Open Access News

This is the first substantive post in this blog....

I have been interested in Openness for many years, and believe that knowledge and science can now only flourish in an Open environment. I believe that close commercial interests (publishers, aggegrators, software developers and industrial customers such as the pharmaceutical industry) stifle innovation in information-driven science. IMO that is why biosciences, with an Open ethic are about 10 years ahead of the chemical sciences in their use of information....

[M]y stance will sometimes be strong, as in the current post where I take issue with Peter Gregory’s comments on Open Access publishing in chemistry. There are very few Open Access journals in chemistry and PeterG was commenting on the launch of Chemistry Central from the BMC stable (reviewed in Peter Suber’s...OA blog...).

My campaign is for Openness in:

• Access. I am least vocal on this, leaving it to established champions such as PeterS, SPARC, Stevan Harnad, Steve Heller and many others. However I support the formation of Open Access in chemistry and would endeavour to publish there is appropriate journals exist. (Before Chemistry Central there were no Open journals that supported chemoinformatics).
• Source. Without openness of code it is difficult for academic groups to distribute and enhance. Some groups manage some innovation in some areas (e.g. quantum mechanics codes) but in informatics the lack of Openness is a serious problem.
• Data. I believe that scientific data belongs to the commons, not to publishers or secondary aggregators which is why I supported the continuation of PubChem last year in its struggle against Chemical Abstracts.
• Standards. Science is bedevilled by lack of interoperability, often promoted by software companies and instrument manufacturers to create lock-in and closed markets. That is why Henry Rzepa and I have developed Chemical Markup Language as a core technology for interoperability and why we are members of the Blue Obelisk movement....

I have issues with primary publishers (such as the ACS) and secondary aggregators (such as the CCDC) who add copyright statements to primary scientific data. I regard this as counter to copyright practice and law as I believe that author’s moral rights and the freedom of factual information cannot be overridden by publishers. This is not an oversight by the publisher - as far as we know Henry Rzepa and I are the only authors to have published supplemental (factual) data in an ACS journal without surrendering copyright - and we understand this was not a right, but a one-off privilege.

I have also been publicly criticised on two occasions as being immoral in publishing Open Source programs in chemistry. The argument of the critics is that Open-ness undercuts responsible developers and destroys their market leading to loss of support for science and poor quality code. This may or may not be true, but I do not see it as immoral....

We have much anecdotal evidence that most scientific data (80+%) supporting primary publications are lost for ever. Many publishers do not support supplemental (factual) data and those that do, do not support its capture in semantic form (PDFs destroy information very effectively). True, we are exploring with several publishers how to tackle this, but they can currently make no strong ethical claims for current practice....

There is nothing intrinsically laudable in publishing scientific material that looks visually the same as it did 120 years ago....

PS: Peter Murray-Rust is a leader in the open data movement and moderator of the SPARC Open Data discussion list.  I'm glad to welcome him to the blogosphere.

On Thursday I noted that the wiki of the Information Commons Interest Group of the Canadian Library Association had created a page on Open Access Advocates in Canada.  The focus on Canada made sense to me, but I suggested that if the wiki added pages on other countries, then the set would form of a very useful networking tool and OA speakers bureau.  I'm happy to report that my wish is coming true.

See the new page on Open Access Advocates Worldwide.

For now, it seems that all the pages except the one on Canada are stubs and only registered users can edit them.  But monitor the site and make sure that you're listed. 

When your conference or workshop needs a speaker, or when you're traveling to another country, browse the list.  When your country is considering a national OA policy, make sure the local activists know about it and coordinate to shore up support.

The purpose of this article is to discuss open access to scholarly indexing/abstracting information....Open access versions of the traditional ready reference tools cannot always substitute for the commercial, subscription-based indexing/abstracting databases, but they can complement them....

• Stevan Harnad, Open access: the evidence and the verdict
• Mark Walport and Robert Kiley, Open access, UK PubMed Central and the Wellcome Trust (full-text OA)
• Richard Smith, The highly profitable but unethical business of publishing medical research

The lion's share of science and scholarship is founded on peer review...But some scientists and scholars are peerless: Their work is at such a high level that only they, or a very few like them, are even equipped to test and attest to its soundness.

Such is the case with the work of Grigori Perelman.  It is a mistake to try to generalize this in any way: it doesn't scale. It does not follow from the fact that a rare genius like Perelman can transmit his huge and profound contribution by simply posting it publicly on the Web -- without refereeing or publication -- that anything at all has changed about the way the overwhelming majority of scientific and scholarly research continues to need to be quality-controlled: via classical peer review.

Nor has this anything at all to do with Open Access....OA continues to mean free online access to peer-reviewed research (after -- and sometimes before -- peer review), not to research free of peer review!

PS: See my comments on Perelman, arXiv, and OA here and here.

Abstract:   The landscape of scholarly communications is transforming into an Open Access environment. Policies are being set by national funding agencies and universities, among others. This session will present an overview of major policy issues, the academic (teaching faculty) perspective on open access publishing and self-archiving and what it all means in the real-world university (library) environment.

In the weeks preceding the iCommons Summit, it was clear to Heather Ford and John Wilbanks that the event could play a role in connecting open science and free culture. The two respective Executive Directors of iCommons and Science Commons agreed that the meeting in Rio should serve as a means for initiating discussion, in the hopes of discovering a way to bridge the divide. The result - the Rio Framework for Open Science....

Serving as a link farm, Open Science is the first substantive outcome of the Summit, delivered less than two months after it was conceptualized. Developed and tailored by Ford and Wilbanks, the first draft of the Framework was released on August 19. It is maintained on the iCommons wiki.

Right now, Open Science is a skeleton - a home for a minimal set of tools for universities and institutions, with the potential and hope that it expands exponentially as more users utilize the resources. By having the infrastructure live on a wiki, community members are able to actively edit, comment, annotate and add to the existing base....

The potential for Open Science is only as limited as the imaginations of the open science community, especially the users. Ford hopes that through iCommons’ work with individual countries, users can see this link farm as a modal point, helping the public garner support and move forward with their own open access initiatives at a local level.

Wilbanks sees Open Science as a means for localizing arguments in the future. The wiki-based site could expand to provide users with PowerPoint presentations, evidentiary writings, and marketing documents targeted to specific regions and audiences. But it is only through the site’s use and community development that the Framework can move in such a direction.

A US-based initiative plans to make new textbooks available for free on the Internet for university students in developing nations.

If the Global Text Project's first book — due in January 2007 — is a success, the project aims to produce 999 more titles covering biology, physics, mathematics and chemistry.

Funding will be sought from the world's 1,000 largest and richest companies, each of which will be asked to sponsor an individual title....Leading professors worldwide will be invited to contribute chapters that will then be compiled into up-to-date texts using the software behind Wikipedia, the popular free-access online encyclopaedia.

An international advisory board drawn from universities in Colombia, Egypt, Malaysia, South Africa, Uganda and the United Kingdom has been set up to oversee the books' creation.

With Wikipedia, entries can be updated and modified by anyone who registers with the site. The Global Text Project will use a modified version of the software behind the website, so that only its editors will be able to accept any suggested changes to the texts.

The books will be written in English and then translated by volunteers into Arabic, Chinese and Spanish.

Students will be able to read the books online or print them as pdf files, and will be encouraged to contribute to future editions.

"These books should never be out of date because they will be subject to continuous improvement," says the project's website. "Each class using one of the books will be asked to add value to the book. They should leave a better book for the next class."...

Speakers from Botswana, Canada, Egypt, Scotland, South Africa and the US were joined by over forty participants from nine southern African countries to discuss practical ways in which open access projects and policies can be implemented in the region.

Co-sponsored by the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA) and eIFL.net, the programme focused on open access journals, institutional repositories, advocacy and the role of funding agencies in open access publishing. Publishers hailed from diverse backgrounds. A fast growing commercial publisher, Hindawi Publishing, shared their experience in successfully converting twenty-five academic titles from a subscription-based to an open access model. Bioline International, a not-for-profit electronic publishing service, advised on improving visibility and impact of quality open access journals from developing countries.

Research funding agencies, which play a pivotal role in promoting open access policies around the world, were also represented. Dr. Andrew Kaniki, Executive Director, Knowledge Management and Strategy of the South Africa National Research Foundation, stated that recipients of NRF grants may use part of their funding to cover publishing costs in peer-reviewed open access journals. "An applicant can request for funds for conference attendance; funding for publication of research findings - the publication can be in an open access journal" confirmed Dr. Kaniki.

Professor Wieland Gevers discussed the new open access recommendations of the Academy of Science of South Africa.

Participants benefited from a roundtable discussion which covered critical issues for the successful implementation of an institutional repository, a freely accessible archive for collecting and preserving the intellectual output of an institution. Professor Julien Hofman presented Lawspace, a digital repository of research at the University of Cape Town. Librarians play a key role in advising their institution on such issues as access and preservation of material in the repository and most importantly advocating for the deposit of material by academics in the repositories as outlined by Susan Ashworth of the University of Glasgow in her presentation. The universities of Zimbabwe, Namibia and Pretoria count amongst those with operational repositories while a number of others plan to launch repositories in the coming months....

Participants agreed to develop national lists documenting the copyright policies of publishers in each country similar to the SHERPA/Romeo list. "This is a great step forward to identify publishers' copyright conditions and will strengthen the hand of academics in southern Africa in providing access to their research. eIFL.net welcomes this", said Melissa Hagemann, who is advising the eIFL.net Open Access Program.

Particle physicists have come up with a novel way to promote free, immediate access to journal articles. Led by CERN, the giant lab near Geneva, Switzerland, they want to raise at least $6 million a year to begin buying open access to all published papers in their field....

Some private biomedical funding groups, such as the U.K.'s Wellcome Trust, now pay the author fees required for their grantees to publish in open-access journals. CERN's announcement goes further, say observers. "Across a discipline is new," says Peter Suber, a philosophy professor at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, who closely follows open-access developments for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition....

To accomplish this goal, the [CERN] task force proposed that a consortium of labs and funding agencies pay publication costs for particle physics papers. It would cost $6 million or more a year to include all the journals willing to offer an open-access option, the group estimated. That would cover up to half of the 6000 or so original theory and experimental papers published each year.

The task force hopes to start with $3 million to implement the policy at a few major journals. The practice would begin with the first LHC [Large Hadron Collider] technical papers next year, says CERN's Rüdiger Voss.

Last week, the American Physical Society announced that a $975 to $1300 payment to its two main journals would make an article available to all readers (Science, 25 August, p. 1031). Elsevier, the other major particle physics publisher, recently announced an open-access option for $3000, an amount not included in the task force's cost estimate. CERN's plan to sponsor journals would not be permanent: "We see it primarily as a transition scenario," Voss says, after which funders would pay author fees for individual grantees.

Nearly all particle physicists already share preprints of their articles on free servers such as arXiv.org at Cornell University Library. Voss, however, argues that the final, vetted article is still what academia values most and that physicists are losing access as budget-strapped libraries cut back on journal subscriptions. Paul Ginsparg, who runs arXiv.org, adds that journals serve as stable, long-term archives and offer extras such as searching for related papers in other journals.

PS: See my blog comments on the CERN task force report.

OhioLINK has made a very welcome recommendation to self-archive.

What is missing from the otherwise useful information that OhioLINK lists, curiously, is a link to the BOAI Self-Archiving FAQ, which has been in place since 2002! And whereas it is always good to negotiate the retention of rights if an author can and wishes, it is erroneous to imply that that is a necessary precondition for self-archiving.

Ninety-four percent of journals already endorse immediate (non-embargoed) OA self-archiving; for articles published in the remaining 6% there is the readily available option of depositing their full-texts and metadata immediately upon acceptance for publication, but making only their metadata immediately accessible webwide, while provisionally setting access to their full-text as "Closed Access" during any publisher embargo period: Meanwhile almost-immediate, almost-OA for each individual would-be user can still be provided by the author on one-on-one basis, via the semi-automatic EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button now being added to the principle Institutional Repository (IR) softwares.

Hence it is now possible to self-archive 100% of the final drafts of peer-reviewed journal articles whether or not the author can or wishes to successfully negotiate the retention of rights....

There's been some chatter among my colleagues in the past week about a letter opposing FRPAA that is being circulated among the senior leadership of some of the research institutions in search of signatories.   This is clearly in response to the supporting letters signed by provosts from around the country urging passage of the act.   (The DC Principles coalition is behind the letter...).

The most recent draft that I've seen has seven signatures (including the dean of my own school of medicine), but I'm sure it will have more by the time it is sent to Senator Cornyn and made public.  Some of my colleagues have expressed surprise that senior academic officers would take the side of the publishers in this debate. 

I'm not the least bit surprised.   There's no neat divide between academia on one side and publishing on the other, particularly when you're dealing with the society publishers.  At my institution, for example, at least sixteen individuals in the medical school alone (including the dean and several department chairs) hold senior editorial positions for major scientific periodicals....

The terrain [of scholarly publishing] is being transformed and that's not going to stop.  Some journals are, indeed, going to fold, and it is disingenuous of open access partisans to argue that FRPAA and related efforts don't represent a serious threat.  The signatories of the DC Principles letter are right to be worried.  But they can't turn back the tide.  Whether FRPAA or something like it passes or not, traditional subscription-based publishing is on the wane, and societies whose economy is based on it are going to have to make radical changes in how they operate in order to survive....

I disagree with the signatories of the DC Principles letter in their opposition to FRPAA.  I have urged my Provost to sign the letter supporting it (not likely, but I gave it my best shot).  But in their concern over the well-being of the societies that they lead and participate in, I am firmly on their side and in their camp.  Yes, we need open access; but we need strong, vibrant and effective scholarly societies, playing a critical and key role in managing the scholarly communication enterprise.   

Comments.

1. I appreciate T. Scott's effort to get his provost to endorse FRPAA.  To date, 60 provosts have done so.
2. There may be OA advocates who simply assert that journals have nothing to fear from FRPAA, but I believe the currents and cross-currents are more complex.  My own position has always been (1) that high-volume OA archiving --the intended consequence of FRPAA-- might well threaten subscription journals; (2) that if we want to look at existing evidence, rather than fears or predictions, then we have to look at physics, the only field where high-volume OA archiving currently exists; (3) that in physics both the APS and the IOP admit that arXiv has caused no subscription cancellations, and in fact both publishers host arXiv mirrors; and finally (4) that if mandated OA to publicly-funded research does undermine subscriptions, then the public interest in research should take priority over the private interest in publisher revenue.
3. I fully agree with T. Scott that "traditional subscription-based publishing is on the wane, and societies whose economy is based on it are going to have to make radical changes in how they operate in order to survive...."  From this point of view, the most significant difference among publishers today is not that some are for-profit and some non-profit, or some large and some small, but that that some are focused on adaptation and some are focused on retrenchment.

Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Digital University/Library Presses, Part 8: Monash University ePress, DigitalKoans, August 31, 2006. Excerpt:

Established in 2003, the Monash University ePress publishes both digital scholarly books and journals, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. Some works are also available in print format via print-on-demand technology....

The press, which charges for its publications, has a two-year embargo period after which materials are freely accessible....There is a time-limited pay per article/chapter option. Use of content by individuals is governed by a license agreement as is use by institutions.

Monash University ePress manager Michele Sabto outlines the economic model of the press as follows:

The ePress has also now moved towards a fee-for-service model that guarantees a minimum income from each title, underwritten by the author/journal editor. Basically it is a publication fee offset by sales income....

The press currently publishes four journals....and four books....

• Jeffrey Herbst, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, Miami University
• Thomas G. Burish, Provost, University of Notre Dame

• Shelli Shaw, Hindawi Publishing: Catering to Open Access, .
• Robin Peek, The Oxford University Press on OA

Except for David Ward, president of the American Council on Education, every member of the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education found enough to endorse in the draft the panel produced last month to support it over all. All of them, certainly, also found some aspects of the report objectionable, yet swallowed those objections and agreed, at a public meeting August 10, to sign the report....That agreement was nearly imperiled last weekend, though. Gerri Elliott, corporate vice president at Microsoft’s Worldwide Public Sector division, sent an e-mail message to fellow commissioners Friday evening saying that she “vigorously” objected to a paragraph in which the panel embraced and encouraged the development of open source software and open content projects in higher education. The paragraph read like this:

The commission encourages the creation of incentives to promote the development of open-source and open-content projects at universities and colleges across the United States, enabling the open sharing of educational materials from a variety of institutions, disciplines, and educational perspectives. Such a portal could stimulate innovation, and serve as the leading resource for teaching and learning. New initiatives such as OpenCourseWare, the Open Learning Initiative, the Sakai Project, and the Google Book project hold out the potential of providing universal access both to general knowledge and to higher education....

The infighting is fascinating (read the full article), but in the end the commission agreed on this compromise language:

The commission encourages encourages the creation of incentives to promote the development of information-technology-based collaborative tools and capabilities at universities and colleges across the United States, enabling access, interaction, and sharing of educational materials from a variety of institutions, disciplines, and educational perspectives. Both commercial development and new collaborative paradigms such as open source, open content, and open learning will be important in building the next generation learning environments for the knowledge economy.

Comment. When I blogged the commission's report back in July, the paragraph on open source and open content was the only section I found worth excerpting. 

Abstract (provisional): The internet is expanding the realm of scientific publishing to include free and open public debate of published papers. Journals are beginning to support web posting of comments on their published articles and independent organizations are providing centralized web sites for posting comments about any published article. The trend promises to give one and all access to read and contribute to cutting edge scientific criticism and debate.

From the body of the paper:

If you are reading this you are benefiting from the Open Access movement in scientific publishing. Open Access reduces the great divide between the haves and havenots of the scientific world, allowing anyone, anywhere on the planet with internet access to read with full text and graphics the latest scientific reports, unfettered by prohibitive subscription fees or lack of affiliation with a major institution to pay for them. That the process directly delivers to the public a product paid for by their taxes can only be considered a just and additional benefit. But access to cutting edge knowledge is not the only divide between the haves and the have-nots. Even Open Access leaves a vast inequality in scientific discourse. If you can’t afford to attend the latest scientific meetings (say, for instance, you work for the US government) or are not a member of a prestigious institution, you can be frozen out of cutting edge scientific discussions. You can neither query the major players nor contribute to the debates, unless your prestige or the media value of the subject matter is such to garner you a published letter to the editor. You can’t even witness the debates until they are published in review articles, by which time they are mostly over....

Just as Open Access distributes primary knowledge, Open Discourse distributes debate....

Dominique Babini and Jorge Fraga (eds.), Edición electrónica, bibliotecas virtuales y portales para las ciencias sociales en América Latina y El Caribe, Buenos Aires: CLACSO, August 2006.  A book of essays on electronic publishing, digital libraries, and social science portals in Latin America and the Caribbean.  The book exists in both a priced, printed edition and an OA edition. Most of the articles have implications for OA, but these are directly about OA:

• Peter Suber, Una introducción al acceso abierto, a Spanish translation of my Open Access Overview
• Dominique Babini, Acceso abierto a la producción de ciencias sociales de América Latina y el Caribe: bibliotecas virtuales, redes de bibliotecas virtuales y portales
• Abel L. Packer and four co-authors, El modelo SciELO de publicación científica de calidad en acceso abierto

Comment. Great idea. Given the Canadian interests of the host, I understand why there aren't (yet?) pages on other countries. But if there were, this would be start of a very useful networking tool and OA speakers bureau.

BTW, I'd add the following Canadians: Michael Geist, Russell McOrmond, G.W. Brian Owen, and Sharon Reeves.

As it works with Google to scan nearly all the books on its shelves, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has decided not to make full-text versions of copyrighted books available online, even to on-campus users.

The university has upgraded its online card catalog to include full-text electronic copies of books that have been scanned as part of its controversial partnership with Google.

Users will be able to read the complete text of out-of-copyright works online. For those volumes, the university is making high-resolution images available for each page....If a scanned book is still under copyright, though, users will not be able to read the digital copy. Instead, the card-catalog system will return a list of the pages that contain the search term and how many times the term appears on those pages. The reader will be directed to the library's stacks for the printed book.

Some observers had wondered whether the university might make full-text versions of copyrighted books available at on-campus computers, but Michigan officials ruled out that option early on. "We don't believe that fair use allows us to make that kind of access available to our user community," said John P. Wilkin, an associate university librarian....

Steven J. Bell, director of the library at Philadelphia University, said Michigan's new digital-book service could spur more scholars around the world to use interlibrary loans to request single pages or groups of pages from books held by Michigan. After all, if scholars can consult Michigan's online catalog to find out which pages contain the terms they are looking for, they might request just those pages rather than the entire book....

Open access to the literature allows scientists in the developing world to read original research papers for free, which contributes to scientific advancement. Nonetheless, in these same countries, funds are not sufficient to pay the publishing charges made by some publications, including 'open access' journals. For this reason, many journals waive fees for scientists from developing countries who submit to them.

Although these waivers benefit the scientists who submit, part of the solution should also come from developing countries themselves. The support from funders must include provision for submission fees, so that government agencies that support research projects take responsibility for their investment. I echo the Salvador Declaration on Open Access for Developing Countries and I urge governments of these countries to consider the cost of publication as part of the cost of the research.

Comment. I agree and have said so whenever it comes up, even if that means criticizing otherwise excellent policies like FRPAA.  However, I'd also point out that the majority of OA journals charge no author-side fees at all.

The open access movement made an impact, but not as much as I expected. It will undoubtedly continue to be corrosive, as the rivals parry and thrust over the big pot of gold to be made from publicly funded research. Government committees have become involved and hearings have been held, in the US, UK and Europe ­- all very exciting stuff!

Comment. Just to clarify: There's a huge pot of money spent on scholarly journals every year (I've seen estimates in the $12 billion range).  But those working for OA to publicly-funded research and, if successful, those hosting it, will not make any money from it.  There's money to be made from some kinds of OA journals (BMC and Hindawi are for-profit publishers and Hindawi is already profitable), but all national policies aimed at OA for publicly-funded research focus on OA repositories, not OA journals.

The first Secretary-General of the new European Research Council (ERC) will be Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, the current President of Germany's Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).  For more details, see Gretchen Vogel's story in yesterday's issue of Science.

Comments.

1. This is very good news for those of us hoping that the ERC will mandate OA for ERC-funded research.  (The ERC will fund €1 billion worth of research every year.)  It's good news because under Winnacker's leadership, the DFG adopted a strong OA policy for DFG-funded research. 
2. Another ground for hope: one member of the ERC's Scientific Council is Wendy Hall, a professor at the University of Southampton Department of Electronics and Computer Science, which mandates OA to the research output of the department.
3. The ERC has no web site yet.  But I'll blog the URL as soon as I learn it.

One of the consequences of a national policy that taxpayers should have free access to the data their taxes pay for - as is the case in the US - is that if you tell American researchers something is free or open source, their expectations are raised.

So when a team of researchers led by Mark Psiaki, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University, discovered that the signals coming from a European test satellite that they thought to be accessible were instead protected by secret codes, they set about cracking them and succeeded. But their success, which allows them and others to test prototype receivers for Europe's new global satellite navigation system, raises two questions: can the body in charge of it, the Galileo Joint Undertaking, succeed as a public-private partnership? And how open will its service be? ...

Part of Galileo's goal is to improve global accuracy and availability. To enable that, an EU-US agreement says Galileo will use the same set of radio frequencies as [the US-built] GPS and in return must offer an open service "without direct fees for end use".

But having had to crack the test satellite's codes, Psiaki asks whether Galileo intends to charge for the part of the service that's supposed to be open? ...

Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Digital University/Library Presses, Part 7: HighWire Press, DigitalKoans, August 30, 2006.  Excerpt:

Established in 1995, Stanford University Libraries’ HighWire Press publishes over 967 journals in digital form, with more planned for future release. Working with scientific societies and other partners, the press focuses on producing high-impact STM (science, technology, and medicine) digital journals. It makes a significant portion of the articles it publishes freely available:

As of 8/30/06, we are assisting in the online publication of 1,403,007 free full-text articles and 3,648,630 total articles. There are 22 sites with free trial periods, and 34 completely free sites. 223 sites have free back issues, and 851 sites have pay per view!

The press provides sophisticated digital publishing services....More information about these digital publishing services is available, such as the Web page about journal hosting services and the Bench>Press Web page....

Headed by Michael A. Keller, the press has a large staff, which appears to include a significant number of dog owners.

Given its long history and its success, a number of articles have been written about the HighWire Press.

Nature has an Editorial in this week’s edition — ‘Boosting access to disease data’ — on the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID) — see previous post. It also has a short news story — ‘Plan to pool bird-flu data takes off.’  [PS: Both are accessible only to subscribers.]

Some excerpts from the Editorial:

“A new agreement by stakeholders to improve the sharing of flu data should eventually stimulate research on many infectious diseases. Now to make it work.” [...]

and the bottom line:

“GISAID’s broad endorsement of the goal of prompt sharing from multiple stakeholders, often with conflicting interests, is in itself progress and a tribute to the diplomacy of those involved. Tangible evidence of change has also come from the Indonesian government and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which both announced in August that they would share all flu genomic data; they should be congratulated on having the courage to change policy.

Agreement on the principles of GISAID is only a beginning, however. Prompt progress in establishing the ground rules for sharing will be essential to build confidence and momentum. Governments need to support laboratory capacities in those countries that need it most, where surveillance is weak. And unless donor countries also provide more funds and technical support to fight the disease in animals, which is the reservoir of human cases, we are likely to have more data to share on avian flu than we would like.”

• Brad Born, Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs, Bethel College
• Rita Cheng, Provost and Vice Chancellor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
• Stephen D. Gottfredson, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, Virginia Commonwealth University

PS: If full OA is out of reach, then why not free to all researchers in developing countries?

There is a growing national and international movement for authors of peer-reviewed journal articles to self-archive their work in repositories that are openly accessible. Open access archiving has major advantages over sole reliance on the traditional publishing model. It substantially increases all researchers’ access to the research literature. There is strong evidence that articles that are made openly accessible have substantially more research impact than articles that are available only through subscriptions and licenses....OhioLINK is building the Digital Resource Commons (DRC) for [the] purpose [of self-archiving by Ohio scholars]....

If traditional publication policies are followed, Ohio authors will not retain the rights to disseminate their own works in electronic form....If this continues, the academic community foregoes the ability to maximize access and to control the economic costs of an expanding knowledge base which under the current system is increasingly unaffordable....

1. Faculty are encouraged to publish in journals that have responsible assignment of rights policies. In instances where faculty have a choice among journals, access to scholarship will improve if they choose publishers that, as a matter of practice, have favorable polices towards author self-archiving in open access vehicles. In addition, new journals are emerging that publish according to full open access models.

2. Whether as allowed by a publisher’s standard author agreement or by amendment, authors/copyright holders must retain the NON-EXCUSIVE right to make their work openly accessible and to use it for their own non-commercial educational and research purposes. This can best be accomplished by retaining copyright and only granting the publisher first publication rights. It can also be accomplished within current common practice where copyright transfers to the publisher by the proper retention of self-archiving and use rights....

By altering an author’s agreement with a publisher certain key rights can be secured that will be advantageous for the author, the institution, and potential readers without harming the publisher....[A]n Author’s Addendum to the publisher’s agreement can be used to ensure the author has retained a bundle of key rights. A template to do so from which a final addendum can be created is attached....

We recommend that faculty members, if the copyright owner, and institutions, if the copyright holder, retain author self-archiving and access rights in one form or another. The template illustrates the basic rights that should be retained. Several optional provisions are suggested which the author or institution can elect to incorporate. As noted below, a great number of publishers are receptive to author self-archiving rights and so a basic addendum may suffice in most cases....

3. In parallel with individual author action, OhioLINK will seek to add a clause to its licenses with publishers in its Electronic Journal Center. This clause will seek to automatically provide the recommended self archiving and access rights to all personnel of Ohio higher education institutions.

4. With the retention of rights, we strongly recommend that works in both Published and Unpublished works categories be deposited in the OhioLINK DRC or a campus repository that links to it.

Comments.

1. There are four important things going on here. First, OhioLINK is encouraging Ohio scholars to retain the rights they need for OA archiving. Second, it's providing its own Author Addendum to help authors retain those rights. Third, it's adding its weight as the licensing agent for member institutions to persuade publishers to agree to these terms. (It knows that most publishers already agree and is focusing on the remainder.) And finally, it's encouraging Ohio scholars to self-archive their preprints and postprints in their institutional repository or in OhioLINK's own repository.
2. OhioLINK is a consortium of 85 academic libraries in Ohio representing more than 600,000 faculty, students and staff. It doesn't set campus policies on self-archiving, but it can facilitate them (by creating its own repository, by writing an Author Addendum, by pressuring publishers to drop permission barriers) and it can encourage member institutions to set policy. Here it is doing all that it can. It deserves all our thanks for that.
3. The OhioLINK Author Addendum (pp. 7-8 of the new recommendations) joins those already crafted by SPARC, MIT, and Science Commons.

The NIH is creating a database for human genetic data that will combine strong privacy protection for research subjects, open access for researchers, and incentives for researchers to deposit their data even before publishing on it.  For more details, see yesterday's call for public comments or today's article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Sam Kean (accessible only to subscribers).  Excerpt from the Chronicle article:

The genetic information would be available on two levels. "Basic descriptive information" about each genome-wide association study would be available to the public, but the health and genetic data and some pre-analysis would be accessible only to researchers cleared by the NIH Data Access Committee. The NIH would also set up mechanisms to ensure that scientists who deposit results into the database before publication receive credit for their findings. Once results have been posted, any scientist could view them; but for a certain "grace period," only those who submitted the data could publish papers about it.

UC will evaluate the cost/benefits of licensing digital resources of out of copyright information against opportunities to digitize equivalent UC resources or participate in other non-profit third-party digitizing efforts of that information....

The libraries make principled investments in publishing business models that produce high quality scholarly content and have the potential for transforming scholarly communication. A publishing or distribution effort can be considered transformative when it is developed principally to reduce access barriers (e.g. open access models)....

UC consideration of scholarly publishing endeavors is informed by endorsements and analyses by key organizations supporting transformative models such as the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC)....

The libraries support the right of UC authors whose scholarly work is included in materials licensed by UC to retain copyright to their work, transferring only first-publication and/or commercial use rights to the publisher while retaining all other non-commercial use and distribution rights....

UC affirms the importance of fair use in fulfilling its libraries' missions and requires that licenses not abrogate the rights allowed it or its members under copyright law, including, but not limited to, fair use and inter-library loan....

In the first year of launch, almost 400 papers have been published under the optional open access model across 36 of the 49 participating titles.

The majority of uptake of optional open access has, as predicted, been in the life sciences, with approximately 10% of authors selecting the open access option across 16 participating journals in this area, compared with approximately 5% in medicine and public health, and 3% in the humanities and social sciences. Three life sciences titles in the areas of molecular and computational biology have seen over 20% uptake. The highest of these was for Bioinformatics, which has published over 50 open access papers in 2006. 2007 online subscription prices have been adjusted for these journals to reflect this uptake....

Twenty-one titles adopted [the Oxford Open hybrid] model in July 2005 [when the program launched], and further titles have joined in 2006, giving 49 journals participating at present.

Claire Bird, Senior Editor, Oxford Journals, commented, "we continue to see wide variation in uptake, and different levels of interest in 'author-pays' open access models between disciplines. The highest uptake has been in areas where more funding for open access is available, such as the life sciences, and we would expect this trend to continue in 2007." Managing Director, Martin Richardson also commented: "...These results show that while open access is beginning to be embraced in some subject areas, the level of uptake is generally quite low. These results continue to suggest that [the fee-based OA journal] is likely to be only one of a range of models that will be necessary to support the requirements of different research communities."...

80% of authors who chose open access in the first year of Oxford Open have paid a discounted open access charge, as members of a subscribing institution....

The online subscription prices of 3 journals (Bioinformatics, Carcinogenesis and Human Molecular Genetics) have been adjusted for 2007 to reflect how much original research material was made freely available in the first phase of the initiative in 2005-2006.

Google to allow free downloads of books, Associated Press, August 29, 2006. 

Google Inc. on Wednesday plans to begin letting consumers download and print free of charge classic novels and many other, more obscure books that are in the public domain.

Using Google's Book Search service, Web surfers hunting titles like Dante's "Inferno" and Aesop's "Fables" will be able to download PDF files of the books for later reading, to run keyword searches or to print them on paper. Up to now, the service only allowed people to read the out-of-copyright books online....

The download initiative does not include any books under copyright....

More news coverage.

Comment. This is big. Of the major book-scanning projects, Google's library project never rivaled the Open Content Alliance for barrier-free access to the resulting texts, even when the texts were in the public domain. Google is now lifting the two largest and most irritating barriers --those that blocked downloads and printing.

What barriers remain? Both OCA and Google restrict downloads to analog image files, even though they have digital text behind the scenes for searching.  (Project Gutenberg is the best source for digitized public-domain books if you want the text in searchable, cut/pasteable form.)  And last I heard, Google is still blocking access, without pattern or explanation, to users in certain countries.

So far, I've seen no announcement on the Google Book Search blog. (Why would Google let itself be scooped by the mainstream press?)  Nor does the barrier-free access seem to have begun yet. Here's a public-domain 1897 edition of MacBeth scanned from Harvard's library.  I can print it one page at a time, but I can't find a way to print or download the full text.

Update. Here's Google's own press release and the Google Book Search blog post (both dated August 30).

The high inflation rate for library journal subscriptions continues with projections for next year at 7-9%. One of the options for reducing the impact of journal inflation on Library and University budgets is to promote publication in the growing number of open access (OA) journals.

“In its second year of publication, Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology had an impact factor of 13.9, making it the highest ranked general biology journal in the world, and five OA journals from BioMed Central ranked in the top five journals in their specialties. These successes are backed by research showing that OA articles generate between 25% and 250% more citations than non-OA articles in the same journal from the same year” (Library Journal, April 15, 2006).

Previous efforts by the Library to support open access:

• membership in SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) an organization started by the largest research libraries (ARL) to develop and promote alternatives to high priced commercial journals including open access journals and repositories. We were a founding member.
• UNH joined the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), an active program of governmental, media, and public relations devoted to supporting the proposal by the NIH and the U.S. Congress to have taxpayer-funded biomedical research freely accessible in PubMed Central.
• adding records for open access titles from the Directory of Open Access Journals (2200 titles) to the Library’s online catalog.
• membership in the group of libraries supporting the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online reference work ($3000 over 3 years).

...By joining we could also encourage our faculty to participate in Open Access publication.

Stockholm University has decided to sign the Berlin Declaration and do something with deposits in its institutional repository.  But I can't tell from the Swedish announcement whether it will require deposits or merely encourage them. 

I'm already trying to get human help with the translation.  But in the meantime, here's Systran's machine translation, which leaves the key question obscure: 

On Stockholm's universities, a workgroup with representatives has from the four faculties and University Library a left letter to the headmaster with proposals to new policy concerning handling of Open Access publication. Headmaster Kåre Bremer has the 29/6 taken decisions on the basis of the workgroup's recommendations to sign the Berlin Declaration and to advocate that the researchers in possibly anxious deposits a copy of each published scientific article in the university's digital archives. More information: Letter from the workgroup for Open Access wide Stockholm's universities

Update. Here's an unofficial statement of the new policy from Ingegerd Rabow. (Thanks, Ingegerd!)

The Vice Chancellor's decision for Stockholm University says that

1. Through their prefects/equivalents institutions from 2007 are responsible for making bibliographic data available in the university publication database
2. This registration shall cover all publications related to the teacher's/researcher´s employment at the university. This includes scientific/scholarly publishing and publishing within the framework of the cooperation with the surrounding society (i..e popular science, articles in the daily press)
3. Researchers as far as possible deposit a copy of each published article in the university digital archive.

Andrés Guadamuz González, Open Science: Open Source Licenses in Scientific Research, North Carolina Journal of Law and Technology, Spring 2006. 

Abstract: In recent years, there has been growing interest in the area of open source software (“OSS”) as an alternative economic model. However, the success of the OSS mindshare and collaborative online experience has wider implications to many other fields of human endeavor than the mere licensing of computer programmes. There are a growing number of institutions interested in using OSS licensing schemes to distribute creative works and scientific research, and even to publish online journals through open access (“OA”) licenses. There appears to be growing concern in the scientific community about the trend to fence and protect scientific research through intellectual property, particularly by the abuse of patent applications for biotechnology research. The OSS experience represents a successful model which demonstrates that IP licenses could eventually be used to protect against the misuse and misappropriation of basic scientific research. This would be done by translating existing OSS licenses to protect scientific research. Some efforts are already paying dividends in areas such as scientific publishing, evidenced by the growing number of OA journals. However, the process of translating software licenses to areas other than publishing has been more difficult. OSS and OA licenses work best with works subject to copyright protection because copyright subsists in an original work as soon as it is created. However, it has been more difficult to generate a license that covers patented works because patents are only awarded through a lengthy application and registration process. If the open science experiment is to work, it needs the intervention of the legal community to draft new licenses that may apply to scientific research. This article will look at the issue of such OA licenses, paying special care as to how the system can best be exported to scientific research based on OSS and OA ideals.