Open Access News

Here are a few responses I've seen to yesterday's public statement by 10 university administrators who oppose FRPAA.

1. A colleague in publishing writes:

   It doesn't take much surfing to identify that many of these signatories are not exactly neutral players, e.g the first two looked up were:

   Mary J.C. Hendrix  - a former president of FASEB

   Barbara Horwitz  - a former president of the American Physiological Society

2. A librarian colleague writes:

   Ten signatories is all the publishers could come up with? I confess I'm happily surprised.

   The University Librarian stopped by my desk a couple of weeks back to let me know that our VP for Research had been approached to sign this, but had asked him first. I wonder how many other institutions played out a similar scenario....

   The education process that FRPAA has enabled is probably vastly more important than FRPAA itself, and without that education process, we don't *get* mandates anywhere, ever.

3. And this for attribution:  Jonathan Eisen, Vice Provost of U. C. Davis on the wrong side of Open Access, The Tree of Life, September 22, 2006.  Excerpt:

   [This is] my first incredibly disappointing moment at U. C. Davis. My brother sent me this link about a letter to Congress from some provosts and deans trying to go backwards on the issue of Open Access to scientific publications....And one of the signatories is the Vice Provost for academic affairs at Davis, Barbara Horwitz. Their letter contains so many falsehoods I do not even know where to begin....

   They also claim:

   The free posting of unedited author manuscripts by government agencies threatens the integrity of the scientific record, potentially undermines the publisher peer review process, and is not a smart use of funds that could be better used for research.

   How on earth does posting of unedited manuscripts threaten the integrity of the scientific record. That is like saying scientists should not give talks on anything until they have published it, and then they should only quote from their published papers. Or, maybe scientists should not even discuss their work at all in public and should just present it through papers published in journals. I am astonished that a Officer of my University would make such a completely outlandish statement.

   Perhaps most amazingly, this collection of supposedly academic folks says:

   As a member of the Senate Budget Committee, you are certainly sensitive to the various forces that shape and reshape the Federal budget from year to year. Recently, for example, we learned that the Biomolecular Interaction Network Database--the world's largest free repository for proteomic data--lost its funding and curtailed its curation efforts.

   This is so absurd I do not even know where to begin. BIND is in the true tradition of Open Access - a database of proteomic information for the world to share. And these provosts and deans are trying to use its loss of funding as an argument for LESS OPEN ACCESS. How completely nonsensical is that. But even more incomprehensible, BIND is a CANADIAN database effort, supported in a large part by Genome Canada funding. So how this relates to the funding by the US Congress is beyond me.

   This collection of provosts and deans clearly do not care about accuracy or the truth. They are clearly trying to protect money that they get from publishing. And they are pretending that this is for "all the scientists". Could they not just be honest and say "listen, we would like to continue to bring in money for publishing. And Open Access might cost us some of that money". Instead, they demean the whole debate by inventing stories....

   [M]any of the signatories have active leadership roles in publishing non Open Access journals. Robert R. Rich is the Editor in Chief of J. Immunology, which does not support Open Access. Kenneth L. Barker is the President of SEBM, a publisher of non open access scientific publications. Barbara A. Horwitz, was the president of APS which sponsored this press release and publishes many non Open Access journals. I am sure many of the others have some type of similar roles. It would have been nice for them to mention that in this press release....
   

PS: I blogged my own response yesterday.

DRIVER is part of the E17.5 billion Sixth Framework Programme (FP6), the European Union's main instrument for funding research in Europe, which runs from 2002-2006....DRIVER will work with partners over the next 18 months to create a test-bed of a large-scale virtual content resource to access and integrate individual repositories. In other words, the intention is not to build a digital repository system itself, but to provide an interface to existing repositories. Users of DRIVER will be able to access services such as search, data collection, profiling and recommendation across a range of content types including reports, research articles, experimental or observational data, rich media and other digital objects. The second phase of the project will be "the successful interoperation of both data network and knowledge repositories as integral parts of the E-infrastructure for research and education in Europe"....

This provides the first indication of the potential opportunities available to commercial players, both software providers and publishers. The DRIVER web site explicitly emphasises that its role will be to focus on infrastructure - the intention is that the "availability of such a basic scientific content infrastructure should encourage academic and/or non-academic service providers to build high-valued and innovative services on top of it". The availability of content for scholarly communication seems to be becoming a given - it is in the provision of tools and services on top of these content sets where the real competition lies. Thomson and Elsevier already know this well - recent announcements of new services targeted at author identification demonstrate these increasingly important areas of competition. But the collaboration of SURF with search player FAST indicates that competition to build services around DRIVER will not only come from other publishers. The value of this market is evident to software solutions providers - however, working with publishers who already know the market well could prove a popular strategy....

Comment. The DRIVER approach, highlighted by Worlock here, is not only one of the best ways to pay for OA but one of the best ways to structure the cooperation of OA initiatives and commercial interests.  Here's the recipe:  Provide OA to the basic data and peer-reviewed literature, and then earn money from services that make the OA layer more useful (i.e. "value-added" services).  Many of these services will themselves be free and open, but the sky's the limit and there's plenty of room for commercial players to create services so useful that they are worth paying for.

[T]he Encyclopedia of Earth [is] a new electronic reference about the Earth, its natural environments, and their interaction with society. The Encyclopedia is a free, fully searchable collection of articles written by scholars, professionals, educators, and experts who collaborate and review each other's work. The articles are written in non-technical language and will be useful to students, educators, scholars, professionals, as well as to the general public....

The motivation behind the Encyclopedia of Earth is simple. Go to Google and type in climate change, pesticides, nuclear power, sustainable development, or any other important environmental issue. Doing so returns millions of results, some fraction of which are authoritative. The remainder is of poor or unknown quality.

This illustrates a stark reality of the Web: digital information on the environment is characterized by an abundance of "great piles of content" and a dearth of "piles of great content." In other words, there are many resources for environmental content, but there is no central repository of authoritative information that meets the needs of diverse user communities. Our goal is to make the Encyclopedia of Earth the largest reliable information resource on the environment in history....

Content for the Encyclopedia is created, maintained, and governed by this community of experts via a specially adapted "wiki" - an online tool that allows experts to collectively add and edit web content. Unlike other, well-known wikis, such as Wikipedia, access is restricted to approved experts and all content is reviewed and approved by Topic Editors prior to being published from the wiki to this public site. Revisions to existing articles are also done on the author's wiki, and when approved they become the current version at the public site. This process produces a constantly evolving, continuously updated reference....

The Encyclopedia is a crosscutting component of the larger Earth Portal, which is a constellation of subject-specific information portals that contain news services, structured metadata, a federated environmental search engine, and other information resources. Every EoE article contains a link to its corresponding portal, and vice versa The Earth Portal is the first major portal to launch within the Digital Universe.

Synopsis

Within the vision of Chemists Without Borders, Open Access to the traditional scholarly, peer-reviewed journal literature is the library, a global library with equal access to our shared knowledge for all. Open Access is necessary to development of equitable access to chemistry education and research opportunities in both the developed and developing world. CWB strongly supports Open Access, as defined in the Budapest, Berlin, and Bethesda statements, and the measures necessary to implement open access, such as funding agencies requiring open access to the results of the research they fund, and educating researchers about Open Access.

Open Source Science promises more rapid advances in research through open sharing of research information at all stages of the research process. Open Source Science means more opportunities for collaboration, whether to facilitate CWB projects or provide researchers with more opportunities for participation in international research collaborations. CWB strongly supports Open Source Science within the context of Open Access.

Open Access

Definition (from the Budapest Open Access Initiative):  "By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."

True Open Access means free availability immediately on publication, or before as preprints....There are two main approaches to Open Access. Articles can be made openly accessible on publication by the journals themselves, using one of a variety of business models (OA publishing, or the gold road). Or, authors can publish in subscription-based journals, and self-archive their work in an open access archive or repository (self-archiving, or the green road).

Open Access to the traditional scholarly, peer-reviewed journal literature advances the vision of Chemists Without Borders in several ways. Indeed, with respect to this literature, open access epitomizes Chemistry Literature Without Borders, as it means equal, barrier-free access to scholarly knowledge for everyone, everywhere....

Open Source Science

There are many approaches to the sharing of scientific information throughout the research process; CWB encourages experimentation with approaches that meet the criteria of open access along with open source. One example is blogging of experiments....

Suggested Actions

Educate chemists and chemistry students about open access and open source science, for example through the CWB blog and newsletter.

Create an open archive for chemistry; help develop and support policies requiring deposit of research articles, for example funders' and universities' policies (note: some resources – technology, expertise – required).

Write letters to funding agencies supporting open access policy initiatives in development, for example the Federal Research to Public Access Act in the U.S.

Encourage chemists to publish in open access journals and/or self-archive their work. Encourage chemistry publishers to move to open access business models and revise authors’ agreement to facilitate self-archiving.

CWB will vote on the statement at its next meeting, probably in mid-October.

...By now Jefferson had become convinced of the importance of making the basic tools of biotechnology freely available to all. Increasingly appalled at the way biotech was developing, he concluded that, whatever other people might do, he at least could act differently. In short, he decided to share [his gene reporter system, GUS] with the world.

So in 1987 he prepared 10,000 tubes of DNA sequences for use with GUS, wrote a comprehensive manual explaining how to use it with plants, and distributed lab packs to 500 research institutions around the world....Within a short space of time GUS was the most widely used reporter gene in the field....

In short, although at the time not conscious of the parallel, Jefferson had independently come up with the same strategy as the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which was later to blossom into the Open Source Software Movement. GUS became first choice for molecular biologists for the same reason as the Open Source server Apache has become the most widely used web server software on the Internet: it was freely available, and it worked!...

As a consequence, GUS was to prove instrumental in helping scientists around the world create more efficient varieties of maize, wheat, rice, soybean and cotton....Excited by this turn of events Jefferson began to a hatch plan for a much grander project. Wouldn’t it be great, he thought, if he could generalise what he had achieved with GUS throughout biotechnology?...

CAMBIA [is] essentially...an umbrella organisation for the BiOS initiative.  And the BiOS initiative consists of three separate projects: a licensing infrastructure to enable the sharing of biotech tools in a non-proprietary manner; a web-based collaboration platform; and a patent database. The BiOS licences, then, are designed to actively encourage collaboration and technology sharing, and to discourage exclusiveness and hoarding....

[T]he way to avoid [harmful patent lock-up], says Jefferson, is Biological Open Source. That is, to re-craft the innovation infrastructure in a way that allows developers of biotech "applications" to assert proprietary rights over their "products", and to profit from that if they wish, while leaving the core tools and "operating systems" of molecular biology freely available to anyone who wants to use them. Only by moving to that position, he says, will we be able to introduce fair and open competition in biotechnology.

In short, biotechnologists need to adopt the same model as Open Source software developers, where the lower levels of the stack (the operating systems) are — like GNU/Linux — freely available to everyone, while the higher level applications built on top of these operating systems are able to be exploited in a proprietary way....This model, argues Jefferson, encourages innovation while avoiding harmful monopolisation....

RP: In talking about Biological Open Source you make frequent comparisons with the Open Source Software Movement. There are a growing number of other "free" and "open" movements today, including Open Access, Creative Commons, Open Data, Open Spectrum, Open Journalism, Open Politics, and so on. Why do you think all these open movements are springing up? What's the big picture here?

RJ: Several things are driving this. As information becomes more pervasive, for instance, we are seeing more abuses of it, and attempts to monopolise it. Moreover, these monopoly threats are more and more pernicious, and their results so evident, that people are putting a lot of effort into trying to fight them. In addition, people perceive IP expertise to be a lucrative new business opportunity, so a cottage industry of IP specialists is developing, and this is encouraging further abuses, and new threats of monopolisation. While the various free and open movements have a lot in common, however, we also need to stress their differences. Open Access, for instance, is not the same as Open Source, or indeed Biological Open Source.

RP: What differences are you thinking about?

RJ: Open Source is about the capability to use something, and so the focus is not just on getting it out there but getting it out there complete with every bit of enablement necessary for anyone to use it, including the legal permissions.

RP: You mean that Open Source implies making available not just the end product (the software), but also the ability to adapt that end product (i.e. the code)? The focus of Open Access, by contrast, is exclusively on making scientific research freely available, not on providing the tools or expertise to exploit that research.

RJ: Precisely. Again, it is the capability to use this stuff, Richard, that is the critical feature. So it is not just about getting it out there. After all, that has always been the ethos of scientific publication, and that is all that science publication does. Publication doesn't get the whole know-how package out there; it doesn't get the permissions package out there; and it is not designed to address the infrastructure — the physical constraints — issues. To be truly Open Source you need these other things too.

RP: And presumably you would see Biological Open Source having more in common with Open Source than Open Access? When you distributed GUS, for instance, you didn’t just release the basic information, but you also made available a detailed handbook explaining how to use it, plus thousands of tubes of DNA sequences?

RJ: That's right. It might help to see the difference if you think about the term A2K, or Access to Knowledge. We are not about A2K, but C2UK, or Capability to Use Knowledge. That is also what BiOS is about, and it is what Open Source is about.

RP: Knowledge is not enough in itself.

RJ: Precisely. There is a huge misunderstanding amongst pundits about this, and also among some of the practitioners too. If you want to talk about Open Access, in which you share all the data, that is fine. Indeed, I'm all for Open Access. But it is the capability to use knowledge that's key. And that capability must encompass the ability to deliver innovation, complete with freedom to operate and other permissions, along with the investments necessary to make a change in something other than a career. So the Open Access Movement is only half way there.

Comment.  I hate to quarrel with someone whose work I admire without reservation, but Jefferson has a truncated view of open access.  In its fullest sense, for example, as articulated in the BOAI, OA provides both free online access to research articles and permission to use and reuse them.  That is, it removes both price and permission barriers.  Nor does anyone claim that this is everything or that, after achieving it, nothing remains to be added.  Where using knowledge requires tools, OA doesn't itself provide the tools or pretend to.  It's one key part in an ecology of mutually supportive initiatives, much needed and very useful on its own but even more useful in conjunction with complementary innovations.

Since 2001, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) has offered free, open source software for the management and publishing of journals and conference proceedings. PKP software reduces publishing costs, improves management, enhances indexing, and increases access to knowledge.

PKP software includes three proven solutions. Open Journal Systems (OJS) provides a journal management system that supports every stage of the refereed publishing process, from submissions to online publication and indexing. Open Conference Systems (OCS) supports the management of conference paper review process as well as the scheduling and release of materials, from abstracts to full papers, with online posting and indexing. PKP Harvester (PKPH) harvests the metadata of OAI-PMH compliant sites, including OJS journals and OCS conferences....

More than 800 journals currently use OJS software; a sample of the journals using OJS is [here].

"Our focus is on improving the public and scholarly quality of research through open source publishing tools that make different forms of open access feasible for journals and conferences," said John Willinsky, director of PKP and Pacific Press Professor of Literacy and Technology at UBC....

"The Public Knowledge Project has a proven track record providing innovative open source software that benefits the whole community," said Heather Joseph, SPARC Executive Director. "PKP's offerings make it possible for scholars and libraries to run successful publishing programs on their own terms and are a leading example of how such tools may be used to provide information via open access channels and facilitate the widest possible dissemination. We encourage SPARC members and partners to consider these valuable alternatives for their publishing programs."

Susanne Dobratz and Frank Scholze, Certification and beyond : DINI open access activities in Germany, a presentation at OAI 4, the CERN workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (Geneva, October 20-22, 2005).  Self-archived September 22, 2006.  Excerpt:

Local publication servers are common and at the same time highly fragmented in Germany. To bring them to greater success it is necessary to standardize further developments. DINI with its publication "Electronic Publishing in Higher Education" laid a foundation for a widespread introduction of general regulations and standards concerning electronic publishing and archiving of scientific documents in institutional repositories. The DINI-Certificate "Document and Publication Repositories" takes this a step further by clearly describing criteria, that will guarantee repositories to be set up and operated according to national standards and international developments. Repositories fulfilling these criteria may be awarded a certificate, testifying to their quality. The DINI certificate may also help their operators to market the institutional repository as a reliable service to support electronic publishing as well as self- archiving at their institution. In parallel to this quality of service activities DINI started to promote a more widespread practice of open access archiving and publishing in Germany by - translating and distributing the SPARC Open Access brochure, - recommending suitable and precise open access policy statements for universities, - recommending standardized usage statistics, - organizing advocacy events, - supporting local initiatives and university libraries in taking on an active role in collecting scientific material from their researchers and teachers - extending the DINI certificate to allow Universities to provide a reliable and attractive self-archiving component to their scientists The talk will show the achievements of the DINI working group on electronic publishing since Peter Schirmbacher’s talk at OAI 3 and discuss the experiences made in Germany with this approach.

Welcome to Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica! Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica was founded in 1959 as a traditional print journal, but has now taken the novel step of moving to the open access model already used successfully by our publisher, BioMed Central. Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica will be freely available online, and will continue to publish articles that encompass all aspects of veterinary research and medicine of domestic animals and wildlife....

Why 'open access'?  Traditionally, readers pay to access research articles, either through subscriptions or by paying a fee each time they download an article. Escalating journal subscription charges have resulted in libraries subscribing to fewer journals, and the range of research available to readers is therefore increasingly limited. Having to pay to access research articles limits how many can read, use and cite them. Often only the title, keywords, and abstract are available for free. As a consequence, many researchers read only the abstract of the paper they are interested in, rather than the full article.

From a scientific point of view, a far better strategy is to offer all readers unrestricted access to the full articles. Such a strategy has at least three benefits. First, authors are assured that their work is disseminated to the widest possible audience and the authors are free to reproduce and distribute their work. Second, the information available to researchers will not be limited by their library's budget. Third, a country's economy will not influence its scientists' ability to access research....

Summary:  NIH's, PLoS's, the Wellcome Trust's and now the UK MRC's unreflective support for PubMed Central (PMC), a Central Repository (CR), as the locus for direct self-archiving by authors is very unfortunate for Institutional Repositories (IRs), for self-archiving, and for Open Access (OA) progress in general. Alma Swan has published key papers on both OA self-archiving policy and institutional versus central self-archiving (IRs vs. CRs) analysing the reasons.
      (a) Institutional self-archiving and central self-archiving are at odds in the quest for a universal self-archiving policy solution that will cover all OA research output.
      (b) It would be awkward and inefficient to have a different external cross-institution CR as the locus of primary deposit for every funding area, subject area, combination of subject areas, or nation.
      (c) Researchers' own IRs are the most natural and efficient way to scale up to covering all of OA space from all disciplines, institutions and nations.
      (d) Direct central self-archiving is already obsolete in the OAI era of interoperable OAI-compliant IRs.
      (e) The optimal solution is for researchers to self-archive their own papers in their own OAI-compliant IRs and for CRs to be harvested from those distributed IRs.
      (f) Universities are in the best position to mandate self-archiving and monitor and reward compliance.
      (g) Mandating self-archiving in CRs instead simply creates an unsystematic and incoherent policy that does not scale up to covering all research output from all research institutions.
      (h) What the NIH, Wellcome Trust and MRC should be mandating is not direct depositing in PMC, but universal depositing in the fundee's own IR, from which PMC can then harvest collections.

It had to happen.  After 125 university presidents and provosts have publicly endorsed FRPAA, the DC Principles Coalition found 10  who oppose it.  From today's announcement:

Senior academic officers from 10 institutions issued a letter to Senators John Cornyn (TX) and Joseph Lieberman (CT) expressing their concerns about the provisions of S.2695, the "Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006." These institutions, which collectively make nearly $3 billion in annual research investments, expressed their concerns that mandating a six-month public release of journal articles would negatively impact the academic community and the publishers that disseminate their work.

In signing the letter in opposition to S.2695, Dr. Robert Rich, Senior Vice President and Dean, University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, expressed his concern that "the legislation would damage the special relationship between scholarly societies and academic communities who work in partnership to ensure that these communities are sustained and extended, science is advanced, research meets the highest standards, and patient care is enhanced with accurate and timely information." Rich also expressed concern that "S.2695 would divert scarce Federal dollars away from research in order to provide a service already provided to the public by society publishers."

The nonprofit publishers comprising the DC Principles Coalition are among those who are able to provide public access to literature either immediately or within months of publication without government mandate through corporate and academic subscriptions. According to Martin Frank, Ph.D., Executive Director of the American Physiological Society (APS) and a member of the Coalition, "a six-month release mandate may force some journals to shift to a publication model requiring authors to pay for their publications through their Federal grants, diminishing funds available for research to benefit the public good."

Issued on September 22, 2006, the letter reads:

Dear Senators Cornyn and Lieberman:

The undersigned senior academic officers write to express our concerns about S.2695, the "Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006."

We agree that the broadest dissemination of scientific literature is good for research. However, mandating a six-month public release of journal articles would have negative unintended consequences for the academic community. The free posting of unedited author manuscripts by government agencies threatens the integrity of the scientific record, potentially undermines the publisher peer review process, and is not a smart use of funds that could be better used for research....

Even when federal funds support the research reported in journal articles, these funds do not cover the costs associated with turning raw data into archived scientific manuscripts. The cost of peer review, copy editing, formatting, printing, online publication, search engine development, and permanent archiving ranges from $2,500 - $10,000 per article.

At present, publishers cover these publication costs through the sale of subscriptions. A Federal policy mandating public access after six months would threaten the financial viability of many of these journals through the loss of subscription revenues, forcing them to identify other means to cover costs.

One such means is to shift the costs to the scientists/authors. This is the business model currently used by the Public Library of Science, for example, which recently increased fees to $2,500 per manuscript. These fees either come from the author's Federal research grant--thereby decreasing the amount available for research--or from the university, which could ultimately lead to higher institutional costs than those needed for journal subscriptions.

In fact, some studies have already shown that research intensive universities would have to pay considerably more to gain access to the same amount of research under an author- pays model than a subscription model....

Comments.

1. Although the letter opposes the OA mandate in FRPAA, the primary objection seems to be the six month embargo.  This is consistent with the recent pattern of publisher lobbying against the NIH policy:  many publishers are signaling that they can live with mandated OA if only the embargo stays at 12 months.
2. The objection to "free posting of unedited author manuscripts" is deceptive.  All the manuscripts in question have been peer reviewed but not all have been copy edited.  If the danger is that the articles are untrustworthy, then the publishers are complaining about their own peer review procedures.  If the danger is that copy-editing adds a crucial layer of fact-checking, then FRPAA gives publishers the right to replace the author's final manuscript with the copy-edited published edition.  Publishers here are complaining about their own choices.
3. The claim that "some studies have already shown that research intensive universities would have to pay considerably more to gain access to the same amount of research under an author- pays model than a subscription model" is also deceptive.  There are precisely three studies of this kind, and all three of them falsely assume that 100% of OA journals would charge author-side fees (when fewer than half do so now) and all three of them falsely assume that universities would pay 100% of these fees (when funding agencies already pay a large percentage of them and would continue to do so).  For more details, see my article on this point in SOAN for June 2006.
4. The other publisher arguments are all old and familiar.  See my 10-point rebuttal to the AAP's version of the publisher argument against FRPAA.
5. The signers of today's letter are senior administrators at University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, the University of Chicago, the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, the State University of New York Upstate Medical University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, the Children's Memorial Research Center at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and University of Tennessee System, the University of California at Davis, and the Oregon Health and Sciences University.  If you work at one of these institutions, let your administrators know that the signing individual does not speak for the faculty or for the research interests of the institution itself.

Sergey Parinov has made a Russian translation of the BOAI Self-Archiving FAQ.  (Thanks to Sergey Parinov via Stevan Harnad.)

Sandrine Avril and Catherine Gunet have made a French translation of my article, Nine questions for hybrid journal programs (from SOAN for 9/2/06). 

Many thanks, Sandrine and Catherine.

The October issue of Walt Crawford's Cites & Insights is now online.  This issue contains a detailed, two-part series on pioneering OA journals (Part I, Part II).  Excerpt:

They weren’t generally called Open Access journals in 1995: If that term existed before 2001 or 2002, it certainly wasn’t the standard name for free online scholarship. But there were examples of free online scholarship, some dating back to 1987. In the May 2001 Cites & Insights, I explored the question: “Do free scholarly electronic journals last?”

The title of that essay, Getting Past the Arc of Enthusiasm, revealed one finding I had suspected going in: It was not unusual for one of these pioneering efforts to start out with a bang, fueled by the enthusiasm of its founders, and fade away in an “arc of enthusiasm,” with articles and the journal itself disappearing after a few years.

In the course of the 2001 essay, I casually asserted a definition that’s been cited elsewhere: If a journal lasts at least six years, it can be considered a “lasting” title even if it later goes out of business. More than half of the open access journals founded in 1995 or before that were refereed and “visible” (see below) were still publishing six years later; that’s a good record. I thought it would be interesting to see how they’re doing after five more years. Thus, this update....

[Walt ends Part I by classifying 83 journals from the ARL Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists for 1995 as Special Cases (3), Oddities (3), Arc of Enthusiasm (14), Ceased Pioneers (11), and Surviving Pioneers (52).  In Part II he lists 189 additional journals missing from the ARL Directory but included in the DOAJ with launch dates of 1995 or earlier.]

Add it up and we see that at least 121 and possibly as many as 184 journals publishing refereed scholarly articles and reviews were available in OA form in 1995 (some years earlier) and lasted at least a decade, showing articles at least through 2004.

How many free online journals came and went between 1995 and 2004? It would be delightful to say that the mortality rate was only 13%: the 25 ceased journals in Part I and the three in Part II, out of the maximum plausible number for 1995 (66 in Part I, 147 in part II). But that benign picture is certainly far too optimistic.

The oldest surviving scholarly ejournal I’m aware of, New Horizons in Adult Education, began in 1987. Thus, this year marks two decades of sustaining free ejournal publishing. It would be fascinating and, I believe, worthwhile to try to track the ejournal landscape through the first of those two decades --or, more realistically, to see what emerged during the first decade (1987-1996) and what happened to those early ejournals. But that’s another story.

Comment. This is the best work to date on the early history of OA journals and should be the point of departure for future histories.

California citizens who want open access to California-funded stem-cell research present their case today before the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the agency overseeing the research.  The OA advocates have publicly released the background materials for their presentation.  (Thanks for California Stem Cell Report.)

PS:  For background on today's meeting, see my blog post on Tuesday.

Summary:  Cornell University's copyright advice pages are numerous and confusing because they cover everything -- from Cornell user rights for the use of other people's work to the negotiation of rights for Cornell authors' own work. One can give prospective self-archivers far more specific advice: The "Immediate Deposit, Optional Access" policy (ID/OA):

(1) Deposit all your final, peer-reviewed, accepted drafts (postprints) in your Institutional Repository (IR) immediately upon acceptance for publication.

(2) Set access to the postprint as Open Access immediately if it is published in one of the 69% of journals that are already green on postprint self-archiving.

(3) Otherwise provisionally set access to the postprint as Closed Access and notify the journal that you will set access as Open Access on [Date, one month from today] if you do not hear anything to the contrary.

(4) During any Closed Access interval, make sure your IR has the EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button to handle any individual requests for a single email copy -- Fair Use -- from would-be users who see the postprint's openly accessible metadata: available for DSpace IRs and for EPrints IRs. 

The EU wants to digitalise and online the vast volumes of cultural works in member state libraries to make them accessible to all, but unless the issue of copyright and intellectual property rights are solved, the European Digital Library may consist only of books and journals published before the 1920s.

The European Commission in August urged the 25 EU member states to speed up and co-operate on the setting up of a European-wide digital library.  In its recommendation, Brussels called on governments to deal with obstacles such as copyright questions and reasons for delays in the digitalisation of materials, which include books, journals, newspapers, photographs, museum objects, films and other cultural works....

The aim is to have at least 2 million cultural works accessible via the European Digital Library by 2008, and at least six million volumes by 2010....

But until a solution is found, only volumes already in the public domain - works no longer covered by intellectual property rights - will be available online....

[W]orks being digitalised for the library will mainly be from before the 1920s unless the issue of intellectual property rights is dealt with. "This is one of the main topics in all discussions going on at the moment," says Britta Woldering of Deutsche Nationalbibliothek and CENL – a group of national librarians.  "The issue of copyright is the biggest barrier for digitalisation," she said.

Ms Woldering said many libraries with digitalised works could only show them in their own reading rooms. "It's like keeping them in a black box, which is ridiculous if you think how many readers they could reach online," she noted....

Cameras are rolling in Yale University classrooms this fall, as part of a project to make video recordings of several courses available free for anyone to view online.

Yale is the latest institution to pledge to create "open courseware," in which detailed material from courses is placed online in the hopes that it will be used by educators and students elsewhere. Open courseware was pioneered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which in 2001 announced plans to put material for nearly all of its courses online.

Yale plans to start out slowly, publishing materials from seven courses by the fall of 2007. After that, the project might expand if it is deemed a success. The effort is supported by a $755,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation....

In an announcement on Tuesday, Yale officials said that the university would be the first to offer complete sets of videos along with its open courses. But Anne H. Margulies, executive director of MIT's OpenCourseWare Initiative, said MIT already has 26 courses online that include full sets of lecture videos. The institute has materials available for more than 1,400 courses, though most focus on text, such as lecture notes.

The idea of systematically publishing course materials online for use by those outside the university has grown slowly in recent years. Leaders from MIT and other colleges recently formed the Open Courseware Consortium, made up of educational institutions worldwide that have pledged to place complete course materials for at least 10 courses online....The University of Notre Dame, which is a member of the consortium, unveiled its first eight open courses this week.

Terri L. Bays, director of the open-courseware project at Notre Dame, said the university planned to publish materials for 30 courses within two years, with the support of a $232,800 grant from the Hewlett Foundation. Within the next 10 years, she hopes that two-thirds of the university's courses will be free online....

I just wanted to make you all aware of the fact that the latest issue of the Journal of Manual and Manipulative Therapy has been posted online....For those of you unfamiliar with JMMT, it is the official journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Manual Physical Therapists and the Canadian Academy of Manipulative Therapy and it is read worldwide with subscribers in some 40 countries. Our goal is to provide up-to-date, evidence-based, clinically relevant information in the area of orthopaedic manual therapy....

Since I have become the Editor-in-Chief, we have also increased our open access and open access, online-only content in an effort to disseminate the material published even wider and quicker.

Open access material in the latest issue includes the abstracts for the upcoming AAOMPT conference, a great guest editorial by Dr. Gwen Jull on cervicogenic headache diagnosis, a case report by Paul Glynn and Josh Cleland on the evidence-based management of a patient with neck and upper extremity complaints with online video supplements, a research article by Oostendorp et al discussing possible characteristics of subpopulations of patients with so-called non-specific low back pain, and a case report by Schenk et al on management of a patient with cervicogenic dizziness. The subscriber-only content is equally interesting and --in my admittedly biased opinion-- well worth a subscription to the Journal.

I have long been concerned over our store of collective human knowledge, and recent events seem to be taking a dramatic turn for the worse.  Nevertheless, I believe there is a solution....

Human knowledge is stored in the distributed network of individual human minds, and a repository of human knowledge needs to be stored in a distributed fashion as well, a "knowledge commons," if you will.

What would the Knowledge Commons look like?  Fairly simple, as it turns out.  Imagine a peer-to-peer network in which everyone could contribute pieces of knowledge, and those pieces would be immediately spliced into bits and replicated throughout the system.  Like SETI@home and other distributed computing initiatives, everyone would share the load, so to speak, for the Knowledge Commons.

Importantly, such a system would be open on two fronts:

1. Open access:  the system would be open to both input and output.  In other words, anyone could put information into the system, and anyone could obtain information out of the system.
2. Open development:  since the core protocol would be open, changes to it would be community-driven.  Furthermore, anyone could develop a client application (or a web application) that would connect to the Knowledge Commons.

What this means is that instead of one wikipedia site, we could have many sites.  Instead of one way to access the Knowledge Commons, we could have many.  And politically, instead of one person controlling our collective knowledge, we could have many.

Hmm, sounds like something worth doing….  Any takers?

With the library community and politically strong disease groups behind the bill [FRPAA], one has high hopes that something of this order will end up as law. However don't hold your breath, as the battle is just beginning on the bill. Many influential society publishers are already working the halls of Congress to get the bill off track. They are joined by the lobbying efforts of major STM publishers. So it is anyone's guess how this will all end, but it is clear that Congress and the general public feel that NIH and other government-funded research results are locked up and not providing a proper return on investment. While many of the library groups are crying that the scientific publishing is broken, it is the disease groups that are getting the most attention. Just creating the image that the cure is out there for any of these horrific diseases that affect children and others but that the cure is locked up in high price journals not accessible to researchers gets great political play and gets votes on the hill.

While many are in the debate on Open Access and this bill, if passed, this bill would have a major impact on publisher's business models. The one community that is still not engaged is the faculty that writes, reads and edits 60,000 articles that result from NIH funding alone. Without this constituency one has to wonder if the Open Access movement is going forward with the power and influence that it needs to win the battle. It is hard to find great enthusiasm in the community of scholars. Scholars just want to do research, teach, and share their results with their peers and to advance their field of knowledge. Promotion and tenure are still the main issues of the day, not Open Access or the high price of journals. Perhaps Open Access is just the current phase that we are going through and some other solution will rise to the top. My feeling is that commercial publishers will evolve and continue to find a way to make money, and the society publishers will be left shifting in the wind if this bill passes.

Following a collaboration project initiated between the Centre for Technology and Society (CTS), of FGV School of Law in Rio de Janeiro, and the Innovation and Access to Knowledge Programme of the South Centre, an intergovernmental organization of countries of the South, it is with great pleasure that we make it public the first post kindly prepared by the latter’s experts: ...

The discussion on the TPMs was highly contentions. TPMs refer to technological tools that may be used by the copyright owner, performer or phonogram producer to prevent or restrict non-authorised use and/or access to works in the digital environment. Concerns have been raised with the implementation of TPMs as they could block access by, for example, consumers to legitimate uses of content when it is in the public domain. According to some delegations, if TPMs were extended to broadcasting organisations and cablecasting organisations as proposed in the two alternatives in the Basic Draft Proposal, it would mean new obligations for WIPO Members, since neither the Rome Convention nor the TRIPS Agreement contains such provisions. In addition, some delegations, including Brazil, argued that TPMs are not relevant to protect signals, which is the objective of the Treaty, and would only serve to protect the content.

IV. Conclusion

...[T]he Broadcasting Treaty contain provisions that may seriously affect developing countries. It also shows that the establishment of safeguard measures, such as limitations and exceptions are essential for assuring access to knowledge, in particular, for those who lack economic resources to pay for accessing information.

Here are brief descriptions of eleven more digital university/library presses, bringing the total number of presses covered by this series of postings to 21.

1. Clemson University Digital Press...
2. EPIC: "The Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC)...."
3. eScholarship Repository...
4. Digital Library and Archives, Virginia Tech University Libraries...
5. Praxis (e)Press...
6. Project Euclid... 
7. Project MUSE...
8. Rice University Press...
9. Scholarly Publishing Office, University of Michigan Library...
10. Sydney University Press...
11. The University of Texas Houston Electronic Press...

Far from charging us for the data it collects, the Government should encourage us to use it freely...Don't you hate it when you have to pay for something twice? ...

Until 1999, the Ordnance Survey, the British Government's mapping arm, was funded by the taxpayer to make detailed maps of the entire country. These days, they sell limited-use licences to this national asset on a "cost recovery" basis. So, having paid my taxes, when I buy an OS map to go walking in the Lakes, I have the privilege of paying again....

In the US, by contrast, geospatial data collected by federal agencies are placed in the public domain. This allows the creation of cool, free-to-access services such as gsmloc.org, which is building a comprehensive database of GSM cell towers to allow people to locate themselves without a GPS, and Gutenkarte, a weird combination of Project Gutenberg e-texts and maps which shows you all the geographic locations mentioned in a particular book. Check out Around the World in 80 Days.

So what might happen if we adopted the American approach? A lot more than a few mash-ups.

A study in 2000 estimated that, although the US Government spends twice as much on data collection as the EU countries, but the economic value generated by businesses using it was more than ten times greater – €750 billion. That's billion, not million. Was the analysis done by self-justifying American civil servants or biased open-geodata activists? No, it was done by the EU itself. You would have thought that most governments would jump at a share in a multi-hundred-billion-euro fillip for their economies.

A further irony about the short-sighted "cost recovery" policy is that, again using the Ordnance Survey as an example, 60 per cent of its data sales are back to the Government itself. This is not cost recovery, it's merely moving cash around the system. Although free and open data distribution would mean the Survey would need explicit funding, the increased tax revenue from the economic activity generated would more than pay for the additional cost (again, according to the EU study). That's joined-up government. We have some of the highest quality mapping data in the world; the possibilities are limited only by the imagination.

Natural justice and hard-nosed economics agree – Ordnance Survey and other government data, in open formats and under open licences, should be made available, free to all.

You make much of your work available free online as Creative Commons-licensed downloads. What prompted you to give your work away for free, and how difficult was it to convince your publishers to go along with the idea?

It's just good business. As publisher Tim O'Reilly says, an author's worst problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity. Of all the people who failed to buy one of my books today, the vast majority did so because they never heard of them, not because they got a free digital copy from the Internet. Indeed, a digital copy makes the print copy more valuable, since it adds utility in the form of portability, ease of reproduction, searching and archiving, and so on. In short, giving away ebooks sells print books.

It's a great moment to be an SF writer. SF appears to be the only fiction that anyone cares about enough to really aggressively steal over the Internet. I'd rather be in the "worth stealing" camp than the "beneath notice" camp. As with every revolution in information production and dissemination, Internet-based copying will create lots of opportunities for attentive, entrepreneurial artists who don't turn crybaby the minute last year's business model is threatened by next year's. I'm going to be one of the entrepreneurs.

My editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, was behind me all the way on this. It was a no-brainer for him and Tor, and the books have sold well enough that there's never been any question as to whether I'll continue the experiment.

The Commission to the European Parliament has come out in favor of open access to publicly-funded geospatial data.  (Thanks to Public Geo Data.)  Excerpt:

The overall aim of the proposal is to improve the way in which spatial data held by public authorities supports environmental policy, by improving the harmonisation of spatial data and the interoperability of spatial services and ensuring greater sharing of the data between public authorities and on-line access by the public....

The Commission does not agree that intellectual property rights held by public authorities should be among the list of grounds for limiting public access to spatial data.

The Commission also does not agree that the possibility of limiting access should be extended to cover discovery services referred to in Article 18(1)(a) of the Commission proposal, since this would mean that the public would not even be able to learn of the existence of the data.

The Commission maintains that the view services referred to in Article 18(1)(b) of the Commission proposal should be made available free of charge, and cannot accept the Council position allowing public authorities to charge and license for these services under certain conditions;

The common position makes the obligation to avoid obstacles to data sharing, as well as the rules for ensuring harmonised conditions for Community institutions and bodies, subordinate to the right of public data providers to charge and license other authorities for their data. It is also vague about the obstacles to be avoided. It will therefore be ineffective in achieving one of the key aims of the proposal, and could even have the effect of increasing obstacles to the sharing of data....

Abstract:   This is a submission to the "Interrogating the Social Realities of Information Systems" Preconference Symposium at ASIST 2006. This abstract describes an investigation of the changing access and use rights of licensed scholarly digital resources, particularly the rights associated with digital works protected by technological protection measures (TPM – also known as digital rights management systems or DRM).

The provosts of six New England land-grant colleges have released their September 6 letter to Senator John Cornyn in support of FRPAA.  From yesterday's press release:

Six public land-grant universities in New England, representing six states and $700 million in annual research investments, have issued a letter of support for the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (S.2695). The letter is signed by the Chief Academic Officers from University of Connecticut, University of Maine, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of New Hampshire, University of Rhode Island, and University of Vermont. This brings the total number of leaders from the higher education community who have spoken out in support of the Act to 125....

Issued on September 6, 2006 by the Council of Presidents - New England Land-Grant Universities, the letter reads:

Dear Senator Cornyn,

As the chief academic officers of the six public land-grant universities, in New England, we are writing to you in support of the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006. Our universities enroll over 100,000 students. They confer about 17% of the bachelor’s degrees and 20% of the doctoral degrees in New England. Collectively they invest more than $700 million per year on research, largely with the support of federal grants.

Dissemination of results is an essential component of the land-grant tradition of research and of our investment in science. We share your concern that far too often the results of research funded by the U.S. government are not broadly available to researchers, scientists, and members of the public. In addition to ensuring that this research is made available quickly, it is also critical that the published information remain broadly available for future use. We are pleased to see that your bill is designed to support both early, as well as long-term, access to scientific research results.

Open access to publicly funded research facilitates the candid discussion needed to accelerate research, share knowledge, improve treatment of diseases, and increase human understanding. Your bill is a crucial step in realizing this goal, and we look forward to working with you to secure the bill’s passage. .”

The provosts whose names appear below have endorsed the FRPAA. The deans and directors of the universities’ libraries also strongly endorse the FRPAA.

Sincerely,

Peter J. Nicholls, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs,
University of Connecticut

Edna Szymanski, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost,
University of Maine

Charlena Seymour, Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs,
University of Massachusetts Amherst

Bruce L. Mallory, Provost and Executive Vice President, University of New Hampshire

M. Beverly Swan, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, University of Rhode Island

John M. Hughes, Provost and Senior Vice President, University of Vermont

Mark Ware Consulting, Scientific publishing in transition: an overview of current developments, a white paper from ALPSP and STM, September 2006.  See esp. pp. 16-26, which are devoted to OA, including the OA citation advantage, OA journal business models and their viability, and OA archiving.  From the executive summary:

[9] There are some 2000-2400 open access journals in existence, publishing about 2–5% of total articles. They use a variety of funding models, grants, membership subscriptions, sponsorship/advertising, commercial reprints, classified advertising, subscriptions to print editions, volunteer labour, and subsidy or support in kind by the host organisation. The best-known approach, is the “author-side payment” model, where a publication charge (mostly in the range $2–3000) is levied on each accepted article (page 16).

[10] It is still too early to say for sure how viable open access publishing will be. Neither of the leading pioneers, Public Library of Science and BioMed Central are even close to profitability. The available data are patchy but, taken together, suggest that achieving widespread sustainability for open access journals will not be particularly quick or easy (page 19).

[11] The other route to open access is via self-archiving, whereby the author posts a version of the article (typically the revised manuscript after peer review but prior to copyediting, known as a post-print, rather than the final published article) to an open web-based repository. These repositories can either be central, subject-based collections (e.g. the well-known physics repository, arXiv) or organised to collect the output of a particular institution (page 22).

[12] A worrying development for publishers is the emergence of policies by research funders and by authors’ employers requiring the deposit of articles in such repositories. The US National Institutes of Health introduced such a policy in 2005, and has subsequently been followed by the Wellcome Trust and some of the Research Councils in the UK, and others in France, Germany and elsewhere (page 25).

[13] Publishers fear that widespread systematic self-archiving of this kind will have a serious impact on journal subscriptions, the revenue stream that supports the vast majority of journals. There is evidence from physics and elsewhere that archiving reduces the amount of use of articles get on the publisher’s website (readers get the articles from the repository instead). There is also some evidence from a survey of librarians that this is becoming an increasingly important factor in considering journal cancellations. A major study on this subject by Scholarly Information Strategies for the Publishing Research Consortium is due to report on this during October (page 26).

Anestis Sitas, CDSware (CERN Document Server Software), Library Hi Tech, 24, 3 (2006).  From the abstract:

Design/methodology/approach – CDSware supports the creation of electronic preprint servers, Online Public Access Catalogs (OPACs) and document systems on the web. It complies with the OAI-PMH (Open Archive Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) and uses MARC 21 as its underlying bibliographic standard. It is open source software, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Findings – CDSware has been created for the handling of large repositories including various types of materials, like descriptions of museum objects, collections of confidential or public documents, etc.

Practical implications – All technical details of the software are described to enable comparison with all other open source software for managing and bibliographic organization of digitized context....

On Tuesday, Yale University announced that it would be starting a version of an open access online tool for those seeking to gain from its courses. But the basis of the Yale effort will be video of actual courses — every lecture of the course, to be combined with selected class materials. The money behind the Yale effort is coming from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which was an early backer of MIT’s project, and which sees the Yale project as a way to take the open course idea to the next level.

“We want to add another dimension to open courseware,” said Catherine Casserly, a program officer at Hewlett. She said that video components used at MIT and elsewhere have been very popular with people all over the world. “We’re trying to make that bridge” to the audience for high quality American education, she said. Casserly said that Yale’s initiative — starting with seven courses this year, with plans to grow quickly — was the first open courseware effort based on lecture videos. “We hope to see this spread to other universities,” she said....

Kleiner said that Yale officers were “very admiring” of the model built by MIT, and she praised MIT as well for sharing extensive information about how its program was designed. But she said that Yale believes that course lectures “are the core content,” and need to be central. “We’re following in MIT’s footprints, but really taking a new step,” she said....

PS:  For more background, see the story I blogged on 9/8/06.