Open Access News

Adam Bosworth, Health care information matters, Google blog, November 30, 2006.  Bosworth is the Vice President of Google.  Excerpt:

At Google, we often get questions about what we're doing in the area of health. I have been interested in the issues of health care and health information for a while. It is now one of my main focuses here, and I've decided to start posting about it.   I've been motivated in this field in part by my personal experiences helping to care for my mother, who recently died from cancer after a four-year battle....[I]t was incredibly challenging to get the right information and help her make the right decisions. Often the health care system isn't well set up to address these issues. I believe our industry can help resolve some of these problems and ameliorate others.

In the end, one key part of the solution to these problems is a better educated patient. If patients understand their diseases better -- the symptoms, the treatments, the drugs, and the side effects, they are likely to get better and quicker care -- before, during, and after treatment....

Using the Google Co-op platform, Google and the health community have labeled sites and pages across the web making it easier for users to refine their health queries and locate the medical information they need. Do a search on Google about a medical issue or treatment like diabetes or Lipitor and you'll see some choices for refining your query, such as "symptoms," "treatments," and so on. If you click on "treatment," your search results are refined and reordered so that sites that have been labeled as being about treatment by trusted health community contributors are boosted in the rankings. Note that how trusted a contributor is --and thus how much they affect your search results-- is dependent both on Google's algorithms and on who the user decides they trust. For example, if my doctor is a Google Co-op contributor and I indicate to Google that I trust her, then when I search, the sites she has labeled as relevant will show up higher in my search results.

This is just the beginning of what our industry can do. People need the medical information that is out there and available to be organized and made accessible to all. Which happens to be our mission. Health information should be easier to access and organize....

We don't have any products or services to announce yet and may not for quite some time, but we thought we'd share a bit about the problems we're interested in helping out on even before we introduce solutions. As we explore these problems and continue to work on them, we hope to share more about our efforts along the way. Your help is welcome and, of course, if you're an extraordinary engineer with a passion in this field, we'd love to hear from you. Write to us at health@google.com.

PS:  I've written to Google, suggesting ways that it could help provide open access to medical research.

Martin Bailey, V&A to scrap academic reproduction fees, The Art Newspaper, December 1, 2006.  (Thanks to Klaus Graf.)  Excerpt:

In a move which could transform art publishing, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (V&A) is to drop charges for the reproduction of images in scholarly books and magazines. Reproduction costs now often make it difficult to publish specialist art historical material. The new scheme will come into effect early next year.

The V&A is believed to be the first museum anywhere in the world which is to offer images free of copyright and administrative charges. It also intends to take a “liberal” view on what should be deemed scholarly or educational. The new arrangements will normally apply to all books published by university presses. Free images will also be available for exhibition catalogues and journals such as Apollo and The Burlington.

Reproduction fees currently bring in just over £250,000 a year for the V&A, and it is estimated that around half this sum will be lost. However, administering the system eats into the profits, so the real loss is much less. Under the new scheme, publishers will be able to download images directly from the internet. Commercial publications will continue to be charged.

The V&A feels that it is important that readers see images of items in the collection, helping to fulfil its educational role and raise its profile internationally....

There has been a sea change in attitudes to Open Access - using the internet to make scholarly research freely available.

At yesterday’s Online conference I was presenting findings from a study of NIH authors (slides and script) that makes clear their concerns about Open Access. My fellow speakers, both from publishers, had already taken a lot of these on board. Jan Velterop of Springer steered a reasonable argument between the science interests of scholarly communication and the ability of publishers to continue facilitating it, while Paul Peters of Hindawi Publishing showed that Open Access actually worked in the favour of smaller publishers like Hindawi.

It is now generally accepted that Open Access is here to stay and groups are concentrating on how to turn it to their advantage.

IFLA and UNESCO have published the IFLA/UNESCO Internet Manifesto Guidelines (dated September 2006 but apparently released this week).  The new guidelines will help libraries implement IFLA's 2002 Internet Manifesto.  (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)  Excerpt:

The IFLA Internet Manifesto was endorsed by the Council of IFLA in 2002. Since then it has been translated into 19 languages and adopted by library associations in 27 countries....[It describes shared values on the] freedom of access to information on the Internet.... The Internet Manifesto Guidelines are specific to Internet access programmes in libraries, and concern service policies and procedures that will lead to the implementation of the Internet Manifesto's values in everyday library work....

Alternatives to established norms are also springing up, such as new copyright frameworks like Creative Commons, a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to build upon and share. Different forms of academic information sharing such as open access are complementing this movement, and underpinning the new emphasis on common resources is open source software, a movement with real potential to shift more power and decision making into the hands of individuals....

Whilst respecting existing intellectual property rights, librarians should encourage open access approaches to the provision of local content, on the basis of creative commons principles....

Barbara Brynko, The Spirit of Giving, Information Today, December 2006.  Excerpt:

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Yale University, and a host of leading science and technology publishers have created a way to bridge the scientific gap between the developed and the developing world with Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE), a new digital Internet library. Through this program, more than 100 developing nations will be able to access one of the world’s biggest collections of scholarly environmental literature at little or no cost. The annual subscriptions to the journals in this collection have the estimated value of nearly $1 million....

More than 200 international scientific publishers, societies, and associations have agreed to participate. Each of the more than 1,500 institutions (both public and nonprofit) that are eligible for OARE will have access to journals ranging from environmental chemistry and botany to urban planning and geology, which will be available through a portal in English, Spanish, and French....

“Working on such a project is both heartwarming and heartbreaking,” according to [Kimberly Parker, head of online collections for Yale University Library], who reported that with current access in many third-world countries, it may take up to 4 hours to download a single article. “But the project trainers in the field reported that even after waiting patiently for 4 hours, the scientist at the other end was thrilled to get the paper [and] share it with his colleagues, so he could continue with his research,” said Parker....

UNESCO and US Library of Congress host meeting on World Digital Library project, a press release from UNESCO, December 1, 2006.  Excerpt:

UNESCO and the Library of Congress will host today at UNESCO Paris Headquarters a meeting to pave the way for the launch of a World Digital Library, an internet-based repository of knowledge from all cultures and in all languages....It will be chaired by Claudia Lux, President-elect of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA).

Other participants include representatives of national libraries in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. They will review major national and regional digital library initiatives already underway and discuss how these initiatives might relate to a World Digital Library....

The World Digital Library is to be developed in cooperation with UNESCO and other libraries and cultural institutions from around the world with the aim of promoting international and inter-cultural understanding, expanding non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and contributing to scholarship.

The project will focus on digitizing unique and rare material and making it available freely on the Internet. This material is to include manuscripts, maps, books, musical scores, sound recordings, films, prints and photographs, and architectural drawings from libraries and other cultural institutions around the world....

Jeffrey Thomas, Online Materials Broadening Global Access to Education, US Info (from the US Department of State), December 1, 2006.  Excerpt:

When the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced in 2001 that it was planning to offer free online access to educational materials from hundreds of its course offerings, the university in Cambridge said it hoped its OpenCourseWare (OCW) Web site would inspire other educational institutions to help create a “worldwide web of knowledge that will benefit humanity.”

Judging by the enthusiastic worldwide response to MIT’s gesture, the university appears five years later to be leading an international movement that is affecting education on every continent. Twelve U.S. educational institutions currently are participating in what has become an international consortium comprising more than 50 institutions in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America....

R. M. Rodriguez and three co-authors, An evaluation of emergency medicine investigators’ views on open access to medical literature, Emergency Medicine Journal, December 2006.  Only this abstract is free online, at least so far. 

Background: Scientists and governmental agencies have called for free universal access to research publications via the internet—open access.

Objectives: To examine the current medical literature reading practices of emergency medicine investigators (EMIs) and their views towards open access.

Methods: Surveys were mailed to the 212 corresponding authors of all original research articles published in years 2002 and 2003 in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, Academic Emergency Medicine and The Journal of Emergency Medicine.

Results: The most commonly read forms of medical literature reported by the 129 (61%) EMI respondents were hard-copy medical journals and online literature review services. 59% of EMIs were in favour of open access; 58% stated they would read a wider variety of medical literature; 21% believed open access would improve the quality of publications and 39% thought it would decrease the quality. When asked how a US$1500 fee for open access would affect their ability to publish research, 69% said it would greatly impede and 19% said it would slightly impede their research.

Conclusions: Despite concerns that open access may impede their ability to publish research and decrease the quality of publications, most EMIs surveyed favoured open access. They believed open access would increase and broaden their medical literature reading.

Don Hawkins, Open Access From the Publisher's Viewpoint, InfoToday blog, November 30, 2006.  Excerpt:

Much has been said about open access (OA) in the past couple of years, with a large part of the debate from the viewpoint of the author or reader. So I was particularly interested in two presentations discussing OA from the other participants —the publishers. Jan Velterop, formerly at BioMedCentral and now Director of OA at Springer, represented a large publisher, and Paul Peters, Sr. Director of Publishing at Hindawi Publishing Corporation in Egypt, represented a smaller publisher....

Velterop...noted that the value of publishing lies in the content, and the old subscription model of journal publishing (the only reasonable model in a print world) implies selling content. Some publishers think that OA undermines their rights, but publishers only have rights to content if they have been given to them, which is the usual case when an author transfers copyright to a publisher (a requirement for publishing). Velterop thinks that publishers should come to the conclusion that OA is a good thing, and then focus our energy on how to achieve it....

Peters presented a strong case for OA as a benefit to scientific publishers. In his view, it has three compelling advantages:

1. Launching new journals and expanding existing titles becomes much easier under the OA model. In the subscription world, increasing the size means increasing the price, which will lead to some cancellations. In an OA world, journal prices do not change when sizes are increased. By their nature, subscription barriers limit the distribution of an article, which in today’s Internet environment is a huge disadvantage. For established journals a publisher’s limited page budget can cause lengthy publication delays. OA journals can immediately publish an article as soon as it is ready.
2. OA attracts authors because of its faster publication speeds. Attracting strong authors is the key to creating strong journals.
3. OA increases competition in the market. Smaller publishers cannot compete in the current subscription market because many journals have a monopoly on their content. The lack of competition makes it difficult for smaller publishers to gain an edge. If authors have to pay the publication cost of their articles from a research budget, they are far more likely to consider the subscription price of a journal when deciding where to publish. If they publish in an OA journal, authors can be sure their article will be widely available, even if they submit it to a less prestigious journal.

In the subscription world, size of the publisher makes a big difference in its ability to compete. Promoting a small collection of journals to potential subscribers can be prohibitively expensive. Many small publishers must rely on word of mouth to increase their base of subscribers, but in an OA world, the author becomes the publisher’s sole customer so it can focus on services provided to the author.

I found it encouraging that these two speakers both presented a good case for publisher support of OA. Maybe there is hope yet that OA will become a widely accepted business model in the scholarly publishing world.

Leila Fernandez, Open Access Initiatives in India - an Evaluation, Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research,  1,1 (2006).  Excerpt:

Abstract:   Developing countries have embraced open access with a view to promoting visibility of research done in these regions. Open access initiatives described in this paper are based on interviews with information professionals responsible for creation and maintenance of online research repositories in India. Open access journals, e-print archives and e-theses repositories are covered with an emphasis on the sciences including the physical sciences, mathematics and the biomedical sciences. Existing repositories were identified from the Registry of Open Access Repositories....Key contacts were facilitated by well-known local open access advocates. Participants were contacted by e-mail and sites visited wherever possible. Many universities in India are at present lacking in infrastructure for establishing institutional repositories, so most of the institutions visited were research institutes and informatics centres. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to ascertain the background of participants, institutional culture, software selection, nature of funding, submission policies and future plans of these repositories. Also covered were promotion methods, user feedback and institutional support. Barriers to setting up institutional repositories are identified in this paper. Special features are described. Based on participant feedback a list of best practices is presented. The study has definite implications for the role of Canadian librarians in the promotion of Canadian research.

Jennifer Richard, Welcome to Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research,  1,1 (2006).  The editorial in a new OA journal.  Excerpt:

Our philosophy guarantees rigorous peer review and high standards for both theoretical and practical articles which are made freely and immediately available to everyone. No embargoes! The founding members of the editorial board and the Partnership Board were adamant about open access; so much so that many were not willing to support the journal if it was not truly open access. If librarians can talk the talk we have to be prepared to walk the walk and that’s what we’ve done with this journal.

India's National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) has reached the 500th full-text deposit in its institutional repository.  For details see today's announcement.

BioMed Central has recently launched peer-reviewed OA journals for two Chinese scientific societies.

• The Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery and Research is the official journal of the Chinese Speaking Orthopaedic Society (launched in September).
• Chinese Medicine is the official journal of the International Society for Chinese Medicine.  See the press release (November 23, 2006).

Yesterday the Democratic leadership of the House Science Committee issued a press release on the closing of the EPA libraries.  Excerpt:

In an ongoing effort to protect and preserve the vast environmental resources of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), prominent House leaders today called on the agency to immediately stop efforts to close libraries across the country pending a review by Congress.

In a letter to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, Ranking Members Reps. Bart Gordon (D-TN), John Dingell (D-MI), Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) and James Oberstar (D-MN) expressed their serious concerns over the current implementation of "library reorganization" plans and the "destruction or disposition" of library holdings.

"It is imperative that the valuable government information maintained by EPA's libraries be preserved," wrote the Ranking Members.

This letter to the Administrator follows-up on a successful effort earlier this fall by the Congressmen to initiate a Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation of current EPA actions regarding their libraries and informational resources....The GAO has begun its review. 

As noted in their letter to the Administrator, the EPA is closing libraries and dispersing resources in accordance with an Administration budget directive that has neither been approved nor formally enacted by Congress. 

Implementation of the library reorganization is proceeding at a rapid pace.  Reports of the library closures, information destruction, and property auctions continue to surface despite the objections to the plan raised by EPA professional staff, EPA employee union representatives and the American Library Association....

Also see the press release from the American Library Association praising the Science Committee letter. 

Walt Crawford is soliciting feedback on how much he should continue to cover "Library Access to Scholarship" (mostly OA) in his newsletter, Cites & Insights. 

PS:  In January 2004 Walt announced that he was scaling back his OA coverage in part because I did it so well.  Fortunately he continued, even if he did scale back, and now he's raising the same question again, in part for the same reason.  My feeling is the same as it was then.  There are two reasons why my voice shouldn't exclude his:  he's good at this (see some examples) and we don't always agree.  Drop him a line and encourage him to keep it up. 

An anonymous academic librarian in Belgium has launched a new blog on ETDs (electronic theses and dissertations), focusing on "recent free access publications" about them.  Welcome to another blog on OA.

The University of California at Irvine has joined the Open Courseware Consortium.  For details, see yesterday's announcement.

Anpere: Anthropological Perspectives on Religion is a new peer-reviewed, open-access journal.  It publishes in English, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian and apparently charges no author-side fees.  (Thanks to antropologi.info.)

Gavin Yamey and Calestous Juma, Improving Human Welfare: The Crucial Role of Open Access, Science Editor 29, 5 (2006) pp. 163-165.  Self-archived November 30, 2006.

Abstract:   Developing countries are increasingly improving their capacity to use scientific and technical knowledge to solve local problems. They are investing in communication infrastructure and improving technology policies. For such measures to be effective, those countries also need greater access to the world’s pool of knowledge.

Restrictions on access to scientific and health information are hindering progress, particularly in the world’s least-developed countries, and are impeding efforts toward global development. Essential information is locked away behind such barriers as journal subscription charges or individual article download fees. Journal articles are typically subject to restrictive copyright licenses that prevent reproduction, distribution, translation, or the creation of derivative works, all of which would help published work to be used for innovation. These restrictions are compounded by infrastructure inadequacies and lack of incentives for increasing the use of scientific and technologic knowledge in solving challenges in developing countries.

Subbiah Arunachalam, A Perspective on Open Access Publishing, Biobytes, December 2006.  Excerpt:

Much of research in India in the fields of science, technology, agriculture, medicine, social sciences, economics, etc. is funded out of taxpayers' money. A few years ago, a DST report quoted a figure of about 75% for the share of publicly funded scientific research. However the findings of these research programmes, usually in the form of research papers published in refereed journals, is not easily accessible even to Indian scientists at large let alone the public....[N]o library in India or for that matter anywhere in the world can afford to subscribe to all the journals [in which Indian scientists publish]. Also, some journal publishers fix their subscription prices at astronomical levels.

As a consequence research published by scientists at the Tuberculosis Research Centre in Chennai, which would be of great relevance to researchers say in a university in Maharashtra, may not be even noticed by the university scientists. Both groups receive funds from the same source, viz. the Indian Government, and yet what one does is not easily accessible to the other. What is more it need not be. The authors at the Tuberculosis research Institute may publish their papers in any journal they want to. But if, at the same time, they also place the papers in an interoperable institutional open access archive (or repository) anyone with an Internet connection can access it. This is precisely why enlightened institutions such as the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian Institute of Science are subscribing to the idea of open access. All eleven Academy journals are open access. Anyone anywhere in the world can access any paper published in these journals - full text and not just abstracts - through the Internet. The Indian Institute of Science is maintaining an open access repository of full text papers and they are on their way to placing every paper published by the IISc faculty and students in this repository. Currently they have more than 5,000 papers....But a vast majority of Indian scientists are not making their papers available via open access.

What can we the common people, the taxpaying public, do? Well in the USA they have an organization called the Alliance for Taxpayer Access....They have over 75 institutional members and they are fighting for open access to all publicly funded research. Through their advocacy, the Alliance members hope to change not only the US policy but also the attitude and behaviour of individual scientists.

Enlightened Indians in all walks of life could form a national organization similar to the US Alliance for Taxpayer Access and persuade the government to mandate open access all research publications resulting from public funding. The Alliance could write to major funding agencies and apex bodies (such as DST, DSIR, ICAR, ICMR, DAE, DRDO, Dept of Space, Department of Ocean development, UGC, etc.), the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister and the science academies and professional societies urging them to adopt a comprehensive open access policy in India. In the US a bill is at an advanced stage of discussion in the Congress and in the UK six of the eight Research Councils have already announced their support to open access. The Wellcome Trust, one of the largest funder of life science research has mandated OA for all papers resulting from their support. Surely we in India can open up the scientific and scholarly literature.

PS:  Unfortunately the URL Arun used in the article for the ATA doesn't work.  I've replaced it with the correct URL. 

The current issue of Wissenschaftsmanagement is devoted to open access.  It contains 18 short articles, all but one in German.  Annette Schavan, Germany's Federal Minister for Science, wrote the editorial.  Most of the articles describe the OA activities of major German institutions like the Fraunhofer Society, the German Rectors' Conference, the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, and the Max Planck Society.  The one English-language article in the issue is "Open Science for an Open Society" (p. 22) by Ulf Dahlsten, Directorate General for the Information Society and Media European Commission.  (Thanks to Georg Botz.)

John Sulston, Free market must serve, not restrain, research, Financial Times, November 30, 2006.  Sulston won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2002 and works actively for open access and open data.  Excerpt:

...[A] truly free market is not easy to achieve. It requires that participants have reasonably equal access to knowledge and opportunity. This does not come about simply by the removal of regulation. In science, as in business, there must be structures that ensure the well endowed do not use their position to block competition. In science this means that publication of papers, which are the tangible measures of achievement, should be accompanied by the open release of all information and materials required for the reported research, so that others may build on the work rather than needlessly duplicate it.

Since the end of the cold war and the subsequent triumphalism in the west, these principles have been under attack. “Free” is increasingly interpreted to mean unbridled competition, whether between individuals, companies or nations. This change is having its effect on science. Public companies are obliged to their shareholders to pursue maximum profitability. The disadvantage of depending on the free market for research and development is that areas that do not have the potential to yield financial return are neglected. Such areas are extensive in human health. Ninety per cent of the disease burden of humanity is served by less than 10 per cent of biomedical spending....

The persistence of this huge wealth gap is a tragedy. International relations are run on extremely competitive lines. When the EU or the US fails to get its way in trade negotiations they bypass the multilateral solution in favour of so called free trade areas. This is imperialism by another name. All the bilateral agreements of the US, for example, have included intellectual property clauses that favour its industries. The consequence is a race to the ethical bottom in trading standards....

There are serious consequences to acquiescing in this. Inability to work in certain areas, such as neglected diseases, is one. There are the restraints on data sharing, which is the essential foundation of science – for it is this rich medium that nourishes the shoots of future development. In the international consortium for sequencing the human genome we fought hard to keep the data open and were successful. Others are not faring so well. In both proteomics and meteorology, commercial considerations impede the open access that is needed for fields to move ahead. Another example is the practice of pharmaceutical companies manipulating data from drug trials....

Martin Enserink, WHO Panel Weighs Radical Ideas, Science Magazine, December 1, 2006 (accessible only to subscribers).  Excerpt:

Lifesaving antiretroviral drugs have been available for a decade in wealthy countries, yet millions of HIV-infected people south of the equator still can’t get them. The medicine cupboard is equally bare for people afflicted by tropical illnesses such as visceral leishmaniasis, sleeping sickness, and Chagas disease, for which there are no truly good therapies. Western medical science has not done well by the world’s poor, and some critics blame this on its reverence for intellectual property (IP). Is it time to overhaul the IP protection system? A new working group hosted by the World Health Organization (WHO) will consider that question in a series of meetings beginning next week in Geneva, Switzerland....

To produce new drugs for neglected diseases, [critics] say, the world needs a new R&D system that rewards not market sales but the potential to save lives and improve health. One such framework, which the IGWG [WHO’s Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property] may consider, is a hotly debated proposal for an international treaty to open up drug discovery, championed since 2002 by James Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology in Washington, D.C. Under Love’s “R&D Treaty,” countries would agree to spend a minimum percentage of gross domestic product on medical research, including a portion for neglected diseases. In addition, the treaty would promote open access to research findings and possibly add R&D incentives. For instance, governments could award big monetary prizes for those who invent important new medicines. Manufacturers would then be free to produce and market them cheaply....

The treaty [was] recommended in a letter to the World Health Assembly by 162 scientists, health experts, and others last year....

PS:  For background see the draft treaty and past posts on it.  Disclosure: I signed the letter of submission and helped draft the treaty's OA provision (§13.1), which would mandate OA to publicly-funded research.

Lori Andrews and three co-authors, When Patents Threaten Science, Science Magazine, December 1, 2006 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:

What if each generation of scientists was forbidden to use —or even think about— the theorems, principles, and natural phenomena that had been discovered or proven by the previous generation of scientists? Researchers may soon find themselves in that position as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) comes dangerously close to issuing patents on the basic building blocks of science itself. A U.S. Supreme Court decision in June 2006, Laboratory Corporation v. Metabolite Laboratories, and a solicitation by the USPTO in July 2006 for comments on proposed guidelines for patent examiners have raised questions about the delicate balance between a common body of knowledge and the exclusive rights over scientific information embodied in a patent....

Scientists may not have paid sufficient attention to the privatization of common knowledge because, in the past, they felt that research activities did not require approval from patent holders. The 2002 Madey v. Duke decision put an end to such protection. Scientists can be influential by helping policy-makers understand that open access to basic laws of nature, products of nature, and mathematical formulae is necessary for scientists to explore and innovate. The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that fact, but, increasingly, the USPTO in granting such patents and the Federal Circuit in upholding them seem to have forgotten it.

PS:  For background, see my previous posts on Madey v. Duke.

Today the open-access mandate at the UK's Particle Physics & Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) takes effect.

Martha Brogan, Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library, Digital Library Federation, November 22, 2006.  A major study (282 pp) of OAI interoperability from the DLF, one of the organizations, with CNI and NSF, that originally sponsored the development of the OAI-PMH.  Excerpt:

This report updates and expands on "A Survey of Digital Library Aggregation Services," originally commissioned by the DLF as an internal report in summer 2003, and released to the public later that year. It highlights major developments affecting the ecosystem of scholarly communications and digital libraries since the last survey and provides an analysis of "OAI implementation demographics," based on a comparative review of repository registries and cross-archive search services. Secondly, it reviews the state-of-practice for a cohort of digital library aggregation services, grouping them in the context of the "problem space" to which they most closely adhere. Based in part on online survey responses collected in fall 2005 from an online survey distributed to the original core services, the report investigates the purpose, function and challenges of next-generation aggregation services. On a case-by-case basis, the advances in each service are of interest in isolation from each other, but the report also attempts to situate these services in a larger context and to understand how they fit into a multi-dimensional and interdependent ecosystem supporting the worldwide community of scholars. Finally, the report summarizes the contributions of these services thus far and identifies obstacles requiring further attention to realize the goal of an open, distributed digital library system.

The new report aims to inform DLF's continuing efforts "to foster better teaching and scholarship through easier, more relevant discovery of digital resources, and a much greater ability for libraries to build more responsive local services on top of a distributed metadata platform," as articulated in its successful IMLS National Leadership Grant, "The Distributed Library: OAI for Digital Library Aggregation." Extending over a two-year period from October 2004 through September 2006, the grant enables DLF to prototype a "second generation" OAI finding system. Concurrently, it affords DLF the opportunity to address challenges identified in the 2003 survey and voiced by early OAI adopters. In particular, DLF is building a comprehensive OAI registry, establishing best practices for shareable metadata, improving communication between data and service providers, and developing curricular materials and training sessions to introduce OAI best practices to a widening circle of institutions (Shreeves et al. 2005).

Using the 2003 survey as a point of departure, this companion report takes a fresh look at the evolution of interoperability and federating heterogeneous content, especially as realized through implementation of the OAI protocol. It re-examines the original set of digital library aggregation services as well as representative new initiatives in an effort to identify trends - progress, needs, and challenges. How are they evolving over time? What have they achieved? What is impeding their progress? How do they envision their future? An online survey conducted in fall 2005 gathered baseline information from more than forty aggregators....

See especially these sections:

• 2.2, Open Access Ascendant - Growth of OAI-compliant Repositories
• 4.1, Points of Reference: Open Access and the Open Archives Initiative
• 4.2, Links in the Scholarly Communication Value Chain

Steven William Glover and four co-authors, A review of health and access to health information in Bhutan, Health Information & Libraries Journal, November 29, 2006.  Not even an abstract is free online, at least so far.

Oxford Journals offers faster and better access to metadata records with OAI-PMH functionality, a press release from Oxford Journals.  Excerpt:

Oxford Journals, a division of Oxford University Press, today announced that all abstracts and metadata for over 180 journals can now be obtained using OAI-PMH functionality.

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) offers any third party, including aggregators and libraries, the opportunity to acquire metadata records within a standard format.

The Oxford Journals OAI-PMH repository contains abstracts and metadata for all journal content, including the Oxford Journals digital archive, with records dating back to 1849. The repository is constantly updated with current issues, as well as articles published as Advanced Access, and provides a convenient location for harvesting metadata collections, or single article metadata.

“Providing OAI-PMH functionality offers third party aggregators and librarians a vastly improved way to extract metadata records from our content”, commented Pam Sutherland, Journals IT Director, Oxford Journals. She continued,

“Metadata can be harvested at any time, as frequently as required, and it’s now much quicker to access the data than via other mechanisms. The Oxford Journals repository is extremely flexible, and users can set their own parameters to obtain precise sets of metadata, sorting by journal, date, volume, or issue. A date-stamp has also been included within all records, even though this is an optional element of OAI-PMH, to allow harvesters to select all records from a specified date.”...

Comment.  This is smart and all journals (OA and TA) should do it.  (I've been recommending it since 2004.)  Inderscience seems to have been the first non-OA publisher to test its potential as a more effective and less expensive alternative to traditional marketing.  For details, see this Inderscience case study from 2003.

Nick Farrell, Internet Archive is free from DMCA, The Inquirer, November 30, 2006.  Excerpt:

After a long and expensive fight, the Internet Archive has been granted an exemption from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The Archive stores computer games and other old software for posterity, and runs the famous Internet Wayback machine. However, it feared that because it was copying others' work it could be in breach of the DMCA.

According to [a press release at] the outfit's website, thanks to the hard work of two law school students of Peter Jaszi of American University, Jieun Kim and Doug Agopsowicz, the Internet Archive and other libraries may continue to preserve software and video game titles without fear of going to jail.

The move cost it $50,000 of pro-bono lawyer time, and a spokesArchivist said that it would be jolly nice if the government could sit down and write a better law that could protect libraries and others archivists of the World Wide Wibble.

Rufus Pollock, UK National Statistics: Are They Open or Not? Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog, November 30, 2006.  Excerpt:

I’ve used data a couple of times from the UK’s national statistics site.

The other day I went there to investigate their licensing as part of an effort to do a simple survey of the openness of various UK government agency’s data. To summarize their copyright statement (full details are in 1):

• National statistics are under Crown Copyright
• If you want to reproduce the statistics other than for research or private study you need a ‘core’ (now called PSI) click-use license

This is where it gets interesting. According to the PSI license (which I’ve textified and posted [here]):

“In this Licence, to reproduce includes the following non-exclusive rights throughout the world:

6.1 publishing the Material in any medium. This includes featuring the Material on websites which can be accessed via the internet or via an internal electronic network or on an Intranet;”

This seems to be pretty broad and cover anything I’d like to do....If this licence was effective it would mean that the data was open.  However further down the National Statistics copyright page one finds:

“Customers wishing to repackage and/or redistribute National Statistics material in their own products or services and allow their customers to use such material should contact msolicensing@cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk with details of their request.”

This seems to imply that repackaging and redistribution require separate permission and are not covered by the PSI licence. If this is the case the freedom to reproduce granted in the click-use license is rendered completely void. All of this makes me wonder whether the National Statistics UK are able to see some special distinction between ‘reproduction’ and ‘repackaging/redistributing’ that’s not apparent to the rest of us.

Comment.  One of the chief benefits of making information OA is that users are spared the expense and delay of asking permission to make use of it.  Some providers understand this and provide blanket permission for certain uses in advance.  However, what they don't always realize is that this benefit is completely negated when the permission is vague or inconsistent.  Then conscientious users will still have to ask permission, denting their productivity, sometimes denting their budget, and increasing the unrelenting pressure to become less conscientious.

One of my favorite examples is a June 2004 policy by Johns Hopkins University Press (JHUP) allowing authors to self-archive JHUP journal articles in their institutional repository "provided the [repository] does not directly compete with either the Johns Hopkins University Press or Project Muse."

The Free Our Data blog has two posts today on how Denmark and Australia charge for access to publicly-funded government data.

The Royal Society has created a home page for EXiS Open Choice, its hybrid OA journal program.  Although the program was launched in June 2006, and had an FAQ from the beginning, it didn't have a home page until yesterday or today.

Although John Willinsky's book, The Access Principle (MIT Press 2005), already had an OA edition, Willinsky has deposited another OA copy in dLIST.  The updated abstract:

This work is copyrighted by MIT Press and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. MIT Press has granted permission to place a copy in dLIST. Readers can also purchase the book from MIT Press, which publishes it (see alternative location for details).

Following abstract is from MIT Press: Questions about access to scholarship go back farther than recent debates over subscription prices, rights, and electronic archives suggest. The great libraries of the past -- from the fabled collection at Alexandria to the early public libraries of nineteenth-century America -- stood as arguments for increasing access. In The Access Principle, John Willinsky describes the latest chapter in this ongoing story -- online open access publishing by scholarly journals -- and makes a case for open access as a public good. A commitment to scholarly work, writes Willinsky, carries with it a responsibility to circulate that work as widely as possible: this is the access principle. In the digital age, that responsibility includes exploring new publishing technologies and economic models to improve access to scholarly work. Wide circulation adds value to published work; it is a significant aspect of its claim to be knowledge. The right to know and the right to be known are inextricably mixed. Open access, argues Willinsky, can benefit both a researcher-author working at the best-equipped lab at a leading research university and a teacher struggling to find resources in an impoverished high school. Willinsky describes different types of access -- the New England Journal of Medicine, for example, grants open access to issues six months after initial publication, and First Monday forgoes a print edition and makes its contents immediately accessible at no cost. He discusses the contradictions of copyright law, the reading of research, and the economic viability of open access. He also considers broader themes of public access to knowledge, human rights issues, lessons from publishing history, and "epistemological vanities." The debate over open access, writes Willinsky, raises crucial questions about the place of scholarly work in a larger world -- and about the future of knowledge.

John Willinsky is Pacific Press Professor of Literacy and Technology at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED and a developer of Open Journals Systems software.

Online Educa tackles lifelong learning and open access, a press release from JISC, November 30, 2006.  Excerpt:

Delegates have been gathering for the world's largest e-learning conference which began in Berlin yesterday. The Online Educa conference on Technology and Supported Learning, now in its twelfth year, has attracted nearly 2,000 delegates from education, research, Government and commercial sectors from around the world....

Joint activities by JISC and SURF began in the afternoon with a workshop on open access. JISC Scholarly Communications consultant Fred Friend introduced the topic, saying that there were considerable economic, social and educational benefits to making research and other outputs available without financial, legal and technical barriers to access. It was also, he suggested, a question of giving more power to authors.

He outlined the two complementary routes to open access. Self-archiving or the deposit of a pre-print or post-print in an institutional or subject repository is one route, he said, while the other is publication through an open access journal....Both routes, suggested Fred Friend, will enable the opportunities provided by technological developments, such as data mining and text mining, to be realised....There are significant economic benefits to open access too, he continued, through the sharing of developments in medical research, for example, and through the value for money gains of publicly funded research being more freely available....

Amber Thomas, JISC programme manager spoke about JISC's work to encourage the establishment and development of repositories in the UK....

Erik Saaman of SURF spoke about open access initiatives in the Netherlands, such as DAREnet (research), LOREnet (higher education), Edurep (non-HE) and Driver (European), and the common technical architectures which underpin them....

Ryan Hargreaves gave an overview of Jorum, the free online repository for learning and teaching resources which is aiming to create a culture of sharing of learning and teaching resources....

John May of the SURF Foundation spoke about LOREnet which is aiming to create a similar 'community of sharing' in the use of online teaching materials in the Netherlands....

Paul Kobulnicky, Scholarly Reputations: Who's Got Buzz?  Educause Review, November/December 2006.  Excerpt:

While giving a presentation at a recent international meeting on institutional repositories, I responded to a member of the audience who questioned the motivation for faculty to participate in such repositories. The individual repeated the oft-mentioned position that scholars, by placing publications in such repositories, unduly risk their contractual relationships with publishers. I responded by acknowledging the concern and by describing options that minimize risk, but since I had the stage, I also wondered aloud about which "big win" choice scholars would make as time moves forward. Those of us who believe both in the rigor of peer review and in open access know that these are not mutually exclusive choices but rather are mutually beneficial elements in advancing scholarship. However, for the sake of the argument, I asked if scholars would choose (1) to have their work published in the premier journal in their field or (2) to have that work regularly come up on the first screen in an appropriate Google search. Although I made the statement to stimulate discussion in front of an audience, I believe that my straw-man choice raises issues that need to be discussed further....

[T]he choice between a prestigious scholarly publication and a high Google ranking was not really an either/or choice. No one should dismiss or diminish the value of using high editorial standards to point both the scholarly and the general communities to work of high quality. However, the placement of scholarship in an open-access institutional repository need not preclude publication in a prestigious title. Authors and their publishers can move to provide open access to their works in pre- and/or post-publication versions. From the perspective of return on social investment, open access to published works can create positive returns for both authors and scholarly publishers. My straw-man choice was contrived, of course: neither scholarship without perceived relevance nor scholarship evaluated only on Web buzz is desirable.

Within the classic and respected framework of scholarly review and selection, scholars need to think about the impact of contemporary, open information access and about the mechanisms that can be used to generate relevance in their work. They need to think about choosing appropriate metadata and about how others, not necessarily just their disciplinary peers, might seek and use their information. They need to think about the links that ought to exist between their work and the broader society that inevitably supports it. Finally, they need to give some thought to the very unscholarly but pragmatic aspects of their work: marketing and promotion, which contribute to the creation of scholarly reputations with "buzz" on the Web.

Be openly accessible or be obscure is a new blog on OA by Jim Till.  Jim is a University Professor Emeritus of medicine at the University of Toronto, a member of the Executive Committee of UT's Project Open Source | Open Access, a member of the editorial boards of two OA journals, Chair of the CIHR Advisory Committee on Access to Outputs of Research --and a former contributor to Open Access News when it was a group blog.  Welcome back to the blogosphere, Jim!

PS:  I thought I blogged this last week but now I can't find the post.  If it's really out there and just slipped through my net (and Google's), I apologize for the repetition.

Dick Kaser, Funding Open Access, Information Today blog, November 29, 2006.  Excerpt:

I had a fascinating conversation at lunch with Anthony Watkinson (center), a publishing consultant and part-time lecturer at University College London. Just back from The Charleston Conference where he spoke on "The Future of Publishing in an Age of Uncertainty," he engaged me in a discussion about Open Access publishing.

I was not taking notes, but the bottom line seemed to be that Open Access is a publishing model still in search of a business model . . . or at least a sustainable funding base.

Though many institutions have pledged support of the idea, Watkinson observed, few have come forward with the money to pay for publishing papers in such a way that they can be offered free-of-charge to users.

Comments.  Depending on how Anthony fleshed out this comment, I could agree or disagree.  More specifically:

• Today the Directory of Open Access Journals lists 2,480 peer-reviewed open-access journals.  That's about 10% of the whole in about 10 years.  Print and toll-access journals have had about 350 years to reach their current level of penetration.
• A large minority of these OA journals (about 47%) are funded by author-side fees, usually paid by the author's research grant.  The majority are no-fee journals, supported by institutional subsidies and other methods.  These journals have business models.  Are they adequately funded?  Some probably are and some probably aren't, just like subscription journals.
• Long-term, the best source of funding to pay for OA journals is the money now spent on TA journals.  So we're not facing an economic mystery, just a complicated choice.
• To many informed observers, the subscription model is doomed.  For example, a public letter (January 2004) signed by the head librarians of the 11 campuses of the University of California, and Lawrence Pitts, Chair of the UC Academic Senate, asserted that the subscription model was "incontrovertibly unsustainable".  The uncertainties of OA business models must be considered together with, or compared to, the uncertainties of TA business models.

Canada's Athabasca University has adopted an OA policy.  (Thanks to Virtual Canuck via OA Librarian.)  The policy:

Athabasca University requests that academic and professional staff deposit an electronic copy of any published research articles (as elsewhere accepted for publication) in an Athabasca University repository. The contract with the publisher determines whether the article is restricted (lives in the repository as a record of the University’s research but is not accessible online by searchers) or open access (accessible online by searchers).

From Terry Anderson at Virtual Canuck:

We argued that this policy was consistent with Athabasca’s commitments to access as “Canada’s Open University”. We had originally hoped that the verb “request” could be strengthened to “requires” but the fears of curtailment of so-called “academic freedom” scared some away and we compromised on the weaker “requests”. To support self-archiving, the AU library has installed a version of MIT’s DSpace known locally as AUSpace...

I was somewhat surprised at the lack of understanding of Open Access publishing and of the need for action on the part of individual scholars to insure that works funded by public funds are made available to the public. The hundreds of thousands of dollars spent annually by even small Universities like Athabasca on database services that provide full text of many (most) proprietary publications has lulled many academics into a sense that such services are available to all scholars. This is obviously not the case and especially not in areas of the 3rd world....

From Heather Morrison at OA Librarian:

Congratulations to Athabasca University for taking one small step forward. However, this is a weak policy, for two reasons, and I would strongly suggest that other universities considering an open access policy not emulate this one.

First, it requests rather than requires academic and professional staff to deposit published research. Experience has shown that policies that request deposit simply do not work, whereas policies that require deposit are extremely effective. Also, rather than beginning with voluntary compliance, the nature of open access is that it makes more sense to start with the requirement - because as soon as faculty and staff experience the impact advantage, and other advantages of convenience, with open access, from a requirement, they will quickly come to appreciate open access, and so they will happily voluntary self-archive.

Second, it leaves the question of open access up to the publishers. Even setting aside the rights of the university, its students and alumni and taxpayer funders at a public institution like Athabasca - universities wishing to educate faculty members about open access would do well to also advise faculty members about their rights, too. Authors and scholars do not need to give up their copyright in order to have their work published; the only copyright that an author need give a publisher, is simply the right to publish; authors can do this and retain their copyright, too.

The vast majority of traditional publishers already routinely allow self-archiving of preprints or peer-reviewed postprints, or both....

As a proud former student [of AU], I would like to point out that, if Athabasca University's new open access policy is not exemplary in the area of self-archiving, AU has long been a leader in open access publishing, as the home of ICAAP, the International Coalition for the Advancement of Academic Publishing....

Chris Greer, The Digital Data Universe of the Future, a webcast of a 56 minute lecture at the Library of Congress, October 11, 2006.  (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)  From the blurb:

Dr. Chris Greer of the National Science Foundation discusses efforts of NSF to develop a strategic vision that provides a national digital framework in which NSF can work with partners in public and private sectors to address data acquisition, access, usage, stewardship and management challenges in a comprehensive way. NSF's five-year goal is twofold: 1) To catalyze the development of a system of science and engineering data collections that is open, extensible and evolvable; and 2) To support development of a new generation of tools and services facilitating data mining, integration, analysis, and visualization essential to turning data into new knowledge and understanding.

Speaker Biography: Dr. Chris Greer's current responsibilities include strategic planning for cyber infrastructure for the biological sciences and digital data activities in the newly formed Office of Infrastructure of the National Science Foundation. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and did post-doctoral research at the California Institute of Technology.