Open Access News

CrossRef has launched a new OAI-PMH interface.  From the announcement (November 8):

CrossRef, the reference linking network for scholarly publishing, announced today the release of an OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) interface to its Web Services metadata distribution program. In addition, it announced that it had recently signed both Scirus and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) as new CWS partners.

CrossRef Web Services (CWS) is a suite of tools to enable authorized partners to collect metadata on a widespread, cross-publisher basis, potentially covering up to 23 million metadata records now included in CrossRef. CWS was developed earlier this year to standardize how published content is crawled, indexed, and linked to on the Web. Participation by CrossRef member publishers is optional.

CrossRef’s new OAI-PMH repository interface will serve as the central point for the distribution of metadata from participating publishers. The service utilizes a robust and widely adopted technology targeted at consumers of large quantities of metadata (for more information, see [the OAI web site]); access to the CrossRef’s metadata repository is controlled by IP authentication and can be tailored to provide specific content from select publishers to each authorized recipient.

In partnering with Scirus, Elsevier’s free, science-specific search engine, CrossRef will allow Scirus to collect metadata from hundreds of participating publishers in order to give researchers, academics, students, and librarians enhanced searchability over authoritative, scientific published content. According to Joris van Rossum, Head of Scirus  “This partnership, which allows us to take advantage of the new Web Services protocol, fits perfectly with Scirus’ ambition to be the most comprehensive and trustworthy search engine for scientific published content on the Web.” 

EMBL-EBI, a pioneering center for research and services in bioinformatics, intends to use the CrossRef metadata to systematically look up DOIs  for the purpose of displaying them alongside bibliographic references in its various databases and utilities, which aim to aid the scientific community in the understanding of genomic and proteomic data. 

Comment.  This is a rare but permissible mix of OAI interoperability and IP access control. CrossRef will harvest metadata that publishers are not making accessible to other harvesters.  But then it will hold the metadata in an OAI-compliant repository accessible only to approved participants. Do not expect the CrossRef-collected metadata be harvestable by other OAI service providers like OAIster and ScientificCommons. (Thanks to Klaus Graf for an email that helped me revise my original comment.)

Lack of access to knowledge main obstacle to innovation, finds Portuguese survey, CORDIS News, November 10, 2006.  Excerpt:

Some 40% of businesses in Portugal are innovators, according to findings from the fourth Community Innovation Survey (CIS 4). This figure could be increased, businesses say, if more information on technology, markets, and potential partners were readily available to them.

The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) has revised its Internet Rights Charter (also available in PDF).  Theme 3, on Access to Knowledge, has three parts:

3.1 The right to access to knowledge Wide-spread access to knowledge and a healthy knowledge commons form the basis for sustainable human development. Because the internet enables knowledge-sharing and collaborative knowledge-creation to a previously unprecedented degree, it should be a focus for the development community.

3.2 The right to freedom of information National and local government, and publicly-funded international organisations, must ensure transparency and accountability by placing publicly relevant information that they produce and manage in the public domain. They should ensure that this information is disseminated online using compatible and open formats and is accessible to people using older computers and slow internet connections.

3.3 The right to access to publicly-funded information All information, including scientific and social research, that is produced with the support of public funds should be freely available to all.

APC intends Theme 3 to spell out Article 27 (which it cites as Article 26) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, asserting that "Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits." 

Milestones:  OAIster Database Approaches 1,000,000 Records, ResourceShelf, November 11, 2006.  Excerpt:

We just noticed that OAIster from the University of Michigan is quickly approaching 1 million entries....

The next update comes in a few days but as of now it’s home to 9,771,738 records from 701 institutions. Here’s a list of those institutions.

Congrats to the entire OAIster Team

Btw, CiteSeer is still going strong now with more than 700,000 entries, searchable citations, and searchable acknowledgements.

See Also: The Milestones Will Continue As Elsevier’s ScienceDirect Service Will Serve Its 1 Billionth Article Download Next Week. This site offers lots of stats including the Top25 Hottest Articles.

See Also: Database: New: Search through the OpenDOAR for repository content

See Also: InfoTrac OneFile Now Home to More than 60 million entries and HighWire Press Gets Very Close to 1.5 million Free Full Text Entries.

Emre Hasan Akbayrak and five co-authors, Institutional Repository Movement in Turkey, in Proceedings Open Scholarship 2006: New Challenges for Open Access Repositories, Glasgow, 2006. 

ANKOS (The Anatolian University Libraries Consortium) established Open Access and the Institutional Repositories Working Group (OAIRWG) in order to raise awareness on Open Access (OA) and Institutional Repositories (IRs) among information professionals in Turkey.  Ankara University is one of the first open access initiatives in Turkey. It has been involved in ANKOS since 2001, expressing a strong interest from the beginning. Over seven hundred and fifty scientific papers produced by faculty members have been self-archived [in the Ankara University IR] and made accessible since the beginning of 2006. The “Hacettepe University Electronic Theses Project” has been carried to make the full-texts of graduate theses and dissertations accessible through the Internet. The Middle East Technical University Electronic Theses and Dissertations project was started to provide web access to theses and dissertations that have been completed at the Middle East Technical University (METU) since April 2003. In September 2003, the METU Library Theses and Dissertations Archive was established and since that time students have been submitting their theses in both print and PDF. On the poster, the activities of ANKOS OAIRWG will be summarized and three examples of open archive initiatives in Turkey will be presented: Ankara and Hacettepe Universities’ Institutional Repositories and Middle East Technical University’s E-Theses Archive.

Rex, Please sign the Open Access Anthropology Letter, Savage Minds, November 10, 2006.  Excerpt:

(here is the official invitation to the OAA event at the AAA. If you agree with this letter, please sign it by clicking “edit” on the link and adding your true name in alphabetical order)

Scholarly societies are in crisis, and the AAA [American Anthropological Association] is among them. Dwindling revenues from sales of AAA Journals are among the causes, and if we don’t staunch the bleeding now, we are warned, there will be nothing left to give.

How has the AAA gotten to a point where its solvency seems to be based solely on the sales of our scholarly work? Work that has already been paid for by public and private granting agencies which we pay registration fees to present at conferences organized by the scholarly society we pay membership fees to join? Why must we also charge our readers?

Recently, the AAA publicly voiced its opposition to Federal Legislation that would require federally funded research to be freely available to the people who paid for it: citizens. This public opposition is clearly not in the interest of AAA members —and the AnthroSource Steering Committee has publicly said as much, proposing a range of initiatives to make our collective work more accessible. For this criticism, the ASSC was dissolved.

Clearly, something needs to change.

1) we need a solid open access policy to make anthropological research widely available;

2) we need a more transparent financial arrangement between the association and its members;

3) we need a form of financial sustainability that does not compromise our ability to disseminate our research.

We invite the sections and their members to start thinking creatively about the solution to these problems....

There will be an informal meeting to discuss Open Access on Saturday the 18th at noon at Gordon Biersch, 33 E. Santa Clara Street (between First and Second).

In the mean time, there are various ways you can be involved. Learn about the issue by visiting [the Open Access Anthropology wiki]. 

There is also an Open Access email list that you can join if you want to talk about these issues, or if you simply want to hear what other people are saying....

Arthur Sale, The Patchwork Mandate, a working paper, self-archived November 11, 2006.  Excerpt:

This document is written mainly for repository managers who are at a loss at what policies they (or their universities or research institutions) ought to deploy. I make no bones about stating that there are only two pure policies: [1] requiring (mandating) researchers to deposit, and [2] voluntary (spontaneous) participation.

The obvious and no-risk solution is for the institution to require researchers to deposit their publications in the institutional repository. There is ample evidence that this is acceptable to over 95% of researchers, both in pre-implementation surveys and in post-implementation evidence. One Australian university is leading the world in collecting 70% of its annual research output and the fraction is rising....

An institutional-wide requirement to deposit in the IR is the logical and inevitable end-point. In fact it is exactly what is needed. Once such a policy is in place the IR manager’s approaches to researchers and heads of centers and all the plethora of feel-good activities actually work. People who are required to deposit their publications are grateful for advice. The occasional chase-up call is not resented. Just about everything that the university can put in place (for example publicity for deposits, awards for the best author or paper, assistance with self-archiving, download statistics, etc) will begin to work as it resonates with every academic in fulfilling their duty.

A mandatory policy will approach a capture rate of 100% of current research publications, but over a couple of years. Figures of 60-90% can be expected in a short time. See [this] for some data on how mandates actually work....

In the absence of mandates, every encouragement policy known to Man fails to convince more than 15% to 20% of researchers to invest the 5 minutes of time needed to deposit their publications. The percentage does not grow with time....This is a global experience....

So, many repository managers find themselves between a rock and a hard place. They can't convince the senior executives to bring in a mandate, and they know that voluntary deposition does not work. Fortunately there may be a middle way or even a transitional way ahead. I call it the patchwork mandate....So what is the patchwork mandate? Simply this:...Since you can't get an institutional mandate, you work towards getting departmental (school/faculty) mandates one by one. Each departmental mandate will rapidly trend towards 100% and needs little activism to maintain this level....

I think that the patchwork mandate strategy will probably work. We are trialing it in Australia. It won't achieve 100% content instantly, but it is a clear way to work towards that. You can even explain it to your senior executives and they probably won't stop you. They may even encourage you to try it.

Just remember that voluntary persuasion of individuals is known not to work beyond a pitiful participation level. Self-archiving needs to be made part of the routine academic duty, and this requires a policy endorsement by someone.

Comment.  In the full paper, Arthur not only gives reasons to try it out, but practical implementation advice.  I recommend the strategy and can add two reasons to think that it will work:  Faculty are more amenable to persuasion from other faculty than from administrators or librarians, and examples are more persuasive than arguments.  The best way to make the case for a strong OA archiving policy is the natural, viral appeal of a successful example. 

Update. Also see Mike Carroll's supportive comments.

Rosetta: Papers of the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity is new peer-reviewed, open-access journal published by the University of Birmingham.  From Helen Goodchild's editorial in the inaugural issue (Autumn 2006): 

The decision to publish in electronic rather than printed form seemed obvious. Initially, this allows us to reach a wider audience, way beyond traditional printed journals. The flexibility of the medium for display also allows us to publish almost anything: from traditional plans and photographs to GIS or movie files with no impact on cost.  This leads directly to the third benefit. Rosetta is run entirely by a team of Birmingham postgraduates with limited (i.e. no) funds.  Hosting by the University provides a permanent electronic archive of postgraduate and professional research and endeavour at Birmingham. The success of journals including Assemblage at Sheffield, now running for eight years and counting, provided us with models from which to develop.  However, as Assemblage is primarily (although not exclusively) an archaeological journal we felt there was a niche that a diverse academic grouping, like that at Birmingham, might fill.

If you remember, Google blocks access to Google-scanned public-domain books outside the US.  Finally we have Google's explanation:

Only books in the public domain -- books no longer under copyright -- have the download feature available. For users in the United States, this typically means books published before 1923. For users outside the U.S., we make determinations based on appropriate local laws. Since whether a book is in the public domain can often be a tricky legal question, we err on the side of caution and display at most a few snippets until we have determined that the book has entered the public domain. These books...may be in the public domain, but until we can be sure, we show them as if they are not.

We're working quickly to digitize and index as many books as possible so we can make Google Book Search truly comprehensive and useful. One way to treat digitized books that may be in the public domain would be to exclude them from the index until we were sure. However, our goal is to make the index as useful as possible, and that means including books as soon as we can rather than waiting for a perfect determination of public domain status. So, some books may initially show up in "Snippet View" and then later, be expanded to "Full View."

Comment.  In most countries on Earth the duration of copyrights is the same as in the US.  So why isn't it easy for Google to provide access to all of those countries as soon as it decides to provide access to the US? 

At least Google admits that these books "may be in the public domain" and that it's temporarily treating them "as if they are not".  That is, it hasn't wrongly classified them, but only delayed classifying them.  Still, in most cases, it's hard to understand why any delay is necessary.

Update. Klaus Graf, who first drew this problem to my attention, is equally skeptical of Google's explanation.

The presentations --both slides and audio-- from the Commons of Science Conference (Washington, D.C., October 3-4, 2006) are now online.  (Thanks to the INIST Libre Accès blog.)

The presentations from the workshop, Copyright and Marking Government Works: Why Keep the Public Guessing? (Washington, November 2, 2006), are now online.

Stewart Brower has launched the PubDrug wiki, as he said he would last week.  From his blog post announcing the launch: 

For the last several years, I've watched as the cost of drug resources has continued to escalate, reaching a point where even large-scale institutions like the University at Buffalo really cannot afford the licensing for the kinds of resources we need for our educational, clinical and research initiatives.

Yesterday, I conducted a public forum to announce the creation of PubDrug.org, an open access drug resource I hope to develop which would serve as an alternative to other high-dollar drug information sources. As I explained to the attendees, this is only the bare-bones beginning of PubDrug -- We will need to attract the interest of many others for this effort to be a success.

If you see the potential need for something like PubDrug, I would encourage you to take a moment to download my slides and read them over. I see roles for editors, contributors, and developers, and I'm sure there are many more roles I'm not thinking of.

I believe our three most immediate tasks to be:

• Developing a robust template for drug monographs
• Creating policies and procedures to guide site development without interfering with the viral nature of wiki-building
• Recruiting lots of people to assist in building this resource

Again, I'm sure there's a lot I'm not thinking of. If you think this effort has merit, please contact me and let me know if you will be able to help....

Stevan Chabot, The DSpace Digital Repository: A Project Analysis, Subject/Object, November 9, 2006.  Excerpt:

...[T]here are some problems with DSpace. In the first place, the software is open source. While this does come with its own benefits, it also comes with its own problems. Commercial support for the software does not exist at this time, neither for installation nor for later technical issues. Libraries used to working with commercial software or ILS vendors may find implementation difficult. Furthermore, some who have previously implemented the software have had problems with performance while updating files and with the structure of the communities...

The major difficulty we have found is with DSpace’s handling of metadata. While we feel that the number of fields in Dublin Core is adequate for most if not all uses (DCMI Usage Board 2006), we are troubled by the lack of authority control when completing its fields....

Despite this fault, we do find that DSpace has many positive aspects. We find it to be an amazingly flexible and robust system which would be ready to handle almost any university’s needs right out of the box. It has the flexibility to handle all types of documents and methods of research, as well as the simplicity to encourage non-technical users towards the Open Access (OA) of scholarly research. We also feel that, given Smith’s intentions as cited above, the system would be an ready for a university to experiment in self-publishing even a part of its faculty’s research. Furthermore, while open source can have its drawbacks, it has some definite benefits. The software itself is customizable from the ground up....

It is the goal of the developer’s of DSpace to make the collection, preservation, indexing and distribution of digital research objects simple (Smith, 2003), to the extent that it encourages researches to self-archive their own work. Despite a few drawbacks that we have noted, particularly with the lack of control over metadata, DSpace is an excellent digital repository system supported by an active community of both users and developers. Given DSpace’s flexibility to archive any type of digital object and deal with any model of research within a department or other research community, it is a highly recommended system which can only improve with further development. This flexibility is increased by the fact that DSpace is open source....

Luke Rosenberger, Custom Search Engines via Google Co-op, lbr, November 9, 2006.  Excerpt:

I've previously discussed the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) on this blog.  DOAJ is truly an incredibly valuable collection of resources....But it's hard to browse that fantastic directory without wishing for a magic search box that could perform a search across that entire collection.  DOAJ has actually started down that road on their own -- of the 2459 journals in the directory today, 721 can be searched at the article level using the Find Articles tool on the DOAJ site.

But with the advent of CSE [Google Custom Search Engines], it seemed to me that we might be able to create that "magic search box" another way.  So I went to the DOAJ site and grabbed the journal metadata in CSV format as described in the FAQ (note that it's licensed CC-BY-SA-1.0).  Then with a few Excel hacks, I was able to parse out a list of 1604 domains from that list that hosted English-language DOAJ journals.  I carved out the domain names, added a slash and asterisk at the end to indicate I wanted everything in that domain, and dropped them in the batch upload box for CSE.  And just like that -- we have what you might call an early prototype of a "magic search box" for English-language DOAJ journals....

Pretty cool, no?  Now, of course, this needs a lot of fine-tuning, which I have already started.  The domain-level addresses I used are too broad.  In one case, there was actually a journal hosted on geocities.com , so I was initially pulling in everything from that domain -- of course, I fixed that quick.  In a lot of cases, journals are hosted on their university publishers' domains, so I'm pulling in all content from that university's site right now.  Fortunately, Google Co-op CSE offers some pretty cool capabilities to focus your search on certain pages or portions of a site....

It may take a little time to work through 1604 domains to check or fine-tune them all, but the nice thing about CSE is that it's part of Co-op, which is designed for collaborative projects.  So if you'd like to help fine-tune the DOAJ CSE, please let me know at lukethelibrarian at gmail dot com and I can send you an invitation to join the crew.

Once that's starting to shape up, I'll work up a CSE that will cover DOAJ's Spanish-language journals.  Then, after that... who knows? ...

Stevan Harnad, Proportion Open Access in Biomedical Sciences, Open Access Archivangelism, November 9, 2006.  Excerpt:

Comments on:

Matsubayashi, Mamiko and Kurata, Keiko and Sakai, Yukiko and Morioka, Tomoko and Kato, Shinya and Mine, Shinji and Ueda, Shuichi (2006) Current Status of Open Access in Biomedical Field - the Comparison of Countries Related to the Impact of National Policies. 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Austin, Texas.

This study randomly sampled 4756 biomedical articles published between January and September in 2005 and indexed in PubMed, hand-checking how many of them were OA, and if so how: via OA journal (gold) or self-archiving (green, via IRs or websites). Its findings: ...

The authors note that their 25% OA estimate in biomedical sciences in 2005 is higher than Hajjem et al's s estimate of 15% OA in biology and 6% OA in health (but Hajjem et al's sample was for 1992-2003, based only on articles indexed by Thompson ISI, and explicitly excluded articles published in OA journals, hence the relevant comparison figure is the present study's 10.9% for self-archiving).

The authors also note that their estimate of 10.9% self-archiving is lower than Swan's estimate of 49% (but Swan's sample was for all disciplines, and the 49% referred only to the proportion of respondents who had self-archived at least one article)....

Several studies -- from Lawrence 2001 to Hajjem et al 2005 -- have reported that there is a positive correlation between citation-bracket and OA (the higher the citations, the more likely the article is OA), and there is disagreement over how much of this effect is a causal Quality Advantage (OA causing higher citations for higher quality articles) or a self-selection Quality Bias (authors of higher quality articles being more likely to make them OA, one way or the other). The present results don't resolve this, as they go both ways.

Clearly, more studies are needed. But even more than that, more OA is needed!

Google 'aids doctors' diagnoses, BBC News, November 10, 2006.  Excerpt:

A team of Australian doctors Googled the symptoms of 26 cases for a study in the New England Journal of Medicine.  In 15 cases, the web search came up with the right diagnosis, the paper published on the British Medical Journal website reports.

The authors say Google can be a "useful aid", but UK experts said the internet was "no replacement" for doctors....

[W]hile doctors carry a huge amount of medical information in their heads, they may need to seek further help if they come up against an unusual case.

In each of the 26 cases studied, researchers based at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane selected three to five search terms from each case and did a Google search without knowing the correct diagnoses. They then recorded the three diagnoses that were ranked most prominently and selected the one which seemed most relevant to the signs. The doctors then compared the results with the correct diagnoses as published in the journal.  Google searches found the correct diagnosis in just over half of the cases....

But they said a successful search needed a "human expert" user, and therefore patients would have less success trying to diagnose themselves on the internet....

"Useful information on even the rarest medical syndromes can now be found and digested within a matter of minutes.  Our study suggests that in difficult diagnostic cases, it is often useful to google for a diagnosis." ...

Comment.  Jan Velterop sent me this story with the comment that it could be seen as an argument for OA.  He's right.  Of course Google won't replace doctors and will help expert users more than inexpert users (qualifications clearly laid out in the BMJ article and this BBC summary).  But it's just as clear that removing access barriers to research literature will help practicing physicians in their practice.  This study was done with Google, which covers a good deal of research literature and a good deal of crap.  Imagine cutting the crap and doing the same study on PubMed Central.  Imagine doing the same study in the hypothetical future when 100% of the peer-reviewed medical research literature is OA and we can build search engines to cover all and only that literature.

A major study of librarian purchasing preferences has shown that librarians will show a strong inclination towards the acquisition of Open Access (OA) materials as they discover that more and more learned material has become available in institutional repositories. The study, which took the form of conjoint and attitudinal surveys, shows that librarians are very sensitive to quality, content cost, the version of the content and how immediately the content is made available.

Overall the survey shows that a significant number of librarians are likely to substitute OA materials for subscribed resources, given certain levels of reliability, peer review and currency of the information available. This last factor is a critical one – resources become much less favoured if they are embargoed for a significant length of time....

The survey tested librarians’ preferences for a series of hypothetical and unnamed products frequently showing unfamiliar combinations of attributes – such as a fully priced journal embargoed for 24 months, or content at 25% of the price but through an unreliable service. By taking this approach, the survey measured librarians’ preferences for an abstract set of potential products thus avoiding any pre-conceived preferences for named products, such as journals, licensed fulltext (aggregated) databases or content on OA repositories.

The data were abstracted into a ‘Share of Preference’ model (or simulator) which has then been used to model real-life products and thus create predictions for librarians’ real-life preferences for these products. It is therefore possible to go beyond the comparisons, in this work, of journals versus OA and to model other preferences, such as between OA and licensed full-text databases.

The key attributes identified in this study, apart for the universal requirement for content quality, were what version of the content (author’s preprint etc) is made available and how up-to-date content is (the embargo period) . Specifically: 

1. There is a strong preference for content that has undergone peer review. Preference is greatly affected by whether or not an article has undergone the refereeing process; authors’ unrefereed original manuscripts were seen as a poor substitute for any postrefereed version of an article. Librarians showed an insignificant shift in preference between any version of an article once it had been refereed, irrespective of the inclusion of editorial changes such as copy editing. Figure 1...shows that the change in the librarian’s preference for the subscribed journal over the same content in an OA archive is greatest, in favour of the subscribed journal when the only version of the content available in the OA archive is the author’s submitted manuscript. 
2. How soon content is made available is a key determinant of content model preference in librarian’s acquisition behaviour; delay in availability reduces the attractiveness of a product offering. The survey tested the effect of embargoes on OA and licensed database content set at 6, 12 and 24 months; a significant impact on librarians’ preference for OA, and licensed database, content was seen when embargoes were set to 12 and 24 month. A 6-month embargo has little impact. Figure 2, below, shows the share of preference for degrees of embargoed and non-embargoed content in an institutional repository versus paid-for journal articles, assuming 100% of content is available in the archive. Only when the embargo is extended to 24 months in this model, does the final published article obtain a greater than 50% share of preference. 
3. Lastly and perhaps unsuprisingly librarians show a strong preference for content that is made freely available, all other factors being equal. Even as librarians were asked to trade off price considerations against other factors such as the version of the content and the immediacy of its availability, there remained a significant pull towards free content or content whose cost had been greatly reduced.

Marlon, Domingus, Research Unleashed?  A presentation at the CODESRIA-ASC Conference Series 2006: Electronic Publishing and Dissemination (Leiden, September 7, 2006).  (Thanks to Stevan Harnad.)  Excerpt:

The international open access movement has reached a new level. In open access stage 1 we see a focus on technical issues related to open access and on gaining content for repositories. The words “open access” are important drivers in this stage. In stage 1, as Alma Swan [2006] points out, we see new technologies applied to existing processes (i.e. more of the same, faster and cheaper).

In stage 2 new technologies are integrated into existing processes (i.e. improve existing systems).[Swan, 2006] In stage 2 we see a focus on services based on repositories and the words “open access” have become less effective. Stage 2, I claim, is all about supporting scholarly communication and using technical infrastructure to be more efficient....

Connecting Africa is a hub for the Africanist community around the world. The open access available publications it provides access to are downloaded dosens of times a month individually. As such it is to be expected to facilitate scholarly communication in African Studies and, to my mind, is an example of open access stage 2.

The South- North divide as seen in the case of SciELO indicates that open access indeed does have an impact on usage of and citations to the oa publications. Also in the North-South perspective the same effects are to be found. Based on these examples one could hold that open access is a means to bridging the divide between North and South. It needs allies like Google and key research tools that make publications visible and available. Whether visibility and availability will diminish the Matthew effect remains to be seen.

The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), in collaboration with the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, has launched an initiative to promote open access information sources in agricultural sciences and technology in India.

The initiative was launched at the First AGRIS workshop on open access in agricultural sciences and technology: Indian initiatives organized at ICRISAT headquarters at Patancheru on 6 and 7 November.

The workshop brought together library and documentation specialists from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) institutes, state agricultural research universities. There were also representatives from specialized institutions such as the National Institute of Agricultural Extension Management (MANAGE), the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) at Bangalore, and the National Informatics Center (NIC).

Launching the first phase, the participants of the workshop decided to suggest the establishment of the two pilot open access information repositories in the agricultural domain within the first year. One would be in Delhi with support from ICAR, and the other in Hyderabad with support from ICRISAT and MANAGE....

Development of new metadata...standards to share information coupled with open source software now in use can ensure open access for users worldwide.

The new open access agriculture information will enable agricultural scientists to obtain information through the Internet that are more searchable, more value added information such as who is the writer, citation and source credibility.

Edwin V. Sperr, Jr., Libraries and the future of scholarly communication, Molecular Cancer, November 7, 2006. 

Abstract:   Changes in the structure of commercial scholarly publishing have led to spiraling subscription prices. This has resulted in a "serials crisis" that has eroded library budgets and threatened the system of scientific communication. Open access represents one possible solution, and librarians are working to help make it a reality.

APDIP Donates 15 e-Primers to Wikibooks, a press release from the UNDP's Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (APDIP).  Excerpt:

APDIP realizes how fast a published book gets out-of-date, especially in the fast-moving field of information and communications technology for development (ICT4D). APDIP has therefore donated 15 of its e-Primers to Wikibooks for free use and update....

Wikibooks is our chosen platform because it facilitates collaboration. Every day, volunteers are improving Wikibooks, making many changes, writing, updating, and correcting books. Wikibooks maintains quality control and has policies and guidelines that users need to follow. Wikibooks are also available for all to freely distribute and reproduce as covered by the GNU Free Documentation License.

We would like to invite you to visit the Wikibooks and contribute your knowledge and experiences in the relevant ICT4D topics. Forthcoming APDIP e-Primers on network infrastructure and security, open content and other topics will all automatically be donated to Wikibooks.

The original published e-Primers will remain in [the APDIP eLibrary] (and, in the case of the e-Primers on FOSS, at [the IOSN library]), and the version in Wikibook will be linked to these. This way any user will be able to see the original version alongside the (modified) Wikibook version....

See the full announcement for the list of 15 books and their links.

Comment. Kudos to the APDIP.  Whenever possible, out-of-print books should become OA.  When they're software primers, or other books that require updating to remain useful, they should become OA and user-modifiable, like Wikibooks.  When they're funded by public money, like these, the decision is even easier.

Michael Cross, Survey subsidies wiped off the map, The Guardian, November 9, 2006.  Excerpt:

In a remarkable failure of joined-up policymaking, the government has killed off almost all central subsidies for mapmaking. A terse statement from the Department for Communities and Local Government announced that next month it will stop paying Ordnance Survey to survey "uneconomic" parts of Britain such as mountains and moorlands....The agency warns that the subsidy's withdrawal "will have an impact on the currency and content of the rural geography in our products"....Since 1999, Ordnance Survey has received £93.5m through the national interest mapping services agreement, known as Nimsa....

Following last week's announcement, funding will cease entirely in December. A statement by Baroness Andrews, one of the two ministers with responsibility for Ordnance Survey, said that from now on it would be up to public bodies needing geographical data to procure it directly....

In the short term, the ending of Nimsa is bad news for Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign, which argues that data held by bodies such as Ordnance Survey be made freely available for individuals and commercial entities to exploit. This model would require data collection to be funded centrally.

Ending subsidies to Ordnance Survey raises another possibility: that a future government might consider outright privatisation - an option considered and rejected in the 1990s. This would be a disaster for free data. [Robert Barr, an expert in geographical information at Manchester University] suggests an alternative approach: splitting the organisation into two. One division would operate a national geospatial database, funded by the taxpayer and made available to all, while the other would compete freely in the marketplace for maps and other "value added" products.

Another model could be Canada's Geobase project, where since 2001, mapping agencies at different levels of government - federal, provincial and municipal - have agreed to share and make available geospatial data under so-called "copyleft" royalty-free licences. The database, available at the Geobase portal, includes administrative boundaries and height data, which have both been subjects of anguished controversy in Britain....

Christina Pikas has blogged some notes on the Access to Scientific Data session at the ASIS&T Annual Meeting (Austin, November 3-9, 2006). 

Starting in January 2007, Springer will publish print editions of 10 journals from the Indian Academy of Sciences (IAS), for distribution outside India.  For details see the October 2 press release  or the November 6 story in IWR.

Comment.  As far as I know, all the IAS journals are OA.  Hence, Springer must see some revenue possibilities in charging for print editions of OA journals.  That's not surprising, but if Springer could confirm it, then it would help answer the most common objection from the publishing lobby against national OA archiving policies --that the policies will undermine subscriptions.  Moreover, if Springer sees revenue in this deal, I suppose it will share it with the IAS.  If so, then large or small, the additional revenue will be additional support for the IAS OA publishing program.  How many other no-print OA journals could strike similar deals for revenue-generating print editions?  We won't know until we see many more try.

Dorothea Salo, Rah-rah OAA! Caveat Lector, November 8, 2006.  Excerpt:

I knew about the uproar in the American Anthropological Association over FRPAA, of course....The online-publishing arm [AnthroSource, disbanded by the AAA for supporting FRPAA] isn’t taking this lying down. Oh, no. There’s an energetic blog. There’s a wiki. There’s T-shirts. There’s talk of a session on open access at the AAA’s national conference --now that’s cojones for you.

I love these folks. They rock. They are my shiny new heroes. I could almost join ALA again just to pull stunts like this. (Almost.) The problem with open access is that we don’t have a glitzy swanky award ceremony to invite these people to and give them little statues.

I’m working on my presentation for this ... and I’ve already stashed AAA in there (along with Stephen Breckler of the APA) as examples of how you! too! can shoot your society in the collective foot by trying to protect your journal revenue at whatever cost to your society’s membership and its public image....My money’s on the OAA against the AAA, all the way. Go heroes go!

Dorothea Salo, Feedback, Caveat Lector, November 8, 2006.  Excerpt:

Clearing rights on this pile of papers [to deposit in the institutional repository] is no joke. What should I do with a 20-year-old article in a journal that no longer exists from a publisher that’s been sold two or three times? ...

I’m erring on the side of inclusion and access, with an immediate-withdraw-on-controversy policy (which has saved my bacon before, though not in any copyright disputes) to back me up....

Sure, they’re just-as-illegally up in plain sight on the author’s own piece of the university web, but publishers who tread lightly around their authors won’t hesitate to come down like a ton of bricks on me. Just ask your local e-reserves librarian.

I intend to treat this as a teachable moment, and I strongly recommend that other repository managers do likewise. I’m keeping track of items I can’t use and why I can’t use them. The list will go back to the author when I’m finally done with this pile....

I shall also mention that some of the items I have to reject because they are publisher PDFs can be archived in final-draft form.  SHERPA/ROMEO will figure in this statement. And of course I shall offer to look at future publishing agreements with or for him, to keep this problem from occurring in future. We’ll see what happens.

Most faculty do not understand how scholarly publishing works, nor do they realize how what they sign affects what they and others can legally do with their work....Triply do they not realize the control they have over the situation. Those few faculty who do understand all this are mostly scholarly-society brass who tell their colleagues to sign the nice agreement, no, you don’t need to read it!

Despite the extra paperwork and faculty ire involved, repository managers need to acquaint faculty with how much of their work is disappearing into the toll-access abyss, and what they can do about it....Moreover, any repository whose policy on copyright violations does not include mediating between publisher and author is missing a trick. Don’t just “disappear” material that shouldn’t have been posted. Make sure the author knows what happened and why. We have to educate. And we have to educate at pain-points, or nothing will change.

Mamiko Matsubayashi and six co-authors, Current Status of Open Access in Biomedical Field-the Comparison of Countries Related to the Impact of National Policies, a presentation at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (Austin, November 3-8, 2006).

This [slide presentation]...reports the current status of Open Access (OA) in the biomedical field, and compares some countries such as the U.S., the U.K. and Japan in terms of the OA situation. There are controversies about the definition of OA. After examining the requirements about OA, we recognized OA as the situation in which researchers could read the full text of articles in unrestricted way. In order to investigate the current situation of OA, 4,756 articles were sampled randomly from articles published between January and September in 2005 and indexed in PubMed. The main results are as follows: 1) The rate of OA articles was 25%, and 75% of all the articles were available online including electronic subscription journal articles. 2) The means of OA was classified into five types. Among them, the rate of OA articles by “OA and Hybrid OA journals” was overwhelming (more than 70%), and that of PMC was 26.2%. The rates of OA articles by “institutional repositories” and “authors’ personal sites” were considerably low (6.0% and 4.9% respectively). 3) When comparing the rates of OA articles by countries, Belgium ranked the first with 41.7%. The five countries indicated more than 30% in OA articles: Canada and India (38.7%), Brazil (36.4%), Australia (30.8%), and the U.S. (30.7%). Each country was different in the means of OA. 4) We explored the rates of OA for two groups; one group consists of articles published in journals with IF, and the other consists of articles published in journals without IF. The rate of OA for the group of articles in journals with IF is 20.6%, and that of articles in journals without IF is 30.8%

D.K. Sahu, Open access journals in agricultural science: adopting 'fee-less-free' model of Medknow, a presentation at the First Workshop on Open Access in Agricultural Science and Technology: Indian Initiatives (Hyderabad, November 6-7, 2006).

Abstract:   Most ‘international’ journals are not international in terms of their content, readership and composition of the editorial boards. Hence, local journals are important to provide local knowledge / local evidence and help in policy making. For a local journal to be successful, it needs quality papers, time of editors and reviewers, finances and readers. Most journals from the developing countries face problems due to lack of time from their part time editors who have more than one job at hand. The journal offices keep changing with the change of editors and loose the contacts with the authors, subscribers and advertisers. In addition, most of these journals have limited visibility outside the print circulation restricted to the members their association. Open access offers help to such journals by increasing the visibility and accessibility as has been shown by Medknow Publications. Medknow now publishing 40 journals has adopted unique ‘fee-less immediate free’ model of publishing. The journals published by Medknow use its manuscript processing system which helps in faster review and resource saving. On acceptance articles are published online without any embargo. The revenue from subscriptions for print edition, advertisements, reprints sale and membership dues helps to take care of the print and online publishing. The increased visibility offered by free access has helped to increase number of articles submitted to these journals which in turn has help to publish more number of articles per issue (e.g. Indian Journal of Urology) and more number of issues per volume (e.g. Indian Journal of Ophthalmology). Not just the submitted manuscripts, but also the citations received by these journals have increased. Interestingly and importantly for the journals from the developing world, by providing free online access none of these journals have lost subscribers to the print edition. Over the last four years, the number of paid subscribers to these journals has been increasing consistently. Hence, it may be apt for the journals from agriculture science in India to adopt a similar ‘free-less-free’ model which helps to improve the quality of the journals.

To protect open access to publicly-funded research, Connecting for Health (part of the UK's National Health Service) has dropped BMJ in favor of Prodigy Knowledge as the distributor of its Clinical Knowledge Summaries.  (Thanks to Ben Toth.)  From today's announcement:

Connecting for Health have confirmed they have awarded a five year contract to provide Clinical Knowledge Summaries (CKS) to a consortium comprising the Sowerby Centre for Health Informatics, at Newcastle Ltd (SCHIN) and international medical publishers EBSCO.

As E-Health Insider Primary Care exclusively revealed last week NHS Connecting for Health ended its agreement with BMJ Publishing Group on 30 September after the BMJ refused to hand over the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) of its material generated during the contract.

CfH began procuring for a new supplier of CKS in May 2006 with an advertisement in the Official Journal of the European Union, where they made it clear that it was essential that the Department of Health owned the IPR of any material used during the contract, which is paid for by taxpayers.

In a statement they said: “This will ensure that, at the end of the contract, the NHS will have continuing rights to the content developed during the course of the contract rather than be left with nothing if the supplier owned IPR, as was the case with the Clinical Evidence contract.” ...

The consortium will be providing GPs and clinicians with Prodigy Knowledge, an updated source of clinical knowledge designed to support healthcare professionals and patients, in managing the common conditions generally seen in primary and first-contact care.

Comment:  Kudos to CfH for enforcing the public's right to OA.  I'm trying to learn more about what happened here, since BMJ is a pioneer of OA and certainly able to understand the terms of a contract.  Will the CfH take steps to regain the rights to material generated during the five year contract with BMJ?  Is there some question about what the contract actually required?

Barry Schwartz, Australia's Proposed Copyright Rules Would Make Search Engines Impossible, Warns Google, Search Engine Watch, November 7, 2006.  Excerpt:

AFP reports that Google has warned Australia that if they pass certain a new copyright law that it will set the country back to "the pre-Internet era." Google's senior counsel, Andrew McLaughlin, told the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, "If such advanced permission was required [to index pages], the internet would promptly grind to a halt." I believe the issue here is that Australia wants Google to get copyright owners to opt in to having their content indexed, archived and cached, as opposed to opting out via a robots.txt file. Australia is not alone here; Belgium newspapers are fighting Google over similar copyright issues. This all just amazes me, seriously.

Postscript by Danny Sullivan:

See also my Google's Belgium Fight: Show Me The Money, Not The Opt-Out, Say Publishers piece that goes into great depth about how this is effectively already the law in Belgium, due to a court ruling there. The appeal on that case will happen later this month, but the threat alone also already caused Microsoft to back out of some indexing.

Nice idea:  instead of a university press office sending out a stream of press releases about cool faculty research projects, how about a blog?  See the egghead blog from the University of California at Davis.  (Thanks to ResearchBuzz.)

Even better:  what if every blog posting about a faculty journal article linked to an OA copy in the institutional repository?

Support open access in anthropology with t-shirts.  (Thanks to Savage Minds.)

D.K. Sahu, Open access in the developing world: regaining the lost impact, a presentation at the Workshop on Electronic Publishing and Open Access: Developing Country Perspectives (Bangalore, India, Nov 2-3, 2006). 

Journals from the developing world usually face problems of poor science, poor visibility and poor recognition. Good science done in the developing countries is usually published in the high impact foreign journals. Open access (OA) can help to improve quality of journals by attracting good science and more authors. OA could also improve citations and impact factor. Medknow Publications, an open access publisher from India, now publishing 39 journals has shown the advantages and impact of OA for the developing world. The OA journals attract more virtual readers [e.g. JPGM’s website attracts over 3000 visitors every day]. With increased visibility most journals have been able to attract more articles and thus publish regularly, more number of articles per issue and more number of issues per year. By providing free access, none of these journals have lost the subscribers to the print version; in fact, the subscriptions for print versions have increased over last 4 years. OA has also shown impact on the citations received by the journals.

Gary Ward, Deconstructing the Arguments Against Improved Public Access, American Society for Cell  Biology Newsletter, November 2006.  (Thanks to Heather Joseph.)  Excerpt:

Recent months have seen several important developments in public access to the scientific literature. In April, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni testified before Congress that the NIH’s current Public Access policy is not working.  Compliance with the policy, which requests that NIH-funded investigators make the results of their work freely accessible in PubMed Central no later than one year after publication, has been exceedingly low: Fewer than 5% of publications funded by NIH are currently being deposited within that time frame. Lawmakers in Washington subsequently introduced bills that would require government-funded researchers to make their results freely available to the public (see sidebar, page 6).

Not surprisingly, congressional interest has mobilized advocates on both sides of the issue. Many publishers are lobbying hard against the proposed legislation, while public interest groups, library associations, patient advocates, and some scientific societies are supportive. Universities have finally begun to weigh in on the issue; provosts and presidents from 126 leading universities and colleges across the U.S. have signed onto letters expressing support for the legislation....

As efforts to provide greater public access to the scientific literature gain momentum, so does the rhetoric. Following is an attempt to correct some of the misinformation that has confounded these discussions, to enable more dispassionate and data-driven consideration of the issues at hand....

The rest of the article is hard to excerpt and I recommend that you read it all.  Ward raises and answers nine objections that publishers often raise against national OA policies:  (1) that they would force publishers to convert non-OA journals to OA; (2) that they would undermine subscriptions and revenue; (3) that a six month embargo is too short; (4) that OA policies threaten peer review; (5) that the costs of implementation would be better spent on new grants; (6) that everyone who needs access already has access; (7) that publishers should be able to charge for the value they add; (8) that OA policies would burden researchers; and (9) that the public doesn't care.

Kelly Edmonds, Off with their heads! Copyright infringement in the Canadian online higher educational environment, Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, Spring 2006.  (Thanks to Stephen Downes.)

Abstract:   Issues of copyright infringement are contentious for academia in the online environment. The educational community on campus must carefully consider how digital materials are used, created and disseminated online given that present laws that regulate these actions are not well developed. It can seem like anyone’s guess on how to proceed in order to avoid copyright infringement. This paper offers current descriptions of intellectual property, copyright laws, infringements, and plagiarism in a Canadian context with a view on creating, using and disseminating digital works. The impact of copyright infringement on students and faculty in higher education is explored and some suggestions are made for protective practice.

From the body of the paper:

It becomes increasingly frustrating to remain current on how to create, use and publish works in the digital environment in ways that respect copyright. The current Canadian laws and licenses on digital rights are lacking, and are currently hindered by a slow process for developing new recommendations. At stake is the integrity and reputation of educational institutions, libraries, educators and students. The consequences for copyright infringement, whether intended or not, are out of proportion to the need for open access for learning and knowledge creation. As educational practices and materials change in an online world, so should the attitudes towards copyright and the laws that govern the use, creation and dissemination of materials....With the growth of online access, education is becoming a sophisticated and desired commodity, which in turn changes the purpose and value of informational materials. Exactly who will emerge victorious from the current copyright struggle is yet to be seen. It may the content owners, or it may be the users. In the end, educators can hope it is those who create and share new knowledge.

The big news in the US this morning is the mid-term election that gave Democrats control of the House of Representatives.  It may also have given them the Senate, but we won't know until we've wandered for a while in the desert of recounts and lawyers.

Here are the outcomes of four races that matter for open access.

1. Joe Lieberman was re-elected Senator from Connecticut.  If you remember, he was defeated in the Democratic primary by Ned Lamont and decided to run as an Independent.  Lieberman introduced the CURES Act in December 2005 and co-sponsored FRPAA with John Cornyn (R-TX) in May 2006, making him the sponsor or co-sponsor of the two strongest OA bills ever introduced in Congress.  Both CURES and FRPAA would mandate OA to publicly-funded research.
2. Rick Santorum (R-PA) lost his Senate seat from Pennsylvania.  Santorum is notable for taking money from AccuWeather, the weather-forecasting company, to sponsor legislation that would stop the National Weather Service from providing open access to publicly-funded weather data.  Santorum was defeated by Bob Casey, Treasurer for the State of Pennsylvania. 
3. Mike DeWine (R-OH) lost his Senate seat from Ohio.  Because Elsevier is a major employer in Ohio, as the owner of Ohio-based Lexis-Nexis, DeWine listened when Elsevier argued that national OA policies would cost jobs in the publishing industry.  DeWine was defeated by Sherrod Brown (D-OH), currently in Congress as a Representative from Ohio's 13th District.  Brown has been a friend of OA, and especially the NIH public-access policy, from his position on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, the authorizing committee for the NIH, and his position as ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Health.
4. Finally, Ernest Istook (R-OK) gave up his seat in the House to run for governor of Oklahoma.  He lost that race and is now, at least temporarily, out of politics.  Istook was OA's best friend on the influential House Appropriations Committee and introduced the language (July 2004) requiring the NIH to mandate OA to NIH-funded research.  We often forget that the House language --Istook's language-- demanded a mandate even though the NIH eventually adopted a weaker policy.

That's three for four --a good day for OA.  I'll add more about other races as I learn more.

As I reported in July, the House Appropriations Bill for fiscal 2007 would compel the NIH to strengthen its public-access policy from a request to a requirement.  The fate of this bill will be decided by the current House and Senate, not the new ones.  The fiscal year started on October 1, so action is past due and we can expect Congress to get back to business as soon as the dust settles.

Claire Johnson, Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics Policies: Indexing, Submissions, Clinical Trial Registries, and Public Access for National Institutes of Health–Funded Studies, Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, October 2006 (accessible only to subscribers). 

Abstract:   This is a brief update for Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics authors relating to the following: the journal's support of public access for National Institutes of Health–funded studies, indexing in MEDLINE, and other indexing systems, clinical trial registration requirements for submissions, and the continuation of not requiring a submission processing fee.

The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) has written a report on the First Workshop on Open Access in Agricultural Science and Technology: Indian Initiatives (Hyderabad, November 6-7, 2006).  (Thanks to Subbiah Arunachalam.)  Excerpt:

...