Open Access News

The British Journal of Healthcare Computing & Information Management has moved to a new publisher (Birchley Hall Press) and converted to OA at the same time.  For more details, see the June 18 announcement.

Birchley Hall Press also publishes the OA journal, Medical Technology Business Europe.

Alma Swan, What a difference a publisher makes, Optimal Scholarship, July 7, 2007.  Excerpt;

How important, how much, how good? Sometimes it’s needed and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it's not even provided. Does it matter? Copy editing, that’s what I’m talking about. It’s a special little focus of interest at the moment because publishers claim it as an important area of added value and want to demonstrate how much they contribute to the integrity of scholarly literature through providing it, while the proponents of self-archiving counter-claim that the author’s final version of an article – the one which contains all the changes advised or required by the peer review process – is a perfectly adequate version to be deposited in a digital repository for open access purposes....

[A] couple of studies have been published recently that have examined the differences between published and author-final versions of articles. Wates and Campbell looked at copy editing changes carried out on a set of science, humanities and social science articles at Blackwell Publishing (as was) and reported that the biggest category of corrections by the publisher was concerned with the references (42.7% of all copy editing changes), the next biggest category (34.5%) was concerned with minor syntactical or grammatical changes and a small proportion (5.5%) of changes corrected author ‘errors that might otherwise have led to misunderstanding or misinterpretation’.

In the other study, Goodman, Dowson and Yaremchuk looked at journals in biology and social sciences and found that publishers had corrected numerous small errors that affected readability, that there were a number of differences between author-final and published versions that were ‘confusing’ and that sometimes the publisher version and sometimes the author version was the more confusing. They also found that in two cases the publisher had omitted data ‘necessary to evaluate the validity of the conclusions’: introduced an error during copy editing, in other words....

So, where do these studies leave us? Somewhat confused, I’d say. Does copy editing add significant value? Does it add insignificant value? Does it even plague an article by introducing errors that weren’t there before? Is the author’s final version adequate for scholarly purposes? 'Yes' seems to be a possible answer to all these questions....

Note: thanks to the authors of the two studies cited above for self-archiving them somewhere so that I could read them in full.

The US National Library of Medicine (NLM) has joined the Digital Library Federation (DLF).  For details, see the blogged announcement by Peter Brantley, the Executive Director of the DLF.  Excerpt:

I am thrilled to be able to announce that the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), the world's largest medical library, has joined my organization, the Digital Library Federation (DLF), as its 36th Strategic Member. The NLM joins the U.S. Library of Congress, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the British Library, Oxford University, and many of the most prestigious U.S. research libraries in the DLF's efforts to shape and define the preservation and access of digital cultural and educational resources for the public community.

NLM is most widely known for Medline, the national Clinical Trials database, the PubMed database of journal articles, and the PubMedCentral (PMC) database of over one million full-text journal articles in the health sciences. It has been a leader in many other areas of note, including the Visible Human Project, and the preservation of much rare information on the international history and development of medicine - for example, the unique Islamic Medical Manuscripts collection.

The NLM is a leading proponent of open-access. In the midst of high-profile commercial digitization projects, many people do not realize that the NLM has long been at the forefront of journal digitization, and with the assistance of the Wellcome Trust and JISC in the U.K., has facilitated the entry in the public domain of hundreds of thousands of important medical articles....

Heather Morrison, Are open access journals ten times more likely to survive?  Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, July 6, 2007.  Excerpt:

Of the scholarly journals started from 2000 - 2006 recorded in Ulrich's, the open access journals were ten times more likely to be still active, strongly suggesting an open access survival advantage for new journals.

Data from Ulrich's, July 5, 2007:

• # of online, refereed, scholarly / academic journals started 2000 - 2006:  2,253
• # of above ceased:  59 = .026%
• # of online, refereed, scholarly / academic journals, open access journals started 2000 - 2006:  724
• # of above ceased:  2 = .0027

The period 2000 - 2006 was selected, to help control for older, subscription-only journals that would have ceased before open access was an option the journal would have considered.

It should be noted that this is a quick study, which has not explored or controlled for all variables; conclusions should be drawn with caution. The data do, however, strongly suggest an hypothesis worthy of testing.

PS:  For some data on the mortality rate of the first generation of OA journals --those launched between 1994 and 2004-- see Walt Crawford's two-part study (Part I, Part II) from October 2006 (or my blogged excerpt).

The International Journal of Social Sciences is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology.  Its first issue isn't out yet, but it already has a general call for papers and a specific call for papers for a special issue to appear in Vol. 2 (February 2008).

The Journal of Physics Students is a new peer-reviewed OA journal.  It hasn't yet published its inaugural issue but is now circulating a call for papers.  From its Open Letter to Supervisors:

It is a truth that maybe the most important scientific knowledge exchange platforms are the scientific journals. There are now over 70.000 journals are published in all fields of science. Most of them is not for your academic discipline and most of them is expensive. As you may notice in last decade, the internet has revolutionized the production of, and access to, academic journals. Currently, there is a movement in academia called “open access” that the article can be searched for and read for free. Today, we want to introduce a new journal for you and your student’s needs....

JPS aims to train students for peer-review publication processes....

Steffan Heuer, Mash-ups für Professoren, Technology Review, July 6, 2007.  (Thanks to Klaus Graf.)  Read the German original or Google's English.

Allison Fullard, South African responses to Open Access publishing: a survey of the research community, South African Journal of Libraries and Information Science, 73, 1, (2007) pp. 40-50.  Self-archived, July 7, 2007.

Abstract:   Open access publishing offers wide benefits to the scholarly community and may also afford relief to financially embattled academic libraries. The progress of the open access model rests upon the acceptance and validation of open access journals and open archives or institutional repositories by the academic mainstream, particularly by publishing researchers. To what extent are the key actors in the South African research system aware of the advantages of open access? This article reports on the findings of a recent survey undertaken to assess the current awareness, concerns and depth of support for open access amongst local researchers, research managers and policy makers in South Africa. The study focuses on issues of quality, article or author charges and the established academic reward system. It concludes that within the prevailing framework, there is little prospect that academics would choose to publish within open access journals. Recommendations for advocacy by the library community are proposed.

Monika Ermert, German Parliament Reforms Copyright Law, Leaves Unfinished Work, IP Watch, July 6, 2007.  This is a very detailed, English-language account of the new bill.  Here's what she says about its implications for OA:

...The bigger problem of the new law lies elsewhere, said [Volker Kitz, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law and former legal expert at BITKOM]. “It’s a pity that the German Parliament did not follow proposals coming for example from the Bundesrat (the upper house of the German Parliament populated by the governments of the states) to promote open access models for research publications,” he said. “It’s in the interest of the general public that research can be accessed easily over the Internet.”

Rainer Kuhlen, professor at the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Konstanz and spokesperson for the “Coalition for Action ‘Copyright for Education and Research’” is more blunt: “The law cares for a permeation of obsolete business models, instead of opening the space for innovation and open access models,” he said.

The criticism of scientists and representatives of the opposition in the Parliament – the Green Party and the left - mainly is addressed at “exemptions from copyright for research and education” that are so tightly restricted that the coalition calls them “grotesque.”

Libraries in the future will be allowed to offer their readers electronic versions of books but are restricted to offering only as many electronic copies as they have on their shelf in order not to hamper publishers’ business. The principle of the so-called “double asset accessoriness” applauded by some members of the coalition and the German liberals shall prevent, for example, universities buying a book once and making it electronically available to every student. This was reintroduced overnight on Tuesday by the Legal Committee after being taken out because of protests. Members of Parliament only got the final draft Wednesday evening.

The second “exemption,” intended to introduce a form of “fair use” in German copyright law, addresses the possibility of ordering copies of documents available from other universities. The electronic document delivery service of research libraries in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, Subito, might have to be restricted to fax and old-fashioned mail delivery, depending on whether there is a reasonable offer from the publisher....[T]his will lead to a price for an email-delivered article of about 15 euros in the future, warned Kuhlen.

While scientists themselves might be able to route around the problems and ask their colleagues for a private email of the article, Kuhlen said, the price increase might add up to the costs for students, on top of recently introduced fees. Students also have started to solve the problem their way by just using what they can find through Google or Wikipedia, he said, adding that the crux is, “making information a scarce resource creates the wrong attitude and will have bad effects in the long run.”

Open access models now are on the list of some who declared a third basket was necessary. The “coalition” in a press release welcomed the third basket....

The UNESCO High Level Group of Visionaries on Knowledge Acquisition and Sharing met in Kronberg/Taunis, Germany, on June 22-23, 2007.  One result of the meeting is the draft Kronberg Declaration on the Future of Knowledge Acquisition and Sharing, which focuses more on education than research.  (Thanks to John Daly.)  Excerpt from the current draft:

[I]n the next twenty-five years: ...Open access to and free flow of content will be of crucial importance for equitable knowledge acquisition and sharing....

[We must] stress the need to: ...Support open access to and free flow of content by the development of open standards, open data structures, and standardized info-structures; ...

Also see the meeting's working document, program and participants, and the home page the group established for The Future of Knowledge Acquisition and Sharing.

Comments. 

• It appears that the Kronberg declaration is independent of the German UNESCO Commission's June 28 resolution in support of OA (at Dessau).  But if there's a connection between then, I'd be grateful if someone would drop me a line.
• If the Kronberg delegates believe that "Open access to and free flow of content will be of crucial importance for equitable knowledge acquisition and sharing," then their declaration really ought to make a clear and useful recommendation to promote OA.  For example:  Governments ought to mandate OA to the results of publicly-funded research.  Or:  Universities ought to mandate OA to their research output.  But since we already have some usefully specific declarations, it's more important to get on with the job of implementing them than to improve the Kronberg declaration.

Eve Gray, A new draft bill on IP rights in publicly funded research, Gray Area, July 5, 2007.  Excerpt:

We have known for a while that there was a [South African] bill in the offing on the management of IP in publicly funded research and this Draft Bill is now available for perusal on the website of the Parliamentary Monitoring Group. The Deputy Minister of Science and Technology, when he visited CET, said that there would be a period for comment on the Bill and, as this draft Bill does affect universities and researchers in universities, I am providing a heads-up for those of you who have a particular interest in the management and ownership of the IP in the research that you carry out.

I was half expecting a Bill on the rights of public access to publicly funded research, along the lines of discussions in the UK, the USA and the EU, among others, for access to research publication. South Africa is a signatory of the OECD Declaration on Access to Knowledge from Publicly Funded Research, so probably needs to enact provisions of this kind at some stage.

This Draft Bill is not along those lines at all. It appears to be about institutional and government control of the commercialization of research and provisions for any research that is potentially patentable. I have not had time to peruse it properly nor think through its implications....

Comment.  Eve is right that the bill focuses on patents and doesn't directly regulate public access to publicly-funded research.  However, it does regulate the copyright on works reporting patentable discoveries and appears to assign such copyrights and the associated patents to the discoverer's institution.  This could well affect public access to articles reporting the discoveries.

Evelyn Harvey, Momentum and meritocracy: Open Access as a model for the future? Nature Network, June 25, 2007.  Excerpt:

Is Open Access (OA) publishing an unstoppable force? Does it face immovable objects in the shape of publication costs, quality control and copyright? The Third London Open Research Conference on 11 June, organised by SHERPA-LEAP provided a forum for lively debate from several viewpoints.

Around 70 delegates gathered at the Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre....OA proponents included representatives from Research Councils UK (RCUK) and the consultancy Key Perspectives. Non-OA publishers were represented by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP)....

OA publication makes research available without access barriers or subscription costs. BioMedCentral and others have shown that it can be a strong publishing business model, and resources such as the Directory of Open Access Journals help researchers keep track of the ~2,500 publications available. Research is also archived pre- or post-publication in online repositories such as PubMed Central....

Frank Scholze of the University of Stuttgart illustrated how the coordination of repositories and online OA journals allows individual researcher profiles to develop. Individual researcher rankings, based on personal citation rates and even readership, are made possible by searches of OA journals and repositories....

In his critical presentation, Nick Evans, Chief Operating Officer of the ALPSP, likened OA to a ‘shark’. Journal subscriptions are a major source of income for learned societies, Evans argued, and removing this will damage research, bursaries and conferences currently funded by the societies.

Small publishers are certainly threatened by OA, but are there ways to adapt to the changes? Some, including the BMJ, have adopted a mixed approach, requiring subscriptions for editorial content, while research articles are free. Others are diversifying into special features such as podcasts for subscribers.

Many delegates were concerned that OA will compromise quality by allowing ‘self-publication’ and inadequate review. The high citation rates and increasing impact factors of OA journals such as those of PLoS belie perceived quality issues, countered Dr Swan, as do the acceptance standards set by many OA repositories....

National, international and inter-agency policy will affect the progress of OA over the next few years. The Budapest Initiative (2002) and Berlin Declaration on OA followed the Lisbon Agenda (2000), and the European Commission is currently considering a mandatory OA self-archiving proposal.
Speaking for RCUK, which now has a mandatory policy on OA, Dr Astrid Wissenburg commented that policies such as six month embargoes on OA publishing may be hampering progress. She added that a lag of three to four years could be expected before new policies take effect....

[O]ne researcher said when confronted with the copyright risks of OA: “My problem isn’t plagiarism, it’s obscurity!”

Germany's Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. has signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge.

Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) has launched an upgrade to its pharma database with both free and priced datasets.  From yesterday's press release:

Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD, Inc) is pleased to announce the introduction of its next generation database technology. Collaborative Drug Discovery's Web-based database enables scientists to collaborate in novel, global efforts to more effectively develop new drug candidates for commercial and humanitarian markets. The technology enables novel community-based research efforts that become more and more useful as additional participants contribute data. Publicly available data sets currently in the system include the FDA orphan and approved drugs and small molecule drug discovery data dating back over half a century. These data sets pertain to a diverse group of neglected diseases, including malaria, tuberculosis, African Sleeping Sickness, Chagas Disease and Leishmania.

Customers can also securely archive, mine, and collaborate around their small molecule preclinical drug discovery data in invitation-only, username-password protected groups....

Researchers can choose to keep their data private or share any or all of it with other research groups in the community. By default, labs using the CDD database only share their imported data privately with fellow lab members. A subset of the data is available openly to the public at no cost (please contact register@collaborativedrug.com for access)....

Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Open access article on consensus definition of acute renal failure has been accessed more than 100,000 times, BioMed Central blog, July 6, 2007.  Hrynaszkiewicz is BMC's in-house Editor of Critical Care.  Excerpt:

The most highly accessed article on BioMed Central's most viewed articles page recently surpassed 100,000 accesses.

Bellomo et al.’s article, published in Critical Care in 2004, presented the first consensus definition of acute renal failure and followed a two day conference of the Acute Dialysis Quality Initiative (ADQI) Group. It has been cited more than 90 times according to both Google Scholar and Scopus.

These impressive access and impact statistics demonstrate the effectiveness with which important research articles can be disseminated, thanks to the wide-reaching visibility achieved by open access. Evidence continues to accumulate that open access research has an advantage in terms of being rapidly read and widely cited by peers....

Stefan Krempl, German parliament passes new Copyright Act, Heise Online, July 6, 2007.  Excerpt:

On Thursday, a majority of the members of the Bundestag from the governing grand coalition and the FDP voted in favor of the government's controversial proposal (PDF file) for a second version of the country's Copyright Act for the Information Society, which includes the amendments proposed by the parliament's legal committee. Members of Parliament from the Greens mostly abstained, while members of the new Left Party voted against the so-called "second basket" of the revised Copyright Act, which will now be sent to the Bundesrat for review.

Germany's Minister of Justice Brigitte Zypries (SPD) said she was pleased that "we have finally completed such an important project" and added that the amendments "make the Copyright Act ready for the digital future." In contrast, Petra Sitte of the Left Party accused the governing coalition of having "lost sight of the interests of researchers and educators." She fears that access to knowledge will become more expensive....

[Jerzy Montag of the Green Party] countered that while copyright applies to everyone, no property right is absolute; after all, all protection offered by the state "is limited by the rights of others." He feels bad the new exceptions provided for education and research are "not future-proof." Rather, he says that all educational institutions should be able to set up as many reading terminals as students need. Jörg Tauss and Carsten Müller, who handle education policy for the SPD and the CDU, respectively, also said that the new amendments leave something to be desired in this respect. For instance, knowledge promoted by public funding should also be made available to the public in compliance with the Open Access Model. Tauss says that copyright violations pose a great threat if data retention archives are open. Then, lawyers would have a "heyday" in search of offenses currently considered minor.

The Queensland government in Australia has released a major new report, Government Information and Open Content Licensing: An Access and Use Strategy Government Information Licensing Framework Project prepared by the Queensland Spatial Information Council.  Although it's dated October 2006, it was not released until June 2007.  Excerpt:

1.  EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1.1 This report outlines work undertaken during Stage 2 of the Government Information Licensing Framework Project.

1.2 Stage 1 of the project resulted in endorsement by the Queensland Spatial Information Council (QSIC) and the Information Queensland Steering Committee of an open content licensing model, based on Creative Commons (CC).

1.3 Stage 2 of the project was initiated to bring QSIC licensing arrangements up to date, and to create a Draft Government Information Licensing Framework based on an open content licensing model to support data and information transactions between the Queensland Government, other government jurisdictions and the private sector.

1.4 Other jurisdictions in Australia and overseas are moving to more open access and use arrangements to support social and economic development, and are introducing policies and principles and implementing appropriate licences to support this move. Background research during Stage 2 has resulted in the recommendation that the Queensland Government also move to open access and use arrangements, balanced with appropriate protection for private and confidential information collected or held by government.

1.5 The project proved valuable in testing the CC licences against a sample of existing licences used within the Queensland Government. A detailed legal analysis of existing licences was undertaken to identify key characteristics and to map these to CC licence provisions....

1.9 There is an opportunity to progress a generic standard for government information licensing in partnership with CC....

2. RECOMMENDATIONS

2.1 That the Queensland Government establish a policy position that, while ensuring that confidential, security classified and private information collected and held by government continues to be appropriately protected, enables greater use and re-use of other publicly available government data and facilitates data-sharing arrangements.

2.2 That the CC open content licensing model be adopted by the Queensland Government to enable greater use of publicly available government data and to support data-sharing arrangements.

2.3 That QSIC and the Office of Economic and Statistical Research continue to work closely with the Department of Justice and Attorney-General to ensure that any privacy provisions developed also support new data use, re-use and sharing policies....

2.5 That the Draft Government Information Licensing Framework toolkit, which incorporates the six iCommons (Creative Commons Australia) licences, be endorsed for use in pilot projects proposed for Stage 3....

Ted Agres, 'Open access' opening wider, The Scientist, July 5, 2007.  Excerpt:

As a growing number of research institutes and professional societies move to embrace open or free public access publishing, legislation is pending in Congress that would mandate scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health to post their final peer-reviewed manuscripts online within 12 months after journal publication.

But don't expect the door to unencumbered access be thrown wide open anytime soon: a number of professional research societies still oppose various aspects of open access, and the mandatory NIH directive is in danger of being scuttled because it is included in NIH's Fiscal 2008 budget bill, which President Bush has pledged to veto if it exceeds predefined spending limits.

Nevertheless, the trend is growing. On June 26 the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) announced that starting next year it will require its scientists to deposit copies of journal articles in NIH's PubMed Central free database within six months of publication....

Last week (July 1), the American Physiological Society (APS) announced a new open access publishing option that allows authors for its 13 journals to post studies online immediately after being accepted for publication....

Since May 2005, NIH policy requests scientists to submit their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts with PubMed Central "as soon as possible" after acceptance for publication but not later than 12 months. But with compliance averaging less than 5%, NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni conceded the voluntary approach wasn't working. "A mandatory policy seems to be the one that will be necessary," Zerhouni told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee in March. He asked lawmakers to make public access within 12 months a condition of NIH grant funding, which they have done....

New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry is a new peer-reviewed OA journal sponsored by the University of British Columbia Library and Department of Anthropology.  The inaugural issue appeared in May.  Also see its blog.  (Thanks to antropologi.info.)

The presentations from the conference, Institutional archives for research: experiences and projects in Open Access (Rome, November 30 - December 1, 2006), are now online.  All are OA-related and most are in English.  (Thanks to Paola De Castro.)

Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society has released report summarizing its Internet & Society 2007 Conference (Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 31 - June 1, 2007).  Excerpt:

We asked participants to think about the role of University in cyberspace and to envision how University might reinvent itself in this new digital age....

Top questions asked were: What is the role of University in cyberspace? How are universities similar to and different from for-profit businesses? What are the implications for their rights as owners and users of intellectual property? Should all publicly funded research be in the public domain? Will becoming more open threaten the standing of University or would it enhance it? How do we create open access journals that are fiscally sustainable? ...

The issue of knowledge dissemination also sparked a particularly illuminating discussion as the majority of panelists considered the challenges that University faces in publishing a journal intended to serve the wider global community and universities in less developed countries. Participants drew a distinction between the digital dissemination of copyrighted works for the same use as originally created and the ability of content owners to be flexible within the realm of alternative, non-profit uses. Public broadcasting norms provided a salient parallel, in that public broadcasters have a mission similar to that of University, promoting wide access to knowledge and attempting to negotiate openness by standardizing use and copyright parameters....

A huge number of suggestions came out of the working groups, and certain sessions produced innovative ideas that may provide platforms for further action. The librarians advocated for the creation of clear guidelines to govern a sustainable multi-institutional repository to house the “wide world” of university resources, including classroom presentations, multimedia materials, and other university-produced works....

The ambitious agenda for the remainder of the [second] day consisted of ten working groups, focusing on some of the most pressing issues affecting University in the digital age. Groups discussed a wide range of topics, including an agenda for fair use, alternative models for scholarly publications, the concept of intellectual property....Topics also included consideration of University and its approach to...Open Access....

The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) has officially launched its Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN).  From yesterday's announcement:

After a year of (off and on) development we are delighted today to announce the official launch of the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN for short): http://www.ckan.net/.

CKAN is a registry of open knowledge packages and projects — be that a set of Shakespeare’s works, a global population density database, the voting records of MPs, or 30 years of US patents.

CKAN is the place to search for open knowledge resources as well as register your own....

CKAN is a key part of our long-term roadmap and completes our work on the first layer of open knowledge tools:

• The Open Knowledge Definition which sets out what we mean by open knowledge.
• KForge/KnowledgeForge which provide a system for managing open knowledge projects and the services (repositories/wikis/mailing lists) they need.
• Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) which provides a registry so that open knowledge creators and users can find other open knowledge projects and resources.

CKAN links in especially closely with our recent discussions of componentization: we envision a future in which open knowledge is provided in a much more componentized form (packages) so as to facilitate greater reuse and recombination similar to what occurs with software today (see the recent XTech presentation for more details). For this to occur we need to make it much easier for people to share, find, download, and ‘plug into’ the open knowledge packages that are produced. An essential first step in achieving this is to have a metadata registry where people can register their work and where relevant metadata (both structured and unstructured) can be gradually added over time....

[T]his [is a] beta version...and we look to user feedback (and we include ourselves here as users) to determine the future direction of development of the system.

FAQ

What kinds of things do you expect people to register in CKAN?

Anything and everything — when we say knowledge we mean any kind of content, data or information. That said there are two main recommendations regarding what you register:

• First, we are looking for people to register ‘packages’ that is collections with some kind of structure rather than individual items. So a substantial set of photos, a datasets of all kinds, the writings of Shakespeare but not an individual blog, or your flickr photo collection (unless it is really big!).
• Second, we’re looking for stuff that’s open: that is material that people are free to use, reuse and redistribute without restriction (other than, perhaps, a requirement to share-alike).

Why Not Just Use the Creative Commons Search Facility in Google/Yahoo/etc

Two main reasons:

1. We focus on work that is open. Simply put the set of open work and the set of CC-licensed works are not identical because (a) not all Creative Commons licensed work is open (for example those which use the non-commercial provision are not) and (b) there are plenty of open works which do not use CC licenses (e.g. Wikipedia)

2. The registry is designed to support holding much more metadata than simply whether the work is open on not. In particular we want to be able to support automated installation of knowledge packages in the future (which requires things like dependency and version information)....

Turid Hedlund and Ingegerd Rabow, Open Access in the Nordic Countries: A State of the Art Report, Nordbib, undated.  The authors' preface is signed February 28, 2007, but the report was announced today.  From the report summary:

The report describes the present situation in the Nordic countries (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland) regarding Open Access in scientific publishing....

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

The report considers the central questions and initiatives to solutions to the copyright problems....

The report gives examples on differences between, for example, medicine and humanities/social sciences concerning publishing as a means for research communication....

The introduction of the report is a section about the background to the Open Access or free access to scientific publications. We try to provide a picture of the central stages in the development of scientific publishing and the Open Access movement. This illustrated the shortcomings of the publishing process and offered the possibilities of the Internet to distribute research publications with free access to all interested....Scientific journal publishing, specifically in the Nordic countries with small language areas and small circles of readers, is one of the problem areas in the report. In section four, alternatives for solutions through some pilot studies in the Nordic countries are described. In sections five to nine a country report of each Nordic country is given (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden). The report finishes with a discussion about future and existing challenges.

This report is commissioned by the Nordbib project, and the report will primarily function as a basis for discussion at a workshop, arranged by Nordbib, during the spring 2007. Nordbib emphasises that both the report and the workshop shall form a basis in support of discussions between different parties to promote the access to research publications....

Canadian Creative Arts in Health, Training and Education has officially announced its conversion to an OA journal.  From the announcement:

CCAHTE, Canadian Creative Arts in Health, Training and Education, recently announced the journal has transitioned to open access. CCAHTE Journal (ISSN 1911-9755), the first interdisciplinary open access peer reviewed electronic journal of the creative arts in health, training and education has been established with a mission to disseminate worldwide, quality information and research about the creative arts in action and practice in health, training and education....

In keeping with its mission, to disseminate worldwide, quality information and research about the creative arts in action and practice in health, training and education, CCAHTE will provide quality, timely and efficient peer review services for papers welcoming research articles while publishing work that will enhance and add to the world’s knowledge in this growing field.

Chris Armbruster, Society Publishing, the Internet and Open Access: Shifting Mission-Orientation from Content Holding to Certification and Navigation Services?  A preprint, self-archived July 5, 2007. 

Abstract:   The internet and the rise of e-Science alter the conditions for scholarly communication. In signing declarations against open access mandates, society publishers indicate that they feel most threatened by the emergence of institutional repositories and the self-archiving mandates that these make possible. However, I suggest that more attention should be paid to the impact of e-Science, the rise of internet-based guild publishers and the entrance of players from the new economy.

In the Philosophical Transactions, Henry Oldenbourg in 1665 provided the model of academic journal publishing, conjoining dissemination and certification, and setting up the journal as a register and archive of knowledge claims. With the internet, however, the time has come to step out of Oldenbourg's long shadow. Society journals should stop aspiring to such functions as registration and archiving and should shed electronic dissemination, while enhancing certification and investing in (new) navigation services.

From the body of the paper:

[P]rofessional societies have done exceptionally well in applying their knowledge networks and tools to produce outstanding journals. They stand to benefit from open access because society publishers are embedded within their specific community, which they serve in a number of ways. They are ideally placed to utilise the rise of digital peer production (e.g. e-Science, but also the textgrid for the humanities) and global epistemic networks (researchers sharing a broadly defined research programme and, for example, sharing pre-prints) to deliver value-adding services to a global audience of users. Society publishers may find that institutional repositories and, more generally, digital libraries, could become partners in publishing. If repositories and libraries collect, disseminate and curate the content, then society publishers may concentrate on providing what they do best: adding value through certification and navigation services....

By ensuring the creation of well-populated repositories, deposit mandates will facilitate the emergence of these new overlay services. I suggest that societies should therefore consider engaging research funders and research organisations in discussion of how best to organise the deposition of publications and data in an open fashion, so that valuable new services may be developed by societies.

Language Documentation & Conservation is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from the National Foreign Language Resource Center and the University of Hawai'i Press.  The inaugural issue is now online.  (Thanks to Language Log.)

Also see Paul Newman's article from the inaugural issue, Copyright Essentials for Linguists:

Abstract:   This paper addresses copyright issues that linguists confront in their capacity as users and creators of scholarly work. It is organized in a simple question-answer format. Questions 1–3 present the basics of U.S. copyright law, including the fundamental nature of copyright as a bundle of intellectual property rights and the role of registration. Questions 4–5 treat issues of copyright notice. Questions 6–8 explain licenses, especially Creative Commons licenses, and the function of an Author’s Addendum. Questions 9–10 look at copyright in the context of online open access publishing. Question 11 discusses the concept of Fair Use. Question 12 analyzes the problem of what are called Orphan Works. Questions 13–19 explore issues of copyright ownership, including Work for Hire, joint authorship, and attribution. Questions 20–22 deal with copyright with specific reference to fieldwork situations and indigenous rights. The paper concludes with a brief presentation of key sources for further study and clarification.

Comment.  Newman makes a good point, but leaves a false impression, in answering Question 10:  "If I take an article from a free, open-access online journal, is it fair to assume that I can use the material for whatever academic purposes I want?"  He correctly says that OA journals are still under copyright and that, in the absence of a CC license or equivalent, users will be limited to fair use.  What he could have added is that most OA journals do use a CC license or equivalent.  Hence, it usually is safe to assume that OA journals expressly permit scholarly uses beyond fair use.

The presentations (abstracts and/or full texts) for the upcoming First International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference (Vancouver, July 11-13, 2007) are now online.  More than 20 explicitly address OA.

Peter Brantley, Science Direct-ly into Google, O'Reilly Radar, July 3, 2007.  Excerpt:

ScienceDirect (SD) is a compendium of scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature from Reed Elsevier....SD is an expensive, and often contentious product in Higher Education due to high year-on-year pricing increases, but it is a highly desirable one, nonetheless.

It was therefore notable when its absence from Google Scholar, Google's search interface for scholarly-related material, was realized....Elsevier has long supported its own search interface for scholarly literature, Scopus, and it was no surprise to many that they avoided inclusion. However, they doubtless lost eyeballs as more and more of this traffic migrated to the freely available Scholar product.

Elsevier has now undertaken to have the majority of its SD journals (those for which it holds or can obtain the copyrights) crawled and indexed by Google....

Ale de Vries, the SD product manager, informs me in an email:

About Google/Google Scholar: we're making good progress. As you may be aware, we did a pilot with some journals on SD first, and now we are working to get them all indexed. We're making good progress there - it's a lot of content to be crawled, but going along nicely. Both Google Scholar and main Google are gradually covering more and more of our journals.

This is notable for a wide range of reasons. One of the most prominent is that Elsevier clearly feels comfortable with having its core intellectual property crawled and analyzed by Google to augment discovery. In contrast to the various European newspaper publisher-related lawsuits, Elsevier has clearly felt that...their ability to execute business strategy is unimpeded by encouraging greater content exposure....

Frederick Noronha, Now obtain free textbooks - online!  India eNews, July 5, 2007.  Excerpt:

...Now there are quite a few examples of textbooks being made available online - free of cost - though one hasn't heard about such initiatives in India.

While BookPower.org is free only to developing countries, the California Open Source Textbook Project can be accessed at opensourcetext.org and a similar project is on commontext.org. There are also free high school science texts at nongnu.org/fhsst/ and the Open Textbook Project at otp.inlimine.org....

Libertas Academica OA textbooks are available at la-press.com/texts.htm while MedRounds Publications can be accessed via medrounds.org, Next/Text at futureofthebook.org/next/text/ and the Potto Project at potto.org

Textbook Revolution is a portal and collection, and is often labelled the 'best single site' at textbookrevolution.org and Wikibooks, linked to the Wikipedia project, is at en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks_portal

India-based activist Prabhala, who till not long ago headed the Southern African Access to Learning Materials project at the Consumer Institute, South Africa, works on issues related to accessing textbooks.

One of the recent studies he worked on was about barriers to access to learning materials in primary and secondary schools in selected 'developing countries', with a focus on copyright law.

Yet another was on the feasibility of an 'open textbook policy' for primary and secondary education textbooks, to be adopted by the South African government.

Prabhala told IANS: 'I'm not aware of any initiatives that create or distribute open access textbooks in India. One important example is the Free High School Science Texts project in South Africa (www.fhsst.org).' ...

Prabhala noted that textbooks in Karnataka were available online, were freely downloadable and could be republished, thanks to the Azim Premji Foundation that has been working with the state education department.

'So while in theory all government textbooks are open access - not all states, nor the central government, have their books up online,' Prabhala said....

The impact factors for Hindawi's OA journals increased by an average of 14% last year.  From today's announcement:

The Hindawi Publishing Corporation is pleased to announce a steady increase in the Impact Factors of its open access journals. According to Thomson Scientific's 2006 Journal Citation Report, the Impact Factors of Hindawi's journals rose by an average of 14% over the previous year....

Of the 21 journals in Hindawi's open access collection that have been reviewed for inclusion in the Science Citation Index, nine titles have already received an Impact Factor, and seven additional titles have been accepted for citation tracking and should receive their initial Impact Factors within the next two years.

Anup Kumar Das, B. K. Sen, and Chaitali Dutta, ETD Policies, Strategies and Initiatives in India: a Critical Appraisal, a presentation at ETD 2007 (Uppsala, June 13-16, 2007). 

Abstract:   The fruits of research from the formal research programmes of conventional universities and academic research institutions in India were under-utilized as the access to theses, dissertations and research reports were very limited to the next generation researchers and scholars. Modern information and communication technology (ICT) acts as an effective intervener for paradigm shifting from closed access theses and dissertations to open access electronic theses and dissertations (ETD). Now, the researchers in national institutions and universities in India have greater access to research literature, due to subscription to many e-journals and scholarly databases in most subject areas. But, the access to thesis and dissertation literature is very limited due to lack of national databases of theses and dissertations, both in bibliographic and full-text formats. Recently, India's University Grants Commission enacted "UGC (Submission of Metadata and Full-text of Doctoral Theses in Electronic Format) Regulations, 2005" to strengthen national capability of producing electronic theses and dissertations, and, to maintain university-level and national level databases of theses and dissertations. Some elite research institutions, such as Indian Institute of Science, have already started providing access to ETDs through open access archives. Some other institutions have taken initiatives to provide access to ETDs only through intranet (within the campus). The Vidyanidhi, INDEST Consortium, CSIR and INFLIBNET Centre are working towards implementation of open access ETD and/or bibliographic databases of theses and dissertations, but they also have some limitations. National policies on open access to ETD and other research literature, particularly the public funded ones, are yet to be ready. In India, some advocacy and pressure groups also exist that support open access to scholarly literature. Present paper explores the policy frameworks, strategic dimensions and analyses SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) of existing ETD initiatives in India.

Bethany Poole, Greater access to public domain works for all users, Inside Google Book Search, July 3, 2007.  Excerpt:

Today we launched a new feature for Book Search to help more people access the world's great public domain works. Whenever you find an out-of-copyright book in our index, you'll see a "View plain text" link, which lets anyone access the text layer of the book. As Dr. T.V. Raman explains on the main Google blog, this opens the book to adaptive technologies such as screen readers and Braille display, allowing visually impaired users to read these books just as easily as users with sight.

This is an exciting step for us in our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. To learn more about Google's efforts to make books and other digitized content more accessible to everyone, check out Dr. Raman's full post.

Comments. 

• Access for the visually impaired is important and long overdue.  But the new plain-text layer also provides access for cutting and pasting, text-mining, and other forms of processing.  Making these books accessible as texts, and not merely as images, is a breakthrough for all users.
• Google always had plain text behind the scenes for searching.  That is, it had to perform OCR on the scanned images in order to build the search index which was the raison d’être of the project.  I've been assuming that Google didn't want to provide OA to the text versions because it didn't want to provide crawlable texts for rival search engines to index.  If so, then what's changed?  Are the newly accessible texts inferior to the versions Google uses to build its index?  (If so, how?)  Or has Google decided, like the OCA, that it doesn't need to be the exclusive indexer of the books it digitizes?

The Journal of Choice Modelling is a new peer-reviewed no-fee OA journal.  (Thanks to Decision Science News.)  It hasn't published its inaugural issue yet, but has released a launch announcement and call for papers.

John Dupuis, Interview with Timo Hannay, Head of Web Publishing, Nature Publishing Group, Confessions of a Science Librarian, July 3, 2007.  Excerpt:

Welcome to the most recent installment in my occasional series of interviews with people in the scitech world. This time around the subject is Timo Hannay, Head of Web Publishing at Nature Publishing Group....

Q4. And speaking of Web 2.0, peer review is a core value in science. There's a lot of experimentation going on out there with alternatives to peer review, even Nature has stuck it's toe into the water. Where do you think this is headed -- no big deal or long-awaited revolution?

My personal view is that peer review is headed for a revolution at some point....

I basically buy the "wisdom of crowds" argument: there are plenty of examples of the web causing new, open and collaborative approaches to replace traditional, closed and proprietary ones -- from open-source software to Wikipedia. You don’t always get a better result to begin with, which is why skeptics find it easy to be dismissive (as they were with both open-source software and Wikipedia in the early days). But as they evolve, and particularly as more people join in, they get better until the results match or even exceed the traditional approaches, often at much lower cost....

I also believe that the web is particularly well suited to a "publish then filter" approach rather than the traditional "filter then publish" approach that was required when publishing was necessarily a physical-world process....

I’m convinced enough to know that we ought to be pushing the boundaries, because peer review is completely central to what we do, and if there’s a better way to do it then we ought to be the ones to find it. But at least in science, no one has found it yet....

Q7. How about journal publishing itself? In 5 or 10 years will we be able to recognize whatever it is that journals have evolved into? Is the very nature of scientific publishing headed for some sort of transformation?

I think the concept of the scientific "paper" will remain intact (even if that name will seem increasingly anachronistic). There’s real value in this unit of publication, which tells a story by explaining how something previously unknown has become know through a particular set of experiments. But beyond that, there’s a lot of potential for change. Smaller units of discovery will be published -- whether through blogs or databases or whatever -- because the barriers to publishing them are now so low. This, in turn, will create the need for new services to find and collate this information, preferably in a personalized way, and new measures of scientific impact that take into account such contributions, which will be much smaller and more numerous than published papers.

Journals will become better linked, easier to search, and more dynamic. Many databases will take more seriously the need for curation, peer review, citability and archiving. In this way, journals and databases will be harder and harder to tell apart, and I think the distinction between them will ultimately become meaningless....

Q9. Who do you think your biggest competitor is? Open Access journals, other society or commercial publishers or even just the notion that everything is available for free on the web?

None of the above. ;-) To be honest, I don’t spend much time thinking about any of those. Open access will come about mainly through funder-mandated self-archiving, not author- or sponsor-funded journals. Of course we compete with other established publishers too, but they are a relatively known quantity. Your point about everything being free is related to an issue that I think is critical for publishers of all stripes: how to create viable business models that don’t involve charging for content (whether readers or authors). That’s not because I believe it’s necessarily going to become impossible to do charge readers, but it won’t always be the optimal (or even a viable) business model, especially for collaborative online services, so we need other options. In short, we need to get much better at monetizing traffic.

But to answer your question, I think our biggest competitor is the unknown grad student in his (or her) dorm room hatching a plan to turn scientific communication upside down in the same way that Napster, Google and Wikipedia disrupted other industries....

Q10. Nature Precedings almost seems like the boldest of Nature's recent web offerings, nudging the larger scientific community into the same direction as, say, the physicists. What was the rationale behind introducing the service, and what do you see as it's place in the Nature suite of web products?

The basic rationale is that it’s in the interests of science for researchers to share their findings with each other as early and openly as possible. As you say, this already happens in physics through arXiv.org (and Paul Ginsparg, who runs that service, has very kindly offered his advice as we’ve been setting up Nature Precedings).

There are all sorts of theories about why it doesn’t happen so much in biology and other fields, but we thought the time was right to try and kick-start it. For one thing, there seems to be an increasing acceptance and understanding of the power and value of the web in enabling open collaboration....

We were also able to get public support from some outstanding partners: the British Library, the European Bioinformatics Institute, Science Commons, and the Wellcome Trust (with more to come, I anticipate). This is key because the barriers to adoption are much more social than technical, and no one organisation has the right mix of skills and influence to pull this off on its own.

For the same reason, we’re also reaching out to other publishers. I expect a few of them will be cautious at first, but many of them clearly appreciate what we’re doing, which is about complementing the journal system, not competing with it, and about building an open federated system, not a closed proprietary one. For our own part, Nature Precedings helps us to engage with scientists at an earlier stage of the research process, which supports our traditional journal activities.

Also, by moving early we hope to be among the first to work out how best to make this kind of service economically self-sustaining. We’ve already made clear that that won’t involve charging for access -- and we’re working with some of our partners to set up open mirror sites to guarantee that....

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

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

The American Physiological Society has launched a hybrid OA journal program called Author Choice.  From the June 29 announcement:

Authors who publish with the American Physiological Society (APS) and want to provide the public with immediate access to their research results will now be able to do so under a plan announced today by the APS.

Under the new program, Author Choice, researchers who publish their studies in APS journals can make their results immediately available by paying an open access (OA) fee. The plan, which takes effect July 1, 2007, also guarantees that researchers who are required to provide open access as a condition of funding can quickly and easily do so....

According to Martin Frank, Ph.D., APS' Executive Director, "...Ten years ago we made online access to our journals immediately available for a nominal fee. Seven years ago we made all articles free online after 12 months. Two years ago we made articles available to all patients in need, at no charge. Now we are letting the researchers and their organizations dictate when the results of their research are made available to the public free of charge. Given today's market forces, it makes sense to let the authors decide what timing best suits their needs."

The plan goes into effect after several years of experimentation with the APS journal Physiological Genomics. During a three year period, APS offered authors the choice of whether to pay an open access fee plus standard author charges. At the end of the test period, 18 percent of authors opted for open access....

Authors who choose immediate access for their work will pay the $2,000 Author Choice fee, plus the customary author fees. Open access choice will apply to all of the APS' 10 monthly research publications: American Journal of Physiology - Cell Physiology; American Journal of Physiology - Endocrinology and Metabolism; American Journal of Physiology - Gastrointestinal and Liver Physiology; American Journal of Physiology - Heart and Circulatory Physiology; American Journal of Physiology - Lung Cellular and Molecular Physiology; American Journal of Physiology - Regulatory, Integrative & Comparative Physiology; American Journal of Physiology - Renal Physiology; Journal of Applied Physiology; Journal of Neurophysiology; and Physiological Genomics.

Some 4,000 Research Articles Have Potential to be "Open" ...

From the Author Choice FAQ:

The [$2,000] AuthorChoice fee was determined by calculating the real average cost of publishing an article in an APS journal, and subtracting the actual average amount already paid by authors in author fees (page charges and color fees). The AuthorChoice fee was designed to completely cover the cost of publishing an article. If enough authors choose open access, the journals will become open access, and we will forego subscription revenue for an author-pays revenue system.

The FAQ doesn't indicate the average author fees, but the copyright transfer agreement for Physiological Genomic