Open Access News

Commission outlines measures to ensure access to scientific information, CORDIS News, February 17, 2007.  Excerpt:

The European Commission has published a communication outlining the actions it intends to undertake at European level to help increase and improve access to and dissemination of scientific information.

The intention of the document, the Commission says, is not to mandate open access publishing and digital preservation, but to promote best practices and initiate a policy debate on these matters....

[T]he Commission's paper...makes the case that speeding up the accessibility and dissemination of research results would help accelerate innovation and increase Europe's competitive edge. The paper also argues that the system would help avoid the duplication of research efforts....

Publishers on the other hand are concerned that self-archiving in open repositories may undermine peer review and jeopardise their income....

Although European research budgets have increased, only 1% is devoted to dissemination.

The Commission document aims to address this situation, starting at European level. It says that the Commission will take measures to promote better access to the publications resulting from research funded under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). For example, 'project costs related to publishing, including open access publishing, will be eligible for a Community financial contribution,' reads the communication.

Also envisaged is the issuing, within specific programmes such as those programmes managed by the European Research Council (ERC), of specific guidelines on the publication of articles in open repositories after an embargo period. This would be done on a sectoral basis, taking into account the specificity of the different scholarly and scientific disciplines.

'This is the beginning of the process,' said Horst Forster, director of digital content at the European Commission's Directorate General for Information Society and Media....'We [the Commission] will not have a mandate on open access,' he told CORDIS News. Instead the aim is to encourage experiments with new publishing business models that may improve access to and dissemination of scientific information, and to promote best practices, he said....

Ji-Hong Park, Exploring the Willingness of Scholars to Accept Open Access: A Grounded Theory Approach, Journal of Scholarly Publishing, January 2007.  Only a fraction of the abstract is free online, at least so far.  (Thanks to William Walsh, who has paid access and blogged the full abstract along with an additional excerpt.)

Abstract:   This article aims to explore what factors increase or decrease scholars' willingness to publish and use articles in open-access journals and discusses how these factors are related to one another. Research-oriented publications on the topic of open-access journals have been few, and there is widespread concern about whether scholars will adopt this new form of scholarly communication. The growing number of open-access journals leads scholars to encounter decision-making situations in which they must choose one journal among multiple alternatives, including open access and non–open access. We conducted open-ended and semi-structured in-depth interviews with eight faculty members and six doctoral students at Syracuse University. Based on the interview transcripts, willingness factors and their relationships were identified and refined using the iterative steps of grounded theory approach proposed by Strauss and Corbin in the 1998 edition of their Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. The findings show seven factors (perceived journal reputation, perceived topical relevance, perceived availability, perceived career benefit, perceived cost, perceived content quality, and perceived ease of use) and eight relationships. There were six positive and two negative relationships. The factors and relationships were then compared to the relevant literature to increase internal validity and generalizability of the study. Both theoretical and practical implications of the research are discussed. Theoretically, this study broadens the scope of relevance criteria studies, first identifies the relationship between two important scholarly communication activities, conceptually contributes to the concept of open access, and applies literature comparison methodology in a pure qualitative study to increase internal validity and generalizability. Practically, the findings of this study may be helpful for promoting open-access publishing by encouraging facilitators and discouraging hinderers. The research may also provide an ongoing working framework for evaluating open-access journal systems.

PS:  As Walsh points out in his blog comment, the authors focus on OA journals, not OA as such.  From the additional excerpt that Walsh posts, it appears that they focus on fee-based OA journals, not on OA journals as such.

Stevan Harnad, Impressions from Brussels EC Meeting, Open Access Archivangelism, February 17, 2007.  Excerpt;

My impressions of the Brussels EC Meeting:

1. The petition demonstrating the very broad-based support for the proposed EC OA Self-Archiving mandate was presented to the EU Commissioner for Science and Research, Janez Potocnik. 
2. The conference itself (which was organized before the petition) then proceeded with its programme, heavily weighted toward publishing and publishers' concerns rather than the access and impact concerns of the research community.
3. Hence, predictably, most of the time and energy was spent on publishing finances rather than on research access and impact.
4. Nevertheless, the overall impression (from the minority research and researcher representation at the meeting) was that the relentless focus on publishing finances was not their primary concern, Open Access was.
5. The (rather bland) statement released at the beginning of the meeting had also been drafted before the meeting and the petition (and apparently with some involvement of the publishers, as there was evidence that they had seen it in advance).
6. But my impression was that the EU Commissioners, Directors-General and Directors (or rather those of their delegates who were in attendance) were favorable to OA, and that concrete developments can be expected as a result of the conference and the petition.

Researcher and industrial support for OA and OA Self-Archiving Mandates will now be very vigorously consolidated.

PS I think a bit of a storm is now brewing in the physics community over the CERN initiative to promote an immediate transition to Gold OA publishing in particle physics. The concern is that this will divert scarce funds from research. I think the concern is warranted....

I'm leaving town in a few minutes, and will be on the road for five days with limited opportunities for blogging and email.  I'll be further behind than usual and will start to catch up on February 22. 

I would have been on the road for a separate trip the past three days, but I was grounded by the New England blizzard.  I'm sorry I had to cancel my talk at Bowdoin College but glad I was able to blog the first wave of news about the Brussels conference. 

The University of California is considering a Draft Open Access Policy  dated January 29, 2007 (but based on a proposal from May 30, 2006).  Here's the heart of it:

This open access policy seeks to increase authors’ influence in scholarly publishing by establishing a collective practice of retaining a right to open access dissemination of certain scholarly works. University of California faculty shall routinely grant to The Regents of the University of California a license to place in a non-commercial open-access online repository the faculty member’s scholarly work published in a scholarly journal or conference proceedings. In the event a faculty member is required to assign all or a part of his or her copyright rights in such scholarly work to a publisher as part of a publication agreement, the faculty member shall retain in the publication agreement the right to grant the foregoing license to the Regents. Faculty may opt out of this policy for any specific work or invoke a specified delay before such work appears in an open-access repository in accordance with the opt-out mechanism set forth below....

The University of California eScholarship Repository is an open access repository in which UC faculty-authored materials can be placed to meet the goals of the policy. Placement of UC faculty-authored material in other trusted, publicly-accessible repositories, such as the National Library of Medicine’s PubMedCentral, or the physics arXiv will also meet the goals of the policy. Trusted, publicly accessible repositories are those which provide reliable, long-term access to managed digital resources; are internet-accessible at no fee for the reader; have explicit preservation and governance policies; and use data formats and technology management that conform to industry standards.

The draft policy also includes a draft author's addendum, to help authors retain the rights they need to authorize OA.

The policy was drafted by a working group convened by Wyatt R. Hume, the UC's Provost and Executive Vice President, who has asked (February 7, 2007) the UC campuses to review it by May 20, 2007.

Also see the policy home page and FAQ.

Comment. This is a strong policy for the largest university system in the US, and well along the process toward adoption.  It could trigger a wave of similar policies across the country.  It doesn't directly require faculty to deposit their work in an OA repository, but it does require them to give the university permission to disseminate an OA copy.  (Like other university mandates, this one has exceptions and faculty may opt out for specific works.)  One gets the impression that the university will actually provide OA whenever it has permission, but that is unstated.  If we assume it, then this "permission mandate" becomes an OA mandate.  Definitely one to watch.

Marilyn Christianson, Ecology Articles in Google Scholar: Levels of Access to Articles in Core Journals, Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, Winter 2007.

Abstract:   Eight-hundred forty articles from core ecology journals were searched in Google Scholar (GS) to determine level and completeness of indexing and access. Testing occurred both on campus and off, and within each venue searching was divided evenly into basic and advanced modes. Off campus, about nine percent and on campus, about thirty-eight percent of links led to text that could be opened directly, without barriers. Fifty-seven percent of test articles had full citations or better, and over seventy-seven percent had at least some type of completable citation. Older articles were less likely to be represented. Full-text articles were concentrated at author sites and at a small number of provider sites. The advanced search found somewhat more full text than did the basic search. Highly cited articles were more likely to be included in Google Scholar.

BioMed Central has started a blog, although it's still in a pre-launch phase. 

Today, for example, BMC Publisher Matt Cockerill posted a note about the Brussels Conference, and included a link to his own presentation, Open Access publishing works. 

The new blog also alerts us to two other new BMC blogs, one at Chemistry Central and one at PhysMath Central.

PS:  This is a smart move for an OA publisher.  Welcome to the blogosphere!

I couldn't blog this earlier because the document wouldn't load for me.  But it loaded for Richard Poynder, who sent me a copy.  Many thanks, Richard.

On Scientific Information In The Digital Age: Access, Dissemination And Preservation, a Communication from the Commission of the European Communities to the European Parliament, the Council and the European Economic And Social Committee, Brussels, February 15, 2006.  Excerpt:

...The Community policy on research looks to maximise the socio-economic benefits of research and development for the public good. The present Communication represents an initial step within a wider policy process addressing how the scientific publication system functions and what impact it has on research excellence....

This Communication's objective is to signal the importance of and launch a policy process on (a) access to and dissemination of scientific information2, and (b) strategies for the preservation of scientific information across the Union. To this end, it announces a series of measures at European level and points to the need for a continuing policy debate....

5.1. Commission position

Initiatives leading to wider access to and dissemination of scientific information are necessary, especially with regard to journal articles and research data produced on the basis of public funding. With respect to journal articles, the Commission is observing and considering experiments with open access publishing.

Fully publicly funded research data should in principle be accessible to all, in line with the 2004 OECD Ministerial Declaration on Access to Research Data from Public Funding....

5.3. Future actions managed by the European Commission

A. Access to Community funded research results

Within FP7, the Commission will take measures to promote better access to the publications resulting from the research it funds. In this context, project costs related to publishing, including open access publishing, will be eligible for a Community financial contribution. The Commission will encourage the research community to make use of this possibility.

The Commission also envisages, within specific programmes (e.g. the programmes managed by the European Research Council), to issue specific guidelines on the publication of articles in open repositories after an embargo period. This would be done on a sectorial basis, taking into account the specificity of the different scholarly and scientific disciplines.

B. Co-funding of research infrastructures (in particular repositories) and projects

Within FP7 the Commission will intensify its activities regarding infrastructures relevant for access to scientific information, in particular by linking digital repositories at the European level. An amount of approximately €50 million will be made available to this end for the period 2007-2008 (some 20 million of which have been allocated for 2007).

In addition, an indicative amount of €25 million will be provided during this period (some 15 million of which during 2007) for research on digital preservation (in particular a network of Centres of competence for digital preservation) and on collaborative tools for using the content.

Within the eContentplus programme (2005-2008), €10 million has been earmarked to improve the accessibility and usability of scientific content, in particular addressing issues of interoperability and multilingual access....

6. Conclusion

Access to, dissemination of, and preservation of scientific information are major challenges of the digital age. Success in each of these areas is of key importance for European information society and research policies. Different stakeholders in these fields have differing views on how to move towards improvements for access, dissemination and preservation.

Within this transition process from a print world to a digital world, the Commission will contribute to the debate among stakeholders and policy makers by encouraging experiments with new models that may improve access to and dissemination of scientific information....

Comments.

1. I'm still digesting this and will have more to say in the March issue of SOAN.  But here's a first take, limiting myself to the hard-core OA issues.  (For example, I'm not commenting on the EC's plans for digital preservation, although I applaud them.)
2. The Communication is weakest on the most important OA issue and strongest on the secondary issues.  The most important issue is recommendation A1 from last year's EC Report:  the proposed EU-wide OA mandate for publicly-funded research.  The Communication retreats from this position and does not say why.  Instead it says that EC will "issue...guidelines" on OA archiving of publicly-funded research.  It doesn't say whether the guidelines will require or merely encourage OA.  Moreover, the guidelines will vary by discipline and by funding program, so that even if the rules in some fields and programs are strong, others will be weak.
3. On other, less essential policy issues, the Communication is strong.  For example, the EC will help pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals, a position I have supported for funding agencies that can afford it.  This policy provides unembargoed OA, supports a new generation of peer-review providers, and lessens --or ought to lessen-- the opposition of publishers.  (Unfortunately, the EC still uses the misleading term "author pays" for OA journals and still seems to believe that all OA journals charge author-side fees when in fact most of them do not.)
4. The EC will also support a strong policy of OA for data, following the OECD Declaration on open data from January 2004, which the EU signed.  And it will spend a lot of money on OA infrastructure.  All of this is most welcome.
5. The Communication is not the final EC policy and the guidelines for OA archiving are still under development.  There's still time for friends of OA to try to influence their direction, just as there's still time for an equal and opposite reaction from publishers who want to bury the possibility of an OA mandate.

Mathias Schindler, VTO, the German Google Book Search Killer?  Google Blogoscoped, February 13, 2007.  (Thanks to Klaus Graf.)  Excerpt:

...In Summer of 2005, the “Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels” (German publishers’ and book shops’ association) announced a project called “Volltextsuche Online” (VTO, “full text search online”) to counter the Google Book Search project. They also supported one lawsuit by the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft (WBG) against Google [later withdrawn]....

The Börsenverein announced VTO to start in spring 2006. The start of VTO was later postponed to the book fair in fall 2006. A Powerpoint presentation [PPT] from last week says that an early system for uploading data will go online this week....

The original proposal of decentralized storage within the publishers servers turned out to be not practical, the idea was scrapped. The draft contract between VTO and the publishers reserves the right to VTO to store the data anywhere they like....

Book publishers have to pay to upload their data to VTO....However, the annual fee is suspended until March 31: Anyone who participates in VTO before that day can get one year free of charge.

Unlike Google Book Search, there is no way to just send the physical book to VTO, the publisher has to send in a prepared PDF file and several meta files. The specification of the meta files is currently in version 0.9 [PDF], it basically lacks any specific meta file information....

VTO claims that there is no way of saving or printing the pages of the book. When I spoke with VTO representatives, they acknowledged that this sentence is not meant literally but that they only prevent users (lobotomized users?) from saving the files by disabling the right mouse button or something....

As a very lame “proof of concept,” I was able to download all the 303 pages of the bestselling book “Measuring the World” by Daniel Kehlmann....No “hacking” was involved and this task can be pretty easy parallelized. Or scripted, for that matter....

I am currently unable to see VTO as a competitor to Google Book Search....

Charles W. Bailey, Jr., The Brussels Declaration: You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows, DigitalKoans, February 15, 2007.  Excerpt:

The recent "Brussels Declaration on STM Publishing" by major scholarly publishers, such as Elsevier and Wiley, can be boiled down to: the scholarly publishing system ain’t broke, so don’t try to fix it. It provides an interesting contrast to the 2004 "Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science" by not-for-profit publishers, which outlined a variety of strategies for making content freely available.

Sadly, it suggests that the "Brussels Declaration" publishers fail to fully understand that the decades-old serials crisis has deeply alienated several generations of librarians, who are their primary customers. Publishers count on libraries being captive customers because scholarly publishing is monopolistic in nature (e.g., one journal article does not substitute for another article) and, consequently, demand is relatively inelastic, regardless of price. However, it is a rare business that thrives by alienating its customers....

As has often been noted, the open access movement is not anti-publisher, but it is publisher-neutral, meaning that, as long as certain critical functions (such as peer review) are adequately performed, it does not matter how [OA] scholarly works are published....

The clock is ticking. The more intransigent publishers are, the stronger the incentive for those who want change to improve open source publishing tools, to fund low-cost or open access publishing alternatives, to seek remedies from governments and other organizations that fund research, and to develop new modes of scholarly publishing.

Dialog, openness to new funding strategies and publishing practices, compromise, and imagination may serve publishers better in the long run than denial, rigidity, and attack. A more flexible outlook may reveal opportunities, not just dangers, in a scholarly publishing system in flux.

Gavin Baker, Let the Light Shine In, Washington Post, February 16, 2007.  A letter to the editor.  Baker is the Open Access Director at FreeCulture.org.

The Feb. 9 news story "Research-Result Battle Now Pits PR 'Pit Bull' Against Barbie Blenders" was a good example of how easy it is to obscure an important issue. By playing up colorful but irrelevant imagery, the story missed the point that students have a critical stake in expanding access to taxpayer-funded research.

Because our futures will be shaped by science, we believe it is wrong to keep publicly funded, peer-reviewed research results locked in expensive journals. The Internet is the ideal way to share scientific advances quickly, broadly and economically. The National Day of Action for Open Access yesterday was designed to build awareness of this opportunity at colleges across the country.

The article said that I declined to reveal details of Freeculture.org's plans for the National Day of Action. In fact, I said that we would have speakers, discussion panels and tables providing information about the issue to engage students in this important public debate. We think that when they are presented with the evidence, students will agree that the status quo isn't working.

We use creative means to encourage our fellow students to think about current affairs. However, political theater is not needed to make a point this time. The merits of public access to federally funded research speak for themselves.

PS:  Exactly.  For background, see my blog post on the original article and how it catered to the AAP's new campaign of media messaging.

Mike Adams, The health care reform legislation that Congress should pass, but won't, NewsTarget, February 16, 2007.  Adams makes 13 suggestions; here's #4:

Require open source publication of all clinical trials, even the negative results

Well here's an idea: let's end the secrecy of clinical trials and let the public -- and the medical industry -- see what really happens when thousands of people are dosed up on synthetic chemicals. The truth about clinical trials for prescription drugs is that most trials are a sham. The numbers and conclusions are almost universally fraudulent. They're designed to get the drug approved by the FDA for marketing, not to actually determine any level of safety of efficacy for the public.

You see, virtually no drugs are tested in combination with other drugs. Nor are drugs tested for sufficient time to determine their long-term risks. And even the trials that are completed are cherry-picked by their sponsors to drum up the most favorable results possible. This, the FDA claims, is the "gold standard" of drug safety. Which is why, of course, over 100,000 Americans were killed by prescription drugs last year alone.

To help solve this little problem, I say we make all clinical trials open source. Free the data. Let the public and the medical community read for themselves what the results are... for the "good" studies and the bad ones, too. Actually, one organization is already making great strides towards open source published studies. Check out the Public Library of Science journals, which, as far as I can tell, are the only honest medical journals in the industry.

PS:  See PLoS Clinical Trials.

Gigi Sohn, The Information Commons and the Future of Innovation, Scholarship, and Creativity, a multimedia PPT presentation for Educause, February 14, 2007.

Unfortunately I couldn't see it because Educause funnels it through HorizonWimba's Live Classrooom software instead of just putting open-format files online.  I tried to jump through the Live-Classroom hoops but I couldn't turn off all the pop-up blockers installed on my computer.  I especially regret this because Gigi is a friend and colleague:  she's the co-founder and President of Public Knowledge, where I'm the OA Project Director.

Update. Here are Gigi's PPT slides without the audio or video (thanks to William Walsh).

Janez Potočnik, 'Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area' – Access, Dissemination and Preservation in the Digital Age, the opening address at the Brussels conference of the same title (February 15-16, 2007).  Potočnik is the European Commissioner for Science and Research.  Excerpt:

...Let me start by addressing one question: why are we here? It’s a simple question and it has a simple answer: it is because the world has changed. And part of this change has been in the norms, the expectations and the demands of research and researchers.

It is important that we make progress in this area. Why? Because the EU's future depends on a knowledge society. The debate about how that knowledge is disseminated is fundamental. It takes in a lot of important issues – sales, copyright, jobs, access and funding. But ultimately, it's about the conditions for spreading knowledge.

Nearly all new research builds on previous work. So the access to scientific results, how rapidly this access is given and the cost of access all impact on research excellence and innovation....

But today's conference is not about previous adaptations [to the digital age], but future ones....

The European Commission has been closely following the debate on experiments with open access to scientific information. We have also been contributing to the debate through the study on the scientific publishing market that we commissioned last year.

I am aware that – sometimes controversial – discussions on open access are taking place between scientific publishers and the scientific community.

This was clear from the replies we received to our online consultation last year on the study. The consultation showed that while the respondents from the scientific community warmly received the report and its recommendations, the publishing industry was mostly critical of its methodology and conclusions....

I recognise the investment that the publishing industry has made over the years. It offers new tools, services and technologies in line with the digital revolution.  This has been highlighted in the Declaration on STM publishing adopted by the publishing community two days ago.

At the same time, the digital revolution has led the European scientific community to suggest that an alternative publishing model, with better access to research publications, could further stimulate research excellence and innovation.

In the EU, there have been two major recent statements on the issue.

In December 2006 EURAB - the European Research Advisory Board - composed of 50% research community and 50% industry representatives - recommended that the Commission (and I quote) “consider mandating all researchers funded under [the seventh Framework Programme] to lodge their publications resulting from EC-funded research in an open access repository as soon as possible after publication, to be made accessible within 6 months at the latest".

The second statement was by the Scientific Council of the European Research Council, Europe's new funding body for frontier research. It stated its “firm intention [...] to issue specific guidelines for the mandatory deposit in open access repositories of research results [...] obtained thanks to ERC grants”....

Just this morning, a research community delegation presented me with a petition of over 19.000 signatories from around the world calling on the European Commission to guarantee public access to publicly-funded research results shortly after publication.

The Commission has a role to play in this evolution and we have already made a first move. Yesterday, the Commission adopted a Communication on access to scientific information in the digital age. My colleague, Viviane Reding, will be discussing this more in detail later in the conference.

The Communication announces a series of measures on how the Commission will deal with open access in FP7 funded projects - and how it will use its funding programmes to improve the access to and the preservation of scientific information. This will include, for example, promoting the use of project costs for open access publishing under FP7.

I have outlined several positions. Allow me to give an idea of the factors influencing my position.

Over the next 7 years, the EU will invest over 54 billion euros in research and development. I want every euro of this funding to contribute in some way to developing a true European Research Area and creating a strong European knowledge society. That is my job. The European Commission, and, indeed, the European citizen, must get a good return on its investment.

So far, funding bodies and the public money more generally have tended to contribute multiple times to the research process.

They fund the research to be performed through research grants.

They also support peer review, in the sense that they usually pay reviewers’ salaries.

Finally, they often acquire the final scientific journal publications for research organisations.

From a research funding body's viewpoint, there is room to improve the impact of research on society and the development of knowledge....

The two main questions facing us today are to see:

• First, how to offer the research community rapid and wide dissemination of results, facilitated by new information and communication technologies.
• Second, how to combine this with fair remuneration for the scientific publishers who invest in tools and mechanisms to organise the information flows and the peer review system....

The European Commission has finally put the documents from the Brussels meeting online, or at least it has tried.  It lists the URLs on a February 15 press release but forgot to mention which URL belongs to which document.  Normally you could click through to find this useful information, but two of the URLs fail, for different reasons.  I confirmed the URLs and learned their intended targets from other EC pages, particularly the i2010 Digital Library Initiative and the the Science and Society publication page. 

• Communication on access to scientific information in the digital age.  I've linked to the English version but the document is also available in French and German.  NB:  I can load the French and German versions, but my copy of Adobe 8 says that the English version is damaged and could not be repaired.  (Hello, EC?)
• Staff Working Paper to accompany the Communication.  NB:  This link brings up an error message, The address you used is incorrect or obsolete.  (Hello, EC?)
• Janez Potočnik's opening address at the Brussels conference, February 15, 2007.  Potočnik is the European Commissioner for Science and Research.
• FAQ

I'll blog excerpts from the Communication and Staff Working Paper as soon as I can load them.  But I didn't want to wait for that before laying out the titles and links.

Last year, to facilitate discussion of the OA recommendations in the EC report, the EC launched a Community on Scientific Publications on SINAPSE, its discussion forum for scientific input on policy proposals. It apparently hopes that the discussion of its new position will continue there.

Excerpt from the press release:

In terms of concrete measures, the Commission has already identified the following:

• To improve current and future access to scientific information, the EU will support experiments with open access in its recently-launched research programme (by, for example, refunding the project costs of open access publishing).
• During 2007-2008 the Commission has also set aside some €50 million to support and help coordinate infrastructures for storing scientific data across Europe and €25 million for research on digital preservation, supporting in particular centres of competence in digital preservation. The eContentplus programme will devote €10 million to improving interoperability of and multilingual access to collections of scientific material (see IP/05/98).
• A major European conference on Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area, organised by the Commission will be held in Brussels on 15-16 February with the participation of the Commissioner for science and research Janez Poto?nik and the Commissioner for Information Society and Media Viviane Reding.

Excerpt from the FAQ:

What will the Commission do?

With the Communication, the Commission is launching a policy process involving stakeholders and Member States. At the same time is announcing a series of measures at European level to improve the accessibility and preservation of scientific information. The measures are the following:

a) improve access to Community-funded research results, by funding the costs of open access publishing and by providing guidelines on publishing articles in open repositories after an embargo period within specific research programmes.

b) co-funding of research infrastructures (in particular repositories) and projects relevant for access and preservation of scientific information. In total some €85 million have been earmarked to this during 2007-2008.

c) further fact-finding as input for the policy debate.

d) strengthening the policy coordination of Member State actions and the policy debate with stakeholders.

Update. I've finally seen (and blogged) the EC Communication on OA. Thanks to all of you who tried to help me around my access problem.

Update. I've also blogged an excerpt from Janez Potočnik's opening address at the Brussels meeting.

Update. Here's a new and better URL for the Staff Working Paper.

Open access to scientific publishing draws controversy, EurActiv, February 16, 2007.  Excerpt:

Scientific publishers fear that the Commission's plans to support online open access to scientific information will undermine their businesses.

In Spring 2006, a public consultation was held on a study concerning the scientific publishing market. The report gave an economic analysis of European scientific publication markets and made a series of policy recommendations. 

The report and its recommendations were warmly welcomed by the scientific community, but the publishing industry was mostly critical of its methodology and conclusions....

The Commission adopted, on 14 February a Communication on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation....

The Communication...announces a series of measures planned to be taken at EU level, namely to support new ways of promoting better access to scientific information online and to preserve research results digitally for future generations. It also explains how the Commission is set to deal with open access in the projects it will fund under its seventh framework programme for research (FP7). 

"I am aware that (sometimes controversial) discussions on open access are taking place between scientific publishers and the scientific community," said Research Commissioner Janez Poto?nik. However, the Commission believes that increased access to scientific information will lead to more research activities and increased publishing activity and thus strengthen the European Research Area (ERA). 

The main challenge, according to the Commission, is to find a win-win situation for both scientists and scientific publishers. This means giving the research community rapid and wide dissemination of results, facilitated by new information and communication technologies and for scientific publishers to have fair remuneration for investing in tools and mechanisms to organise the information flows and the peer- review system....

PS:  This article gets a lot wrong about the EC report recommendations (as if they required grantees to publish in OA journals or as if they required non-OA journals to convert to OA) and the history of OA (as if it all started with the Berlin Declaration).  I've limited my excerpt to what's new from the Brussels meeting, and I hope it's more trustworthy on those developments than it is on previous developments.

Anna Wojciechowska, Analysis of the use of open archives in the fields of mathematics and computer science, OCLC Systems and Services, 23, 1 (2007) pp. 54-69 (accessible only to subscribers).  Abstract:    

Purpose – The objective of this paper is to study the use of institutional open archives in France, and more specifically “Hyper Article en Ligne” (Hal).

Design/methodology/approach – This study analyses self-archiving of articles by those of the French researchers in mathematics and computer science who work in relation with the French National Network of Mathematics Libraries (RNBM). The survey was performed by sending a questionnaire to the researchers via libraries of the RNBM.

Findings – The paper provides information about the knowledge of open archives, about information search, experience in self-archiving and copyright awareness of French researchers in mathematics and computer science.

Originality/value – This paper tries to identify the causes of the difficult development of open archives in France.

Ann G. Green and Myron P. Gutmann, Building partnerships among social science researchers, institution-based repositories and domain specific data archives, OCLC Systems and Services, 23, 1 (2007) pp. 35-53 (accessible only to subscribers).  Abstract:

Purpose – In developing and debating digital repositories, the digital library world has devoted more attention to their missions and roles in supporting access to and stewardship of academic research output than to discussing discipline, or domain, specific digital repositories. This is especially interesting, given that in social science these domain-specific repositories have been in existence for many decades. The goal of this paper is to juxtapose these two kinds of repositories and to suggest ways that they can help build partnerships between themselves and with the research community.

Design/methodology/approach – The approach taken in the paper is based on the fundamental idea that all the parties involved share important goals, and that by working together these goals can be advanced successfully.

Findings – The key message is that by visualizing the role of repositories explicitly in the life cycle of the social science research enterprise, the ways that the partnerships work will be clear. These workings can be seen as a sequence of reciprocal information flows between parties to the process, triggers that signal that one party or another has a task to perform, and hand-offs of information from one party to another that take place at crucial moments. This approach envisions both cooperation and specialization.

Practical implications – If followed, the recommendations offered in the paper will allow those implementing various kinds of repositories to work together with others in new ways, thus both enhancing the amount of information preserved and its value for the community.

Originality/value – This is one of the first times that the mutual possibilities of institutional and domain-specific repositories have been brought together.

Self-Evident? In a Shot at Public Access Advocates, Publishers Release Brussels Declaration, Library Journal Academic Newswire, February 15, 2007.  Excerpt:

Not long after a report that disclosed a publishers' meeting with a public relations executive to form a response to calls for public access to government-funded research comes the Brussels Declaration, a statement sponsored the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM). And, perhaps not surprisingly, the document reads a lot like the start of a public relations campaign. In ten bulleted points, STM outlines what it calls "self-evident" values, ranging from the sensible ("one size fits all solutions will not work"), to the obvious ("publishing in all media has associated costs"), to the outright contentious ("open deposit of accepted manuscripts risks destabilizing subscription revenues and undermining peer review").

The declaration, signed by 35 major publishers and eight trade associations, is the latest development in a once-again simmering battle between public access advocates (including libraries) and publishers. After the report of the publishers' meetings, public access advocates seized on the issue last week by releasing a statement of support from one of its allies, the American Society for Cell Biology, which called for free public access to government-funded research....

Notably, the declaration seems to follow advice reportedly given to publishers by PR "pit bull" Eric Dezenhall. For example, it touts the role of publishers in the "irreplaceable" peer-review process, even citing peer-review in assailing public access proposals. "Despite very significant investment and a massive rise in access to scientific information, [the publishing] community continues to be beset by propositions and manifestos on the practice of scholarly publishing," reads an introduction to the Brussels Declaration. "Unfortunately, the measures proposed have largely not been investigated or tested in any evidence-based manner that would pass rigorous peer review." Of course, some of the ten "self-evident" values espoused by publishers in the Berlin Declaration also seem to lack hard evidence, and the declaration even offers some ambiguous statistics, for example suggesting that "even after 12 months, on average electronic articles still have 40-50 percent of their lifetime downloads to come."

EU To Support More Cost-Free Access To Research Results, Wall Street Journal, February 15, 2007.  Only this introductory snippet is free for non-subscribers:

The European Commission Thursday said it plans to support more cost-free access to the results of scientific research, a move that could hurt medical publishers such as Reed Elsevier NV (ENL) and McGraw-Hill Cos. (MHP).

Publicly funded research should be available to a broad audience, according to the commission, the European Union's executive arm. The Brussels body on Thursday and Friday....

EU outlines digital age strategy, The Parliament, February 15, 2007.  Excerpt:

The European commission has unveiled a strategy to promote better access to online scientific information.

Speaking at a major conference in Brussels, EU research commissioner Janez Potocnik outlined how Europe can best capitalise on the “excellent work” of its researchers.

“New ideas are usually built on the results of previous research,” he said. “We must make sure that the flow of scientific information contributes to innovation and research excellence in the European research area,” he said.

On the eve of the event, a 19,000-name petition from the research community was handed to Potocnik calling on the commission to guarantee public access to publicly-funded research results shortly after publication....

Potocnik said the commission had earmarked around €50m to help coordinate infrastructures for storing scientific data across Europe....

To improve current and future access to scientific information, he said the EU will also support experiments with “open access”.

“There is no quick fix,” Potocnik said. “That is why we have to look at how we can find a way forward.”

Paul Meller, EU to push online publication of scientific data, InfoWorld, February 15, 2007.  Excerpt:

In a bid to speed up the dissemination of scientific discoveries, the European Commission said Thursday it plans to shake up the old-fashioned world of scientific publishing by throwing its weight behind a move to make scientific research results freely available on the Internet....

The Commission is hosting a two-day conference starting Thursday with the publishers as well as with advocates of a free, Internet-based model for scientific publishing.

In its statement, the Commission made it clear that it favors freer access to research results. It is planning to spend about €85 million ($111 million) over the next two years improving the digital storage and online accessibility of scientific results.

Digital technologies are reshaping how research information is viewed, analyzed, and eventually published, the Commission said. For example, about 90 percent of all science journals are now available online, often by subscription. But digital technologies are also leading to more "open access" publishing. This provides free and wide access to publications online. Better access to research data also opens the way to new types of uses and services, often through the reusing of past results as the raw material for new experimentation....

"The digital revolution has led the European scientific community to suggest that an alternative publishing model with better access to research publications could further stimulate research excellence and innovation," Commissioner for Research Janez Potocnik told delegates at the conference.

Publishers association STM had argued that it would be wrong for the Commission to favor one business model over another and urged it to back off from the scientific publishing sector.

But the association changed its tune Thursday, after learning how serious the Commission is about taking action.

"I am pleased that the Commission has recognized the complex issues that surround the publication and preservation of scientific information and has seen fit to initiate a dialogue rather than prematurely imposing a policy that could undermine STM publishing, which is such an important industry for Europe," said Michael Mabe, CEO of STM in a statement released Thursday.

The STM welcomes the Commission's action plan "in the area of creating a level playing field for publication business models, recognizing that further research on preservation and economics is essential before adopting any policy positions," the association said in its latest statement.

PS:  The EC statement still isn't available online.  To judge from this story, it's strong enough to justify the lede but squishy enough to justify publisher expressions of gratitude.  More later.

The EU Observer news ticker reported this item (no direct URL) at 13:46 EU Central time this afternoon:

EU may tie science grants to open access

Brussels may in 2008 tie EU research grants worth €7 billion a year to commitments to make the data public down the line, EU officials said on Thursday. The suggestion comes after a 20,400-strong petition complaining that access to EU-funded data is now controlled by a coterie of publishing giants.

PS:  I know that today at the Brussels scientific publishing conference the EC distributed hardcopies of its non-binding communication on an EU-wide OA mandate.  If anyone has the electronic text, I'd be very grateful for a copy.

A small announcement of big news for Canadian OA from the Public Knowledge Project:

The Canadian Foundation of Innovation awarded $5.8 million to the Synergies project over the next 4 years, for the development of scholarly publishing technologies, featuring Erudit and Open Journal Systems.

Worldwide petition on open access delivered to European Commission, a press release from JISC, February 15, 2007.  Excerpt:

More than 20,000 call for public access to publicly funded research

A petition calling on the European Commission to adopt polices to guarantee free public access to research results was delivered today to Janez Potocnik, EU Commissioner for Science and Research. Nobel laureates Peter Agre, Martinus Veltman, and Harold Varmus...are among the more than 20,000 concerned researchers, senior academics, lecturers, librarians, and citizens from across Europe and around the world who have signed the petition.    

Organisations too are lending their support, with the most senior representatives from nearly 750 education, research and cultural organisations from around the world adding their weight to the petition, including research funders (e.g., the European Research Council, German Research Council, Swedish Research Council, UK's Medical Research Council, and the Wellcome Trust), research organizations (e.g., CERN, CNRS, and the Max Planck Society), and national academies (e.g., Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts & Sciences (KNAW), and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences).

The petition calls on the EC to formally endorse the recommendations outlined in the EC-commissioned Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe.  Published in early 2006, the study made a number of important recommendations to help ensure the widest possible readership for scholarly articles. In particular, the first recommendation called for 'Guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results shortly after publication'....

The petition was initiated to demonstrate the overwhelming public support for the EC to accept the recommendations of the EC-Study and implement a policy of public access to publicly-funded European research.

'Open access to the published scientific literature is one of the most desirable goals of our current scientific enterprise. How can we do cutting edge research if we don't know where the cutting edge is?'  Richard J Roberts, Nobel Prize winner for Physiology or Medicine in 1993 and petition signatory.

JISC Executive Secretary Dr Malcolm Read, said: 'Maximising public investment in European research and making more widely available its outputs are key priorities for the European Union as it seeks to enhance the global standing of European research and compete in a global market. JISC is proud to be sponsoring a petition which seeks these vital goals and which has already attracted such widespread support.' ...

The petition is sponsored by JISC, the SURF Foundation (Netherlands), SPARC Europe, DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany), DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek, Denmark).

PS:  The short-term goal of this petition was to generate a large number of signatures for today's presentation.  But the campaign is not over until the EC adopts a strong EU-wide OA policy.  Hence, the petition is still open for signatures.  If you haven't already signed, please  do so and spread the word.  If you have already signed, thank you.  When I just checked, the signature tally was up to 21,143.

The presentations from the BioMed Central Colloquium, Open Access: How Can We Achieve Quality and Quantity? (London, February 8, 2007), are now online.

A reader named BCK has posted a long comment at Archivalia on high-priced journals in physics, the Stuttgart decision a few years ago to cancel all Elsevier titles, and the CERN project to convert all TA journals in particle physics to OA.  Read it in German or in Google's English.

Barry Bergman, Free-science movement gains a foothold at Berkeley, UC Berkeley News, February 14, 2007.  Excerpt:

When the journal Nature reported last month that a group of scientific-publishing goliaths had enlisted a "PR pit bull" to "take on the free-information movement"...the move was widely viewed as a declaration of war....

At Berkeley, though, one scientist at the heart of the so-called open-access movement — which aims to apply that principle to the highly specialized realm of scientific and medical research — was thrilled to hear that big commercial publishers were circling the wagons to defend their for-profit, subscription-based model.

"I think it's fantastic," exults Michael Eisen, an assistant professor of molecular and cell biology and a genetics researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "It's just evidence that open access is working."

Eisen, who received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers at a White House ceremony in 2004, is a co-founder of the San Francisco-based Public Library of Science, a leading advocate for free, online dissemination of scientific research....

With subscriptions for many scientific journals running to thousands of dollars — and some single-article downloads priced at more than $50 apiece — proponents of open access argue that vital medical knowledge, for example, is prohibitively expensive for individuals and families seeking reliable information, as well as for health workers caring for patients in developing countries. And as rising subscription fees force many libraries to constantly scale back their collections, even university-affiliated researchers can find themselves in the dark....

Many scientists, he adds, need not only access to printed text, but the ability to more fully exploit computer technology by manipulating and massaging other researchers' data — as was done, in one prominent example, with the Human Genome Project.

"It's completely ridiculous that I, a publicly funded scientist, am unable to get access to the articles written by my colleagues and to download them onto my computer," says Eisen. "I'm not trying to steal their ideas, I'm not trying to do anything but make that information — which they've spent their lives generating, and the government has spilled billions of dollars into funding — much more robust, much more dynamic, and much more useful...."

[B]ecause so much of the money for scientific publishing derives from the federal Treasury — in the form of direct research grants to scientists and indirect funding to publishers for printing their work — the result, Eisen says, "is a business that for decades has basically been allowed to print checks from the government to themselves with very little restraint." ...

From the sidebar:

For Berkeley's library, 'serials crisis' means shrinking access to information

When the 10 UC libraries joined the Public Library of Science as an institutional member in 2004, Beverlee French, systemwide director for shared digital collections, called the move an effort at "directing some of our scarce dollars away from overpriced journals and toward innovation."

With budgets flat and scholarly-journal prices rising far faster than inflation, however, what's known as the "serials crisis" remains a pressing problem here at Berkeley and at universities and research institutions throughout the nation. Chuck Eckman, associate University Librarian and director of collections at Berkeley, warns that without increases to its budget, the campus library faces a shortfall of roughly $1.4 million in 2008 — with a commensurate reduction in journal, book, and digital-resource acquisitions — and a still-larger deficit in 2009.

"There's normal inflation and excessive inflation," Eckman says, referring to skyrocketing prices for serial journals. According to the Association for Research Libraries, serials costs jumped 226 percent between 1986 and 2000, a period when the Consumer Price Index rose by 57 percent....

Sanjo Jose, Adoption of Open Source Digital Library Software Packages: a Survey, in Manoj K. Kumar (ed.), Proceedings CALIBER 2007: 5th International Convention on Automation of Libraries in Education and Research Institutions, 2007, pp. 98-102, Punjab University, Chandigarh, India.  Self-archived February 14, 2007.

Abstract:   Open source digital library packages are gaining popularity nowadays. To build a digital library under economical conditions open source software is preferable. This paper tries to identify the extent of adoption of open source digital library software packages in various organizations through an online survey. It lays down the findings from the survey.

The survey covers DSpace, EPrints, Fedora, and Greenstone.

The presentations from Open Repositories 2007 (San Antonio, January 23-26, 2007) are now online.  (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)

As part of the National Day of Action for OA, the students at Harvard College Free Culture have announced an OA Thesis Repository for undergraduate senior theses.  It will use CC licenses and start accepting deposits on March 1.

Comment.  Apart from the Harvard-Smithsonian digital video library, Harvard still doesn't have an institutional repository and it's time for it to launch one.  On the one hand, I applaud the students for refusing to wait for the larger institution to act.  But on the other, the student thesis repository will not, apparently, be OAI-compliant.  If Harvard launched a general OAI-compliant IR, it would help all its constituents.  Students could use a section of it, faculty would enlarge their already considerable audience and impact, and researchers worldwide would have access to Harvard's research output.

John Ottenhoff, Renaissance Women, Text Encoding and the Digital Humanities: An Interview with Julia Flanders, Academic Commons, February 2007.  Excerpt:

Julia Flanders is Director of the exemplary Brown University Women Writers Project and Associate Director for Textbase Development at the Brown University Scholarly Technology Group. With those projects and as Editor in Chief of the [open access] Digital Humanities Quarterly, due to launch in 2007, Julia is a key figure in humanities computing and text encoding initiatives. Academic Commons recently caught up with her to talk about her various projects....

Academic Commons: What's your sense of how faculty are using digital resources like WWP in their research? What kinds of changes are happening in their work, and what kind of obstacles are they facing?

Julia Flanders: At the moment, I think they're using digital collections in much the same way as they use collections of printed books: to find documents they're interested in and to read them. Searching helps to speed up this process; online access makes it more effortless and exposes readers to a wider range of material. But habits of reading are not yet changing very much.

The biggest obstacle is the granularization of online resources, and the lack of cross-collection analysis functions. This is a problem partly because of funding and intellectual property issues, but also because it is something fundamental about the incunabular stage of electronic publishing we're still in. Different projects are experimenting--appropriately!--with different kinds of markup, different approaches to representing materials in digital form. Those differences pose challenges for integrated searching, but they also represent important explorations into digital modeling. Tools like the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) are making it increasingly possible to find items across digital collections, but I think the more detailed analysis functions will have to wait until a further stage in the history of electronic publishing....

Eric Kansa, Open Context: Community Data-sharing and Tagging, Academic Commons, February 2007. 

The Alexandria Archive Institute is now “beta-testing” Open Context.

Open Context is a free, open-access online database resource for archaeology and related fields. It is a highly-generalized tool that pools and integrates individual researcher datasets and museum collections. Funding for the development of Open Context came from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Open Context has a variety of demonstration datasets now available for exploration and testing. These include field archaeology contextual records and finds registers, geo-archaeological samples, and a variety of zooarchaeological analyses. We are also adding museum and reference collection datasets. Some projects have rich image collections and narrative material, and others are of primary interest for specialist comparative analyses.

To help make sense of this widely varying body of material, we have developed a user folksonomy system....

We are working toward interoperability with other systems and developing partnerships to assist in OAI standards compliance and support from institutional repositories. We are also working with the Science Commons to find "some rights reserved" frameworks that create incentives for sharing primary data.

We would also like to see some of this framework incorporated into institutionally-backed digital repository systems. Thus, we are eager to partner with other related initiatives. We already have an established a partnership with the University of Chicago OCHRE project. The data structures underlying Open Context are based on the pioneering efforts this group. Open Context uses a subset of the global schema described in OCHRE’s  “Archaeological Markup Language” (ArchaeoML). Because of this, data imported into Open Context is fully compatible with the OCHRE system. Besides OCHRE, there are several other initiatives looking to create digital resources for archaeology, and we would like to broaden the scope of our collaborations.

Matt Hodgkinson, Declaration of Pomposity, and a Declaration of War?  Journalology, February 15, 2007.  Excerpt:

Ahead of the EC Conference on Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area, a group of publishers have released what they dub the 'Brussels Declaration', which shamelessly echoes the Berlin Declaration on Open Access, the Budapest Open Access Initiative and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing....

They have stated that "we have decided to publish a declaration of principles which we believe to be self-evident". Oh, for pity's sake! Using language that apes the US Declaration of Independence makes them sound very pompous. Is it really 'self-evident' that "Copyright protects the investment of both authors and publishers"? Insisting on transfer of copyright to the publisher certainly helps maintain publisher profits, but how does that help the authors? ...

The real target of this declaration is self-archiving. Stevan Harnad, the "archivangelist", optimistically commented on the IWR Blog that "There will be no war in Brussels. The meeting is about online access to European research findings. The European research community is meeting to decide how to maximise access, usage and impact for its research findings. The answer -- the very same answer -- has already been proposed by the European Commission [...] As a condition for receiving public research funding, all funded researchers should self-archive the resulting research publications online in an Open Access Repository, free for all would-be users"....

The ninth "principle" in this declaration is that "Open deposit of accepted manuscripts [self-archiving] risks destabilising subscription revenues and undermining peer review [...] Free availability of significant proportions of a journal’s content may result in its cancellation and therefore destroy the peer review system upon which researchers and society depend". I sense that hostilities have started... Perhaps soon the publisher tanks will be parked on the University of Southampton's driveway?

Overall this declaration makes these publishers look self-satisfied and a bit silly. I'd have expected better from the BMJ Group, who are one of the signatories.