Open Access News

From August 14th 2006 authors submitting articles to selected Cambridge Journals will be able to make their articles freely available to everyone, immediately on publication. Building on the success of Breast Cancer Online, the first Cambridge Open Access project, and Neuron Glia Biology, which provides Open Access after 6-12 months, Cambridge Open Option introduces a new Open Access model to a further 15 journals from the Cambridge list.

Gavin Swanson, STM Editor-in-Chief at Cambridge Journals said: "I've been involved in the Open Access world for some time and the launch of Cambridge Open Option is the result of a great deal of painstaking research into best practice. I'm confident that we have a robust model that will benefit both authors and researchers equally. We're hoping that this will become a major part of our journals publishing in the future and that it will help us give greater access to the results of scientific research reported in our journals."

Once their paper has been accepted for publication, authors can choose whether or not to make it freely available to everyone on publication via Cambridge Journals Online (CJO). In this way, all of the editorial decision processes are maintained in a neutral way. The journal's Editor and reviewers will not know that the paper is to be included in the program until it is accepted.

All Cambridge asks in order to provide this service is that the author, or their institution or funding body, pays a fee to cover costs associated with the publication process, from peer-review of the submitted manuscript, through the copy-editing and typesetting, to online-hosting of the definitive version of the published article. The charge that will be applied for each article is £1500/$2700. The costs associated with producing printed issues are not included.

Papers will continue to be made available in both print and online versions; the only difference is that Open Access articles will be freely available online....

It is anticipated that the subscription prices of the participating journals will be adjusted in the future to take into account the impact of the Open Access publishing model. The level of change will depend on the uptake of the Cambridge Open Option by authors. Any subscription price changes will occur on a title by title basis....

Cambridge Open Option encompasses the following journals published by Cambridge University Press:
Journal of Agricultural Science
Biofilms
Cardiology in the Young
Development and Psychopathology
Experimental Agriculture
Expert Reviews in Molecular Medicine
Geological Magazine
Genetical Research
Epidemiology and Infection
Laser and Particle Beams
Journal of Plasma Physics
Psychological Medicine
Journal of Tropical Ecology
Visual Neuroscience
Zygote

Cambridge University Press Journals allow authors to post their articles in personal and departmental web pages and in institutional repositories. Authors can immediately post their own versions of articles (as submitted but prior to editorial input from Cambridge University Press) on their personal or departmental web pages or institutional repositories. They can also post the full pdf version of the published article 12 months after first publication. The full terms and conditions relating to institutional repository and author hosting are provided to all authors contributing to Cambridge Journals.

Comments.

1. I hope you're counting. This is the third OA hybrid program introduced in August, and August isn't even two weeks old yet. The first two were BMJ Unlocked (August 3; see my comments) and Wiley Funded Access (August 8; see my comments).
2. Like other hybrid programs, this is a welcome step. It will enlarge the body of OA literature even if the author uptake is low. Cambridge promises to lower subscription prices in proportion to author uptake, which is good, but says nothing about waiving fees in case of economic hardship, letting authors retain copyright, or depositing copies of the Cambridge Open articles in an OA repository independent of Cambridge.
3. I applaud Cambridge's decision to continue to allow immediate OA archiving of peer-reviewed author manuscripts, even when authors choose not to participate in Cambridge Open. That's a step most of the other OA hybrid programs have been unwilling to take.

Once there was a way to tell the grey literature from what had been clearly and cleanly published in black and white. It was all in the font and binding. For the better part of the twentieth century, the grey literature was typically the work of typewriters, mimeographs, photocopies and other devices, with the pages stapled, paper-clipped, and three-hole punched in binders, to [put] not too fine a spin on it....

The computer and laser printer changed some of that by removing any typographic distinctions that set the grey literature off from work that had been formally published, while the Internet over the last decade-and-a-half in scholarly publishing has almost completely blurred critical aspects of the distinctions between grey and published literature, as those distinctions apply to academic communication. My work with the Public Knowledge Project has been to explore how greater access to scholarly work is reshaping the possibilities for the circulation of this form of knowledge, and one aspect of that is how in some scholarly fields, such as physics, that circulation is going global well before a work is formally published, while at the same time, the formal peer-reviewed publication of that work is no longer the principal site of its circulation.

In 1991,what is now known as arXiv.org was started by Paul Ginsparg, as a place where “pre-prints” of papers in high-energy physics could be posted....These papers include early drafts, revised versions, published versions, and corrected versions, with sometimes a mix of versions of the same paper through its iterations. With tens of thousands of connections made daily to the site, it seems pretty clear that a good number of researchers are using the site as their portal into the literature, whether it black, grey, or white....[O]pen circulation of the work collected in arXiv.org represents a blurring of just the sort of distinctions that GL once served so well to make.

The open and free circulation facilitated by the Internet, which has been so dramatically demonstrated by arXiv.org, has given rise to an “open access movement” within scholarly communication....

What all of this points to is how the wider, more immediate and openly public, circulation of research and scholarship is trumping the traditional distinctions of the print literature. Much of this open research has been peer-reviewed, with the details of the journal publication clearly identified on the article, but it may not be in an officially published form. On top of this, corresponding developments with “open data” are talking place, making another form of GL immediately and widely available for new forms of collaboration and reanalysis. Governments and the courts are posting reams of material online. The Wikipedia and the blogosphere represent grass-root efforts to reshape the basis of participation in human knowledge. What has been made public by being published is no longer a black and white issue. There is still plenty of room for judgments and distinctions to be made about the quality, type, and nature of this knowledge. This growing openness around what is known assists in the very assessment and verification. I, for one, do not see grey skies ahead, but something brighter.

Objectives: The question of who pays for research to be conducted and published is an important one as it may result in publication bias. The traditional model of medical publishing has relied on subscriptions for funding. There has been increasing interest in making the results of scientific research freely available. One proposed mechanism is an author-pays system, which shifts cost from subscribers to authors. We investigated the impact of author page charges on the nature and type of published research, and the association of industry funding with types of published research.

Methods: Four infectious diseases journals with comparable scope were studied—two with page charges and two without. Variables included type of research study, area of research, author demographics, study setting and industry funding. The differences between a subscription model vs. a mixed model (author page charges and subscription charges) were studied. We also investigated changes within the same journal once it had moved from a subscription model to a mixed model.

Results: Authors from developing countries were significantly less likely to be published in the mixed-model journals (OR 0.25, 95% CI 0.15–0.41, P < 0.001). Clinical trials published in any type of journal were significantly more likely to be industry funded than any other type of research (OR 12.7, 95% CI 7.0–22.9, P < 0.001). Industry-funded research was significantly less likely to be about diseases affecting predominantly the developing world (OR 0.47, 95% CI 0.25–0.89, P < 0.05).

Conclusion: There is clearly a relationship between industry funding and certain types of published research. The model of funding of journal publishing can also affect the nature of published research. Shifting publishing costs to authors favours well-funded organizations, industry sponsored research and wealthy countries. Such potential for publication bias must be considered when planning for open access models.

Comments. I don't have access to the full article and base these comments only on the abstract.

1. The authors use the term "page charges" to refer to processing fees charged by some OA and OA-hybrid journals. This is misleading, since the term already refers to fees charged by non-OA journals that pay for benefits other than OA. Processing fees at OA journals and hybrids buy OA and shouldn't be confused with other author-side fees that don't buy OA.
2. There's no doubt that OA journals charging author-side fees will deter authors from developing countries (and indigent authors from developed countries) unless the journals adopt a policy, as PLoS, BMC and others have done, to waive fees in cases of economic hardship. It seems that the authors only studied OA hybrids where (so far) fee waivers are rare. Readers shouldn't conclude that the same barriers to entry exist at full OA journals with waiver policies.
3. Most OA journals charge no author-side fees at all. But the authors only studied fee-based OA journals. Again, readers shouldn't conclude that the same barriers to entry exist at the majority of OA journals, which charge no author-side fees.

Background: Open access is making a noticeable impact on access to information. In 2005, many major research funders, including the Wellcome Trust, National Institutes for Health (NIH), and the Research Councils UK (RCUK), set out their position in a number of statements. Of particular note was the stipulation that authors receiving grants must deposit their final manuscript in an open access forum within 6–12 months of publication.

Observations: The paper will look at the open access position statements issued by some of the major funding bodies in the biomedical sciences. The paper will also look at the models used by publishers to provide open or delayed access, such as Oxford Open from Oxford University Press, HighWire Press' delayed access policy, BioMed Central, and Public Library of Science (PLoS). There are now over 1.2 million articles in PubMed that are freely accessible via publishers' websites.

Conclusion/discussion: Could funding agencies accelerate the move to open access? The list of funding agencies supporting open access is growing. The National Institutes for Health and the Wellcome Trust have been joined by many of the world's major funders in biomedical research whose goal it is to make their research findings available with no barriers.

PS: The funder contribution to OA progress is large and undeniable. For my review of the major policies and the lessons to be learned from them, see my article from this month's SOAN.

In the sense of an "Open Access" movement this article is an appeal for making scientific publications accessible in Internet free-of-charge and worldwide without any restrictive "permission barriers." It presents projects and initiatives in both the United States and Germany and advocates a stronger reception of American approaches here in Germany. According to this article, "Open Access" is the answer to the crisis scientific literature is facing, which is not only reflected in the professional journal prices, but also means that an anthology is maybe subsidized four times by local authorities, and the state then has to buy back its own research findings from commercial publishing houses. There are also thoughts about providing "Open Access" not only for books and articles. The article closes by dealing with the resistance and barriers to this idea and deliberating possible solutions, with an emphasis on the legal framework.

Summary: At a time when the immediate problem for Open Access (OA) Institutional Repositories (IRs) is not removal but deposit (IRs are still mostly empty), there is no need for an institutional or departmental mediator/moderator/approver phase in the self-archiving process. Authorised institutional authors should all be able to deposit/approve and delete/approve their own papers, instantaneously. If it is felt that there is a need for vetting deposits, let the deposits be monitored only after they have been successfully deposited and are visible in the IR. A distinction also needs to be made between (i) unrefereed preprints and (ii) refereed postprints of published articles. (i) If you want authors to be willing to deposit their unrefereed preprints at all, you must allow them to remove them at will, instantaneously. (ii) For refereed postprints, 99% of the time authors will never want to remove them. They are published. The postprint is merely a supplement to the published version, for those would-be users who cannot afford access to the published version. The published version (at the publisher's website) cannot be withdrawn; so withdrawing the access-supplement in the author's own IR is in general pointless.

(i) An Institutional Repository (IR) is not the same thing as a Central (uni-disciplinary or multidisciplinary) Repository (CR) like arXiv or PubMed Central.
    (ii) A pre-refereeing preprint is not the same as a refereed postprint.
    (iii) The first and most fundamental goal of the Open Access movement is to provide Open Access to the published, peer-reviewed research literature.
    (iv) Open Access to pre-refereeing preprints is and must remain an optional bonus that the author may or may not provide, temporarily or permanently, over and above access to the refereed postprint.
    (v) Open Access to the refereed postprint is a necessity, across all disciplines, to supplement Toll Access (via journal subscription/license/pay-per-view).
    (vi) Open Access to the unrefereed preprint is not a necessity, not necessarily discipline-universal, and should not be portrayed as such.
    (vii) Central Repositories (CRs) evolved on the basis of spontaneous, voluntary self-archiving, of both preprints and postprints.
    (viii) Institutional self-archiving is a matter of systematic institutional policy, and pertains specifically to refereed, published postprints.
    (ix) Institutional self-archiving is (largely) restricted to the institution's own authors self-archiving their own work: preprints and postprints.
    (x) Institutions can and should control the content of their IRs (mainly by restricting it to their own researchers' output and by ensuring that it includes all the institutional published postprint output).
    (xi) The fact that institutional employees are the self-archivers gives IRs a level of control and answerability that superordinate CRs like arxiv -- in which anyone in the world can deposit -- do not and cannot have (although research-funder CRs are a partial exception).
    (xii) But for neither IRs nor CRs should access-provision (self-archiving), be conflated with publication, nor preprints (provisional) with postprints (peer-reviewed, published, and permanent).

Dear Mr [Robert] Ross [of Elsevier Science],

We regret to have to tell you that we, the Editorial Board of Topology, are resigning with effect from 31 December 2006.

As you are well aware, the Editors have been concerned about the price of Topology since Elsevier gained control of the journal in 1994. We believe that the price, in combination with Elsevier's policies for pricing mathematics journals more generally, has had a significant and damaging effect on Topology's reputation in the mathematical research community, and that this is likely to become increasingly serious and difficult, indeed impossible, to reverse in the future.

As you know, we have made efforts over the last five to ten years to negate this effect....

The journal Topology has an illustrious history with which we, on becoming editors, were extremely proud to be associated. It owd its foundation to the inspiration and vision of the great Oxford topologist JHC Whitehead in the late 1950s, and the Honorary Advisory Editorial Board and also our predecessors on the Editorial Board have included some of the greatest names in 20th century mathematics. We believe that the journal's ethos and structure, based around a group of editors making editorial decisions jointly in Oxford with the expert assistance and advice of highly eminent editors elsewhere around the world, has many strengths and has provided a great service to the mathematical community in the past. However we feel that Elsevier's policies toward the publication of mathematics research have undermined that legacy.

Therefore, with great reluctance and sadness, we have made the difficult decision to resign.

[signed] Martin Bridson, Ralph Cohen, Nigel Hitchin, Frances Kirwan, Marc Lackenby, Jean Lannes, Wolfgang Lück, John Roe, and Ulrike Tillmann.

The journal of the Canadian Medical Association, CMAJ, whose editor and deputy editor were dismissed in February in a fight over editorial independence (BMJ 2006;332: 503 [Free Full Text]), may have to compete with a new open access journal. It is being created by former CMAJ editors, including the deputy editor, Anne-Marie Todkill, and editorial board members.

The new journal, Open Medicine, is a "Canadian health and clinical medicine journal dedicated to furthering integrity, independence, and open access in scholarly publishing," says its website. The site is currently under development, although the journal is accepting and reviewing manuscripts.

Much of research in India in the fields of science, technology, agriculture, medicine, social sciences, economics, etc. is funded out of taxpayers' money. A few years ago, a DST report quoted a figure of about 75% for the share of publicly funded scientific research. However the findings of these research programmes, usually in the form of research papers published in refereed journals, is not easily accessible even to Indian scientists at large let alone the public, for the simple reason scientists publish their research papers in a wide variety of journals published from many countries and no library in India or for that matter anywhere in the world can afford to subscribe to all these journals. Also, some journal publishers fix their subscription prices at astronomical levels....

[Indian authors] may publish their papers in any journal they want to. But if, at the same time, they also place the papers in an interoperable institutional open access archive (or repository) anyone with an Internet connection can access it. This is precisely why enlightened institutions such as the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian Institute of Science are subscribing to the idea of open access. All eleven Academy journals are open access. Anyone anywhere in the world can access any paper published in these journals - full text and not just abstracts - through the Internet. The Indian Institute of Science is maintaining an open access repository of full text papers and they are on their way to placing every paper published by the IISc faculty and students in this repository. Currently they have more than 5,000 papers....

What can we the common people, the taxpaying public, do? Well in the USA they have an organization called the Alliance for Taxpayer Access; please see [the August issue of its newsletter].  They have over 75 institutional members and they are fighting for open access to all publicly funded research. Through their advocacy, the Alliance members hope to change not only the US policy but also the attitude and behaviour of individual scientists.

Enlightened Indians in all walks of life could form a national organization similar to the US Alliance for Taxpayer Access and persuade the government to mandate open access all research publications resulting from public funding. The Alliance could write to major funding agencies and apex bodies (such as DST, DSIR, ICAR, ICMR, DAE, DRDO, Dept of Space, Department of Ocean development, UGC, etc.), the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister and the science academies and professional societies urging them to adopt a comprehensive open access policy in India. In the US a bill is at an advanced stage of discussion in the Congress and in the UK six of the eight Research Councils have already announced their support to open access. The Wellcome Trust, one of the largest funder of life science reserach has mandated OA for all papers resulting from their support. Surely we in India can open up the scientific and scholarly literature.

PS: Arun is exactly right. The ATA has been very effective in the US. Every country should have an equivalent.

This foundational white paper reports on a year-long study by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, examining the relationship between copyright law and education. In particular, we wanted to explore whether innovative educational uses of digital technology were hampered by the restrictions of copyright. We found that provisions of copyright law concerning the educational use of copyrighted material, as well as the business and institutional structures shaped by that law, are among the most important obstacles to realizing the potential of digital technology in education....

[T]he following emerged as the most significant copyright-related obstacles to educational uses of content:

• Unclear or inadequate copyright law relating to crucial provisions such as fair use and educational use;
• Extensive adoption of “digital rights management” technology to lock up content;
• Practical difficulties obtaining rights to use content when licenses are necessary;
• Undue caution by gatekeepers such as publishers or educational administrators.

While the primary task of the foundational white paper was to identify these obstacles, the paper concludes with some discussion of paths toward reform that might improve the situation. It suggests that certain types of legal reform, technological improvements in the rights clearance process, educator agreement on best practices, and increased use of open access distribution would help overcome the obstacles we identified....

Even though many scholars wish to eliminate the toll structure currently in place for the distribution of digital versions of their works by offering no-cost digital copies, they still have an interest in protecting their intellectual property, and regulating how it is used. Accordingly, even accounting for the open access movement (discussed further in section 7.4), limited use of DRM systems by individual educators and their institutions might increase with time. Although academics tend to reject DRM systems as a means for charging users for access to their works, they may nevertheless use DRM systems to ensure the integrity of their works, attribution for their efforts, and enforcement of restrictions on how their works may be used....

More [education about copyright], particularly if it is focused on educational uses, should improve understanding and perhaps combat the apathy and caution that sometimes lead to unnecessary self-imposed restrictions and impede adoption of open access practices....

(Professor Peter Suber, a well-known advocate for open access to scholarly research, has prepared an excellent overview of the topic here.)...

The most important [obstacles to open access] include:

• Resistance from the academic publishing industry to changes in its fundamental business model, which depends on enforcement of intellectual property rights (this industry effectively includes nonprofit scholarly societies that rely on their journals for significant revenue, university presses, and journals such as law reviews that are associated with universities, as well as large commercial publishers);
• Concern by scholars that publishing in an open-access journal or similar venue might lack the professional prestige associated with publishing in established traditional journals;
• Apathy and inertia by scholars and educational institutions who do not perceive the benefits of open access as justifying the effort, expense, and upheaval of shifting to more open distribution models;
• Uneven adoption between different academic disciplines, with greater use of open access among scientists and less in humanities, social sciences, and professional fields.

There is already a vibrant community of organizations and activists promoting open access in the face of these impediments. Educators can contribute to this cause in many ways, by promoting open access within their institutions and by using it in their own work. Those publishing in traditional journals can negotiate to retain certain copyright powers, including at least the right to self-archive. The Scholar’s Copyright Project at Science Commons recently released three versions of model Author’s Addenda that scholars in all fields can append to the form copyright assignment contracts used by journal publishers.

Open access is spreading, and will continue to grow. It will never become a universal mode for distributing content, particularly content of a more commercial nature (which educators often wish to use in their teaching or writing). Nevertheless, continued efforts to increase open distribution will remain an important means of enabling educational uses of content. When content is available, for instance, in an open-access journal or under a Creative Commons license, the other obstacles discussed in this white paper simply dissolve. Because the impact of such minimally restricted content is so profound, any increase in its amount will greatly improve the landscape for educational uses of content.

• Dominique Babini, Preparing authors, publishers and librarians to work together building open access digital libraries
• Concepción Díaz Mayans and Luis Bermello Crespo, The Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information (PERI) in Cuba
• W. Patricia Escobar Salguero, PERI in Bolivia: the need to further regional collaboration and networking
• Fu Xiaofeng, China Scientific Data Sharing Program (China-SDSP)
• Subbiah Arunachalam, dLIST - A central repository for Library Information Science (LIS)
• Daisy Ouya, Open access survey of Africa-published journals

The scientific community may soon have a clearer picture of what is going on with the H5N1 avian flu virus in Indonesia, the country which most concerns many experts following the worrisome virus. After hoarding for months the genetic blueprints of the viruses isolated from both poultry and people, Indonesian officials have done an about-face and are sharing a large number of both avian and human viral isolates....

Last week the country’s health minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, announced that Indonesia wanted the genetic sequences of all the viruses isolated from human cases in Indonesia to be put into open access databases where any scientist could study them....

The Geelong lab has been working to sequence the avian viruses and should have some initial results any day now, [Peter] Roeder said. [Roeder is an animal health officer with the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization.] That information will be placed in the public domain, he added. "As soon as the sequence data become available to the government of Indonesia we have an agreement with them that they’ll make it available to the international community."

Sequence data for viruses isolated from about 40 human cases has in recent days been placed in public access databases. When the World Health Organization learned Indonesia was willing to share the data, it asked the two laboratories that had sequenced the viruses for Indonesia to put the information into the public domain. Up until then the data had been stored in a password-protected database accessible only to scientists working for the WHO or for laboratories that do this type of work for the organization. The two labs quickly complied with the WHO request....

Dr. Ilaria Capua, an Italian veterinary virologist who has spearheaded a campaign to put sequence data for all H5N1 viruses in the public domain, said Indonesia’s move may be part of a trend to greater openness. "There is a growing consensus on this data sharing," Capua, who runs an avian influenza reference laboratory for the International Organization for Animal Health, said from Rome. "I would applaud Indonesia and then invite all the other health ministers (of affected countries) to follow that example. And then the veterinary isolates will come."...

Abstract: Current Institutional Repository packages do a poor job of maintaining the article’s metadata in a consistent fashion. Documents and other entities are unreliably identified and there exists no mechanism for correlating related data between multiple repositories. A consistent reference service (CRS) mediates and maps between different identifiers, from multiple sources. It overcomes the shortcomings of packages such as EPrints and allows the construction of useful applications and services, such as automatic CV generation or citation impact profiling. This project has developed a highly efficient and scalable CRS, capable of tracking many thousand identifiers. It utilises semantic web technologies to remain open and responsive, providing intuitive and flexible services for searching and retrieving information. A sophisticated plug-in for the EPrints software has been developed, which utilises the CRS to improve the inherent consistency of the metadata; reinforce the use of local naming schemes and significantly enhance the repository’s user interface. A CRS deployment is already in active use by researchers of the ReSIST Project.

The government of Manitoba says it was the first in Canada to make all its publicly funded geospatial data freely available, without any licensing terms, to government, businesses and citizens. This is the policy that Technology Guardian's Free our Data campaign calls on the UK government to adopt.

Officials say that the Manitoba Land Initiative, adopted in 2000, is based on sound business sense. "Frankly, it just did not make good economic sense to try and sell data that the taxpayers already paid for, and it was costing us much more to try to sell data and manage distribution then we were making in revenue," says Harvey Pokrant, director of the information technology services branch in the provincial capital Winnipeg....

This is a vivid contrast to the UK government approach, which encourages state bodies holding data to treat it as intellectual property and to charge for its use, even by other parts of government....

In theory, freeing data along the Manitoba model should make life easier for officials creating policies for environmental protection, managing natural resources and encouraging investment in the province. It should also encourage the private sector to create value-added products based on public data. Pokrant says there is evidence that this is happening....

Abstract: The myADS-arXiv service provides the scientific community with a one stop shop for staying up-to-date with a researcher’s field of interest. The service provides a powerful and unique filter on the enormous amount of bibliographic information added to the ADS on a daily basis. It also provides a complete view with the most relevant papers available in the subscriber’s field of interest. With this service, the subscriber will get to know the lastest developments, popular trends and the most important papers. This makes the service not only unique from a technical point of view, but also from a content point of view. On this poster we will argue why myADS-arXiv is a tailor-made, open access, virtual journal and we will illustrate its unique character.

While U.S. copyright law has always been more liberal than the European Union towards the right of publishers to copy facts for other uses the advent of the Web has raised a flurry of U.S. lawsuits in recent years to claim more intellectual property rights to factual data. But USA Today notes that a recent decision in a closely watched case has tipped the scales in favor of facts-seekers. The ruling against Major League Baseball Players Association by a content licensee that was denied a license renewal for baseball players' names and statistics notes clearly:

"The undisputed facts establish that the names and playing records of (MLB) players as used in CBC’s fantasy games are not copyrightable and, therefore, federal copyright law does not pre-empt the players’ claimed right of publicity...the First Amendment takes precedence over a [right to publicity]."

This will be a boon for data miners that have been fighting a myriad of conflicting laws, regulations and Web site terms and conditions - and a shot across the bow to EU publishers that continue to fight off claims to legacy database products.

The EU Database Directive of 1996 provides "sui generis" protection to facts that have some significant investment in them, but a relatively recent Working Paper being circulated is pushing to drop these requirements and has drawn support from institutional content purchasers. Though this may sound like an attack on publishers' profits, comments from the American Library Association point to a section in the working paper that underscores the negative effects of data protectionism: "Alarmingly, in the years since the adoption of the Directive, the European share of the global database market has decreased relative to that of the United States, and the ratio of European to U.S. database production has decreased from 1:2 to 1:3." In other words, if the directive is necessary to protect the viability of premium database producers, what is the evidence that it's working?...

In a recent preprint, Houghton & Sheehan (2006), using estimates from economic modeling, have confirmed the substantial potential enhancement of the return on resource investment in research if the resulting articles are made Open Access:...

Excerpts:
"Whether applied across the board or to sector specific research findings (e.g. open access to publicly funded research) it seems that there may be substantial potential benefits to be gained from more open access. For example [GERD = Gross Expenditure on Research and Development]...

- With Germany's GERD at USD 58.7 billion and assuming social returns to R&D of 50%, a 5% increase in access and efficiency would have been worth USD 3 billion;

- With Japan's GERD at USD 112.7 billion and assuming social returns to R&D of 50%, a 5% increase in access and efficiency would have been worth USD 5.8 billion;

- With the United Kingdom's GERD at USD 33.7 billion and assuming social returns to R&D of 50%, a 5% increase in access and efficiency would have been worth USD 1.7 billion; and

- With the United State's GERD at USD 312.5 billion and assuming social returns to R&D of 50%, a 5% increase in access and efficiency would have been worth USD 16 billion.

"While it is impossible to calculate the quantum of benefits with certainty, these simple estimates of the potential impacts of enhanced access on returns to R&D suggest that a move towards more open access may have substantial positive impacts...

"Given substantial R&D expenditures and the scale of the potential impacts identified in this preliminary work, these issues represent fertile ground for further policy relevant inquiry."

These estimates agree substantially with prior estimates that have been made (e.g., for the UK, Canada and Australia, see below).

Research Funding Councils and Universities worldwide are at last beginning to realise that it is high time (indeed well overdue) to maximise the returns on their research investment by mandating Open Access self-archiving....

that all refereed publications in conferences, journals and books, be deposited in the School/University repository. This applies to faculty, and to PhD candidates and other students, without exception.

Thanks to ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies).

• Paul N. Courant, Scholarship and Academic Libraries (and their kin) in the World of Google
• Diane I. Hillmann, Getting the Word Out: Making Digital Project Metadata Available to Aggregators
• Sarah L. Shreeves, Jenn Riley, and Liz Milewicz, Moving towards shareable metadata

Update. FM just added another article to this issue: Sandra Braman, Tactical Memory: The Politics of Openness in the Construction of Memory.

Abstract: The environment in which research is being conducted and disseminated is undergoing profound change, with new technologies offering new opportunities, changing research practices demanding new capabilities, and increased focus on research performance. A key question facing us today is, are there new opportunities and new models for scholarly communication that could enhance the dissemination of research findings and, thereby, increase the returns to investment in R&D?

Identifying access and efficiency limitations under the subscription-based publishing model that has dominated scientific publishing, this paper explores the potential impacts of enhanced access to research outputs. We develop a modified growth model, introducing ‘access’ and ‘efficiency’ into calculating the returns to R&D. Indicative impact ranges are presented for gross expenditure on R&D (GERD) and government expenditure on R&D (GovERD) for all OECD countries. We conclude that there may be substantial benefits to be gained from increased access to research findings, and our preliminary estimates suggest that this may be fertile ground for further policy relevant inquiry.

From the body of the paper itself:

There are two main conclusions to this paper. One is that, while there are many limitations to the approach outlined, these simple estimates provide some sense of the possible scale of the potential impacts of enhanced access on returns to R&D. The second is that the returns to R&D approach, with accessibility and efficiency parameters, offers the foundation for one method for measuring these impacts in a more rigorous manner.

Scholarly Exchange has launched a new open access journal, Advances in Disease Surveillance, on its free and fully supported e-publishing platform. The journal is devoted to publishing public health, epidemiologic, biostatistical, and bioinformatics work relevant to detecting emerging diseases and disease patterns around the world. ADS is the official journal of The International Society for Disease Surveillance.

"Starting up a journal was as easy as making a phone call.  All you need is a domain name, Scholarly Exchange, and time," remarked co-editor Ken Kleinman, ScD. "Since Open Journal Systems was running and ready to use on the Scholarly Exchange server from the very beginning, we were able to start the journal in a matter of days. The amazing thing is that OJS is so easy to use, especially in this ready-to-run installation."

"We don't have to pay a publisher (or let one gouge our readers) or even hire a programmer or install software. The content is free and authors retain copyright to their own works."

Scholarly Exchange provides well-supported open-source OJS software that manages as much or as little as of the publication process as needed-from simply providing a professional-looking presentation for journal content to managing the review, copyediting, and typesetting processes.

The Society chose to start the journal without on-screen display advertising, paying instead the minimal cost-recovery support fee. "Luckily, we found Scholarly Exchange, which hosts the space and runs the software for a fraction of the cost of doing that ourselves," added Dr. Kleinman.

Provosts from 21 universities have signed a letter supporting the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (S. 2695). Their action follows an open letter to the academic community issued by 25 other university provosts who support the bill (C&EN, Aug. 7, page 38)....The 21 universities that have signed the letter, addressed to bill cosponsor Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), include Rice University; the University of Colorado, Boulder; the University of Hawaii, Manoa; and Washington State University. They all are part of an organization called the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA), a consortium of 31 research libraries in 16 states in the greater Midwest and western U.S.

“We share your concern that far too often the results of research funded by the U.S. government are not broadly available to researchers, scientists, and members of the public,” the letter states. The letter also notes that “public access to publicly funded research facilitates the open discussion needed to accelerate research, share knowledge, improve treatment of diseases, and increase human understanding.”

The University of Texas, Austin, and Texas A&M University have also sent letters to Cornyn supporting the legislation, according to the GWLA letter.

Many scholarly publishers, including the American Chemical Society, which publishes C&EN, argue that the provisions of the bill would damage their ability to continue publishing high-quality, peer-reviewed journals.

The University of California system has joined Google's controversial book-digitization project, and the partnership is expected to convert millions of books from the system's 100 libraries -- even volumes that are protected by copyright -- into fully searchable electronic texts....

The university system is the seventh major participant to join Google's ambitious effort to add digital versions of books to its popular online search engine, and the first full partner to join since two groups of publishers sued to stop the company from scanning any books still covered by copyright.

"We're comfortable that the activity is fully respectful of copyright law," said Daniel Greenstein, executive director of the California Digital Library, a division of the university system....Some library partners in the program, such as Harvard, have sidestepped the controversy by deciding to allow only out-of-copyright books to be scanned by Google. But the University of California has decided to allow copyrighted books to be scanned. The University of Michigan is also allowing copyrighted books to be scanned, but it made that decision before lawsuits had been filed challenging the practice....

Officials would not say how many books would be scanned or how the books will be chosen. But the number of volumes "could go into the millions," said Mr. Greenstein. He said scanning should begin "in the next several weeks."...

The word used by officials at both Google and the university to describe the project's benefits for academe is "discoverability." Allowing scholars to search the full texts of millions of books quickly, officials argue, will make it possible for researchers to discover books that might help their research but that they wouldn't have known about otherwise.  That, in turn, "will allow library users to make connections between information and ideas that were hitherto inaccessible, driving the pace of scholarly innovation and enhancing the use of our great libraries," according to a fact sheet prepared by the university about the project.

Adam M. Smith, group business-product manager for Google's book-search project, said in an interview that the company is in talks with other libraries as well. "We are actively in dialogues with other university and academic libraries that have interesting special collections," he said, adding that some of the libraries are in other countries. "Hopefully, in a short time here, we'll be able to announce some additional libraries located outside of the United States."

Why keep adding institutions when some of the world's largest libraries are already involved? "We have the higher-level objective of creating a product where users can search the full text of all the world's books in a single place," Mr. Smith said.

If scholarly publishing had an endangered-species list, the art monograph would be at the top. At least that's the perception of many art historians as they struggle to publish their work.  "Between dwindling sales and the soaring costs of acquiring illustrations and the permission to publish them, this segment of the publishing industry has become so severely compromised that the art monograph is now seriously endangered and could very well outpace the silvery minnow in its rush to extinction," writes Susan M. Bielstein in a recent call to arms, Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk About Art as Intellectual Property, published this spring by the University of Chicago Press.

As the press’s executive editor for art and architecture, Ms. Bielstein writes from the barricades. She knows that publishing art monographs costs a pretty penny. Art historians need high-quality illustrations to support their arguments, but in most cases, they must shell out for reproducible images, even of works in the public domain. And they, not their publishers, foot those bills. "It’s not unusual for a scholar working on the Renaissance to pay $10,000 or $15,000 to illustrate a book that may sell only 400 or 500 copies," she says in an interview. Contemporary subjects still under copyright, and subject to an artist’s or estate’s whims, can prove to be an even costlier proposition....

Now two leading scholars [Mariët Westermann and Hilary M. Ballon] are poised to issue a major [Mellon-funded] report ["Art History and Its Publications in the Electronic Age"] on the state of art-history publication....[T]he two authors also see a developing resolve among scholars, publishers, and image providers to make art monographs easier and cheaper to illustrate and publish. They take heart, for instance, from a major proposal by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, to make images freely available to scholars....

[T]he most prominent recommendation in the draft report concerns permissions. All parties agree that it is harder than ever to navigate what Ms. Bielstein calls "the ecosystem of rights publishing." What’s fair use? Should a museum be able to charge for a reproducible image of an out-of-copyright object in its collection? Most do. And as digital publication tempts more and more publishers and scholars, how will they protect images that appear in an electronic book or an electronic version of a journal article?

The report’s authors urge those in the field to "organize a campaign to break down barriers to access and distribution of images, in all media and at affordable prices, for scholarly research and publication." (Ms. Bielstein’s book makes a similar exhortation.)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has taken a revolutionary step toward that end with the "scholars’ license," which it hopes to have in place by this fall. "We have responded to what scholars needed and wanted," says Doralynn Pines, associate director for administration. "We are proposing, in certain areas, certainly for scholarly purposes, ... that we permit people to use the images with no fee." Under the old way of doing business, a one-time use of one transparency or digital image from the Met set a scholar back $135....

The Met’s scholars’ license may well turn out to be the crowbar that pries open the doors of other image repositories. "There have been a lot of eyebrows raised and a lot of interest" at other institutions," Mr. Shulman reports. "I have no doubt that other leading museums are figuring out if they can do it or if they should."

Ms. Bielstein says that "what the Met is doing is of inestimable value," because the museum continues to be "a pacesetter for other museums on matters of policy and professional practice. Still, this is just the beginning. An enormous amount of effort and activism is needed to ensure that the public domain is open and accessible to everyone."...

Comments.

1. Klaus Graf recommends an article by Susan Bielstein, a conference presentation by Bielstein, and an article by Kenneth Hamma.
2. In my January 2004 article on OA in the Humanities I said, with perhaps too much resignation, that copyright and permission barriers explain "why open access will come last to art history." I'm very heartened to hear what Westermann, Ballon, Bielstein, and the MMA are doing. They should give courage to scholars in other fields where the barriers are objectively lower.

Before reading on, a quick comment....How about some cooperation between the various scanning projects? Nice idea but this is business folks. Does a book need to be scanned twice or more? Couldn’t more books be scanned in a shorter amount of time with some cooperation between these and other scanning projects? Who decides and what criteria will be used as books move from the stacks to the scanner? Who will decide what company scans which books and when?

Now, the news…This is some very interesting manuvering by all involved in the Google v. Microsoft search war. Yahoo is also part of the Open Content Alliance. As we also mentioned last week, it was two months to the day that Microsoft announced that they were very excited to be working with the UC Libraries and UC said they were happy to be working with MS....

Google will be scanning and digitizing millions of books from the University of California’s more than 100 libraries across its 10 campuses and making those titles fully searchable, Adam M. Smith, group product manager on Google Book Search, said Tuesday. Google has been working since last year to scan, digitize and make searchable public domain and copyright-protected books from the university collections of the Library of Congress; Oxford, Harvard and Stanford universities; the University of Michigan; and the New York Public Library.

U.C. officials are already having books digitized as part of the Open Content Alliance (OCA), which is led by the nonprofit Internet Archive, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Jennifer Colvin, strategic communications manager at the California Digital Library, which works on digitization projects for the U.C. school system, said she saw no conflict or problems with the school system working with two seemingly competing scanning projects. "We value our partnership with the OCA," she said. "As a public institution, we believe in making our materials as widely and freely available as possible."...

Google is sharing the copies of the scanned books with its library partners but restricting access to them beyond that. For instance, the books can be searched only in its index and not through any other search engines....

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle said he was pleased that U.C. will continue to work with the OCA, but he criticized the school for "privatizing its library system" by agreeing to Google’s limitations on distributing and sharing copies of digitized books. "They’re effectively giving their library to a single corporation," Kahle said. "Having a public institution decide to go with Google’s restrictions doesn’t help the idea of libraries being open in the future."

PS: For my take on how the Open Content Alliance is more open than the Google Library project, see my November 2005 article in SOAN.

Abstract: My claim in this contribution to this important symposium is that the law and legal scholarship should be freely available on the Internet, and copyright law and licensing should facilitate achievement of this goal. This claim reflects the combined aims of those who support the movement for open access law. This nascent movement is a natural extension of the well-developed movement for free access to primary legal materials and the equally well-developed open access movement, which seeks to make all scholarly journal articles freely available on the Internet. Legal scholars have only general familiarity with the first movement and very little familiarity with the second. In this contribution, I demonstrate the linkages between these movements and briefly outline the argument for open access law.

Global publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc., today announced a new funded access service for authors of journal articles. Through this new program, authors will have the option of paying a fee to ensure that their article is available to non-subscribers upon publication via Wiley InterScience, Wiley's online publishing platform, as well as the author's funding agency's preferred archive if applicable.

"Wiley developed the funded access program as a response to journal authors whose funding might have certain requirements," said Mike Davis, Vice President, Global Life and Medical Sciences. "For those authors who want to publish in a Wiley journal, and whose funding agency requires deposit in an archive, this new program supports these requirements."

As an initial offering, funded access will be available for 45 biomedical journals. Only authors of primary research articles qualify for this new service, and only those authors whose articles have been accepted for publication will be offered the funded access option at the point when the article is accepted, to ensure that the funded access option has no influence on the peer review and acceptance process.

Wiley will deposit the final PDF of the article into the funder's archive; this is the final, authoritative version of the article, after peer review, editing, any final corrections, online and print formatting, and publication. The fee for ensuring articles are made available through the funded access program is $3,000 per article.

[See the press release for the 45 participating journals.]

Comments.

1. Like other hybrid journal programs, Wiley's is a welcome step. It's welcome insofar as it enlarges the body of free online literature. (Wiley doesn't use the term open access.) But like some other hybrid programs, this one has flaws. The author-side fee is high, which will probably lead to a low level of author uptake. (At least nobody should conclude that low uptake indicates low interest in OA.) Wiley will not apparently let participating authors retain copyright, will not lower subscription prices in proportion to author uptake, will not waive the fee in cases of economic hardship, and will not allow deposits in OA repositories (outside Wiley's control) unless required by the author's funder.
2. Wiley will charge authors who want to provide free online access to the published editions of their articles, even when authors are bound by a mandate from their funder. But most funder OA policies apply to the final version of the author's peer-reviewed manuscript, not to the published edition. Wiley doesn't say whether it would charge fees for authors who want to comply with funder mandates in that form. It shouldn't. Publishers have no right to interfere with funder-grantee contracts, especially when the funder contract comes first and the publisher contract comes second.