Open Access News

Internet Archaeology: creating an Open Access success story, a press release from JISC, May 25, 2007.  Excerpt:

Internet Archaeology was established in 1996 with funding until July 2001 from the JISC eLib programme. Innovative since its inception, it was the first refereed online e-journal in Archaeology and has been very successful in gaining international recognition as a high-quality academic journal....

Internet Archaeology is unique in Archaeology in that it is a multi-media journal available exclusively on the Web; it has no print equivalent. It includes elements that would be impossible in a paper publication, such as searchable databases to analyse online; full-colour, interactive images; video footage; virtual reality models and access to related digital archive material. This allows the subscriber to choose the level of detail required through a variety of indexing and searching methods to provide new opportunities to enrich teaching and research. For example students can work interactively with archaeological material, which facilitates active learning. Archaeologists can use this resource to examine examples of best practice when designing fieldwork projects and data management systems.

Internet Archaeology 2008-2009: Open Access for UK HE and FE

Two year funding from JISC Collections will help Internet Archaeology with the transition to Open Access. The funding for the period from 1st January 2007 to 31st December 2009 will allow free access, from January 2008, (to issues 22-25 of the journal) to the growing number of universities and colleges that teach Archaeology....

The funding period also provides Internet Archaeology with the opportunity to develop its long-term Open Access model as it seeks to generate a growing proportion of its revenue from publication subventions from research councils, commercial developers, and state funding archaeological agencies....

Internet Archaeology Archive 1996-2006

JISC Collections has also purchased the Internet Archaeology Archive 1996-2006 (which includes issues 1 to 21 inclusive) on behalf of UK higher and further education institutions, which means they can now have permanent access to ten years of rich multimedia scholarly content completely free of charge. Content ranges from excavation reports (incorporating text, photographs, data, drawings, reconstruction diagrams, interpretations) and analysis of large data sets along with the data itself, to visualisations and applications of information technology in archaeology....

PS:  I can't tell whether the free online access will be limited to users from UK institutions.  If anyone knows the answer, please drop me a line.

Update. I just learned from Liam Earney at JISC that the newly-funded free online access will be limited to the UK. However, Lorraine Estelle at JISC reassures me that IA plans to use some of its new funding to prepare for full worldwide OA.

Heather Morrison, Demystifying open access journals: pure gold, a presentation at the Canadian Library Association Annual Conference (St. John's, May 23-26, 2007).  Self-archived May 24, 2007.

Abstract:   A brief overview of open access publishing (pure gold, i.e. no delayed back access) and library involvement, with a focus on the Canadian scene. Includes audience quizzes. Part of a panel designed to stimulate discussion on open access publishing.

Today is fifth birthday of Open Access News.  Blogger says it has 11,066 posts, which comes to about six a day.  (About 200 were written by my co-contributors during the period when OAN was a group blog.)  I'm sure that the last couple of years bring up the average and that the slope of the curve is rising rather than falling.  There's nothing else I'd rather be doing right now, but that relentless growth is ominous and I have to keep reminding myself that it reflects the steadily mounting worldwide momentum for OA.

The presentations from the session on the current status of open access at the Council of Science Editors 2007 Annual Meeting (Austin, May 18-22, 2007) are now online at the home page of the DC Principles Coalition:

• Martin Frank, Society View of OA
• Matthew Cockerill, The View from Europe
• Peter Banks, The Value of OA

Italy's Università degli Studi di Salerno has signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge.

Judith Winters, New ways to unlock potential of research, AHDS Newsletter, Spring/Summer 2007.  Excerpt:

AHDS Archaeology and the e-journal Internet Archaeology are working together on the LEAP project: Linking Electronic Archives and Publications. Judith Winters (editor of Internet Archaeology) provides a short summary of the main aims and objectives of the project

What is LEAP?

LEAP is a project to investigate novel ways to combine the interpretive analysis of publications with the underlying data of archives. To do this, the project will use four exemplars of multi-layered e-publications and e-archives. LEAP will also examine how new ways of combining publications and data can be applied beyond archaeology across the arts and humanities.

Aims of LEAP

• To explore questions of linking between distributed archives and e-publications and to investigate the ways in which e-publications can be interactive, multi-layered and underpinned by supporting data.
• To look at how multiple forms of dissemination can be used for different audiences.
• To implement dynamic interfaces between and within resources that can accommodate different types of user.
• To assess how far tailored interfaces are capable of long-term preservation.
• To examine other questions which arise from this means of dissemination: quality control, peer review, IPR, citation....

Ben Bridgewater and eight co-authors, Has the publication of cardiac surgery outcome data been associated with changes in practice in northwest England, BMJ, June 2007.  Abstract:  

Objectives: To study changes in coronary artery surgery practice in the years spanning publication of cardiac surgery mortality data in the UK.

Methods: A retrospective analysis of prospectively collected data from all National Health Service centres undertaking adult cardiac surgery in northwest England was carried out. Patients undergoing coronary artery surgery for the first time between April 1997 and March 2005 were included. Changes in observed, predicted and risk adjusted mortality (EuroSCORE) were studied. Evidence of risk-averse behaviour was looked for by examining the number of patients at low risk (EuroSCORE 0–5), high risk (6–10), and very high risk (11 or more), before and after public disclosure.

Results: 25 730 patients underwent coronary artery surgery during the study period. The observed mortality decreased from 2.4% in 1997–8 to 1.8% in 2004–5 (p = 0.014). The expected mortality (EuroSCORE) increased from 3.0 to 3.5 (p<0.001). The observed to expected mortality ratio decreased from 0.8 to 0.51 (p<0.05). The total number and percentage of patients who were at low risk, high risk and very high risk was 2694 (84.6%), 449 (14.1%) and 41 (1.3%) before and 2654 (81.7%), 547 (16.8%) and 47 (1.4%) after public disclosure, respectively, demonstrating a significant increase in the number and proportion of high risk patients undergoing surgery (p<0.001).

Conclusions: Publication of cardiac surgery mortality data in the UK has been associated with decreased risk adjusted mortality on retrospective analysis of a large patient database. There is no evidence that fewer high risk patients are undergoing surgery because mortality rates are published.

In the same issue, also see Steven Livesey's comment, Is public access to surgeon-specific data affecting practice adversely?  (No abstract available.)

Roberto Meneghini of BIREME has called for OA to Brazilian research.  Read the Portuguese original in the Jornal da Ciênca or Google's English.  (Thanks to Donat Agosti.)

PS:  Just last week BIREME required the journals indexed in LILACS or SciELO, and publishing articles on clinical drug trials, to require OA to the underlying trial data.

The International Publishers Association (IPA) has released released an English translation of the Bundesrat Decision of May 11, 2007.  Excerpt:

Decision of the Bundesrat

Communication from the Commission of the European Communities to the European Parliament, the Council and the European Economic and Social Committee on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation

COM (2007) 56 final; Council Doc. 5748/07

In its 833rd session on 11 May 2007, pursuant to §§ 3 and 5 EUZBLG (Act on Cooperation between the Federation and the Federal States in European Union Affairs), the Bundesrat adopted the following Opinion:

1. The Bundesrat generally welcomes the Communication from the Commission taking up the increasingly important topic of knowledge dissemination in the digital age....

The call for the freest possible, immediate and open access to information corresponds with the aim of the EU to increase the competitiveness of the European economy.

2. At the same time, the Bundesrat points out that the call for the freest possible, immediate and open access to scientific information may conflict with the protection of intellectual property, and in particular copyright, which is also a significant criterion for the success of the internal market and the promotion of innovation and creative activity....

3. The Bundesrat therefore welcomes that the Communication does not only present ways to facilitate knowledge transfer, but also outlines the position of publishers, emphasising their central role in the scientific information system.

In this context the Bundesrat particularly welcomes that the Commission recognises the quality control function of publishers of scientific publications, and that it intends to monitor open access experiments - also offensively pursued by publishers, as well as to support their publication costs.

Publishers, and particularly the scientific journals they publish, play a pivotal role in the scientific information system. Over the past years, the publishing industry has undertaken substantial investments in the area of “online publishing”, thereby already contributing to an efficient dissemination of information. In doing this, publishers constantly compete for authors and readers. This ultimately guarantees the high quality of scientific publications....

5. The Bundesrat regards open access publication as an additional method of knowledge dissemination, in particular with regard to research results. However, the Bundesrat also points out that open access does not avoid the costs of knowledge processing and knowledge transfer, but rather shifts them from the users to the authors; that there are also reasons in favour of publishing scientific publications through a publisher.

The Bundesrat welcomes that the Communication does not regard changes, in particular limitations on copyright, as necessary to reach the goals....

6.  The Bundesrat points out that in the light of predominantly effective competition in the market for scientific information, public intervention is advisable only in demonstrably necessary cases and with as low in intensity as possible.

In the view of the Bundesrat, the co-financing of research infrastructures (in particular “digital repositories”) announced by the Commission does raise the fundamental question of the extent to which the supply of information is a public duty. This question should receive particular attention within the framework of the discussion process now launched by the Commission....

Also see the IPA press release accompanying the translation (May 24, 2007).  Excerpt:

IPA welcomes the statement by the Bundesrat. Says IPA Secretary General Jens Bammel: “IPA appreciates the balanced arguments and constructive tone chosen by the Bundesrat. Open access is a great opportunity which must be explored. At the same time care must be taken that we do not lose what is in fact working so well in other business models. This debate should be conducted in a measured way, based on sound arguments and empirical facts reflecting the high standards of academic debate in the journals themselves. The Bundesrat statement is a welcome contribution to this debate.“

Adds Jens Bammel: “The principle must be that business models for publishing scientific information should not be mandated by governments but should prove their own value and sustainability in the marketplace, and with the researchers how freely chose the most appropriate journal for each article.”

Comments. For background, the Bundesrat was discussing the EC's Communication on access to scientific information in the digital age, February 15, 2007.  For my thoughts on the same EC Communication, see SOAN for March 2, 2007,

1. First I thank the IPA for making and circulating this English translation.
2. The good news for OA supporters is that the Bundesrat endorses the goal of OA, more or less ("The call for the freest possible, immediate and open access to information corresponds with the aim of the EU to increase the competitiveness of the European economy.")
3. The good news in a minor key is that the Bundesrat's reservations about OA are based on misunderstandings.  There's hope that we can educate the members and counteract the publisher lobbying whose effects show so strongly here.  On the other hand, the Bundesrat has already acted and the chances for reconsideration any time soon are slight.
4. OA needn't interfere with copyright.  If the Bundesrat objection ("the call for the freest possible, immediate and open access to scientific information may conflict with...copyright") is abstract, and includes sloppy or careless implementations of OA, then it's true.  But in exactly the same way, TA publishing may also conflict with copyright.  If the claim is more specific, that certain OA proposals conflict with copyright, then the Bundesrat has not specified the proposals or the conflicts and we can only wait until it does so.  Moreover, the objection is contradicted by the Bundesrat's own acknowledgment in #5 that "the [EC] Communication does not regard changes, in particular limitations on copyright, as necessary to reach the goals...."
5. [T]he Bundesrat also points out that open access does not avoid the costs of knowledge processing and knowledge transfer, but rather shifts them from the users to the authors.... Where does one start with this bolus of misinformation?  First, no serious proponent of OA ever said that OA publishing was costless.  Second, the Bundesrat is apparently focused on fee-based OA journals.  But let's disentangle this.  Even fee-based OA journals do not usually shift costs to authors.  They charge publication fees but the fees are usually paid by funders or employers, not by authors out of pocket; and many fee-based journals will waive the fees in cases of economic hardship.  Beyond this, most OA journals do not even charge fees.  And beyond this, the EC Communication was not even talking about OA journals.  It was talking about OA repositories, which never charge fees.
6. The Bundesrat points out that in the light of predominantly effective competition in the market for scientific information.... This is an unfunny joke that could only have been written by a publisher lobbyist.
7. Finally, Jens Bammel's argument that we should let the market decide which models to adopt is easily answered.  Scientific research and publication are permeated by government spending and government policies, and do not represent a market in any ordinary sense. In Europe, as in the US and around the world, most scientific research is funded by taxpayers, most scientists work at public institutions and are paid by taxpayers, and most subscriptions to subscription-based journals are bought by public institutions and paid by taxpayers. If publishers really mean that government money and policymaking should keep out of this sector, then they should say so. But they would go bankrupt under such a rule. What they really want is the present arrangement of government subsidies for the work they publish, government subsidies for their own subscription fees, and double-payments by taxpayers who want access. (That's a market?)

WideOpenEducation is a new blog devoted to open access and open source, especially in higher education.  It's sponsored by the Online Education Database.  From its inaugural post:

The term ‘open education’ refers to the free exchange of educational ideas among universities, organizations, educators, and students. The widespread use of the Internet has made it possible for these groups to collaborate more efficiently than ever before and create a robust system that benefits everyone. According to Chris Lehmann, “[T]eachers have long known that the best methods of teaching are only made better with collaboration with peers.” This collaboration forms the core of open education.

Open education takes shape in the form of open educational resources, or OERs. There are three different types of OERs:

1. Learning content, which may include journals, collections, and open courseware.
2. Learning tools, which may include software, content management systems, content development, and publishing and development initiatives.
3. Implementation resources, which may include intellectual property licenses, design principles, and localization of content.

Wide Open Education’s focus will be on all of these aspects of open education as well as any tangentially-related matters. Enjoy!

Cory Doctorow, Google Print doesn't do exclusive deals with libraries, but still holds the public domain tight to its chest, Boing Boing, May 24, 2007.  Excerpt:

A couple weeks back, I blogged about NPR's segment on digital libraries, where Brewster Kahle criticized Google for striking exclusivity deals with libraries that prohibited Google's competitors from scanning their collections.

Google has replied, saying that it doesn't have any such deal with the libraries, and they've put it in writing. They've even included one of their library contracts. This is really, really good news.

I'm still disappointed that Google puts restrictive notices on their public domain works (these aren't licenses, just "polite notices") that tell what you're not allowed to do with these books. I know they're worried about their competitors getting ahold of those documents, but that's the deal with the public domain: it doesn't belong to you, period, it belongs to all of us. Just because you scan a public domain book, it doesn't confer the right to control it to you.

More importantly: Google is betting that it will make more money by locking these books up to be merely read than it could by making them available as a giant tarball for the Internet to bend, spindle, mutilate and fold. That merely hosting these will generate more pageviews than turning them loose for remix, mashup, scholarship and other forms of inventive re-use.

It just doesn't seem like Google, betting against the Internet's creativity and capacity to innovate. I know they've got a lot of smart people there, but I hope they understand that they don't have all the smart people. Google makes the bulk of its money by indexing the cool stuff other people make. Why restrict people from making more cool stuff? ...

Travis C. Brooks, Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics: A Brief Introduction for the non-Expert, a preprint posted to arXiv May 23, 2007. 

Abstract:   Open Access to particle physics literature does not sound particularly new or exciting, since particle physicists have been reading preprints for decades, and arXiv.org for 15 years. However new movements in Europe are attempting to make the peer-reviewed literature of the field fully Open Access. This is not a new movement, nor is it restricted to this field. However, given the field's history of preprints and eprints, it is well suited to a change to a fully Open Access publishing model. Data shows that 90% of HEP published literature is freely available online, meaning that HEP libraries have little need for expensive journal subscriptions. As libraries begin to cancel journal subscriptions, the peer review process will lose its primary source of funding. Open Access publishing models can potentially address this issue. European physicists and funding agencies are proposing a consortium, SCOAP3, that might solve many of the objections to traditional Open Access publishing models in Particle Physics. These proposed changes should be viewed as a starting point for a serious look at the field's publication model, and are at least worthy of attention, if not adoption.

George Siemens, Scholarship in an age of participation, Emerald InTouch, March 27, 2006.  Siemens proposes an open access, open review journal for "emerging trends in educational technology and pedagogy, exploring fields of social software, connectivism, and networked learning" and calls on interested colleagues to contact him.

Wessex Archaeology adopts Creative Commons license for photos, Past Thinking, May 24, 2007.  (Thanks to Jo Cook.)

[Disclaimer: I work for Wessex Archaeology]

Wessex Archaeology have just announced that they will be using a Creative Commons license for the 600+ photos that they have on Flickr and in their gallery.

Let’s hope that other heritage organisations follow suit. The “All Rights Reserved” copyright model is very restrictive when you study and record the past, and want to share some of that work with others to aid and encourage further learning.

By adopting the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0? license, they are actively saying to people “we want you to use our photos”. Which for a heritage organisation, is fairly novel!

The British Epigraphy Society is digitizing and providing OA to the backfile of BES News.  (Thanks to Charles Ellwood Jones.)

Sandra Porter, Finding scientific papers for free, one more experiment, Discovering Biology in a Digital World, May 24, 2007.  Excerpt:

I meant for this to be a three part series, but in part II, I learned that one more experiment had to be done. I had to know if the articles I found in PubMed Central were the same articles that I found in PubMed.

Part I and part III cover the background and my favorite method. Now, we're going to find out if my favorite method is really enough....

To test this, I did a PubMed search with term "cancer," as before, and limited the search to free, full, text.

Then, I clicked the Preview/Index tab, opened the Filter field, and selected either the pubmed pmc free filter or the pubmed pmc filter....

Then, I clicked the AND button to add that term to my query. (Using the AND, OR, or NOT buttons works wonderfully, because everything is properly formatted with quotes and brackets.)

In part II, I found 220,219 articles on cancer in PubMed and 171,702 articles in PubMed Central. In today's experiment, I found that only 52,160 articles (a little more than a third, were shared between the two databases).

What's the take home message?

PubMed Central contains articles that are not available in PubMed (with limits). So, to get as many articles as you can, you do need to search both databases. And, if that doesn't work, my commenters (here and here) have left a number of excellent suggestions!

Carl Bergstrom, Eigenfactor: Measuring the value and prestige of scholarly journals, C&RL News, May 2007.  This is the first full account of the Eigenfactor as a measurement of citation impact, its algorithm, its intended uses, and its advantages over other impact measurements.  I won't post an excerpt because the article doesn't directly touch on OA issues.  But I will point out that Eigenfactor results are free of charge.

Tom Matrullo, A conversation with JSTOR's Bruce Heterick, Improprieties, May 24, 2007.  (Thanks to David Weinberger.)  Excerpt:

I had a good conversation the other day with Bruce Heterick, Director, Library Relations, at JSTOR.... 

[My] recent interest in JSTOR [is] mainly derived from (1) searching for certain topics in the Humanities and Social Sciences, (2) discovering with glee that interesting articles from scholarly journals are now online, (3) realizing with consternation that such articles lie behind an institutional barrier that blocks access to anyone not affiliated with a participating institution, and (4) registering puzzlement that anyone would take all sorts of pains to firewall knowledge -- knowledge mainly produced by scholars at not-for-profit institutions of higher learning devoted to bringing light into our world.

Heterick was generous with his time, and patient with my questions....

[H]ere's the maybe-if-and-when good news, the presiding lights behind JSTOR are now looking at various ways and means to open its treasurehouse to all, because they understand that that makes all sorts of sense. They simply have to ensure that by doing so, they don't remove the parts of their economic model that have enabled them to build a self-sufficient, independent 501(c)3 organization in a relatively short time.

Let me back up and offer some of what Heterick shared with me about JSTOR (more background here and, in book form via here.)

The founding aim of JSTOR was less dissemination than preservation....

[PS:  Here omitting good detail on the current JSTOR business model, range of content, and range of paying users.]

[A]long the way [JSTOR has] begun to look at the possibilities for more open access to its collections. Any qualifying institution in Africa can get access to its entire collection for free. There are special rates for high schools and an effort to get more public libraries to buy in.

Enter Google

Now, all this was taking place in the background, without much in the way of public notice, until last year, when JSTOR allowed Google to spider its online archives....

At which point, Heterick said, requests for JSTOR's online material "exploded." JSTOR found itself in the interesting position of letting it teasingly be known that it has an astonishing wealth of scholarship at the same time as it was saying to any unaffiliated researcher at its gate: "Not now."
JSTOR hadn't thought of offering a pay-per-view access before Google crawled its archive. Now, as of January, JSTOR has invited its publishers to make their titles available to unaffiliated researchers on a pay-per-view basis....

[S]till, the goal of open access is very much on its mind.

“It’s not a question of if we should do it but when we can do it and not devolve our preservation goals,” he says. “Would people or libraries be willing to pay to maintain JSTOR and maintain its long term mission of archiving? We don’t know… .”

Would institutional libraries continue to pay the subscription fees if the journals were openly available to all? On one hand, why should they? Still, it's not impossible: after all, JSTOR is ensuring the immortality of the work of...scholars at these same universities. It's also saving the costs of continually adding space....

Comment.  This is important and could become be a huge step toward OA in the social sciences and the humanities.  I talked to the Mellon Foundation in 2004 about the possibility of OA to sufficiently old and amortized back issues of participating journals, and the answer was not a flat no.  The door was ajar.  It's very heartening to hear that the door is opening further and that JSTOR now considers OA to be a goal.

The NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure has launched the Community-based Data Interoperability Networks (INTEROP) project and is now soliciting proposals (May 23, 2007).  (Thanks to Clifford Lynch.)  From the solicitation:

Synopsis of Program.  Digital data are increasingly both the products of research and the starting point for new research and education activities.  The ability to re-purpose data – to use it in innovative ways and combinations not envisioned by those who created the data – requires that it be possible to find and understand data of many types and from many sources. Interoperability (the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged) is fundamental to meeting this requirement.   This NSF crosscutting program supports community efforts to provide for broad interoperability through the development of mechanisms such as robust data and metadata conventions, ontologies, and taxonomies. Support is provided for Data Interoperability Networks that will be responsible for consensus-building activities and for providing the expertise necessary to turn the consensus into technical standards with associated implementation tools and resources.  Examples of the former are community workshops, web resources such as community interaction sites, and task groups.  Examples of the latter are information sciences, software development, and ontology and taxonomy design and implementation....

Approximately 10 awards may be made in each of the fiscal years 2008, 2009, and 2010 subject to the quality of proposals and pending the availability of funds. Awards may be up to $250,000 total costs per year for three to five years....

The due date for the first round of funding is August 23, 2007.

Abstracts of the presentations on Open Data at XTech 2007 (Paris, May 15-18, 2007) are now online.

Paul Miller, Linked Data - the real Semantic Web? Nodalities, May 22, 2007.  (Thanks to Peter Murray-Rust.)  Excerpt:

It has been interesting to follow the rise of the 'Linked Data' meme in the Semantic Web community recently, and to track it alongside longer term (but quieter) mutterings around 'Open Data' from the likes of Tim O'Reilly and XTech programme committees past and present.

The recent push is due in no small part, I believe, to the sterling efforts of the Linking Open Data community, and to the support they've been receiving from W3C's Semantic Web Education & Outreach (SWEO) group, of which I'm a rather quiet member.

Listening to Tim Berners-Lee's keynote in Banff a week or so back, there was a strong steer toward 'Linked Data', and the opportunities presented by the relationships between resources and the aggregate of those resources. This thread came up again and again, most notably in the Linked/Open Data sessions. Thinking about it again, the whole Linked Data thrust actually comes across as a far more compelling way to describe the value of the Semantic Web to the non-geek audience....

If the Web of Data is the target, of course, the thorny issue of to whom the data belong, and the ways in which the data may be used, come to the fore once more. This is an area we've been tackling with contributions such as the Talis Community License, and it came up in Rob's contribution in Banff [Rob's audio here, PDF of everyone's slides here], as well as papers from both of us at XTech last week....

One conversation from last week that has carried over onto email this week was with Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation. They don't have a license, but they do usefully define a set of principles to underpin the notion of 'open knowledge', and they explicitly include the separate notion of data....

We're seeing movement as a growing body of implementors, commentators and analysts recognise the potential of linking disparate data resources together, leveraging some of the more basic capabilities of RDF and other Semantic Web enabling technologies. We're also seeing a matching awareness of the need to protect use of those data sets (and not merely to safeguard the interests of data owners, but also - and far more tellingly - to give confidence to data aggregators and users), and a refreshing willingness to engage openly and cooperatively in reaching a pragmatic solution. It's a great time to be involved in this space, and Talis looks forward to playing our full part across the piece.

Melanie Bates and three co-authors, Attitudes to the rights and rewards for author contributions to repositories for teaching and learning, ALT-J, March 2007.  Only this abstract is free online for non-subscribers, at least so far:

In the United Kingdom over the past few years there has been a dramatic growth of national and regional repositories to collect and disseminate resources related to teaching and learning. Most notable of these are the Joint Information Systems Committee's Online Repository for [Learning and Teaching] Materials as well as the Higher Education Academy's subject specific resource databases. Repositories in general can hold a range of materials not only related to teaching and learning, but more recently the term 'institutional repository' is being used to describe a repository that has been established to support open access to a university's research output. This paper reports on a survey conducted to gather the views of academics, support staff and managers on their past experiences and future expectations of the use of repositories for teaching and learning. The survey explored the rights and rewards associated with the deposit of materials into such repositories. The findings suggest what could be considered to be an 'ideal' repository from the contributors' perspective and also outlines many of the concerns expressed by respondents in the survey.

Financial rewards for nanotech science authors and peer reviewers, a press release from AZoM.com ("The A to Z of Materials"), May 22, 2007.  (Thanks to Jim Till.)  Excerpt:

The AZo Journal of Nanotechnology Online...has recently notified all authors and peer reviewers of their revenue share earnings for the last 12 month period.

Authors of the most popular papers have earned in excess of $500 for their contributions under the AZoNetwork Patented OARS (Open Access Revenue Share) scheme and peer reviewers have earned between $100 and $500 for their efforts.

Due to the free and open access nature of the journal and the size of the AZoNano.com online audience, which now exceeds 350,000 monthly visitor sessions, the most popular AZoJono paper has been viewed more than 17,000 times in the last 12 months.

Professor Chennupati Jagadish, Federation Fellow at the Australian National University and member of the AZoJono peer review team commented, "The AZo Journal of Nanotechnology Online (AZoJono) has been leading the open access publications in Nanotechnology with timely publication of manuscripts as well as rewarding authors, reviewers and editors for their efforts. The number of downloads of some of the papers published in AZoJono has been phenomenal."

Don Maclurcan, from the Institute for Nanoscale Technology, University of Technology, Sydney and an AZoJono author commented, "Quality publishing with an online, open-access journal that financially rewarded its authors and reviewers seemed beyond belief. I was wrong. Not only were my papers rapidly disseminated around the globe but I also received a nice Christmas bonus!"

Dr. Ian Birkby, the inventor of the OARS scheme and CEO of the operator of AZoNano.com, the online publisher, AZoNetwork, commented,... "Although we accept it is unlikely that financial reward is the main aim of authors, it is nevertheless significant that we have proved that high quality science writing can be rewarded financially whilst at the same time be distributed in a true open access format. Although the current results are but a small beginning, we believe they nevertheless represent a significant change in the scientific publishing landscape and we look forward to employing our Open Access Revenue Share scheme into other scientific disciplines."

PS:  Recall that earlier this month AZoM won a Hitwise Australia award for online leadership in manufacturing and industry.  For more on AZoM's patented OA business model, my comment in SOAN for October 2005.

Germany's Aktionsbündnis: Urheberrecht für Bildung und Wissenschaft (Coalition for Action: Copyright for Education and Research) issued a press release yesterday on its communications with the national ministries of science and culture.  The coalition asked the ministries whether they agree that the government has a role to play in providing access to publicly-funded research, and where they stand on the conflict between the upper house of Parliament's 2006 support for OA and its May 2007 deference to private publishers.  The coalition also calls on Parliament to resolve its conflicting positions in favor of OA for publicly-funded research.  Read the press release in German or Google's English.

Carl Zimmer, An Open Mouse, The Loom, May 24, 2007.  Excerpt:

[This] is also a chance to add my two cents to a discussion that's been bubbling for a few weeks: the clash between bloggers and scientific journal publishers. Last month Shelley Batts at Retrospectacle wrote a post about a paper, and included a chart that appeared in it. She promptly got a letter from Wiley, the journal's publisher, menacing her with legal action unless she took the chart down. A long discussion then unfolded about fair use, a concept so mystical that I get a headache every time I try to figure out whether it applies to some text or image I'd like to use in my own work. Once the controversy reached Boing-Boing proportions, Wiley sent Batts a note telling her that it was all a big misunderstanding and that they "would typically grant permission on request in order to ensure that figures and extracts are properly credited."

For us science writers, there's a huge irony to this episode. Scientific journals like attention. The better-funded ones will go to great lengths to get stories written about their papers. They offer us science writers elaborately appointed press packages offering sneak peeks at papers coming out in the near future. They sometimes give us the cell phones of the authors of those papers, in case we need to call them in the middle of the night....

But scientific journals also cling to conventions that block the news from spreading --particularly through the online world. Wiley, for example, initially reacted to Shelley not with enthusiasm, but with a menacing note. When Shelley responded by politely asking for permission, she was told to contact another person at Wiley. And when Wiley finally sort-of apologized, they still expected Shelley to jump through conventional hoops to get permission. All this kerfuffle over a little graph. It might have taken days to get permission to reprint it, which in the blogosphere is a geological era. Wiley was, consciously or unconsciously, going out of their way to squash interest in their papers.

Compare Shelley's experience to what I'm about to do. I'm going to --shudder-- reprint a diagram from a journal. Just lift it straight out....

[PS:  Omitting chart and discussion of it.]

[The chart is from] a paper they published last summer in the journal PLOS Genetics....

And what do I now hear from PLOS? Do I hear the grinding of lawyerly knives?  No. I hear the blissful silence of Open Access, a slowly-spreading trend in the journal world.  PLOS makes it very clear on their web site that "everything we publish is freely available online throughout the world, for you to read, download, copy, distribute, and use (with attribution) any way you wish." No muss, no fuss. If I want to blog about this paper right now, I can grab a relevant image right now from it. In fact, I just did.

I certainly appreciate the importance of copyrights (as the owner of many for my articles and books), but in these situations, keeping information behind a thick wall starts to seem a bit crazy, like the loss of precious bodily fluids. Far from committing some sort of violation to the PLOS paper, I have actually just spread the word about it. A few readers may even go back to read the original. And it was so easy and straightforward for me to do so that I will be very reluctant to bother with anything else.

PS:  The Batts/Wiley story broke in late April when I was traveling.  If I'd been at my desk, I'd have covered it or at least I'd have tried.  But because the comments proliferated explosively, I wasn't at my desk, and I had a full load of other work, I decided that I had to let it go.  I'm glad to catch up a bit with this post.  I'm also glad to have the chance to recommend comments by Mark Chu-Carroll, Cory Doctorow, Matt Hodgkinson, Bill Hooker, Rob Knop, Brock Read, Kaitlin Thaney, Bryan Vickery, and Alan Wexelblat.  Finally, Katherine Sharpe at ScienceBlogs, where the controversy began, solicited comments from five "experts and stakeholders" (Jan Velterop of Springer, John Wilbanks of Science Commons, Mark Patterson of PLoS, Matt Cockerill of BMC, and me.)

Ghent University has joined the Google Library Project, becoming its 16th library partner and the fifth from a non-English speaking country.  From Ghent's announcement:

Until now all we have done is to accumulate treasures and carefully arrange them on the shelves of our libraries. … We seem to have forgotten that this immense capital, little used today, could bear abundant fruit. Let us hasten, therefore, if it is possible … to make it completely available to scholars by publishing a universal catalogue.

          (Ferdinand Vander Haeghen, 1867)

Ferdinand Vander Haeghen (1830-1913), Chief Librarian in the nineteenth century already had an Open Access attitude....

It is 140 years later now and Ghent University still has this open mind to projects like Google Book Search. Ghent was the first Belgian University to sign the Berlin declaration on Open Access last February. The Berlin declaration encourages researchers to publish in Open access and holders of cultural heritage to support open access by providing their resources on the internet.

Ghent University is the Belgian partner in the European DRIVER project that aims to create a portal for freely accessible European research output. The University library already added 40,000 cultural heritage photographs and almost 2,700 publications in Open Access. 

And now we are really excited by the perspective of adding so many out op copyright books in Open Access through the partnership with Google’s Library Project. An important asset for the cooperation is the wonderful collection  kept in [our] Booktower. These books came into the library with the French revolution when convents and abbeys were confiscated. The chief librarians in the nineteenth century succeeded in bringing together valuable and unique collections. The most active one was the above mentioned Ferdinand Vander Haeghen. More details can be found in background information.

The partnership with the Google Library Project is the result of an ICT-mission from the Flemish Minister for Science and Innovation Fientje Moerman in which the Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology (IBBT) participated....

Also see the shorter announcements from Google Book Search and Google Librarian Central.

PS:  Google says Ghent is the 15th library partner, but I've been counting the Library of Congress, which participates through the World Digital Library.

Laura Cohen, Social Scholarship on the Rise, Inmersión Educativa, May 23, 2007.

As an academic librarian, I've been trying to get a handle on the emerging parameters of social scholarship. This is the practice of scholarship in which the use of social tools is an integral part of the research and publishing process. The process gains a number of characteristics, including openness, conversation, collaboration, access, sharing and transparent revision.

In this entry, I'm going to paint an idealized picture of this process, gathering together both observations and speculations. I'm not suggesting that any one individual would do all of these things. I'm just looking at the options - or better yet, the opportunities....

A social scholar contributes to the conversation about her research topic by discussing her findings and ruminations on her blog and by inviting comments....

During the source gathering phase of her research, a social scholar shares important citations by depositing and tagging them on academic-oriented bookmarking sites such as Connotea and CiteULike....

A social scholar deposits her works-in-progress in a pre-print repository in order to take advantage of useful comments from peers.

Post publication, a social scholar provides open access to her works by depositing them in a post-print repository, institutional repository, personal Web site, etc....

Whenever possible, a social scholar publishes in open access journals....

MollyK has blogged some notes on the Open Access Panel at Copyright Utopia: Alternative Visions, Methods and Policies (Adelphi, Maryland, May 21-23, 2007). 

Closed is Not Necessarily the Opposite of Open: Open Access Initiatives
Paul Jaeger (moderator), Ann Bartow, Brian Crawford, Heather Joseph, Denise Troll Covey

This session was remarkably hostile, and unfortunately given the complexity of the topic, did little to clarify the issue at hand: Open Access and its potential for radical (and in my opinion, greatly needed) change in the scholarly communications arena. While I don't claim to be an OA expert, I do feel that I have a solid understanding of the principles and issues, and this session made me anxious and frustrated as I realized that people without my background were undoubtedly more confused afterward than before we even began. Despite Heather Joseph's "modern interpretive copyright dance", the session was truly characterized by the following phrases (supplied by panelists, not audience): "pit bull", "fired up", drank a bottle of Tabasco". Nevertheless, there were good points made, which I share below.

• faculty are more concerned with what their peers are doing with OA journals, not about the dysfunction in scholarly communications or serials pricing
• if everyone waits to see what their peers do (chicken & egg issue), then nothing will change!
• to get faculty to go green, must understand current culture in order to change it
• advancement & stature in field are key issues for faculty, not public access; faculty don't understand that there is an access issue...until you cancel journals
• if ILL changes to strict document delivery (current section 108 review) then faculty will likely become interested in publicly accessible materials
• lobby for OA resolution to be adopted by Faculty Senate
• publishing agreements are contracts, and contracts are negotiable
• what is in it for individual researchers? what are the carrots?
• only through use of research findings by others is research impact maximized

On April 30, Heather Piwowar launched Research Remix, a new blog on data sharing and reuse.  (Thanks to Bill Hooker.)  From her about page:

[T]he goal of this blog is to capture my notes as I flail around learning everything I can about data sharing and re-use, with the short-term goal of writing my biomedical informatics doctoral dissertation literature review. Taking notes here out in the open in case it interests anyone else along the way.

See for example her post from yesterday, Nonresponse to data sharing requests:

A few years ago, as I expressed frustration due to lack of a reply from a corresponding author, a professor summarized his experience: one third of authors do not reply when contacted, one third reply but are not able or willing to supply requested data, and one third reply and do supply the information.

I’ve since run across two published reports [one, two] which quantify the nonresponse to data sharing requests. Does anyone have others? ...

What a sorry state of affairs.  In some ways it is understandable. Sharing data is hard. People are busy.  But isn’t sharing data part of a scientist’s job description?

Sandra Porter, Finding scientific papers for free, part III: my new favorite method, Discovering Biology in a Digital World, May 23, 2007.  Excerpt:

This is the third, and last part in a three part series on finding free scientific papers. You can read the first part here: Part I: A day in the life of an English physician and the second part, where I compare different methods, here.

Today, I will show you how to use my new favorite method....

1. Go to the NCBI.

2. Choose the link to PubMed. (It's in the top blue bar, under the DNA icon)

3. Click the Limits tab....

4. Click the box next to "Links to free full text."

5. Select any other Limits that might apply.

I often pick English for the language since I can't read any other language. I wouldn't try to impose too many limits at first....You can always narrow the search later.

6. Enter your search terms and click "Go."

7. Click the Review tab if you wish to read reviews, click links to the articles if you wish to see the abstract and get a link to the publication....

Where to find more info...

1. Cancer Biology covers the different types of literature databases, Boolean operators, combining queries, limiting searches, and using the search history.

2. Allelic Variants of Superoxide Dismutase demonstrates many ways to find information about genetic diseases, and includes my topic for today; how to find free papers in PubMed.

3.  Some of yesterday's readers contributed their favorite search strategies in the comments section.  If you're looking for specific papers, these are some great ideas....   

PS:  For background, see the excerpts from Part I and Part II that I blogged here yesterday.

The presentations from the Couperin Consortium meeting, Journée d'étude sur les Archives Ouvertes (Paris, May 21, 2007), are now online.   (Thanks to the INIST Libre Accès blog.)

GlaxoSmithKline's own OA Clinical Trial Register was a major source of data for a new study showing that Avandia, GSK's drug for diabetes, increases the risk of heart attack.  For details see yesterday's Wall Street Journal.  (Thanks to Ari Friedman.)

Update. Apparently scientists studying Avandia risks don't have access to all the GSK data they'd like. See Jonathan Eisen's post about a radio discussion of the problem and his own phoned-in contribution.

Update. Cory Tomsons warns that the role of open data in this case doesn't mean that we can relax efforts to regulate and improve drug safety. Excerpt:

Open access to the data is a good idea, but it is not enough. Public health cannot take place voluntarily or in a legal vacuum. We need regulation to enforce that open access, we need regulation to uncover harmful effects and screen for snake-oil ‘alternative therapies’, and we need regulation to free doctors and patients from biased sales pitches. Absent this, informed choice about medical treatment is a myth.

News from Ari Friedman's Self-Archiving Initiative:

There is now software available, written in PERL, to check journal policies in a long list of citations and e-mail the authors to ask them to provide archivable versions. If you have any problems adapting the code to your own purposes, please e-mail the author.

I wrote him for additional details and learned this:

It was designed to help create this page. 

Given a webpage of articles in that particular citation format (can be changed with some minor coding), it runs through a list of articles, looks their open access status up in ROMEO, then embeds comments next to each article with that status.  A separate script can then run through and e-mail all the authors whose works are not currently OA.  The text of the e-mail is customizable.  We used it to ask the author to send us a version which we were allowed to make publicly available on our page, but I imagine if it gets any use outside of its original use it will be to ask authors to self-archive the works and provide the link.

PS:  Unlike the email request buttons now available for EPrints and DSpace, Friedman's software applies to online bibliographies, not repositories, sends many queries at once, and can ask authors to deposit their articles, not merely to forward copies of articles already on deposit.  This could be very useful. 

ANKOS (Anatolian University Libraries Consortium) has published a guide to establishing an institutional repository, in Turkish with an English summary.  (Thanks to Bulent Karasozen.)

The slides and video of the colloquium by CERN's Salvatore Mele at Stanford's SLAC, Demystifying Open Access (Palo Alto, May 14, 2007), are now online.  (Thanks to Jens Vigen.)

James Mitchell Crow, Scientists seek indicators of illness, Chemistry World, May 22, 2007.  Excerpt. 

A £17 million fund has been set up by the UK's Medical Research Council (MRC) for research into biomarkers, the tell-tale body chemicals that are associated with particular diseases....

The MRC have contributed £8 million to the fund, with a further £1 million from the British Heart Foundation and £8 million from a range of pharmaceutical and analytical science companies. Money has been awarded on condition that the results are made freely available in open access scientific journals. The projects will run for three years....

Comments. 

• Both the Medical Research Council and British Heart Foundation require OA to the research they fund.  But their policies require deposit in an OA repository, not publication in an OA journal (see their policies here and here respectively).  I suspect that Crow simply mixed these up. 
• What's new and promising (but not unprecedented) is that "a range of pharmaceutical and analytical science companies" would contribute to a research fund with an OA mandate.  Kudos to the leadership in all the contributing companies.

Donat Agosti, Das Urheberrecht behindert die Forschung, Handelszeitung, May 16, 2007.  How copyrights hinder research and how OA accelerates it.

(Because the original is a PDF, I can't link to a machine translation.)

The Gotham Prize is a new annual $1 million award for innovation in cancer research.  It doesn't specifically require OA for research results, but it does specifically try to counteract the data hoarding and secrecy that often accompany promising new ideas, especially in their early stages.  From the FAQ:

For competitive reasons, preliminary research and ideas are often not widely shared. (Though a handful of foundations insist on sharing of preliminary research, this is not the norm)....Research that leads to non-patentable treatments or cures is not usually funded by the for-profit world. Most areas of prevention are ignored. Research that involves long lead times and/or basic science also does not receive enough support. Sharing of preliminary research and new ideas is limited. In recognition of these issues, it is hoped that the Gotham Prize for Cancer Research will help to fill in some of these gaps and lead to accelerated progress in the prevention, diagnosis, etiology and treatment of cancer.

Wikipedia for Data - Freebase, OpenBusiness, May 23, 2007.  Excerpt:

Want to know how many dentists are in one mile vicinity, if they are next to tube stop and are specialists in teeth whitening? Freebase say they can not only give you this information, but that the database behind it will be build Wikipedia style.

Normally one would say this is ‘nuts’, but the team behind it seems promising (and Tim O’Reilly thinks the idea is HUGE).
OpenBusiness has interviewed one of the minds behind Freebase.

Robert Cook is one of the co-founders of Metaweb, the company behind Freebase. The company attempts nothing less than to build a ‘better infrastructure for the Web’.

Behind the Metaweb is also Danny Hillis, serial inventor and entrepreneur who was behind the Connection Machine a parallel supercomputer at MIT....

Freebase aims to be the Wikipedia for data. So naturally OpenBusiness was interested. Also their business model seems cool. They say they will make money through an through an API program. Depending on the commercial vs. non-commer