Open Access News

Michael Rogawski and Peter Suber, Support for the NIH Public Access Policy, Science Magazine, September 15, 2006.  A letter to the editor.  Since the Science version is only accessible to subscribers, I've posted an OA copy here (and a correction here).  Excerpt:

In their letter "Public Access Failure at PubMed" (7 July, p. 43), M. Stebbins et al. express a skeptical view of the NIH public access policy, basing their critique on several misconceptions that deserve comment.

1) Is the policy too costly? The current NIH appropriation is $27.9 billion. The $3 million anticipated yearly cost of the public access policy represents 0.011% of the appropriation. In fact, the expenditure on public access is dwarfed by the $30 million annually that NIH reports it provides its funded investigators for page charges and other costs of publishing in subscription journals.

2) Stebbins et al. claim that there is a lack of a demonstrated desire by the general public for access to primary research papers. Usage statistics for PubMed Central (PMC)the NIH database that provides full-text research articles to the public for free and serves as the repository for articles submitted under the public access policy suggest otherwise. There were more than 5 million users of PMC in April. That level of use suggests that not only are working scientists taking advantage of the resource, students and the lay public are as well. There is surely usage from junior colleges, research institutes, small companies, and many other organizations that do not have large budgets for biomedical research journal subscriptions.

3) The public access policy is criticized because there is no dedicated system to guarantee that corrections can be made after publication. Substantive author corrections or retractions are often made by the subsequent publication of errata or retraction notices. The National Library of Medicine has an established system that ensures that any published errata or retractions are noted in the PubMed citation and PMC full-text articles include a link....

6) Stebbins et al. claim that the proposed Federal Research Public Access Act (S.2695) requiring federal agencies to implement a public access policy has drawn criticism because it unfairly places scientists between funding agencies and publishers. Actually, organizations that have a financial stake in publishing are the main source of opposition to the policy and to S.2695. Scientists submit articles without compensation, they carry out peer review usually without compensation, and they often serve as editors for little or no compensation. Publishers make huge profits from this business model based on free labor. Because of the unsupported concern that the public access policy would adversely affect their business interests, they use their political and economic clout to lobby for restricted access, which is detrimental to the professional interests of the scientists that they claim to be serving....

Suzanne P. Lewis, Open Access Articles Have a Greater Research Impact Than Articles Not Freely Available, Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 1, 3 (2006).  A review of Kristin Antelman, Do Open-Access Articles Have a Greater Research Impact? College & Research Libraries, 65, 5 (Sep. 2004) pp. 372-82.  From the abstract:

The four disciplines represented a range of open access uptake: 17% of articles in philosophy were open access, 29% in political science, 37% in electrical and electronic engineering, and 69% in mathematics. There was a significant difference in the mean citation rates for open access articles and non?open access articles in all four disciplines. The percentage difference in means was 45% in philosophy, 51% in electrical and electronic engineering, 86% in political science, and 91% in mathematics. Mathematics had the highest rate of open access availability of articles, but political science had the greatest difference in mean citation rates, suggesting there are other, discipline?specific factors apart from rate of open access uptake affecting research impact....

The finding that, across these four disciplines, open access articles have a greater research impact than non?open access articles, is only one aspect of the complex changes that are presently taking place in scholarly publishing and communication. However, it is useful information for librarians formulating strategies for building institutional repositories, or exploring open access publishing with patrons or publishers.

Heather Morrison, Publishing Cooperatives: Another Seminal Work by Raym Crow, Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, September 15, 2006.  Comments on Crow's case for publishing cooperatives (longer February 2006 version or shorter September 2006 version).  Excerpt:

[Crow] presents a blueprint for moving to open access that will work for a great many publishers....

From my perspective, this is a unique opportunities for libraries to be involved in helping to set up and support such cooperatives. Many of these societies would very much like to move to open access, but lack the means. Their members are our faculty; it makes sense for us to help them, as this creates the changes in scholarly communications we have been seeking.

It is not hard for a library to provide support. There is free, open source software available. Hosting costs are minimal, and technical supports costs can be quite reasonable. Simon Fraser University Library, for example, has analyzed the costs involved per-journal to come up with a cost-recovery fee of $750 Canadian per journal, as listed on the SFU library web site [here].

This is a unique window of opportunity for library leadership in creating change in scholarly communications, in my view.
For the small, print-only publisher, with a little help, it could actually be quite easy to move from print-only to online and open access. It is easier to move to open access immediately, than to set up authentication and electronic subscription tracking first (it's probably more work to set up authentication and tracking than it is to set up an electronic journal)....

Even if the cooperative approach initially is likely to appeal first to the smaller publishers, not the big expensive ones where we'd really like to see changes, here is something to think about: once a cooperative is established, any editorial board fed up with high prices and limited access - has someplace else to go....

Abstract:   This is a submission to the "Interrogating the social realities of information and communications systems pre-conference workshop, ASIST AM 2006." Commons-based digital libraries (CBDL) are an emerging phenomenon – they are digital libraries based on notions of common pool resource management. Developing a CBDL framework will provide a sustainable and equitable vision for digital information management and use. The common-based digital library is first defined followed by the essential aspects of the framework. The metaphorical meanings and theories of libraries, repositories, and the commons are not included. Interested researchers are encouraged to contact the author. Acknowledgments: Thanks to Blaise Cronin for very helpful comments on a very early draft. Thanks to the faculty at Indiana University - they helped me develop some of these ideas by asking lots of hard questions. Thanks also to Heather Morrison for helping me refine the definition.

The NIH has agreed that when publishers deposit articles on behalf of authors, under the NIH's public access policy, then it will consider the authors to be in compliance with the policy.  The agreement was worked out with the American Society of Hematology (ASH) but will extend to other publishers who wish to take advantage of the option.  From yesterday's announcement:

The American Society of Hematology (ASH) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have signed an agreement that creates a new option for nonprofit publishers to comply with the NIH's Public Access Policy. Implemented by NIH on May 2, 2005, the policy has achieved less than 4% voluntary compliance. This new agreement will substantially increase compliance with NIH's policy thus enhancing access to science, help achieve NIH's goals of managing its research portfolio and developing a digital research archive, and protect the integrity of journal articles while maintaining the publisher embargo period of up to 12 months....

The new option was originally developed by a group of nonprofit publishers and includes the following provisions:

1. Participating nonprofit publishers will submit to NIH the final version of NIH-funded research articles upon publication. NIH will view the author as compliant with the policy and the author will not incur the burden of submitting and negotiating with NIH.
2. NIH has internal use only of the articles during the journals' embargo periods of up to 12 months.
3. Following the embargo period, NIH can publicly provide links to the articles on the journals' Web sites, and also distribute the content of articles from the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) PubMed Central (PMC) Web site.

As negotiations neared completion, a new provision was added by NIH that allows the NLM to distribute the full content of NIH-funded research articles to foreign country archives.

"ASH has volunteered to have its journal, Blood, be the first participant in this effort," said Bradford S. Schwartz, MD, Chair, ASH Journals Committee, and Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry and Dean, College of Medicine at Urbana of Illinois. "We hope that other nonprofit publishers will also participate. Regrettably, some publishers are reconsidering participation because the new provision is duplicative given the fact that the articles are accessible on the journals' Web sites and will be on PMC."

Comments.

1. The good news:  Publishers may deposit immediately upon publication, and probably will.  The bad news:  Under this option, the embargo will always be 12 months. 
2. To elaborate the good news:  This is a variation on the dual deposit/release strategy, which Stevan Harnad first conceived and I've often recommended.  To move closer to the full strategy, the NIH should release article metadata immediately upon deposit. 
3. To elaborate the bad news:  The NIH is letting publishers strong-arm authors into accepting the maximum embargo.  This may only formalize the status quo, but it's a retreat from several earlier understandings about the policy.  Don't forget (a) that the NIH policy is a request to authors, not to publishers, (b) that the policy "strongly encourages" authors to permit public release "as soon as possible" after publication, (c) that Elias Zerhouni, Director of the NIH, said in February 2005 that authors have a "right" to early release and that the "NIH is committed to helping our scientists exercise this right," and (d) that Zerhouni told the Washington Fax on January 21, 2005, that "we expect 12 months to be the exception, not the rule." All of this is now forgotten. 

Pascal Courty and Gerald Marschke, An Empirical Investigation of Gaming Responses to Explicit Performance Incentives.

From the journal's announcement:

The Journal of Labor Economics awarded Pascal Courty (European University Institute) and Gerald Marschke (SUNY ­ Albany) the H. Gregg Lewis Prize for their article....Awarded biennially in even-numbered years, the Lewis Prize honors the best paper published in the Journal in the last two years....In honor of Courty and Marschke’s award-winning work, the University of Chicago Press has temporarily lifted all access restrictions to the article....

Comment. It's an excellent idea to provide retroactive OA to articles when they, or their authors, win subsequent awards or recognition. But why not make it permanent OA? Does the press really think it will gain more from toll access to an old but respected article than it will gain from OA that draws new readers, impact, and citations? In a forthcoming article, I argue for systematically providing permanent OA to past research articles, starting with the most important.

With funding from the Mellon Foundation, the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University has conducted an analysis of repositories and services based on a methodology for connecting user requirements with repository programmatic features. The Sheridan Libraries considered a diverse range of content types and end user services by developing and gathering numerous scenarios from multiple institutions, and collaborating particularly with MIT, UVA, and ProQuest to evaluate DSpace 1.3.2, Fedora 2.0, and Digital Commons. In all cases, we worked with the "out of the box" system and documented APIs. It is important to note that our analysis focused on the ability of each of these systems to support specific functionality through documented APIs. Future work should include additional analysis of other means for supporting functionality (e.g., user interface or application based import or access), and of additional systems (e.g., ePrints)....

All project materials, including final results, are available at the main project wiki.

BioMed Central has released its Summary of funding agency policies on open access.  From today's press release:  

BioMed Central today released the results of its international survey of 75 biomedical funders on their policies regarding open access to the results of research. The survey confirms that there is strong support by funders for moves to increase access to the results of research, through open access publishing and open access archiving.

Summary of survey findings:

• 33 funders responded to the survey (or had already made their policies on open access publicly available)
• 31 funders have confirmed that they are willing to fund article processing charges for open access publication
• 16 funders are signatories of one of the major international declarations in support of open access
• 15 funders have an official policy in support of open access
• 11 of these official funder policies either encourage or require funding recipients to deposit all resulting research articles in an open access repository

To assist authors wishing to publish in open access journals, the results of BioMed Central's survey have been compiled into a comparison table, bringing together detailed information on each funder's policy.

Matthew Cockerill, BioMed Central's Publisher, commented: "It is very encouraging to see a growing number of funders expressing official support for open access, and confirming that they will make funds available to allow authors to publish in open access journals. Many of the funders we contacted as part of the survey indicated that, while they did not yet have an official policy in support of open access, it was an issue that they were actively working on. We hope that publication of this comparison table of funder policies will encourage even more funders to define official policies on open access."

PS:  For another collection of funder OA policies, see JULIET.

Abstract. The academic impact advantage of Open Access (OA) is a prominent topic of debate in the library and publishing communities. Web citations have been proposed as comparable to, even replacements for, bibliographic citations in assessing the academic impact of journals. In our study, we compare Web citations to articles in an OA journal, the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (JCMC), and a traditional access journal, New Media & Society (NMS), in the communication discipline. Web citation counts for JCMC are significantly higher than those for NMS. Furthermore, JCMC receives significantly higher Web citations from the formal scholarly publications posted on the Web than NMS does. The types of Web citations for journal articles were also examined. In the Web context, the impact of a journal can be assessed using more than one type of source: citations from scholarly articles, teaching materials and non-authoritative documents. The OA journal has higher percentages of citations from the third type, which suggests that, in addition to the research community, the impact advantage of open access is also detectable among ordinary users participating in Web-based academic communication. Moreover, our study also proves that the OA journal has impact advantage in developing countries. Compared with NMS, JCMC has more Web citations from developing countries.

Unlike the humanities, in most of the sciences today, the debates about open access (OA) are focused on ethical, professional and financial issues, not intellectual ones. In other words, few disagree that "the world-wide distribution of peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other interested minds" (to use Professor James Till's phrasing) is a positive intellectual move....

In the humanities, little of this debate has been evident. Perhaps it is because the publication of humanities research findings is less time sensitive, so rapid OA archiving has not seemed necessary. The silence about OA publishing is likely because of the continuing emphasis on monograph rather than article publication: books are still the currency in the tenure and promotion market. But the much discussed "crisis in scholarly publishing" has steadily been taking its toll, prompting the Modern Language Association of America to urge changes in the tenure process to provide more recognition for research disseminated in other than book form. If libraries cannot afford to but new scholarly books and university presses cannot afford to publish books few will buy and so cut back on their lists, junior scholars cannot get their books into print and therefore find it difficult to get tenure.

There are two obvious answers to this professional problem and both should be considered seriously. The first is the publication of books electronically: in July, an announcement was made that Rice University Press (which ceased publication in 1996) was being revived but would publish only online books --- peer reviewed, like all high quality scholarly publications....The second answer is that university tenure and promotion committees in the humanities should move away from the printed book as the measure of success and validate journal articles (in print or online) or electronic books as well, when the same processes of peer review are in place....

[T]his kind of step...would be a positive response to the crisis faced by young scholars whose careers are bying hijacked by the economic problems of the scholarly publishing industry....

In the course of our research, we often amass enormous files of visual and print materials that we could store --- and share --- through open access repositories. In my experience, few scholars feel particularly possessive about the material, even if they have often gathered it arduously: they share it readily with colleagues and students. The next step would be to share it with even more interested people through this kind of public archive....

PS:  For my take on why OA is moving more slowly in the humanities than in the sciences, see Promoting Open Access in the Humanities.

Karen Markey and five co-authors, Nationwide Census of Institutional Repositories: Preliminary Findings, a presentation at JCDL 2006 (Chapel Hill, June 11-15, 2006).   (Thanks to DigitalKoans.) 

Abstract:   The MIRACLE (Making Institutional Repositories A Collaborative Learning Environment) Project is a multi-phased research project that is investigating the development of institutional repositories (IRs) in American colleges and universities to identify models and best practices in the administration, technical infrastructure, and access to repository collections. This paper features preliminary findings from the project’s first phase, a nationwide census that will reveal the extent of college and university involvement with IRs in the United States. Preliminary findings address the types of investigative activities that institutions are conducting prior to making the decision to implement an IR, perceived benefits of IRs, staffing for IRs, methods of recruiting digital content, characteristics of operational IRs including their costs, and respondents’ next steps on the road to implementing an IR.

One table in the paper ranks the top and bottom three benefits of IRs.  The top three were "Capturing the intellectual capital
of your institution", "Better service to contributors", and "Longtime preservation of your institution’s digital output".  The bottom three were "Reducing user dependence on your library’s print collection", "Providing maximal access to the results of publicly funded research", and "An increase in citation counts to your institution’s intellectual
output".

When institutions without IRs were asked why they didn't have one yet, the top two reasons given were "Other priorities, issues, activities, etc., are more pressing than an IR" and "We have no available resources to support planning".  The bottom three reasons were "We do not understand or believe in the value or effectiveness of an IR", "We have no support from our library’s administration", and "We do not need an IR
These top and bottom reasons indicate".

Richard K. Johnson, Will Research Sharing Keep Pace with the Internet? The Journal of Neuroscience, September 14, 2006.  Excerpt:

The ways scientists share and use research are changing rapidly, fundamentally, and irreversibly....These changes signal a new era of digital scholarship. Many of yesterday’s limitations on research and learning are being swept away by the Internet. For the first time in history, we have a practical opportunity for efficient, unlimited sharing of information at virtually no cost beyond that of providing it to the first reader.

Many elements comprising the process of scientific exchange have been quick to respond to the opportunity....However, journals have been comparatively slow to embrace the potential of the ubiquitous network. True, online editions are now the norm for most journals and online reference linking has made it easier to navigate the literature. But fundamentally, most online journals are simply digital editions of their print analogs. Little changed since they were invented >300 years ago....

[T]he scientific paper and its historic container, the journal, are poised for change. The possibilities and demands of science together with new enabling technologies are just too compelling to resist....

The Internet offers the opportunity to eliminate access barriers that limit use of scientific findings, to share research freely among all potential readers. Because scientific discovery is a cumulative process, with new knowledge building on earlier findings, it is counterproductive to keep research locked up like books in a fourteenth century monastery....

To its credit, the Society for Neuroscience is taking steps to embrace change rather than guard the status quo that seduces so many successful organizations. The guiding principles of SfN's Open Access Publishing Strategy well capture the spirit with which all societies should approach the transition ahead: recognize the value and likelihood of open access publishing and be ready with an effective strategy when this happens; maintain the ethos of scientific publishing (i.e., that it is by and for scientists and that the advancement of science ranks above all other publishing motives); maintain peer review as an essential element in any open access format (Society for Neuroscience, 2006).

Q:  Many of Knovel’s science and engineering data tools are available for free. Can you please comment on the degree of success of your hybrid model which accommodates both paying customers and individual free accounts?

A:  We offer a material amount of content for free, primarily in the academic market. All of the content we offer for free, which is generally high value chemical data, is owned by Knovel. We do this as a thank-you to academe in general as they have been tremendously supportive of Knovel and our strong growth. In fact, we provide free access to significant content to almost 1,000 institutions around the world and are pleased to provide access to any institution that would find chemical property information useful. Although, this approach is not entirely altruistic as the graduates of these institutions become our end users in the future and it is our goal to have those graduates demanding to know “where’s my Knovel” when they land at their first job.

The Australian government has announced the approval of an OA Learning Object Repository Network (LORN).  The network should launch later this year.

ALPSP has announced the ALPSP/Charlesworth and ALPSP Awards 2006.  One winner is an OA data service.  Excerpt:

ALPSP Award for Publishing Innovation

...This year’s award was made to the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) for their Data Exchange, Quality Assurance and Integrated Data Publication (CIF and checkCIF).

The crystallographic information file (CIF) and associated data dictionaries allow the seamless transfer of information from experimental apparatus, through computation analysis, to database deposition and publication. CIF also allows the definition of quality standards for data deposition and publication and the deployment of mechanisms for checking compliance with such standards, via the checkCIF web accessible service. The main features of the standard are its well defined machine readable syntax, large collection of individually defined data names and the formalism which allows automatic validation of certain attributes of data. The standard has been extended to assist with routine aspects of editorial checking and peer review, which can now take place with much increased speed and confidence.

The judges were impressed with the way in which CIF and checkCIF are easily accessible and have served to make critical crystallographical data more consistently reliable and accessible at all stages of the information chain, from authors, reviewers and editors through to readers and researchers. In doing so, the system takes away the donkeywork from ensuring that the results of scientific research are trustworthy without detracting from the value of human judgement in the research and publication process.

The development and maintenance of CIF and checkCIF is sponsored by several publishers, but it is freely accessible to all. IUCr already works closely with other related structural science communities and is looking to extend this cooperation. The judges felt that in developing CIF and checkCIF, the IUCr has established an important example of data quality assurance with potential applications in other scientific, medical, and indeed social sciences publishing.

Here's an academic take on the legislation from today's Chronicle of Higher Education:

Congress has approved a bill establishing a Web-based, Google-like search engine to provide a single, public source of information about federal contracts and grants, including projects financed through academic earmarks.

The move was part of a flurry of activity in Congress this week to provide more transparency and accountability for earmarks, the noncompetitive awards secured by lawmakers for colleges and other constituents. The House of Representatives approved on Thursday a rules change requiring that all Congressional sponsors of earmarks be publicly identified.

The move for increased disclosure came as Congressional Republicans face low poll ratings and a November election. Critics fault the party for presiding over an explosion in earmarks for colleges and other recipients since Republicans took control of Congress in 1994.

But it was unclear whether the increased sunshine would reduce the number of these set-asides -- many members of Congress and college officials already boast openly about specific earmarks they obtain....

For each federal award, the new database must identify the recipient and give a description of the project and the amount of any federal funds that this recipient has received in the past 10 years. The bill sets a deadline of January 1, 2008, for the database to go online and January 1, 2009, for it to list subcontracts and subgrants....

[The database will include individual grants for scientific research.] Roy D. Blunt, a Missouri Republican who is House majority whip, said the database could highlight a variety of "wasteful government grants," and he mentioned two specific grants to universities that were financed by the National Institutes of Health and that the House voted in 2004 to eliminate (The Chronicle, September 10, 2004.) Congressman Blunt cited "millions of dollars spent with the National Institute of Mental Health to study what makes a meaningful day for college students, or to study how college students decorate their dorm rooms."

[N]umerous Democrats and some Republicans said the measure, H. Res. 1000, was flawed because it contained loopholes. The disclosure requirement applies, for example, to earmarks in appropriations bills passed by House committees but not to amendments introduced during floor debates. Those "manager's amendments" are often loaded with earmarks and introduced shortly before a final vote, leaving legislators little time to examine or debate them.

For more, see my first blog posting on this bill and other news coverage.

OpenDOAR is pleased to announce an upgrade to its service, with more repositories listed and more features for both users and repository owners.

OpenDOAR...has now surveyed over 1000 candidate sites world-wide for inclusion in the list. This has produced a quality assured list of 760 repositories....

A key feature of OpenDOAR is that all of the repositories we list have been visited by project staff, tested and assessed by hand. We currently decline about a quarter of candidate sites as being broken, empty, out of scope, etc. This gives a far higher quality assurance to the listings we hold than results gathered by just automatic harvesting....

OpenDOAR recently came as the leader in a global survey of 23 repository listings carried out by John Hopkins University for the purposes of analysing repositories and their holdings....

OpenDOAR listings can be sorted by subject area, language, country, content type and results searched in combination with keywords. Results can be displayed in different formats, including a tabular form which can be changed and specified for an individual's interests. Entries highlight repository features such as the size of holdings, presence of e-alerts, RSS feeds and language....

The OpenDOAR team have produced tools to assist repository administrators in defining the re-use policies for their holdings. These tick-box tools are simple to use and help administrators clarify their permissions. They produce complete policies, ready to plug into a repository's structure....

The EU is willing to fund a study of its digitization needs, process, and policies.  From its call for tenders:

[We will fund] the development and testing of a framework and associated methodology for the collection and analysis of data on digitisation of material by libraries, archives and museums in the EU. The aim is to be able to better identify the total European digitisation effort and progress, make international comparisons, and stimulate further digitisation.

The study results will be used by stakeholders that have an interest or direct involvement in digitisation policies and funding (governments, statistical agencies, cultural institutions, academic and scientific institutions, publishers, industry).

A report from the British Academy, to be launched on 18 September, expresses fears that the copyright system may in important respects be impeding, rather than stimulating, the production of new ideas and new scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

It is in the nature of creative activity and scholarship that original material builds on what has gone before – ‘if I have seen further, it is because I had stood on the shoulders of giants’ – therefore provisions that are overly protective of the rights of existing ideas may inhibit the development of new ones.

Existing UK law provides exemption from copyright for fair dealing with material for purposes of private study and non-commercial research, and for criticism and review. “There is, however, little clarity about the precise scope of these exemptions, and an absence of case law” said John Kay, who is Chair of the Working Group which oversaw the Review. “Publishers are risk-averse, and themselves defensive of existing copyrights.”

The situation is aggravated by the increasingly aggressive defence of copyright by commercial rights holders, and the growing role – most of all in music – of media businesses with no interest in or understanding of the needs of scholarship. It is also aggravated by the unsatisfactory EU Database Directive, which is at once vague and wide-ranging, and by the development of digital rights management systems, which may enable publishers to use technology to circumvent the exceptions to copyright which are contained in current legislation.

The Academy publishes with the report a draft set of guidelines for Fellows and scholars on their rights and duties under copyright legislation. They include

• authors and producers of original creative material should understand that their interests in copyright are not necessarily identical with those of publishers and should not rely on publishers to protect them
• the law should be clarified - statutorily if necessary – to make clear that the use of copyright material in the normal course of scholarly research in universities and other public research institutions is covered by the exemptions from the copyright act.
• publishers should not be able to use legal or technological protection through digital rights management systems to circumvent copyright exemptions
• the growth of digital databases should be monitored to ensure that ready access continues to be available for the purposes of scholarship

Comment.  The US suffers from all the same problems except the EU Database Directive.  I wish the US National Academies, perhaps joined by the AAU, would say so and recommend the same remedies.  In both countries, the set of remedies could be expanded to include the first-sale doctrine for digital content, Lawrence Lessig's Public Domain Enhancement Act, a reduction in the term of copyright (at least prospectively), and clarification that search indexing is fair use.

Update. The full report is now online (September 18, 2006).

The Royal Society has finished digitizing all the back issues of all its journals back to 1665.  To celebrate, it's offering free online access to the lot until December.  See the RS announcement or The Register's news story.  (Thanks to Matt Cockerill.)

Normally I don't blog trial offers of free online access but I'm making an exception for this one.  This window onto the history of science is extraordinary.

Update. Here's a comment from Tom Wilson on the Information Research Weblog:

The journals will be freely available until the end of the year but then only through subscription. Unfortunately, the Royal Society has teamed up with JSTOR in making this offer, and JSTOR is not an open access supporter.

So - this fascinating resource will not be available readily to historians of science, unless their institutions pay the subscription, or to enthusiastic amateurs, or, presumably, to school-children. Surely the archive could have been made partially open access - from 1665 to 1899, perhaps?

Once again, we have an instance of commercial interests closing down access to scholarly, scientific information.

[T]hrough a series of innovative licensing deals, the [UK National Archives] is taking an unusual approach to the task of digitising even obscure archives: it's encouraging private firms to foot the bill for doing so, in return for a certain amount of exclusivity - often time-limited - on the use of data. One result, according to chief executive Natalie Ceeney, is to create a thriving industry for genealogy websites in the UK - and the study of our ancestors is already one of the biggest pursuits on the web.

Britain's online genealogy sites are "probably better than any other country," she told the Guardian/RSA Free Our Data debate in July. And certainly, wider access for the public and for private companies is very much what Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign seeks to create with Her Majesty's digital crown jewels....

Access to the National Archives is already free, says Ceeney; the problem is that access is to the paper form. Digitising the data makes it far more easily available, and useful; but...[d]igitising documents, especially old ones, is a slow, labour-intensive business.

Thus National Archives online data is not free to electronic shoppers. It'll cost you £3.50 to order your great-grandfather's medal record from the first world war (if he was of that generation, he'll probably have one), and £8.50 to order an electronic image of a document not yet digitised.

But, according to Ceeney, licensing data to commercial firms is keeping costs down. "The average price to download a census record is 60p, about a tenth of what it would cost to digitise it ourselves."

Ceeney's approach may be a neat way of squaring the cost circle as public organisations come under dual pressures to minimise their taxpayer funding while simultaneously making their data widely available....

Tim Coates has blogged some notes on yesterday's keynote by Richard Charkin (CEO of Macmillan) at the National Acquisitions Group conference (Reading, September 13-14, 2006).  Excerpt:

[Charkin] urged the [publishing and library] sectors to build a united front to help battle "copyright erosion" by open access models, Google digitisation, and other threats.

Comments.

1. This is all I have on the OA part of Charkin's talk.  If anyone has more details, I'd like hear them.
2. Of course OA literature does not depend on the infringement or abolition of copyright.  I assume that Charkin knows this.
3. How about if universities and libraries build a united front to battle the "copyright enclosure" by publishers who demand to own the copyrights to research conducted by others, written up by others, and funded by taxpayers?

Ulrich Herb, Schöne neue Welt des Open Access, Telepolis, September 14, 2006.  (Thanks to Der Schockwellenreiter.)  Part 1 of a multi-part story, this part focusing on price barriers to scientific research --either in the form of reader-side subscription fees or author-side publication fees.  FWIW, here's Google's English.

PS:  I can't tell whether Herb acknowledges two important qualifiers:  (1) that most OA journals charge charge no author-side fees and (2) that more TA journals charge such fees than OA journals.  He does acknowledge that OA archiving charges no user fees.

Philica is a new OA journal covering every academic field, charging no author-side fees, providing immediate OA to the submission, and using a form of open review with anonymous, recursively weighted reviewers.  Articles in different fields are collected into sections called PsychoPhilica, EduPhilica, JurisPhilica, and so on.  (Thanks to inn0vate.)  From the site:

Philica was conceived by two British psychologists who had grown dissatisfied with traditional academic journal publishing. This makes profits from researchers’ efforts through strong copyright restrictions which greatly limit the free exchange of information, both between research groups and between researchers and the public. Philica gives control back to researchers, and provides an open and transparent forum where knowledge and thought can live and grow.

Crucially, Philica still provides a process of academic peer review, allowing proper critical examination of ideas and findings. However, for the very first time this process is both transparent and dynamic. It is transparent as reviews can be seen publicly; it is dynamic because opinions can change over time, and this is reflected in the review process....

You submit Articles or Observations using our submission page. Here’s the interesting bit: Your work is published to the community instantly. It is available for viewing by everyone and anonymous refereeing by any other professional researcher....And because Philica is the “Journal of Everything”, never again will you read that awful phrase, “Your work is great — but this isn’t the right place for it”....

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Abstract:   In this article open access is defined, and the resources and issues of greatest relevance to the medical librarian are discussed. The economics of open access publishing is examined from the point of view of the university library. Open access resources, both journals and articles in repositories, are already significant and growing rapidly. There are close to 2300 fully open-access peer review journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) (320 health sciences titles are included). DOAJ is adding titles at a rate of 1.5 per day. An OAIster search of resources in repositories includes more than 7.6 million items (a rough estimate of the number of articles in repositories, although not all items are full text), and this number will exceed one billion items before the end of 2007. Medical research funders, including the US National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, the UK Medical Research Council, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, either have implemented or are considering open access policies. This will drive greater growth in open access resources, particularly in the area of medicine. There are implications and leadership opportunities for librarians in the open access environment.

The Chapman University School of Law (in Orange, California) issued this press release last Friday:

In an increasingly important objective measure of scholarly productivity, the Chapman University School of Law has been ranked #1 in the nation in terms of the number of scholarly articles posted in the past 12 months on the Social Sciences Research Network, or SSRN, a key online distribution network for legal scholarship.

The rankings [free registration required], which became available this week based on data through September 1, 2006, list Harvard Law School at #2 , New York University at #3 and the University of Minnesota at #4. Rounding out the top ten were UCLA (#5), Yale (#6), Duke (#7), and the University of Chicago, University of Illinois and George Washington University (tied at #8). Chapman law professors also took top honors in the number of scholarly articles posted by author, out of 1,500 professors listed nationwide: Professor Jeremy Miller was #1, Professor John Eastman was #3, and Professor Donald Kochan was #21.

The Chapman law faculty also broke into the Top 100 on SSRN in terms of the number of articles downloaded over the past 12 months....

Parham Williams, dean of the Chapman School of Law, noted that the accomplishment was even more impressive than it first appeared, as the majority of Chapman faculty only began posting their scholarship on SSRN this past summer....

Joe Hodnicki at Law Librarian Blog excoriates the Chapman statement:

US News ranked Harvard the second best law school in the country in its 2006 report. Chapman, well, Chapman is a Fourth Tier school. Harvard's academic peers rated the school and its faculty 4.8 on a scale of 5.0. Chapman's peer assessment score is 1.5, only four law schools scored lower than Chapman in peer assessment.  I conclude, reasonably I think, that these two school aren't exactly playing in the same league, not even in the same law school fantasy league....

[O]f the 145 Chapman Law documents posted in the SSRN digital depository in the last 12 months ending on September 1, 2006, a whooping 108 were submitted in August 2006 (and most of those were submitted on the last day of August). This has to be the most creative jag any law school faculty has ever experienced -- just-in-time productivity, no less.  But a closer examination reveals that the only person who was really productive in Orange, California in August was the person who uploaded the documents to SSRN, documents whose dates of publication ranged from 2006 to ... wait for it ... 1981. Yes, 1981!...

I hope the Chapman Law Library staff didn't spend its entire summer tracking down hardcopies for scanning!

Comment.  Note for non-lawyers:  SSRN is the OA repository of choice for legal scholarship in the US. 

Hodnicki is right that Chapman doesn't rank high on the standard criteria for evaluating law schools and he's right that Chapman's recent SSRN posts don't show recent productivity.  But since Chapman made neither claim, his arguments are beside the point except to put Chapman's real claim in a wider context.  Chapman claimed that it was doing better than other law schools at providing open access to its research output --which is true and commendable. 

There are many criteria for judging the worth of a law school.  (Disclosure:  I graduated from Northwestern Law School in 1982.)  Willingness to provide open access to its research output is new, and Chapman is right to say that it's "increasingly important".  It may not be in the US News set of criteria, but it's a valid measure of a school's commitment to live up to its mission to share the knowledge it generates. 

I do hope that the Chapman's law librarians spent the summer tracking down hardcopies for scanning.  I also hope they spend regular time helping faculty (or those who need help) post OA copies of their born-digital research.  I hope they work just as hard next year as they did last year and I hope that other law school librarians will try to catch up with them. 

And by the way, I also hope that US News will soon add, as one criterion among many others, the percentage of a school's annual research output on deposit in OA repositories.  I hope all similar guides do the same, whether they are evaluating law schools, medical schools, graduate schools, or any other kind of research institution.

• Elizabeth Kiss, President, Agnes Scott College
• Ronald D. Liebowitz, President, Middlebury College
• Robert R. Lindgren, President, Randolph-Macon College
• Douglas Bennet, President, Wesleyan University

The tally is now 120 and counting.

The Dutch DARE project has launched Promise of Science, an OA repository for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) in the Netherlands.  Promise of Science covers all Dutch universities and on launch day (yesterday) already contained 10,000 Dutch ETDs.  The site supports searching by keyword, author, institution, or year.  For more details see the announcement.

The EU i2010 strategy has launched a new web site on the Digital Libraries Initiative, including a new FAQ.  The project is European-wide and multi-lingual, covering both the sciences and cultural heritage, and includes a commitment to massive digitization, long-term preservation, and open access for works in the public domain and those copyrighted works for which the project can obtain permission.

PS: I'd say more about this important initiative here but I've often blogged it in the past.  I hope the new web site lets the i2010 team streamline or simplify its confusing proliferation of sites.

Public Library of Science (PLoS), to launch a new medical journal on neglected diseases -- US$1.1 million: PLoS will launch PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, a new open-access, peer-reviewed medical journal covering science, policy, and advocacy on neglected tropical diseases. While other medical journals have increased their attention to neglected diseases in recent years, few journals focus on the topic. The new journal will provide an important forum for scientists from developed and developing countries to share the latest information on neglected disease research.

Comment. The Gates Foundation has come close to supporting OA in the past, particularly through its annual Access to Learning Award and its recent decision to mandate data sharing for Gates-funded AIDS research.  But I believe the PLoS grant is its first direct support for OA literature.  This could mark the beginning of a significant new source of funding for OA to medical research.

Update. Here's the PLoS press release on the new journal. Excerpt:

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) announced today the creation of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, the first open access journal devoted to the world's most neglected diseases.

PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases will focus on the overlooked diseases that strike millions of people every year in poor countries, including elephantiasis, river blindness, leprosy, hookworm, schistosomiasis, and African sleeping sickness. The journal, supported by a $1.1 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will begin accepting submissions in 2007....

[Peter Hotez, Editor-in-Chief of PNTD] will discuss the journal during a panel discussion on neglected diseases on September 21 at the Clinton Global Initiative's annual meeting in New York. The panel will also feature former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who has helped to lead the successful global campaign to eradicate Guinea worm disease....

"Through its open-access format, the journal will help build health and research capacity in the regions most affected by neglected tropical diseases," said Dr. Hotez.

The journal's distinguished international editorial board includes many experts from developing countries, and some of the biggest names in tropical medicine and global health, including renowned health economist Jeffrey Sachs and the director of the World Health Organization's African river blindness control program, Uche Amazigo....

A new EU-funded project will lay the foundations of a large-scale, pan-European public infrastructure for research information.

Open-access to research information is vital for researchers. The long-term vision of the DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research) project is to create an knowledge infrastructure for European researchers, which could include any form of scientific resource, from reports, to research articles, to raw data to other media.

A number of countries and institutions already have repositories and networks which bring together a wide range of research content. A good example of this is the DARE Network in the Netherlands. Launched in 2004, DARE networks the digital data collections of all Dutch universities, as well as several related institutions, and allows users to access the information, which is arranged consistently. To date, DARE provides access to more than 75,000 digital records. The organisation behind DARE, SURF (the Dutch higher education and research partnership organisation which networks services, information and communications technology), is a partner in the DRIVER project. 

In a similar way, the European Digital Repository Infrastructure will eventually be a virtual network of repositories from across Europe. Initially, the project will focus on linking 51 institutional repositories from the Netherlands, UK, Germany, France and Belgium. This early 'test-bed' version of the European Repository will offer users a number of services, such as search, data collection, profiling and recommendations....

Ultimately, the project partners hope their virtual repository will build up a critical mass of research materials which will represent a powerful demonstration of Europe's research output.

I have just returned from Amman, Jordan, working with the General Assembly of eIFL, a network of library consortia representing well over 3,000 libraries in almost 50 countries, serving over 8 million users. They do a lot of work on "Open Access", to make books and content available in countries in development and in transition. Advocacy work to make sure that authors have alternatives to giving up the rights to their own work, and the new role a librarian can have in dealing with such issues on behalf of research staff, while negotiating with the big publishers.

Paul Peters of Hindawi Publishing Corporation in Cairo explained how they have built a growing company out of material available under Creative Commons licenses, very much along the same lines as software companies produce open source software: the creator pays to make the initial version, after that the cost of reproduction is nearly zero.

The reasoning of Hindawi and Open Access: few authors are driven by a need (or possibility?) to create income from selling copies of their work. Most are writing to get maximum exposure of their ideas or research, so any barrier to distribution should be eliminated. Exposure will generate better opportunities to attract funding or better-yielding other engagements: jobs, speeches, project opportunities...

On Sept. 6, a group of 56 presidents from various liberal arts colleges around the country issued an open letter supporting the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 [FRPAA]. This letter, which was co-signed by Swarthmore College President Al Bloom, brought the issue of open access research further to the forefront of higher-level education.

“[President Bloom] was pleased to [sign the letter] for precisely the reasons the letter urges support of the legislation,” Vice President Maurice Eldridge ’61 said in an e-mail....

“In a nutshell, the basic idea [of open access] is that academic research should be published in venues without restrictions to use,” Department of History Professor Timothy Burke said. “We as a college are supporting faculty to carry out research which the academic author receives nothing for, and then the library has to pay to be able to read it. This is a bizarre economic irrationality.” ...

[College Librarian Peggy Seiden] was happy at the progress that was being made, particularly in Congress. “I’m generally supportive of the open access movement, in most ways that it’s been defined,” she said. “I think it’s important for faculty and their institutions to retain ownership of information and not cede rights to publishers. I’m certainly happy this is on the congressional agenda. For too long, libraries have had to lead the effort to reform scholarly communication on our own.”

Burke said that the support for open access makes sense for most faculty who publish their research. “What you accrue [through your publishing] is reputation capital, all of which helps you,” he said. “What are the conditions of circulation that will help you? As much circulation as possible.”

He also expressed hope that the administration would continue its efforts in pushing for a higher degree of open access research. “I know there’s a lot of interest and discussion between college presidents and college provosts, and the leaders understand that open access is a no-brainer that helps financially and ethically. It’s a win-win situation.”

Vice President Eldridge agreed with Burke’s viewpoint about the advantages of open access. “I suspect that open access would not change fundamentally the way that faculty and students conduct their research so much as enhance and perhaps even streamline the process,” he said.

Physics research promoter and publisher the American Physical Society (APS) is to extend open access to all its journals.

The APS previously made its five print journals available through subscriptions, and its two e-journals (Physical Review Special Topics and Physics Education Research) on an open access basis.

Payment of a $975 (£514) publication fee will secure the free online availability of any article from Physical Review A-E (the fee for Physical Review Letters articles is $1,300). The model covers all articles, including those from the APS archive, which stretches back to 1893, should any philanthropic sponsors wish to pay for articles to be released online for free.

Tom McIlrath, APS treasurer and publisher, said the society had been keen to keep the fee low to make it as attractive as possible to authors....The society had been discussing ways of introducing open access for some time, said McIlrath. The difficulty, he said, lay in enabling authors to publish open access articles without significantly impacting subscription revenue.

“If we get a lot of requests this way, [McIlrath said,] we can lower subscription prices further. If it begins to be a predominant path for authors to take, we’ll have to reconsider, because it begins to eat into our subscription fees.” ...

Comment. For my evaluation of the APS implementation of the hybrid model, see my article in the September SOAN.

India is making noticeable progress in the field of 'Open Access', a growing global trend which could help it get out of the trap which blocks researchers from here reading what other Indians have published.  Yet, a lot more still remains to be done, say experts working in the area.

"Nearly a hundred journals have already taken the Open Access route," says Chennai (South India)-based Subbiah Arunachalam, an information scientist once called India's and the developing world's "great advocate for open access".
Open Access (OA) implies the free online availability of research-oriented scientific and scholarly journal articles. It picked up globally since around 2002.

"Journals of the Indian Academy of Science, the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), the Mumbai-based (medical publishing) MedKnow, NIC-Medlars and the Calicut Medical Journal, among others, have gone the Open Access route," Arunachalam told APC.

In early 2006, the Bangalore-based information company Informatics (India) Ltd, launched Openj-gate. This portal covers 3500+ English-language [OA] journals. Some 2000 of these are peer-reviewed.

But much [more] is needed. Says Arunachalam: "Research performed in India, funded by Indian taxpayers, is reported in a few thousand journals, both Indian and foreign. Since some of these journals are very expensive. Many Indian libraries -- including sometimes the author's own institutional library -- are not able to subscribe to them." ...[Cutting discussion of many OA successes.]

Interestingly, some major global commercial publishers had promised to offer access to countries having less than $1000 per capita incomes. But they went back on their word, on the plea that they enjoyed sizeable subscriptions in India.
So, will this solve the dilemma of having so much science, and yet so little of it -- for a world which is "developing" but where the gap is simply growing?