Open Access News

Chemoinformatics and much chemical computation is seriously broken. The formats are 30 years old, the producers compete against each other, there are no validated data resources, programs and no communal agreed knowledge. Each producer sees themselves at the centre of the universe and caters only for their own requirements, leading to a forest of “stovepipes” in the antipattern jargon. There is no sign of positive reaction to the developments on the web. Neighbouring disciplines such as bioinformatics sigh meaningfully and then go ahead and create the Open chemical resources they need....

Chemical software used to be free. It wasn’t interoperable, but that is because machines weren’t. Even if you used a single language (FORTRAN) there was a lot of work to transport it....

This mess persists. But about 10 years ago a number of small initiatives took place to create Open alternatives - a real labour of love because theye were generally not innovating, but playing catchup. They weren’t taken seriously. For the most part they still aren’t. But it’s changing. There is now a critical mass of developers in mainstream chemoinformatics - not enormous, but sufficient to create a usable, useful system. That is growing rapidly....

We discover each other by cyber-methods - mailing lists, IRCs, etc. The best known of the IRCs is freenode cdk. So people become cyberfriends. Before the ACS meeting in san Diego 2 years ago we decided to meet in Horton Plaza - by the Blue Obelisk. Amusingly there are two so we nearly didn’t manage it. But we did, and the name stuck. I wrote a short summary of our communal aims and aspirations and it’s taken off from there. We’re meeting again in San Francisco next week.

The Blue Obelisk now has its own mailing list and many members including me have blogs. You can find it all [here].

More and more US university presidents and provosts are signing to support the proposed FRPAA self-archiving mandate. Let us hope that they will not now sit waiting for the Act to pass, but will also go on to sign a self-archiving mandate for each of their own respective universities -- and then register their policies in ROARMAP for other universities to emulate. (The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access [ID/OA] mandate is the optimal policy to adopt -- infinitely preferable to the "Optional Delayed Deposit" mandates that are currently being contemplated instead of giving the details deeper and more careful thought.) 

(UK vice-chancellors and pro-vice-chancellors should hasten to adopt ID/OA too, now that half the RCUK research councils and the Wellcome Trust have already mandated self-archiving! The European Commission is next...)

PS: This is the first Arabic declaration in support of OA and I'd love to know more about it. I don't trust my English versions of the conference name or declaration title. I've found an article that may --or may not-- be about the same event. Using the French text and the English article as clues, I still can't find a link to the conference web site (if it has a web site). If any readers can help with these, with a good English translation of the declaration, or with background on the sponsoring organizations, I'd appreciate it. Thanks. --More later, I hope.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to highlight how application integration and project collaboration is being used to support the development of newly established university electronic presses and institutional repositories.

Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents a summary of a number of projects that have been established within the Australian university environment. These projects are used to illustrate models of collaboration that can be used to assist the establishment of small or new scholarly publishing projects.

Findings – Suggests that in instances where universities are exploring new models for dissemination of their scholarship, collaboration between institutional projects may assist in the ongoing development of content and in the provision of access to this content....

Henk F. Moed, New developments in citation analysis and research evaluation, Information Services and Use 26, 2 (2006) pp. 135-137.  (Thanks to Wouter Gerritsma.)

The core of this contribution presents preliminary results from a study examining the effect of “open access” upon citation impact and visibility. This contribution presents the main lines of the research and preliminary findings. Detailed findings from all studies will be published in separate, future research articles....

Following the work by Kurtz et al. and Davis and Fromerth, three effects were distinguished. The first is the genuine Open Access Effect, in the sense that the archive increases access to research papers. The second is termed the Early View Effect: articles appear earlier in the archive than they do in the publisher archive. Finally there is a Self-Selection or Quality Bias Effect. Better authors use the archive, or authors deposit their better papers in the archive. Following Harnad and Brody, the average citation impact of WoS papers deposited in ArXiv was compared to that of articles not deposited in that archive, by calculating an ArXiv Impact Differential.

A preliminary analysis related to a set of 22 WoS journals, in which Physical Review B contributes by far the largest number of papers deposited in ArXiv. Large differences in the ArXiv Impact Differential were found across journals. Moreover, the analysis provided evidence of strong Self-Selection and Early View Effects. Correcting for these effects, the remaining ArXiv Impact Differential may be one or even two orders of magnitude (i.e. factors of 10) lower than the Impact Differentials reported by Harnad and Brody, depending upon journal, citation type and time window, and type of statistic calculated. Whether the remaining ArXiv Impact Differential reflects an open access effect or still a Self-Selection Effect, – the tendency that authors deposit their better papers in ArXiv –, is still an open question....

Update. Here's a page in English that Hilf has made of the same session, including links to each of the presentations.

The ICMJE principles essentially say that journal editors should refuse to publish articles on new drugs unless the underlying clinical trial data are on deposit in an OA database independent of the drug manufacturer.

Shawn Mathur and four co-authors, Open access and beyond, Molecular Cancer, September 6, 2006.  Excerpt:

Abstract:   Uncensored exchange of scientific results hastens progress. Open Access does not stop at the removal of price and permission barriers; still, censorship and reading disabilities, to name a few, hamper access to information. Here, we invite the scientific community and the public to discuss new methods to distribute, store and manage literature in order to achieve unfettered access to literature.

Update. This article is now OA (at the same URL). Apparently it should have been OA from the start but was mistakenly left behind the password wall. Excerpt:

The Internet has changed how we conduct and share research, primarily by increasing the global reach of scholarly communication. With scholarly journals, this possibility of expanding the circulation of knowledge has led to an "open access" movement that is making an increasing number of published, peer-reviewed articles free to read on-line. Authors, editors, publishers, and librarians are exploring new ways of using the Internet to make more of their research available in this way. The Society for Neuroscience provides an excellent example. It has recently increased the level of open access to The Journal of Neuroscience by making back issues, once they are 6 months old, freely accessible to on-line readers. The current president of the Society for Neuroscience, Stephen Heineman, explained that the move to increase access made sense, not only in light of National Institutes of Health and patient advocacy group initiatives, but because "open access is also consistent with the mission of the Society to promote research and to educate the public" (Heineman, 2006), and to that end, the Society is a signatory to the Washington D.C. Principles for Free Access to Science....

The question that scholarly societies and publishers are asking is that even if no one disputes the public good represented by the greater circulation of this knowledge, how can a journal be expected to offer free access to its content and remain financially viable? More than that, why would a scholarly society put subscription revenues at risk to further increase free access to its content? ...

To begin with the simplest of points, made across a growing number of studies, open access leads to a work being cited more often and more quickly (Hitchcock, 2006)....

The most important reason for pursuing open access comes down to first principles. With its proven ability to increase the circulation of research (meaning that more researchers are turning a critical and appreciative eye to this work), open access strengthens the scientific claims of articles and overall quality of the research literature. Open access to research literature may prove to be the most important scientific gain afforded by the Internet....

Yet, open access is also part of a larger set of worries for the executive directors of scholarly associations. Many of them are witnessing the slow attrition of journal subscriptions among institutions, as libraries face tough choices between the big publishers' bundled titles and the smaller society titles. At the same time, individuals are seeing less value in subscribing to titles that the library delivers to their laptops. How, then, are societies to serve member-authors, whose primary interest is in increasing their readership (rather than seeing it dwindle) and realizing the full benefit of their contributions to the public good? ...

[T]Internet is already leading, much as the printing press did centuries ago, to a greater circulation of this work. How much greater that circulation will be, and to whose benefit, are the questions that we should all be asking. The answer will depend, in part, on the leadership and vision of scholarly societies such as this one, as well as the actions of its members (when it comes to self- archiving their published work). At the very least, this is a time to experiment (the very thing we do so well, after all) with new ways and models of scholarly publishing....

Also see Gary Westbrook's editorial in the same issue, introducing the journal's series of OA articles on OA, of which Willinsky's is the first. Excerpt:

Certainly there are legitimate reasons why government-funded research should be available to those who paid for it, but the reality, at least for the Journal of Neuroscience is that 96% of the articles published since 1981 are already freely available to anyone with Internet access. Only the 600 papers published in the last 6 months are under access control, and those are freely available to each of the >35,000 members of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) as a benefit of membership, as well as at more than 1000 libraries across the world. A recent survey of the membership indicated strong support for the concept of open access, but an unwillingness to pay the ~$3000 cost of each article published in the Journal, perhaps not a surprise in this year of uncertain grant funding.

Beginning with the January 2007 issue, all papers in Plant Physiology corresponded by ASPB [American Society of Plant Biology] members will be published with full Open Access. This means that anyone with an Internet connection anywhere in the world will have instant full access to your paper as soon as it is published, i.e. Real-Time Plant Physiology. This includes full access to the publish-ahead-of-print version (Plant Physiology Preview) as well as to the final, fully edited version, full access to supplemental data, and full access to all the advanced linking and tracking tools. Since more than 50% of the papers currently published in Plant Physiology are corresponded by ASPB members, more than half of the papers in the January 2007 issue will be fully Open Access. We anticipate that the proportion of Open Access papers will increase as submitting authors join ASPB to become eligible for this new member benefit....

Why should you be concerned whether or not your article is published with Open Access? In addition to helping fulfill the altruistic academic aspiration of making new knowledge as widely available as possible, there are strong reasons to believe that Open Access drives higher impact and citation by accelerating recognition and dissemination of research findings. A recent longitudinal bibliometric analysis of Open Access vs. non–Open Access papers published over a 6-month period in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences supports this premise (Eysenbach, 2006). Even in a journal widely available in research libraries and one that publicly releases its full content after 6 months, Open Access articles were found to be twice as likely to be cited in the first 4 to 10 months compared to non–Open Access articles....

Plant Physiology and The Plant Cell have for the past 10 months offered a similar author fee–based Open Access option. Since we introduced this option in Plant Physiology with the December 2005 issue, about 10% of the articles published in our journal have been Open Access. These articles, on average, have been accessed about 10% more often and downloaded approximately 20% more often than the non–Open Access articles published in the same volumes. It is somewhat puzzling why this so. While there is a cohort of readers that do not have subscription access and thus must wait until Plant Physiology releases content 12 months after publication, I believe a stronger factor is the ease with which Open Access papers can be directly viewed from various sorts of Web searches. Although it is too early for citation data on Plant Physiology Open Access papers to be meaningful, we believe that this early recognition will translate into an increase in article citations and impact as was seen for the 15% of articles in PNAS with that journal's author fee–based Open Access. Since more than 50% of the papers published in Plant Physiology during 2007 and beyond will be Open Access, I am a strong believer that the journal will grow in impact and stature as a result.

ASPB President Mike Thomashow, in a recent article in the ASPB News, laid out the financial risks for the Society that are associated with Open Access. While Plant Physiology's membership-based Open Access model mitigates those risks, I nevertheless believe that the plant biology community will be very grateful to ASPB for signing on to this bold experiment: RT-Plant Physiology.

Comments. Kudos to Plant Physiology (PP) and the APSB for this innovation. 

1. Basically, PP is becoming a new kind of hybrid OA journal.  What's new here is that authors needn't pay an article-specific fee to select the OA option.  They only have to belong to the ASPB.  For authors who are already members or who would have joined anyway, this is essentially a no-fee model. For all ASPB members, regardless of their reasons for joining, this is a one-fee, many-article model.
2. If it's true that 50% of PP's articles in the January 2007 issue will be OA, then its rate of author uptake will significantly surpass the average for other hybrid OA journals.
3. Another virtue of the PP hybrid model is that it uses society membership dues to support the journal (so that some of its articles can be OA).  By contrast, other society publishers use subscription fees on their journals (so that none of their articles are OA) to support the society.  I hope other societies will notice and try out this elegant model.
4. Finally, notice that PP recognizes that OA benefits journals, not just authors and readers.   

Seven undergraduate lecture courses will be available online as streaming videos starting next fall, the first step in a pilot program to make select Yale classes accessible to the general public worldwide.

The initiative — dubbed the Open Educational Resources Video Lecture Project — will be funded by a $775,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, for which Yale President Richard Levin serves as a director. Coordinating the program is Diana Kleiner, a professor of art history and classics....

“It’s part of thinking more globally about the University and its reach beyond the walls of Yale by reaching out to other educators, other students — college students, high school students — and especially people in developing countries,” Kleiner said....

[T]he University’s program takes inspiration from the OpenCourseWare program at MIT....But while the MIT program and others freely provide syllabi, lesson plans, some readings, and assignments, the Yale initiative will also include videos of lectures, currently rare in existing online programs....

While the new initiative is not aimed at Yale students, with recordings available on-demand, a student could conceivably sleep through a class and then watch it online later. But if that is the case, Smith said, then the program may not be worth it....

PS: A quick search of the OAN archives turns up 25 files, each of which is a week's worth of blogging with at least one reference and perhaps many more.

In this post I content that the chemical information cycle is broken - to the detriment of the chemical and general commons. I’ll explain what that means.

Robert Terry, Wellcome Trust, is widely know for his advocacy of Open Access....Essentially his argument is that funders support scientists to do research. The results of this work are then given (i.e. copyright assigned) to publishers who get peer-review donated by the scientific community and then restrict the dissemination to readers who are able and prepared to pay. The wealth flow (which include both money, informatics goods, and services) is a net drain FROM the funders TO the shareholders of the publishers....

[By contrast, under OA] the cycle is complete: funders support science; science is published into the commons; the commons can be seen by the funders who can demonstrate the value of their contribution; and the new goods inspire the next generation of science.

Can we apply the same sort of logic to software and data in science? Again we need a cycle or the producers end up subsidizing other parts of the chain. In bioscience this can work. Although there is a considerable problem in any science in supporting data and technology there is direct funding for databases and software....The funders support science with a partial provision for the development of tools to support it. They require that the tools and the data are made available to the community. In this way the cycles are closed and there is a flow of goods back to the commons....

In contrast the flow in chemistry is broken. I have omitted the funders from the diagram but there [are] very few projects where major software or data has been mandated as Open by the funders. I’d be delighted to have examples. In practice almost all software is commercial and unresponsive to the needs of the science commons. The major market for both software and data is the pharmaceutical industry which pays billions to major information suppliers. This biases the flow so that only crumbs return to the commons. It’s actually worse than zero because if a commercial offering exists there is no motivation to build one in the Commons. So innovation is stifled....

A French chef whose restaurant is given an extra “star” in the famed Michelin Guide (on a scale of 1 to 5) can expect a flurry of new patrons, prestige and profits in the coming year. Similarly, restaurants that “lose” a star can see sales drop as much as 50%. Since there is so much money riding on the quality of food served in top French restaurants, why aren’t the recipes and food preparation techniques used by great French chefs protected by copyrights, patents or trade secret law?  The answer, as explored in a fascinating paper by Emmanuelle Fauchart and Eric von Hippel, is that the social norms of the culinary professionals are a more effective tool for protecting the “proprietary” interests of top-flight chefs....Any chef who violates these norms is stigmatized or even ostracized by the community....

Comment. What's the OA connection?  There are several but let me pick out just one.  The French chef solution is remarkably similar to the one that has evolved in the world of scholarship.  In principle, many kinds of plagiarism could be pursued as copyright infringement.  In practice, however, we punish them as violations of academic norms, not as violations of law.  This is reflected in a little-known sentence of the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing:

Community standards, rather than copyright law, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now.

OA is compatible with copyright as long as the copyright-holder consents to OA.  But publishers who claim they need to hold copyrights in order to prevent or punish plagiarism are blowing smoke.  In the rare case when a copyright is needed to pursue a plagiarist, it doesn't matter whether the author or the publisher is the copyright-holder.  And in the vast majority of cases, no copyright will be needed.  We act like French chefs, not like lawyers.

Access for Members of the Public to Digital Content held in University and College Libraries, Research Information Network, August 2006. A "Report on Current Practice and Recommendations for the Future" by "Members of the Expert Group on Public Access to Digital Content in Academic Libraries".  Excerpt:

This paper reports on the current position with regard to the provision of access for members of the public to digital content in libraries in the higher education (HE) sector in the UK. It has been prepared by an expert group assembled by the Research Information Network (RIN) and provides advice to the sector and to its funding agencies on issues that need to be addressed if public access is to be enhanced.

The Government has acknowledged the significance of providing access to members of the public to scientific journals and other materials held in academic libraries, in pursuit of its aims of enhancing public understanding of science, of lifelong learning, and widening participation in higher education....

We present seven recommendations - addressed to Government, to the Higher Education Funding Bodies, to the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), to Eduserv Chest, to the Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL), to the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA), and to university and college libraries – to address these issues....

Comment. All seven recommendations will increase access to TA research for walk-in patrons, online patrons, lay readers, and independent scholars. But one recommendation is missing:  provide open access to a larger portion of the research literature.  The UK is already working toward OA on many fronts, of course.  But every new argument, ally, and connection helps the cause, just as every failure to recognize how OA can solve a problem is a setback for OA and for the prospects of solving the problem.  We can talk at length about negotiating permissions to share keys for locked doors, but at some point we should also talk about leaving the doors open. 

Jennifer De Beer sends this email report from the ASC-CODESRIA conference, Bridging the North-South Divide in Scholarly Communication on Africa. Threats and Opportunities in the Digital era (Leiden, September 6-8, 2006):

It is a get-together of mostly African Studies scholars/researchers, and for sure the theme of Open Access i.a. has been thrashed around in these past couple of days. And I am most happy to report on the connecting-africa project (officially launched yesterday), which proves what can be done when you have, at base, an already-established network of IRs (institutional repositories). For, what the initiative is, is an aggregator research (material) locator service using OAI-PMH to harvest only African Studies-related research from IR's the world over. The list of current data providers is available here, and what's also of interest are not only the indications of the quantity-subset of records being harvested in the aggregate-total number of records in disparate institutional archives, but also the figure indicating the number of African Studies experts for the institutions listed. Now, it will be obvious that the statistical data is more refined with regard to Dutch data providers (I imagine as a consequence of the, at-base, data collection effort of the DARE network), but the aim with the Connecting-Africa project is to expand the list of data providers (and so, in turn, accessible research output) to all such IRs globally which have material of interest to African Studies scholars. Already, and I am proud to see, that the IR at Rhodes University in South Africa, is one of the data providers in the network. Shows what can be done when there is enough interest, enthusiasm, and action!! Well done to the team at the African Studies Centre here in Leiden!

Here's some more detail from the about page at Connecting-Africa:

Connecting-Africa is a service that provides access to African research information and materials produced in the Netherlands and elsewhere.

The service provides:  [1] details of researchers on Africa affiliated to Dutch universities and research institutes; [2] details of organizational units of Dutch universities and research institutes where research on Africa is being undertaken; [3] titles of published research on Africa in the Netherlands; [4] digital resources on Africa (full-text of publications, images and sound) in about 40 international university repositories.  There is no charge for using the service or for contributing to it....

Connecting-Africa is the result of a pilot project started in September 2003 by the African Studies Centre in Leiden (ASC). The Distributed Africana Repositories Community (DARC) project aims to make all Africanist research material and information in the Netherlands accessible through a community portal on the Internet.

By providing federated access to university repositories and other resources, including library catalogues and publishers’ services, and by gathering knowledge and expertise that are both physically and electronically scattered across universities and research centres, it is hoped to offer fertile ground for a more effective knowledge exchange....

His test case is Emanuel Geibel's Gedichte, published in Stuttgart in 1873. (Geibel died in 1884.) As Klaus observes, the book is in the public domain in every country on Earth and US users have free online access to the full text.

Comment. When Klaus told me this by email a few days ago, I asked some friends outside the US to click on the link and tell me whether they got a book or an error message. So far, they report no access from Australia, Canada, England, Finland, France, India, Nigeria, and Paraguay. How many report access? None. (Thanks to many friends in many places for rapid turn-around on this informal survey.)

When denying access to non-US users, Google gives this error message:

Page images and the full text of this item are *not available* at this time due to *copyright restrictions*. (Why?) However, you may search within the text of this item to determine the frequency and location of specific words and phrases.

I join Klaus in calling on Google and Michigan either to restore access to non-US users or to explain what copyright problems bar access to this public-domain book.

Update (9/11/06). The book is not accessible in Nepal or South Africa either.

Is it folly to believe that a medical or scientific journal can have any measurable impact upon global poverty? I don’t think so, and nor does the Task Force on Science Journals, Poverty, and Human Development, of which I’m a member....

As you can imagine, I feel passionately that the most effective way that journals can help to lift people out of the extremes of poverty is to champion open access to the world’s treasury of medical, scientific, and technical knowledge. I’m not alone in my conviction --the United Nations, for example, has repeatedly championed open access as a development tool. If you’re unconvinced that open access has anything to do with human development, I urge you to read the UN Millennium Project report Innovation: applying knowledge in development. The lead author is Calestous Juma, Professor of the Practice of International Development at Harvard's John F Kennedy School of Government and another member of the PLoS Board of Directors. The report includes an extremely compelling description, with some fantastic case studies, of how developing countries are improving their capacity to harness scientific and technical knowledge to solve local problems themselves. But they can only do this if they have an adequate pool of public domain knowledge in the first place.

And this is where editors can step in. As the PLoS Medicine editors say in our editorial this month, expanding the amount of essential information placed in the public domain “would give developing countries the scientific and technical information needed to solve fundamental challenges, promote public health, manage the environment, and participate in international trade.” How can we not do it?

Background - The North Carolina (NC) Area Health Education Centers (AHEC) Digital Library (ADL) is a web portal designed to meet the information needs of health professionals across the state by pulling together a set of resources from numerous different sources and linking a pool of users to only the resources for which they have eligibility. Although the ADL was designed with the primary purpose of linking health care professionals to a set of licensed resources, the ADL also contains a significant number of links to free resources. These resources are available to any ADL member logging into their ADL account and to guest visitors to the ADL. While there are regular assessments of the subscription resources in the ADL as to utility and frequency of use, up until this point there has been no systematic analysis of the use of the overall set of free resources. It was decided to undertake an examination of the usage of ADL free resources over a 6-month period to analyze the utility of these resources to both ADL members and guests....

Results - The vast majority of resource use through the ADL is to licensed resources. There are 2056 free resource URLs in the ADL, to which 1351 were linked out, meaning there was at least one link out to 65% of the free resources. The single most popular free resource was PubMed with 4803 link outs or nearly 20% of the total link outs to free resources. The breakdown of free resource use by different use groups indicates that the highest percentage of use of free resources was by guests followed by institutional affiliates and AHEC Faculty/Staff. The next 3 highest user groups accessing free resources are: paid members, preceptors, and residents.

Conclusions - The only free resource capturing a significant number of link outs is the free link to PubMed. This reflects the importance placed on traditional medical literature searching by the ADL clinical user base. Institutional affiliates access free resources through the ADL with the second highest frequency of all the user groups. Finally, in analyzing use of free resources, it is important to note the overall limitations of this survey. While link outs are excellent indicators of frequency of use they do not provide any information about the ultimate usefulness of the resource being accessed. Further studies would need to examine not only the quantitative use of resources, but also their qualitative importance to the user.

The Indiana University Digital Library Program will advance two projects to make the state's history broadly available to Hoosiers, thanks to grants recently announced by the Indiana State Library. The projects — one to digitize a 100-year run of a popular history journal, and the other to digitize historic correspondence from the utopian community of New Harmony — leverage IU's strengths to benefit the state.

"The benefits are twofold," says Patricia Steele, Ruth Lilly Interim Dean of University Libraries. "Citizens across the state will have the opportunity to gain a better understanding of their own history, and we at the IU Libraries advance our goal of providing free and open access to the information researchers need."

Both projects are expected to be online in summer 2007....

By eChemistry I mean more than simply compiling in-house data and running programs - I mean semantically enriched chemistry that machines can help to process....The single fundamental requirement in eScience is that there is shared data. Ideally this should be semantic, and that’s a challenge, but at least it should be there and shared. In chemistry there is virtually none. What there is has almost all come from bioscience (e.g. NCI and PubChem) and some of the US government agencies. However mainstream chemistry is totally uninterested in sharing chemical data and when it needs it expects to have to pay private sector providers. As a result innovation in eChemistry and chemoinformatics is stifled....

This is exemplified by a question from JohnIrwin on the Indian CHMINF-L list....John has compiled a wonderful list of compounds (ZINC) from a wide variety of sources such as chemical suppliers and made it available to PubChem - as a result of this and similar efforts PubChem has ca 5 million compounds (information, not physical samples). He quite reasonably asks whether we can do the same for chemical reactions.  Read on…

The Open Knowledge Foundation has released version 1.0 of the open knowledge definition.  This is not an attempt to redefine open access but to define a related concept.  Excerpt:

Access.  The work shall be available as a whole and at no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably downloading via the Internet without charge. The work must also be available in a convenient and modifiable form.

The other 10 provisions cover redistribution, reuse, technological restrictions, attribution, integrity, discrimination, and some specific licensing issues.

• Norbert Lossau, Open Access an Hochschulen: Strategien, Chancen und Probleme bei der Umsetzung
• Eric Steinhauer, “Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch’ ich Gewalt.” Kann und soll man open access rechtlich erzwingen?

One of the most amazing quotes I’ve seen in a while comes from Allan Adler, vice president for legal and government affairs of the Association of American Publishers, in an article about Open Access to Research.

[Mr. Adler] rejected the idea that taxpayer financed research should be open to the public, saying that it was in the national interest for it to be restricted to those who could pay subscription fees. “Remember — you’re talking about free online access to the world,” he said. “You are talking about making our competitive research available to foreign governments and corporations.”

There are just so many problems with this thinking that I don’t even know where to start. If the cost of making information available to the public who sponsored it is making it available to everyone on the planet, so be it. Let’s not use national security as an excuse to deprive the public of yet another right due them, let alone to further reinforce the problem of the rich getting richer.

And what are we afraid of, anyway? That our 5% of the population won’t be able to continue indefinitely in a lifestyle that consumes 25% of the planet’s resources? That someone else might improve their quality of life at the cost of our own?

Comments. When I blogged Adler's quote yesterday, I was inclined to let its absurdity speak for itself.   But I think David is right to take the time to show how dishonest it really is.  I'd add the following to what he has already said.

1. We're talking about published research, not classified research that isn't published.
2. Thank goodness our enemies can't afford to pay subscriptions or visit libraries.
3. Thank goodness Americans have never benefited from scientific advances made by non-Americans.
4. Thank goodness harming Americans has the side-effect of harming foreigners.  At least our sacrifice is not in vain.
5. Thank goodness publishers are willing to collect subscription fees for this patriotic purpose.
6. Thank goodness publishers are willing to shoulder the responsibility of controlling access to our research.   We realize that they didn't have to.  They didn't conduct this research, write it up, or fund it.

Recently, DIANE Publishing, which reprints a wide variety of government publications, made all of its titles in Google Book Search 100 percent viewable. While the Partner Program's default settings limit people to viewing 20 percent of any title, you're now free to read every page of every DIANE publication in the index. Explains Herman Baron, President of DIANE Publishing,

Our mission has always been to carefully select U.S. government reports and publish them to make it easier for readers to access this valuable information. Google Book Search provides a way for us to make these documents available to Google users worldwide. The free flow of government information to a democratic society is utmost in our mind....

Feel like browsing? Try an advanced search by publisher to check out the other government reports DIANE has made fully viewable online.

Much is made of how librarians impede open access. I’ll surprise you: I agree with that assessment. I don’t agree with the usual complaints, however. It’s got nothing to do with metadata (though I agree that we over-obsess about it sometimes, and the evidence shows it isn’t where we need to put the bulk of our effort). It’s got nothing to do with preservation, which is an absolutely valid and necessary concern. It’s got nothing to do with peer-reviewed research versus everything else we can and do archive.

It’s ignorance. Just as with researchers, the biggest problem I see in libraries is that outside of some enlightened leaders and a scattering of peasants like me, librarians know next to nothing about open access. Worse, my sense (admittedly based on anecdotal evidence only) is that the ingrained librarian distrust of free-as-in-beer is actively hindering library use and promotion of open-access materials.

Serials Solutions offers an open-access module in its popular e-journal management software. Dozens of OA journals and other sources, added to library collections in a few keystrokes. It’s a very enlightened approach. I wonder how many libraries that subscribe to Serials Solutions turn up their noses at it?

I wonder how many repository-rats have to struggle to build a coalition around a repository inside their own library. Insofar as I have managed it, it’s been by force of personality rather than my colleagues’ intellectual investment in the concept. Several of my colleagues still stumble over their own tongues when they introduce me to faculty (which they are exceedingly good about) and try to describe what I do.

I wonder how many hear “But why would they just give that all away?” in tones of abject disbelief. (True story. I heard this with my own ears, from an honest-to-goodness librarian.) I wonder how many librarians at smaller, non-research-intensive institutions don’t think open access concerns them. I wonder how many are turned off by virulent anti-librarian sentiment in the open-access community --I’ve gotten fighting mad about that myself once or twice.

Much as I dislike survey research, I see a use for it here. We need to know how bad the ignorance problem is. We need to know if librarians are suppressing open-access materials, and if so, why. We need to know if they’re buying into publisher fear, uncertainty, and doubt....

Comment. I've always thought of librarians as strong allies of OA.  But I realize that this could be a sampling error:  the ones I know best are strong allies and I know many of them for precisely that reason.  We all have skewed samples of other groups, but for what it's worth here are two rough inductions from the samples I have:  the average librarian knows more about OA than the average researcher, but the average researcher is easier to excite about the idea in a five minute conversation. 

1. Does the journal let participating authors retain copyright? Yes.
2. Does the journal use an OA-friendly license, like those from Creative Commons? Yes. Does it let authors do so? Yes.
3. Does the journal automatically deposit participating articles in an OA repository independent of the publisher? Yes. If the OA repository in question accepts such articles, which is not always the case. Does it allow the author to do so? Yes.
4. Does the journal waive fees in cases of economic hardship? In exceptional cases only. There is no blanket waiver.
5. Does the journal promise to reduce the subscription price in proportion to author uptake? Yes.
6. If authors have a prior obligation to their funding agency to provide OA to their peer-reviewed manuscript, does the journal let them comply without choosing the new OA option and paying the associated fee? See answer to question 7.
7. If the journal previously allowed author self-archiving without an embargo, does it still allow it for authors who do not choose the new OA option? Yes.
8. For participating authors, do the OA publication fees cover page and color charges or are the latter laid on top of the former? There are no page charges. The article processing charges do cover colour charges, for the online version. Additional colour charges do apply if the author wants colour in print, but the option is given to print in black and white at no extra charge, while the online version is in full colour.
9. Is the fee high or low? As Peter already says, there is no right answer.

Thanks, Jan. If other publishers of hybrid journals would like to publicize their answers to these nine questions, I can offer this forum. If the answers are short, like Springer's, then I can blog them here. If they are long, I can post them to SOAF and blog an excerpt and link here.

Dion Hoe-Lian Goh and five co-authors, A checklist for evaluating open source digital library software, Online Information Review, 30, 4 (2006), pp. 360-379. Accessible only to subscribers, at least so far.  Abstract:

Purpose – Many open source software packages are available for organizations and individuals to create digital libraries (DLs). However, a simple to use instrument to evaluate these DL software packages does not exist. The objectives of the present work are to develop a checklist for DL evaluation and use this checklist on four DL software packages.

Design/methodology/approach – Features that characterized “good” open source DL software were determined from the literature. First identified were essential categories of features that DL software should possess. These categories were then decomposed into supporting features. From these, a checklist that covered all such features was developed. The checklist was then used to evaluate four popular open source DL software packages (CDSware, EPrints, Fedora, and Greenstone) for the purposes of assessing suitability for use in a DL project to be undertaken by the authors.

Findings – A checklist consisting of 12 categories of items was developed. Using this, Greenstone was found to be the best performer, followed by CDSware, Fedora and EPrints. Greenstone was the only software package that consistently fulfilled the majority of the criteria in many of the checklist categories. In contrast, EPrints was the worst performer due to its poor support for certain features deemed important in our checklist, and a total absence of functionality in other categories.

Originality/value – The present work attempts to develop a comprehensive checklist for assessing DLs. Its flexibility allows users to tailor it to accommodate new categories, items and weighting schemes to reflect the needs of different DL implementations.

Comment. There's something odd about the packages the authors chose to compare. Eprints is not general-purpose digital library software. It's more specialized for OA repositories. But if the authors thought it fit the category anyway, then why not also DSpace?

Steve Hitchcock, Filling a repository: Caltech's low-hanging fruit, Eprints Insiders, September 6, 2006. Excerpt:  

Porter, George S., Let's Get it Started! Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, Summer 2006

As long as content generation remains an IR's biggest, most pressing and most elusive task, it helps to share experience about what has worked in different cases. Caltech's George Porter advises targetting the low-hanging fruit: "To get an institutional repository up and running, librarians need to go where the content is, preferably content which will entail little effort to clear rights and permissions for distribution."
This is fine as one strategy...

Stevan Harnad has already pointed out that this view misses the mandating approach entirely. Within a departmental or school-based context, another vital ingredient is to find a champion among senior staff, ideally the head, not just to deposit content but to rally staff and set the group's agenda around the repository: give people something to do with the repository. It's more important that such people are champions for the repository, and for the group, than necessarily for OA.

That's what happened in ECS Southampton. Yes, we have champions for OA too, but those who made things happen locally were the heads of school and departments, not noted for their OA advocacy. Their call was based around the use the repository to build group bibliographies and prepare group-based research assessment submissions. At that time the heads may have been taking a calculated risk, but these ideas are more widely understood now, so this should not be the case any more.

Go for the low-hanging fruit too, but top-down works best.

SNM announced today that its flagship Journal of Nuclear Medicine and the Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology have moved to an open access publishing model, providing free, full-text online articles 12 months after publication.

"With digital open access, users are free to read, download, copy, distribute and print articles--with proper acknowledgement and citation," said Heinrich R. Schelbert, JNM's editor in chief. "This action speeds the delivery of important developments and innovations that significantly impact disease recognition, staging and management, thus expanding its audience to include medical researchers, physicians, technologists, other health care providers, patients and their advocates, students and the global public," said Schelbert, professor of molecular and medical pharmacology at the University of California at Los Angeles and the George V. Taplin professor at the university's David Geffen School of Medicine....

Comment. Full OA journals provide free online access immediately upon publication.

Mark Jordan, Putting Content Online: A practical guide for libraries, Chandos Publishing, September 2006.  A new book on digitization.  It doesn't discuss OA but will be relevant to many OA projects.  Two of the chapters are OA from the author's site:  Chapter 6 on Search and Display and Chapter 8 on Project Management.

Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Digital University/Library Presses, Part 9: University of Cincinnati Digital Press, DigitalKoans, September 6, 2006.  Excerpt:

Established in 1995, the University of Cincinnati Digital Press is a service of the Digital Projects Department of the University of Cincinnati Libraries....

The press publishes both research publications and online publications....The press distributes its research publications on CD-ROM for a fee, and it utilizes the locally developed Windows-based CUrator software....With the exception of monographs (partial contents accessible), online publications are freely available. They are categorized as bibliographies, exhibits, monographs, and Web sites.

Do you remember the software from George Mason University with the working name Firefox Scholar?  It's been renamed Zotero and the public beta is expected to be released this fall.  From the site:  Zotero...

• captures citation information you want from a web page automatically, without typing or cutting and pasting on your part, and saves this information directly into the correct fields (e.g., author, title, etc.) of your Zotero library
• lets you store —beyond citations— PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages
• allows you to easily take notes on the research materials you capture
• makes it easy to organize your research materials in multiple ways, such as folders, saved searches (smart folders), and tags...
• is free and open source...

Comment.  Zotero's ability to extract citation information from a web page could automate the collection of metadata and lower the already-low hurdle to self-archiving.  It will be very useful to have this power built in to a tool that scholars might already have running on their desktops, embedded in their browser --and even more useful to have it in an open-source tool that could be optimized for self-archiving and integrated with the open-source archiving packages like Eprints and DSpace. 

A promise: If it should turn out that the spontaneous author uptake rate for the "hybrid gold open access" option (i.e., journals that give authors a choice between either conventional subscription-based publication or paying to make their own article open access) significantly exceeds the spontaneous author uptake rate for "green open access" self-archiving (currently only about 15%, averaged across all fields, even though 94% of journals have given authors their green light for immediate OA self-archiving), then this weary archivangelist will retire to his tent, in defeat and dismay, at having wasted a decade and a half on trying to maximize the impact of human rationality, only to discover that the sole thing that had been missing all along -- as Thomas Walker had suggested in 1998, in the proposal that launched the American Scientist Open Access Forum -- was the option to purchase the extra visibility at a price!

My guess, though, is that researchers are no more likely to do, spontaneously, for a fee, what they would not do, spontaneously, for free....Most researchers will not bother to self-archive until and unless they are required to do so by their institutions and/or funders: Not for free, and even less likely for a fee!

Hence it is Immediate-Deposit & Optional-Access Self-Archiving Mandates (IDOA) by researchers' institutions and funders that will propel self-archiving rates from their current spontaneous 15% rut into unstoppable growth toward 100%....

(Only IF AND WHEN the urgent question should ever become (1) how to pay publication costs (subscriptions having been cancelled) rather than (2) how to end access-denial and impact-loss (as now), THEN the windfall savings from the subscription cancellations will be the rational source out of which to pay the publication costs. To pay for OA now, in advance, when all the money is all still tied up in subscriptions, when all costs are still being covered, and when catastrophic cancellations are only a hypothetical possibility -- well, you find your own preferred i-word for describing it...)

• Tony Frank, Provost and Senior Vice President, Colorado State University
• David McLaughlin, Provost, New York University
• A. Edward Uprichard, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

When the Federal Public Research Access Act w