Open Access News

Here are Peter Murray-Rust's final blog posts from the Berlin 5 conference, which ended yesterday:

• Blogs, folksonomies and tagging - get going!  Urging others to blog conference presentations.
• Final thoughts.  On optimism, open data, open licenses, OA for ETDs, OA for images, text mining, and Web 2.0.
• Alma Swan.  On Alma's final keynote and why OA is unstoppable.

Yesterday the Alliance for Taxpayer Access released a webcast recorded on August 30, The importance of public access to publicly funded research for patient advocates.  From the description:

In this brief (30-minute) and informative event, Pat Furlong (Founding President and CEO of Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy) joins Heather Joseph (Executive Director of SPARC and administrator of the ATA) to review:

• What is public access and why is it important to patient advocates?
• What is the Alliance for Taxpayer Access?
• Current public access legislative initiatives and their status
• How you can help make public access to publicly funded research a reality

View the recording for:

Talking points for patient advocates reaching out to legislators

• We support the Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health because taxpayers have a right to the results of research funded with taxpayer dollars.
• Access to health-related information is critical to patients and families who wish to make informed decisions about their care and who wish to ensure scientists and doctors have access to the research they need to advance therapy....
• We ask that the results of research funded with taxpayer dollars be made available on the Internet, for free, as soon as possible and no later than 6 months after publication in a journal.

Tips on effective advocacy

• Stay current on issue-related developments and in close touch with other advocates.
• Use your personal story to convey the importance of access to information in your life.
• Establish a relationship with your representatives. Keep them informed on how the issue impacts you on a regular basis – i.e. you were unable to access an article related to an ongoing trial, or just send casual updates on what you’re doing.
• Make sure you thank them for each and every step.

Eve Gray, Open Sourcing Education, Gray Area, September 20, 2007.  Excerpt:

After weeks of intermittent rain, the sun finally came out - bright but chilly - for a gathering of open education activists from around the world, meeting at the Shuttleworth Foundation's offices, set in beautiful gardens in the Cape Town suburbs. We were there to discuss the possibility of drafting a Declaration on Open Education Resources, The model for the exercise was the OSI's Budapest Open Access Initiative, so influential in profiling and driving the Open Access movement over the last 6 years. The Cape Town meeting followed on from the workshop sessions held at the iCommons Summit in Dubrovnik in June (which are reported on by Mark Surman and Phillipp Schmidt on the iCommons blog), and sought to codify and consolidate the understandings of open education mapped out in Dubrovnik.

The workshop was supported by the Shuttleworth Foundation and the Open Society Institute and was attended by an impressive array of leading names in open education, from Mark Surman, who helped facilitate the workshop, Darius Cuplinskas and Melissa Hageman from the OSI Information Programme, Helen King, Karien Bezuidenhout and Andrew Rens from Shuttleworth, Phillipp Schmidt from the University of the Western Cape, James Dalziel of Macquarie E Learning, Richard Baranuik from Rice University, Paul West from the Commonwealth of Learning, David Wiley from Utah State University, Peter Bateman from the Open University, Delia Browne from the Australian Copyright Advisory Group, Werner Westerman from Chile, student textbook activist David Rosenfeld from the US PIRG consumer group, Lisa Petrides from IKSME – and many more. The proceedings, which were very interactive, were tracked in a wiki during the course of the discussions, as the facilitators used a number of workshop techniques to collectively map the terrain, agree on values, identify strategies and brainstorm the selling points of open education resources.

What came out of this meeting for me? First of all, a realisation that the OER terrain is very complex, from a number of perspectives. Drafting a statement is going to  be an even more complex task than the Budapest Initiative and it will need to incorporate the diversity that emerged across the education system, vertically and geographically, in the course of our discussions. Most importantly, there are major differences between the provision of resources at different levels of the education system - not always acknowledged in the OER discussions....

The most contentious issue turned out to be that of the kinds of licence that would be appropriate and that would signal true openness. This is something on which consensus is going to need to be reached over the next few months. 

The availability of technology in the poorer countries of the world is a major concern and it was clear that this would need to be addressed if the vision of this group was truly to be a global one....

The next steps? A draft declaration will be drawn up by Mark Surman, working with three 'stewards', Ahrash Bissell of CC Learn, Delia Browne, an IP lawyer working for the Copyright Advisory Group of the Australian government and  James Dalziel from the E Learning Centre of  Excellence at Macquarie University, also Australia. This will then be circulated to the broader group for feedback before being more widely canvassed. High profile supporters from academe and the educational world will be sought as champions for the initiative.

As Darius Cuplinskas said, "We're about to launch a wave of creative disruption." I am looking forward to it.

Alexis Madrigal, Traditional Journal Publishers' Anti-Open-Access PR Plan Revealed, Wired Science, September 21, 2007.  Excerpt:

Yesterday, New Scientist published a plan by PR firm Dezenhall Resources detailing how traditional science publishers could turn government opinion against open-access journals.

There’s nothing wrong with employing a famously tough PR firm, but the memo reveals that Dezenhall recommended sidestepping the real issues around peer review and the business model that powers it, in favor of “rhetorical campaign points” about Big Government and scientists’ hypocrisy.

The memo notes that the key issue is that “publishers are trying to protect their businesses and the integrity of the research they publish.” Yet, two of Dezenhall’s example messages focused on government “censorship” and “nationalization” of science. No one really believes, on either side, that government is taking over science publishing....

Glyn Moody, Defending Openness, Linux Journal, September 21, 2007.  Excerpt:

...Unfortunately the parallels between the two movements [open source and open access] even extend to the realm of FUD. The Prism Coalition is funded by a group of academic publishers who see their business models - and hefty profits - threatened by this new approach (sound familiar?), and is designed to discredit open access in the eyes of policy-makers and the general public.

What's interesting is that the Prism Coalition uses the same tactics as those seeking to undermine open source. For example, it uses insinuation - in this case, that open access is somehow incompatible with peer review, and hence threatens the very basis of science: even the name "PRISM", which stands for "Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine", tries to imply this. Open access is actually about how papers are distributed, not about the process of selection, which is just as rigorous as that of traditional scientific journals.

Prism also invokes that old red herring "innovation" in its attempt to prevent open access being required for government-funded research....

According to this view, government mandates that require free online access for all are somehow inimical to innovation, as if open access were not itself highly innovative. This is the same argument that a government preference for open source is unfair and detrimental to innovation, as if open source were never innovative, and even though it has clear advantages for governments in terms of transparency, competition and code re-use. It also employs the same redefinition of what constitutes diversity and choice as when Microsoft argues against competition based around a single, open standard - like ODF - in favour of multiple, competing and incompatible standards....

The Journal of Religion, Conflict, and Peace is a new peer-reviewed OA journal published by the Plowshares Project, "a peace studies collaborative of Earlham, Goshen, and Manchester Colleges."  For more detail, see Joseph Leichty's editorial in the inaugural issue, The Genesis of Journal of Religion, Conflict, and Peace.

Comment.  I'm proud of the part played in this project by Earlham College, where I taught for 21 years, and pleased that I was able to help the journal think through the decision to become OA.  I wish it well.

Peter Sefton, Open Notebook Science and Not-so-open Notebook Science, PT's outing, September 20, 2007.  Excerpt:

Peter Murray-Rust introduced me to the term Open Notebook Science over lunch in June this year.

In this post I will look a little at open science, as practiced by chemists, and at a recent DLib paper by colleagues of mine from Monash [Andrew Treloar et al.] about the continuum of data form when it is collected to when it is published, or curated, in the context of the forthcoming Australian National Data Service (ANDS)....

I think that to cater to the access requirements noted by Andrew Treloar et al you might need a “Shared Notebook” approach as opposed to an Open Notebook approach. That is, the benefits of a unifying tools like Blogs and Wikis shared with colleagues but not open to all. ( I do realize that there's a bit of baggage that comes along for the ride if you substitute Shared for Open, but I think the term fits.)

In fact I've worked on a “Shared Notebook” project myself. RUBRIC. RUBRIC used a shared space in which to work, which included a wiki, although our blogs were open-access. Read Kate Watson and Chelsea Harper's paper for more about how we got on.

So, some research needs to be kept under wraps, and some people are happier collaborating within a trusted community....

Stevan Harnad, Tripping on Tipping Points: Jubilatio Praecox, Open Access Archivangelism, September 21, 2007.  Excerpt:

Thomas & McDonald (2007) wrote:

"This study's findings only reinforce... predictions and arguments favoring institutional mandates. As the data in this article show, a mandate is arguably the "tipping point" described by Gladwell (2000) that can make depositing behavior among scholars not just widespread, but also more of an ingrained and complete behavior"

Sandy Thatcher, President, AAUP, responded:

'If you'll remember our prior discussion about open access, Stevan, I warned that just this "success" might be the "tipping point" to drive a host of commercial and society publishers out of the business of journal publishing. One "tipping point" causes another? Witness, as partial proof, the reaction of STM publishers represented by the PRISM initiative. I read that as a warning that, if the government forces a change in their business model, they may just walk away from the business. I assume you wouldn't consider that a bad thing at all, but my question would be what kind of structure will take its place and what expectations will universities have of their presses to pick up the slack?'

What is remarkable is how actual empirical facts (very few) are being freely admixed, willy-nilly, with fact-free speculations for which there is, and continues to be zero empirical evidence, and, in many cases, decisive and familiar counterevidence, both empirical and logical....

There has been no "tipping point." Just talk about tipping points, and that talk about tipping points has been going on for years.

There has been no one driven out of business, nor any empirical evidence of a trend toward being driven out of business. Just talk about being driven out of business, and that talk about being driven out of business has been going on for years.

And as to the "partial proof" in the form of the STM/PRISM "reaction" -- that very same reaction (with the very same false, alarmist arguments) has been voiced, verbatim, by the very same publisher groups (STM, AAP, ALPSP), over and over, for over a decade now. And they have been debunked just as often (see long list of links below). But that certainly hasn't been enough to make the publishers' anti-OA lobby cease and desist. Do you consider the relentless repetition, at louder and louder volume, of exactly the same specious and evidence-free claims, to be "proof" of anything, partial or otherwise?

And the phrase "the government forces a change in their business model" is just as false a description of what is actually going on when it is spoken in Sandy's own well-meaning words as when it is voiced by PRISM and Eric Dezenhall: The government is not forcing a change in a business model....

This quite natural (and overdue) adaptation to the online age on the part of the research community -- mandating Green OA self-archiving -- may or may not lead to a transition to Gold OA publishing: no one knows whether, or when it will. But what is already known is that OA itself, whether Green or Gold, is enormously beneficial to research, researchers, their institutions and funders, the vast R&D industry, and the tax-paying public that funds research and for whose benefit it is funded, conducted and published....

So the "tipping point" for Green OA itself would be an unalloyed benefit for everyone except the peer-reviewed journal publishing industry, whether or not it led to a second tipping point and a transition to Gold OA....

You ask "what kind of structure will take its place and what expectations will universities have of their presses to pick up the slack?" I presume you are referring to the multiple hypothetical conditional: if Green OA mandates reach the tipping point that generates 100% Green OA, and if that in turn generates journal cancellations that reach the tipping point that generates a transition to Gold OA? The answer (which I have provided many times before) is simple: That "structure" will be Gold OA, funded out of (a part of) the institutional cancellation savings....

Comment.  Well-put.  I made some of the same points in the September SOAN.  There's no evidence yet for a tipping point (or slippery slope), although there might be later.  And there's no evidence that a future tipping point would hurt peer review even if it did hurt revenues at some existing publishers.  On the contrary, there's strong evidence, so far, that OA and TA will coexist for some time, and strong reason to think that, even if OA grows at the expense of TA, research productivity and quality control would both improve.

More blog posts from Peter Murray-Rust at the Berlin 5 conference:

• NIH and RCUK.  Notes on talks on these funder policies, esp. at the RCUK.
• Open Data and institutional repositories.  Notes on the session convened by John Marks.
• Maxine Clarke.  Notes on the talk by Clarke, an editor at Nature.
• What did I say?  Post-presentation notes on his own talk.
• Ilaria Capua’s bravery.  Notes on the "stunning presentation from Ilaria Capua on the necessity of releasing sequence information relating to avian flu."  [PS:  More on her bravery here.]
• How to progress Open Data?  More notes on what he will say himself.

Richard Cave, Topaz Release Candidate 0.8, PLoS blog, September 20, 2007.  Excerpt:

...[W]ith this release candidate, the Topaz framework allows multiple journal websites to use a single repository. So the release candidate isn't specific to just PLoS ONE. Why is this important? Enabling multiple journals on one repository allows articles to be viewed across all sites accessing the repository. The interactive tools of PLoS ONE will be available for all journals hosted on Topaz. This will include articles originally published in PLoS Clinical Trials and articles soon-to-be published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

Features implemented in Topaz RC 0.8:

• Enable multiple journals using a single repository....
• Filter search results by journal using OTM.
• TrackBack linkbacks for articles. TrackBacks are used primarily to facilitate communication between blogs - a TrackBack allows a blog author to see who is linking back to a blog post. We're using this same feature, based on the Six Apart specification, to see who is linking back to a published article....
• Citation download of the article. Many users have requested this feature and now you can download the citation for an article in the RIS file format (compatible with EndNote, Reference Manager, ProCite, RefWorks) or BibTex (compatible with BibDesk, LaTeX)....
• Allow multiple email addresses for "E-mail this Article."
• Administrative modifications to annotations.
• Administrative interface for multiple journals....

The Canadian Journal of Sociology will convert to OA, starting in January 2008.  Editor Kevin D. Haggerty lays out the details in a candid editorial, Change and Continuity at the Canadian Journal of Sociology, in the Summer 2007 issue.  (Thanks to Heather Morrison.)  After listing 10 changes he plans to implement at CJS, Haggerty mentions this one:

11.  Transition the CJS/CCS to an “Open Access” format. This is the most fundamental change, and it can be captured in two propositions: 1. Starting in January 2008, the journal will no longer publish a hard copy edition, and 2. The journal will be freely available to anyone with an internet connection....

[N]ew articles will also be indexed by all of the major indexing services. The difference is that new articles will now also be available free of charge online.

Open access electronic journals are no longer idiosyncratic ventures existing at the margins of scholarly publishing and at the bottom of the hierarchy of journals. When the New England Journal of Medicine began to offer open access to all its contents, six months after articles had been initially published, it ended any notion that journals providing open access were of a lesser quality or prestige....

There are multiple reasons for this change. For authors, it means that your articles will have a greater impact....

There is also the principled position that open access ensures that a larger segment of the public can easily access research — research which the public has often helped to fund through taxes. As such, it advances current efforts to nurture a form of “public sociology” in Canada. Major institutions are increasingly expecting that researchers will publish in open access journals. Canadian Institutes of Health Research, for example, is about to release its policy requiring grant-holders to make a copy of any published work freely available within six months of publication and it seems likely that SSHRC will soon follow this open access mandate policy.  The Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie is excited to be among the path-breaking journals providing authors with the opportunity to publish their works in an established quality high-profile venue that is also open access. Indeed, we expect that it is only a matter of time before all of the major journals follow our lead.

Another advantage of the electronic format is that it loosens the degree to which editorial decisions are structured by financial considerations....

The financial implications of this move remain somewhat opaque, and I have agonized over this issue....Retiring the hard copy version of the journal eliminates subscription revenue, which is one of our major sources of funding. That said, mimicking wider publishing trends, the journal’s subscriptions have been substantially declining at the same time that our electronic readership (through Project MUSE and other venues) has increased dramatically. Moreover, it was always the case that most of our subscription revenues went to cover the costs associated with producing a hard copy volume, such as printing, subscription management and postage.

Ultimately, this move means that we are now more centrally dependent on SSHRC funding, but in practice that has been the case for some time. There is, however, reason for optimism about the funding situation. SSHRC has emerged as a major proponent of open access publishing and is now supporting open access journals. Given the prominence and reputation of the CJS/CCS I expect that we will continue to receive such funds....

The front page of the AAP's Professional/Scholarly Publishing division used to feature a link to the PRISM web site and a paragraph on its launch and goals.  But today the paragraph has disappeared and the page no longer mentions PRISM at all.  It was the AAP/PSP Executive Council that launched PRISM last month.

Alma Swan's calendars of OA quotations and original artwork and calligraphy are becoming an annual tradition.  Her 2008 Open Access Calendar is now online.  This year's calendar also features notable dates from the history of the OA movement.  From the description at Key Perspectives:

A 2008 Open Access calendar, created by Alma Swan, is now available on this website. Alma says "I hope you like it and that it will help to inspire you during the next year." We invite you to print and staple it together for your own use. Some people have already asked whether the calendar is going to be professionally printed and made available in bound form. This is feasible if enough people would like this to be done. The maximum cost, including calendar, board-backed envelope and postage would be 11 Euros or 16 US dollars, though it could be less if the print run is large enough. If you are interested in having a printed copy, please contact me at the following address: aswan AT keyperspectives.co.uk. In the meantime, please feel free to download the pdf version here.

John Hawks, Openness, casts, and CT scans, john hawks weblog, September 20, 2007.

Background:  Paleoanthropologists need to compare fossils, but this is hard because fossils are usually stored in different places and rarely travel.  Plaster or plastic casts ease this problem, but they introduce some distortions and are still hard to produce or ship around to all who need them.  CT scans are more accurate than casts and should be easy to share.  Excerpt:

...Another aspect of gatekeeping behavior is the availability of CT scans. One of my correspondents wrote that CT scanning will make casting irrelevant, because everybody will have CTs of all the fossils and will be able to make their own casts when they want to. Boy, it sure seems like this ought to happen. After all, CT scans are even better than casts in some ways -- they let you see internal details and allow computer reconstructions, for example. They're not perfect, particularly for close details beyond the resolution used in today's CTs. But they should be very cheap to distribute. A world that can disseminate Craig Venter's complete genome to anybody who wants it ought to be able to find some way to get a few hundred CT scans sent around.

A number of efforts are starting to make CT distribution possible -- notably, NESPOS, the Vienna Virtual Anthropology group, and a few others. I expect these efforts will improve, and we will see more and more students able to access the essential data of paleoanthropology.

But for those who've been reading the blog for any length of time, you'll remember I wrote about this problem two years ago.

During the two years since that post, there has been a great deal of progress in scanning fossils. Most papers about new fossils are supported by data from scanning. A small proportion of these scans have been made available to paying professionals, or soon will be. Most are locked away, with no long-term prospect of ever being distributed. Today, none are openly available. Not a single scan of a hominid fossil can be obtained in the open, free of charge.

Why do I argue so strongly for completely open access? I believe it is a matter of credibility. A fundamental principle of science is replicability. If someone else cannot replicate your results, they have no reason to believe you. You have no scientific credibility....

The beauty of science is that it is self-correcting. You can read this blog to find the obvious mistakes in papers published in those marquee journals. This self-criticism is essential to science's credibility. But it is hampered by secrecy....

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is expanding to cover many other fields.  One of the 16 fields in its forthcoming Humanities Research Network will be the Philosophy Research Network (PRN). 

The American Philosophical Association announced the PRN in August.  (Thanks to Vincent C. Müller for the pointer.)  From the APA front page:

...The Philosophy Research Network (PRN) is part of the Social Science Research Network, a massive website started 10 years ago or so by scholars in law, economics, business, and so forth. There are hundreds of thousands of papers and abstracts now posted on the SSRN, and in the last 12 months there have been over 3,700,000 downloads of papers through the site. In short, this service is a big success in the social sciences. It is a one-stop place for people to post working papers so that those dealing with related topics can have access to them (free of charge). It thus consolidates and organizes the sort of electronic exchanges that already occur via e-mail, or through private websites. And it improves on such exchanges by allowing users to access new work through keyword, abstract, or author searches.

The PRN will be formally launched later this summer, and you will see an announcement about it from the APA. But we are happy to say that the network is now accessible in a preliminary way, and we invite you to try it out by posting some of your work. You'll need a PDF version of the papers you want to post, and an abstract of each that you can cut and paste into a text box during the posting process....

The PRN will eventually have its own web address, but you can get to it now by going to the SSRN [here]. You will see a full list of the sub-networks. If you expand the Humanities Research Network list (by clicking on the + sign to the left), you will see the one for philosophy. And if you expand that, and then expand the list of "subject matter journals" in philosophy, you will see what we're up to. We recently put up papers of our own just to test-drive the system. Signing on and getting this done the first time is a little bit of a hassle, but after that it's very easy. And your papers can be found on your own personal page (created automatically when you sign up) and by perusing the subject matter areas in which you want them listed.

SSRN is based at the University of Texas, and supports its staff and infrastructure through university sponsorships and institutional subscriptions. The network does very light screening to exclude material of a non-scholarly sort, and to refine the classification of papers--for example, by increasing the number of cross listings. Otherwise there is no peer review, and this posting does not amount to a publication....

Comment.  On the one hand, I'm glad that my field, philosophy, will finally have a discipline-wide repository.  On the other, SSRN imposes restrictions unheard of at other OA repositories.  For example, it adds an SSRN watermark to the pages of some deposited articles and only allows links to SSRN papers in abstracts.  As Vincent Müller pointed out to me, it doesn't support data harvesting by ROAR.  And I don't like the PDF-only limitation.  I plan to monitor the site to see whether SSRN lifts these restrictions.

Jim Giles broke the story of the AAP hiring of Eric Dezenhall in Nature for January 24, 2007.  Now Giles is telling more of the story.

In a post today at NewScientist's Short Sharp Science blog, Giles writes:

The link between the AAP and Dezenhall must have irked someone linked to one of the publishers, because emails connecting the two were leaked to me (the sender did not give a name). Dezenhall's strategy includes linking open access with government censorship and junk science – ideas that to me seem quite bizarre and misleading. Last month, however, the AAP launched a lobby group called the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine (PRISM), which uses many of the arguments that Dezenhall suggested.

I've written a comment article about this in New Scientist this week, and you can read the leaked proposal from Dezenhall here (pdf). Let us know what you think of the AAP's strategy, or about open access in general.

His story in NewScientist is TA and only the first two paragraphs are free online:

An unexpected package arrived on my desk earlier this year. The sender did not give a name, and the return address was false. Inside were copies of emails between senior staff at major scientific publishing houses. They were discussing a surprising topic: plans to hire Eric Dezenhall, a public relations guru who has organised attacks on environmental groups, represented an Enron chief, and authored the book Nail 'Em! Confronting high-profile attacks on celebrities and businesses. (See our related blog, plus the leaked proposal from Eric Dezenhall here)

Leaked emails and controversial characters like Dezenhall are not normally associated with the staid world of academic journals, but the big publishers are getting a little spooked. Over the past decade, researchers have started to demand that scientific results be set free. The majority of research is publicly funded and is reviewed, free of charge, by public-sector scientists....

The leaked two-page Dezenhall proposal to the AAP is apparently unabridged.  But it's a scanned image and I don't have time rekey it.  However I recommend it for showing more than we've seen to date on (1) the strengths of the OA movement that worry the publishing lobby (called "the coalition" here, perhaps in anticipation of PRISM) and (2) the coalition strategies and tactics for persuading policy-makers to defeat OA initiatives.

Update.  I just gained access to the full text of Jim Giles story in NewScientist.  Here are some more excerpts:

...The majority of research is publicly funded and is  reviewed, free of charge, by public-sector scientists. But it is then  placed in journals where it is available only to those who pay for a  subscription or belong to a library that has one. Many academics want  this system replaced with one that ensures access for all.

This is not a message that all publishers want to hear. The profits  from many academic journals rest entirely on subscription fees; if  articles are available for free, researchers may decide they need not  bother signing up. Publishing houses have ploughed millions of  dollars into the infrastructure needed to keep this business going  online. If everyone gets to expect free access, that investment will  look misguided. The publishers hired Dezenhall because they wanted a  PR campaign to counter these threats.

It's a shame they cannot see the bigger picture. Restricting access  to journals slows down the work of everyone involved in science, not  just researchers but also policy-makers, journalists and campaigners.  For scientists in poorer nations, often the places where the benefits  of research are most needed, access can be non-existent. Subscription barriers also hamper the integration of databases and research  papers, which many see as the future of scientific publishing.

These benefits are not incompatible with the survival of commercial  publishers. What is needed is a change of business model, not a  revolution....

The emails I received show that Dezenhall advised the AAP to  focus on what seem to me to be emotive and highly misleading  messages. Publishers were told to equate traditional journals with  peer review, even though open-access publications operate peer review  in exactly the same way. US government plans to boost access to  papers, which include making all publicly funded health research  available via a dedicated archive, were to be described as  "censorship" and "copyright theft", though it is hard to see what  possible basis these accusations can have....

Dezenhall's campaign launched last month. The AAP has formed a lobby  group, the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine  (PRISM), and most of what it says is in line with what Dezenhall  suggested. To anyone who has followed the debate on open access, the  messages look pathetic, and one AAP member - The Rockefeller  University Press - quickly said that it "strongly disagreed" with  what the association has done.

Those who would like to see open access win out should think twice  before dismissing PRISM. Its messages are designed not to win an  intellectual debate but to sway people who know little about what  open access means: the US senators who will soon vote on the archive  plans....

Long-term, however, PRISM looks like a desperate move. No successful  company wants to tear up its business model and start again, but  change is inevitable. Open-access journals are springing up faster  than ever (43 in the last month), and the better-established ones are  already profitable. In the last eight years, 12 whole editorial  boards have quit traditional journals in protest at high prices, and  launched rival open-access publications. The AAP's lobbying may delay  things, but the open-access movement has a momentum that not even  Dezenhall can reverse.

Update.  Blake Stacey has rekeyed original two-page proposal that Eric Dezenhall presented to the AAP.  Excerpt:

...It’s hard to fight an adversary that manages to be both elusive and in possession of a better message: Free information....

There are no clear villains. Government is looking to give taxpayers free access to the research that they fund and publishers are trying to protect their business and the integrity of the research they publish. The free internet movement is strong and getting stronger....

Strategies

• Supplement the Coalition’s lobbying efforts with communications “air cover”
• Simplify the Coalition’s arguments into easily digestible concepts (e.g., censorship)....

Develop simple messages (e.g., Public access equals government censorship; Scientific journals preserve the quality/pedigree of science; government seeking to nationalize science and be a publisher) for use by Coalition members....

Paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer reviewed articles....

Inventory the Coalition’s adversaries, their arguments and weaknesses prior to launching communications....

Estimated Budget.  $300,000 - $500,000 for a six month program.

Peter Murray-Rust, The laws of robotics; request for drafting, A Scientist and the Web, September 20, 2007.  Excerpt:

I have been asked about what we need for robotic access to publishers’ sites. Several publishers are starting to allow robotic access to their Open material. (Of course the full BBB declarations logically require this, but in practice many publishers haven’t made the connection). So let’s assume a publisher who espouse Open Access and allows robotic access to their site. Is, say, CC licence enough?

There are no moral problems with CC, but the use of robots has additional technical problems, even when everyone agrees they want it to happen....

I can see roughly two types of robotic behaviour:

1. systematic download for mining or indexing....It would be highly desirable to minimise repetitious indexing and an enthusiastic publisher could put their XML material in a proper repository framework with a RESTful API (rather than requiring HTML screen-scraping of PDF-hack-and-swear). In return there could be a list of acknowledged robots so that these could act as “proxies” or caches.
2. Random access from links in abstracts or citations. This is likely to happen when the bot is in PMC/UKPMC, or crystaleye, and discovers an interesting abstract and goes to the full-text on a publishers site. The bot may have been created by an individual researcher for a single one-time purpose.

So I’d like to come up with (three?) laws of mining robotics. Here’s a first shot:

• A publisher should display clear protocols for robots, with explanations of any restrictions and lists of any regular mining bots.
• A data-miner should use software that is capable of honouring machine-understandable guidance from servers. The robots should be prepared to use secondary  sites.
• Mining software should be Open Source and should honour a common set of public protocols.

But I would like suggestions from people who have been through this…

When I first blogged the news that AnthroSource, the publishing arm of the American Anthropological Association, was moving from the University of California Press to Wiley-Blackwell, it was just a plan.  Now it's official.  From the Wiley-Blackwell announcement (September 19, 2007):

Wiley-Blackwell...and the American Anthropological Association (AAA) today announced that they have formed a new publishing partnership to commence in 2008.

Wiley-Blackwell will publish 23 anthropology journals and newsletters of the AAA including the American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, and the Medical Anthropology Quarterly. Wiley-Blackwell will also host AnthroSource-the premier online portal to full-text anthropology articles serving the research and teaching needs of scholars and practitioners in the US and around the world.

The AAA Executive Board's decision to join Wiley-Blackwell was the result of a year-long process centering around a detailed request for proposals and evaluation of publisher submissions. In its development of AnthroSource in 2002, the core goals of the AAA included developing a portal that could provide scholars with innovative discovery tools for accessing scholarly content, in text, photo, audio and video media, and an electronic means to expand the reach of anthropological knowledge to additional readers worldwide....

To support the AAA's mission of disseminating anthropological knowledge, Wiley-Blackwell will work with the Association over the next several years to enhance the global dissemination of its publications, including expanding its free and reduced-price access programs in developing countries....

Comment.  In June 2006, the AAA signed a public letter opposing FRPAA without consulting its members and triggered a wave of member protests.  When the AnthroSource Steering Committee expressed its support for FRPAA, the AAA disbanded the committee.  Nevertheless, many anthropologists hoped that the AAA would convert AnthroSource to OA.  Now AAA lays those hopes to rest and will have to explain to members how this move advances anthropology more than OA and why the views of the membership, and even the AnthroSource Steering Committee, were systematically disregarded.

Update.  Also see the September 19 statement by William Davis and Alan Goodman (respectively, Executive Director and President of the AAA) and Jennifer Howard's story on the Chronicle of Higher Education News blog.  Excerpt from Howard:

...The deal features a profit-sharing arrangement under which the association will get 60 percent of “excess revenues over expenditures” each year, according to a memo circulated to the association’s journal editors and section heads and sent to The Chronicle. The association is also guaranteed a minimum yearly income that should be worth some $2.7-million over the contract’s five-year life, the memo says.

Initial reaction has been cautiously optimistic, although the association’s leaders continue to take fire for how they went about the search for a new publishing partner. “I can honestly say that I support the move, and that I think the AAA did the right thing,” wrote one poster on the anthro blog Savage Minds. But “the process by which it happened has been demoralizing — more evidence that as a scholarly society the AAA does not see any need to communicate with its membership at large, solicit their input, or operate in an even quasi-transparent manner.”

Update. See the comments on Jennifer Howard's story on the Chronicle of Higher Education News blog. Here's one:

No indication that the AAA is concerned about the pricing of its journals, which I am prepared to bet will raise at at least 10% per year over the life of the contract. Let’s be clear about what is going on here the AAA is using a private publisher to extract income from universities through their libraries. The bad news though is that university libraries will not be able to afford these increases. In the end fewer subscriptions will be sold and fewer people will have access to this scholarship. If the AAA really cared about scholarship in anthropology they would be pursuing an open access strategy.

The Serials Librarian, vol. 52, no. 1/2, is not the most recent issue but I overlooked it at the time it came out, c. August 2007.  (Thanks to Charles Bailey's Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog.)  Here are the OA-related articles.  Only abstracts are free online, at least so far.

• Carol Hixson and Linda Cracknell, How to Implement an Institutional Repository
• Robin Sloan and Pat Howe, Things Fall Apart
• T. Scott Plutchak, What's a Serial When You're Running on Internet Time?
• Krista Schmidt and Nancy Newsome, The Changing Landscape of Serials: Open Access Journals in the Public Catalog
• Lee C. Van Orsdel, The State of Scholarly Communications: An Environmental Scan of Emerging Issues, Pitfalls, and Possibilities

And here's one from vol. 52, no. 3/4:

• Kitti Canepi and three co-authors, Open Access and Conscious Selection

On Monday, University College Dublin and partners launched the Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive Repository (IVRLA).  (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)  From the announcement:

Monday September 17th will see the launch of the Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive repository (IVRLA), a key component in humanities research infrastructure for University College Dublin (UCD) and other third level institutions.

IVRLA is a digital archive containing a number of digitised collections from UCD’s holdings, of use and interest to Irish humanities researchers. The IVRLA has developed a sophisticated interface enabling users to browse, search, tag and cite digital objects and view or download them in a variety of file formats. This interface sits on top of an open source repository architecture that functions as the IVRLA’s base content store. An elaborate collection model has been developed ensuring all content is viewed within context and structure. This model is particularly suited for organic primary source collections and enables hierarchy and sub-division in how objects are arranged and held within collections....

From the September issue of The European Library Newsletter:

The European Library and the National Library of Serbia are collaborating in an ambitious project that aims at creating a pan-European bibliography of Romani language publications and a Romani Virtual Collection of digitised resources across Europe....

The project will be achieved in 4 steps. In the current and initial phase, available records are being collected and harvested from the national libraries across Europe. The second phase involves the selection of material for digitisation. This digitized material will form a virtual library, bringing together the diaspora of Romani people and their cultural heritage. Such digitization also helps in its long term preservation .

The following countries have contributed by providing bibliographic records or keywords for harvesting purposes: Serbia, Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, The Netherlands, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.

Peter Murray-Rust is blogging life at the Berlin 5 conference:

• Open access - both easy and difficult.  The opening plenary address by Sijbold Noorda
  of the European University Association.
• Open Data: What am I going to say?  Some OA activists he's met and pre-talk ruminations on what he'll say.
• Plenary 1.  Brief notes on talks by Fred Friend (JISC and University College London), Jens Vigen (CERN), Subbiah Arunachalam (M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation), and Hiroya Takeuchi (Chiba University).
• Monetizing informatics - a fantasy.  More ruminations on what he might say in his own talk.  "Given that the EU already has an economic model where farmers are paid not to grow crops but to preserve the countryside, we could argue that publishers might be paid not to ban people from reading “their property”. This would then create a lively market in doing something useful with the data. If the publishers wanted to be in this market they would need to actually do something NEW, or someone will eat their lunch.  Tell me that this is not a fantasy."
• SCOAP.  Notes on the talk by Salvatore Mele (CERN).
• Chris Armbruster; green ==> gold.  Notes on Chris Armbruster's talk.
  

The Berlin 5 conference --Open Access: From Practice to Impact: Consequences of Knowledge Dissemination-- started yesterday in Padua and ends tomorrow.  Abstracts of the presentations are already online.

Greetings to all my friends who are gathered there.  I'm sorry I couldn't attend myself.

Cory Doctorow, Free data sharing is here to stay, The Guardian, September 18, 2007.  Excerpt:

Since the 1970s, pundits have predicted a transition to an "information economy". The vision of an economy based on information seized the imaginations of the world's governments. For decades now, they have been creating policies to "protect" information — stronger copyright laws, international treaties on patents and trademarks, treaties to protect anti-copying technology.

The thinking is simple: an information economy must be based on buying and selling information. Therefore, we need policies to make it harder to get access to information unless you've paid for it.

That means that we have to make it harder for you to share information, even after you've paid for it....

But this is a tragic case of misunderstanding a metaphor. Just as the industrial economy wasn't based on making it harder to get access to machines, the information economy won't be based on making it harder to get access to information. Indeed, the opposite seems to be true....

It used to be that copy-prevention companies' strategies went like this:

"We'll make it easier to buy a copy of this data than to make an unauthorised copy of it. That way, only the uber-nerds and the cash-poor/time-rich classes will bother to copy instead of buy."

But...a third option [now exists]: you can just download a copy from the internet. Every techno-literate participant in the information economy can choose to access any data, without having to break the anti-copying technology, just by searching for the cracked copy on the public internet....

And, of course, as Paris Hilton, the Church of Scientology and the King of Thailand have discovered, taking a piece of information off the internet is like getting food colouring out of a swimming pool....

Many of us sell information in the information economy — I sell my printed books by giving away electronic books, lawyers and architects and consultants are in the information business and they drum up trade with Google ads, and Google is nothing but an info-broker — but none of us rely on curtailing access to information.

Like a bottled water company, we compete with free by supplying a superior service, not by eliminating the competition....

Rufus Pollock, Talk at Law 2.0: Openness, Web 2.0 and the Ethic of Sharing, Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog, September 18, 2007.  Excerpt:

Yesterday I was at the SCL’s “Law 2.0? : New Speech, New Property, New Identity” talking on Openness, Web 2.0 and the Ethic of Sharing. The full text of my talk is inline below, there are companion slides up online (more graphics!) and for those who like source here a link to the markdown original....

One of the first printed texts of which we have record is a copy of the Buddhist Diamond sutra produced in China around 868AD. In it can be found the dedication: “for universal free distribution”. Clearly, the idea of open knowledge, that is knowledge you are free to use, reuse and redistribute, has been present since humanity first began to formally transmit and share ideas. It is also likely that the urge to keep ideas secret, particularly those that had ‘commercial’ value, is equally old....

With the introduction of formal monopoly rights such as patents and copyrights during the sixteenth and seventeenth century there was now a halfway house of sorts whereby the monopoly (and the associated profits) of secrecy was combined with openness in the form of the disclosure of the work....

Free, unencumbered access to a piece of knowledge whether it be a film or a database, is the most obvious way that openness delivers benefits. Because it is cheaper and easier to get hold of open knowledge it may be much more widely used than it would otherwise. Each such extra user, who gains access because open knowledge is cheaper or easier to get hold of than ‘closed’ knowledge, derives a benefit that increase the well-being of society.

Let me give a few examples of how profound these effects may be....

While the benefits of openness for users are obvious, by contrast, the benefits for production are much less so. After all, by removing the possibility of monopoly provided by secrecy or intellectual property, openness may eliminate one of the primary means by which producers finance their activities. Nevertheless there are a variety of ways in which openness can be beneficial (as well as several reasons why it may not be as harmful for revenues as one might think)....

The main point to make is that in industries which are cumulative, that is new ideas and inventions build upon old, proprietary rights mean having to ask ‘permission’ (and pay for it) — while openness does not. With openness it is easier for subsequent innovators and creators to produce new work while with proprietary rights one have increased transactions costs as well as a whole bunch of bargaining issues — most prominently the risk of ‘hold-up’. Particularly in cases where the initial creator today may be the reuser tomorrow the benefits of openness in freer and more rapid reuse and cumulative innovation may outweigh the losses from lower immediate revenues....

David R. Gerhan, Wanted: One Principal Search Engine for Digital Images, College & Undergraduate Libraries, 14, 2 (2007).  Full-text not yet available.

Abstract:   The growing online universe of digital images supporting humanities, history, and cultural heritage scholarship prevents many researchers and reference librarians from remaining current with new developments. Commercial generic image search engines provide one approach. The Open Access Initiative has stimulated another set of search engines developed largely by the academic and professional sector. Seven search engines in all meet criteria of public availability without fee and breadth of both subject coverage and participation by repositories. They are subjected to testing to determine if a single one is emerging as the OCLC or the RLIN for digital images supporting the humanities.

National e-books project makes taught course texts freely available, a press release from JISC, September 20, 2007.  Excerpt:

From today and for the next two years a collection of 36 taught course texts is being made freely available to all higher education institutions as part of JISC’s national e-books observatory project....

The aim of the national e-books observatory project is to make available a critical mass of freely available e-books in order to gather much-needed evidence on the use of a greatly under-used but potentially enormously important resource....

In addition JISC is funding a deep-log analysis study to discover the precise ways in which the core e-books are used....

Funding by JISC to publishers via the aggregators will mitigate the risk of revenue loss caused by the possible impact on print sales....

Andrew Clark, Murdoch hints that all online Journal content will be free, The Guardian, September 19, 2007.  (Thanks to Ben Toth.)  Excerpt:

Rupert Murdoch again raised the prospect of ditching subscriptions for the Wall Street Journal online yesterday, hours after the New York Times dropped charges for premium sections of its website.

As the trend gathers pace towards free-of-charge news publishing on the internet, Mr Murdoch suggested he was leaning towards making the Journal site free once he completes a $5.6bn buyout of its owner Dow Jones.

The Journal is often held up as a rare example of a paper with premium content that can afford to charge without losing too many readers. It charges an annual $99. Mr Murdoch told a conference in New York that making the site free would help boost readership and revenues. "If you make it free, it will hurt the paper? - I don't think so," he said according to a Reuters report. He added: "That looks the way we're going." ...

Vivian Schiller, general manager of NYTimes.com, said the change was motivated by a shift towards search engines for finding news in cyberspace. The volume of traffic funnelled through search engines such as Google News and Yahoo! was so great that the newspaper had concluded it could maximise advertising revenue by throwing open the entire site.

Some of the NYT's star columnists have been calling for their writing to be available to the widest possible audience. Since the paper introduced charges two years ago, 227,000 paying subscribers have signed up, generating $10m annually.

Comment.  If this becomes a trend, it won't directly spill over to scholarly journals, which can raise much less money from advertising than newspapers.  On the other hand, their expenses are much lower and there may be some indirect spillover, for example, through new user expectations and better data on the connection between free online access and heightened impact.  See my February 2006 article on advertising as a supplementary (not necessarily sufficient) source of revenue for OA journals, and on Google AdSense ads as a way to avoid both the real and the perceived problems of editorial corruption.

Matthew Cockerill, Webcite links provide access to archived copy of linked web pages, BioMed Central blog, September 17, 2007.  Excerpt:

...[The] lack of permanence of web links (sometimes known as link rot) is a general phenomenon across the web, but it is a particularly problem in the case of published scientific research. On the one hand, the coherence of the published scientific record depends on being able to refer back to the articles including the online material that they refer to. But on the other hand, the character of scientific research projects (which tend to be funded for a few years at a time) and of scientific careers (which tend to involved frequent shifts between institutions) mean that scientific web pages become inaccessible with worrying regularity....

So, since late 2005,  BioMed Central has been working in partnership with the WebCite initiative, based at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation at Toronto General Hospital, to preserve archival copies of all web pages linked to from BioMed Central articles.

Wherever you see a [WebCite] logo, whether in the body of an article, or in the reference section, you can click on that link to view a version of that page that has been archived at WebCite....

For example, this Journal of Biology article links to the BioGRID database. The WebCite copy provides a snapshot of the BioGRID home page, including stats on the database, as it was at the time of publication....

[I]n order to provide long term digital permanence, it is important that the WebCite project itself should have long term sustainable support. To this end, we encourage other publishers to participate in the initiative, and to consider ways of supporting it, perhaps via a similar collective model as that used for the CrossRef linking initiative....

The Biosciences Federation has issued a Position statement on Open Access, September 19, 2007.  The BF represents over 50 scientific societies and other bioscience organizations in the UK.  I haven't checked but I imagine that most of the societies publish journals.  Here's the executive summary from the position statement:

Maximising access to research articles is very important to learned societies in fulfilling their missions. Open Access publishing is a way to achieve this, providing it is adequately funded so that the viability both of journals, and of the various activities which are made possible by journals income - conferences, meetings and other educational events as well as grants, bursaries and research funding - is not compromised.

The Biosciences Federation believes that a number of practical issues need to be addressed if Open Access publishing is to succeed, and is keen to enter into dialogue on these issues with the higher education community, funding bodies and government. The major issues identified are:

• Adequate funding needs to be available, and authors need to be aware of this.
• Publication charges will necessarily vary between journals.
• Authors must understand clearly their funder’s or institution’s requirements.
• In some disciplines, research funding is modest or non-existent; an alternative way forward needs to be found for these areas.
• Consideration must be given to publication which takes place after the end of the grant, and to work which is not carried out under the terms of a specific grant.
• The balance of costs will change; those who publish relatively little will save money, while research-intensive universities will have to find more money than under the subscription model.

The Biosciences Federation’s members see the alternative route to Open Access – self-archiving – as being more problematic unless Open Access publication is in place:

• Journals are likely to face widespread cancellations when a ‘tipping point’ of free access to their content is reached.
• Should some journals disappear as a result, so too would the framework within which they currently manage peer review.
• The significant contribution which learned societies make to the research community through conferences, training, bursaries and other grants, research funding, etc. – partly supported at present by publishing revenues – would be reduced.
• Authors have the task of depositing their articles, with accompanying metadata.
• Readers will be confused by the availability of multiple versions.
• Institutions have the labour and expense of creating and maintaining copies of articles in their databases.

In order to inform the debate, the Federation has commissioned research to establish the scale to which publishing income supports member society activities; additional research will explore learned societies' current and future response to Open Access initiatives, and their members' attitudes and behaviour in relation to Open Access. The results will be published early in 2008.

The members of the Biosciences Federation believe that if Open Access publication can be made to work, and can be funded at appropriate levels, then the problems and risks currently surrounding self-archiving would disappear. Institutions would be free to link to the definitive version and/or to store a copy of the definitive version themselves.

Also see the BF press release.

Comments.

• It's very understandable that society publishers should want assurances of adequate revenue before they consider a move to OA.  But to want adequate funding for "conferences, meetings and other educational events as well as grants, bursaries and research funding" before they consider removing access barriers to research is to give all these other society missions a higher priority than the mission of accelerating research and sharing knowledge in the field.  This may be a responsible ranking of the priorities.   But how many of these societies have asked their members for their priorities?  How many adequately cover all these missions with subscription revenue today?  How many assume that the subscription model itself is sustainable (and hence, feel no pressure to find an alternative unless it comes with revenue guarantees)? 
• The BF seems to believe that all OA journals charge publication fees, when in fact most do not.
• As OA archiving spreads, it may or may not cause journal cancellations.  In the field in which it has spread the furthest and been practiced the longest (physics), it has not caused journal cancellations.  I summarized the evidence in an article earlier this month (see esp. Section 5).  All we can say today is that other fields may or may not be like physics in this respect, and that publisher fears not only lack evidence but are currently opposed by counter-evidence.
• It's true that if a peer-reviewed subscription journal disappeared, then "the framework within which [it] currently manage[s] peer review" would also disappear.  But it's not true that a peer-reviewed subscription journal facing a critical number of cancellations would necessarily disappear (it might convert to OA), and not true that its disappearance would necessarily deprive the field of a peer review provider (the money formerly spent on subscriptions would be freed up to support peer-reviewed OA alternatives).  I spell this out in more detail in the same article I cited above (see esp. Sections 12-14).
• Publishers can avoid the multiple version problem, insofar as it's a problem, by allowing authors to self-archive the published edition.  Publishers should also understand that version differences bother publishers and librarians much more than they bother readers, especially if the versions are well-labeled.  (The versions deposited in PubMed Central under the NIH policy, for example, need not be the published editions, but they always cite and link to the published editions.)
• BF should be careful not to overstate the cost and labor of maintaining an institutional repository.  First, many of the cost estimates in the literature are for multi-purpose repositories that do much more than simply provide OA to the research output of an institution.  Second, repositories cost a lot less than journal subscriptions.  They don't do the same work.  But the money spent on a repository is a good investment in the visibility and impact of the articles, authors, and institution, and a good investment in a superior form of scholarly communication. 
• You could even say that the cost of providing OA is much less than the cost of doing without OA.  For example, John Houghton and Peter Sheehan have shown that the (already low) cost of OA archiving hugely amplifies the return on investment in research:  Quoting their July 2006 study:  “With the United Kingdom's GERD [Gross Expenditure on Research and Development] at USD 33.7 billion and assuming social returns to R&D of 50%, a 5% increase in access and efficiency [their conservative estimate] would have been worth USD 1.7 billion; and...With the United State's GERD at USD 312.5 billion and assuming social returns to R&D of 50%, a 5% increase in access and efficiency would have been worth USD 16 billion.”
• Having said all that, I applaud BF's support for OA journals (if the money exists) and OA repositories (if OA journals exist).  As it studies the issues, I believe it will discover fewer obstacles, and more opportunities, than it now suspects it will discover.

Update (9/21/07). Also see Stevan Harnad's comments.

At its June 2007 meeting, the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC) decided not to mandate OA for RGC-funded research.  However, it did encourage publicly-funded Hong Kong universities to encourage OA. 

Here's the relevant part of the minutes of its June 2007 meeting, which were sent to all Hong Kong university vice-chancellors and presidents on August 6, 2007.  The "UGC institutions" are the eight universities supported with public funds by the University Grants Committee.  I thank the RGC for permission to reproduce this paragraph:

Open-access Repositories for Res