Open Access News

Peter B. Hirtle, Copyright Keeps Open Archives and Digital Preservation Separate, RLG DigiNews, April 15, 2007.  Sadly, this is the last installment of the FAQ column in the final issue of DigiNews.  Excerpt:

I have read that if I publish with a “green” publisher or use one of the author’s addenda, my articles can be preserved in an open access digital repository. Is this true?

The short answer: probably not....

Given that it would appear that more and more funded research is going to find its way into open access digital repositories, an obvious question is whether libraries can rely on those repositories to preserve that information.  Unfortunately, they cannot, for at least two reasons. 

First, as has long been recognized, open “archives” are primarily concerned with providing open access to current information – and not the long-term preservation of the contents. Most lack the technical, organizational, and financial support required for a true digital preservation program. In its draft position statement on access to research outputs, Research Councils UK noted the distinction....

Second, and more troubling, is that the agreements that make it possible for authors to deposit articles in an open access repository do not necessarily also convey the rights needed by the repository to preserve and make available digital information over time....

[T]he self-archiver must have the right to authorize DSpace (or other repositories) to make copies and reformat submissions. Prior to submission to a journal, an author would have that right. When copyright is transferred to a publisher, the publisher must then authorize the author/self-archiver to grant those rights. Yet in the typical copyright transfer agreement of even a “green” publisher, the explicit right to license preservation activities to DSpace is sorely lacking....

Are authors who attach an author’s addendum to their copyright transfer agreement any better able to grant the needed permissions to the repository?  In some cases, the answer is yes....

Open access archives can be a valuable tool in making information immediately available. With time, the license terms that permit self-archiving may mature to explicitly permit digital preservation of the files as well as third party use of the archived material (the other great lacuna in the current agreements).  For now, however, libraries will need to rely on the published journal literature for the long-term preservation of scholarly information. And, as library directors concluded in our recent report, E-Journal Archiving Metes and Bounds: A Survey of the Landscape, only journals that are part of formal third party journal archiving programs can be said to be effectively preserved. In sum, libraries cannot yet rely upon open archives for long-term access to the journal literature.

Stevan Harnad, OA or More-Pay? Open Access Archivangelism, April 18, 2007. 

Summary:  Springer Open Choice offers authors the choice of paying for Optional Gold OA: While all publication costs are still being paid for by institutional subscriptions, authors can pay Springer $3000 extra to make their article (Gold) OA for them.
   But there is no need (nor sense) to pay anyone an extra penny while institutional subscriptions are still paying all publication costs. Researchers' institutions and funders should instead mandate that their researchers self-archive their published articles in their own Institutional Repositories in order to make them (Green) OA.
   Mandating deposit in an Institutional Repository is a university and funder policy matter in which the publishing industry should have no say whatsoever. The way to remove the publishing industry lobby from this research-community decision loop is the pro-tem compromise -- wherever there is any delay in adopting an OA self-archiving mandate -- of weakening the mandate into an immediate-deposit/optional-access mandate (ID/OA), so that it can be adopted without any further delay.
   (Such ID/OA mandates can be accompanied by a cap on the maximum allowable length for any publisher embargo on the setting of access to the (immediate) deposit as OA: 3 months, 6 months, 12 months: whatever can be agreed on without delaying the adoption of the ID/OA mandate itself. The most important thing to note is that most of the current, sub-optimal Green OA mandates that have already been adopted or proposed -- the ones that mandate deposit itself only after a capped embargo period [or worse: only if/when the publishers "allows it"] instead of immediately -- are all really subsumed as special cases by the ID/OA mandate. The only difference is that the deposit itself must be immediate in all cases, with the allowable delay pertaining only to the date of the OA-setting.) ...

Raizel, An Open Letter to Google, William Patry, and Google's Library Partners, No Attention, April 13, 2007.  (Thanks to Klaus Graf.)  Excerpt:

All I'm asking for is full access for the public to government documents on Google BookSearch. These documents are in the public domain and therefore should not be limited by claims of copyright, by Google or by the Library Partners.
According to Google's own FAQ:

For books that enter Book Search through the Library Project, what you see depends on the book's copyright status. . . . If the book is in the public domain and therefore out of copyright, you can page through the entire book and even download it and read it offline.

This statement implies all materials on Book Search that one cannot page through or download are not in the public domain.

Can you provide the public a reason why Google BookSearch has not made public domain government documents fully available? ...

I'm sure you know that government works created by the U.S. federal government are not protected by copyright....

Josiah Ober and three co-authors, Toward Open Access in Ancient Studies: The Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics, Hesperia, 76 (2007) pp. 229-242.  (Thanks to Tom Elliott.)

Abstract:   The authors’ experience with founding and managing an open-access Internet site for publishing scholarly preprints, the Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics, raises issues about the status of publication in classical studies. Open-access e-prints offer unique advantages in terms of availability and dated registration of work, but raise concerns about certification and permanent archiving. E-prints and traditional publications are currently complementary. Yet the worlds of scholarly publication and academic evaluation of scholarship are changing in important ways; closer cooperation between publishers, scholars, and university administrators could help to maximize benefits and limit costs to disciplines, institutions, and individuals.

Donat Agosti, Urheberrecht als Hindernis für die Forschung, NZZ Online, April 20, 2007.  Read it in German or Google's English.

Here are the two key paragraphs, translated for OAN by Agosti himself:

Despite the fact that the president of the Council of the Swiss Science Foundation, Dieter Imboden, recently decided that recipients of awards are required to self archive through personal or institutional repositories at the respective universities, there is not legal basis what can be offered in such a repository. These new repositories --such as ZORA at the University of Zurich, will thus only slowly be populated because the entertainment industry’s aggressive prosecution of copyright piracy led to a big uncertainty....

A clearcut law which would state that essentially all works have to be open for indexing and should be searchable on the Internet would be an important solution, and it would open the door for full text searches. This would not necessarily mean, that the publications are also open access. But it would allow developing adequate new licences between the publishers and the authors, as well as new forms of publications reflecting new possibilities to enhance the return for money spent in science....

Abhishek, Towards Open Access For Scientific Research, Descritics, April 20, 2007.  Excerpt:

...I shall only deal with the problems in accessing scientific journals in a developing country like India. For long, the basic research has been concentrated in the U.S. or Europe....

It is interesting to note that most...journals of repute...remain the exclusive preserve of the rich universities abroad. They...often price their products beyond the purchasing power of the individuals in the developing countries by setting up prohibitively expensive access controls.

The Open Access movement wanted to change all that....

The importance of being updated [on new research] cannot be under estimated. Yet, I find it odd that the journals allow for [embargoed] access to the articles after six months, or for some, after years; what relevance would it hold at a later stage? The crying need is to make all access free and fair, irrespective of the country where the person is accessing the articles from....

In the March 2007 issue of WZB-Mitteilungen there are two OA-related articles.  (Thanks to Eric Steinhauer via Klaus Graf.)

• Jeanette Hofmann, Wem gehört das Wissen?  Digitalisierung stellt Urheberrecht vor neue Herausforderungen
• Sonja Grimm and Christoph Haug, Zugang für alle Open Access: Publizieren

The Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law project (OAK Law) at Queensland University of Technology has released A Guide to Developing Open Access Through Your Digital Repository.  From the April 18 announcement:

The Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law Project has launched a guide for organisations and academic institutions who implement and manage [open access] digital repositories. We believe the guide will be beneficial to repository managers as a practical day-to-day tool.

‘A Guide to Developing Open Access Through Your Digital Repository’ examines and explains the copyright issues involved in depositing and accessing material in digital repositories....Finally, the guide touches on more technical considerations, such as software and metadata.

We see the guide as a building block towards a broader accessibility framework. While the focus is Australian law, it has potential to be adapted to other jurisdictions.

The Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) Foundation has joined the Alliance for Taxpayer Access.

The Research Information Network (RIN) has released a new report, Stewardship of digital research data: a framework of principles and guidelines, April 2007.  Excerpt from the full-text:

The essential goals we are seeking to achieve are thus to facilitate the advancement of research and innovation, to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of research, and to maximise the value of public and private investment in research. In pursuance of those goals, the fundamental policy objective is to ensure that

Ideas and knowledge derived from publicly-funded research should be made available and accessible for public use, interrogation, and scrutiny, as widely, rapidly and effectively as practicable....

PS:  As far as I can tell, the report endorses OA both as a goal for preservation projects and as one of the means.

Michael Cross, Bad maps are key factor in farming fiasco, The Guardian, April 19, 2007.  Excerpt:

One accusation we face at Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign is that public sector information is a minority interest. Why should any normal person, let alone a busy government minister, be interested in subjects like free access to geospatial information?

A simmering political row over a fiasco that cost English farmers £20m and a senior civil servant his job may move the issue up the agenda.  The National Farmers' Union said this week that geographical information was a key factor in the latest fiasco involving government IT....

Maps printed from the Land Register were sent to every farmer claiming subsidy to check. According to Julie Robinson, a lawyer with the National Farmers' Union, this is where the system went wrong. "Many of the maps sent back to farmers to check turned out to be seriously inaccurate." ...

Freely available mapping data might not have prevented the rural payments fiasco - but it would have given all parties more warning that it was coming....

Most of the presentations from the CERN workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI5) are now online.  All of them are OA-related.

On April 21-22, 2006, the Swedish Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities hosted a seminar, Scholarly journals between the past and the future.  Now the presentations have been published as a book:

Martin Rundkvist (ed.), Scholarly Journals Between the Past and the Future. The Fornvännen Centenary Round-Table Seminar. Stockholm, 21 April 2006. Kungliga Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, Konferenser 65. Stockholm 2007. 109 pp. ISBN 978-91-7402-368-8.

The editor's advice:  "don't buy stock in commercial journal publishing companies."

PS:  I'd link to the seminar and book but I can't find URLs for either one.

OpenLearn, the open courseware project at Open University, has won a major award.  From the OU press release:

The Open University's OpenLearn project has won a platinum award at the IMS Global Learning Consortium Learning Impact Awards 2007.

The OpenLearn website offers free and open learning educational resources for learners and educators worldwide. Its entry received full marks from the award judges in the area of Expanded Access: Impact on reaching new populations.

The project's success in attracting a global audience since its launch in October 2006 was said by the judges to be a "true innovation in open access" which was to be "applauded".

The Task Force on Electronic Publication for the American Philological Association (APA) and the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) has issued its Final Report.  The report is undated but appears to have been released March 31, 2007.  Also see the separate appendix.  (Thanks to Karla Hahn.)

From the Executive Summary:

The Task Force was charged the analysis of particular issues associated with the burgeoning area of electronic publishing, including peer refereeing, freedom of information, intellectual property protection, storage and retrieval of data and whatever other concerns it may identify. Having prepared a policy statement in summer 2006, the Task Force turned to the final report of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) released in 2006....After discussion...and comments, the Task Force has formulated the following recommendations:

R1. Continue with the efforts, supported by the Capital Campaign and Board of Directors, to plan, design, and sustain a portal to digital content....

R4. Appoint two or three editors and institute a section for postprints (and perhaps other material) in the CDL's eScholarship Repository, or like platform.

R5. Explore a new digitally-distributed series of APA monographs....

R6. Appoint a small group to explore the feasibility of digitizing the APA microfiches to make them freely available in an open-access archive.

R7. Issue a statement encouraging development of a high-quality non-commercial digital library of Latin texts.

From the body of the report:

E.4. open access and open content: humanities scholars believe in the transformative power of human communication and artistic expression, and it is natural that they should want original documents and a great deal of the secondary literature that explains and interprets them to be available to as wide an audience as possible with as little constraint as possible, in continuation of the ideals of the public library. Open-access archives are a valuable alternative to commercialized media and the unfortunate expansion of copyright restrictions brought on by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It is appropriate for the societies and their members to encourage and participate in open-access, open-content endeavors. (See Recommendations F.4 and F.6 below.) ...

Open-access digital repositories of postprints are a logical location for scholars to deposit the kind of published work that is being neglected by the standard digitized collections. The California Digital Library operates an open-access eScholarship Repository that hosts some national disciplinary collections on the basis of participation of University of California departments or faculty. The CDL manager has already agreed that if, for instance, the Classics Department at Berkeley sponsored the inclusion of a APA/AIA postprint collection, such a section could be set up, controlled by editors appointed by the APA. The function of editors would be to review submissions for suitability of content and quality of appearance. The eScholarship Repository is already equipped with the mechanisms for submission and editorial review....

RECOMMENDATION 4: appoint two or three editors and institute a section for postprints (and perhaps other material) in the CDL’s eScholarship Repository, or like platform....

A growing number of books from major library collections are becoming available through GoogleBook and competing projects. Works of classical scholarship have begun to appear in such collections. This is all to the good, but we do not have assurance of the quality of the available materials (for instance, there are reports of missing pages, and availability of only some volumes of a multi-volume work), nor is the free accessibility of more recent works in any way certain. Therefore, it is fully appropriate for classicists and archaeologists to consider projects to place professionally selected specimens of our historical scholarly resources in open-access collections....

We believe that if [our previously microfiched] works are digitized, then the proper disposition of them would be in an open-access archive, perhaps with the provision that print-on-demand copies could be ordered....

RECOMMENDATION 6: Appoint a small group to explore the feasibility of digitizing the APA microfiches to make them freely available in an open-access archive.

The recommendations in the report have been submitted to the APA and AIA boards but have not yet been adopted.

For background on the APA/AIA deliberations, see my blog post from December 23, 2006.

Prof. R.K. Shukla's library science students at Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) in India have been evaluating OA journals in different fields.  So far they have written studies of the OA journals in chemistry, engineering, LIS, medicine, and social sciences.  All the studies are now themselves OA through the IGNOU repository. 

Euroscience, which represents 2,300 working scientists in 40 European countries, has launched a new blog dedicated to OA, Opening scientific communication.  It's a group blog and welcomes new contributors.

The inaugural post is by Stevan Harnad, Green OA Self-Archiving Needs a Lobbying Organisation, April 19, 2007.  Excerpt:

...Gold OA and Green OA are clearly complementary, but there is considerable disagreement over which one should be given priority. The current level of OA worldwide is about 20%, of which about 5% is Gold and 15% is Green....

The critical difference in the probability of increasing OA to 100% via Gold or Green is that Gold OA depends on two further factors: Converting journals to Gold and finding the money to pay authors’ Gold OA publication fees....

The situation with Green OA is very different, because it does not depend on converting publishers, and it is virtually cost-free. Most institutions already have Institutional Repositories (IRs). The only problem is that they are largely empty because, as noted, only about 15% of researchers self-archive spontaneously — even though a series of recent studies have demonstrated OA’s dramatic benefits for all fields of scientific and scholarly research (doubled usage and citations)....

Green OA mandates have been repeatedly demonstrated to work....

Moreover, if and when mandated 100% OA from Green self-archiving should ever go on to cause journal subscriptions to be cancelled, thereby forcing journals to convert to Gold OA publishing, the cancellations themselves will release the institutional subscription funds that can then be used to pay for institutional authors’ Gold OA publication charges.

So the pragmatics of the status quo and the goal would seem to indicate that mandating Green OA (by research funders and institutions) should be given priority, rather than focussing on trying to convert journals to Gold OA and trying to find the funds to pay for it. Journal publishing is in the hands of publishers, but Green OA self-archiving is in the hands of authors and their institutions and funders....

So my ardent plea to this discussion group is to give priority to Green OA mandates by universities and funders. An immediate-deposit, immediate-OA mandate is obviously optimal, but if that cannot be agreed upon immediately, an ID/OA [immediate deposit / optional OA] mandate is infinitely preferable to any further delay in adoption....

As far as I can tell, there are only four kinds of “high-level” OA goings-on that are being arranged periodically by various official organisations (librarians, universities, publishers, funders, government committees):

(1) Librarians and universities, who think OA is all about journal affordability, preservation, digital curation (IRs) and interoperability (OAI).

(2) “OA Publishers,” who insist that OA is all about conversion to Gold OA and the funding of Gold OA fees (CERN, etc.).

(3) Anti-OA publishers whose interest is in lobbying against Green OA mandates as a threat to their industry.

(4) Copyright reformers who think OA is all about reforming copyright law.

There is no recognized topic of Green OA, no Green OA-specific interest group recognized or invited to any of these high-level meetings.

So only two recourses are left to Green OA advocates: One is to do as we are doing, which is to keep on raising our voices on behalf of Green OA in writings and petitions and at the meetings we are invited to.

The other possibility is the one Richard Poynder and Napoleon Miradon and others have proposed, which is to organise an official Green OA lobby. I think that would be a splendid idea (but it would have to be carefully protected against dilution by well-meaning but blinkered proponents of (1) and (4), and perhaps even (3), which would defeat both its focus and its purpose)....

Let us work to make it sooner, rather than later.

OpenDOAR now has an open API for useful and creative mash-ups.  From yesterday's announcement:

OpenDOAR, as a SHERPA project, is pleased to announce the release of an API that lets developers use OpenDOAR data in their applications. It is a machine-to-machine interface that can run a wide variety of queries against the OpenDOAR Database and get back XML data. Developers can choose to receive just repository titles & URLs, all the available OpenDOAR data, or intermediate levels of detail. They can then incorporate the output into their own applications and 'mash-ups', or use it to control processes such as OAI-PMH harvesting.

The following example illustrates how the API works:

http://www.opendoar.org/tools/apidemonstrator.php

This makes the API request below for repositories holding French language material, with the results sorted by country and repository name:

http://www.opendoar.org/api.php?la=fr&show=basic&sort=co,rname

The resultant XML is then processed locally for display using [a] PHP script....

This is just one example of the many uses to which the API can be put. Three experimental applications were created by external collaborators during the prototype stage, including the Google Maps mash-up Repository66. These examples are detailed in the full online description of the API...where full technical documentation can also be found.

PS:  For background, see my blog post from March 21, 2007.

Charlie Rapple has blogged some notes on a talk by John Cox (unclear when or where --probably the UKSG meeting in Warwick).  Excerpt:

...One consequence of online publishing is the hunger for Open Access - an unproven business model which has not yet shown itself to be sustainable, says Cox....[T]he world's 850 institutional repositories may currently be scantly populated...but they are being supported by a number of major funding agencies, and may yet grow sufficiently to change the current landscape....

The future for publishers, therefore, is in the functionality within which they wrap their content. If the research itself is freely available - and easily discoverable - elsewhere, publishers have to differentiate themselves with truly useful features (e.g. supporting datasets, taxonomies, community facilities). Cox praises OECD's SourceOECD for using the capabilities of online to add massive value over the print, and Alexander Street Press for building communities in the humanities - demonstrating the value across different sectors.

Web 2.0 "will bring further changes", of which user-generated content and folksonomies have most relevance to scholarly publishing. They represent the value-adds which can differentiate publisher platforms from institutional repositories - if publishers are willing or able to make the necessary investment in technology, and to make the transition to being service providers rather than manufacturers.

Comment.  OA is a kind of access, not a kind of business model.  It's not only compatible with many different business models, but it's already supported by many different business models.  However, Cox is otherwise right --if I may paraphrase him this way-- that the future for publishers lies in adding value to OA content.   OA is not going away and the OA percentage of peer-reviewed journal literature will only keep growing.  Some publishers will offer OA themselves and recover their costs from sources other than readers.  Others will charge readers for access to enhanced versions of the OA literature.  Some of these enhancements will themselves be OA, but some will be unavailable gratis and worth paying for.  For those publishers who want to charge for access, as opposed to another kind of service, the new struggle will be to stay ahead of the creeping gift economy that will find ways to make each new enhancement available to end users free of charge.

Update. Also see Rapple's notes on Sally Morris' talk at the same conference.

Douglas Brown, Scientific Communication and the Dematerialization of Scholarship, ProQuest CSA, 2007.  (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)

Abstract:   Many scientific research fields are becoming massively computationally intensive, handling and mining enormous datasets, a trend that is opening up possibilities for new methods of discovery, transdisciplinary and problem-centred investigation, and very large scale collaboration. Simultaneously, research practices at the frontier are changing rapidly as scientists and engineers are moving towards a research process of continuous refinement - writing, annotating and revising in near real time using the Internet - a tendency that may be further encouraged by the emergence of new, informal writing platforms and collaborative tools. These and related developments of the last decade may be contributing to the transformation of a system of scholarly research communication, based on the printed scholarly journal and the research article, that has been in place essentially unchanged for over three centuries. Following a backward glance at the beginnings of modern scientific communication, this article draws attention to this sudden, apparently dramatic shift, reviewing moves towards the development of 'cyberinfrastructure', a vision of a 'natively digital' scholarly communication system, the proliferation of open access institutional repositories, and the possibility of entirely new forms of scholarly communication as science itself shifts into a new phase in the 21st century.

Siân Harris, Bentham announces OA growth strategy, Research Information, April/May 2007.  Excerpt:

Bentham Science plans to launch over 300 open-access journals during 2007 with the first 100 journals being launched by May 2007. The journals, collectively known as ‘Bentham Science OPEN’, will cover all major disciplines of science including engineering, mathematics, chemistry, medicine, bio-chemical sciences, pharmaceutical sciences, earth sciences and environmental science. They will be published exclusively online and will be available for free viewing via Bentham Science’s website.

Bentham Science OPEN will launch three types of open-access journals: those that publish research articles; those that publish exclusively review articles; and those that publish letters or short communication articles. All articles will be peer-reviewed prior to publication and Bentham promises that article-processing charges to authors will all be less than US$1000 per published article.

‘We have decided that we can now build-up an impressive and large list of exclusively open-access titles without endangering our current subscription list,’ Bentham’s editorial director Matthew Honan told Research Information. ‘Our aim is three-fold,’ he continued. Firstly the company wants ‘to build-up the largest list of open-access journals of any existing STM publisher.’ It also hopes to successfully publish a list of both open-access and subscription journals. The third aspect of this open-access strategy is that the company has observed an increasing trend in favour of open-access publishing, for example from funding bodies such as The Wellcome Trust. ‘As a publisher we need to listen to our authors and follow the trends in publishing which we believe we are doing,’ said Honan.

This is not the company’s first experience of open access. An open-access option is available on Bentham’s 79 existing subscription titles, with author charges of US$3000 per published article....

The April/May issue of Research Information is now online.  Here are the OA-related articles:

• Adam Bostanci, Biomedical archive is first step towards national hub (on UKPMC)
• Elisabetta Poltronieri, Fostering open-access in the research community (report on an OA conference in Rome, November 30 - December 1, 2006)
• Encouraging innovation (an interview with Ahmed Hindawi, founder of Hindawi Publishing)
• Matthew Cockerill, 'OA creates new opportunities' (see excerpt blogged below)
• The repository jigsaw (on France's HAL)
• Siân Harris, Bentham announces OA growth strategy (on Bentham Science Publishers)

Matthew Cockerill, OA creates new opportunities, Research Information, April/May 2007.  Excerpt:

For many years, publishers, scientists, academics, librarians, funders and government officials have debated the value of greater public access to the results of scientific research. The internet has fundamentally changed the economics of distributing scientific research results, and has made the idea of universal access to research a realistic prospect. The number of open-access journals continues to increase rapidly, as does the proportion of scientific research that is freely available online.

As open-access publishing has emerged it has attracted both enthusiasm and scepticism in almost equal measure....

Scepticism and debate are healthy, especially if the debate is informed by evidence. In the case of open-access publishing, the track record of existing open-access journals now demonstrates that the open-access model can succeed in the real world. In particular, open-access journals have demonstrated their ability to operate as a sustainable business, and to publish research of high quality – validated by the industry’s leading metrics.

Perhaps more importantly, the success of open-access publications is also stimulating the research community to...consider how the open-access model can provide a channel for the rapid publication of more research results in formats that allow their effective compilation and reuse....

An example of open-access success can be seen in Malaria Journal....

BioMed Central’s much newer Journal of Medical Case Reports benefits from the open access publication model in a different way....

[A]n important aspect of many open-access journals is that they also encourage the publication of more incremental advances, and even negative results, if properly performed....[O]pen-access journals provide more raw data for researchers to use in subsequent studies....

Lastly, open access, by making the underlying research articles freely available and reusable, opens up myriad possibilities for enhancing and extending that research. This includes the use of computational techniques to mine research articles for information, and the use of Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, tagging and wikis to allow the research community itself to enrich articles with additional content and connections....

OpenDOAR has announced an email distribution service.  From today's announcement:

OpenDOAR, as a SHERPA project, is pleased to announce the release of a trial email distribution service for repository administrators, service providers and researchers around the world....

The global open access repository community is a vibrant and disparate group of individuals, whom make use of local and national email discussion lists for rapid and effective communication. However, to date there has been no readily available system to allow them, or other interested parties, to reach a bespoke or broader portion of the community on a truly global scale. It is to fulfil this perceived need that OpenDOAR has introduced this service.

Through using a small series of simple menus and options on the request form it is possible to directly address a specific proportion of the OpenDOAR listed repositories, including: countries, continents, language groups and software platform.

In keeping with the OpenDOAR quality assurance ethos all potential emails are filtered by SHERPA staff in terms of content and suitability of scope before redistribution.

As this is a pilot service the actual types of emails that will be redistributed remain uncertain, although it is anticipated that the follow types will be commonly received:

• Emails announcing conferences, events and workshops

• News or announcements concerning OA software platform developments

• News of Open Access developments

• Requests for collaborators on a project, research or similar

• Announcements of research results of general interest to OA community....

The Open Knowledge Foundation has released Open Economics version 0.4.  From today's announcement:

This is the fourth release of the Open Economics project and the first that has been deemed ‘worthy’ of a full release announcement. The Open Economics project provides data storage and visualization for economics data as well as associated web services and assorted modelling code. The project home page is:  [here] while the open economics web interface is currently available at: [here] (though note that we plan to move to a dedicated domain in the near future).

On the BioMed Central blog, Matt Cockerill previews the BMC consultation workshop at Medical Libraries Association 2007 (Philadelphia, May 18-23, 2007).  Excerpt:

Join BioMed Central at MLA 2007 in Philadelphia to find out more about how librarians and research administrators can work together to promote open access....

Peer-reviewed open access publications, such as those listed in the Directory of Open Access journals, have the potential to deliver universal access at no greater cost to the scholarly community than the traditional publishing system. Desirable as this outcome may be, many librarians face a Catch-22 situation. Open access publication has costs - typically covered by publication fees - but library budgets are already so tight that they cannot easily stretch to cover publication fees, in addition to subscriptions.

Fortunately, a solution to this problem is at hand. Research funders around the world, most prominently the Wellcome Trust and the US National Institutes of Health, have recognized the shortcomings of the traditional journal publishing system, and are taking steps to enhance access by setting up open access repositories, calling on grantees to deposit publications in those repositories, and making funds available to cover the cost of publishing in open access journals. Reports commissioned by the Wellcome Trust , the European Commission and most recently the Australian Productivity Commission have all concluded that open access publishing has the potential to cost less than the traditional model, while delivering vastly more access, and so promises to be an extremely cost-effective use of research funds. Wellcome estimates the total cost of disseminating the results of research through open access journals as only 1-2% of the cost of carrying out the research.

A major benefit of open access journals is that they address the concern that open access repositories might undermine the peer-review system. Open access journals, such as those published by BioMed Central, provide a business model for the publication of high-quality peer-reviewed journals that is fully compatible with open access via repositories. Open access journals make the most of repositories by ensuring that articles are deposited systematically, in final form, with immediate open access, and without requiring additional effort on the part of the author....

Under the traditional model, the role of the librarian centred on purchasing access to proprietary information for users. In an open access environment, librarians have the opportunity to take a more active role in facilitating scholarly communication. By partnering with research funders and research administrators to support open access repositories and open access journals, they can ensure that research from their institution is effectively disseminated....

[The BMC consultation workshop] will be held onsite at the MLA conference on Monday, May 21st, 2007 from 7.00 - 9.00am and breakfast will be provided. Spaces are limited, so please send an email to MLAconsultation@biomedcentral.com if you would like to attend.

The March issue of SCRIPT-ed is devoted building a knowledge commons by unlocking intellectual property in Australia.  From Graham Greenleaf's editorial:

This special issue of SCRIPT-ed is based on papers presented at the Conference Creating Commons: The Tasks Ahead in Unlocking IP, held at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, on 10-11 July 2006. The ‘Unlocking IP’ project, funded by the Australian Research Council, investigates the rapidly changing relationship between public and private rights in Australian copyright law and practice. It explores options for maximising the ‘unlocking‘ of the potential uses of copyright works through sharing and trade in works involving public rights (open content, open source and open standards licensing) and through enhancement to the public domain. The papers in his Special Issue address all four main aspects of the project (i) theories and taxonomy of public rights (Greenleaf); (ii) voluntary licences and their consistency, simplicity, and effectiveness (Bond, Coates); (iii) technical issues in finding works with public rights more effectively (Bildstein); and (iv) incentives to expand public use rights (Clarke) and requirements to protect them (de Zwart). Nicol’s paper deals with aspects of all four topics in relation to patent regimes and biotechnology, whereas the focus of the other papers is on copyright. One common theme in most papers is the national dimension of commons, the question of to what extent commons are created by and situated in the copyright regimes, institutions and practices (including licences) of particular countries. Is the ‘Australian commons’ significantly different in its features than the ‘Scottish commons’, or are both now largely homogenised in an US-flavoured international commons stew? ...

You can watch the Unlocking IP project unfold at [here] and more entertainingly on the project researchers’ blog The House of Commons.

John Willinsky and Ranjini Mendis, Open access on a zero budget: a case study of Postcolonial Text, Information Research, April 2007.  This is #3 in IR's series of case studies in open access publishing.  Abstract:

Introduction. The founding of a new open access journal is described in terms of its use of the open source software Open Journal Systems, its contribution to a new field of inquiry and its ability to operate on a zero budget in terms of regular expenses.

Method. A case study method is deployed describing the circumstances of the journal's founding and current manner of publishing.

Analysis. The use of online and open source software, as well as a global team of volunteers is presented as the basis of sustaining an open access approach to publishing.

Results. The journal has been able to operate with a zero dollar operating budget over the course of its first six issues and is in a position to continue in this manner.

Conclusions. A strong commitment to the principles of developing a new field of inquiry committed to global issues of access to knowledge, in combination with open source and Internet technologies, has lowered the barriers to the exercise of academic freedom on a modest, but nonetheless global scale.

Co-Action has written a short report on last week's meeting of the OpenAccess.se project (Stockholm, April 12-13, 2007).  In its entirety:

Nearly all of Sweden’s university and college libraries were represented, in addition to the Swedish Research Council, individual researchers and others. The main focus was on Open Access policies and practices within and between Swedish universities and colleges, and on Swedish and European archiving and repository challenges and techniques.

Håkan Billig, Secretary General of the Medical Scientific Council of the Swedish Research Council, and responsible for drawing up guidelines for and implementing the Research Council’s publication policies, reported that the Research Council is likely to announce their long-awaited Open Access policy in December 07. The Council has signed the Berlin declaration and the Petition to the EU, yet has been uncertain as to how it would proceed in practice. Though Billig could not provide the details of the forthcoming policy, his presentation suggested that in future, funding recipients will be bound by a contractual clause that addresses Open Access publishing in some form. Billig emphasized that the Research Council’s prime goal is to maximize access, not to minimize publishing costs.

Marianne Wikgren, Research Officer at the Humanities and Social Sciences Scientific Council of the Swedish Research Council announced that earmarked funds to support the publication of Open Access journals will be available from 2008. The Scientific Council is currently restructuring its application forms to this end. This should spur the launch of several new Open Access journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences, as well as provide some needed support to existing journals.

Turid Hedlund and Ingegerd Rabow, Open Access in the Nordic Countries - a State of the Art Report, Nordbib, February 28, 2007.  (Thanks to Co-Action.)  Excerpt:

The report describes the present situation in the Nordic countries (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland) regarding Open Access in scientific publishing. The present progress report presents comprehensive policy issues when present, as well as initiatives concerning a transfer to a more Open Access publishing policy, such as immediate application of Open Access publishing at various universities or research institutes. Success stories and challenging areas are given in the report and are illustrated with concrete examples.

The reports deals with primary Open Access publishing of scientific journals, working paper series and doctoral theses as well as parallel publishing of scientific articles in publication repositories. The role of the publishers will also be examined in connection with questions about agreements.

Open Access publishing demands a clear picture of the copyright to material published on the Internet. The report considers the central questions and initiatives to solutions to the copyright problems....

The introduction of the report is a section about the background to the Open Access or free access to scientific publications....In the following two sections publication patterns and the differences that exist within all science fields are described. Our examples are taken from biomedicine and the humanities and social sciences. Scientific journal publishing, specifically in the Nordic countries with small language areas and small circles of readers, is one of the problem areas in the report. In section four, alternatives for solutions through some pilot studies in the Nordic countries are described. In sections five to nine a country report of each Nordic country is given (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden). The report finishes with a discussion about future and existing challenges.

This report is commissioned by the Nordbib project, and the report will primarily function as a basis for discussion at a workshop, arranged by Nordbib, during the spring 2007....

ArchaeoInformatics.org has released a screencast presentation on data sharing in archaeology.  From the Alexandria Archive Institute blurb:

ArchaeoInformatics.org, a consortium of five institutions working toward a cyberinfrastructure for archaeology has just made an in depth presentation about Open Context available. The presentation introduces Open Context and why it is a significant advance for data sharing in archaeology, and how it may illustrate a valuable approach for data sharing in many other 'small science' disciplines.

Europe's Digital Library experts set to focus on copyright today, a press release from the European Commission, April 18, 2007.  Excerpt:

The EU's High Level Expert Group on Digital Libraries - which includes, inter alia, stakeholders from the British Library, the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, the Federation of European Publishers and Google - will present this afternoon an advisory report on copyright issues to the European Commission. In addition, the group will discuss today how to ensure more open access to scientific research and how to improve public-private cooperation. The work of the High Level Group is part of the European Commission's efforts to make Europe's rich cultural and scientific heritage available online. For this purpose, the group advises the Commission on issues regarding digitisation, online accessibility and digital preservation of cultural material....

PS:  That's all I have on today's meeting or its OA agenda.  If anyone has more, I'd love to hear it and, if permitted, publicize it.

Increased citation impact for BioMed Central journals, BMC blog, April 17, 2007. 

Every year, BioMed Central calculates unofficial impact factors for journals that have published a significant number of research articles but do not yet have an official impact factor. These unofficial impact factors use the same citation data and methodology used by Thomson Scientific's official impact factor calculations.

Newly calculated unofficial 2006 impact factors show a significantly increased citation rate for BioMed Central journals. For example, BMC Biology and BMC Medicine, the flagship journals of the BMC series, both increased their unofficial impact factors significantly. The 2006 unofficial impact factor for BMC Biology is 4.43 (up from 3.81 in 2005) while for BMC Medicine the 2006 figure is 4.17 (up from 2.52 in 2005).

Updated unofficial impact factors for more than 50 journals published by BioMed Central are listed on our Impact Factor FAQ page, alongside details of official impact factors for a further 26 journals.

Overall, the average unofficial impact factor for a BioMed Central journal increased by 0.39 compared to 2005. Other BioMed Central journals with impressive unofficial 2006 impact factors include Journal of Neuroinflammation (4.36), Retrovirology (4.32), Cardiovascular Diabetology (4.00), Molecular Cancer (3.62) and Journal of Translational Medicine (3.30). Updated official 2006 impact factors will be released by Thomson Scientific in June.

[Stuart] Shieber, Why Don’t Scholars Provide Open Access to Their Articles? Harvard Interactive Media Group, April 17, 2007.  Blurb for a public talk to be given at Harvard today:

Let us stipulate, for the purpose of discussion, that open access to the scholarly literature is a Good Thing for the individual scholars and for society as a whole. Why then, do scholars not make their articles available through open access? In particular, why are institutional repositories so poorly populated? (See, for instance, Institutional Repositories: Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University’s Installation of DSpace.) The question is not idle; as Harvard University contemplates setting up an institutional repository, it behooves us to make sure that the effort is worthwhile and that a significant fraction of the scholarly article output of the faculty end up available therein. I will review the background on the issue and then make a proposal that I believe could lead to extremely high availability rates at modest cost. The proposal does, however, require the enthusiastic participation of the free culture movement.

DSA has blogged some notes on the panel discussion, Trying the Gold Road on a Shoestring Budget: Open Access Publishing with PKP's Open Journal System, at CNI's Spring 2007 Task Force Meeting (Phoenix, April 16-17, 2007).  Excerpt:

Speakers: Nancy John (UI [University of Illinois] Chicago), Edward Valauskas (First Monday)....

Needless to say, I was drawn to this session not only because I am quite familiar with PKP/OJS from attending Access in Canada, but because we in K-State [Kansas State University] Libraries have discussed moving into the role of publisher, and this desire recently found expression in our strategic plan. While Cornell and other partners (including the U of Utah as I learned at dinner last night) are busy at work on DPubs, it has yet to become a full-fledged publishing platform, as opposed to OJS, which can handle the full lifecycle of journal publishing, from submission to archiving.

UIC's goal was to highlight the work of UIC faculty, support the emergence of OA journals, educate the campus about intellectual property, and demonstrate the library's leadership role in this arena. In addition to journal publishing, they also have a DSpace-backed repository administered by the library.

All of this came about after a 2005 program on scholarly communication, where faculty were able to discuss the various issues related to journal publishing: quality, quantity, academic freedom, promotion/tenure concerns, need for campus support to do editing, archiving, etc. Faculty engaged in the work were "going under," i.e.- being overwhelmed by the work, so the library went on a search to manage the process. They found a faculty member who edited a journal (Behavior and Social Issues). The journal hadn't actually published an issue in some time, since they were woefully behind in their work. The library offered to 'rescue' the journal and opted to use the PKP/OJS. She said the install time was 15 minutes and that the software requires little customization. The documentation taught the editor how to use it in under an hour (as promised by the name of the document: OJS in Under an Hour).

Their second partner was First Monday, previously published by Munksgaard online only. Started in 1995, first issue in May 1996. Munksgaard did it for three years as an open journal, then decided to charge, so the editors pulled it out and moved it to UIC (Jan 1999). The journal is very successful: 795 papers, 132 issues, 951 authors, 30-40 countries represented, 6.4 million downloads in 2006. Check out the Web page for this journal; right there on the bottom of the page is the name University of Illinois Chicago Library! ...

Charles W. Bailey Jr. has collected some links for journals offering OA podcasts.

In a recent SSP-L message, Mark Johnson, Journal Manager of HighWire Press, identified three journals that offer podcasts or digital audio files:

• BJM
• JAMA
• New England Journal of Medicine

Here are a few others:

• ACS Chemical Biology
• Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine
• The Journal of Law, Economics and Policy
• The Journal of Neurologic Physical Therapy
• The Lancet
• Nature
• Science

Péter Jacsó reviewed Science.gov 4.0 in his column for Thomson Gale, March 2007.  (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)  Excerpt:

The U.S. government has produced many valuable open access full-text and abstracting/indexing databases and developed excellent hosting systems. Beyond the very well known and widely used databases of the National Institutes of Health hosted on the excellent Entrez system, these include many other databases and services: the ERIC database and service (with more than 100,000 full text documents), the useful Energy Citations and even more useful Information Bridge full text databases of the DOE, the excellent Transportation Research Information Services, TRIS Online, the outstanding NCJRS (National Criminal Justice Reference Service) with ever growing full text coverage and very smart software, the not so outstanding but important NTIS database with subset of its indexing/abstracting records. There are many other open access government databases which include full text scientific documents and/or indexing/abstracting records....

Science.gov is...a much better tool for searching science and technology-related documents than Google's special U.S. Government search or the Microsoft-powered USASearch.gov....

Open Medicine launched today, but already the web site is overwhelmed with traffic.  Give it a few hours and try again.  While you're waiting, read some of the voluminous press coverage.

Update.  I finally got in.  Here's an excerpt from James Maskalyk's editorial in the inaugural issue:

...To attain their true worth, medical journals need to place the knowledge on their pages into as many capable hands as possible. In the past, this opportunity was limited mainly to those with a university library close by. Now, because of the Internet, one simply needs to be near a telephone line. The capacity of medical journals to disseminate knowledge has never been greater.

Unfortunately, physicians attempting to answer a clinical question are faced with two unappealing options: to navigate a sea of unedited pages of varying quality, or to pay for access to more carefully reviewed scholarly information. It seems an anathema to the spirit of medical research that, largely for economic reasons, the information it produces remains hidden from many potential users. Access is limited not only for health professionals in poorer countries, but also for health care providers in wealthy countries (most of whom do not have "free" access to information unless they work in universities), and for patients, who deserve the opportunity to become informed about research that affects their lives. The transformation of research findings and discussion of the results — the application of knowledge — is curtailed. Just as importantly, the debate over its merit is stifled before it can properly begin.

There is a necessary cost to medical publishing, the publisher's pursuit of profit notwithstanding. The reviewing and editing processes that help to ensure the reliability of information is intensive, requiring considerable resources. However, the costs of editing and peer review, where possible, should not be borne by the end user, but should be shared by a broader group in society who acknowledge that the utility of information lies in its application and that the health of individuals and populations is a common good. There is increasing recognition that the costs of publishing the results of medical research should be built into funding grants as an integral part of the cost of research: without dissemination, knowledge cannot truly be said to exist.

Traditional modes of medical journal publishing can also exact a price in other, less noticeable, ways. There is clear evidence of publication bias in medical journals predicated on financial conflicts, geography and poverty. There are also several important instances where information and debate have been stifled because of private and political concerns over making knowledge public. To an important degree, the impetus to launch Open Medicine arose from widespread dismay in the Canadian and international medical community over one such attempt to suppress open discussion and restrict the scope of health care discourse. Further, too much of the revenue that sustains medical journals comes from pharmaceutical advertising that attempts to influence physicians into making decisions based on brand recognition rather than on discerning scholarship.

Medical knowledge should be public and free from undeclared influence. When possible, it should be free for those who apply it. Since people's lives depend on it, that knowledge must be filtered several times before it is ready to use. Studies need to be peer reviewed, to have their statistics analyzed, their content edited, then copy edited, then published quickly for as wide an audience as possible. The prospect of having a high-quality source of information that held true to these principles but was also free and globally accessible was impossible to imagine 20 years ago....

[I]is our intention to make the journal not only open, but also collaborative. As an example, the editors considered the merits of publishing peer reviews along with accepted papers, and began reviewing the published evidence on the effectiveness of open peer review. Before reaching consensus, we realized that this is a discussion our readers and contributors should actively participate in. As we developed Open Medicine, we made extensive use of a wiki site and quickly realized how well it captured our combined efforts. We will continue to experiment with its use as an editing tool, and are discussing ways to add a wiki to our public site.

Information technology is evolving at a blistering pace. To try to keep step with its potential to influence medical science and practice, Open Medicine is hosting a blog on the topic. To manage it, we are using an open-source program (Drupal). So, too, for our manuscript management system (OJS)....Our intent is to harness as much power as possible from the collaborative potential of a connected world. With it, Open Medicine can publish articles as soon as they are peer reviewed and edited, host the discussion on their interpretation and perhaps even watch them change. Once they are published, they will be available to the widest possible audience and to the worldwide media who can cast them even further....

Ultimately, the success of Open Medicine will depend on how important our readers believe it is to have open access to high-quality medical information that is as free from commercial and political influence as possible. We believe there are few things more important....

Also see these two articles from the Analysis and Comment section:

• Gavin Yamey and four co-authors, The joys and challenges of being an open access medical journal
• Matthew E. Falagas, Peer review in open access scientific journals