated that it agreed, drawing a comparison with the snippets used in Google web search. And the Court also rejected the WBG's argument that the scanning of its books in the U.S. infringed German copyright law.

We've always recognized the importance of copyright, because we believe that authors and publishers deserve to be rewarded for their creative endeavors. And we specifically designed Google Book Search to respect copyright law - never showing more than two or three snippets around a search term without the publisher's prior permission, which they can give through our Partner Program. This is separate from the Library Project, the subject of this petition. By helping people to find and buy books, Book Search enables publishers to reach a much larger, and more global, audience....

Comment. This is an important decision, though it only applies to German law and isn't apparently final even for German law. It gives long-awaited legal support to Google's key contention: that although it makes full-text copies for indexing, without seeking permission, it only displays short, fair-use snippets to users, and that the length of the displayed snippets is more relevant than the length of the undisplayed copies. Many US lawyers and law professors specializing in copyright law believe that the same argument will prevail in US courts.

Update. Also see the growing news coverage of this story.

SHERPA's new JULIET service breaks down the differing requirements from each of the Research Councils (and others) to try and simplify [1] what the policy says has to be done, [2] what authors should archive, [3] when they should archive, [4] where they should archive their outputs....

It is intended to add other policies from other funding bodies to JULIET as these become available.

Comment. This is an excellent idea announced with perfect timing. It should be very useful for researchers who need to understand the terms of funding from different agencies and for advocates and analysts who need to track the progress of funder-stimulated OA.

JISC today welcomed the RCUK’s position statement on access to research outputs, saying that the statement represents ‘an important step’ in helping to ensure that the fruits of UK research are made more widely available. With individual research councils beginning to set out their guidance for implementing the RCUK principles, the statement will have major repercussions for the future of UK research.

Published today, the statement reaffirms the RCUK’s belief in the value of repositories as a means of improving access to the results of publicly-funded research. It also restates its encouragement given last year to UK researchers to deposit their outputs in e-print repositories, suggesting that deposit should take place at the earliest opportunity.

JISC fully supports this principle and is investing significantly in the development of institutional repositories in the UK through its £3.5m digital repositories programme and the £13.8m repositories and preservation strand of its capital programme. JISC is also supporting the development of UK PubMed Central as a repository for research outputs in bio-medicine. JISC is therefore well placed to ensure that repositories are available for researchers who wish to deposit their outputs in them, and that the necessary national infrastructure is in place to support access and resource discovery across institutional and subject-based repositories....

Scientists funded by the UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) will soon be obliged to deposit copies of their published articles in an online repository “at the earliest opportunity,” the council announced today (June 28).  The new archiving requirements will apply to papers arising from grant applications submitted on or after October 1st 2006, and for projects funded at BBSRC-sponsored institutes, the council said in a statement on its Web site.

The BBSRC decision came as part of a wider position statement published today by Research Councils UK, the umbrella body for all of the UK’s seven research councils, which distribute government funds.  That long-awaited policy says that researchers funded by any of the councils should deposit their research outputs in a repository. However, it leaves the decision on how and when to implement such a policy up to each of the individual research councils, each of which funds research in different disciplines.

Leaving the decision up to the individual councils was an important point when drafting the statement, said Adrian Pugh from RCUK. “We’ve been aware that there is a huge breadth of variation within the research community and it’s very difficult to capture all the nuances that go across that community,” he told The Scientist....

Today’s statement comes 12 months after RCUK published a draft position statement on this issue. That earlier statement had triggered a hostile reaction from some journal publishers, but Sally Morris, chief executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, told The Scientist she was “much happier with what the RCUK has now done.”  For instance, Morris applauded the fact that RCUK had put an emphasis on working with publishers to make the arrangements, and that the policy recognized that different disciplines would respond in different ways....

[1] In June 2005, the Executive Group of Research Councils UK (RCUK) issued a draft position statement on access to research outputs. Following consultation and discussion, the research councils remain committed to the principles that underpinned that statement and agree on the further activities necessary to develop their position. These principles state that:...Ideas and knowledge derived from publicly-funded research must be made available and accessible for public use, interrogation and scrutiny, as widely, rapidly and effectively as practicable....

[3] RCUK Executive Group reaffirms its long-standing position that authors choose where to place their research for publication. It is for authors’ institutions to decide whether they are prepared to use funds for any page charges or other publishing fees. Such funds could be part of an institution’s indirect costs under the full economic costing regime. RCUK Executive Group makes no judgement as to the most appropriate publishing model.

[4] Research councils agree that their funded researchers should, where required to do so, deposit the outputs from research councils funded research in an acceptable repository as designated by the individual research council. This requirement will be effective from the time indicated in the guidance from the individual research council, This guidance will be published on individual Research Council websites and will, where appropriate, require funded researchers to:

• Personally deposit, or otherwise ensure the deposit of, a copy of any resultant articles published in journals or conference proceedings, in an appropriate repository, as designated by the individual research council.
• Wherever possible, personally deposit, or otherwise ensure the deposit of, the bibliographical metadata relating to such articles, including a link to the publisher’s website, at or around the time of publication.

[5] Full implementation of these requirements must be undertaken such that current copyright and licensing policies, for example embargo periods or provisions limiting the use of deposited content to non-commercial purposes, are respected by authors. The research councils' position is based on the assumption that publishers will maintain the spirit of their current policies.

[6] Where relevant, grant guidelines will be amended to provide guidance to grant holders on the requirement for ensuring the deposit of material, and will apply from the date indicated in individual research council’s guidance. These research councils will also encourage, but not formally oblige, award-holders to deposit articles arising from grants awarded as a result of applications before that date.

[7] RCUK Executive Group has consulted widely on its position statement and it is clear that there is a wide spectrum of views on the likely impact of self-archiving on subscription journals. Accordingly, RCUK Executive Group will:

• Organise a workshop jointly with interested learned societies to discuss the implications for them of self-archiving.
• Consult with the publishing community regarding copyright and licensing issues through existing forums. There is no intention that individual researchers will be expected to break publishers’ copyright or licensing agreements or to negotiate with publishers.
• Initiate a project to investigate the impact of author-pays publication and self-archiving on research publishing. Three leading publishers (Macmillan, Blackwell and Elsevier) have indicated that they are prepared to be involved in the project. Discussions have also taken place with the Royal Society, which also believes that such research could be useful. It is intended that this project will start late in 2006 and report in late 2008. RCUK will review its position in mid to late 2008 in light of the findings from this research. A pre-study with the Research Information Network and the Department of Trade and Industry on the availability of data on scholarly publishing has already started.

Also see the RCUK press release.

In recognition of the diverse research communities served by ea