Open Access News

ProQuest has launched UMI Open Access Publishing.  From the site:

Open Access is a term used to describe content that a reader can access free of charge. With the new UMI® Open Access publishing service, graduate students can now publish their dissertations and theses with ProQuest on an open access basis. Those graduate student authors that choose to publish their graduate works on an open access basis will be significantly increasing the reach of their research....

The primary benefit of Open Access publishing is that it guarantees the widest possible exposure of your graduate research. It can also help ensure that the officially published version of your dissertation or thesis is the most widely available version in the primary literature....

In addition to the standard features of our Traditional publishing service - rigorous quality assurance, assignment of an ISBN, permanent storage in our microfilm vault, and so on - the Open Access publishing service includes the following:

• Free, public access to your graduate work in PQDT Open, our online repository of Open Access graduate works (launching in late fall 2006).
• Free access to your graduate work for all institutional subscribers to ProQuest® Dissertations & Theses (PQDT), the database of record for graduate research.
• Explicit author permission for the degree-granting institution to make the full text of your graduate work available to the world through their institutional repository.

How does Open Access publishing compare with ProQuest's  Traditional publishing service?  Read more here about the details and see a comparison chart showing the benefits of our Open Access and Traditional Publishing services....

Learn more about how Open Access publishing works in our downloadable Overview, and check out our Open Access Publishing FAQ.

Arthur Sale has created a Google Custom search engine, AuseSearch, covering all the OA repositories in Australia and New Zealand.

LibraryZen has created LisZen, a Google Custom search engine drawing on 500+ library-related blogs, including Open Access News.

PS:  Google Custom search is very spreading fast and I don't plan to blog all the new search engines, even those focusing on academic sites and topics. 

Charles Bailey has added four Google Custom search engines to Open Access Update, the RSS feed and web site woven of many individual OA-related feeds.  One of the new search engines covers the Mailing Lists in the collection, one covers the Serials, one covers the Weblogs, and one covers the Wikis.

Abstract: this post looks at the cost of publishing and dissemination in relationship with open access. The wide range of costs per article - from nothing, to thousands of dollars - is explained. A journal that relies on free, open source software, volunteer labor, and in-kind server support, may have no hard dollar costs. A commercial journal with paid editorial staff, profits and taxes to deal with, may have substantial expenditures.

In preparation for its meeting next week, Establishing a sponsoring consortium for Open Access publishing in particle physics (Geneva, November 3, 2006), CERN has posted some background documents for the participants.  (Thanks to Jens Vigen.)

From the briefing document:

A meeting has been called at CERN on November 3rd 2006 to work towards establishing a consortium of major particle physics funding agencies, aimed at guiding a transition of the current subscription model for journals to a more stable, more competitive and more affordable future for the dissemination of quality-assured scientific information adapted to the era of electronic publishing....

The [June 2006] report concluded that as a number of journals in the field were ready to experiment with OA, and as a number of large research institutions were ready to support these titles both financially and by author encouragement, the remaining action necessary was to make a funding arrangement, called SCOAP3 – a Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics.

In summary, the publishers of the main journals are ready to offer author-fee publishing and enter into discussions about OA publishing. The research community itself is better educated than ever before about the problems with the current model and the necessity for a shift. The world outside physics is moving in the same direction. The remaining challenge is to reorganize funding of publication and to raise funds to support the transition to the new system. The particle physics publishing sphere will again become stable and the various players can benefit from the technical efficiencies that an OA landscape should enable....

Based on the cost per article quoted by the publishers, and the number of articles published in the period 2003-2005, sponsoring all journals ready for OA at the time of the task force enquiry would have required an annual budget of 5-6 M€. To start a significant OA exercise today, it is estimated that at least 3 M€/year will be needed. It should be noted that this sum is significantly less than the present global expenditure for particle physics journal subscriptions....

The consortium will offer to collaborate with all publishers proposing OA solutions. However, only journals corresponding to a set of criteria to be defined by the consortium will enjoy financial sponsorship. To ensure academic freedom for the particle physics community the consortium will commit itself to raise sufficient funds to ensure the availability of more than one journal title for each related sub-discipline. It is expected that the purchasing power of the consortium will have a significant influence on the publishing market.

Tentatively a transition period of 3-5 years should be envisaged to allow time for grant cycles to be adapted to author-side financing of publishing costs and for publishers to fine tune their OA policies....

A risk inherent in this model is that the community pays twice for a journal, namely for the subscription and for the article fees. Therefore, to profit from consortium sponsoring, publishers must make a firm commitment to lower the subscriptions. By this means, SCOAP3 can target individual journals for maximum cost reduction impact. Funding agencies must immediately introduce a mandate so that after the transition period all grants will require OA publication and include funds to cover such costs. After this time the role of SCOAP3 will be re-evaluated.

CERN invites institutions who support the plan to email their comments and has already posted two of the letters of support.  One letter is from the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY):

DESY fully supports Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics and we would like to see it realized within a short time scale.  It is of great importance for DESY to be actively and constructively involved in the forthcoming discussions aiming at establishing a Sponsoring Consortium.  Hence, the DESY Research Director, Professor Dr. Rolf-Dieter Heuer, will participate in the first CERN meeting on this subject on November 3, 2006.

Another supporting letter is from the University of Patras in Greece:

At the University of Patras we are closely following the new trends in dissemination of scientific results and we have a strong belief in that if the ideas of the open access movement will be generally adopted by the community, it will imply better access to science both for researchers and the society at large. The Rectorate of the University would therefore like to take the opportunity to express its support (with a symbolic financial support of 5000 CHF) for the personal initiative you have demonstrated by creating a task force to study the situation for particle physics. The report, which we have read with great interest, has certainly the potential to be used as basis for changing the publishing scenery of particle physics, and the model should also be applicable to most other branches of science....

Hopefully the change in the publishing paradigm will lead up to further changes as well. So far the electronic journals have just reproduced the traditional paper journals in an electronic manner. Electronic publishing has though a potential much beyond this....

Comment. For background, see the Report of CERN's Task Force on Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (June 22, 2006) and my short article about it in SOAN for September 2006.

The CERN plan is the most ambitious OA initiative taking place in any field today.  Nowhere else is any group trying to convert all the journals in a field to OA or to bring the stakeholders together to raise the money to fund a permanent alternative to journal subscriptions.  We'll all be watching with interest.

A Year Later, OCA Members Gather in San Francisco To Take Stock, Library Journal Academic Newswire, October 27, 2006. Excerpt:

It's all "catching on," says Internet Archive founder and Open Content Alliance pioneer Brewster Kahle. Last week, on October 20, the first anniversary of the formation of the Open Content Alliance (OCA), 100 delegates from 40 organizations, including the Internet Archive, the University of California, Berkeley, the British Library and the Smithsonian, gathered in San Francisco to assess the efforts of the alliance to date. And if the OCA has failed to make as many headlines as its corporate competitors, it is nevertheless making steady progress with its scanning efforts. Kahle told the LJ Academic Newswire that, one year into the project, the OCA has moved from its "big picture" beginnings to the more nuts and bolt issues....

As the project progresses, member meetings could soon become quarterly events, he said.

After its first year, OCA has now scanned and cataloged over 30,000 books, available on its site. Today, OCA scans about 500 books a day and expects output to increase tenfold by the end of 2007. OCA partners include Yahoo!, the University of California, the British Library, Smithsonian Institution, University of Illinois, Boston Library Consortium, European Archive, O'Reilly Media, Research Library Group, as well as many other academic, technological, non-profit, and government organizations. Perhaps most importantly, Kahle said the OCA discussions honed in on the "open" in the Open Content Alliance. For OCA, the effort is more than a race to scan library book content for a commercial index, but extends to the use of that content. With OCA, "public domain means public domain," Kahle noted. "That was one of the 'aha' moments, that open as we know it may not be open enough and that the digitized public domain must be public domain. Libraries understand this; so does Yahoo." That means, Kahle says, once public domain books are scanned, there are "no restrictions at all on users, and anyone can build any service on top of it." In contrast, he noted, restrictions in some of Google's library partner contracts appear to limit how some library copies of public domain books scanned in Google Book Search can be used by parties outside the library.

In my talk for the Canberra Society of Editors on Wednesday I proposed that the Australian Government make its publications open access.

This would need just two phrases of six words removed from the Commonwealth Copyright notice used on Australian Government web pages. That would lift the restriction preventing copies of government documents being made (the restriction on selling copies could be retained).

To make this change clearer I also proposed the Australian Government adopt the Australian version of the Creative Commons license (developed by the QUT Law School and Blake Dawson Waldron Lawyers), with the options for "Attribution", "Non-Commercial" and "No Derivative Works.
This would give the Australian Government a competitive advantage when it comes to getting their policies widely known.

At the Web Standards Group meeting on Thursday, Tim Dale from the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO), mentioned that revised government web guidelines would be released in December.  I suggested to Tim the new guidelines could include a revised Commonwealth Copyright notice incorporating a Creative Commons license. He seemed to like the idea and said it would be looked at....

The entire editorial board of the prestigious mathematics journal Topology has resigned to protest the pricing policies of the journal's publisher, Elsevier, a giant European editorial company.

"Topology has a very high price per page," said Marc Lackenby, a member of the editorial board and a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford. "Elsevier as a whole doesn't seem to be acting in the interest of the mathematical community."

The New York Sun published an article on Thursday describing the resignations, which were announced over the summer and take effect on December 31....

[Lackenby] and his co-editors sent a letter on August 10 to Robert Ross, the Elsevier publisher in charge of pure-mathematics journals, announcing their resignations. In the letter, the board members said, "We believe that the price, in combination with Elsevier's policies for pricing mathematical journals more generally, has had a significant and damaging effect on Topology's reputation in the mathematical-research community, and that this is likely to become increasingly serious and difficult, indeed impossible, to reverse in the future."

In a statement released by Elsevier on Thursday, the company said it "regrets the decision taken by the editorial board of Topology, but we believe it doesn't fully reflect the changes we have made over the past decade, and continue to make, which have moderated price increases and provided considerably more value for customers, in terms of both cost per article and research efficiency."

According to Mr. Lackenby, the high cost of the journal, which has an institutional price of $1,665 per year in the United States, was hurting its quality. "Many mathematicians were beginning to boycott the journal," he said. The editors had noticed a drop in the number of high-quality papers submitted for publication and also a decline in the number of mathematicians willing to serve as peer reviewers. As a result, he said, "the recent issues have been quite a bit thinner."

Mr. Lackenby said "the overwhelming response of the mathematical community has been to back our resignation." Moreover, he said, "there was an overwhelming point of view that Elsevier was exploiting the mathematical community."

When Peter Woit, a lecturer in mathematics at Columbia University, posted a note about the resignations on his blog, Not Even Wrong, it attracted 49 comments, many of which expressed displeasure with Elsevier.

This is not the first time that an editorial board has revolted at an Elsevier publication. In 1999 the 50-member board of the Journal of Logic Programming resigned and formed a new journal, according to Peter Suber, a research professor of philosophy at Earlham College and an advocate of open-access publishing.

Mr. Suber has used his blog devoted to open-access issues to list cases in which editors had left journals to start lower-cost or free alternatives. According to Mr. Suber, Elsevier faced another uprising by topologists in 2001, when some editors of Topology and Its Applications resigned and later formed Algebraic and Geometric Topology....

PS:  Minor correction:  The Chronicle cites my page of lists, not my blog.

Timo Hannay, The Scientific Paper of the Future, a slide presentation for the the Microsoft eScience Workshop at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, October 13-15, 2006).  (Thanks to Richard Akerman.)   Timo is the Director of Web Publishing at the Nature Publishing Group.

U. Southampton ranks 3rd in the UK and 25th in the world in the G-factor International University Ranking, a measure of "the importance or relevance of the university from the combined perspectives of all of the leading universities in the world... as a function of the number of links to their websites from the websites of other leading international universities" compiled by University Metrics.
      Why is U. Southampton's rank so remarkably high (second only to Cambridge and Oxford in the UK, and out-ranking the likes of Yale, Columbia and Brown in the US)?
      Long practising what it has been preaching -- about maximising research impact through Open Access Self-Archiving -- is a likely factor. (This is largely a competitive advantage: Southampton invites other universities to come and level the playing field -- by likewise self-archiving their own research output!)

PS:  Stevan and I (and many others) have long argued that when universities provide OA to their research output, they raise their visibility and impact.  If you're reading this, then you've certainly heard the argument before.  But did you know that University Metrics was measuring this kind of institutional visibility and impact?

Abstract:   This is a forthcoming panel at ASIS&T AM 2006, Nov. 6, 2006 (1:30 - 3:30 pm). Presenters: Donald Kraft, Louisiana State University & Editor, JASIST; Edie Rasmussen, University of British Columbia, Samantha Hastings, University of South Carolina & Editor, ASIS&T Monograph Series; and Anita Coleman, University of Arizona and Editor, dLIST. Sponsor: SIG DL. The goal of the panel is to explore the concept of the commons by framing it in the context of scholarly communication while also honing our understandings about digital libraries and repositories as technologies and socio-cultural artifacts. Panel members will uncover the pros and cons of the commons for LIS research and scholarly communication by describing the cognate and competing extant information realities. Edie Rasmussen will discuss the role of digital libraries in the commons. Anita Coleman, dLIST editor, the first open access archive for the information sciences will present her latest research about open access archives and the commons. Donald Kraft, Editor-in-chief of JASIST, will share his experiences editing a peer-reviewed ISI-ranked journal. Samantha Hastings, editor of ASIS&T monographs will share book publishing plans and concerns. This document contains brief overviews of the panel presentations together with the questions of each presenter for the audience/other panelists.

Following on from the OpenDOAR Search that we launched yesterday, we have just created two new *SHERPA Search* services which may be of interest.

One is for all UK Open Access Repositories -

One search facility is for SHERPA Partner repositories -

They are also accessible from the SHERPA Home Page.

In each case, these search facilities may be useful for those of us wishing to search one of these sub-sets of the world's open access repository material. As we have pointed out on the site, for researchers looking for information in their field, then the global search service of OpenDOAR might be more appropriate. However, we have received enough queries and suggestions over the past few years to think that a full-text search service for the UK or for SHERPA Partners may be of benefit to some users like advocates or administrators; for example, in establishing a national picture of particular research....

What the Google tool does do is to give a quick and useful search from specified repositories or other sites. We have included the 800 plus assessed OpenDOAR repositories for the global OpenDOAR search, and nearly 80 repositories for the UK Search, but of course, the specification could be quite small - say 3 or 4.

This opens up other ideas and possibilities. It certainly gives a quick solution to searching across a number of repositories based at the same institution. For example, here in Nottingham we have Nottingham ePrints, Nottingham eTheses and Nottingham eDissertations among others. I know that in a number of institutions, there may be one or more separate repositories that have been set-up within a department - often, but not exclusively a computer science department. The Google tool gives the opportunity to have a cross-repository search within the institution.

These services are a trial: they not perfect and there may be some oddities thrown up from the Google system, but they are producing interesting results and raising some new ideas. We are collecting feedback and will pass this on to Google.

Andy Powell, Pushing an OpenDOAR, eFoundations, October 27, 2006.  These comments on the new OpenDOAR search engine probably apply just as well to the new ROAR search engine.  Excerpt:

The OpenDOAR directory of open access repositories has announced a new search service based on Google's Custom Search Engine facility.  Good stuff - though for me it raises several questions of policy and implementation....

I thought I'd do a little experiment, to try and compare results from the new OpenDOAR search service with results from a bog standard Google search....

What these results say to me is that, for known item searching at least, there is little evidence that Google is losing our research nuggets within large results sets.  What Google is doing is to push the nuggets to the top of the list.  In fact, in some cases at least, I suspect one could argue that the vanilla Google search is surrounding those nuggets with valuable non-repository resources that are missed in the OpenDOAR repository-only search engine.

For me, this exercise raises three interesting questions:

1. Are repositories successfully exposing the full-text of articles (the PDF file or whatever) to Google rather than (or as well as) the abstract page?  If not, then they should be.  I think there is some evidence from these results that some repositories are only exposing the abstract page, not the full-text.  For a full-text search engine, this is less than optimal.  My suspicion is that the way that Google uses the OAI-PMH to steer its Web crawling is actually working against us here and that we either need to work with Google to improve the way this works, or bite the bullet and ask repository software developers to support Google sitemaps in order to improve the way that Google indexes our repositories.
2. Are we consistent in the way we create hypertext links between research papers in repositories?  If not, then we should be.  In the context of Google searches, linking is important because each link to a paper increases its Google-juice, which helps to push that paper towards the top of Google's search results.  Researchers currently have the option of linking either direct to the full-text (or one of several full-texts) or to the abstract page.  This choice ultimately results in a lowering of the Google-juice assigned to both the paper and the abstract page - potentially pushing both further down the list of Google search results.  The situation is made worse by the use of OpenURLs, which do nothing for the Google-juice of the resource that they identify, in effect working against the way the Web works.  If we could agree on a consistent way of linking to materials in repositories, we would stand to improve the visibility of our high-quality research outputs in search engines like Google.
3. What is the role of metadata in a full-text indexing world?  What the mini-experiment above and all my other experience says to me is that full-text indexing clearly works.  In terms of basic resource discovery, we're much better off exposing the full-text of research papers to search engines for indexing, than we are exposing metadata about those papers.  Is metadata therefore useless?  No.  We need metadata to support the delivery of other bibliographic services.  In particular we need metadata to capture those attributes that are useful for searching, ranking and linking but that can't reliably be derived from the resource itself.  I'm thinking here primarily of the status of the paper and of the relationships between the paper and other things - the relationships between papers and people and organisations, the relationships between different versions, between different translations, between different formats and between different copies of a paper.  These are the kinds of relationships that we have been trying to capture in our work on the DC Eprints Application Profile.  It is these relationships that are important in the metadata, much moreso than the traditional description and keywords kind of metadata.

Overall, what I conclude from this (once again) is that it is not the act of depositing a paper in a repository that is important for open access, but the act of surfacing the paper on the Web - the repository is just a means to en end in that respect.  More fundamentally, I conclude that the way we configure, run and use repositories has to fit in with the way the Web works - not work against it or around it!  First and foremost, our 'resource discovery' efforts should centre on exposing the full text of research papers in repositories to search engines like Google and on developing Web-friendly and consistent approaches to creating hypertext links between research papers.

Les Carr at Southampton University has created a ROAR Search Engine, which searches the 748 OA repositories registered at ROAR.   Like the OpenDOAR search engine, launched yesterday, the new ROAR engine is built from Google Custom Search.  Here are Les' comments on the new ROAR engine from a posting this morning to the AmSci OA Forum:

[The OpenDOAR search engine] is a very interesting service!

There was a discussion on this list at the beginning of August about "Search Engines for Repositories Only". There were several attempts to define constrained searches using RollYO or similar, but they all suffered from one defect or another (too few sites, or logins required etc). The Google Custom Search that OpenDOAR have set up seems much more suitable to the repository community needs. Further, it would seem to be fairly simple to set up Country-specific searches (a la UKOLN's EPrints UK) by providing location-identifying annotations for each repository.

I have had a go with this, and created a ROAR-based Repository Search Engine [here].  You can search all the ROAR repositories for a keyword and then Derek Law can click on 'Scottish Research' to reduce the set of results to those coming from the Scottish repositories (the "small and smart" ones, according to his recent keynote at Open Scholarship :-)

There is a serious point that this opens up: why would we bother with OAI-based repositories, if you can do it all with Google? The advantage that OAI provided us was "metadata", ie the possibility of providing more accurate resource identification. The advantage of repositories were that they provided an identifiable source of (well- maintained) research material. Of course, the one can be simulated by the other, and if Google could support a simple quality control "refereed material" tag then we could get by without OAI and without repositories.

Well, it doesn't, and so OAI still seems our best hope. However, even with five years of OAI our repositories are not doing a very good job of sharing metadata that helps a service to comprehend the status of the holdings that it harvests (is this a published, refereed journal article or equivalent? Is this a paper from an unrefereed workshop? is this a chemical data file?) Too much is still down to interpretation and subsequent data mining of the web pages. The Eprints Application Profile seems to be doing a good job in achieving consensus in the use of Dublin Core, but there is an urgent need for it to be implemented by all repositories!

We've spent a lot of time and effort on advocacy and policies over the last couple of years, but I think it's time that we went back to some of the technical fundamentals and made sure that our information interoperability is up to scratch, otherwise we'll find ourselves in a universe where the only thing you can do is a keyword search!

Comments.

1. The ROAR search engine is as welcome as the OpenDOAR engine and for the same reasons.  Kudos to Bill Hubbard (at OpenDOAR) and Les Carr (at ROAR) for getting these off the ground.  I'd still like to see ROAR and OpenDOAR merge, rather than take the valuable time of valued OA activists to build duplicate services, but this doesn't detract in the slightest from the utility of their latest features.
2. As for Les' reflections on the continuing utility of OAI, see my May 2004 article, The case for OAI in the age of Google. 
3. If I were revising that article today, I'd add that Google (and Google Scholar and Google Custom Search) could neutralize some of the remaining advantages of OAI if it would (1) label peer-reviewed articles as peer-reviewed and (2) label OA articles as OA.  It could make strides toward the first if it used, instead of discarding, the metadata it found in OA repositories.  To make strides toward the second it would have to produce an OA-detecting algorithm that could distinguish an abstract from a full-text article.  Authors could help by using machine-readable CC licenses, since the Google advanced search page already has a "usage rights" filter to limit results to CC-licensed content.

OpenDOAR - the Directory of Open Access Repositories - is pleased to announce the release of a trial search service for academics and researchers around the world....

OpenDOAR already provides a global Directory of freely available open access repositories that hold research material: now it also offers a full-text search service from this list of quality-controlled repositories. This trial service has been made possible through the recent launch by Google of its innovative and exciting Custom Search Engine, which allows OpenDOAR to define a search service based on the Directory holdings.

It is well known that a simple full-text search of the whole web will turn up thousands upon thousands of junk results, with the valuable nuggets of information often being lost in the sheer number of results. Users of the OpenDOAR service can search through the world's open access repositories of freely available research information, with the assurance that each of these repositories has been assessed by OpenDOAR staff as being of academic value. This quality controlled approach will help to minimise spurious or junk results and lead more directly to useful and relevant information. The repositories listed by OpenDOAR have been assessed for their full-text holdings, helping to ensure that results have come from academic repositories with open access to their contents.

This service does not use the OAI-PMH protocol to underpin the search, or use the metadata held within repositories. Instead, it relies on Google's indexes, which in turn rely on repositories being suitably structured and configured for the Googlebot web crawler. Part of OpenDOAR's work is to help repository administrators improve access to and use of their repositories' holdings: advice about making a repository suitable for crawling by Google is given on the site. This service is designed as a simple and basic full-text search and is intended to compliment and not compete with the many value-added search services currently under development.

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 has now surveyed over 1,100 repositories, producing a classified Directory of over 800 freely available archives of academic information.

Comment.  This is a brilliant use of the new Google technology.  When searching for research on deposit in OA repositories, it's better than straight Google, by eliminating false positives --though straight Google is better if you want to find OA content outside repositories at publisher or personal websites.  It's potentially better than OAIster and other OAI-based search engines, by going beyond metadata to full-text --though not all OA repositories are configured to facilitate full-text Google crawling.  If Google isn't crawling your repository, consult OpenDOAR or try these suggestions.

On one side of an electoral boundary, people might buy sun-blushed tomatoes; on the other, economy baked beans. Retailers like to know such things, so data from the 2001 census is of great commercial interest - and also the subject of the latest controversy in the Free Our Data debate.

Last week, the Association of Census Distributors filed a complaint against a state-owned entity, Ordnance Survey, over the conditions placed on the re-use of intellectual property in census data. It is the second time this year that the national mapping agency has been the subject of a complaint to the government's Office of Public Sector Information.....

Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign proposes that the best way to avoid such disputes is for basic data sets collected at taxpayers' expense to be made freely available for any purpose (subject to privacy and national security constraints). While this would involve more direct funding for agencies such as Ordnance Survey, the economy as a whole would gain. At the moment, says [Peter Sleight of Target Marketing Consultancy], the national good is compromised because of a single trading fund's commercial needs.

Dean Giustini has used Google Custom Search to create a search engine for OA medical sources that he calls Google Medicine.

Comment.  Google has made it very easy to set up powerful search engines for particular sites or topics.  (Yesterday I made one for my blog, newsletter, and writings on OA.)  I expect to see specialty search engines --like Dean's-- spread quickly to every conceivable research niche.  Of course each one will be optimized for OA content. 

Suggestion to Dean:  drop Wikipedia and stick to peer-reviewed sources or make a second version that sticks to peer-reviewed sources.

I knew that Roy would be likely to give a very practical nuts-and-bolts introduction to developing institutional repositories and I was certainly not disappointed.

Why do it?

• Allows you to capture the intellectual output of an institution and provide it freely to others (pre-prints, post-prints, things that folks have the rights to archive). Many publishers allow authors to publish their work in archives either as a pre-print or after the fact.
• To increase exposure and use of an institution’s intellectual capital. It can increase their impact on a field. More citations from open access and archived materials.
• To increase the reputation of your institution.

How do you do it? ...

Software options....

Key decisions

• What types of content do you want to accept (just documents? PPT files, lesson plans, etc?)
• How will you handle copyright?
• Will you charge for service? Or for specific value-added services?
• What will the division of responsibilities be?
• What implementation model will you adopt?
• You will need to develop a policy document that covers these issues and more.

Implementation models

• Self archiving – ceaselessly championed by Stevan Harnad. Authors upload their own work into institutional respositories. Most faculty don’t want to do this.
• Overlay – new system (IR) overlays the way people normally do things. Typically faculty give their work to an administrative assistant to put it on the Web. Now, the repository folks train the admin assistant to upload to the repository instead. Content is more likely to be deposited than if faculty have to do it....
• Service provider – not a model for a large institution. Library will upload papers for faculty. The positives is that works are much more likely to be deposited. The negative is that it’s a lot of work and won’t scale....

Discovery options: Most traffic comes from Google searches, but only for repositories that are easily crawlable and have a unique URL for each document. OAI aggregators like OAIster.org have millions and millions of records. They harvest metadata from many repositories. Some may come direct to the repository, but most people will not come there looking for something specific. Citations will drive traffic back to the repository.

Barriers to success:

• Lack of institutional commitment
• Faculty apathy (lack of adoption and use)
• If it is difficult to upload content, people won’t use it.
• If you don’t implement it completely or follow through it will fail.

Strategies for Success

• Start with early adopters and work outward.
• Market all the time. Make presentations at division meetings and stuff
• Seek institutional mandates
• Provide methods to bulk upload from things already living in other databases
• Make it easy for people to participate. Reduce barriers and technical/policy issues.
• Build technological enhancements to make it ridiculously easy for people to upload their content....

Charles Bailey has added a search engine to his indispensable Open Access Bibliography.  From his announcement: 

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals is now searchable using a Google Custom Search Engine. The new search box is just before the table of contents in the bibliography’s home page. Only the bibliography sections of the document are searchable (e.g., the "Key Open Access Concepts" section is excluded).

Keep in mind when you search that you will retrieve bibliography section file titles with a single representative search result shown from that section. To see all hits in a section, click on the cached page, which shows the retrieved search term(s) in the section highlighted in yellow.

Officials from the leading Internet search engine are working to remove barriers that prevent their technology from reaching vast troves of information buried in government databases....[W]hile portions of agency Web sites are easily indexed by Google and other common search engines, the engines cannot search other areas, known as the deep Web....

As much as 40 percent of the content on agency Web sites is invisible to Google's crawlers, said [J.L. Needham, a strategic partner development manager at Google]....

Needham said he is meeting with a variety of agencies to discuss how the information housed in their databases can be made available in the search results from engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN....

A Dec. 16, 2005, memorandum from Clay Johnson, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, states that all agencies must set up their public information so that it is searchable by Sept. 1, 2006. It states that "increasingly sophisticated Internet search functions" can "greatly assist agencies in this area."

Agencies also were required to provide all public data in an open format that allows the public to aggregate "or otherwise manipulate and analyze the data to meet their needs" by Dec. 31, 2005, according to a separate OMB memorandum signed by Johnson on Dec. 17, 2004....

In addition to the technical challenges presented by the company's request, EPA has to consider whether a commercial company could assert proprietary ownership on federal data or whether providing government data to one company would provide an unequal playing field for other companies, Luttner said.

Needham said Google, for one, does not want to assert ownership over any information obtained from agencies, and agency efforts to improve the ability to search their Web sites would likely be equally beneficial to its competitors....

Yesterday a group of influential non-profits launched the US-based Digital Freedom Campaign.  From the site:

The Digital Freedom Campaign holds as its core value the recognition that new technologies are essential to the creativity and innovation that have allowed this nation to thrive.  Digital technology enables anyone and everyone to be an artist and an innovator - to produce music, to create cutting edge films and videos, and to reach new audiences.  For consumers, it allows individuals the ability to enjoy these new works when they want, where they want, how they want and to participate in the process.  These are basic freedoms that must be protected and nurtured.  The Digital Freedom campaign is dedicated to defending the rights of artists, innovators, creators and consumers to use lawful technology free of unreasonable government restrictions and without fear of costly lawsuits

While the focus, at least for now, is on music and video, the campaign will help education and research by fighting for fair use, the public domain, and the right to use new technologies without restrictions designed to protect entrenched businesses and their business models.  Joining the campaign is free of charge.

There are a number of trailblazing authors that challenge the publishing industry’s control by managing the roles of printing, marketing and distribution of their own works, discovering new inroads into printing and marketing, and using the internet as a weapon of mass dissemination. These individuals are attempting, word by word, to improvise their way towards a new status quo in the publishing industry. These authors are not content with a business model that requires them to relinquish the rights to their work, or one that encourages them to agree to diminished control and limited financial compensation.

Three short stories follow of self-publishing trailblazers who are attempting to alter this traditional publishing model....

Information Technologies and International Development (ITID) has converted to open access, becoming the first OA journal from MIT Press.  Not only is the current issue (Fall 2006) OA, but all past issues (back to Fall 2003) are now also OA.  From the editorial by Michael L Best and Ernest J. Wilson III in the current issue :

With this issue we break with the past --and rush to meet the future-- as we introduce ITID now as an Open Access Journal. Under this method of publication all of our content will be available over the Internet at no cost. Print copies can still be obtained from the publisher on a fee basis. We believe this open access approach defines the future for academic publications and, critically, will serve well our global audience. Open access publication means:

• Wider access for our readers --especially those coming from the Global South who might not have been able to afford the subscription prices.
• Higher impact to our authors --research shows that open access journals have higher rates of readership, citation, and overall impact.
• The same level of quality and prestige already associated with ITID....
• An improved intellectual property environment --under open access publication we will move a Creative Commons copyright license....
• A richer online environment for discussion, collaboration, scholarship, and community building! ITID is the first open access journal offered by the MIT Press and we intend to work closely with the Press to innovative with the model and help to define open access scholarly publications.

This inaugural open access year is made possible by the generous support of the Community Affairs division of Microsoft. We are looking to expand our set of donors and to enhance the open access business model.

We made the first public announcement of ITID becoming open access at the inaugural International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) held this May at the University of California, Berkeley....

From the MIT press release (October 25, 2006):

Making high quality content freely available online to anyone interested in the intersection of communications technologies and development around the world is an exciting opportunity for the journal and The MIT Press. But where editors and the Press hope that lessons from this new model may truly have an impact is within the larger community - in academia, the private sector, NGOs, and governments around the world.

"We can't think of a better congruence between delivery platform and purpose," says MIT Press Director Ellen Faran. "ITID's content, mission, contributors, and readers will all be well supported by its free online availability."

PS:  Congratulations to ITID and MIT Press.  It's wonderful to see the MIT journals starting to catch up with MIT's many other pioneering OA initiatives.  And thanks to Microsoft for taking this step to support OA.  (Microsoft is a member of the Open Content Alliance.) 

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), a non-profit research organization that funds more than 300 US researchers, is considering a plan to pressure its investigators into making their published papers freely accessible.

The plan, if approved, would dictate that publications must be deposited in a public database within six months of publication in order to count towards an investigator’s application for reappointment. HHMI investigators apply for reappointment every five or seven years....

After years of requesting voluntary compliance, several funding agencies are considering tougher stances. In 2005, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) asked grantees to voluntarily deposit articles in a public database such as PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. A year after the request, only 4% of NIH grantees had done so, prompting Congress to propose legislation mandating compliance.

Meanwhile, on 1 October, Britain’s Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust medical charity began requiring grantees to deposit final, peer-reviewed manuscripts in public databases as soon as possible, but no later than within six months of publication....

HHMI president Thomas Cech says a decision on the proposed policy will probably be made in early 2007. Although HHMI officials say they will not legislate where their investigators publish, several researchers say the threat of weakening their reappointment application represents significant pressure.

Cech says the proposed policy is simply an extension of HHMI guidelines about sharing published reagents and other research material....

The HHMI [Wellcome Trust?] is still negotiating with publishers, but [Mark] Walport [of the Wellcome Trust] says most major journals, including Science and Nature, have complied with the Wellcome Trust’s guidelines.

Many publishers let authors pay to make their articles available immediately. For example, Wellcome Trust grantees can make their papers in most Elsevier journals publicly accessible for $3,000 per article. Both the HHMI and the Wellcome Trust already provide funds for publication in open-access journals. “We see payment to the publisher as part of the cost of research,” says Walport. “And we’re prepared to pay appropriately.”

Comment.  The HHMI was the funding agency most responsible for convening the group that eventually issued the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003).  At the time, HHMI was willing to pay processing fees at fee-based OA journals, but wasn't willing to go further to mandate OA archiving.  I commend it for proposing to take this much-needed extra step.

The HHMI hasn't yet adopted a policy.  But if we count its mandate proposal in the mandate column, and do the same for the mandate proposal at Canada's CIHR, and if we count the new semi-mandate in Austria as a mandate, then the HHMI proposal is the eighth OA mandate this month.  There are the four new mandates from the RCUK, the expansion of the existing mandate at the Wellcome Trust, the Austrian policy, the CIHR draft, and now the HHMI.  We've never had a month like this.

There's been a rebellion, not with pitchforks but pocket calculators. The nine members of the editorial board of the Oxford University-based mathematics journal Topology have signed a letter expressing their intention to resign on December 31. They cited the price of the journal as well as the general pricing policies of their publisher, Elsevier, as having "a significant and damaging effect on Topology's reputation in the mathematical research community."

The subscription cost of journals can be difficult to determine, since institutions often subscribe to many periodicals in a single bundle. But according to Elsevier's Web site, in 2007 the cost of a single year (six issues) of Topology, in all countries except Europe and Japan, will be $100 for individuals and $1,665 for institutions.

Founded through the vision of the Oxford topologist J.H.C. Whitehead in mid-century, Topology has an "illustrious history" with "some of the greatest names of 20th century mathematics" among its editorial and honorary advisory editorial board members, the editors wrote in their resignation letter, dated August 10. " Elsevier's policies towards the publication of mathematics research have undermined this legacy."

A company spokesman, David Ruth, replied, "Elsevier regrets the decision taken by the editorial board of Topology, but we believe it doesn't fully reflect the changes we have made over the past decade, and continue to make, which have moderated price increases and provided considerably more value for customers, in terms of both cost per article and research efficiency."

Board resignations have occurred at other Elsevier publications, such as the Journal of Logic Programming and the Journal of Algorithms, and also at a variety of other publishers such as Kluwer and Taylor and Francis. Of the Topology resignations, Mr. Ruth said, "Considering that Elsevier publishes more than 1800 journals, this still constitutes a pretty rare occurrence." ...

One editor of Topology, John Roe, whose specialty is the relation between geometry and differential equations, said the rising cost of journals has concerned academics, not just mathematicians, for a long time.

To those who favor free online access to scholarship, mass resignations of editors are "declarations of independence," a research professor of philosophy at Earlham College, Peter Suber, said. Usually, he said, an editorial board "has a long track record of failed negotiations with their publisher. The typical scenario is the editors resign, form a new journal at a lower price, and the old journal hires new editors."

A Lehigh University mathematics professor, Donald Davis, who moderates an online algebraic topology discussion list, said, "University library budgets are no longer adequate to subscribe to all the journals they used to." The Head Librarian of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences Library at New York University, Carol Hutchins, said, "The degree of choice is shrinking" and cited reasons such as the consolidation of publishing firms.

"Elsevier's prices are very high," said an emerita mathematics professor at Barnard College, Joan Birman, who resigned a few years ago from the board of an Elsevier journal, Topology and Its Applications. She said her feeling was, "We do the work, we check each other, we referee the articles, edit and typeset them and send them to the publisher, which slaps them between two covers and charges a huge amount."...

PS:  Thanks to Gary Shapiro.  This is the longest and most detailed article I've seen on a journal declaration of independence in the mainstream press.  For background, see my blog post from August 11, 2006.  I promise (as I've been saying since August...) to add this rebellion to my list of declarations of independence.

Peter Schirmbacher, Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des elektronischen Publizierens auf der Basis der Open-Access-Prinzipien, in Petra Hauke and Konrad Umlauf (eds.), Vom Wandel der Wissensorganisation im Informationszeitalter:­ Festschrift für Walther Umstätter zum 65. Geburtstag, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, September 2006.  (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) 

Most of the presentations from the 2006 Northeast Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society (Binghampton, October 5-7, 2006) are now online.  Three are explicitly on OA.  (Thanks to George Porter.)

Since 2002, the UK's JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) has shown a strong commitment to an emerging trend in research institutions and digital repositories. This commitment has been reflected in its Digital Repositories Programme as well as a £14m investment in the Repositories and Preservation strand of its Capital Programme.

Repositories are digital stores that manage and provide access to resources and metadata. They come in many shapes and sizes: subject repositories, both national and international; data archives and data centres; learning object repositories; digital libraries; and institutional eprint repositories. According to the OpenDOAR directory, around 50 of the UK's 200 higher education institutions already have institutional and/or department repositories.

This growing role of repositories in UK research and education is reflected in the 25 projects that make up JISC's Digital Repositories Programme. This programme which aims to enable institutions to make better use of repositories across research, teaching, information and administration....

Delivering on these visions for an interoperating infrastructure of repositories and services is no easy task, but the work that has been and is being done by the wide range of JISC-funded projects is already having an impact and this is set to continue. The UK repositories search service, for example, will offer a single access-point to search repositories across the UK. And the EPrints metadata application profile, backed by the Digital Repositories support team, will enable the service to offer a much richer set of search features. What's more, many projects will begin over the next three years, offering new tools and mechanisms to support widespread open access to resources....

[Russell's] track record has been in driving though change in organisations with a strong history, but which needed to modernise to face new challenges. This has included experimenting with open access at the Royal Society as well as introducing a more commercial focus. Learned bodies may have a not-for-profit tax status but very few could continue their activities if they didn’t generate a surplus from publishing which could be applied to other areas of their work....

[Sally Morris, Russell's predecessor at ALPSP] thinks that his diplomatic skills will help too. ‘At the Royal Society he navigated a very difficult path between what the membership think and what the publishing division think, particularly with issues such as open access,’ she commented. ‘The Royal Society deals with very distinguished people and I think the solution it has come up with – to experiment to see if it works or not – is extremely diplomatic. Scientists learn by experimenting.’ ...

So what sort of things will he be tackling in his new job? ‘There are clearly issues that need to be addressed, like open access. This is seen by some as a threat to the traditional business models of publishers but I think it’s a shame that publishers have been labelled as being very conservative and unwilling to change. Many of the technology changes that have happened over the last 10 years have been driven by publishers,’ he pointed out. ‘I will be working as part of the APLSP to try and change some of those perceptions....’

Universities in the US have become embroiled in a letter-writing war over a proposed public access research law.

The Oberlin Group of Liberal Arts College Libraries backs the law, but the DC Principals [sic] for Free Access to Science Coalition is worried it will damage scientific publishing....Senior academics from 10 US institutions signed the [DC Principles] letter....

The Oberlin Group said 53 college presidents had signed its letter to the senators....

Comment. The title of this article is incorrect (senior administrators are not "split...down the middle" but overwhelmingly on the side of FRPAA) and the body of the article is misleading for suggesting that there is only one pro-FRPAA letter for senior administrators when there are five.  First, 25 provosts signed the pro-FRPAA CIC letter (July 28, 2006).  Then, 22 more signed the GWLA letter (August 22, 2006).  Then came the Oberlin Group letter (September 5, 2006), signed by 53 presidents.  Then six more presidents signed the NECP letter (September 19, 2006).  SPARC put all these pro-FRPAA signatures together on one page, added its own statement of pro-FRPAA principles, asked other presidents and provosts to sign, and has elicited had a steady stream of new signatures since August.  The total to date in support of FRPAA = 127.  The total opposed = 10.

Here at the Northwestern University Law Review, we have read with interest the recent discussion concerning the importance of open access publication of legal scholarship.  We wanted to take this opportunity to express our commitment to maintaining broad and costless access to the information we publish.

Starting with the fourth issue of our ninety-ninth volume [Summer 2005] and moving forward, all of our content has been, and will continue to be, available as a PDF download through our past issues tab.  As a result, anyone will be able to find Northwestern University Law Review content using an internet search engine, and download it for free.  Furthermore, we will maintain a fully permissive policy regarding authors who wish to post drafts of their forthcoming articles to SSRN, Bepress or other locations on the web.  That's the easy part.

The hard part is that we are currently sitting on a mountain of information which is not readily convertible to PDF format -- nearly 100 years of scholarship published solely in print in the Law Review.  We are committed to making this information freely available as well.  However, the technical and financial challenges that accompany scanning the mountain of material that was published before PDFs existed make this a project that will be ongoing, and contingent on donated funding.  (For those interested in speeding this process with a donation to the Law Review Fund, please click here for more information.)

Our current plan is to scan and post archival content at a steady rate, working backwards from the most recent issues towards the oldest.  It may take some time before all of our content is open-access, but it is and will remain a key goal for the Law Review.  In the meantime, we hope soon to be able to publish abstracts of our archival content on our site, which will be freely available to all.

We would welcome suggestions as to how we might best accomplish these goals.  As always, thanks for visiting the Colloquy.

Comment. Kudos to all involved.  Everything about this policy is enlightened except the fixation on PDFs (an unnecessary condition for a digitization program and an abominable format).  I'm proud of the law review, proud of the law school --and, not least, I'm class of 1982.

OA [open access], OS [open source], FS [free software] & CC [Creative Commons] share commonalities but also have some differences: there are genuine convergences and genuine divergences....

Here is the heart of the matter. Let me try to convey it purely by analogy first: I am personally in favour of open-code pharmac