Open Access News

MIT has released the webcast of a forum, Copyright, Fair Use, and the Cultural Commons, originally held on April 28, 2007.  (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.)  From the description:

Moderator William Uricchio [Co-Director, Comparative Media Studies Program and Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, and Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University] sets the scene for panelists’ discussion of current copyright wars with a brief historical overview of copyright protection....Uricchio notes, “Bizarrely, the faster information circulates, the longer we’re extending copyright protection. It seems totally at odds with where our constitution framers and case law emerged from.” ...

Hal Abelson [Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, MIT School
of Engineering] offers his sense of how copyright concerns constrict life at the academy. MIT, he says, has begun putting fences up around its own course materials, including the most basic and central of thinkers. For instance, it has limited online, published versions of Aristotle, Pascal and Fermat to students in a particular course, for a single semester. Huge expense goes into getting permissions from faculty, and university lawyers are so concerned about offending copyright holders that they bar reams of material from MIT’s OpenCourseWare site. Abelson believes these fences risk “destroying the university as an intellectual community,” and recommends using open content (granting Creative Commons licenses) as much as possible, as well as aggressively exercising fair use.

PS:  Apart from Uricchio and Abelson, the other panelists were Wendy Gordon (Professor of Law at Boston University), Gordon Quinn (President Co-Founder of Kartemquin Films), and Pat Aufderheide (Professor of Communications at American University).

Stevan Harnad, Where There's No Access Problem There's No Open Access Advantage, Open Access Archivangelism, September 7, 2007. 

Summary:  Kurtz & Henneken (2007) report that the citation advantage of astrophysics papers self-archived as preprints in Arxiv is caused by (1) Early Advantage (EA) (earlier citations for papers self-archived earlier) and (2) Quality Bias (QB) (a self-selection bias toward self-archiving higher quality papers) and not by (3) Open Access (OA) itself (being freely accessible online to those who cannot afford subscription-toll access). 

K & H suggest: "[T]here is no 'Open Access Advantage' for papers from the Astrophysical Journal because in a well funded field like astrophysics essentially everyone who is in a position to write research articles has full access to the literature." 

This seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation for K&H's findings. Where there is no access problem, OA cannot be the cause of whatever higher citation count is observed for self-archived articles. 

We (Hajjem & Harnad 2007) have conducted a similar study, but across the full spectrum of disciplines, measuring the citation advantage for mandated and unmandated self-archiving for articles from four Institutional Repositories that have self-archiving mandates, each compared to articles in the very same journal and year by authors from other institutions (on the assumption that mandated self-archiving should have less of a self-selection Quality Bias than unmandated self-archiving). 

We again confirmed the citation advantage for self-archiving, and found no difference in the size of that advantage for mandated and unmandated self-archiving. It is likely that the size of the access problem differs from field to field, and with it the size of the OA citation advantage. It is unlikely that most fields are as well-heeled as astrophysics.

Mike Rossner, Executive Director of Rockefeller University Press, has allowed me to distribute the letter he sent to the DC Priniples Coalition:

I read with interest your letters to the Senate regarding the LHHS appropriations bill. The Rockefeller University Press will not sign these letters, and we hereby withdraw our support for the DC Principles coalition. Please remove our name from the list of signatories on your website.

Although the headline on the DC Principles website declares, "Not-for-Profit Publishers Commit to Providing Free Access to Research," it seems clear that your lobbying efforts are more closely aligned with those of the commercial publishers who keep their content under access controls. We at the Rockefeller University Press strongly believe in the release of journal content to the public after a short delay. In an ideal world, this would be done voluntarily by all publishers. Given the reluctance of many publishers to do so, however, the government has been forced to take action. We support these government efforts to make research funded by the public available to the public after a short delay, and we would thus like to remove any association of the Rockefeller University Press with the DC Principles coalition.

Comments.

• First some annotations:  The “LHHS appropriations bill” is the one from the House Subcommittee on Labor Health and Human Services Education and Related Agencies that would strengthen the NIH policy from a request to a requirement.  For details on the bill, see my article in the August 2007 issue of SOAN.  The DC Principles Coalition supports some kinds of free online access for research literature, but it lobbies vigorously against government policies that would encourage or require OA for publicly-funded research.  For examples of DCPC letters to Congress opposing the original NIH policy and opposing recent attempts to strengthen it, see its web site.
• Last week (August 30) Mike Rossner and Rockefeller University Press released a letter to PRISM, “strongly disagree[ing] with the spin that has been placed on the issue of open access by PRISM” and asking it put a disclaimer on its website “indicating that the views presented on the site do not necessarily reflect those of all members of the AAP.”
• Kudos to Rossner and Rockefeller for speaking up again.  The DCPC supports the removal of some access barriers to scientific research, but its lobbying campaign against OA for publicly-funded research harms science, researchers, and taxpayers.

Kevin Bradley, Junran Lei, and Chris Blackall, Memory of the World: Towards an Open Source Repository and Preservation System, UNESCO, dated June 2007 but apparently released in September.  Recommendations to UNESCO on open-source repository software for long-term preservation (rather than OA), focusing on DSpace, Fedora, and Greenstone.

Fytton Rowland, The open access debate, UKSG Serials e-News, September 5, 2007.  Excerpt:

Recently, the American Association of Publishers (AAP) launched the PRISM coalition (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine), an anti-Open Access (OA) lobbying group. This followed their taking advice from a PR consultant, Eric Dezenhall, who specialises in damage limitation exercises....

For-profit commercial publishers are legally required to defend their shareholders' interests, of course, but what of the not-for-profits that belong to the AAP? Interestingly, Rockefeller University Press (RUP) have written to the AAP (of which they are a member) asking that the PRISM statements should include a disclaimer that not all members of the AAP agree with PRISM's views, and stating categorically that RUP 'strongly disagree with the spin' put on OA by PRISM.

A large proportion of the scholarly literature is published by not-for-profits....OA presents these bodies with a dilemma. By their charters, their mission is to advance scholarship and they publish in pursuance of that mission. But their members or their proprietor universities have become used, in many cases, to surpluses from the publishing operations cross-subsidising other activities. The larger American learned society publishers, with some exceptions, have been particularly strong in their resistance to OA. Publishing staff of British learned societies also speak frankly, in private at least, in the same way. Smaller societies feel that OA threatens not just their surpluses, but their very existence, as I discovered in my research in New Zealand a few years ago. Yet, if they oppose unfettered access to published scholarly work, they may be failing to advance scholarship as their charters require.

I have always been a staunch advocate for the not-for-profit sector of scholarly publishing industry, having spent the first half of my career working in it, and I sympathise with my former colleagues about the difficult position that they are now in. But simply allying themselves with the oligopolists of the commercial scholarly publishing industry won't do. Their managers need to work with academics - who are their authors, editors, referees, readers and indeed their proprietors - to find new business models that protect the not-for-profits' existence and stability while allowing all the world's scholars and students unfettered access to published research work. OA isn't going to go away, and if existing publishers refuse to provide it, someone else will.

SPARC has released a letter to its members about PRISM, September 6, 2007.  It was written by Heather Joseph, SPARC’s Executive Director.  Excerpt:

I’m writing to bring to your attention the recent launch of an anti-open access lobbying effort. The initiative, called “PRISM – the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine”, was launched with development support from the Association of American Publishers and specifically targets efforts to expand public access to federally funded research results – including the National Institute of Health’s Public Access Policy.

The messaging on the PRISM Web site, which is aimed at key policy makers, directly corresponds to the PR campaign reportedly undertaken by the AAP earlier this year. As Nature reported in January, AAP publishers met with PR “pit bull” Eric Dezenhall to develop a campaign against the “free-information movement” that focuses on simple messages, such as “public access equals government censorship,” and suggested that “the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review”. News of this proposed campaign met with immediate and heavy criticism in the academic community.

The new PRISM Web site closely tracks with the recommended PR strategy, highlighting messages that include:

• Public access/open access will destroy the peer review system
• Public access equals government censorship
• The government is trying to expropriate publishers’ intellectual property

This campaign is clearly focused on the preservation of the status quo in scholarly publishing, (along with the attendant revenues), and not on ensuring that scientific research results are distributed and used as widely as possible. The launch of this initiative provides a timely opportunity for engaging faculty members, researchers, students and administrators in dialogue on important issues in scholarly communications.

To assist in this conversation, the Association of Research Libraries has prepared a series of talking points that explicitly address each of the PRISM messages listed above....

The reaction to the launch of PRISM by the academic research community has been immediate and quite strong. Of particular note are reactions by these important constituencies:

1) Some publishers have called for the AAP to post a disclaimer on the PRISM Web site, indicating that PRISM does *not* represent their views on the issues of open access and public access. (See open letter from Mike Rossner, Executive Director of Rockefeller University Press.)

2) Some journal editors have also expressed displeasure with the initiative. For example, Tom Wilson, Editor (and Founder) of the International Journal of Information Management, resigned from that editorial board in protest of Elsevier's involvement with PRISM.

Others, including Peter Murray Rust of the University of Cambridge (UK), have written to publishers with which they are affiliated as author or editor and asked them to take action to publicly disassociate themselves with PRISM.

3) Researchers are also questioning how their choices may result in unwanted association with PRISM. Some are calling for colleagues to register displeasure over publishers’ involvement with PRISM by reconsidering submitting work, reviewing, or editing for publishers who support the coalition (See ). Others are going even further, calling for a boycott of those publishers....

PRISM developments will be of interest to many on campus – including those who follow open access and anyone who is involved with PRISM publishers as an author, editor, or subscriber. Please feel free to share this information. To stay abreast of related news, visit the SPARC Web site or Peter Suber’s Open Access News blog....

Copyright Alliance Urges Congress to Throw Out Proposal Eliminating Researchers’ Copyright Protections, Intellectual Property Today, September 6, 2007.  Excerpt:

The Copyright Alliance today urged Congress to eliminate a provision that would dramatically reduce the copyright protection from scientific research papers....

A provision included in the FY 2008 Labor HHS appropriations bill requires authors of scientific articles who have received grants from the National Institutes of Health to submit any subsequent papers they write for free access on the National Institutes of Health web site after the papers have been accepted for publication and undergone a peer review sponsored by that publication.

"It is reasonable and appropriate that Congress would wish to widely disseminate results of research partially funded by one of its agencies. However, the provision would require any researcher receiving NIH funds to surrender a manuscript – after acceptance by a publisher and after a full peer review – to the government to be posted for free to the world, no more than one year after publication. This has never been an obligation connected with NIH grants.....

"The unintended consequence of this measure is the chilling effect it could have on the ability of would-be publishers to conduct peer review and publish and disseminate their works....

Comments.

• The CA is uninformed.  Most of its members are not in academic publishing and not even close (e.g. Motion Picture Association of America, National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, National Football League, and the Walt Disney Company) and must be very new to this issue.  But two of its members are Reed Elsevier and the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which recently launched PRISM.  It appears that they made the kind of pitch to the larger organization that they made online through PRISM, and heads nodded around the table.  Now CA’s weight is behind their cause.  Too bad someone on staff didn’t check the facts.
• The bill now in Congress that would strengthen the NIH policy would not “eliminate” copyright protections or “dramatically reduce” them.  Not for researchers and not for publishers.  It wouldn’t affect copyright protections at all.  Here’s the full text of the relevant part of the bill:

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

The bill is careful not to amend copyright law and explicit that the new policy must comply with copyright law.  What part of “consistent with copyright law” does CA not understand?

• One sign of PRISM involvement is that the CA statement uses PRISM’s inaccurate and dishonest word “surrender” to describe what the bill would require.  Here, however, CA says that researchers would have to surrender their manuscripts while PRISM said that publishers would have to surrender their published articles.  Nothing of either kind is in play here.  The bill would archive copies of authors’ peer-reviewed manuscripts in PubMed Central.  Authors may keep their manuscripts, publishers may keep their publications.  Authors may still copyright their works, may still transfer copyrights to publishers, and publishers may still hold and exercise those copyrights.  The PMC copies wouldn’t even be the published versions of the articles, but only the versions approved by peer review and not yet copy edited.
• Also like PRISM, CA asserts without argument that the bill would threaten peer review.  See my full-length rebuttal to that canard, just published last week. 
• Publishers don’t like the bill to strengthen the NIH policy; that is clear.  They believe it will jeopardize their revenue.  But they don’t like to lead with that argument.  In this case they are pretending that the bill threatens researcher interests rather than their own.  But in fact mandating open access will have no effect on researcher copyrights (which they may and undoubtedly will still transfer to publishers) and it will directly benefit researchers by enlarging their audience and impact.  Whom do you trust to speak for the interests of researchers in this debate, publishers or the presidents and provosts of 132 American universities?  Publishers or 26 American Nobel laureates in science?

CheckPoint Learning has a short interview with Gabriele Beger on OA (in German).  Beger is the Director of the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, the President of the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Informationswissenschaft, and a strong supporter of OA.  Read the interview in German or Google’s English.

Antonia Loick, The New Copyright Act, Goethe-Institut, August 2007.  Also available in German.  Excerpt:

On 5th July 2007, the German Bundestag passed the Second Act Governing Copyright in the Information Society (the "Second Basket" of copyright law reform). Four years after the first reform, a new balance has been struck between the interests of authors, exploiters, equipment producers and end-users, none of whom are, however, especially happy with the compromise solution....

Open access: scientists and researchers versus science publishers

A further subject of dispute regulated by the Copyright Act concerns the interests of researchers and the scientific community, on the one hand, and science publishers, on the other. The dispute centres on the question of whether scientists have a basic right to access knowledge they have produced free of charge ("open access"), knowledge that has traditionally been published and sold by scientific publishers.

The bill had originally actually provided for schools, universities and non-commercial research institutes to be allowed to digitise copyrighted works for their own purposes and without having to obtain permission and to post them on an intranet or the Internet and reproduce them from there as often as they wished. This proposal was put forward by the Coalition for Action "Copyright Law for Education and Research" (Aktionsbündnis "Urheberrecht für Bildung und Wissenschaft“), set up jointly by major German research organisations such as the Max Planck Society, the Conference of University Directors and the Helmholtz Association. They argued that it is absolutely essential that the members of an information society should have free access to the findings of scientific research, especially if the lion's share of such findings has been generated via publicly funded research institutes. Although there are indeed a number of good reasons that speak in favour of this proposal, its statutory implementation would have ruined numerous publishing houses. This cannot be in the interests of society. The Act therefore contains a compromise solution: museums, libraries and archives may now digitise their collections and display them at electronic workstations. However, the number of reproductions of a particular work that may be shown simultaneously at such stations will be dependent on the number of copies of the work the library has in its collection. A further controversial issue was also regulated. In future, libraries will be permitted to transmit copies of newspaper articles or excerpts from books to their users if the pertinent publisher does not offer this service itself.

On 21st September 2007, the bill will go before the Bundesrat (Upper House). If no objections are raised, the new Copyright Act will come into effect before the end of the year. It can, however, already be safely assumed that the reformed Act, too, will require revision in the near future as a result of the rapid pace of technological developments. Many of today's opponents will then be found back in the arena, battling fiercely over the contents of the "third basket" of copyright reform.

Update. Germany's Bundesrat approved the bill on September 21, 2007, and the new rules take effect on January 1, 2008. For an English-language summary of the key provisions, see this document from STM (October 2007).

To keep track of the growing number of OA policies, especially the OA mandates, see the following:

1. the comparative table of funder policies from BMC
2. the Juliet database of funder policies from SHERPA
3. the ROARMAP list of funder and university policies from EPrints

Stevan Harnad, 32nd Green OA Mandate: Kudos and Caveat, Open Access Archivangelism, September 6, 2007.  Excerpt:

The UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is now the 6th of the 7 UK Research Councils to adopt a Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate

That makes AHRC's the 18th funder OA mandate worldwide, in addition to 14 university and departmental mandates, 2 proposed multi-university mandates, and 4 proposed funder mandates, for a total of 38 Green OA mandates adopted or proposed so far.

Like most of the mandates adopted so far, the AHRC has some needless, easily-corrected flaws, but first, let us (with Dr. Johnson) applaud the fact that it has been adopted at all: Bravo AHRC!

Now the mandate's altogether unnecessary and ever-so-easily-corrected flaw:

In their anxiety to ensure that their policy is both legal and not needlessly worrisome for publishers, AHRC (and many of the other funder mandates, including yesterday's CIHR mandate from Canada) have allowed an embargo period before the article is made OA, if the publisher wishes.

That is fine. But it is a huge mistake to allow the time at which the article must be deposited to be dictated by the publisher's embargo.

The deposit should be required immediately upon acceptance for publication, without exception. If there is no publisher embargo, that deposit is also immediately made Open Access at that same time. Otherwise it is made Closed Access for the duration of the embargo period. (Only the bibliographic metadata are visible and accessible via the web, not the article itself.)

It may seem pointless to require an article to be deposited immediately if it cannot be made OA immediately. But the point of requiring immediate deposit either way is to close a profound loophole that could otherwise delay both deposit and OA indefinitely, turning the mandate into a mockery from which any researcher can opt out at the behest of his publisher....

PS:  Stevan then quotes my own comments on the AHRC policy, but I’ll merely point to them.  In short, I agree on the need for what Stevan calls immediate deposit / optional access (or what I call the dual deposit/release strategy), but I believe there should also be a firm deadline on the embargo period.

Update. Also see Arthur Sale's comments, building on Stevan's.

Aisha Labi, Turkish Professors Uncover Plagiarism in Papers Posted on Physics Server, Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog, September 6, 2007.  Excerpt:

Dozens of academic papers containing apparently plagiarized work have been removed by moderators from arXiv, the popular preprint server where many physicists post their work before publication, Nature (subscription required) is reporting. According to the article, 67 papers by 15 physicists at four Turkish universities were pulled after an examination of their content revealed that they “plagiarize the works of others or contain inappropriate levels of overlap with earlier articles.”

Nature quotes Mustafa Salti, a graduate student at the Middle East Technical University whose name was on 40 of the problematic papers, defending his work: “Most of our papers have been published in the science citation index journals. Until now no one has claimed that we plagiarize.”

Suspicions were apparently stoked when, during oral defenses of their dissertations last fall, Mr. Salti and another student demonstrated a poor grasp of even the most basic of physics concepts....

The investigating professors notified the moderators of the arXiv site, which is based at Cornell University. The service’s founder, Paul Ginsparg, told Nature that the incident was the worst case of plagiarism the site had ever experienced.

Update (11/4/07). Because two of these papers were published in General Relativity and Gravitation, the editors conducted their own investigation of those two papers. They found that one was guilty only of self-plagiarism: "We do not see a serious problem in authors using such cutting and pasting techniques from their own papers for introductory material, even though we would prefer that material to be written anew each time." They found that the other was guilty of plagiarizing from other authors. See the editorial published on October 30, 2007 (accessible only to subscribers).

Michael J. Kurtz and Edwin A. Henneken, Open Access does not increase citations for research articles from The Astrophysical Journal, a preprint deposited in arXiv September 6, 2007.

Abstract:   We demonstrate conclusively that there is no "Open Access Advantage" for papers from the Astrophysical Journal. The two to one citation advantage enjoyed by papers deposited in the arXiv e-print server is due entirely to the nature and timing of the deposited papers. This may have implications for other disciplines.

Update. Also see Stevan Harnad's response.

Open Access Astronomy, Oh Inverted World, September 5, 2007.  Excerpt:

Over at Astronomy Blog Stuart is currently working on a project to define an xml-based schema which could be used by the various institutions and organisations running the world’s professional telescopes to release information about their observing.

Elizabeth C. Turtle and Martin P. Courtois, Scholarly Communication: Science Librarians as Advocates for Change, Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, Summer 2007. 

Abstract:   Science librarians are in a unique position to take a leadership role promoting scholarly communication initiatives and to aid in making scientific information more accessible. This article outlines steps and identifies resources that science librarians can employ to become scholarly communication advocates on their campuses.

Update. Also see Peter Murray-Rust's comments on this article.

Dorothea Salo, Yes, IRs are broken. Let’s talk about it, Caveat Lector, September 5, 2007.

...Institutional repositories as a class are in serious trouble. They are not producing the outcomes they promised —or, indeed, much of any outcome in many cases. They are sucking up library staff time and development muscle, and libraries haven’t enough of either commodity to waste on a non-productive service.

Fundamentally, the value proposition on which IRs were sold to libraries was in error. Voluntary self-archiving in institutional repositories simply does not happen in the absence of deposit mandates. From a library perspective, this changes the picture from the original “build it, step back, and they will come” to “make a tremendous ongoing investment in marketing and library-mediated deposit services that may never pay off if other libraries at other institutions don’t do likewise.” It’s only sensible that many libraries back away from the latter commitment....

We are not confronting our error. Except for Stevan Harnad and Arthur Sale, we are by and large not so much as acknowledging our error —instead, we are papering it over with happytalk case studies....

To the best of my knowledge, no provisions have been made at any of the universities adopting the [CIC author] addendum to track addendum uptake among faculty and publisher response thereto, which in practice means I have no way to find out which faculty have successfully employed the addendum so that I can retrieve and archive their articles. “But they can self-archive!” Sure they can. They won’t without a mandate. The addendum doesn’t change that....

An example: mediated deposit. Repository systems blithely assume that the person pushing the buttons to make a deposit is the same person with authority to grant the repository’s license—that is, a person with intellectual-property rights over the content. This is wishful thinking. In most repositories, most deposits are done by a third party, be it a librarian, departmental staff, or a faculty member’s graduate-student assistants. None of the repository software packages or services I know of acknowledges this reality by separating the act of depositing content from the act of licensing it for preservation and display. I don’t even want to talk about how much time I have wasted building chicken-wire-and-duct-tape paper licensing workflows around this problem. Nor do I care to talk about how many faculty I’ve seen walk away from paper licenses they’d likely click through onscreen without a care in the world....

How much more uptake would we have if we could offer a service enabling departmental IT staff to batch-deposit papers which (once individual faculty have responded to the email requesting licensure) appear magically as prettily-formatted HTML citations on faculty and departmental web pages? It’s technically feasible. We haven’t done it because we’ve fixated far too strongly on the “self” in “self-archiving.”

How much more uptake would we have if we maintained a system that welcomes and cares for unfinished work as well as curating and displaying the finished products of that work? I can say with some authority that I’d have a great many more preprints and postprints if faculty could find their preprints and postprints in the first place! ...

Alma Swan, The business of digital repositories, in K. Weenink et al. (eds.), A DRIVER's Guide to European Repositories, Amsterdam University Press, 2007.  Self-archived September 6, 2007. 

Abstract:   This chapter is aimed at those who are involved in planning, setting up and running a digital repository for an institution or community. It covers making a business case, costs, staffing requirements, managing growth and change and other sustainability issues. A number of repository case studies across Europe were used to derive data to inform the study.

Donat Agosti, "That's life" - is it?  Biodivcontext, September 6, 2007.  Excerpt:

...[I]n todays New York Time (Sept 6) you can read an Op-Ed contribution by EO Wilson, "That's life"....

The [Wilson-inspired] Encyclopedia of Life is a very secretive initiative administering data collected by third parties. There is no substantial budget, nor are science plans there, to create new data. In fact, the proposed support for the affiliated Biodiversity Heritage Library has been cut - the only place, where EOL could have helped to convert existing data into a digital, all accessible and open form.

Wilson's own commitment to open access is dubious, and his credentials to develop new ways to provide access to biodiversity data are non existent....

There are ways to be more efficient at very little cost.

• Open Acccess: Assure, that all the forthcoming taxonomic and ecological literature is open access, either by the green or the gold road.
• Commit the publishers to insert taxonomic specific tags (such as provided by taxonx the schema), so new names and descriptions can automatically be harvested.
• Support by our government of Name Registries for all the world orgasnisms, such as IPNI and Zoobank.
• Provide targeted access to legacy publications, digitize and mark them up, so that they can be harvested, their names, descriptions and distribution records, and provide doi or handles for all of these records.
• Commit the members of the Conservation Commons to deliver: provide access to their data.
• Bridge the gap between the conservation, industry and sytematics community, so that a link between data exists.
• Implement the OECD guidelines to provide access to publicly funded scientific data....

Heather Morrison, DOAJ: strong growth, and understanding the numbers, Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, September 6, 2007.  Excerpt:

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a list of peer-reviewed, fully open access journals. DOAJ's clearly defined vetting process makes it attractive as a means of measuring open access publishing. DOAJ numbers, over the past couple of years, have consistently indicated strong growth in fully open access journals (for details, see The Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series). An examination of DOAJ titles by start year as of today indicates strong, continuing addition of recent new titles (e.g. 289 with a start date of 2005, 311 with a start date of 2004)....

Recent data, DOAJ titles by start year
2006 and 2007 are not presented here. Please see explanation below.

2005: 289
2004: 311
2003: 278
2002: 281
2001: 295
2000: 269
1999: 155
1998: 151
1997: 154
1996: 112
1995: 77
1994: 28
1993: 27
1992: 11
1991: 14
1990: 19

For full data, see the Open Data Edition.

...The start year in DOAJ is the first year articles are available as OA, not the first year the journal started. An older journal which converts, but does not have older copies online, will have a different start date in DOAJ than the first year of publication.

Recent start years are always likely to be understated.  New titles must be identified by DOAJ, or present themselves to DOAJ. Also, DOAJ is a vetted list. New titles are only added after they have gone through this process, to ensure that the title is indeed open access and meets peer-review or equivalent quality control status, and after enough articles are published to warrant inclusion. What this means for DOAJ numbers: recent title figures will always be understated. Many journals begun in 2006 have not yet gone through a full year of publishing, and these titles will not have completed the DOAJ vetting process. The current year will always be understated, for this reason and also because, until the year is complete, new journals are likely to start....If short-term growth dips a little at DOAJ, it most likely means that someone is on vacation.

DOAJ start years are subject to change.  This may be counterintuitive: due to changes in open access status, or digitization of back issues, DOAJ start years are likely to change....Journals that no longer meet the DOAJ criteria and are weeded from the list will cause a drop in their start year count.

This explains how Sally Morris, based on research conducted in the early part of 2005, came to the erroneous conclusion that OA journal start-ups had peaked in 2001, with slightly fewer than 180 journals counted. Sally and her group of volunteers counted only 80 journals in DOAJ with a start-up year of 2004, and concluded that OA journal start-ups had dropped. At the time of counting, journals that had started in 2004, and some in 2003, are likely to have still been unknown to DOAJ, or not yet completed the vetting process....

At the time of counting early in 2005, Sally reports that there were 1,443 journals then listed in the DOAJ. As of today, there are 2,842, nearly twice as many. This illustrates an increasing trend towards OA publishing, not a decline.

The year 2004,the low point on Sally's chart, is today's apparent peak. Sally and her group counted about 80 journals in DOAJ with a start year of 2004; today, DOAJ records 311 journal start-ups in 2004, nearly 5 times more than at the time of Sally's count. This illustrates two things: my point that titles in recent years will always be understated in DOAJ, and also that OA start-ups at the time of Sally's study were not declining, but rather increasing....

Sally Morris' conclusions and data can be found in the Personal View (not peer reviewed) article, When is a journal not a journal? in the subscription-based Learned Publishing Vol. 19:1, January 2006....

Last week Peter Murray-Rust wrote an open letter to Oxford University Press, asking whether it supports PRISM, and yesterday he received a reply from Martin Richardson, the Managing Director of Oxford Journals.  From Richardson’s reply:

Oxford University Press is not part of the PRISM initiative, and we do not intend to become a signatory to the PRISM Principles.

OUP is very active in several Open Access initiatives, all of which are extensively documented on our website. Our approach has been to develop an evidence-based understanding of the implications of OA on scholarly research dissemination, and to share that with the wider community, and this is our preferred method of contributing to the OA debate.

PS:  Kudos to Martin Richardson for this direct statement and to Peter Murray-Rust for his initial letter.  I also second PMR’s own comment:

This is very good news from a major publisher with an early OA strategy.

We have now had several publishers distancing themselves from the PRISM initiative. Unfortunately the PRISM site is closely linked to AAP and so poorly constructed that it is impossible to separate membership of AAP from PRISM....

I try to be fair on this blog and...[it] would make things much easier if the actual membership of PRISM were published - if it actually has one. Failing that publishers would save themselves from unnecessary confusion if they were to publicly state their non-affiliation as OUP and others have done.

After all, I am not the only one who can write letters… (and since this blog has a CC licence anyone can adapt the format of my letter(s) without my permission).

The UK Arts & Humanities Research Council announced its long-awaited OA policy today.  You can find it on the AHRC access policy page and in Appendix 9 of its lengthy (111 pp.) Research Funding Guide for 2007/08:

It is the AHRC’s position that authors choose where to place their research for publication. It is for authors’ institutions to decide whether they are prepared to use funds for any page charges or other publishing fees. Such funds could be part of an institution’s indirect costs under the full economic costing regime....

The AHRC requires that funded researchers:

• ensure deposit of a copy of any resultant articles published in journals or conference proceedings in appropriate repository
• wherever possible, ensure deposit of the bibliographical metadata relating to such articles, including a link to the publisher’s website, at or around the time of publication

Full implementation of these requirements must be undertaken such that current copyright and licensing policies, for example, embargo periods and provisions limiting the use of deposited content to noncommercial purposes, are respected by authors.

The final paragraph is emphasized (in bold type) in the Funding Guide but not emphasized on the access policy page.

Comments.

• I applaud the mandatory language.  But the policy is sketchy on most other important details.  It doesn’t indicate which version should be deposited or what counts as an appropriate repository.  It urges immediate deposit for metadata but doesn’t do so for the text itself.  It gives no timetable for depositing the text and no maximum length for the delay or embargo. 
• It gives nearly as much space to the exception as it does to the policy, and creates the same gigantic loophole as the new CIHR policy and the older ESRC policy.  If publishers don’t want their authors to make any version of their articles OA, they only have to adopt a house rule to that effect and suddenly the AHRC policy does not apply to AHRC grantees who submit work that that publisher.
• The AHRC is the sixth of the seven Research Councils UK to announce its OA policy.  If this kind of mandatory language qualified by a vitiating exception can be called a mandate, then it’s also the sixth to adopt a mandate. The other five are at the BBSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, and STFC.  The EPSRC is still deliberating.  Of the six RCUK OA policies, three allow authors to use grant funds for publication fees at fee-based OA journals (MRC, NERC, STFC) and three do not (AHRC, BBSRC, ESRC).

Digitization Project News - ERIC Releases Second Wave of Full-Text Documents, a press release from ERIC, September 4, 2007.  Excerpt:

More than 8,000 additional full-text documents have been released to the public as ERIC's Microfiche Digitization Project continues. To date, more than 30,000 documents published on microfiche by ERIC between 1982 and 1992 have been made available in full text. Digitized content will continue to be released on a monthly basis.

The Microfiche Digitization Project is an ongoing initiative to convert microfiche documents indexed from 1966-1992 to electronic format. Digitization is progressing in reverse chronological order. ERIC continues to seek the permission of copyright holders to release their older works in electronic full text. If you or someone you know has work in ERIC that is available in microfiche only, please go to the digitization page. Granting permission will ensure that older materials are widely accessible.

PS:  For background, ERIC (one of the world’s oldest OA resources in continuous operation) is digitizing more than 40 million microfiche documents for OA and released the first batch of about 20,000 back in June.

DRIVER has written an FAQ to accompany the DRIVER Guidelines.  It focuses on technical questions that arise in running a DRIVER-compliant repository.  For example:

The records in my institution's repository all link to the full text of the article which is free to access. However, some of these articles are not stored on my institution's server. For example when an academic joins my institution, records of their previous publications are added to our repository and linked to the file still held on their old institution's repository and server. Will this cause any difficulty for DRIVER in harvesting from my repository?

No this will not cause a problem for DRIVER. DRIVER searches for a URL in the metadata record that links to the document. There are no specific constraints regarding the URL as long as it is valid.

AAP PR Campaign against Open Access and Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Update re the PRISM Coalition, an ARL issue brief, September 5, 2007.  This is an update to ARL’s issue brief from January 2007 on the AAP’s Dezenhall hire.  Excerpt: 

A new initiative has been announced in an ongoing public relations campaign sponsored by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) against initiatives concerning access to federally funded research (public access) and open access generally. PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine), a new coalition, is attracting substantial criticism from a broad spectrum of researchers. The PRISM message corresponds directly to plans described in internal publisher documents leaked to reporters to “develop simple messages (e.g., public access equals government censorship)” that are aimed at key decision makers.

As news of this initiative evolves, it presents an opportunity to engage in conversations with members of your campus community concerning the changes to the scholarly communication system and how this may affect scholarly journal publishing. This memo provides talking points to assist you and your staff in working with members of your campus community with regards to the recently disclosed publishers public relations campaign against open/public access initiatives and legislation concerning access to federally funded research....

[N]either public access policies to federally funded research or open access journals alter the traditional practice of peer review.

• Peer review is already built into open access journals and to policies concerning access to federally funded research thus showing the fallacy of the predicted demise of peer review.
• The peer review system, based almost completely on the voluntary free labor of the research community, is independent of a particular mode of publishing, or business model.
• Publishers’ own studies have found that open access journals are peer reviewed as frequently as comparable subscription journals.
• The existing National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy and legislation concerning access to federally funded research called for submissions from only peer-reviewed journals and “includes all modifications from the publishing peer review process.”
• Finally, journal publishers do not create the content they publish, nor do they generally pay authors for that content or compensate reviewers for the time they spend ensuring the quality of published research through their contributions to the peer review process. The academy supports and provides the peer review.
• Public access to federally funded research policies proposed to date have all incorporated embargo periods to protect publishers from any rapid shifts in subscription revenues....

Update. Also see the brief story on the ARL issue brief in Library Journal Academic Newswire for September 6, 2007.

Update. There is now a Slashdot thread on the ARL issue brief.

Peter Murray-Rust, Copyright paralysis from the British Library, A Scientist and the Web, September 5, 2007.  Excerpt:

I posted recently (Copyright madness - story 2) about a colleague who wished to access an eighty-five year old scientific paper (in the transactions of the Transylvanian Haematological Society) and had bizarre restrictions put in her way. Now she wishes to access an even older paper and it gets worse:

The absurdities apply equally to very old articles, which should be well out of copyright. Thus  I am looking into the early origins of [garlic as a blood clotting agent], having traced the concept back to 1899, and a journal (and author!)  long since deceased.  Only the  British Library still has it,  but a request for an inter library loan to them is only granted if I agree to the BL’s own copyright terms, which include my not being able to

a) copy what they send me

b) give my copy to anyone else

c) have it translated for me (it’s in Transylvanian)

d) or acquire it in digital form should I wish to pass it through OSCAR or other text mining.

I will in fact go and try to collect it....I will let you know what happens!

PMR: This is grotesque. There is no way this document is in copyright. A colleague confirmed that the British Library has effectively decided that the simplest management technique is to copyright everything they issue as an Interlibrary loan. And they have some sort of protection from the law by doing this.

Comment.  See the BL response when the PLoS Director of Publishing, Mark Patterson, asked why the BL was charging for copies of PLoS articles, which are all OA.  At first I thought the BL was saying, in effect, that it doesn’t have the resources to see whether an article is under an open license (or in the public domain).  But it’s more complicated than that, and the more I re-read it, the less I understand it.  In the case of PLoS articles, the BL charges a copyright fee set by UKCLA and passes the fee on to UKCLA, keeping nothing for itself.  But it doesn’t explain why UKCLA believes that PLoS articles should carry copyright fees.

Update. I just received this message from a colleague:

The BL doesn't keep any of the copyright fee for itself (whether for OA or non OA publishers), but it does keep the service charge.

There's nothing wrong with a service charge, of course (as long as the article is CC-BY licensed, rather than CC-NC). The key problem is charging a copyright fee which should not be levied, passing it on to someone other than the copyright holder, and then most frustratingly, adding a standard wrapper around every article saying 'this is copyright material and you can't do anything with it without permission of the copyright holder' which is a flat out untruth...

The BL is very much aware of this and committed to fixing it, I believe. Unfortunately, the gap between the BL recognizing that something isn't working right, and fixing it, would seem to generally be measured in decades....

Update. PMR has blogged a sequel to his original post, showing what his correspondent did next.

Update. My comment above led PMR to investigate how the BL is treating his own OA work. He found that it is charging an access fee for one of his OA articles. ("I am now gobsmacked.") He has written an open letter to the BL asking it to explain.

I mentioned last week that Gavin Baker would be a guest blogger on open education and open access at Terra Incognita. 

His post appeared today:  Open Access Journal Literature is an Open Educational Resource.  It starts with a good intro to OA for those who are already familiar with FOSS.  This excerpt starts after that intro:

...Here are four reasons why advocates of OERs [Open Educational Resources] should support OA journal literature:

1. As direct learning content in tertiary education
2. As “outside-the-classroom” learning content
3. As learning content for self-learners
4. As “raw materials” for re-use in free learning content

1. Journal literature as direct learning content, particularly in tertiary education

As long as professors assign readings from scholarly journals, learning content will not be fully free if the journal literature is not free....

Who profits when students pay [for coursepacks containing journal articles]?  The copy center or book store will receive a portion. Another portion may go to a rights licensing middleman, such as the Copyright Clearance Center. But most of the revenue will go to the article’s copyright holder – which, as a rule, is the journal publisher, not the article’s author.

Open access cuts out these middlemen: once peer review and editing have been performed, and the article has been published, the article is forever free to the world for educational use.

Other approaches to circumventing the middlemen will not prove as sustainable a solution as OA:

• Relying on fair use as legal grounds to distribute copies of the articles to students is a perilous position.
• E-reserves are similarly problematic.
• “Virtual coursepacks,” which link to copies of the articles in electronic databases via the institution’s library subscriptions, only shift the cost from students to libraries....

2. Journal literature as indirect or “outside-the-classroom” learning content

Journal literature is often encountered in educational contexts other than where an article has been assigned for reading.

Most commonly, a tertiary student will consult journal literature as a source for coursework. Tertiary students are frequently assigned to write research papers which cite articles from scholarly sources, including peer-reviewed journals. The process of conducting this search, filtering and reviewing relevant literature is an educational process. Broad access to this literature enhances the student’s education. Unfortunately, as long as scholarship is disseminated on a “toll-access” basis, some students will be priced out of access. This is particularly notable for students at educational institutions in developing countries....

3. Journal literature as learning content for self-learners

If one considers education as lifelong learning, then journal literature must be acknowledged as learning content with great value for self-learners.

Many parents of children with uncured diseases have an unquenchable thirst for information about the condition – particularly for rare diseases which receive little coverage in the mainstream press. Journal articles which report original research are of incredible value to help parents understand their child’s condition. Unfortunately, many of these parents express frustration with obtaining access to relevant literature. (Many organizations which represent these parents are members of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access for this very reason.)

Less dramatically, newspapers report daily on the latest findings of scientists and health research. Usually, the coverage reports findings originally published in a peer-reviewed journal. But the curious reader who desires to read the original paper himself is frequently stymied, not having a subscription to the journal. (For a light-hearted example to the contrary, see this recent article from the Daytona Beach News-Journal, which points readers to an article deposited in the arXiv.)

Going a step further, consider that prized tool of self-learners, Wikipedia. Imagine if each Wikipedia article on a scientific subject was fully referenced (a goal of the project). Imagine further that each citation linked to a freely-available copy of a relevant journal article. Those links would prove tremendously valuable to the self-learner who aspires to deepen his understanding of the topic.

Beyond access barriers, removing permission barriers opens even more possibilities: translation, summary, annotation and commentary, to name a few.

4. Journal literature as “raw materials” for re-use in free learning content

OA journal articles can be cited in free textbooks, listed as recommended reading at the end of a textbook chapter, included as learning modules (with or without annotation, translation, summary, etc.), or repurposed for use in other learning content (need a graph or illustration? Just borrow it!).

OA journal literature represents a broad body of scholarly-quality content, without price or permission barriers, available for re-use to enrich OERs....

Giannis Tsakonas and Christos Papatheodorou, Exploring usefulness and usability in the evaluation of open access digital libraries, Information Processing & Management, September 4, 2007.  Only this abstract is free online, at least so far:

Advances in the publishing world have emerged new models of digital library development. Open access publishing modes are expanding their presence and realize the digital library idea in various means. While user-centered evaluation of digital libraries has drawn considerable attention during the last years, these systems are currently viewed from the publishing, economic and scientometric perspectives. The present study explores the concepts of usefulness and usability in the evaluation of an e-print archive. The results demonstrate that several attributes of usefulness, such as the level and the relevance of information, and usability, such as easiness of use and learnability, as well as functionalities commonly met in these systems, affect user interaction and satisfaction.

Heather Morrison, Jim Till: Be Openly Accessible - or Be Obscure, Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, September 4, 2007.  Excerpt:

Now that the Canadian Institutes for Health Research's Open Access to Research Outputs Policy Announcement has been released, it is high time to celebrate the Chair of the CIHR Advisory Committee on Access to Research Outputs, one of Canada's most noteworthy open access advocates, Dr. Jim Till.

Formerly a member of the Open Access News team when it was a group blog, Jim is now the author of one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking blogs on open access on the web: Be Openly Accessible or Be Obscure. What I love about Jim's blog - aside from the delightful name, and wonderful concept - is that his posts are original works, often profound reflections and new perspectives on open access. Jim's work has inspired and sharpened my own thinking on topics such as the economics of article processing fees. Jim often points to particular articles, that are OA - or not, and what the consequences are. If you read my writings often, you may have noticed phrases such as unless you're aiming for obscurity creeping in; definitely an influence!

Jim's first foray into public open access advocacy was in 2000, when he wrote this message to The American Scientist Open Access Forum, where he muses about the difference in self-archiving behavior between physicists and the biomedical community....

Jim's participation in The American Scientist Open Access Forum led to an invitation to publish in a toll-access journal, Learned Publishing, on the topic of self-archiving. This was also his first experience with self-archiving, of the article, Predecessors of preprint servers, Learned Publishing 2001; 14(1): 7-13, available OA in arXiv (with the permission of Learned Publishing).

Jim's first experience with open access publishing came earlier, however, with the article Peer Review in a Post-Eprints World: A Proposal, in the Journal of Medical Internet Research....

Jim has already accomplished far more than most of us; prior to CIHR, Jim was instrumental in the development of the Open Access Archive of the Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance (CBCRA)....

This post is part of the Canadian Leadership in the Open Access Movement series.

PS:  Thanks, Heather, for celebrating Jim’s long and dedicated work for OA, including his work on OAN.  Congratulations, Jim! 

Heather Morrison, Open Access Policy: let's put the public good first! Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, September 4, 2007.  Excerpt:

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Access to Research Outputs Policy is exemplary in its strong support for immediate open access, whether through OA publishing or self-archiving. This is not the clear mandate that we would like to see, but it is a important step forward, and an important contribution to the debate.

One weakness of this, and other OA policies both existing and in development, from my point of view, is the acceptance of embargo (delay) periods to accomodate for-profit publishers.

Since when does public policy put profits first - in this case, before the advances in research that can improve our health, the rights of taxpayers to maximum benefit from their investment?

Do we shy away from public policies requiring building developers to make buildings accessible to the disabled, earthquake-proof, or asbestos-free, out of fear of diminishing the profits of developers?

Another strength of the CIHR policy is the call for annual review. Let us hope that OA activist Dr. Jim Till continues in his role as Chair. Already, here is my suggestion for the first review: brook no delay - require immediate OA!

Comments. 

• I agree that immediate OA is in the public interest, but I’m also willing to accept an embargo as a compromise to get a policy approved. 
• I have to disagree that the CIHR policy is exemplary in its strong support for immediate OA.  It’s exemplary in most other ways.  But its gigantic loophole —mandating OA only “where allowable and in accordance with publisher policies”— removes all the teeth from the policy and legitimates publisher resistance.  Publishers who don’t want immediate OA, or OA within six months, or OA ever, may simply say so, and from that moment the policy will no longer apply to CIHR grantees who submit their work to those publishers.  Like Heather, I’d be very happy if the CIHR amended its policy to require immediate OA.  But I’d also be happy if it amended the policy to require —really require— OA within six months.

Michael Geist, CIHR Introduces New Open Access Policy, Michael Geist, September 4, 2007.  Excerpt:

...Critics will rightly note that the policy is not iron-clad - publication in an online repository is conditional on the publisher's policy.  Accordingly, if a publisher refuses to allow researchers to post their articles, the researcher does not violate the grant requirements by not posting.  This leaves publishers with a measure of control, though a growing number of them do permit this form of archiving....

While it is tempting to say that this does not go far enough, it is an exceptionally important development for open access in Canada. 

First, even with its faults, the policy will help ensure that five percent of the world's health research scholarship - tens of thousands of articles (CIHR funds approximately 5,000 researchers annually producing as many as 30,000 articles) - are generally freely available. 

Second, this is the second stage in the CIHR's move toward open access.  Clinical trial data is already made available online and the granting council supports expenses related to open access publishing.  As the global move toward open access accelerates, it is well positioned to do more.

Third - and perhaps most important - it places renewed pressure on SSHRC and NSERC, the other two major granting councils, to at least match CIHR.  The same principles apply - taxpayer funded research should be made available to the public that pays the bills and with CIHR now on board, it is now clearly time for the other two councils to adopt open access policies.

Stevan Harnad, Canada's CIHR: 31st to Adopt a Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate, Open Access Archivangelism, September 4, 2007.  Excerpt:

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has just announced the official adoption of the Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate it had proposed last year.

This is the 31st Green OA Mandate adopted worldwide, but the 1st in North America....

In all, 14 departmental and university self-archiving mandates plus 17 funder mandates have so far been adopted worldwide. In addition, 2 large multi-university mandates (Brazil and Europe) are in the proposal stage, as are 4 proposed funder mandates (two of them in the US and very big).

The UKis still substantially in the lead for OA mandates adopted, but if the pending US and European mandate proposals are adopted, OA will have prevailed unstoppably worldwide.

The next big growth area will be the sleeping giant of university Green OA mandates, fueled