Open Access News

1. I'm slowing down for the holidays, and will try to catch up later with the developments I missed while making merry.
2. Sometime yesterday Open Access News passed the milestone of 10,000 posts.  About 200 of them were posted by my co-contributors during the time when OAN was a group blog.

Happy holidays!

Tactical Tech and iCommons have released the Open Publishing Edition of NGO-in-a-box.  From the site: 

The Open Publishing Edition of NGO-in-a-box is a toolkit of Free and Open Source software, tutorials and guides for producing, publishing and distributing content. The Edition...is aimed at small to medium sized non-profits, independent media organisations, free culture creators and grassroots journalists with a particular emphasis on those in developing and transition countries.

The contents of the toolkit were selected by an editorial team made up of leading international practitioners working in DIY publishing, free culture, technology for social justice and the development and deployment of free and open source software....

On September 26, 2006, the American Philological Association (APA) and the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) issued a joint statement on electronic publishing.  (Thanks to Ross Scaife for alerts to this and the documents below.)

The statement didn't mention OA, but the draft Issues and Recommendations for Discussion (October 20, 2006) discussed the problem of OA in the humanities in good detail --but for the false assumption that "most" OA journals charge author-side fees (in fact, most charge no fees).  It recommend a study of the extent to which American classicists lack access to American classics journals.  It also recommended OA archiving and the launch of new OA archives.  The two organizations called for a period of public comments, which ended on December 20.

Gregory Crane, Editor-in-Chief of the OA Perseus Project, has made his December 20 comment public.  Excerpt:

[O]ne way to improve working conditions and research opportunities for university and college teachers is to support, in every possible way and with as much energy as we can muster, the creation of massive digital libraries based on open access such as those now being built by Google, Microsoft, the Open Content Alliance and others. Even if only partially realized, these efforts will expand the intellectual reach of all college and university teachers. If these efforts come close to their original goals, we will find online and freely accessible a larger and far more useful research library than any institution of higher learning has ever created. Classicists stand to gain more than any other discipline, for the field is often strongest at liberal arts colleges which have never had access to first class research environments. Nor is open access alone always enough. After sustained requests from an increasing set of researchers, we at Perseus decided to make all the content that we could available under a Creative Commons attribution/sharealike/non-commercial license. Researchers want to apply their own analytical tools to the full source texts and to create derivative works....

Saving money is a good way to go bankrupt. The strategic challenge that classics faces as a field is to maintain and expand its role in the broader intellectual life of society. Our situation is much closer to that of a university competing with other universities than it is to Hollywood or the music industry raising capital from mass market sales....

The APA reports 3,195 members.21 In our last survey of users (April 2005), 400,000 unique users consulted the Perseus Digital Library, 90% of whom were working with classical materials....

The joint APA-AIA Task Force on Electronic Publication "plans to reach some conclusions when it meets in San Diego in January 2007."

John Blossom, Second Nature: PLoS One Picks Up Where Nature Left Off, Content Blogger, December 22, 2006.  Excerpt:

The launch of the new PLoS ONE scholarly research portal looks like a big win for open access research content from a number of angles. PLoS ONE is posting research and will allow interactive review before and after publication for scientific articles via a very sophisticated publishing environment. The PLoS ONE platform applies many of the best practices of social media, providing ready access to comments posting and awareness of active discussions to draw in more active discussions. PLoS ONE will publish all papers that are judged to be rigorous and technically sound, and had already posted more an 100 papers by its launch - a remarkable number for a just-launched scholarly journal of any kind. By contrast Nature's recently shuttered open-review portal trial, which ran for around four months, attracted only 71 authors willing to post their work online and attracted 92 technical comments.

As we noted in our latest news analysis article one of the keys to successful social media products is a dedicated core of trusted contributors who will be able to ensure editorial success. PLoS ONE starts with a global editorial board of more than 200 scholars, ensuring a broad array of inputs for reviewing content. Some of the fears about having content rejected after having had it exposed to comments prior to publication may be relieved by the PLoS ONE policy that allows papers that have been already rejected by PLoS Biology and Medicine journals to be re-submitted via PLoS ONE. This is a potentially valuable feature, allowing research that may not have yet reached the highest levels of acceptance to mature through its exposure to comments from a broader audience.

PLoS ONE is finally opening the doors to the potential for fundamental changes in how scholarly research proves its worth. With an open exchange of ideas and commentary facilitated by technologies long available to the general public and a solid body of research and reviewers PLoS ONE holds out the potential to liberate the highest levels of scholarly innovation from the regimen of the printing press. Changing the way that research is paid for was a good first step for open access, but with the ability to eliminate artificial distribution bottlenecks that choke off natural conversations PLoS ONE may do for scholarly research what Wikipedia has done for reference materials - with much more integrity in the underlying editorial processes.

Alf Eaton has launched PLoS Too, a mirror of PLoS ONE that he'll use as a "testing ground for trying out article display formats" --taking advantage of the fact that all PLoS ONE articles are free to manipulate under CC licenses and published in XML under the NLM DTD.  If you know Alf's earlier work, this experiment will be worth watching.

Mia Garlick, “Returning Author’s Rights: Termination of Transfer” Beta Tool Launched, Creative Commons blog, December 21, 2006.  Excerpt:

Creative Commons is excited to launch a beta version of its “Returning Authors Rights: Termination of Transfer” tool....It’s a beta demo so it doesn’t produce any useable results at this stage. We have launched it to get your feedback.

Briefly, the U.S. Copyright Act gives creators a mechanism by which they can reclaim rights that they sold or licensed away many years ago. Often artists sign away their rights at the start of their careers when they lack sophisticated negotiating experience, access to good legal advice or any knowledge of the true value of their work so they face an unequal bargaining situation. The “termination of transfer” provisions are intended to give artists a way to rebalance the bargain, giving them a “second bite of the apple.” By allowing artists to reclaim their rights, the U.S. Congress hoped that authors could renegotiate old deals or negotiate new deals on stronger footing....A longer explanation of the purpose of the “termination of transfer” provisions is set out in this FAQ.

Despite this admirable Congressional intention, the provisions are very complex and have not been frequently used. CC’s tool is intended to go some way towards redressing that....Unfortunately, the termination provisions are currently so complex and technical that this tool can only serve an informational role. Many aspects of the “termination of transfer” provisions require legal analysis which is impossible to code so we are working on linking the tool to legal referrals. This FAQ provides an explanation of the tool’s intended architecture....

We have set up a page on the Creative Commons wiki to gather comments....

Comment. I've never heard of a researcher using this provision to reclaim rights to a published journal article.  If any one knows a past case, please drop me a line.  I'd also like to hear about any researcher who uses the provision in the future to reclaim key rights, especially for the purpose of providing OA to the peer-reviewed full-text.

Update. Read Lawrence Lessig's blog post on the right of termination and transfer. The right doesn't kick in until an agreement is 35 years old, which makes it moot for most journal articles. Journals that don't provide OA to 35 year old articles, and don't let authors do it themselves, are an endangered species.

Spotlight on HSRC Press, SA BookNews Online, December 15, 2006.  Excerpt:

As the Marketing Manager of HSRC Press, Karen Bruns has a fairly good idea of what is needed to achieve success in this line of business....

"As far as we know, the HSRC Press is South Africa's only open access publisher. We think we might be the only open access publisher in Africa but as we haven't been able to verify that, we really can't make that claim. We publish both in print and in electronic form. It's one of the things that make us unique and it's probably the most exciting part of what it is that we're doing. It feels very pioneering and at the same time, we're increasing both the pool of and access to high quality social science research-based publications.”

"Considering where we're located, I am often asked whether we only publish the research output of the Human Science Research Council (HSRC). While we do manage all of the intellectual property of the HSRC, the answer is no, as we publish many externally authored works - provided they're furthering the social sciences, which is the mandate of the organisation in terms of a statutory act.” ...

"[W]hat most people ask us most often is whether the open access model assists in selling more books!  The question is most often accompanied by a cynical eyebrow and a wary expression. I am just as wary to answer, because my answer would have to be that we have seen significant year on year sales increases since our inception in 2002."

According to Karen, their success can be linked to the improvement of their products, the increase of their sales network, and their growing efficiencies. She is wary of pinning their success to the adoption of the open access model, as she wouldn’t want publishers, librarians, authors, academics, policymakers, or civil society to think for one minute that the adoption thereof was a marketing ploy!

“The reason that we have adopted this model...is that we wanted to assist in opening access to quality social science in Africa - both to Africa and from Africa.” ...

Thanks to Eve Gray for the alert, as well as for this comment:

Karen strikes a chord for me in this interview when she comments wryly on the fact that that the most common question people ask is whether Open Access online provision sells more books. As she says, that is not the point at all. I cannot imagine that book sales come anywhere near covering the costs of the publishing department. The HSRC provides generous financial support for the HSRC Press, presumably because the organisation finds that this is a good investment. Having its research effectively and widely disseminated achieves the purpose of the research council, ensuring that its research findings have significant development impact. Moreover, I would imagine that its successfully marketed publications profile the HSRC very effectively in the eyes of the government that funds it and contributes to its ability to attract private research contracts to expand its research activities and supplement its public funding.

Gracian Chimwaza and Vimbai M. Hungwe, AGORA/HINARI Training of Trainer workshops: imparting hands-on skills on the use of e-resources in agriculture and health in Sub-Saharan Africa, INASP Newsletter, December 2006.  Excerpt:

Since April 2004, ITOCA [Information Training and Outreach Centre for Africa] has carried out 20 AGORA/HINARI National Training of Trainer workshops in 14 Sub-Sahara Africa countries, and over 500 professionals in health and agriculture sectors have been trained. The aim of the training is to equip participants with adequate practical knowledge on the use and access of scholarly literature and relevant electronic resources to enable researchers and information managers improve on research and teaching in the region. The train-the-trainer model has seen over 6000 users trained downstream at participating institutions....

ITOCA spearheads outreach and training programmes for TEEAL (The Essential Electronic Agricultural library), FAO's Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA) and WHO's Health InterNetwork Access to research Initiative (HINARI) programmes in the region.

These workshops are conducted over 3-4 days for 25-30 participants. During the workshops, researchers, policy-makers, educators, librarians and extension specialists have access to high quality, relevant and timely information on agriculture and health via the Internet and CD-ROM....

SPARC has released its December 20 comment on the draft OA mandate from the Australian Government Productivity Commission.  The public comment period ended on December 21.  (For background on this proposal, see my blog post from November 13, 2006.)  Excerpt:

SPARC enthusiastically commends the far-sighted draft recommendation of the Productivity Commission that “published papers and data from ARC and NHMRC-funded projects should be freely and publicly available” (Draft Finding 5.1). This is an important step that will be welcomed by all beneficiaries of research.

While your recommendation recognizes the tremendous potential to expand the impact of Australian research outputs, we encourage you to go a step further in delineating the kind of public policies that are needed. The experiences of other nations have demonstrated that the effectiveness of well-intended policies can easily be undermined by unnecessarily timid implementations. For example, the voluntary public access policy of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, implemented in May 2005, has resulted in deposit of less than five percent of eligible articles in NIH’s digital repository. The agency is now evaluating steps to improve on this unfortunate outcome, but success has been delayed by years.

We believe that, in order to guarantee a better result, it would be useful if your report called for Australian public access policies that fall within these parameters:

• Research funders should include in all grants and contracts a provision reserving for the government relevant non-exclusive rights (as described below) to research papers and data.
• All peer-reviewed research papers and associated data stemming from public funding should be required to be maintained in stable digital repositories that permit free, timely public access, interoperability with other resources on the Internet, and long-term preservation. Exemptions should be strictly limited and justified.
• Users should be permitted to read, print, search, link to, or crawl these research outputs. In addition, policies that make possible the download and manipulation of text and data by software tools should be considered.
• Deposit of their works in qualified digital archives should be required of all funded investigators, extramural and intramural alike. While this responsibility might be delegated to a journal or other agent, to assure accountability the responsibility should ultimately be that of the funds recipient.
• Public access to research outputs should be provided as early as possible after peer review and acceptance for publication. For research papers, this should be not later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. This embargo period represents a reasonable, adequate, and fair compromise between the public interest and the needs of journals.

We also recommend that, as a means of further accelerating innovation, a portion of each grant be earmarked to cover the cost of publishing papers in peer-reviewed open-access journals, if authors so choose. This would provide potential readers with immediate access to results, rather than after an embargo period.

While SPARC is not in a position to evaluate whether Australian public access provisions should be limited to ARC and NHMRC, we believe the benefits apply to all publicly funded research. We urge that your recommendations with regard to public access be framed broadly....

PS:  In October 2006, the Productivity Commission recommended OA mandates for the Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), and since then both agencies have adopted strong OA policies.  See the ARC policy (c. December 3, 2006) and the NHMRC policy (c. December 8, 2006).

Update (12/25/06). See comments by Stevan Harnad and Arthur Sale on the SPARC letter.

Nick Hodson has recently launched a pilot project to let web users post OA copies of public-domain books to the Internet Archive.  From his announcement (on Klaus Graf's blog, Archivalia):

I have recently started a project to upload the scans in PDF form of many of the above books to the Internet Archive. The main purpose is to clear the path so that people from all over the world can upload their scans, and was suggested to me by Brewster Kahle. He calls it a Grassroots Book-Scanning enterprise. I am doing a pilot study, with twenty-one books in Stage One, and a further fifty in Stage Two. All the problems should be ironed out by the time this is complete in a few weeks from now. I am working on a manual to advise people wanting to get involved. After that a further hundred books will be prepared, put onto a DVD, and possibly posted for me directly at Internet Archive. There will be many more to follow after that. You can review progress on this project [from this page].

In addition to the PDF I have posted an HTML file for each entire book, and a TEXT file that can be used to make an audiobook. The spelling in the latter has been converted to the American style (some of the posted books have not been done yet). There is also in each book's folder a small text file that explains how easy it is to make a good audiobook, with a recommendation that people should use TextAloud MP3 available from NextUp whence you can also get the highly recommended voices from Acapela. These are of course once-off purchases, and after that you can make the audiobooks for free, except for the small cost of storing them on CDs. The technology also works for most novels on Project Gutenberg. There is a very easy process available within TextAloud for splitting the book into chapter files, correctly named, and from this creating a set of MP3 files for the book, one for each chapter.

James Doran, Founder of Wikipedia plans search engine to rival Google, Times Online, December 23, 2006. Excerpt:

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, is set to launch an internet search engine with amazon.com that he hopes will become a rival to Google and Yahoo!

Mr Wales has begun working on a search engine that exploits the same user-based technology as his open-access encyclopaedia, which was launched in 2003.

The project has been dubbed Wikiasari — a combination of wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for “rummaging search”.

Mr Wales told The Times that he was planning to develop a commercial version of the search engine through Wikia Inc, his for-profit company, with a provisional launch date in the first quarter of next year....

Mr Wales believes that Google’s computer-based algorithmic search program is no match for the editorial judgment of humans....Mr Wales aims to exploit the same network of followers and the same type of free software [used for Wikipedia] to create his search engine.

“Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks’,” Mr Wales said. “Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way. But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves,” he added. “We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”

Mr Wales believes that the reputation already fostered by his Wikipedia community and the transparency of his technology will build sufficient trust in his search engine to bring in advertising revenue and make the Wikiasari venture profitable....

Update (12/29/06). Ben Vershbow corrects some widespread errors about this project. For more corrections and new details, see Danny Sullivan's interview with Jimmy Wales.

Update (1/6/07). To follow this story, subscribe to the mailing list or read the Search Wikia blog set up by Jimmy Wales.

Enrico Alleva and Igor Branchi, Making available scientific information in the third millennium: perspectives for the neuroscientific community, a presentation delivered at Institutional archives for research : experiences and projects in Open Access (Rome, November 30 - December 1, 2006). 

Abstract:   The rules governing the globalised process of sharing scientific information in the research community are rapidly changing. From the 1950s, commercial publishers started owning a large number of scientific journals and consequently the marketable value of a submitted manuscript has become an increasingly important factor in publishing decisions. Recently some publishers have developed the Open Access (OA), a business scheme which may help stopping such tendency. Indeed, in the case of an open-access publication, the marketable value of a manuscript may be not the primary consideration, since access to the research is not being sold. This may push scientists to re-consider the purpose of peer reviewing. However, costs remain a key point in managing scientific journals because OA method does not eliminate peer review process. Thus, OA may not solve the problem of the market pressures on publishing strategies. Furthermore, the OA has another strong point: everyone can read OA papers, including scientist living in poor countries. But, will OA method create new discriminations on who can publish on OA journals? Will it be possible to really exclude or strongly limit the influences of the market from scientific publishing? The example of the non-profit e-print arXiv, a fully automated electronic archive and distribution server for research papers with no peer review will be discussed. For neuroscientists, the possibility to make available scientific data, even in the case of negative results (usually, very difficult to publish) is an important step to avoid purposeless repetition of costly experiments involving animal subjects. The possibility to arrange internationally or locally peer reviewed papers in institutional repositories (IR) is a necessity. However, access to IR should be regulated, e.g. banning or limiting profit organizations and exploiting internet systems, professional organizations or network groups.

The Alfa Institute of Biomedical Sciences has launched E-Meducation, a portal of OA resources for medical education.

Maria Rosaria Bacchini, fedOA, Open access archives a "Federico II" University of Naples, a presentation delivered at Institutional archives for research : experiences and projects in Open Access (Rome, November 30 - December 1, 2006).  In Italian but with this English-language abstract:

In this paper the Author illustrates the Institutional Repository of “Federico II” Naples University: fedOA. This archive was developed since 2004 and it has been officially introduced in November 2005 based on GNU EPrints software.
This software use got the possibility too go through the following aspects:  [1] Eprint type, [2] Metadata set, and [3] Fulltext format type supported.  Moreover, FedOA archive will contain all the research doctorate e-theses and furthermore even all the University Teachers staff scientific releases.

Franco Toni, Statistics of Open Access Journals, a presentation delivered at Institutional archives for research : experiences and projects in Open Access (Rome, November 30 - December 1, 2006). 

Abstract:   The exponential growth of e-journal access and downloads has strongly enhanced the role of statistical data, in order to evaluate the use of resources and define subscription acquisition strategies and their management.

On one hand, the automatic data harvesting performed by computers provides statistics, but on the other hand it does not guarantee the comparability and harmonisation of collected data. Therefore, the process of statistical data formulation has to be supported by the use of standards
- the most important being “counter” which is gradually becoming the de facto in this field. That could permit the merging of obtained results from different systems.

Furthermore, all the main commercial publishers regularly supply reliable statistics unlike Open Access resource suppliers and aggregators, with the exception of BioMed Central, that does provide statistics.

All this could have some negative implications for decision makers that do not have a suitable system to choose between Open Access and equivalent or similar non Open Access resources.

Recent studies have established that Open Access articles have an IF and a citation level higher than the others. It should be fundamental to verify the use of Open Access periodicals compared to the non Open Access ones in the same fields. If the results of this analysis are in favour of Open Access journals, these could become an important factor for the success of the Open Access initiative in terms of reducing library expenditure for serials. The access identification of journals through the user IP address is a globally adopted method and easy to apply, therefore it could bring about a significant increase in the diffusion of Open Access periodicals.

Dan Hunter, Open Access to Infinite Content (or 'In Praise of Law Reviews'), Lewis & Clark Law Review, 10, 4 (2006).  Self-archived December 20, 2006. 

Abstract:   This Article is about legal scholarly publication in a time of plenitude. It is an attempt to explain why the most pressing questions in legal scholarly publishing are about how we ensure access to an infinity of content. It explains why standard assumptions about resource scarcity in publication are wrong in general, and how the changes in the modality of publication affect legal scholarship. It talks about the economics of open access to legal material, and how this connects to a future where there is infinite content. And because student-edited law reviews fit this future better than their commercially-produced, peer-refereed cousins, this Article is, in part, a defense of the crazy-beautiful institution that is the American law review.

Dean Giustini, How Web 2.0 is changing medicine: Is a medical wikipedia the next step?  BMJ, December 232, 2006.  An editorial.  Excerpt:

Few concepts in information technology create more confusion than Web 2.0. The truth is that Web 2.0 is a difficult term to define, even for web experts. Nebulous phrases like "the web as platform" and "architecture of participation" are often used to describe Web 2.0. Medical librarians suggest that rather than intrinsic benefits of the platform itself, it's the spirit of open sharing and collaboration that is paramount. The more we use, share, and exchange information on the web in a continual loop of analysis and refinement, the more open and creative the platform becomes; hence, the more useful it is in our work....

This tour through Web 2.0 ultimately returns to the idea of using software to create optimal knowledge building opportunities for doctors. The rise of wikis as a publishing medium—especially Wikipedia—holds some unexamined pearls for the advancement of medicine. The notion of a medical wikipedia—freely accessible and continually updated by doctors—is worthy of further exploration. Could wikis be used, for example, as a low cost alternative to commercial point of care tools like UpToDate? To a certain extent, this is happening now as the search portal Trip already indexes Ganfyd, one of a handful of medical wikis being developed....

The web is a reflection of who we are as human beings—but it also reflects who we aspire to be. In that sense, Web 2.0 may be one of the most influential technologies in the history of publishing, as old proprietary notions of control and ownership fall away. An expert (that is, doctor) moderated repository of the knowledge base, in the form of a medical wiki, may be the answer to the world's inequities of information access in medicine if we have the will to create one.

PS:  Also see the call for a medical Wikipedia by Peter Frishauf, founder of Medscape.

John Wilbanks, Another reason for opening access to research, BMJ, December 23, 2006.  (Thanks to Dean Giustini.)  Wilbanks is the Executive Director of Science Commons. 

Summary points:  [1] Authors should be prioritising open access to their works —for the good of other scientists and to ensure that the full benefits of the internet and advanced technology may be realised.  [2] Open access is rapidly becoming a mainstream idea in scholarly publishing, with more than 2000 open access journals and more than a million author self archived open access papers.  [3] Legal and technical barriers to open access are easily overcome using freely available tools.

From the conclusion:

Authors have several resources, including open access journals, open access archives, educational materials, and legal tools, that make open access easy and legal to achieve. Although open access has made considerable progress, and more scholarly work is publicly available than ever before, most peer reviewed articles remain closed to both human study and indexing by software. Authors, institutions, funders of research, and scholarly publishers should continue the movement towards open access so that no scholar is disadvantaged by his or her economic status and so that the full value of technological progress can be applied to the scholarly literature.

Antonella De Robbio, Open access e copyright, a presentation delivered at Institutional archives for research : experiences and projects in Open Access (Rome, November 30 - December 1, 2006).  In Italian but with this English-language abstract:

The aim of Open Access international movement is the removal of any economic, legal or technical barrier to the access to scientific information, this in order to guarantee scientific and technological progress for the benefit of the collectivity. Copyright Management in higher education is a strategic issue because it is involved in any process from creation to dissemination of scholarly works created at the university. Whatever the situation regarding ownership of copyright, university policies should balance the interests of stakeholders by reserving rights or benefits for research uses or teaching activities. A variety of approach can exist even within one country, depending by laws or by habits to faculties. Copyright laws - customized on musical and cinematographic environment - are often inadequate to deal with the complex issues surrounding the management of intellectual works created at universities. Nowadays, inside scholarship communication world, the copyright is perceived as very strong legal barrier, because copyright laws influence in a negative way the dissemination of intellectual research output, and most intellectual content (90%) are hindered
inside editorial platforms. Furthermore authors, but also Universities, not always are awake about difference between
authorship and ownership with disastrous consequences about rights ceased to third market actors which limit or slowdown the dissemination processes and negatively influences the impact on the community, with heavy cultural, social and economic relapses. For this reason authors must take the control of their right and learn to determine the conditions under which her or his work is made available on open access, choosing to deposit a copy of a work in a repository or publish in an open access journal. On the other side the universities, in particular in Italy, should put as priority the identification of stakeholders and the allocation of their own interests. This direction is a crucial step toward the development of policies or agreements that seek to assure to the University and their authors the ability to use and manage the works in fulfillment of their most important interests.

Michael Cross, Commercial case for free data rises overseas, The Guardian, December 21, 2006.  Excerpt:

Slowly but relentlessly, the question of how government should encourage people to exploit the vast resources of digital information it holds is creeping above the political horizon. Last week, opposition MPs tabled questions to ministers about what action they plan to take following the Office of Fair Trading's criticisms of the way the public agencies behave in the market for data.... 

Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign proposes a simple solution: government bodies should make available all data owned or funded by taxpayers, subject to the demands of privacy and security, at the marginal cost of dissemination. In the internet age, this is usually zero. There is a stark contrast between the UK's approach, running parts of government as businesses selling data and the US, where federal data is available for free.

However, an international study carried out for the Office of Fair Trading paints a more complex picture. The study is a rare attempt to perform a consistent analysis of how three different countries' agencies work. They are the US, where federal data is almost all free; Sweden, which has a similar position to Britain's, and Australia, which falls between the two. For each country, the study examines the state mapping, meteorological and companies registration agency. These generate the most commercially exploited public-sector data. But the way they run their businesses varies greatly: Australia's meteorological agency makes a profit of US$6.15m (£3.12m) a year, Sweden's mapping agency US$5.3m. Their US equivalents depend on government funding....

PS: For background, see my post from December 8, 2006.

Jim Stemper and Karen Williams, Scholarly communication: Turning crisis into opportunity, C&RL News, December 2006. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) Excerpt:

Scholarly communication first entered our professional consciousness in the 1990s, centered on the topic of rising serials prices and their impact on libraries’ budgets. Our lexicon was one of problems, crises, and the clear definition of an enemy. Several years’ experience working in this arena has led to a more informed, broader perspective —part of a natural evolutionary process. Formerly we focused almost exclusively on the economic case, with some real successes. A number of faculty and administrators became outraged and engaged. But many also told us the system works just fine for them; publishers told regulators that the real problem is underfunding of universities. To achieve a marked, sustained impact on scholarly communication, librarians need to be advocates for faculty and administrative action. Scholars must be the new face of this effort and focus on how the present system restricts access to their scholarship. In other words, this is no longer just a library problem of serials inflation (with a spillover effect of reduced monograph purchases), but a series of scholarly communication issues and opportunities owned by scholars, their campuses, and their societies.

We still recognize access problems caused by continued high subscription costs, changing copyright laws, and the licensing of access. Current publishing models are still not economically sustainable. But there is a growing awareness of new opportunities for more sustainable models through ongoing advances in technology. There is genuine hope that the symbiotic relationship between higher education institutions, scholarly societies, and commercial publishers, which could previously be characterized as tense and antagonistic, will realize more cooperative and beneficial partnerships in the future.

Where do we go from here? ... Through the cumulative effect of our actions we can accomplish infinitely more than we could alone. In that spirit, the goal of this resource guide is to give nascent scholarly communication efforts a shared knowledge base, one that provides colleagues with tools to build effective programs on their campuses....

Chris Leonard, Details about PhysMath Central, Egg, December 21, 2006.  Excerpt:

[E]arlier this week I was interviewed for a longer article by the people at First Author.  I thought it would be good to share my answers with you all as it gives an insight into what we are planning for in terms of functionality for PhysMath Central. I should have stated that some of these features may not be there on launch, but it gives our development team something to aim for (sorry guys). In any case they will be there very soon afterwards....

[FA] The physics and maths academic communities were pioneering in their adoption of open access, notably with the founding of Arxiv. You also have experience in the commercial sector. How will you work with and borrow from the experience of both these sectors?

We are a commercial company providing an open access service. From a commercial standpoint open access makes sense. Scientists are demanding it and it is almost seen as unethical in some fields to publish results in a subscription journal. It is difficult to see the future of subscription journals as rosy.

But open access does not necessarily imply 'free'. If we are based on a sound financial footing, that bodes well for the long-term future of open access. We are not dependent on grants or philanthropy and will be able to grow with the growing interest in open access in the future.

[FA] You recently promised to take advantage of new technologies to communicate research findings clearly and to meet the challenges of the future. Can you give some examples of these technologies and how you believe they will change the ways scientists research, collaborate and publish?

Sure - this is one of the most exciting parts of working in open access. Not only can we develop tools and services around our data, but anyone can. All articles are available, for free, to anyone in fully-formed XML, so we hope to see some suite of services like 'Google Labs' develop around this data.

However, for our part we intend to use new technology to support the scientific process in many ways. Apart from the tight arXiv integration already mentioned we are also going to use wikis with the editorial board members to refine the scope of the journals, journal blogs to inform everyone of editorial developments, OAI-PMH to update A&I services, RSS for journal content updates, multimedia to support the online text, comments from readers on each article, and we are very keen in working on ways to further structure and open up our data to other services. Other developments, such as 'tagging' of articles and refining the peer-review process will be considered if there is an appetite for it from the community we serve.

There is also an increasing drive to make raw data of experimental results available alongside the article itself. For particle collision data, for example, this would be problematic given the sheer volume of data - but this barrier will come down with time and for some fields it is already possible to publish raw data, so we will be investigating this option in the coming weeks.

Peter Brantley blogged the gist of Google's journal digitization program on November 9, and wrote an open letter to the AAUP about it on November 10, both much before my own first post on the subject December 17.  (Thanks to Dorothea Salo.) 

Ronald Milne, The Google mass digitisation project at Oxford, Liber Quarterly, 16, 3/4 (2006).  Only this abstract is free online:

For most of the 400 years of the Bodleian Library's existence, users have had to travel to Oxford to use its collections. In recent years, Oxford has undertaken a number of focused, 'boutique' digitisation projects. Now, as a partner in the Google Library Project, an immense range of scholarly and other 19th century out-of-copyright library materials from the Bodleian's collections will be digitised en masse and will be made freely available over the internet to anyone who has Web access. Millions of books and journals will be scanned in the course of the project and the author contends that digitisation on such a scale represents a revolution in the dissemination of information that parallels the impact of the invention of printing from moveable type in the 15th century.

Lapham's Quarterly and the Institute for the Future of the Book have launched an OA, annotated edition of the Iraq Study Group Report.  See the background and details by Ben Vershbow on the Institute's blog.

The UK government has released The UK Statute Law Database, the first free online edition of the country's consolidated laws.  Thanks to Francis Irving, who also provided this comment:

It’s super. Last week, access to consolidated versions of the law of the UK wasn’t possible without paying lots of money. Now it is free.

There are some down sides - 40 acts are not covered at all, law is only guaranteed included up until the end of 2001, and the data only has history of changes back to 1991 (details on status here).

Worse, from the point of view of OKF [Open Knowledge Foundation], the copyright/licensing situation is still not good. Now the data is free as in beer, can we have it free as in speech as well please? (More details in my previous post on the subject)

Even so, it is a fantastic new resource, and congratulations to everyone involved in creating it. Meanwhile, make sure you don’t bear armour, you maintain the dykes on the edges of your property, and you don’t write blank cheques.

Update (1/10/07). The source I quoted above has added the following correction: "Thanks to the enquiries of Nick Holmes it has been confirmed that the original copyright notice was a mistake and the database will be fully open, available for anyone to use and reuse under the standard terms of the PSI click-use license. Hurrah!"

The new issue of Zeitenblicke (vol. 5, no. 3, 2006) is devoted to Digitale Medien und Wissenschaftskulturen.  The articles are in German but have English-language abstracts.

BioMed Central has announced an increase in its article processing charges for 2007:

BioMed Central's standard article-processing charge (APC) has been fixed at £750 since July 2005. From January 2007, this will be increased to £850 for the BMC-series of journals and other titles for which peer review is organised in-house. In-house journals with higher editorial input and costs such as Genome Biology will have a higher APC. For independent journals, for which external Editors manage the editorial work, APC changes will take effect from 1 July 2007. The standard APC for independent journals will be £800, but prices will vary according to funding arrangements and agreements with journal Editors.

These increases reflect inflation and increased costs since the introduction of the standard APC of £750 in July 2005 and will keep APCs in line with the true cost to BioMed Central for article production, developing and maintaining websites and editorial systems, providing customer service, and marketing and editorial support.

Full details of all prices will be available on BioMed Central's FAQ page on 1 January 2007.

Jean-Pierre Lardy, Le modèle de publication hybride: lecteur payant/auteur payant, DADI, October 2006.  (Thanks to Actu-enstblog.)  An overview of the many hybrid journal programs and their different policies on key questions.  (In French.)

Mark Chillingworth, Expert edition, Information World Review, November 27, 2006.  Excerpt:

...Discussing Citizendium with IWR, [Larry] Sanger says the main difference between it and Wikipedia is that those who contribute content will have to use their real name and that it will have expert editors....

Sanger says experts will have to specify their credentials to become a Citizendium expert on a user page, as well as offer links to independent sources highlighting their credentials.  He admits, though, that Citizendium offers experts who make their living from writing or publishing material little or no incentive to offer up their knowledge.

Wikipedia has already shown there is a wealth of people prepared to create content or offer expertise for free. “There is a quorum of people who are willing to volunteer for the good of the world,” says Sanger. He adds that he has “dozens” of editors lined up, including PhDs. “A lot of them are disaffected Wikipedia members,” he says....

“It would foolish not to consult [experts], and with the internet it is possible to consult them. There is a potential here now to create a global village of experts who can be consulted on everything. The results could be really useful. A wiki-like project with experts was not possible until now. We needed Wikipedia to show the way.” ...

Despite Citizendium’s non-profit status, Sanger is researching revenue models to pay for its running and possibly for some experts. Sponsorship is a possibility, using a statement form of branding rather than display adverts. But Sanger’s preferred revenue model is to attract philanthropic individuals to pay for the content on certain subjects.

“We are inviting ordinary people who require a certain piece of information to pay for its production. They will pay for the content as a gift to the world.” In this scenario, Citizendium acts as a content broker, selecting and paying an independent author. “Patrons will specify the content, and will be recognised for it as the patron, but they cannot choose the person who writes the content,” Sanger says.

Of the phenomenal growth of Wikipedia, Sanger says: “It is simply a matter of convenience. Most of the information on Wikipedia is locatable on the web, but Wikipedia brings it all together in one place.”  And that is also why Sanger believes that Wikipedia will not be replaced by Citizendium. “Wikipedia has a giant support network. It’s hard to imagine that Citizendium could ever damage it....

Tamina Vahidy, A New Digital Library, Line 56, December 21, 2006.  Excerpt:

The latest book digitization effort is The Open-Access Text Archive (OATA) run by the Internet Archive. OATA integrates with Project Gutenberg so, for those who are used to going to Gutenberg.org for their plain text or Plucker e-content, you can go to OATA instead.

The OATA has a number of advantages over the existing digital book archives we've visited. For one, it has a box marked "batting average" that ranks items by the percentage of people who downloaded them after visiting details pages. This is a refreshing complement to a mere popularity box, which OATA also has. OATA says that keeping a batting average "avoids the 'rich-get-richer' behavior of ranking by the number of downloads."

So far, the most downloaded items from OATA have been, in order, The New Hacker's Dictionary, Ethics of Sex Acts, and Pictures of ARPANET. The items with the highest batting averages are all advanced science texts....

PS:  The article brings welcome new exposure to OATA, but OATA is not "the latest book digitization effort".  It was launched in December 2004.

Nicholas Zamiska, Nature Cancels Public Reviews Of Scientific Papers, Wall Street Journal, December 21, 2006.  (Thanks to TechDirt and Glyn Moody, who both have interesting comments.)  Excerpt:

The journal Nature is abandoning an experiment aimed at bringing Wikipedia-like group editing into the world of scientific publishing.

For several months beginning this past summer, Nature has invited scientists whose articles were shortlisted for publication in the journal to first post their work online for public review....The scientific magazine's move was intended in part to see if a more-open review process could expose low-quality or fraudulent papers that critics of the current system say too often slip into print.

But Nature, which is published by a unit of Macmillan Publishers Ltd., said in an editorial in Thursday's issue that it was ending the experiment due to lack of participation. The journal found that in the competitive world of scientific publishing, the vast majority of authors were unwilling to post their papers and few scientists were willing to criticize their peers' work publicly by posting comments on Nature's Web site....

Meanwhile, another experiment with collaborative editing got under way this week. A new online scientific journal called PloS ONE invites readers to post comments or questions about articles once they are published....

Comments.

1. First my standard disclaimer:  open access is compatible with every form of peer review and does not intrinsically favor or resist any of them.
2. It's a mistake to compare open review to Wikipedia.  Open review invites all comers to offer assessments or judgments, while Wikipedia invites all comers to revise the primary text itself.  Moreover, most systems of open review only post judgments with attribution, while Wikipedia contributions are anonymous.  Finally, of course, most systems of open review --including Nature, PLoS ONE and early proponents of the model like Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics-- combine internal expert review with open external comment. 
3. Reader comments at Techdirt suggest that the Nature experiment was not widely known, even by Nature readers.  (I blogged it on September 18, 2006.)  In addition, since individual reader assessments may be partial, addressing only a point of intersection with their own research, their value grows over time as the mosaic fills in.  Hence authors and referees may be more willing to take part in a permanent open-review forum than in an experiment that could disappear at any moment.  (The Nature experiment was only scheduled to last three months.)  And it's certainly possible that hopeful Nature authors would rather have the premium whuffie of Nature's standard imprimatur than the unknown value of the new alternative.  If true, then PLoS ONE and Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics should give us a better test of open review than Nature did.

Update. See Nature's own account of the experiment. This article is OA, but Nature's editorial on the experiment is not.

Update. The most detailed account I've seen of the experiment, outside Nature itself, is Christen Brownlee, Peer Review Under the Microscope, Science News, December 16, 2006. Unfortunately, it's only accessible to subscribers.

The presentations from the meeting, Open Educational Resources: Institutional Challenges (Barcelona, November 22-24, 2006), are now online.

So are the presentations and videos from Univers Lliure (Barcelona, November 29, 2006), on free and open projects at Catalonian universities.

Thanks for both tips to Ignasi Labastida i Juan.

PLoS ONE officially launched yesterday, at least in beta.  See the launch photos on Flickr and read the PLoS press release:

Until now, online scientific journals have been little more than electronic versions of the printed copy. Today, that all changes with the launch of PLoS ONE, which publishes primary research from all areas of science and employs both pre- and post-publication peer review to maximize the impact of every report it publishes. PLoS ONE is published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the open access publisher whose goal is to make the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource.

PLoS has taken a close look at the way scientific and medical publishing works now, and has asked how the Internet can be used to make it work better. As a result, virtually everything about PLoS ONE is new: the peer-review strategy, the production workflow, the author experience, the user interface, and the software that provides the publishing platform.

Harold Varmus, Co-Founder and Chair of the Board of PLoS and President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, remarks, "For those of us who have been engaged with PLoS from its conception, the launch of PLoS ONE is tremendously exciting --this is the moment when we seize the full potential of the Internet to make communication of research findings an interactive and fully accessible process that gives greater value to what we do as scientists." ...

Although PLoS ONE opened its doors to manuscript submissions only in August, it already receives in excess of 100 submissions each month and launches with the publication of 100 peer-reviewed research articles. The volume of articles is unprecedented for a journal launch, and is an indication of the strong support within the research community for the PLoS ONE approach....

In almost all other journals, publication of a research paper is a full stop. The next significant step forward will be the publication of another paper following on from the previous work. But in PLoS ONE, as soon as an article is published, a conversation between authors and readers can begin. There might be a question about a method that is described in the article, a link to another useful work or resource that can be added, or an alternative interpretation that can be offered for some of the results. In each case, readers and authors can respond to the addition, and everyone else can benefit from the resulting dialogue. The possibilities are without limit, and the applications of this technology will no doubt hold some surprises.

The beta version of PLoS ONE that is launched today is a work-in-progress. It is presented in beta because PLoS wishes the community to help shape PLoS ONE, and the underlying publishing platform, into its most valuable form. The software is open source, and will form the first part of an innovative and flexible publishing system that will be developed over the next two years and will be available to all groups for storing, disseminating, and sharing literature and data....

PS:  Congratulations to PLoS and bon voyage.

Karen Coyle, Mass Digitization of Books, The Journal of Academic Librarianship, November 2006 (accessible only to subscribers) .  (Thanks to Current Cites.) 

Abstract:  Mass digitization of the bound volumes that we generally call “books” has begun, and, thanks to the interest in Google and all that it does, it is getting widespread media attention. The Open Content Alliance (OCA), a library initiative formed after Google announced its library book digitization project, has brought library digitization projects into the public eye, even though libraries were experimenting with digitization for at least a decade. What is different today from some earlier digitization of books is not just the scale of these new initiatives, but the quality of “mass.”

Update. If you're like me and don't have access to the full text, Klaus Graf has blogged an excerpt. Here's an excerpt from his excerpt:

Google has clearly stated that their book project is solely aimed at providing a searchable index to the books on library shelves. They are quite careful not to promise an online reading experience, which would increase the quality control effort of their project and possibly make rapid digitization of the libraries impossible. Library leaders are enticed by the speed of mass digitization, but seem unable to give up their desire to provide online access to the content of the books themselves. If mass digitization is the best way to bring all of the world's knowledge together in a single format, we are going to have to make some reconciliation between the economy of “mass” and the satisfaction of the needs of library users.

University College London has posted podcasts and slides for the lectures in its series, C21st Curation: access and service delivery.  (Thanks to Richard Akerman.) 

Most are OA-related but see especially Astrid Wissenburg's lecture, Scholarly communications and the role of researcher funders, from April 26, 2006.  Wissenburg is the Director of Communications at the UK's Economic & Social Research Council, which adopted an OA policy about two months after this lecture.  Unfortunately her lecture is one of the only ones in the series to have slides only and no podcast.

The University of North Texas maintains CyberCemetery, an OA archive of digital documents from defunct US government agencies and programs.  From an article about it in Pegasus News: 

Don't bother asking UNT librarians to remove sensitive but not classified information on the CyberCemetery. They'll refuse. "It's for the people of this country," said [Cathy N. Hartman, assistant dean of digital and information technologies at UNT Libraries] of the CyberCemetery's free and open access. "It belongs to the people."

Daniel Griffin, Workshop pieces together European Library digitisation project, Information World Review, December 19, 2006.  Excerpt:

In an initiative launched through the European Digital Library Project (EDLProject), representatives from the European Community’s (EC) various eContentPlus funded programmes which are designed to create easier and improved access to digital collections, have gathered for a workshop held at the Austrian National Library.

The workshop was intended to begin the process of building the European digital library. Remarking on the initiative, Hans Petschar, the director of the Austrian National Library’s picture archive said “It created an atmosphere of enormous willingness to work together with the European Library to achieve a European digital library.” ...

Content...from book, audio, video, photography, rare texts and archived documents from across the EC will need to adhere to certain common criteria including metadata standards, which will mean that users such as researchers can search by theme, across a variety of formats and all under one search inquiry....

It is estimated the European digital library will be built over a three to four year period and its next move is to consider keeping the project sustainable with an organised business model. A second workshop is due to be held once more at the Austrian National Library at the end of January to consider the framework and timelines for the next phase.

Update. Also see the EDLProject's own press release on the meeting.

The Sloan Foundation has given the Internet Archive a $1 million grant to support digitizing projects for the Open Content Alliance.  See today's story by the Associated Press:

...The latest tensions [in the Google Library Program] revolve around Google's insistence on chaining the digital content to its Internet-leading search engine and the nine major libraries that have aligned themselves with the Mountain View-based company.

A splinter group called the Open Content Alliance favors a less restrictive approach to prevent mankind's accumulated knowledge from being controlled by a commercial entity, even if it's a company like Google that has embraced "Don't Be Evil" as its creed.

"You are talking about the fruits of our civilization and culture. You want to keep it open and certainly don't want any company to enclose it," said Doron Weber, program director of public understanding of science and technology for the Alfred P. S