Open Access News

Abstract: Print book collections are facing significant transformation in response to mass digitization, remote storage, and preservation. These issues should be considered within a system-wide context in which individual print book collections are viewed not as isolated units, but rather as parts of a larger whole. As libraries look beyond the boundaries of their local print book collections to consider system-wide implications, they will need to be equipped with data and analysis about the system-wide print book collection. This paper provides a brief overview of the system-wide print book collection, defined as the combined print book holdings of libraries everywhere, as reflected in the WorldCat bibliographic database. Issues addressed include the size of the collection; holdings patterns; distribution by publication date and language; and the relationship of the system-wide print book collection to overall book production. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of some implications of the analysis, and possible directions for future research.

PS: This article is more relevant to OA than the abstract might suggest. Here are three bits, with my comments in parentheses and italics.

• It's hard to count how many distinct books have ever been published but "the closest approximation" is WorldCat which, with a little refining, identifies 24 million. (Google's initial goal to digitize 15 million books, assuming no duplicates, puts it over the halfway mark.)
• 9.5 million books are only held by one library each. (Incredible. Digitization and OA would be like discovering a lost civilization.)
• Only 2.4 million books are held by more than 50 libraries each and only 301,000 are held by more than 500 libraries each. (Books are long-tail, both in distribution and demand. We need digitization and OA to overcome the limitations of even the largest print collections.)

One Laptop per Child is closer to reality with the Children’s Machine (CM1). One of the key features is that it “creates its own mesh network out of the box....” Each laptop will participate in an ad-hoc network with each laptop operating in a peer-to-peer fashion. This opens up a slew of possibilities for the laptops.

Why not have a TOPAZ server running in every village that could be browsed by every CM1 in the nearby network? The TOPAZ repository can contain Open Access articles published on medicine, neglected tropical diseases, etc....But the TOPAZ repository isn’t constrained to just Open Access [research] – it can contain any type of object from video presentations to textbooks.

Take a TOPAZ server and add every piece of educational material licensed by Creative Commons. Load the repository up with course material from MIT Open Courseware and Connexions Repository, textbooks, lesson plans, music lessons from Berklee Shares, museum resources, architectural solutions, agricultural information, etc. Setup a peer-to-peer TOPAZ network for information to be sent to remote repositories as soon as it is available. Put this in a village surrounded by CM1s and imagine the possibilities.

There’s talk that the CM1 will revolutionize how we educate the world’s children. The reality is that the CM1 laptops will be used by children and shared by their families. If the information is available, then the CM1 will truly revolutionize education.

Comment. This is a beautiful, attainable vision. It's true that access to OA content has to wait for bridges across the digital divide. And not every low-bandwidth bridge is good enough, since a slow or flaky connection for large files or many people can be equivalent to no connection at all. Taking advantage of the CM1's mesh network and P2P is a shortcut to serious, useful access. In principle, any kind of content could have its own node in that network, but we should make sure that OA content is first in line. Communities that can't afford stable broadband can't afford TA content either.

For example, you can see which papers are currently being discussed by organic chemists, or which web pages are being linked to by chemoinformaticians It's sort of like a hot papers meeting with the entire chemistry blogging community. Sort of.

(Thanks to Richard Akerman.)

PS: Congrats to PLoS and congrats to authors for seeing the value here and supporting something new.

Key provisions [of the UC-Google contract] are in Section 4, which restricts the University’s use of the digital copies, and Section 8, which says those prohibitions are forever (”survive expiration or termination of this agreement.”) UC is essentially barred from entering into pooling agreements with other universities, and other provisions ensure that no entity other than Google or UC may develop an alternative search engine or finding aid.

The library community knows, or should know from the Showtime deal, that perpetual restrictions on the use digital copies are not in the public interest.

PS: The same terms exist in the Michigan-Google contract, as I blogged back in June 2005.

• Peter Lange, Provost at Duke University
• Alfred F. MacKay, Provost at Oberlin College
• Robert L. McGrath, Provost & Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Stony Brook University
• Arthur T. Johnson, Provost at University of Maryland - Baltimore County
• Bruce L. Mallory, Provost and Executive Vice President at the University of New Hampshire
• Dana Dunn, Provost at the University of Texas at Arlington

The total is now 54. (There will soon be a running tally on the page.) If you work at a U.S. institution, ask your president or provost to sign on to this call for open access to publicly-funded research. Also point out to them that university administrators who support FRPAA needn't wait for its adoption to foster OA on their own campuses.

LibriVox is the largest of several emerging collectives that offer free or inexpensive audiobooks of works whose copyrights have expired, from Plato to “The Wind in the Willows.” (In the United States, this generally means anything published or registered for copyright before 1923.) The results range from solo readings done by amateurs in makeshift home studios to high-quality recordings read by actors or professional voice talent.

LibriVox celebrated its anniversary on Aug. 10, around the same time it surpassed the 100-book mark. It also offers more than 200 recordings of short stories, plays, speeches, poems and documents like the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence. By comparison the audiobook industry, which typically sells recordings for $15 to $30, released 3,430 titles, taking in $832 million, in 2004, the last year for which figures are available. LibriVox’s founder, Hugh McGuire, 32, a software developer and writer in Montreal, said there were another 100 works in development, all of which would be recorded, edited and uploaded by volunteers. “The principles of the project are to be totally noncommercial, totally ad free, totally volunteer and totally public domain,” he said....

One of LibriVox’s colleagues in the free audiobook realm is Telltale Weekly, which sells recordings for 25 cents to $8, but makes them available at no charge through its Spoken Alexandria Project after five years or 100,000 downloads, whichever comes first. It was founded in 2004 by Alex Wilson, a writer and actor in Chapel Hill, N.C., who performs many of the readings. Another service, LiteralSystems, has 51 works available for free download and emphasizes their professional quality....

All three services rely on Project Gutenberg, the online repository of works in the public domain, for texts....

Like most life scientists, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health spent a great deal of time managing data. As is the case in many labs, data were stored in Excel spreadsheets that were e-mailed to colleagues. As such, much time was spent formatting and preparing data for analysis. And when data was shared, there were also difficulties tracking any changes to the data to ensure everyone was working with the same information.

“I was working on many projects with lots of colleagues; it was hard to synchronize all of the information,” says Michael Barmada, associate professor of human genetics in the Graduate School of Public Health. “I started looking for a data management solution....We were dealing with huge amounts of data, and we were looking for ways to fit all types of data together. We were getting swamped.”

In his quest for a solution, Barmada heard a talk by Josh Knauer, director of advanced development at MAYA Design, about a new type of database called the Information Commons, a peer-to-peer system that allows many people to securely post and share large amounts of disparate data. In today’s vernacular, it’s something like a wiki database where many users can contribute data, designated people can edit or change the data, and in this case, the originator of the data can selectively control who sees what data.... For those wanting to try the Information Commons approach, MAYA Design will offer the basic software for free. If specific tools are desired, MAYA typically partners with an organization where both apply for a research grant or contract to fund the development.

Scott Carlson, U. of California Will Provide Up to 3,000 Books a Day to Google for Scanning, Contract States, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 25, 2006. Excerpt:

A mere two months after the University of California begins its book-digitization project with Google, the university may provide the search company with a whopping 3,000 books a day for scanning. That nugget, and many others, can be found in a confidential contract that allowed California to join Harvard and Stanford Universities, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library, in the search-engine company's elaborate and controversial library-digitization effort.

The contract was released in part as a response to an open-records request from The Chronicle.

According to the document, the university will provide at least 2.5 million volumes to Google for scanning, starting with 600 books a day and ratcheting up over time to 3,000 volumes a day. Materials pulled for scanning will be back on the shelves of their libraries within 15 days.

The contract offers clues to the scale of Google's ambition. "It is simply stunning that they can work with 3,000 books a day," said Prudence S. Adler, associate executive director of the Association of Research Libraries, after reviewing the contract.

Daniel Greenstein, director of the California Digital Library, who helped set up the deal, said Google had committed early on to a core value for the university: public access to the public-domain materials at no cost. "They said, As long as we are alive as a company, or successors are alive using this file, we will make it available for free," he said. "I've never seen this from anybody. That was their opening gambit." ...

Both the university and Google will get digital copies of the scanned works, but there are some restrictions on how the university can use its copies. The university can offer the digital copy, whole or in parts, "as part of services offered to the university library patrons." But the university must prevent users from downloading portions of the digital copies and stop automated scanning of the copies by, for example, other search engines.

Entire works not covered under copyright can be distributed to scholars and students for research purposes, but there are limits on in-copyright material. The university retains a right to distribute no more than 10 percent of the collection to other libraries and educational institutions for noncommercial research....

Officials at Google provided few insights into the contract. The restrictions placed on the digital files, particularly those covered by copyright, were requested by both Google and the University of California, Adam M. Smith, the group business-product manager at Google, said in an e-mail message....

[S]ome publishers have been worried about how libraries might use their digital copies from Google. Sanford Thatcher, director of Pennsylvania State University Press and president-elect of the Association of American University Presses, said that the agreement gave the university too much leeway. "California could set itself up as a facility for providing e-reserves to all land-grant institutions," he said....

Others fretted that the University of California was giving too much to Google. Brewster Kahle, co-founder of the nonprofit Internet Archive, said the contract was another step in the "balkanization" of the digital library system. He said that while each of the institutions that have partnerships with Google will get digitized versions of their own books, they will not be able to share those versions to build a digital library. Only Google will have the most comprehensive collection, he said. "We want a public library system in the digital age, but what we are getting is a private library system controlled by a single corporation," he said....

Mr. Kahle forged a partnership with the University of California in forming the Open Content Alliance, which also includes Yahoo, Microsoft, and institutions such as Columbia University, the Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Toronto. The alliance, which has made open access a core component of its mission, is scanning only out-of-copyright materials.

"Microsoft, Yahoo, the Sloan Foundation, and dozens of libraries are funding a public and open system, but this is made more difficult by UC's agreeing to spend millions of taxpayers' dollars to benefit a single corporation's interest in building a private library," he said. "Needless to say, I am disappointed and hope it does not undermine others' interest in pursuing broad public benefit."

Mr. Greenstein said that the University of California was digitizing at full capacity with the Open Content Alliance, and would continue to do so. But one has to look at the Google deal from the university's point of view, he said. With the Open Content Alliance, "I think last month we did 3,500 books. ... Google is going to do that in a day. So, what do you do?"

"I understand [Google's] ends are commercial," he said. "But it's one of these things where their business model, their interests, and our interests align around public access for the public domain forever and for free."

Poorer countries where bird flu is spreading may patent individual strains of the virus as a way to help them negotiate lower prices for vaccines and treatments.

The plan is being advanced by a new program, announced today, that urges participating countries to place genetic information about their individual bird flu strains into central databases in return for rights that will allow the countries to control who uses the data.

While nations such as Indonesia have been increasingly willing to share such information, government leaders have expressed concern they may not be able to afford the products that result. The new program would help countries charge for information involving their individual strains, or negotiate low prices for drugs and tests developed from the data.

"This is an independent effort to bring scientists together to collaborate, share data and put in place some protections that will also be good for the countries of origin of the flu strains," said Nancy Cox, head of the CDC's influenza branch, in a telephone interview yesterday....

Comment. You don't see this very often: a movement to patent more stuff (esp. naturally occurring substances) integrated with a data-sharing initiative.

There's a reason you don't see it very often, of course. Patent-holders usually want to confine information to themselves and licensees. But this deal does a remarkable job of bypassing that problem, even if you decide in the end that it's closer to a compromise than a win-win. Yes, the patent-holding countries can decide who may and who may not use their patents to develop medicines. But in exchange they are providing true OA to the data without limits or favoritism. Under the deal, they won't use their patents to impede research or restrict access to information, only to negotiate a royalty or discount on commercial products developed from them.

From an anonymous post at Community Mobilization:

On one of the e-mail distribution list I read a question from a Oracle employee questioning the wisdom and difference of knowledge harvesting and/or recycling.  He commented that harvested knowledge (like corn) is often sent into guarded silos and rot away....

Jay Bhatt is collecting the links to OA journals in engineering not already listed in the DOAJ.  Roddy MacLeod has already submitted one:

INGENIERÍAS
Magazine of the Faculty of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering of the Independent University again Leon

Based on an on-line inquiry and semi-directive interviews, the aim of this work is to find out how scholars in French universities in the field of humanities feel about the Open Archives phenomenon. The study tries to establish what keeps them from publishing their scientific production that way. It also indicates some directions librarians could follow to introduce and allow a better use of these Open Access repositories.

Ben Vershbow, Librarians, hold google accountable, if:book, August 24, 2006. Excerpt:

I'm quite disappointed by this op-ed on Google's library initiative in Tuesday's Washington Post. It comes from Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, which represents 570 independent colleges and universities in the US (and a few abroad). Generally, these are mid-tier schools — not the elite powerhouses Google has partnered with in its digitization efforts — and so, being neither a publisher, nor a direct representative of one of the cooperating libraries, I expected Ekman might take a more measured approach to this issue, which usually elicits either ecstatic support or vociferous opposition. Alas, no....

If you're not Michigan or Google, though, the benefits are less clear. Sure, it's great that books now come up in web searches, and there's plenty of good browsing to be done (and the public domain texts, available in full, are a real asset). But we're in trouble if this is the research tool that is to replace, by force of market and by force of users' habits, online library catalogues. That's because no sane librarian would outsource their profession to an unaccountable private entity that refuses to disclose the workings of its system — in other words, how does Google's book algorithm work, how are the search results ranked?  And yet so many librarians are behind this plan. Am I to conclude that they've all gone insane?...

We may be resigned to the steady takeover of college bookstores around the country by Barnes and Noble, but how do we feel about a Barnes and Noble-like entity taking over our library systems?...

I am wholeheartedly in favor of digital libraries, just the right kind of digital libraries.

What good is Google's project if it does little more than enhance the world's elite libraries and give Google the competitive edge in the search wars (not to mention positioning them in future ebook and print-on-demand markets)?...

What's frustrating is that the partner libraries themselves are in the best position to make demands. After all, they have the books that Google wants, so they could easily set more stringent guidelines for how these resources are to be redeployed....

Google, a private company, is in the process of annexing a major province of public knowledge, and we are allowing it to do so unchallenged. To call the publishers' legal challenge a real challenge, is to misidentify what really is at stake. Years from now, when Google, or something like it, exerts unimaginable influence over every aspect of our informated lives, we might look back on these skirmishes as the fatal turning point. So that's why I turn to the librarians. Raise a ruckus.

Comment. I'm on the record preferring the OCA model to the Google model.  So I certainly agree that participating libraries could exert pressure on Google to improve its model, for example by providing full open access to public-domain books with no barriers to printing, downloading, or redistribution.  Nevertheless, Ben's conclusion here is marred by a number of false assumptions:  (1) that librarians are "outsourcing their profession" to Google, (2) that Google is "taking over our library systems", (3) that Google's library project does "little more than enhance the world's elite libraries and give Google the competitive edge in the search wars", and (4) that Google "is in the process of annexing a major province of public knowledge".

Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Digital University/Library Presses, Part 6: UTSePress, DigitalKoans, August 24, 2006. Another installment in Charles' useful series.  Excerpt:

Established in January 2004, the University of Technology, Sydney’s UTSePress publishes e-journals and conference proceedings. The university’s DSpace institutional repository is also under the UTSePress....

The UTSePress uses Open Journal Systems to publish five e-journals....

The UTSePress has published one conference proceeding: International Conference on Wireless Broadband and Ultra Wideband Communications. It appears that Open Conference Systems is being used to support this function.

These documents provide further information about the UTSePress: (1) "UTSePress Breaks Boundaries in Online Publishing" (press release) and (2) "UTSePress: UTS Advancing Scholarly Publication."

Most of the examples I tried used WorldCat but not all do. In the Google blog post announcing the new feature, Google says "we have worked with more than 15 library union catalogs that have information about libraries from more than 30 countries, as well as with our colleagues working on Google Scholar (which includes a similar feature just for scholarly books)."

Update. Run a number of Google book searches and you'll notice that some do and some don't provide a link to a library catalog search. Over at ResourceShelf, Gary Price has a handful of examples. His verdict so far: "Hard to find a pattern."

For this feature, Ask defaults to the one most relevant feed on a topic. But if you want to see more than one feed for that topic, then simply click on the "Blogs & Feeds" tab at the top of the page, where three sub-tabs let you choose among "Posts", "Feeds", and "News". Click "Feeds" to see Ask's list of OA-related feeds.

Comment. This is an elegant way to make use of something useful. All RSS feeds are OA, and there are valuable ones on a rapidly growing number of topics. While blogs are impossible to overlook these days, RSS feeds still rank high on the list of best-kept secrets about the free and easy exchange of information. There are some very good blog- and RSS-specific search engines, but users who don't know much about RSS feeds are not likely to seek them out. Ask is making them visible to new users and thereby increasing the visibility of the information they contain.

The present Communication outlines the context of the Commission Recommendation on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation. The Recommendation aims at bringing out the full economic and cultural potential of Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage through the Internet. It is part of the Commission’s strategy for the digitisation, online accessibility and digital preservation of Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage as set out in the Commission Communication ‘i2010: digital libraries’ of 30 September 2005....

The digital libraries initiative aims at enabling all Europeans to access Europe's collective memory and use it for education, work, leisure and creativity...

Only part of the material held by libraries, archives and museums is in the public domain in the sense that it is not or no longer covered by intellectual property rights. Europe’s cultural heritage should be digitised, made available and preserved, while fully respecting Community and international rules on copyright and related rights. Particularly relevant in this context is Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society, which stipulates in its Article 5(2) that Member States may provide for exceptions or limitations in respect of specific acts of reproduction by publicly accessible libraries or by archives, where they are not for direct or indirect economic or commercial gain...

THE COMMISSION OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES ...HEREBY RECOMMENDS THAT MEMBER STATES:

...promote a European digital library, in the form of a multilingual common access point to Europe’s distributed...digital cultural material, by:

1. encouraging cultural institutions, as well as publishers and other rightholders to make their digitised material searchable through the European digital library,
2. ensuring that cultural institutions, and where relevant private companies, apply common digitisation standards in order to achieve interoperability of the digitised material at European level and to facilitate cross-language searchability;

...improve conditions for digitisation of, and online accessibility to, cultural material by:...identifying barriers in their legislation to the online accessibility and subsequent use of cultural material that is in the public domain and taking steps to remove them;

1. creating mechanisms to facilitate the use of orphan works, following consultation of interested parties,
2. establishing or promoting mechanisms, on a voluntary basis, to facilitate the use of works that are out of print or out of distribution, following consultation
   of interested parties,
3. promoting the availability of lists of known orphan works and works in the public domain,
4. identifying barriers in their legislation to the online accessibility and subsequent use of cultural material that is in the public domain and taking steps to remove them;

PS: By "online accessiblity" the recommendation seems to mean "online accessibility without charge", though it never mentions open access and never discusses the presence or absence of access charges.

Researchers studying avian influenza say they have agreed to share data that were previously being kept behind closed doors — a move they hope will speed insights into the virus that threatens to spark a human pandemic.

Some countries and organizations have come under fire for hoarding genetic information about the virus. The data have been kept under wraps partly because of concerns that other groups might use them and publish scientific findings without giving due credit to researchers involved.

Now many leading avian influenza scientists have tentatively agreed to share data as part of an effort called the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID). A letter outlining the agreement is published online today in Nature, signed by 70 scientists and health officials, including six Nobel laureates....

[I]n essence, the participants have agreed to place genetic sequences into secure sections (which have not yet been set up) of existing online databases, as soon as possible after producing and analysing them. The group proposes using the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration [INSDC], a network of three major public databases, for the collection.

The data will, at first, only be accessible to scientists who have signed up to the agreement, but will become open to the public after 6 months at the most. Scientists who sign up make a promise to share their sequences. They must also agree to collaborate with, and appropriately credit, all other researchers in publications and intellectual-property agreements....

Veterinary virologist Ilaria Capua at the Vialle dell'Universita in Padova, Italy, started something of a backlash against this system in March this year. Instead of placing her flu sequence data in the WHO-linked, password-protected database, she chose to enter it into the publicly available GenBank, and called on colleagues to do the same. "When you're facing a pandemic, you have to get your priorities straight," she says....

Bogner's and Capua's efforts have resulted in this GISAID agreement, which they put together with Nancy Cox, head of the influenza division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, and David Lipman, director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information in Bethesda, Maryland....

Capua says that she is "really happy with the result". Perhaps, she says, the same framework could be used to distribute data for other emerging infectious diseases in which information must be shared quickly. "If a new SARS knocks on our door, we have a system in place," she says.

More news coverage of GISAID.

Update. Also see the August 24 public letter from Peter Bogner, Ilaria Capua, Nancy J. Cox, David J. Lipman and others, A global initiative on sharing avian flu data, calling on scientists worldwide to share avian flu data and participate in the GISAID initiative. Excerpt:

Several countries and international agencies have recently taken steps to improve sharing of influenza data, following the initiative of leading veterinary virologists in the field of avian influenza. The current level of collection and sharing of data is inadequate, however, given the magnitude of the threat. We propose to expand and complement existing efforts with the creation of a global consortium — the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID) — that would foster international sharing of avian influenza isolates and data....

GISAID's policies for rapid and complete data release are modelled on those established for community resource projects. These policies have successfully been employed previously, for example by the International HapMap Project (http://www.hapmap.org) — a project to map, and make freely available, data on DNA sequence variations in the human genome.

This letter is also posted at the GISAID site along with the full list of signatories. Also see the press release accompanying the letter.

Just glanced at the OpenDOAR live server and I'm pleased to report that we've just passed the 600 manually quality assured repositories listed on the site.  This is great, as only a couple of weeks ago we passed the 500 mark.  Of course what the site doesn't show at this point are the number of sites we've actually discounted from the service.  A lot of the repository targets listed on other repo directory sites are dead ends, empty, non-functional or simply not Open Access repositories.  To date we've evaulated and discounted nearly 180 sites, and the number is rising each day.  In time we'll list these as the service, hopefully, develops.

PS: BTW, the SHERPA Blog is new, only launched on Monday. This is a welcome extension of SHERPA's online presence and service to OA.

S.A. Mathieson, It's a struggle to get data out of councils, The Guardian, August 24, 2006. Excerpt:

Much of the Free Our Data debate, held last month in London with the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, focused on Ordnance Survey. Its chief executive, Vanessa Lawrence, defended its model of raising revenues from customers rather than the taxpayer - although with 47% of OS's revenue coming from the public sector, taxpayers often are the customers....

However, one attendee questioned the willingness of organisations that enjoy direct tax-raising powers, with no financial dependence on selling data, to free our data - local authorities.

Benjamin Bennetts, managing director of the not-for-profit company Land Management Information Service (LaMIS), told the debate that his business has enormous difficulties extracting data from local authorities, adding that he sees "absolutely no consistency [and] no means for anyone to challenge a decision not to release data"....

Established in January 2004, Cornell University’s Internet-First University Press is described as follows:

These materials are being published as part of a new approach to scholarly publishing. The manuscripts and videos are freely available from this Internet-First University Press repository within DSpace at Cornell University.

These online materials are available on an open access basis, without fees or restrictions on personal use. All mass reproduction, even for educational or not-for-profit use, requires permission and license.

There are Internet-First University Press DSpace collections for books and articles, multimedia and videos, and undergraduate scholarly publications. There is a print-on-demand option for books and articles.  There are DSpace sub-communities for journals and symposia, workshops, and conferences....

As more funders insist on open access, it seems not improbable that grant seekers will consider open publication venues and self-archiving a way to win brownie points on future grant applications. I expect this to have only a modest positive effect at best… but anything positive is good news.

Funders could accelerate the effect, of course, by explicitly listing open access to previous research among the factors they weight when deciding on grants.

Comment. This is definitely another way that funders could help. But they tend to take the opposite course and give the most credit to publication in venerable high-prestige journals. This policy discriminates against OA journals (but only because they are new) and disregards OA archiving. It doesn't negate the good effects of an OA mandate on funded research, but it shows a commitment to OA only one front when funders could help on at least two.

From the August 22 issue of BioMed Central Update:

Connotea, the free online reference manager for clinicians and scientists, now supports all journals published by BioMed Central. When you save a link to a BioMed Central article with Connotea, Connotea will automatically identify the article and pull in the bibliographic information for it.

PS: This is a testament to public support for FRPAA. (Not surprising in light of the Harris Poll of May 2006.) To send a copy of the letter yourself, visit the FRPAA letter page but also read the short description of how Progressive Secretary works.

The start of the LHC [Large Hadron Collider] experiments at CERN in 2007 will be a major milestone for particle physics and for science at large. It will be a unique opportunity to reform the publishing paradigm of the particle physics community to ensure the widest, and most efficient, dissemination of results from this unique facility.

Recognizing this fact, CERN set up in December 2005 a tripartite “Task force on Open Access publishing in particle physics”, representing authors, publishers, and funding agencies and mandated to “study and develop sustainable business models for Open Access for existing and new journals and publishers in particle physics, focused mainly on a sponsoring model”. The task force envisions free and unrestricted Web-based access to peer-reviewed journals as the ultimate goal of Open Access (OA) publishing in particle physics; at the same time, it considers that OA publishing must be available to individual authors without financial barriers, and remain affordable for the community at large. To make the OA transition attractive and transparent to authors, the study focused on the conversion of established, high-profile journals, while leaving room for new, emerging journals in the field; to overcome the practical and psychological obstacle of traditional publication charges (author fees), the study focused on business models sponsored primarily by major laboratories and by funding agencies.

To survey the present particle physics journals landscape, and to sound the interest of relevant publishers to participate in a large-scale transition to OA, a questionnaire was sent in February 2006 to about 20 publishers for a total of about 40 different journals dealing with particle physics and/or closely related fields....For each journal, the publisher was asked whether he would consider a transition to OA under the condition that a sustainable business model could be identified....Amongst the journals ready for an OA transition are:

• Physical Review D and Physical Review Special Topics – Accelerators and Beams (PRST–AB, a sponsored OA journal already), published by the American Physical Society (APS);
• Journal of High Energy Physics (JHEP), Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP), and Journal of Instrumentation (JINST), published by SISSA (Trieste) and presently marketed by Institute of Physics Publishing (IOP);
• The European Physical Journal C, published by Springer, EDP Sciences, and Società Italiana di Fisica.

In addition, some smaller and/or more highly specialized journals declared themselves ready for an OA transition, or are published under an OA business model already. These journals combined cover up to 50% of the original research literature in particle physics (excluding review articles, conference proceedings, and instrumentation papers)....

Based on the cost per article quoted by the publishers, and on the average number of papers published in the period 2003-2005, sponsoring all journals ready for OA at the time of the enquiry would require an annual budget of 5–6 Million €, significantly less than the present global expenditure for particle physics journal subscriptions.

To exploit this savings potential and to promote a rapid, large-scale transition of the particle physics community to OA publishing, the task force proposes a “Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics” (SCOAP3). Potential funding partners of this consortium are: [1] funding agencies supporting particle physics; [2] major particle physics laboratories; [3] major author communities, such as large experimental collaborations; [4] funding agencies supporting OA publishing in general; [5] libraries....

Tentatively, the task force envisages a transition period of five years to establish a ‘fair share’ scenario between funding agencies and other partners, to allow time for funding agencies to redirect budgets from journal subscriptions to OA sponsoring, and to allow time for more publishers to convert journals to OA. At the end of this period, the vast majority of particle physics literature should be available under an OA scheme. To allow for OA publication of LHC results from the outset, SCOAP3 should become operational not later than 2007.

For more background on the CERN OA task force, see the press release announcing its launch on December 14, 2005.

Comments.

1. First, apologies for not catching this sooner.
2. This is new and potentially big. It's the first time that anyone has tried to convert all the TA journals in a field to OA by offering to pay reasonable article processing fees. (None of the journals would charge authors.)
3. All or most of these articles would be OA through arXiv. Why isn't that enough? Here are a few answers. (1) arXiv deals more with unrefereed preprints than with refereed postprints. For many researchers (like Grigory Perelman) that's enough. But most researchers acknowledge that access to the published edition, if it can be arranged, is even better. (2) Converting the journals to OA will bring much-needed budget relief to lab and university libraries, which will be part of the consortium CERN is putting together. (3) While physics journals have coexisted with arXiv for 15 years, freely admit that they haven't lost subscriptions to it, and even host mirrors of it, they may worry that it's only a matter of time before arXiv and OA archiving will eat into their subscriptions.
4. Note the key discovery that makes the CERN plan feasible: "[S]ponsoring all journals ready for OA at the time of the enquiry would require an annual budget of 5–6 Million €, significantly less than the present global expenditure for particle physics journal subscriptions." This is the primary reason to believe that the long-term sustainability of OA journals is not in doubt (even if the transition is bumpy): the actual costs of peer review and publication are lower than the prices we currently pay for access through subscriptions.
5. Clearly this fact didn't escape the notice of the surveyed journals. If they convert to OA under this plan, then for most of them revenue will decrease even if the revenue that remains suffices to pay the bills. Why would they agree? My guess: they recognize that subscriptions are not sustainable in a world in which high-volume OA archiving is a fact of life and library budgets grow more slowly than published literature. The CERN plan offers survival and protection, which offset the greater revenue and greater risks of continuing as a subscription journal.
6. If CERN pulls this off, could the plan be duplicated in any other field? It may appear unlikely: CERN dominates particle physics in a way that no other institution dominates any field. Moreover, physicists and physics journals are unusually accustomed to OA through archiving. But remember that CERN plans to build a consortium of funding institutions, not to do it alone. And the rates of OA archiving are growing in other fields, especially as funders start to mandate it for the research they fund. It may work in particle physics and it may transfer to other fields.

PANDORA, Australia’s Web Archive at the National Library of Australia (NLA), has been archiving Web-based publications for 10 years, in conjunction with participants at the Australian State Libraries and other cultural organisations....

Many studies and articles examining archival practice and policy have emanated from PANDORA. None, however, has attempted to gauge the effect of archiving on the archived—that is the publishers and their publications....

The results of the study show that PANDORA archiving has thus far not had a detrimental effect on publications, and is in fact mostly benign and in some cases beneficial. It is to be hoped that the knowledge that Internet archiving does not necessitate any conflict between archivists and publishers will assist in guiding future negotiations.

Here are some results read off the charts in the article: 37% of surveyed publishers said PANDORA archiving changed the public perception of their publication for the better, and less than 1% said for the worse. (Most said it caused no change.) 96% said that overall it has been positive for their publication. 92% said it increased the number of hits to their online publication. 29% said it increased their publication's citation rate. (Most said it caused no change.) 11% said it increased revenue from their web site, while only 1% said it decreased revenue.

• Edgar Crook, For the Record: Assessing the Impact of Archiving on the Archived. (For some excerpts from this article, see my next post, above.)
• Dharma Akmon and Elisabeth Kaplan, Developing Electronic Records Capacity in the Small Collecting Repository: the Documenting Internet2 Project
• Peter Hirtle, FAQ: Orphan Works and Section 108 Updates

Stevan Harnad, US Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Report on Institutional Repositories, Open Access Archivangelism, August 22, 2006.

Summary:  An ARL survey of US Institutional Repositories (IRs) begins: "Since 2002, when DSpace and other institutional repository (IR) software began to be available..." But EPrints, the first and most widely used IR software, was created in 2000...

"[Of the 87/123] responding ARL libraries 37 (43%) have an IR." But according to ROAR, there are at least 200 OAI-compliant archives in the US, 115 of them institutional or departmental IRs, 18 of them e-thesis IRs.

The ARL survey reports that "By a large majority, the most frequently used local IR software was DSpace, with... bepress [second]," but for the US ROAR currently lists 55 DSpace, 52 EPrints, and 44 Bepress archives. The corresponding worldwide figures are: 210 EPrints, 167 DSpace and 53 Bepress.

ARL states that "The average IR start-up cost has been around $182,500 and its average ongoing operation budget is about $113,500." For some less daunting cost estimates, see here and here.

ARL finds that "IR and library staff use a variety of strategies to recruit content: 83% made presentations to faculty and others, 78% identified and encouraged likely depositors, 78% had library subject specialists act as advocates, 64% offered to deposit materials for authors, and 50% offered to digitize materials and deposit them." No US university yet has a self-archiving mandate. US Provosts ought to try that: They might find it trumps all other ways of recruiting content (as Arthur Sale's analyses have been showing)!

I’m in Washington today meeting with Sheila Walcoff, Counselor to the Secretary of Health & Human Services (HHS). The discussion will concentrate on Senate Bill 2695, the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (FRPAA)....

We all search Pubmed to access the latest information on DMD [Duchenne muscular dystrophy] research and care, and often investigate other areas of research searching for ways to help our children. Using keywords, our search will result in a list of published articles and, in most cases, an abstract of the article will be available. While the abstract is helpful, it does not provide the whole story. You have to pay to access the article, unless you are associated with a University and even then, access is limited to specific journals. On average, the individual cost is $20 to $30 for each article. Keeping up with the latest information is very expensive!

As you might imagine, there are two sides to the story – namely the publishing industry is concerned about economic impact and believes access after 12 months is adequate. On the other side, stakeholders (us) want and need the information as soon as possible.

PPMD [Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy] has been working on this issue with the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA). We support the proposed legislation that would mandate public access to federally funded research by NIH investigators within six months of publication. We believe access would have tremendous benefits for all: for the researchers who may not have ready access to all journals, for health care professionals who need to treat patients based on the latest research results, and for our families who need to make informed decisions for their children.

Because US taxpayers underwrite this research, we believe we have a right to expect its dissemination and use will be maximized. It is important to have access and equally important for us to look across the field – to ‘look under every rock’ – to stimulate new ideas and to learn from other fields.

Our goal is: free online access as soon as possible and no later than 6 months after the article has been published in a peer review journal.

Q: How does BioMed Central ensure long-term sustainability of its open access journals while staying profitable? Can you briefly discuss your business model?

A: BioMed Central's business model is to cover the the cost of publishing through an 'Article Processing Charge' or APC, payable for every published article. Funders such as the Wellcome trust have expressed strong support for such a model, saying that publication and dissemination is best seen as the final part of the process of doing research. The cost of paying to cover publication costs is tiny (1-2% by most estimates) compared to the costs of carrying out the research in the first place. But the benefits of universal open access are enormous.

There is no inherent reason why open access publications supported by Article Processing Charges should have any difficulty being sustainable and profitable. The same amount of money currently spent by the scientific community supporting traditional subscription-only journals could easily cover the cost of open access publication of that same research. The costs in both cases are likely to be similar. BioMed Central is already very close to profitability as a commercial open access publisher. The fact that new open access journals are not immediately profitable should be no surprise to those in the publishing industry. Even traditional scientific journals do not generally make a profit in their first 5 years - the fact is that starting new journals is hard work and requires a lot of investment. But open access publishers such as BioMed Central are now seeing that hard work pay off. It is notable that there are already examples of commercial publishers who are operating profitably on the open access model - e.g. the Hindawi Publishing Corporation.

Q: Based on impact factors and other citation-based metrics, how are open access journals placed, when compared to the traditional (subscription based) journals?

A: BioMed Central's journals are doing extremely well in terms of citation-based metrics, especially since they are relatively new journals....[Nine] BioMed Central journals are all in the Top 10 by impact factor, in their ISI subject category....Genome Biology's first impact factor (9.71) is especially impressive, and demonstrates clearly the compatibility of open access publishing with the highest editorial standards. For more details on BioMed Central journal impact factors, see [here]....

Q: As far as open access initiatives are concerned, can you please elaborate on new products or services that you plan to launch in the near term?

A: Today marks the launch of Chemistry Central - a new portal site for open access journals in chemistry. Chemistry Central is from the same team responsible for BioMed Central, and builds on BioMed Central's proven open access journal publishing technology. We have also added special features to meet the needs of chemists (for example, figures can be submitted in the popular ChemDraw and ISISDraw file formats). In the last several years research communication in biomedicine and physics has evolved rapidly, with emphasis on more open communication of research results. Chemistry has up to now lagged behind, with chemistry-related journals and databases overwhelmingly remaining subscription-based. In fact, though, the benefits of open access publication are just as applicable to fields like Chemistry. It's time for change - hence the launch of Chemistry Central....

Abstract: The behavior of researchers when self-archiving in an institutional repository has not been previously analyzed. This paper uses available information for three repositories analyzing when researchers (as authors) deposit their research articles. The three repositories have variants of a mandatory deposit policy.

It is shown that it takes several years for a mandatory policy to be institutionalized and routinized, but that once it has been the deposit of articles takes place in a remarkably short time after publication, or in some cases even before. Authors overwhelmingly deposit well before six months after publication date. The OA mantra of 'deposit now, set open access when feasible' is shown to be not only reasonable, but fitting what researchers actually do.

From the body of the paper:

Conclusions:

1. Repository managers should invest in promotion and follow-up for 2-3 years after a mandatory policy is promulgated, after which the behavior becomes routinized.
2. No especial activities need to be undertaken to convince researchers to deposit research articles soon after publication – this seems to happen naturally under mandatory policies.
3. Six month embargos by publishers are likely to be unpopular with researchers, since in the absence of constraints they deposit earlier than this.
4. The recommendation widely adopted by the open access movement and summarized as ‘deposit immediately, and make open access as soon as legally possible’ is shown to be excellent advice for any university or funding agency considering adopting a mandatory policy.

Comment. This is an important set of results. Sale's research shows that OA mandates work without coercion and supports the case for university-level mandates, the case for the dual deposit/release strategy, and the case against self-archiving embargoes.

Update. The published edition is now online, in the October 2006 issue of First Monday.

Broad dissemination of research results is fundamental to the advancement of knowledge. For America’s taxpayers to obtain an optimal return on their investment in science, publicly funded research must be shared as broadly as possible. Yet too often, research results are not available to researchers, scientists, or the members of the public. Today, the Internet and digital technologies give us a powerful means of addressing this problem by removing access barriers and enabling new, expanded, and accelerated uses of research findings.

We believe the US Government can and must act to ensure that all potential users have free and timely access on the Internet to peer-reviewed federal research findings. This will not only benefit the higher education community, but will ultimately magnify the public benefits of research and education by promoting progress, enhancing economic growth, and improving the public welfare.

We support the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 and urge its passage by the US Congress.

The web site includes a form allowing presidents and provosts to add their signatures and a list of those who have already endorsed FRPAA by signing the July 28 CIC letter or the July 31 GWLA letter. As new university leaders sign on, the list will grow.

Comment. This is extremely helpful. The provosts and presidents who have already endorsed FRPAA show Congress that the bill has critical support from universities and researchers. There are undoubtedly other provosts and presidents who would have signed one of the first two letters but didn't know about them and others who will now be inspired to sign. This is an opening for all faculty (esp. in US institutions) to campaign locally and persuade their campus leaders to show their public support for open access to publicly-funded research.

10. Publish in OA journals
9. Submit grants to funding agencies that support OA publishing.
8. Move to a country that has signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access.
7. Only review for OA journals. For mixed-access journals, make them guaranty that article they want you to review will be OA, otherwise, don't review it.
6. Recruit scientists that publish in OA journals.
5. On grant-review panels, score applicants that have an OA publishing record better then an equivalent applicant that publishes in closed journals.
4. Subscribe to or read Peter Suber's OA blog
3. In your grants and papers, reference OA publications
2. When reviewing papers, give the authors a hard time for citing closed access publications when there are better ones that are OA....
1. If you are looking for a position in Academia, and you find yourself in front of a departmental chair- person that tells you they will not grant you tenure if you publish in OA journals, don't take that job.

Comment. We'd all make these lists differently, but I hope they'd all have some family resemblance. (See my list of what researchers should know about OA and my list of what resarchers can do to promote OA.) I like this one, especially #4, but can't resist making two suggestions.

I'd revise Number 8: don't move, just work to get your university and the major public funding agencies in your country to sign the Berlin Declaration --and then to implement it.

Number 10 is good advice but we can't yet assume that all scholars will be able to find high-quality OA journals in their research niche. Until then, scholars should understand that publishing in a conventional journal, and self-archiving the postprint, is a quick and easy way to provide bona fide OA to their research. I'd make providing OA to one's own work --through OA journals or OA repositories -- Number 1.