Open Access News

Timo Hannay, Foo and beyond, Nascent, June 29, 2007.  Hannay is the Director of Web Publishing at the Nature Publishing Group.  Excerpt:

I have an article in this month's STM News (a periodical for science, technology and medical publishers). The full publication is members only, so my draft is reproduced below for anyone who's interested. Appropriately enough, it's basically a summary of the ways in which the O'Reilly alpha-geek crowd has influenced our activities at Nature....

There is another more subtle reason for journal publishers to be interested in databases: the dividing line between the two realms is getting ever fuzzier, and may eventually disappear altogether. As journals have moved online, they have taken on some of the characteristics of databases (searchable, structured, constantly updated). Meanwhile, some databases are starting to mimic certain aspects of journals (peer-reviewed, archival, citable). This has led to the appearance of 'hybrid' publication that are both databases and journals depending on how you look at them. For example, the Molecule Pages, a collaboration between Nature and the University of California at San Diego, is a review journal covering several thousand proteins involved in intracellular signalling. But the information is held in a relational database [PS: and appears to be OA], making it easy to query the data and represent it in numerous different ways; while being archival and citable, it is also continually update[d]....

The idea that everyone can now do their own publishing, making publishers superfluous, is misguided. But publishers do need to adapt....Publishers need to become adept at mitigating gaming and spamming of their systems, and at monetizing web traffic rather than selling subscriptions....

Above all, publishers need to be leading the online charge, not following the scientists we serve. We are the information dissemination experts, so if we aren't pushing the boundaries and testing what's possible in this new world then we're not merely missing out, we're also not doing our jobs. Cynics will point out that most apparent 'opportunities' are a long way from turning a profit, and many probably never will. They're right. Do any of the STM projects I've mentioned above make a lot of money? No. But are they representative of the future of scientific communication, and do they provide a platform on which to build information businesses of the future? You'd better believe it.

I'm a tiny bit concerned that [Suber's] title overstates my position. Subscriptions of various kinds are going to be with us for a long time to come. But in the context of social software (which is what I was writing about in one of the passages he quotes), it often doesn't make sense to charge users directly. That's why I think publishers need to get much, much better at monetising traffic — we're almost all useless at this right now.

Citizendium is planning major changes in governance and scope.  Founder Larry Sanger outlines them in a long letter to the CZ discussion list and excerpts some highlights on the CZ blog. 

Thierry Chanier, Commentary: Open Access To Research And The Individual Responsibility Of Researchers, Language Learning & Technology, June 2007.  A general intro to OA.  From the conclusion:

In this short tour around the scientific publication world, we have seen that free / open access to research findings has been officially acknowledged. But the traditional organization of scholarly publication runs against the objective of allowing the entire annual set of 2.5 million papers to be freely accessed. Thanks to recent academic initiatives, new models of scientific publication have emerged that offer direct open access to journals. They have gained support from various research agencies. This "gold" model for journals should be explored in every discipline, particularly in the Humanities, where large amounts of money are used to support publication. However, it will be a slow process.

Open archives (the "green road") represent the most efficient way of providing full open access through authors’ self-deposits. New open archive services are under continuous development and will enhance research for the reader as well as for the author (Shadbolt, Brody, Carr, & Harnad, 2006). Already the researcher has the choice of depositing in institutional, disciplinary, or thematic repositories, all of which are being interconnected. Conforming to mandates issued from institutions and research agencies, the deposit has to provide the final version of the accepted paper. Access to the deposited article can at that time be set immediately as open access, or it can be set as closed access during any embargo period (6 to 12 months, maximum), with only its metadata freely accessible web-wide until the embargo period is over. During any embargo period, however, a powerful new feature of most repositories (namely, the "Email Eprint Request" button) makes it possible for individual users to semi-automatically and almost-instantaneously request an individual copy of the article by email, for individual use -- just as users had requested reprints by mail in paper days.

A final caveat: authors are encouraged to fix their own copyright statements before signing any transfer to the publisher. This can be easily done when sending the final version of a paper to the publisher, either by including a license such as the Creative Commons (2007) or by depositing a copy of the paper in an open archive repository, which establishes a similar license. As more and more authors take such action, research agencies will be encouraged to explicitly support better copyright policies and invite publishers to rephrase their own licenses. But there is no need to wait until this happens because open access is a property of individual works, and proper attribution of authorship is not a question of copyright law but of community standards.

PS:  Well-done.  I'd only correct one small point in the final paragraph.  Works deposited in an OA repository do not automatically, or even usually, receive a CC license or equivalent as part of the process.  That requires a separate step by the author or someone acting on the author's behalf.

Charles W. Bailey, Jr., A Look Back at Eighteen Years as an Internet Digital Publisher, DigitalKoans, June 29, 2007.  Excerpt:

When I began my digital publishing efforts 18 years ago, the global network environment was much more fragmented than it is today (for details, see The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide), and the primary information access tools were e-mail, FTP, mailing lists, and USENET newsgroups. Gopher servers, which represented a significant advance in information access, would not become available until 1991, and NCSA Mosaic, an early Web browser that ignited interest in the Web, until 1993. You can get a good sense of the context of my digital publishing efforts by consulting the Hobbes’ Internet Timeline v8.2 and the Timeline of the Open Access Movement....

PS:  Charles is not only a pioneer in electronic publishing but in OA publishing.  The best way to get a sense of his extensive contributions is to see the chronology of his publishing activities, and the bibliography about those publications, which I've had to omit from this excerpt.  I only hope this is just a retrospective exhibit for an ongoing career.

InfoBlawg lists 11 OA publications from Chile.  Read the Spanish original or Google's English.

Danah Boyd, Knowledge Access as a Public Good, Britannica Blog, June 27, 2007.

...I entered the academy because I believe in knowledge production and dissemination....I want to help people gain access to information in the hopes that they can create knowledge that is valuable for everyone.  I have lost faith in traditional organizations leading the way to mass access and am thus always on the lookout for innovative models to produce and distribute knowledge....

Knowledge is not static, but traditional publishing models assume that it can be captured and frozen for consumption.  What does that teach children about knowledge?  Captured knowledge makes sense when the only opportunity for dissemination is through distributing physical artifacts, but this is no longer the case.  Now that we can get information to people faster and with greater barriers, why should we support the erection of barriers? ...

Why are we telling our students not to use Wikipedia rather than educating them about how Wikipedia works?  Sitting in front of us is an ideal opportunity to talk about how knowledge is produced, how information is disseminated, how ideas are shared....

Personally, I hold these truths to be self-evident, and I’d rather see us put in the effort to make Wikipedia an astounding resource that can be used by all people than to try to dismantle it simply because it means change.

Comment.  So far, so good.  My only criticism is that Boyd focuses on Wikipedia and seems unaware of the wider world of open access to peer-reviewed research.

The Ethics Committee (Comité d'éthique or COMETS) of France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) has issued an opinion on diffusing the results of research.  (Thanks to the INIST Libre Accès blog.)

The opinion makes eight recommendations, among them that CNRS should [1] support accessible publication systems in order to ensure the broadest possible dissemination of knowledge, [2] educate researchers about different methods of research communication, [3] ensure the open dissemination of data, and [5] think about ways to correct the abuses of the dominant system of monopoly publishing.

Read the French original or Google's English.

Danny Kingsley, Losing access to research, ScienceAlert, June 29, 2007.  Excerpt:

Changes to the way academics will be assessed and funded [in Australia] are a hot topic in learned circles, with the Research Quality Framework (RQF) looming next year if the Government retains office in the upcoming federal election. Unfortunately this new system will be a lost opportunity for opening up access to research results in Australia....

The Federal Government has indicated that it wants to increase the accessibility of Australian research. There is even an ‘Accessibility Framework’ statement about this issue, and the RQF is one of the ways this was to be addressed. So it is surprising that the RQF is being set up in a way that actively prevents open access....

One of the good outcomes of the preparation for the RQF has been that all institutions in the country have either built a repository or are preparing to do so....

But to date, the problem with encouraging open access has not been the creation of repositories. It has repeatedly been demonstrated overseas that self-depositing only accounts for about 15% of total scholarly output if there is no incentive to deposit. So open access enthusiasts were very encouraged late last year when it was announced that for the RQF, academics would be required to place their chosen four best works into a repository for the assessors.

At the time, this requirement seemed to be an excellent step towards increasing both awareness and use of repositories....

Further clarification of the reporting requirements has turned that enthusiasm to disappointment. The problem is copyright....

Recently it was announced that the assessors for the RQF will require the final publisher’s version for their assessment work. That is, the version which is restricted by copyright and cannot be made freely available in a repository....

Another blow to repository managers struggling to keep up with these constantly moving goal posts is the newly announced requirement that the assessors need to be able to click directly through to the publisher’s pdf. Almost without exception, repositories are set up so that each item has a metadata page (listing the author, title and abstract etc) with a link to the pdf....There will need to be a major reconfiguration of existing repositories to remove this page in order to fulfil this new requirement....

In the rush to ensure the RQF starts in March 2008, many of the original philosophies behind the system are being lost. Certainly what looked last year like a great opportunity to open up access to Australian science, now looks like the door being slammed once more on the people who paid for it.

Academia, IT Industry Leaders Create New Principles for Sharing Collaborative Research, a press release from IBM, June 27, 2007.  Excerpt:

...[L]eading universities and information technology (IT) companies announced today a set of guiding principles for sharing intellectual property resulting from collaborative research.

The new Free Participant Use Principles are designed to provide a common starting point for discussions about collaboration in an industry where cross-licensing of technology is the norm, and rapid time to market is the business imperative....

The principles document an additional model for handling the intellectual property rights that arise from collaborative research between industry and university participants. They will be useful in situations where the participants intend for the results to be available to each other without fee, and to be available to others on either a free or reasonable fee basis....

One of Gordon Brown's first acts as the new UK Prime Minister was to reorganize the government departments responsible for research and education.  This doesn't affect OA policy yet, but it's bound to before long.

First, Stephane Goldstein summarizes the changes:

The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has lost its responsibility for the Research Councils and science policy and has become the new Department  for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (the elegant-sounding DBERR).  The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) has transformed itself into the new Department of Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), and no longer looks after higher education in England....

Out of the ashes emerges a sparkling new Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) which will, to quote the currently sparse website, "bring together the nation's strengths in science, research, universities and colleges to build a dynamic, knowledge-based economy."

So, for the first time in about fifteen years (please correct me if I'm wrong), responsibility for higher education research is not split between two Departments.  Put in another way, both strands of the dual support system will be overseen by the same Secretary of State; the man in question is John Denham, who joins the Cabinet for the first time.  In this way, all research will be directly represented at the Cabinet table in a way that hasn't been the case previously.  Good news maybe?

At time of writing, the more junior ministerial appointments haven't yet been made, so it is not yet known who will be Minister for Science, assuming there is still such a function....Nor do we yet know how the new arrangements will affect the relationships and dynamics between the Research Councils and HEFCE (the non-English funding bodies don't report to DIUS), and the operation of the Office of Science and Innovation - not to mention the future of dual support funding itself....

Universities UK generally supports the changes:

Drummond Bone, President, Universities UK, said: "This is an exciting and forward-looking move, which we welcome. It creates an extremely powerful ministry and clearly shows the central place that higher education holds in Mr Brown's vision for the future of the country. Universities are key to the generation and exploitation of new knowledge in the UK, so there is a clear rationale for moving Science and Innovation to the new department....

"It is crucial, however, that the integrity of the dual support system for funding research in universities with an unhypothecated stream of resource is not lost in this move."

The People's Open Access Education Initiative is a new OA project to improve healthcare and health education in developing countries.  From the site:

Help to build Public Health capacity in low- to middle-income countries, using open education resources freely available on the Internet

This education will involve partnerships and collaboration across the global and digital divides, and will be both credible and affordable

"A learning resource that is freely available, which makes use of already established material and seeks to modify it appropriately for local use"

From the Development Gateway Foundation:

The education programme will be low cost but highly credible, and the design embraces three aspects. First, identifying open access materials, linked to the competencies required to tackle public health problems, with subsequent modifications to the materials by teachers and students to reflect local issues. Second, teaching through on-line facilitation by volunteers in conjunction with members of local universities. Third, accrediting learned competencies....

CLA Moves Open Access, CLA digest, June 29, 2007.  (Thanks to Heather Morrison.)  Excerpt:

CLA [Canadian Library Association] Executive Council has approved some recommendations from the Open Access Task Force that move CLA towards providing virtually all of its intellectual property free of charge, in digital form, online and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. The revised policy has four parts:

• CLA will provide for full and immediate open access for all CLA publications, with the exception of Feliciter and monographs The embargo period for Feliciter is one issue, and the embargo policy itself will be reviewed after one year. Monographs will be considered for open access publishing on a case-by-case basis.
• CLA actively encourages its members to self-archive in institutional and/or disciplinary repositories and will investigate a partnership with E-LIS, the Open Archive for Library and Information Studies.
• CLA will generally provide for the author's retention of copyright by employing Creative Commons licensing or publisher-author agreements that promote open access.
• CLA will continue its long-standing policy of accessibility to virtually all CLA information except for narrowly defined confidential matters (e.g. certain personnel or legal matters).

For background, see the full report of the Task Force on Open Access.

PS:  Kudos to the CLA for this large, welcome step, and kudos to the OA Task Force, convened by Heather Morrison, for its leadership.

Eve Gray, African Academies of Science promote access to digital knowledge resources, Gray Area, June 28, 2007.  Excerpt:

...[T]hings are moving on the African continent as university leaders tackle the challenge of the knowledge divide. A recent event that I attended was convened as an International Planning Meeting of the Inter-Academy Panel on International Issues (IAP). Organised by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) and the US National Academy of Science (NAS), it brought together delegates from the African Academies of Science in Pretoria in May for an intensive one-day workshop on 'Promoting Access to and use of Digital Knowledge Resources in Countries with Developing and Transitional Economies: The Role of Science Academies in Africa'.

Speaking for the host academy, Professor Wieland Gevers, Chair of the Publishing Committee of ASSAf, outlined the new role that is emerging for African Academies....In its 5 years of existence ASSAf has conducted a major research project on scholarly publication in South Africa on behalf of the Department of Science and Technology, culminating in a set of strong recommendations for the development of open access journals and repositories. Government was indicating its willingness, he said (very soon) to ask the academy to oversee the implementation of a national system of inter-operable repositories as well as a system of journals and other scholarly publishing paid for by government - on the basis of Chile....The Academy is raising funding to set up an editors' forum that would help to enhance the quality of locally-produced journals and would promote the idea of open access publishing through the green and gold routes as a way of growing and strengthening high quality research output from South Africa.

Paul Uhlir, speaking for the IAP, said that the objective was to strengthen the capacity of the African academies through an initiative to enhance access to information. using digital knowledge resources. An aim is the creation of OA institutional repositories in the developing world....

Mechanisms are needed to promote development and access in the first instance to information produced at national and regional levels and secondarily to information produced in the OECD countries....

Along with other delegates, [El Hadj Ibrahima Diop of the Senegalese Academy] expressed concern that an over-emphasis on traditional global scholarly publishing routes was alienating young academics, given the imbalances in the journal publishing indexes, which are dominated by older researchers and favour publication from countries in the North. Diop challenged the hegemony of the academic journal, with its word counts and inequitable value systems and very slow timescales - if scholarly publishing is a matter of communication, rather than the route for personal promotion, he asked, what would the most appropriate model be for what we need to communicate in Africa? If the journal is an old-fashioned genre, he said, do Africans have the courage to say this is not the route for us?

Malik Maaza of iThemba Laboratories for Accelerator-based Science in Cape Town (a project of the National Research Foundation) concurred, saying that enhancing the visibility of high quality African journals, like the South African Journal of Science, should ensure free access to peer reviewed scholarship in Africa in a short period....

In discussion, there was consensus that, in the African context, what was needed was the creation of a stable of high-quality open access journals and other publications with a regional and national focus, to raise the profile of African scholarship....

DataShare project to demystify data, an announcement from EDINA, June 28, 2007.  Excerpt:

EDINA is supporting DISC-UK, a national group of data librarians, with a new JISC-funded project called DataShare, exploring ways to help academics share their data over the Internet.

With four universities taking part - Edinburgh, LSE, Oxford and Southampton - a range of exemplars will emerge from the establishment of institutional data repositories and related services.

Project members will work closely with staff involved with repository management and development at their own institutions to pilot models for depositing research data into institutional repositories. The project will help to demystify complex data in repositories, and assist institutions in overcoming barriers to incorporating research data.

From EDINA's site on DataShare itself:

The DataShare project is based on a distributed model in which each partner is responsible for the work on incorporating research data into their own repositories, yet experience, support and knowledge are shared in order to increase levels of success. This builds on the existing informal collaboration of DISC-UK members (Data Information Specialists Committee) for improving their data libraries and models of data support at four institutions...It will also bring academic data libraries in closer contact with e-prints repository managers and develop new forms of cooperation between these distinct groups of information professionals within academic environments. The advantage for the broader community is to provide exemplars for a range of approaches and policies in which to embed the deposit and stewardship of datasets in institutional repositories. Indeed, among the partners there will be exemplars for the three main repository solutions: EPrints, DSpace and Fedora. Project management is based at EDINA.

Project Deliverables

• Exemplars of the process, pitfalls and successful outcomes of setting up an institutional data repository service at each of the four institutions.
• Documentation and open source code for adapting DSpace, Fedora and EPrints repository software for handling datasets.
• Toolkits, briefing papers and other outputs to inform UKHE repository community about data management and research support.
• Enhancements to partners’ IRs including testing for trusted repository status.
• Technical watch on e-Research, VREs, Web 2.0 and related developments.
• Papers, presentations and online dissemination of collected knowledge.

Lund University has launched Journal Info, an online tool to help scholars evaluate journals where they might submit their work.  The project has support from the National Library of Sweden.  (Thanks to Co-Action.)

This is another very useful service from the university that brought us the Directory of Open Access Journals and (with the U of Nottingham) OpenDOAR.

Journal Info is not limited to OA journals.  But when you look up a non-OA journal, it tells you that it's not OA and suggests some OA journals as alternatives.  For an example, see the entry for Advances in Cancer Research from Elsevier. 

The entry also tells you the publisher, ISSN, the self-archiving policy, subscription price per article, subscription price per citation, for- or non-profit status, and how the journal rates on some quality and impact metrics.  For rapid scanning, it gives a green tick mark for each parameter (e.g. access, price, impact) on which the journal falls into the top of half of the journals covered, and a red x when it falls into the bottom half.

Today the service covers 18,000 journals and is still growing.  For more information, see the FAQ, which is in English.  There is a long press release in Swedish (June 28) and a short one in English (June 29).

Google has established a Google Health Advisory Council.  From the announcement:

Every day, people use Google to learn more about an illness, drug, or treatment, or simply to research a condition or diagnosis. We want to help users make more empowered and informed healthcare decisions, and have been steadily developing our ability to make our search results more medically relevant and more helpful to users.

Although we have some talented people here with extensive backgrounds in health policy and technology, this is an especially complex area. We often seek expertise from outside the company, and health is no exception. We have formed an advisory council, made up of healthcare experts from provider organizations, consumer and disease-based groups, physician organizations, research institutions, policy foundations, and other fields. The mission of the Google Health Advisory Council is broadly to help us better understand the problems consumers and providers face every day and offer feedback on product ideas and development. It's a great privilege for us to work with this esteemed group.

Comment.  Open access to medical research and information ought to be a central concern of the new advisory council.  It's too early to say whether OA will make it to the council's agenda, but one reason to think it will is that Sharon Terry is a member.  Terry is the President and CEO of the Genetic Alliance and an energetic champion of OA.  See her case for OA in C&RL News for July/August 2005, based on her personal struggle to learn more the genetic disease afflicting her children.  Excerpt:

Although the United States wisely invests billions of dollars in biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), we discovered that the results are locked up in very costly annual journal subscriptions and institutional licenses that can cost thousands of dollars for a single journal, or made scarce by use-limiting, per-article charges that can run as much as $30 to read a single study....If families are effectively barred from having access to these articles, what of the effect on researchers and clinicians with limited budgets striving to make new discoveries?...Our experience forces us to ask the hard question: Who really owns the NIH biomedical research we fund with our tax dollars?...It is now time to unlock this science and make it more accessible to all of us. Fortunately, change is in the works....Ultimately we would like all government agencies to require that published papers resulting from publicly funded research be deposited in PubMed Central, or similar repositories, with no embargo....We have no time to lose: we need public access to government-funded science now.

Project Gutenberg Canada --already online-- will officially launch this Sunday, Canada Day.  ResourceShelf quotes an email from Gutenberg founder Michael Hart:

The twin missions of Project Gutenberg Canada are to promote and make available, free of charge:

CANADIAN BOOKS
- Canadian literature (in both of Canada’s official languages)
- non-fiction books on Canadian history, politics, and culture

INTERNATIONAL BOOKS
- fiction and non-fiction (from all countries) which are in the Canadian public domain
- in any language, as is appropriate for a country with Canada’s multicultural makeup...

[T]he site already includes around 200 titles by such famous Canadian authors as Emily Carr, Frederick Philip Grove, Louis Hémon, Pauline Johnson, Stephen Leacock, Nellie McClung, and L. M. Montgomery of “Anne of Green Gables” fame.

Kirk Biglione, DRM for Books: Will Publishers Learn Anything from the Music Industry’s Mistakes? MediaLoper, June 25, 2007.  (Thanks to DigitalKoans.)  Excerpt:

Every once in a while you hear publishers mutter something about not wanting to make the same mistakes the music industry made. While it’s an admirable goal, the problem is that it’s not clear that we all have the same view of what those mistakes actually were. As the music industry approaches the post-DRM era, it’s pretty clear that Digital Rights Management is one big mistake that book publishers would do themselves a favor by avoiding.

The very nature of DRM runs contrary to the freedoms that all book readers know and love. The freedom to read a book anywhere, the freedom to read a book without special requirements or equipment, the freedom to loan a book to a friend, or borrow a book from a friend or library. By inserting a layer of DRM between readers and books the experience of reading is fundamentally transformed in all of the wrong ways. Not only that, DRM protected books lose all of their essential viral qualities. Unrestricted books sell themselves — DRM protected books never get the chance to.

Given the potential for disaster, it’s only appropriate that the O’Reilly TOC conference devoted a full session to Digital Rights Management. The session was was quite illuminating, if for no other reason because the conference organizers were unable to find a major trade publisher willing to speak to the advantages of using DRM....

What we were left with was a level-headed presentation by a couple of publishers who are actually using DRM-free content as a way to expand their businesses and serve their customers.

Ale de Vries of ScienceDirect spoke about his company’s service which gives subscribers unlimited access to over 2,000 peer-reviewed scientific journals in an unrestricted PDF format....

Michael Jensen of National Academies Press (NAP), a publisher of academic books and reports, described how his company has increased sales by making the full content of all of its books available for free online....

Jensen explained:

“Visibility is the killer. The worst thing for a publisher is to have your material be invisible. We’re dealing with a culture of abundance where there’s so much more material out there than anyone can ever find. It’s our job as a publisher to get our words and content into the minds of as many people as possible. The best strategy for that is to make it as open as we can afford to make it open.”

Jensen also stressed that NAP’s decision to make its content freely available was a legitimate business decision and not a form of zealotry.

“Openness matters as a business strategy, DRM gets in the way of that, creates customer service problems, and impediments to the realities of the new gigantic audiences that we’re trying to tap.” ...

While piracy is a very real problem, the truth of the matter is that DRM creates more problems than it solves. Publishers may argue that they want the right to control who copies their books — and while that is their right, in this case having the moral high ground isn’t necessarily the best business decision.

The July issue of Walt Crawford's Cites & Insights is now online.  This issue contains a lengthy rebuttal to Mark Helprin's NYTimes op-ed arguing for perpetual copyrights and a lengthy new installment in his excellent series on Library Access to Scholarship.  In the latter, Walt takes on some recent examples of publisher extremism, including Brian Crawford's attack on OA ("[Brian] Crawford says, “The hypocrisy is breathtaking.” I [Walt Crawford] agree, but would suggest he’s looking in the mirror when he says that") and the ALPSP/AAP/STM position paper on balancing author and publisher rights ("about as unbalanced a statement of “balance” as I’ve seen").  Among his other topics:  the difficulty of ascertaining the costs of publishing a peer-reviewed journal article, the HHMI deal to pay Elsevier for green OA, and Rick Anderson's guest editorial on OA in Learned Publishing.

Lisbet Rugtvedt, Free and open learning and research in Norway, a presentation at the Technology for Participation conference (Kristiansand, Norway, June 27, 2007).  Rugtvedt is Norway's State Secretary for the Ministry of Education and Research.  (Thanks to Co-Action.)

...The Open Access-Movement has gained momentum and attention since its inception through the Budapest Open Access Initiative back in 2002. Both pillars of Open Access – Self-archiving and Publishing – are important instruments for the preservation, dissemination and democratisation of academic work.

Open Access has a number of distinct advantages:

• For scientists, Open Access Self-Archiving offers a centralised electronic archive for their academic work that can be easily disseminated to colleagues and interested parties.
• The institution will be more visible.
• Open access is instrumental in making results of academic inquiry a common good. This can be of vital importance, e.g. for developing countries, who struggle in getting access to research findings from countries in the western hemisphere.

In Norway, one of the major initiatives in the field of Open Access is NORA, a joint venture between the university libraries at several of our universities and colleges. The main goal of this project, funded by the Norwegian Digital Library, is to further a more co-ordinated and forceful development of open institutional archives in Norway. Four of our six universities have established such archives, and they collaborate on this, and the university colleges are beginning to collaborate. Other major Norwegian initiatives include the Museum Project at four of our universities aiming at the development of joint database systems for digitising the collections at our university museums as well as The Norwegian Biodiversity Information Centre, which is a national source of information on biodiversity. The organisations main function is to supply the public with updated and accessible information on Norwegian species and ecosystems.

The most challenging part of Open Access is related to Open Access publishing. Open access has been the subject of much discussion amongst several groups, and some even see it as a threat. However, it is my firm belief that Open Access publishing can be an important tool in order to increase access to and dissemination of research. Dissemination is after all the third main area of activity in higher education, and we owe it to the public at large to facilitate easy access to research financed by public funding. Open Access is also well suited for younger researchers who need to get a high number of citations early in their careers.

On the other hand, let me also be clear on the following: Open Access publishing must not run the risk of being perceived as second rate. If so, Open Access publishing will by many is regarded as a fringe activity. I think the ideals of the Open Access movement should be paired with the traditions of peer reviewing well embedded in Academia.

Let me also briefly comment on the role of government with regard to Open Access. I think governments can play a number of roles as a facilitator of Open Access:

• Governments can ensure the sufficient infrastructure for Open Access initiatives.
• Governments can ensure that the legislation, including IPR issues, facilitates Open Access.
• Governments must be clear advocates of academic quality and peer reviewing, also for Open Access publishing.... 

The OECD recently published a report from their study on Open Educational Resources. The report, which has the interesting title “Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources” contains a number of interesting issues and finding. Let me dwell on some of these....

Ladies and gentlemen, dear guests: At the end of the day free and open learning and research goes to the very heart of our political project; to secure high quality education for all in a lifelong learning perspective. Access to digital content and training opportunities throughout our lives are necessary in modern society.

As regards Free Software and Open Access, we are grateful for the pioneering efforts of the Free Software and Open Access movement. Their invaluable work is very important for the world of education and research. Now the time has come to bridge the empowering potential of Free Software and Open Access with the need for mainstreaming and the quest for quality....

Comment.  Informed, intelligent, and inspiring.  Imagine having a cabinet secretary or minister in your country who could give this talk.

Calestous Juma, Open access to existing technical knowledge, [Nairobi] Business Daily, June 28, 2007.  Juma is a Professor of the Practice of International Development at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Excerpt:

One mechanism for improving human welfare in African countries is to expand the amount of essential information that is in the public domain, that is, to expand the “knowledge commons”.

A remarkable example of the use of publicly available information was the so-called Green Revolution that helped such countries as Mexico and India become self-sufficient in food production....

The knowledge commons is thus a critical foundation from which innovation develops. The well-established practice of providing an expiry date for intellectual-property rights, after which knowledge becomes publicly shared, is an illustration of the importance that society has historically attached to the role of the knowledge commons....

Scientific and medical research articles should surely be part of the knowledge commons. For the scientific and technologic communities, open-access publishing unleashes full-text literature into a single information space.

Unrestricted access to genetic and molecular information has revolutionized life-science research in recent years and has helped to establish new fields, such as proteomics and genomics.

An example of this revolution is GenBank, a public database of DNA sequences that is freely accessible to all scientists without restrictions....Open access to the broader scientific and health literature will have equally profound benefits for research on challenges faced by developing countries....

The Nairobi-based African Agricultural Technology Foundation is focusing on making proprietary technologies available royalty-free for developing new technologies for small-scale farmers....

An equivalent revolution is taking place in medical and scientific publishing. A growing number of open-access publishers not only make information free, but publish it under innovative copyright licenses which allow readers to use the results of research in innovative ways. Such licenses maximize the usefulness, impact, and value of the literature.
For example, African health ministers are licensed to make millions of copies of the report of the first randomised trial of circumcision for HIV prevention, to give a copy to every health professional in their country, to translate it into local languages without restrictions, or to create locally relevant derivative articles....

The "Google Five" Describe Progress, Challenges, Library Journal Academic Newswire, June 28, 2007.  Excerpt:

Their numbers have now swelled to 25, but what's up with the five pioneering libraries that signed on with the ever-growing Google Book Search? At the American Library Association Annual Conference, panelists from each library said they were pleased with the progress, though they acknowledged continuing challenges ranging from damaged books to search quality. Google product manager Adam Smith led off by describing the new "About the Book" page under construction for titles in Google Book Search, which includes key terms and phrases, references to the book from scholarly publications or other books, chapter titles, and a list of related books—even for books that aren't digitized....

[Harvard University Library's Dale Flecker] praised the "About this book" feature and predicted that "text mining" will be an important part of research. Tierney said that seven to ten reference questions or interlibrary loan requests a week are generated by use of Google Book Search. Dunkle added that Michigan has received more international reference questions through GBS. Thomas [of Oxford] said that the scan plan has produced "much more detailed knowledge about our collection," including the surprise that about one percent of the Bodleian Library's books have uncut pages, meaning they've never been opened.

Challenges remain, Smith conceded, including generating better metadata. Dunkle said that librarians in the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), the 12-library group that recently signed a deal with Google, hope to find ways to search across the books, though "I personally think Google will get there first." Flecker said Harvard librarians also hope Google will solve some access problems. "Right now, to be frank, I don't find the retrieval in Book Search to be that impressive." Flecker said....

Emory University's Martin Halbert, speaking from the audience, briefly described his university's alternative plan in which libraries retain control of the digital volumes, and can focus on coherent subject areas. Google's Smith was magnanimous. "From Google's perspective," he said, "We view this as complementary."

How to measure success? "We'll define success as getting as much of our collection digitized as we can," observed Oxford's Thomas, noting that most of the collection doesn't circulate, and that digital access can transform scholarship. Stanford's Tierney said that she hoped the growth of the program would help convince publishers to release more material in copyright "available in non-snippet view." She said she hoped the "orphan works" issue, which leaves so much published material in copyright limbo, is resolved. "I would not want my physician to be using pre-'23 medical texts," she observed.

At ALA, SPARC Forum Details Economic Stability of Open Access, Library Journal Academic Newswire, June 28, 2007.  Excerpt:

For roughly the past five years, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has devoted the bulk of its energies to open access (OA). So at this year's SPARC Forum, the organization offered a progress report on OA publishing efforts, specifically, the economic stability of open access. Moderated by scientist Alma Swan, the panel featured speakers from three OA publishers with different backgrounds: Mark Patterson from the Public Library of Science, a non-profit start-up; Bryan Vickery from BioMed Central (BMC), a seven-year-old for-profit open access publisher; and Paul Peters of Hindawi, a relatively new publisher that this year transitioned from a subscription model to OA. While each publisher is at a different point on the economic stability spectrum, each reported steady, somewhat dramatic progress.

A biologist, Swan aptly quoted another biologist, Theodosius Dobzhansky to set the tone for the session: "nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution." She then detailed the evolution of open access, noting that roughly 2500 journals were now OA, nearly 10 percent of all academic journals according to the Directory of Open Access Journals. While OA can be applied in many models, the $7 billion STM industry is moving from journals to databases, as researchers search for articles rather than publications, and that the momentum behind OA is also visible anecdotally. Swan noted that she sees personnel often move to OA publishers from posts at major publishers like Elsevier. "But how many do you see moving the other way?" she asked.

Patterson gave a brief overview of PLoS's efforts. PLoS has clearly succeeded in creating a brand, and that submissions were rising sharply, now numbering over 200 a month. PloS journals are peer-reviewed, can publish articles quickly, and increasingly offer a suite of community-enhancing Web 2.0 tools, he noted, which offer authors value for the author charges paid. While PloS is not yet economically sustainable, it's moving in that direction. The exception: PLoS One, the organization's general science publication, which is financed by $1250 per article author charges and is currently sustainable. The two flagship journals, PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology, which charge authors $2750 per article, are more specialized and more costly Some 90 percent of authors pay author charges, while the rest are subsidized by the publisher.

BMC's Vickery said that the seven-year-old publisher now publishes 170 OA journals, with roughly 25,000 articles, and now generates 4500 submissions per quarter. He said BMC was hoping to announce that it was profitable by the year's end. He put BMC's costs at around 47 cents per article download, which he said was well below what commercial publishers claim. He also endorsed the idea of institutional repositories as "complementary" to open access publishing.

Peters said that all 80 of Hindawi's journals are now fully OA. Hindawi, which began in 1997 as a subscription publisher, began the shift in 2004 after facing the challenge in attracting subscribers in a heavily consolidated budget-squeezed market. While panelists mainly discussed the viability of OA publishing, Peters turned the tables bluntly calling the subscription market unworkable. Authors choose where to publish, but libraries buy the bulk of the output, he noted, and that disconnect removes or obscures the authors' incentive to seek value in any publishing deal....

Nature has created another OA supplement, this time on Glycochemistry & Glycobiology.  (Thanks to Graham Steel.)

Congressional Panel Favors Access To Publicly Funded Research, a press release from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), June 28, 2007.  Excerpt:

Public access to NIH-funded research took a major step forward this week with Senate Appropriations Committee agreement to direct the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to require that its funded research be made publicly available on the Internet.

This milestone was immediately praised by the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), a coalition of patient groups, researchers, consumers, and libraries that has long called for such a step.

"The momentum is real and Congress understands the public's interest," said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, an ATA founding member). "We congratulate Senators Tom Harkin and Arlen Specter for their bipartisan leadership on this issue."

"It is significant that Senate appropriators are determined to leverage the taxpayer investment in research by ensuring it can be broadly applied," added Joseph. "Two years after the well-intentioned voluntary NIH policy was introduced, too many researchers, students, small businesses, and people facing diseases still lack access to the publicly funded research they want and need. This is a big step in the right direction."

The Senate's 2008 appropriations bill specifically requires that NIH-funded researchers deposit in the National Library of Medicine's online archive [PubMed Central] an electronic copy of their peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication in a journal. Articles would become publicly available no later than 12 months after publication.

"Action by our Senators in supporting this change is especially welcomed by the patient community," said Colleen Zak, Executive Director of the Autosomal Recessive Polycystic Kidney Disease and Congenital Hepatic Fibrosis (ARPKD/CHF) Alliance. "Delivering on the NIH public access policy will create anticipated opportunities for accelerating research and finding cures."

Under the current NIH Public Access Policy, implemented in May 2005, investigators have deposited less than five percent of eligible manuscripts and, although a few publishers have also deposited articles stemming from NIH-funded research, the vast majority is not yet publicly available.

Congress has expressed concern about the voluntary policy's failure to meet its goals. However, this is the first time the Senate committee has proposed legislative action to correct the situation. The Senate measure is similar to one recently put forth by the House of Representatives Labor/HHS Appropriations Subcommittee.

The FY08 Senate Appropriations Bill is expected to go before the full Senate for a vote later this summer. The House Labor/HHS Appropriations measure will be considered by the full House Appropriations Committee in July.

PS:  Don't confuse this with last week's news that the OA mandate had been approved by the Senate appropriations subcommittee responsible for the NIH (the Senate Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies).  Today's news is that the full Senate Appropriations Committee has approved it.   This brings us one step closer to an OA mandate at the NIH.  But we're still several steps short of the goal and still need approval by the full Senate, approval of a similar bill by the House, reconciliation in a conference committee (if the two bills differ), and the signature of the President.

The UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has issued The Government Response to the Office of Fair Trading Study on removing access barriers to public sector information (June 2007).  Excerpt:

2. ...The OFT’s report concentrates on the commercial use of public sector information by customers.
3. Public sector information holders (PSIHs) are usually the only source for much of this raw data, and although some make this available to businesses for free, others charge. A number of PSIHs also compete with businesses in turning the raw information into value-added products and services. This could enable PSIHs to restrict access to information provided solely by themselves.
4. The OFT study found that raw information is not as easily available as it should be, licensing arrangements are restrictive, prices are not always linked to costs and PSIHs may be charging higher prices to competing businesses and giving them less attractive terms than their own value-added operations.
5. The report has also found that...the full benefits of public sector information are not being realised. OFT has estimated that the market could increase from £400m to over £1billion annually.
6. The Government acknowledges the estimated economic benefits highlighted in the OFT report. At the same time Government has to consider the costs, ensuring the on-going financial provision of the information currently collected, the fiscal cost and the costs to the bodies affected by the OFT’s recommendations....
8. The government welcomes the recommendations, and is able to accept the majority at this point....
11. We are unable to accept all the recommendations at this time....

For those of us interested in OA to publicly-funded research, here's the key OFT recommendation and the government's reply:

OFT recommendation

9.22 We recommend that the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) reviews the case for including documents held by government research establishments within the scope of the Re-use Directive.

Response

As the OFT report notes, the Commission’s forthcoming review of the Re-use Directive provides an opportunity to review the coverage of public research organisations. We would be willing to participate in the Commission’s review, although we do not at present believe that a case has been made for extending the coverage of the Directive. Commercial operations of public research organisations are still relatively small scale. There is no evidence to suggest market distortions are occurring, but if such evidence emerges we would of course review the position.

The terms of the OFT report mention briefly the issue of data from public research organisations, and this paragraph contains the Government’s response in relation to such organisations. In relation to this, the Government supports the policy with regard to dissemination of publicly funded research laid out in a Research Council UK position statement published in June 2006. The models and mechanisms for publication and access to research must be both efficient and cost-effective in the use of public funds. Public research organisations should be able, in handling any requests for data, to recover the full economic costs they incur, including collection, maintenance and delivery, to sustain the public sector investment in their research.... 

Comment.  The last paragraph is inconsistent.  The RCUK position statement endorses open access (indeed, mandatory open access).  The government cannot support that policy and call for cost-recovery access fees at the same time.

Matthew Cockerill, publisher of BioMed Central, has commented on the new OA mandate from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI):

In a significant development for the open access movement, the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes (HHMI) this week became the first large research funder in the USA to require its investigators to make their published results openly accessible. The policy on Public Access to Publications, announced this week, requires HHMI Investigators to ensure that all biomedical articles on which they are a major author are made freely accessible within at most 6 months of publication, and are deposited in PubMed Central .

The policy also proposes a clear mechanism for enforcement, indicating that, in future, only articles published in compliance with the policy will be eligible for consideration when investigators HHMI appointments are reviewed.

HHMI's President, Tom Cech, discussed the background to the Insitute's open access policy in the May issue of the HHMI Bulletin.

A notable aspect of HHMI's initiative on open access is that the Insitute has agreed to pay some traditional publishers up to $1500 (on top of subscription revenue) in order to ensure that HHMI retains the right to post a copy of the author's manuscript version (not the final published version) on to PubMed Central after a 6 month embargo period. This emphasizes the importance attached to open access by HHMI, but also makes clear the value for money offered by BioMed Central's article processing charge (APC). 

BioMed Central's typical APC, after institutional discount, is less than $1500 and this cost is instead of subscription revenue, not in addition to it. In return for this payment, BioMed Central makes the official final version of published articles freely available on PubMed Central immediately on publication, and also makes the articles freely available for reuse and redistribution.

Many HHMI Investigators have already published in BioMed Central's open access journals. We hope that the Institute's new policy on open access will encourage further HHMI researchers to give our journals a try....

The June issue of First Monday is now online.  None of the papers is on OA to research articles or data, but these six are on open access to research infrastructure:

• Paul Avery, Open Science Grid: Building and Sustaining General Cyberinfrastructure Using a Collaborative Approach.  Abstract:   I describe in this paper the creation and operation of the Open Science Grid (OSG), a distributed shared cyberinfrastructure driven by the milestones of a diverse group of research communities. The effort is fundamentally collaborative, with domain scientists, computer scientists and technology specialists and providers from more than 70 U.S. universities, national laboratories and organizations providing resources, tools and expertise. The evolving OSG facility provides computing and storage resources for particle and nuclear physics, gravitational wave experiments, digital astronomy, molecular genomics, nanoscience and applied mathematics. The OSG consortium also partners with campus and regional grids, large projects such as TeraGrid, Earth System Grid, Enabling Grids for E–sciencE (EGEE) in Europe and related efforts in South America and Asia to facilitate interoperability across national and international boundaries.

• Dan L. Burk, Intellectual Property and Cyberinfrastructure. Abstract: The development of a new generation of cyberinfrastructure promises to increase and facilitate globally distributed scientific collaboration as well as access to scientific research via computer networks. But the potential for such access and collaboration is subject to concerns regarding the intellectual property rights that will be associated with networked data and with networked collaborative activity. Intellectual property regimes are generally problematic in the practice of science, because scientific research typically assumes practices of openness that may be hampered or obstructed by intellectual property rights. These difficulties are likely to be exacerbated in the context of networked collaboration, where the development and use of intellectual resources will likely be distributed among many researchers in a variety of physical locations, often spanning national boundaries. Such issues may be addressed by a combination of public and private approaches, including amendment of U.S. law to recognize transborder collaborative work, and adoption of clarifying contractual agreements among those who are collaborating via cyberinfrastructure, including cautious adaptation of “viral” licensing from the open source coding community.

• Sara Boettiger, Issues in IP Management to Support Open Access in Collaborative Innovation Models.  Abstract:   Building Web–based collaborative environments to encourage innovation in patentable technology provides different challenges than those found in the realm of copyrightable material. Cyberinfrastructure can be designed to encourage a free exchange of information and ideas that produces well–documented benefits for collaborators. But this may come at the cost of foregone patent rights, as the disclosure of information can limit options to patent. If the goal is open access, though, some argue that the predisposition toward the public domain is an important element. This essay argues that achieving openness in fields of patentable technology may require cyberinfrastructure that is designed to accommodate flexibility in the management of intellectual property. First, the potential value of patents is explored as they support the goal of open access. For some technologies, collaborative cyberinfrastructure may inadvertently restrict open access because placing a technology in the public domain removes the leverage a patent owner has to influence downstream activity. Second, this paper considers the potential role of defensive publishing in cyberinfrastructure; a lack of control over how the inventions are published may make it easier for others to surround the published technology with patents, ultimately limiting open access. In some instances, strategic defensive publishing may be warranted in order to place technologies more securely in the public domain. Both of these discussions explore the likelihood that designing cyberinfrastructure for innovation in patentable technology fields demands a keen understanding of the interface between the public domain and patents, and also a balance between retaining options for IP management and enabling the fluidity of collaboration.

• Brett M. Frischmann, Infrastructure Commons in Economic Perspective.  No abstract.  Excerpt:  This essay briefly summarizes a theory (developed in substantial detail elsewhere) that better explains why there are strong economic arguments for managing and sustaining infrastructure resources in an openly accessible manner. This theory facilitates a better understanding of how these fundamental resources generate value for society and how decisions regarding the allocation of access to such resources affects social welfare. The key insights from this analysis are that infrastructure resources generate value as inputs into a wide range of productive processes and that the outputs from these processes are often public goods and nonmarket goods that generate positive externalities that benefit society as a whole. Managing such resources in an openly accessible manner may be socially desirable from an economic perspective because doing so facilitates these downstream productive activities. For example, managing the Internet infrastructure in an openly accessible manner facilitates active citizen involvement in the production and sharing of many different public and nonmarket goods. Over the past decade, this has led to increased opportunities for a wide range of citizens to engage in entrepreneurship, political discourse, social network formation and community building, among many other activities.

• Arti K. Rai, Knowledge Commons: The Case of the Biopharmaceutical Industry.  No abstract.  Excerpt:  While they have resisted legislative reform, pharmaceutical firms have repeatedly engaged in private action to promote commons of various sorts. This article describes, and compares, two types of commons creation in which pharmaceutical firms have recently engaged. In one case, the aim has been to defeat a proliferation of upstream property rights that might threaten an “anti–commons.” In the other, the aim is to solve the daunting research problem of predicting drug safety and efficacy ex ante, before expensive failures in late–stage clinical trials or after the drug has been marketed.

• Joel West, Seeking Open Infrastructure: Contrasting Open Standards, Open Source and Open Innovation.  No abstract.  Excerpt:  While “open” normally has connotations of public goods, the idea of “open”–ness has been used for decades as a competitive strategy by firms in the computers and communications industries. Phrases like “open standard,” “open source” and more recently “open innovation” have been used to refer to these strategies.  What do they have in common? Which ones really are “open”? What does “open” mean, anyway?  To consider the issues faced in the creation and adoption of cyberinfrastructure, here I contrast firm strategies for these three types of “open”–ness in the context of their respective business models....After considering the general issues of openness in IT systems, I look more specifically at the questions of openness as they related to a possible cyberinfrastructure designed to enable new forms of scientific research and collaboration in the twenty–first century

• Sacha Wunsch­Vincent, Taylor Reynolds, and Andrew Wyckoff, Implementing Openness: An International Institutional Perspective.  Abstract:   The debate on “openness” has tended to focus on standard setting, software copyrights, patent policy and collaborative innovation models – large issues that evoke heated debates that take on a quasi–religious dimension. As these issues start to enter onto the mainstream public policy agenda of many countries, moving these ideas from punditry to policies is not obvious.  But openness also manifests itself in less visible, more tractable issues such as open access to infrastructure, scientific research and use of public data and information — fundamental elements of “cyberinfrastructure.” While perhaps less visible in the public debate, these elements provide lessons on how to implement openness into public policy and outline an ecology for supporting openness. Our experience reveals that it is important to break down the issues into practical elements that bureaucracies can implement, where metrics can be devised that allow dispassionate economic analysis, where divisive issues can be isolated, and where the stakeholders are not so diverse.

The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) has released its Guide to Open Data Licensing.  From today's announcement:

Over the last month we’ve been working to produce a Guide to Open Data Licensing. As the name should make clear this is a guide to licensing data aimed particularly at those who want to make their data open. The guide is currently located on the wiki so that anyone can edit and update it....

While attending XTech back in May it became clear that there were a lot of questions both about the legal status of data and what approaches to use when licensing it — something that had also become apparent following on from Jo’s post back in April on copyright not being applicable to geodata).

We started work on the guide in order to have something which could help answer these kinds of questions. At present it is roughly divided into two sections. The first section deals with the practical question of how to license your data. The second section discusses what kinds of intellectual property-like rights exist in data in various jurisdictions.

This guide is very much in an ‘alpha’ state, with much that can be done to improve and extend it. We’ve been working on it in the wiki precisely so that anyone may edit it and we’d welcome contributions — whether it be adding new sections and use cases or just fixing typos. So please, check it out and feel free to make changes.

Leigh Watson Healy, Google as Publisher: Is Google Poised for a New Push into the Information Industry?  Outsell, May 2007.  The report is not OA and not even close (it costs $1,295).  But the thesis is interesting.  From the press release:

A new Outsell, Inc. report on Google’s technology reveals that Google can enter the publishing industry at any time with the “flip of a switch.”

“News publishers and providers, book and magazine publishers, and directory providers are all in Google’s line of fire,” said Leigh Watson Healy, Chief Analyst, Outsell.

[The report]...looks at how Google’s technical infrastructure, patents and agile development processes give the company the readiness to enter the publishing segment, whether accidentally or intentionally. A unique feature of the report is a comprehensive list of Google’s publishing-related patents, which can be “powered up” under the right circumstances. Google has also assembled technologies that extend along the entire spectrum of publishing’s core functions—-from content acquisition to e-commerce and royalty payments.

According to Stephen E. Arnold, GGReport’s technology analyst, “Pundits focus on Google’s search and advertising business. Google has developed powerful content acquisition and publishing tools under the radar of most Wall Street analysts and publishers. Combined with Google’s Checkout, a payment system similar to eBay’s, Google can become a one-stop shop and disintermediate anyone between the author or content creator and the buyer.”

The Outsell report analyzes:

• Google’s content creation engine.
• The cost and automation advantages of Google’s “intelligent” publishing system over a traditional publisher’s operation—which represent formidable barriers to entry.
• Essential actions for existing publishers and information providers that want to remain competitive should Google make a move, such as quickly adopting an agile publishing platform.

Sweden's OpenAccess.se has announced a new project to improve the infrastructure for the nation's research output and at the same time to increase the OA portion of that output.  The project is called Unified access to and reporting of Swedish scientific publications.  (Thanks to Co-Action.)  Excerpt:

...[S]oon you will be able to access the total Swedish research publishing output at a single place. A planned new service aims to improve the accessibility and visibility of research publications created by Swedish researchers, including a growing share of Open Access web publications. It will also provide a secure infrastructure for the reporting of research output. The National Library of Sweden has granted 1.5 million [kroner] via...OpenAccess.se to a project led by the university libraries of Uppsala, Lund and Gothenburg in cooperation with the Department for LIBRIS at the National Library

Unified access to and reporting of Swedish scientific publications

The project will develop a service that

• Harvests metadata for all Swedish scientific publications from the publication databases of all Higher Education institutions
• Makes the metadata accessible for searching by end users and for harvesting to other services
• Facilitates the use of the metadata for the reporting and analysis of the Swedish scientific publishing output.

The strategic aim is to

• Improve the visibility of Swedish scientific publications
• Improve the accessibility of Swedish scientific publications,
• Increase the share of Swedish scientific publications that is Open Access
• Provide a unified and comparable basis for reporting of Swedish scientific publishing output
• Provide incentives for institutional publication databases to increase their coverage and adhere to common standards...