Open Access News

Eva Tallaksen, Universities urged: 'share benefits of health research', SciDev.Net, November 17, 2006.  Excerpt:

Prominent scientists have joined forces with a group of students to urge the World Health Organization (WHO) to include in its global strategies how universities can ensure health research benefits developing countries.

Submitted this week (15 November), their petition — the Philadelphia Consensus Statement — outlines how universities can improve access to medicines and transfer of knowledge to the developing world by changing their licensing policies and intellectual property (IP) rights.

Some 80 top law, science and global health experts — including four Nobel laureates — as well as 150 students have signed the petition.

It is unique in seeking to spur universities, rather than companies or governments, into taking action, says Dave Chokshi, a medical student at the US-based University of Pennsylvania....

The petition lays out specific proposals on how universities can improve access to the fruits of this research by such measures as granting rights to companies to manufacture and export generic versions of new drugs to developing countries, price reductions,...lifting of patent requirements...engaging with public-private partnerships or institutions in developing countries, creating new opportunities for drug development, and carving out exemptions for research in university patents or licences....

Each year, 10 million people die from diseases that are treatable with existing drugs, according to the WHO.

More than half of all pharmaceutical innovations in the United States come from universities, making them a key place to address issues of access to medicines and research into neglected diseases.

"The current IP system isn't working for the majority of the world," says signatory David Mayne, professor emeritus in engineering control theory at the UK-based Imperial College London....

Comment.  The policy recommendations in the statement are very good but sadly incomplete.  The statement calls on universities "to make the fruits of their research available in the developing world" but doesn't call on them to make the research itself available in the developing world.  Or, it focuses on access to new drugs and technologies and largely ignores access to literature and data.  Or, it focuses on access barriers created by patents and largely ignores those created by copyrights.  It should ask universities to mandate open access to the research output of their faculty.  (It should also ask funding agencies, especially public funding agencies, to mandate open access to the research published by their grantees; but so far the statement is limited to university actions.)  If researchers routinely deposited copies of their journal publications in interoperable OA repositories, then barrier-free access to the peer-reviewed research would complement barrier-free access to new medicines and technologies.

Jan Velterop, Price & Value, The Parachute, November 17, 2006.  Excerpt:

...In a normal functional economic system, the potential buyer just doesn’t buy [when the price seems too high]...or buys something that can be regarded as a substitute for what he initially desired, elsewhere, at a lower price.

Academic journals with their subscription models are not functioning along those lines, as they are monopoloid, i.e. non-substitutable, non-rivalrous. The paying party doesn’t have the choice. A subscribing library can’t just cancel an expensive journal and buy a cheaper one instead, because what his patrons find in one, they will not find in the other and vice versa. That’s why the model should be ‘flipped’, from a ‘user-side’ payment, to an ‘author-side’ payment.

In contrast to users, authors do have the choice. They can, in almost all cases, decide to go to another journal with their paper. And if price becomes a factor for them or their backers, they can weigh that in their decisions. For them, journals are substitutable, rivalrous....

[C]hanging to a standard economic model – which is what author-side payment for publication (i.e. payment on behalf of the party with a choice) entails – will offer us a chance to create a functional market environment and to converge the perceived value and the fee (the definition of a fair price)....

Those who see open access simply as a way to pay less are free to do so, of course, but it makes open access a mere negotiating lever with publishers....

The problem really is that for non-substitutable, non-rivalrous, material, the market for subscriptions is intrinsically dysfunctional. It may sometimes look as though high prices cause cancellations, but low-priced journals have suffered cancellations as well, and what’s more, there is no discernible pattern that reliably shows a distinction between higher priced and lower priced journals in that regard....

Open access is more fundamental than about price. It is also more fundamental than increased usage figures or citation counts. It is about the notion that results of research carried out with public money are public goods....

Should the cost of publishing be scrutinized? Sure. In the same way as the cost of research is scrutinized....

The current subscription system doesn’t give us that chance. Nobody knows what a fair price is. We are, absurdly, measuring ‘cost per download’, ‘cost of citation’ and the like and believe we are measuring value. Has anybody ever approached, say, the proceedings of a parliamentary debate in that way? Even just as a thought experiment? What is 'usage' anyway? Scientific articles are important documents. The only thing that valuing them by their usage and citation does is to make the usage and citation potential of articles into criteria for publishing them, instead of their intrinsic scientific merit. Thus making a brilliant article that few understand seem pretty worthless. And – possibly worse – making a poor, but controversial, popular, and fashionable article seem the more valuable of the two. Surely, that can't be where we want to go.

Jeff Van Drimmelen, Skypecasts' Academic Potential, Educause Connect, November 13, 2006.  (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)  Excerpt:

Skypecasts have the potential to revolutionize the academic community. They not only open up many options to teacher and student interactions, but level the playing field in a way that equalizes every participant’s voice. They also create thousands of new and exciting possibilities for real-time learning that were never possible before. This article gives a broad overview of what Skypecasts are, some possible applications in academia, as well as some of the pros and cons of using them now.  You can see the original post on my webpage here.

In writing this article I realized that it would be appropriate to create a Skypecast to discuss this article and other issues facing those who implement technology in education.  Join me at 10:30 (Eastern Standard Time) on November the 20th, 2006 to discuss Using Technology in Education....

Definition:  Skype has a great Skypecasts FAQ page. They define Skypecasts as “large, hosted calls on Skype.” Sound pretty simple. Basically you can create or join a large online conference call with UP TO 100 people. Skypecasts are scheduled to begin and end at a certain time and usually have a certain topic of discussion. The users must download and use Skype in order to join the Skypecast....

There are Skypecasts going right now with the title “Chat in HINDI or URDU” or “You speak English with me I teach you Chinese.” Online discussion groups could be created for foreign languages acquisition classes where students could speak with a native speaker of a language and in turn help others learn English....

Comment.  Hear, hear.  Earlier this month I participated by telephone in an OA conference taking place in Hyderabad, India.  It would have been much less expensive for the hosts if I participated by Skype.  I have a couple more teleconferences coming up, one for a group in Vancouver and one for a group in Barcelona.  I prefer them to travel because they save time (how often have you spent three days on the road to give a 40 minute talk?), money, hassle, backaches, and (no joke) carbon dioxide emissions. 

Eric Kansa, Once more on FRPAA, Digging Digitally, November 17, 2006. Eric restates some of Gary Ward's excellent answers to publisher objections to FRPAA, clearly hoping that officials at the AAA will pay attention.  Then he continues:

Now, it is not my purpose to bash the AAA on this matter. I believe very strongly that they are mistaken in their opposition to FRPAA, but I also believe it is essential to fully explore and address the concerns of scholarly societies and their publishing arms....

In moving toward open access, we need to consider how the costs will be covered. It is obvious that not every open access model will be sustainable or appropriate for disciplines such as anthropology or archaeology. I can’t imagine “author-side fees” (such as those expected by PLoS) working in these disciplines. I can imagine a system where professional societies, university libraries, and other consortia come together to underwrite and subsidize open access dissemination.  Universities and university libraries already spend a great deal of money on publication, and shifting some of these resources toward lower-cost open access systems seems viable. Peter Suber has devoted much attention to this issue and explores many pragmatic options (two examples: here and here.) I’m glad open access advocates in anthropology are careful and judicious in how they approach this issue (see this open letter on Savage Minds). Not all routes toward open access are the same. Some may be more sustainable than others, and some models adhere to the ideals of “open knowledge” more than others. FRPAA represents one strategy, and as noted by Gary Ward (above), FRPAA represents little risk to existing publication frameworks.

That said, we must not lose sight of the fact that the current publication regime is in trouble and is not sustainable (here, here, and this important letter about cost pressures on the University of California libraries). The AAA needs to remember this broader context before they entrench themselves even further in their opposition to FRPAA....

Hopefully, heads will cool and the AAA executive staff will realize that the (now defunct) AnthroSource Steering Committee recommendations, especially for the development of a “member-informed policy on open access” are sound and reasonable. FRPAA and open access should not be summarily dismissed. They are important issues that need to be aired and debated by the membership and other anthropological stakeholders. Hopefully, we’ll continue to see some progress toward these ends.

The Karman Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Bern is undertaking an OA Pantheon Project on the architecture of the ancient Roman building.  More importantly, the project marks a general commitment by Karman to OA.  (Thanks to Klaus Graf.)  From the Pantheon site:

The Pantheon Project, as all other future Karman Center projects, focuses on Open Access Scholarship, that is, not only the research results from the Pantheon Project and the Karman Center, but also all the basic data and discussion concerning them will be made freely accessible to all interested scholars for their own use. We also hope to convince archives and other institutions owning historical sources, such as drawings, photographs, prints, rare books, maps, etc., to help us make them available online for research. This would not only help to intensify scholarly work but would at the same time help to preserve the often very delicate or easily damaged originals. One tool developed at the University of Bern to serve large amounts of images and other data over the internet, is Digilib, the digital image library.

And more from another page within the site:

The Pantheon Project aims to establish new tools and norms of Open Access Scholarship: not only the research results from the Pantheon Project, but also all the basic data, intermediate results and discussion will be made freely accessible to all interested scholars. Archives and other institutions will be asked to publish their historical sources – drawings, photographs, prints, rare books, maps – online and make them freely accessible for research....

Digital resources can be referred and quoted in electronic documents, and links can be backtracked to citation sources, so that in the future scholarly work carried out using the Open Access archive can be easily harvested and searched.

A second and very important aspect is the form of interactive collaboration over the internet....

As can be seen, the Karman Center is testing new forms of scientific work and publication in the humanities, which will hopefully result in the establishment of these new forms as permanent working methods in the scientific community. Although the natural sciences, particularly in large projects that can only be realised through the collaboration of hundreds of scholars, have been using web-based collaboration and publication for more than a decade now, the approach to scientific work in the humanities is of a very different structure....

Also see Gerd Grasshoff's slide presentation on the Karman Center's approach to humanistic scholarship, its commitment to OA, and its Pantheon Project.

The Library 2.0 gang has released a podcast of its telephone conference on Open Access and Web 3.0.  (On November 7 it released a podcast on Open Data about libraries.)

The Australian Government Productivity Commission has posted a circular on how to submit comments on its recent draft report on public support for science:

You are invited to examine Draft Report and to provide written submissions to the Commission. (In addition, the Commission intends to hold a limited number of consultations to obtain feedback on the draft.)...There is no specified format for submissions. They may range from a brief outline of your views, to a much more substantial assessment of a range of issues. Where possible, you should provide relevant data and documentation to support your views. Written submissions should reach the Commission by Thursday, 21 December 2006....Submissions will normally be placed on the Commission’s website shortly after receipt, unless they are marked confidential or accompanied by a request to delay release for short period of time....Submissions may also be sent by mail, fax or audio cassette....By email: science@pc.gov.au.

PS:  For the OA recommendations in the draft report, see my blog posting from November 13, 2006.

Sascha Knauf, Open Access — Global Instrument for Society Development, a slide presentation (in German) at the seminar on Open Access to Knowledge: new opportunities with Internet: Part 2: Copyright and Open Access (Kiev, November 13, 2006).  (Thanks to Iryna Kuchma.)

From George Porter at Caltech:

[The] Open Access @ Caltech blog has surpassed 200 entries this week. The entries document Open Access choices made by Caltech faculty, staff, and students, primarily from 2003 to date. In addition to articles published in Open Access journals (PLoS, BMC, NAR, etc.) and hybrid-OA journals (PNAS, Company of Biologists, etc.), the blog notes participation on editorial boards of OA journals, release of technical reports, archiving commitments from individual faculty, among other noteworthy OA-related activities.

Wiley has acquired Blackwell.  For details, see today's press release.

Also see the news coverage.

Comments.  I don't blog this because it already has consequences for OA but because it could.

1. Wiley has a hybrid OA program called Funded Access (since August 2006; see my SOAN review) and Blackwell has a hybrid OA program called OnlineOpen (since February 2005; see my SOAN review).  Wiley's policy is much less author-friendly than Blackwell's.  After the merger, will the Wiley policy move toward the Blackwell policy?  Vice versa?   Both?  Or will each continue to apply, more or less unchanged, to separate sets of journals?
2. On another front, see Mark McCabe, The Impact of Publisher Mergers on Journal Prices.

Update. David Prosser points out (by email) that "back in 2002 the UK Office of Fair Trading issued a Statement on the market for scientific, technical and medical journals. In it, they listed the publishers of ISI-rated STM journals (Table 1, page 7). If this sale goes through then the top 15 publishers (in terms of number of journals) will have become just 9 publishers - a remarkable case of market consolidation in just 8 years."

Bill Hooker, Open Question on Open Access, Open Reading Frame, November 15, 2006.  Excerpt:

In a comment on Scott's recent entry (discussed below), Mark D makes a good point, one that I've touched on previously and that bears repeating:

The problem is, I haven't seen any hard data that documents the cost of peer review, redaction, and publishing. Everyone throws numbers around as if they were confetti. We are all, supposedly (publishers and librarians) in the scientific/technical community, yet so very few people take a scientific approach to this issue.

The first step on the road to open access, should be a review of the processes and costs associated with scientific publication. Sounds like a good paper for the library association journal. Any librarians out there that want to tackle this paper?

And as for the publishers, if they really do wish a dialogue, then why don't they reveal their redaction costs? Any takers out there in the publishing world?

Online publication dramatically lowers costs relative to printed journals, but it is not free. Copyediting is still required, peer review must be co-ordinated even though the actual reviewing is done by authors for no charge, and the digital objects (articles, data, etc) must be created, archived and maintained in an accessible format. There are surely other important costs, too, that do not occur to me right now. All of this costs money, but the Big Question of OA is: how much money?... [PS:  Omitting a good collection of stated costs and estimates.]

Comments. The problem is complicated.  Here are a few reasons why.

1. Different publishers give different estimates (as Bill well-summarizes).  Some test our credulity, such as Richard Charkin's testimony before the UK House of Commons that the cost per published article at Nature is 30 thousand pounds (scroll to p. Ev 2, Q16).  But even if we could eliminate absurd, miscalculated, and bad-faith estimates, we'd face the problem that different estimates may count different aspects of the publishing process in the cost per article.  And even if we could standardize the measurement, we'd have to face the fact that different publishers really do have different costs.  One reason is that they differ in their overheads and efficiency.  A lean and mean start-up, optimized for OA publication, will have lower costs than a traditional print publisher retooling for electronic publication.  It will have no legacy equipment or employees and therefore lower overheads.
2. Apart from leanness and meanness, OA publishing has fewer expenses than non-OA publishing.  It dispenses with print (or prices the optional print edition at cost), eliminates subscription management, eliminates DRM, eliminates lawyer fees for licenses and enforcement, reduces or eliminates marketing, and reduces or eliminates profit margins. In their place it adds back little more than the cost of collecting author-side fees or institutional subsidies.
3. Some other variables are the submission rate, the acceptance rate, and average article length, the average use of charts and illustrations, and the local cost of labor.  Of course profit margins also vary.
4. In 2002, Fytton Rowland found that the average cost of peer review per published article was about $400.  Note that this depends on the average acceptance rate, since the cost per accepted paper must also cover the cost of reviewing rejected papers.  Also note that the cost of peer review is almost entirely the cost of facilitation, since most referees are not paid, and the clerical tasks in facilitation are steadily being automated.  Hence the cost of peer review is coming down every year as journal management software improves, especially open-source software like DPubS, GAPworks, Hyperjournal, ePublishing Toolkit, OpenACS, Open Journal Systems (the current leader), SOPS, and TOPAZ. 

Carl T Bergstrom and Theodore C Bergstrom, The Economics of Ecology Journals, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, November 2006.  (Thanks to Katie Newman and George Porter.)  Only this abstract is free online, at least so far.

Over the past decade, scientific publishing has shifted from a paper-based distribution system to one largely built upon electronic access to journal articles. Despite this shift, the basic patterns of journal pricing have remained largely unchanged. The large commercial publishers charge dramatically higher prices to institutions than do professional societies and university presses. These price differences do not reflect differences in quality as measured by citation rate. We discuss the effect of price and citation rate of a journal on library subscriptions and offer an explanation for why competition has not been able to erode the price differences between commercial and non-profit journals.

Update. See the OA edition of this article. (Thanks to William Walsh.)

There's a new entry on the Weasel's Manual of Apologies for Misbehaving Monopolists from Ted Bergstrom: 

Geography Professor, Nick Blomley, wrote an editorial called "Is this Journal Worth US$1118?"  in Geoforum, an Elsevier journal.  Blomley presented data comparing prices and citations for a number of geography journals.  Blomley's article inspired an Elsevier spokesperson, Chris Pringle, to write a rejoinder titled "Price and Value:  A Publisher's Perspective", an essay that will appeal to connoisseurs of Weaselsprache the world over.  Mr. Pringle explains that "the cost per download has declined fivefold between 1999 and 2005".  You have to give the man credit for finding something that grew more than five times as fast as Elsevier prices over this period.   Article downloads will do it.  The days when we used to walk over to the library to read journals are not so far behind us.

Of course we are still left wondering why it is that Elsevier journals cost about four times as much per article as non-profit journals, (whose downloads must also be growing about five times as fast as Elsevier prices. )  Mr. Pringle has an answer for that one too. "Some journals rely solely on a limited number of subscriptions whereas others benefit from additional revenue sources as well as subsidies and tax breaks."  I suppose that he means that  Elsevier journals have fewer subscribers than the cheaper non-profit journals.  (What do you suppose could be the reason for that?  Reminds me of Lizzie Borden pleading for leniency on the grounds that she was an orphan.)    As to subsidies: most professional societies do not subsidize their journals, but collect a substantial surplus from journal operations which they use to sponsor societal activities.  Nevertheless they manage to make do with prices that are about a fourth of Elsevier prices.  Maybe its the tax breaks, eh?

Tim Brody, Google CSE added to the Registry of Open Access Repositories, Open Access Peon, November 16, 2006.  Excerpt:

A few weeks ago OpenDOAR announced the inclusion of a experimental Google CSE ("customised search engine"). Google released their CSE (or 'co-op') tool on the 26th October, and its a testament to Google's skill at identifying new niches that CSE has already gained such interest.
Being OpenDOAR's nearest (good natured) competitor its incumbent on me to make sure we don't fall behind in the technical stakes....

What Google CSE means for us registries is we can now (theoretically) provide full-content searches of registered repositories with a minimal of effort. This is what OpenDOAR have done, and we've followed suit in our own search interface.

In addition to constraining the search to given sites Google CSE provides 'refinements' - editor-provided key terms that either filter the list of sites, or weight certain sites higher in the search results. Refinements allow the CSE creator to provide sub-customised searches to more finely control the search results, the typical example being to create a CSE for a topic area (e.g. tropical diseases) then to provide refinements for different types of users (e.g. medical practitioners).

To create the Google CSE and refinements for ROAR I created two exports: the TSV and Context files. The TSV file contains the URLs of the sites to be included, labels for each site and the site's weighting. A label is an identifier that can be used to refine search results (e.g. Australian repositories are labelled with 'country_au').

The Context file contains the basic search engine configuration (title, description etc.) and what effect refinements have on the search results. Refinements can change the weighting of sites, alter the query or filter out given sites. In the ROAR CSE I've set all the labels to 'filter' (i.e. only include sites that contain the given label).
So, that's the theory, but in practise Google CSE refinements don't appear to work like that (or work at all). If you try out the ROAR search, first of all you'll notice you get very few matches back and secondly you actually get more matches the more refinements you use. Hopefully this will be resolved in time, in the meanwhile prepare to be confused!

Eve Gray has blogged some notes on the Bangalore Workshop on electronic publishing and open access (November 2-3, 2006).  Excerpt:

...Right at the beginning of the workshop, in one of the introductory addresses, Prof N Balakrishnan, the Associate Director of the Indian Institute of Science, said, 'What we need to do is change the “developing country” rhetoric to a world perspective.' Put another way – when I emailed Gordon Graham, of the LOGOS journal, one of the wisest people I know from the publishing industry, he wrote back, 'Do tell me more about the workshop. What a combination. India, China, Brazil and Africa constitute about two thirds of humanity.' They are both right – what this workshop reminded us is that we in the developing world are the norm - with all our challenges - not the privileged and powerful who call the shots in scholarly publishing. Alma Swan raised the same issue in another way, echoing something that was said in Leiden: that we have a problem with the common expression of the international/local dichotomy. Why should developing country issues be considered 'local' when these apply to the greater proportion of the global population, while , for example, we bow down to the 'international' status of the comparatively narrowly-focused ISI indexed journals?

Lawrence Liang, of the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore, gave us the message in another way. In a typically virtuoso and mind-stretching keynote address, in which he charted different meanings of ownership, in different languages and cultures. He invited us to resist a property discourse that conflates property rights with academic rights and turns the collegiality of academe into the hierarchy of property....

Its insistence on the importance of a developing world view has led India to be an early and successful adopter of Open Access. The Indian Academy of Science publishes 11 OA journals and, strikingly from my point of view as a publisher, Prof Chandrasekran, the Secretary of the IAC, said that whenever the IAS works with international partners, it insists that this must be on its own terms, in ways suitable to the situation in the developing world. There is a lesson to be learned here by those struggling African journal editors who hand over their journals to UK publishers in the name of 'viability', all too often landing up unable to afford to buy back their own output.

The general tone of the contributions and discussions at the workshop was pragmatic, echoing Subbiah Arunachalam's plea at the start of the workshop that we move from words to action in developing South-South collaboration. Barbara Kirsop and Alma Swan both gave admirably clear expositions of the advantages of OA for developing countries, speeding up the solution of global problems, avoiding expensive duplication, increasing impact factors and providing grater visibility for national research. With preprint archiving, the impact or journal articles can begin even before the publication date of the article. Muthi Mathan of NIT in Rourkela gave quietly impressive practical advice on how to swing an organisation round to mandating OA archiving.

Medknow, the Indian OA medical publisher goes from strength to strength, now publishing 40 journals all of them Open Access, none of them dependent on author fees, said DK Sahu, the MD of the company....

In Latin America, SciELO , too, came early to Open Access. Abel Packer stressed the ways in which this collaborative effort across Latin America and the Caribbean is moving journals from the status of local and regional towards the international flow of scientific information....

Prof Zu Guang, the Head of the Department of Publication at the Natural Science Foundation Council revealed that most [Chinese] journals were government supported, something that influences the journals' ability to choose its publication mode....

Against this background, African efforts seem fragmented and decentralised. As Susan Veldsman put it, after her account of the work that EIFL is doing in southern Africa, few repositories are actually up and running, most still in the incubation phase. The problems faced are lack of HR capacity, lack of government support, decentralised efforts and the need for strategic and not only operational efforts. My own paper, based on the work I have been doing for my OSI fellowship, looked at the consequences of publish and perish policies in South Africa in a context where government is, in contradiction of its scholarly publishing policy, looking for development impact from national research spending....The most promising development is the South African Academy of Science report on scholarly publishing, commissioned by the Department of Science and Technology, that has come up with the proposal that the Academy take on the role of scholarly publishing coordination and quality control....

Papers from the Bangalore workshop are online [here].

Michael Cross, A one-way street to postcode madness, The Guardian, November 16, 2006.  Excerpt:

An up-to-date list of addresses is vital for local authorities - but they have to pay for the data they created themselves....

Council executives in charge of maintaining databases of land and property are in the frontline in the battle against one of the biggest absurdities highlighted by Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign: that councils have to spend local taxpayers' money for the privilege of using data that they themselves largely created.

The data are accurate lists of addresses, essential for public services and collecting council tax....Councils say they provide lists of street names and numbers for free - but Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail treat their data as a commercial asset and charge other public bodies to make it available to the wider public.

When a local authority puts its schools admission system online, as required by the e-government programme, it must pay Royal Mail if it wants to allow residents to search for a school by postcode. "We provide our data for free and they sell it back to us," says Kristin Warry, national chair of street gazetteer custodians....

The result...could be a grassroots rebellion. David Heyes, address manager at Wigan metropolitan borough council, Greater Manchester, says he is "very uncomfortable" with the click fee....

Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign offers a way out of the imbroglio. Surely there is a case for something as simple and valuable as lists of addresses to be declared open? The problem is that without such a radical step, the mood is driving government in the opposite direction....

The reviews are just a part of the comprehensive entirely free PW web site. Reviews are available from 1987 only, but there are 132,000 of them....

The management of Publishers Weekly apparently recognized that there is not much to loose by making the review collection, and the entire journal open access. After all, Publishers Weekly is included in many of the largest and most widely subscribed databases of ProQuest, Thomson Gale and EBSCO at least for the past ten years in full text. Most of the PW reviews are also available in Amazon’s book records, and in a number of other fully or partially open access databases.

It was the right move by PW to change to the open access model (and probably making more money from click-through ads than from the earlier required subscription fees). I would not be surprised if ALA would come to the same conclusion about the Booklist Online service when it turns out to be a hard sell for the price.

PS:  The review includes links to other collections of OA book reviews. 

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have agreed to use the Sitemaps 0.90 standard to let webmasters tell search engines how to direct their crawlers.  For details, see today' press release.

Comments.

• Sitemaps is a Google product and I believe that until now Google was its only user.  If so, then kudos to Google for voluntarily opening the standard and kudos to Yahoo and Microsoft for joining it rather than spurning it as "not built here". 
• For OA journals and repositories not already crawled by these three search engines, this is an easy way to increase your visibility.

Update. Google originally released the Sitemaps protocol last year under a Creative Commons license. So the kudos for Google remain, but should go back a year.

Michael Geist, Copyright Notices on Books, Agora Vox, November 15, 2006. Excerpt:

...As I flipped to the opening page of [a new travel book by Paul Wells], I was struck by the copyright notice...:

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher - or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency - is an infringement of the copyright law.

I recognize that few people actually read these notices and that most would consider this standard. Yet there is something wrong about Canadian publishers (in this case McClelland & Stewart’s Douglas Gibson imprint) using legal notices that are exceptionally misleading and which perpetuate the incorrect view that nothing may be copied without prior permission.

It goes without saying that I just violated this particular clause by reproducing a part of the publication without permission, but I certainly have not violated Canadian copyright law in doing so. In fact, the Supreme Court of Canada has made it very clear that far more could be copied for research or private study purposes without a license and without violating the law.

These misleading notices must stop....

The notice page in the Wells’ book also contains an acknowledgement for the financial support of the federal government’s Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council. This too is typical as the Canadian book publishing industry relies heavily on taxpayer support. Last year alone, the BPIDP distributed more than $26 million to Canadian publishers, including $578,365 for McClelland & Stewart. I think public support for book publishing in Canada is a good thing, but I also think that it is wrong to provide public support to publishers who then proceed to mislead the public about their copyright rights. The solution is simple - borrowing from the move toward open access requirements for government-funded research, government book publishing funding programs should insist on a condition that prohibits the use of overbroad and misleading copyright notices.

Yesterday the Charleston Advisor announced its sixth annual Readers Choice Awards.  (Thanks to David Prosser.)  Two are OA-related.

1. "Hybrid Open Access" won in the category of Best Contract Options, with this citation: 

   Hybrid Open Access - as a new pricing model for scholarly journals which shows some promise of working for publishers and campuses as an interim solution for the journal pricing crisis.

2. "The Networked Book" won in the category of Best Effort:

   The Institute for the Future of the Book is providing a creative new paradigm for monographic production as books move from print to the screen. This includes integration of multimedia, interviews with authors and inviting readers to comment on draft manuscripts.

3. I won a special award for Non-Librarian Working for Our Cause:

   Peter Suber - for his excellent work in managing the influential SPARC Open Access Forum (blog) and the Open Access Newsletter.

Comments.

• I applaud the careful wording of the award for hybrid OA.  The hybrid model shows "some promise" as an "interim solution".  For my take on its promise, its limits, and why it works better as a stepping stone than as a destination, see my article from September 2006 (esp. the last section, "Strengths and weaknesses of the hybrid model").
• The networked book is not just Web 2.0, but also OA --or not just OA, but also Web 2.0. As I wrote back in July, in conjunction with MediaCommons, a related project from the Institute for the Future of the Book: "From a narrow OA point of view, what's most interesting about these projects is the way they take OA for granted and move on to other frontiers, such as turn-around time, peer review, and interactivity. To me, this is the future: OA will be the default and creative energy will focus on how to build on the OA foundation to take full advantage of the networked environment for the purposes of scholarship."
• I'm honored by the Readers Choice award.  My readers are the best, sending me a steady stream of suggestions, criticism, and support.  Thanks to you all.  (I feel a bit guilty winning this award when I didn't even know I was in the running.  How well am I really covering this scene if I could receive such a pleasant surprise?)
• I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't insert a gentle correction to set the record straight.  My blog is called Open Access News.  The SPARC Open Access Forum is a discussion list I moderate.

The December issue of Walt Crawford's Cites & Insights is now online.  This issue contains a long section on OA, Library Access to Scholarship, covering FRPAA (at length), the nine interviews on OA in Research Information, some OA developments from OAN, some commentary by Dorothea Salo and Charles W. Bailey, Jr., and some posts and articles by others.  It's a wide-ranging review of some important recent developments and analysis.  Recommended.

The University of Tasmania has given Arthur Sale its 2006 Vice-Chancellor's Award for Outstanding Community Engagement.  In the citation, it makes special mention of his work on behalf of open access:

You are also an internationally recognised and respected contributor to the debate around free access to publicly funded research through the Open Access movement....

If that sentence needs any proof, here it is:  I can post this news on this blog and count of my regular readers to understand that the award is well-deserved.  Congratulations, Arthur!

Eight classicists have issued an open letter (November 7, 2006) on Classics in the Million Book Library.  (Thanks to Klaus Graf.)  Excerpt:

Classicists face a unique opportunity. Google, Microsoft, the Open Content Alliance and other emerging projects (such as the European i2010 initiative) have begun to create very large collections ultimately designed to exceed in size the largest academic print libraries on earth. Classics stands to gain more than many disciplines. Among work published in the United States, many useful editions, reference materials and publications are in the public domain and thus are among the first texts to be included in these projects....

Immense digital libraries based on open access and aimed at massive audiences put scholars under an obligation to avoid a new access divide opening up between ourselves and the wider community that we serve....

The expectations for digital editions should be higher than for their predecessors: we expect dynamic textual notes (compare witness A vs. B), links to high resolution images of the manuscript, papyrus, inscription or other source, and potentially even new forms of annotation (e.g., syntactic markup as a component of a standard edition). Our job is to make these huge new collections a foundation for this next generation of more expressive and sophisticated editions.

New digital tools should go beyond their print counterparts in at least three ways.

First, reference materials and scholarly editions should provide a knowledge base to support advanced services...

Second, reference materials and scholarly editions should be updatable in a continuous, documented, versioned fashion....

Third, human and machine decisions should reinforce each other. Just as OCR should provide a first draft that editors may correct, named entity identification, syntactic analysis, morphological analysis and similar processes should provide useful initial results that human readers can correct and augment....

Recommendations:

1) We should do our best to build on what Google, OCA and other projects are doing, augmenting and enhancing it for the uses of classicists....Centuries of classical scholarship and a generation of digital classics have put us in a position where we can add value to these raw materials, making them intellectually accessible to audiences at any point on the globe. 

Enhancements may take several steps. First, we must establish a service with materials on which we can freely experiment (these include many of the image books entering the Open Content Alliance). Second, academic libraries such as Michigan can apply these techniques directly to the sources files that Google has digitized from their collections. Third, these services, once published, will, we hope, become standard within large commercial libraries....

2) Core open source content: While we may rely on Google etc. to digitize the vast majority of content, we must as a profession take responsibility for creating and maintaining a rich core of reliable editions and reference works described above that can be uploaded into any digital library, and which individuals and groups can use to provide a starting point for the new, open source knowledge base on which scholarship will depend. In this case, the Open Content Alliance, with its commitment to the free distribution of ideas, provides a natural collaborator.

3) Open source services: e.g., GATE (Generalized Architecture for Text Engineering), Zotero, Canonical Text Services, Morpheus, the University of Chicago’s PhiloLogic, TextGrid, EpiDoc (discipline-specific XML for epigraphy), Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri, components of the Perseus Digital Library, interoperable geo-referenced data via protocols disseminated by Pleiades....

Rebeca Cliffe, "Self-Archiving & Journal Subscriptions": New Study Probes Librarian Decision Making, EPS Insights, November 14, 2006 (accessible only to subscribers).  Excerpt:

The report, carried out by Scholarly Information Strategies on behalf of Publishing Research Consortium (PRC), has suggested that a significant number of librarians are likely to substitute open access materials for subscription resources. This runs contrary to the argument made by many in the open access debate, that OA self-archiving is not detrimental to journal subscriptions.

The authors surveyed 400 librarians from a number of countries in July 2006. It looked at both their general attitudes to open access, and the relative importance of specific decision-making factors to their content acquisition process. These included price, embargo period, article version, and reliability of access. Librarians were found to strongly favour material that had undergone peer review, with unrefereed versions of an article seen "as a poor substitute" for a refereed version, but editorial changes to subsequent versions had little impact on librarians' preferences. The speed with which content is made available is another significant factor for librarians. For content that is available for self-archiving in an institutional repository immediately following publication, just under 75% of librarians preferred to access the OA version of the article. The impact of a six month embargo on self-archiving on this preference share was found to be negligible. Only 12 and 24-month embargoes were found to have a significant impact - with a 24-month embargo, just over 50% of librarians were found to prefer the paid-for version of the journal article. Finally, librarians were found to have a strong preference for free content, when all other factors were equal....

Steven Harnad, on his Open Access Archivangelism blog, argues that the report's attempt to remove bias means "it is impossible to draw any conclusions about self-archiving causing cancellations by librarians, because the librarians were never asked what they would cancel, under what conditions; just what hypothetical products they would prefer over what". ...

Gavin Baker, Sustaining the Information Society: New (and Old) Conflicts in the Knowledge Economy, a presentation at Campus & Community Sustainability (Gainesville, October 25-26, 2006). 

Abstract:   This presentation reports on the movement for sustainability in the information environment. The wealth of nations today relies on intangible products: information goods or "intellectual property" such as ideas, symbols, and data. IP-based industries are growing in their share of America's economic output, outpacing fields such as manufacturing and resource extraction. While those latter industries have well-documented sustainability challenges, the rise of the information society has been met with a growth of interest in sustainable management of information goods and resources. Sustainable business models, legal and political regimes, and institutional, community, and individual practices are now the subject of study and debate worldwide. Academic communities are taking particular interest as they strive to fulfill their mission to serve the public good through efforts such as Yale's Access to Knowledge project and MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative....

The November issue of D-Lib Magazine is now online.  Here are the OA-related articles:

• Bonita Wilson, Balancing the Rights of Authors and Publishers
• Peter Hirtle, Author Addenda: An Examination of Five Alternatives
• Michael Organ, Download Statistics - What Do They Tell Us?: The Example of Research Online, the Open Access Institutional Repository at the University of Wollongong, Australia

Sami Lange, Tax-funded research should be made available to those in need, Spartan Daily, November 15, 2006.  Lange is an LIS graduate student at San Jose State University.  Excerpt:

...A professor of microbiology at the University of Vermont is allowed access to about 66-75 percent of his required journal articles. He then has to rely on inter-library loans and only requests articles that are exactly what he needs and misses out on discoveries he might have made by browsing through other relevant articles in the entire journal.

For parents of children with rare diseases who have no access to information on their children's illness and scientists and academics unable to get the latest information in their field because their institution doesn't subscribe to an unusual journal, the need for access is not only a desire, but of vital importance.

Our fast-paced, need-it-now society demands immediate access to information. Heather Joseph, of Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, said, "whether it is speeding a response to a potential flu pandemic, developing energy alternatives, or putting the brakes on global warming, access to publicly funded science is more critical than ever." ...

The recent and most groundbreaking issue is the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006, which requires agencies who have a research budget in access of $100 million to implement online access to articles within six months of publication.

When describing the act, Nobel Prize laureate Richard Roberts said, "as a scientist and a taxpayer, I support this bill because it lifts barriers that hinder, delay or block the spread of scientific knowledge supported by federal tax dollars."
The policy excludes classified, copyrighted or patented materials. Publishers of the scholarly journals are concerned that open access will precipitate the cancellation of many library subscriptions. However, built into the act is a six-month delay in the release of completed manuscripts that may help to address this concern....

For those interested in voicing an opinion about the act, the Alliance for Taxpayer Access has displayed action steps in support of the policy on their Web site. The list includes phoning, faxing or e-mailing your senator to support the bill, faxing a letter of support to Senators John Cornyn and Joe Lieberman, the sponsors of the bill, and issuing a public statement of support....

Henk Moed, The effect of 'Open Access' upon citation impact: An analysis of ArXiv's Condensed Matter Section, a preprint deposited in arXiv November 13, 2006. 

Abstract:   This article statistically analyses how the citation impact of articles deposited in the Condensed Matter section of the preprint server ArXiv (hosted by Cornell University), and subsequently published in a scientific journal, compares to that of articles in the same journal that were not deposited in that archive. Its principal aim is to further illustrate and roughly estimate the effect of two factors, 'early view' and 'quality bias', upon differences in citation impact between these two sets of papers, using citation data from Thomson Scientific's Web of Science. It presents estimates for a number of journals in the field of condensed matter physics. In order to discriminate between an 'open access' effect and an early view effect, longitudinal citation data was analysed covering a time period as long as 7 years. Quality bias was measured by calculating ArXiv citation impact differentials at the level of individual authors publishing in a journal, taking into account co-authorship. The analysis provided evidence of a strong quality bias and early view effect. Correcting for these effects, there is in a sample of 6 condensed matter physics journals studied in detail, no sign of a general 'open access advantage' of papers deposited in ArXiv. The study does provide evidence that ArXiv accelerates citation, due to the fact that that ArXiv makes papers earlier available rather than that it makes papers freely available.

Heather Morrison, That day has arrived, and Canada must seize it (more on CIHR), Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, November 14, 2006.  Excerpt:

Another thought on the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Consultation on their Draft Policy on Access to Research Outputs (comments due November 24, 2006).
This policy is leading-edge in the area of open data. But, does it go far enough?

The Final Report of the National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data recommends a much stronger leadership role for Canada. Two paragraphs from this Report explain beautifully why open data is so important:

Complex and rich arrays of scientific databases are changing how research is done, speeding discovery and creating new concepts. Increased access will accelerate these changes, creating a new world of research and a whole new world. When these databases are combined within and between disciplines and countries, fundamental leaps in knowledge can occur that transform our understanding of life, the world and the universe.

For example, in the analysis of human genetics, the technology to capture enormous amounts of data and to mine them for new information is already showing the genetic make-up of life and the understanding of numerous diseases and syndromes. We will soon be able to analyze such complexities as the pre-disposition to disease in animal and plant populations based on genetics, social and environmental conditions, and demographics, so that all these factors can become part of new disease prevention strategies. With the ability to access and integrate data compiled in different fields, totally new knowledge regimes are being opened in ways that have historically been impossible.

Catriona J. MacCallum, ONE for All: The Next Step for PLoS, PLoS Biology, November 14, 2006.  An editorial.  Excerpt:

...[I]in just a few weeks, the Public Library of Science will launch a new “journal,” PLoS ONE, that will initiate a radical departure from the stifling constraints of this existing system. Its aims are not only to provide a more inclusive open-access platform for scientific literature —papers will not be rejected on the basis of such subjective justifications as those invoked above— but to reflect far more closely the way that scientific research is conducted by taking advantage of the increasing functionality and flexibility of internet-based communication. All papers that make a valuable contribution to the scientific literature, that are replicable, that are clearly written, and whose conclusions are supported by the data deserve publication. PLoS ONE will provide the means to do that swiftly and efficiently.

The launch is only the first step—indeed, we refer to this first version of PLoS ONE as a beta version to emphasize that it will develop rapidly during the months after launch. Initially, PLoS ONE may not look so different from a traditional journal. There is a large and growing editorial board who will handle peer review. Papers, if accepted, will be rapidly posted online (acceptance to publication will be a matter of days) in XML and PDF versions, included in abstracting and indexing services, and they will be deposited in the publicly available archive PubMedCentral. Similar to the other PLoS journals, there will be a publication charge to pay for the cost of review, production, and web hosting (in this case, US$1,250, although there is a discounted price of US$750 for pioneering authors submitting before the official launch). Like the other PLoS journals, the fee will be waived for those without access to appropriate funds. But that is where the similarity ends.

From the start, PLoS ONE will be open to papers from all scientific disciplines....

Peer review will also be also handled differently. PLoS ONE uses a two-stage assessment process starting when a paper is submitted but continuing long after it has been published. Submitted papers will first be scrutinized by an appropriate handling editor from the PLoS ONE board....This pre-publication peer review concentrates on objective and technical concerns to determine whether the research has been sufficiently well conceived, well executed, and well described to justify inclusion in the scientific record....But peer review doesn't, and shouldn't, stop there. And this is where the increasing sophistication of web-based tools can begin to play a part. Once a paper is in the public domain post-publication, open peer review will begin. Readers are able to comment on—and rate—articles. Papers will not be a static statement of fact but the beginning of a conversation with the scientific community. Obviously, this will be no free-for-all. Anonymous commenting will not be permitted, and, to take part, commentators will need to conform to the norms of civilized scientific discussion.

The tools that PLoS ONE will use to create such web functionality come from a new open-source software project called TOPAZ. PLoS ONE will be the first publication to be produced on this platform, and so the PLoS ONE and TOPAZ teams are working closely together to meet the growing demand for sophisticated tools and resources to read and use the scientific and medical literature. We are convinced that we will be the first of many publishers, societies, universities, and research communities to take advantage of TOPAZ to produce open-access publications economically and efficiently.

This functionality is just the beginning for PLoS ONE. What could now be termed a high-volume, broad-scope online publication will rapidly develop into a much more dynamic platform than can be encompassed by the name “journal.”...

Moreover, because an open-access model enables each paper to pay for itself, no matter how small the field, the subject can be nurtured. To stimulate this endeavor, PLoS ONE will ultimately provide multiple portals as part of its publishing service, where such research can be aggregated for as long as required by a dedicated editorial board regulating the quality and scope of the content displayed....

The October issue of Scholarly Communications Report is now online.  Only the TOC is accessible to non-subscribers.

Chris Surridge spoke on PLoS ONE at MIT on October 20.  A video of the talk is now online at the Open Wetware wiki.  Chris is the managing editor of PLoS ONE.

FreeCulture has joined the Alliance for Taxpayer Access and blogged its reasons why:

FreeCulture.org has joined the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, which supports open public access to taxpayer-funded research. We join other student groups such as Universities Allied for Essential Medicines and the American Medical Student Association as members, along with a long list of universities, libraries, patients, and public interest groups.

Our reasons for joining are two-fold:

1. As the leading group of student advocates for the public interest in intellectual property and information & communications technology, we recognize access to research as a defining issue for our generation. Public access will lead to faster cures and treatments for disease, improve scholarship and research, and promote development. Whether it’s brilliant photos of space, GIS data, or scholarly journal articles, the people have a right to what they pay for. Access to publicly-funded research, and open access generally, is simply the right thing to do.
2. As students, we work with academic research all the time. After all, who isn’t required to write a research paper at some time or another? Whether it’s a term paper or a doctoral dissertation, scholarship always builds on the past. That requires access to the work of those who’ve come before us.

FreeCulture.org is proud to support the alliance’s work on behalf of the Federal Research Public Access Act and other efforts. Here at the University of Florida, we worked with the Student Senate to pass a resolution supporting FRPAA and open access — and succeeded. We hope to work with ATA to provide more information and resources to engage students on the issue in the future.

PS:  Welcome to FreeCulture.  Students have a strong interest in OA, as scholars and as citizens, and their voices will help the worldwide campaign to bring it about.

Charles Bailey has summarized the results of a DSpace User Survey.  Excerpt from his summary:

• The vast majority of respondents (77.6%) used or planned to use DSpace for a university IR....
• Preservation and interoperability were the highest priority system features (61.2% each), followed by search engine indexing (57.8%) and open access to refereed articles (56.9%). (Percentage of respondents who rated these features "very important.") Only 5.2% thought that OA to refereed articles was unimportant.
• The most common type of current IR content was refereed scholarly articles and theses/dissertations (55.2% each), followed by other (48.6%) and grey literature (47.4%).
• The most popular types of content that respondents were planning to add to their IRs were datasets (53.4%), followed by audio and video (46.6% each)....

Barbara Palmer, Ongoing crisis in academic-journal pricing is the focus of recent colloquium, Stanford Report,  November 15, 2006.  A report on Stanford's Scholarly Communications Colloquium (Palo Alto, November 6, 2006).  Excerpt:

...[T]were two points on which almost everyone agreed: The high costs for journal subscriptions charged by commercial publishers in recent years are unsustainable, and the ability to distribute articles electronically has fundamentally changed academic research and publishing....

From 1986 to 2003, the unit cost of serials purchased by academic research libraries rose by 215 percent compared with a 68 percent rise in the consumer price index over the same time period, said Doug Brutlag, professor of biochemistry and current chairman of the Academic Council's Committee on Libraries. The Faculty Senate passed a resolution in 2004 encouraging faculty to consider journal pricing as well as reputation when considering where to publish or serving on editorial boards.

There is a big discrepancy between the prices charged by for-profit and nonprofit journals, reported Ted Bergstrom, professor of economics at the University of California - Santa Barbara, in a talk titled "The Changing Economics of Scholarly Journals." Bergstrom presented data comparing journal costs in 2004 that showed that the price-per-page of for-profit journals was about three times the average price-per-page of nonprofit journals.

Prices should be decreasing rather than increasing, since the ability of scholars to publish papers on their own websites has reduced the value of journal subscriptions, Bergstrom said.

In a recent analysis of articles published in economics journals, Bergstrom found that 73 percent of all articles and 100 percent of the papers published in the four leading journals could be found for free online. Not only are papers that are free on the web more often cited than those that are not, but also authors of papers that appear in high-impact journals are more likely to post them on their own websites than authors of articles in minor journals and papers, Bergstrom said....

A similar analysis of science and medical journals completed 18 months ago showed that from 37 to 45 percent of the content of three leading journals, Science, Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine, made its way into the free zone in cyberspace, said John Sack, director of HighWire Press, who moderated a panel of Stanford authors and editors. The study corroborated Bergstrom's finding that the higher impact a journal has, the more likely it is that the content would become free from the authors' own websites, Sack said.

Research belongs in the public domain, to advance science and also because taxpayers, including the "guy flipping hamburgers," help foot the bill for publicly funded research, said Patrick Brown, professor of biochemistry and a co-founder and co-director of the Public Library of Science (PLoS)....

Slides from many of the presentations are archived at the Scholarly Communication and Publishing Issues website.

The website a