Open Access News

The Physical Sciences Section of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has joined CERN's SCOAP3 project.

Liz O'Brien, Library struggles to keep up with journal demand, The Santa Clara (student newspaper at Santa Clara University), February 21, 2008.  (Thanks to LIS News.)  Excerpt:

...In the last six years, the deficit between the library's operating budget and the scope of journals, books and databases available has been steadily increasing, said Taeock Kim, associate university librarian. In other words, the library's budget can't keep up with the number of new journals available.

"The gap is getting bigger every year, so we have to be really careful in what we purchase," said Kim....

Since 2001 alone, when the university subscribed to 5,168 journals, subscriptions have decreased by 1,335, said Aimee Algier, head of technical services....

"Faculty need greater library facilities that Santa Clara can't provide," said history professor Steven Gelber. "It's always been the case, but my sense is that it's getting worse because the amount of material available in libraries is growing exponentially and the university can't keep up."

Much of that inability to keep up stems from the high inflation rates of journals and databases....

As long as prices increase at a much faster rate than the library's budget, it is unlikely there will be any new journal purchases.

"We're falling behind by standing still," Gelbert said.

In his February 24 ethics column for the New York Times, Randy Cohen argues that it's illegal but "not always unethical" to copy and share the full text of a book which is out of print but still under copyright.  In fact, this kind of sharing promotes the purpose of copyright law (in the US, "to promote the progress of science and useful arts"), while letting the book's ideas "slip into darkness" would "undermine its purpose".

Cohen was responding to a reader's question about a particular book on aviation by Richard Coffey.  When Cohen contacted Coffey, Coffey said, "I'm pleased [readers] still find it useful. They're welcome to post it and make copies."

The February issue of Open Source Business Resource is devoted to Open Data.  Here are the articles:

• Dru Lavigne, Editorial
• Tracey P. Lauriault and Hugh McGuire, Data Access in Canada: CivicAccess.ca
• Joseph Potvin, How is Copyright Relevant to Source Data and Source Code?
• Jordan Hatcher, Implementing Open Data: The Open Data Commons Project.  (PS:  Also see the excerpt blogged here yesterday.)
• Ismael Peña-López, The Personal Research Portal

Richard Poynder, The Open Access Interviews: John Wilbanks, Open and Shut?  February 22, 2008.  Excerpt:

...As the Open Access debate has developed, however, it has become increasingly clear that maximising eyeballs [which can read research literature] is just the first step. Open Data advocates like Peter Murray-Rust, for instance, argue that research papers also need to be accessible to machines — an argument he put to me recently with some passion....

John Wilbanks, VP of Science Commons, has an even broader view of the role the Internet has to play in science. Like Murray-Rust, Wilbanks believes it is essential for research papers to be machine-readable. Likewise, he believes we need to develop an appropriate legal infrastructure to facilitate this. He also believes it is essential that science databases are freely available, and that these databases are interoperable — not just with one another, but with research literature.

In addition, Wilbanks believes the Internet should be viewed as a platform for facilitating the free circulation and sharing of the physical tools of science — cell lines, antibodies, plasmids etc. In a sense, he wants to see these tools embedded into research papers — so if a reader of an Open Access paper wants more detailed information on, say, a cell line, they should be able to click on a link and pull up information from a remote database. Should the researcher then want to obtain that cell line from a biobank, they should be able to order it in the same way as they might order an item on Amazon or eBay, utilising a 1-click system available directly from the article.

To make this possible, points out Wilbanks, we need to build the necessary technical infrastructure. This, he says, will require creating new ways of automating the collection, aggregation and discovery of scientific information, as well as the construction of an effective ecommerce system for the physical materials of science. And the best hope for achieving that, he adds, is by helping to create the so-called Semantic Web.

The end game, explains Wilbanks, is to make the research process as seamless and frictionless as possible. This implies that the scholarly paper is no longer simply an article to be viewed by as many eyeballs as possible, but also the raw material for multiple machines and software agents to data mine, a front-end to hundreds of databases, and the launch pad for an ecommerce system designed to speed up the process of research.

In this light, Open Access is not an end in itself, but the necessary precondition for a complete revolution in the way that science is done....

[According to Wilbanks], we are approaching the point where we will not be able to develop new life-saving drugs, or devise solutions to complex problems like global warming, without the kind of dramatic change in the way we do science that Science Commons envisages; for science is now so complicated that we will soon be unable to crunch the data quickly enough, or effectively enough, unless we embrace the kind of machine-driven, network-centric approach envisaged by the Semantic Web. As Wilbanks bluntly puts it, "The fact is that the complexity involved in studying a living system is such that even Pfizer — with $4 billion a year in R&D — can't handle it." ...

Jordan Hatcher, Implementing Open Data: The Open Data Commons Project, Open Source Business Resource, February 2008.  Excerpt:

...With the funding and support of the information management company Talis, the Open Data Commons project (ODC) was founded in the autumn of 2007 to provide legal tools for sharing data. This project started through funding licence development by Jordan Hatcher and Dr. Charlotte Waelde of the University of Edinburgh. This resulted in the creation of the Public Domain Dedication & Licence (PDDL) legal tool which will be maintained by the Open Knowledge Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation promoting open knowledge. The PDDL dedicates the data and databases to the public domain, a position that offers a wide degree of flexibility for users of data and helps freely enable semantic web projects based on using large amounts of data....

In December 2007, Science Commons released their Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data. This protocol, written in the same style as a Request For Comment (RFC), outlines a legal standard for open access to data based on three principles:

• the protocol must promote legal predictability and certainty
• the protocol must be easy to use and understand
• the protocol must impose the lowest possible transaction costs on users

Guided by these three principles and Science Commons' experience in maintaining their database FAQ on Creative Commons licences and data, they arrived at an approach that calls for waiver of relevant IPRs so that data could be treated as close to being in the public domain (without IPRs) as possible. Thus the protocol calls for waiver of:

• copyright
• the sui generis database right in the European Union mentioned above and similar protections
• implied contract rights and rights in tort or delict such as unfair competition or trade secrets....

In implementing the Science Commons protocol, the ODC project set goals of:

• making the protocol international
• writing the legal document in plain language
• clearly stating what rights were and were not covered....

The end result of the Science Commons Protocol and the implementation by ODC are solutions for those wishing to further data integration projects and to openly share their data. The PDDL together with the accompanying Community Norms statement will be particularly useful for scientists wishing to share their research data. But scientists are not the only anticipated users, as government sector data services, and private companies involved in data generation and sharing will all have an interest--as both consumers and producers of data--in having an option that allows for use and re-use of databases without restriction. The goal of the ODC project is to grow with the support of its users to meet the need for accessible legal tools for the creation of a web of open data of all types.

Should you wish to support the ODC's efforts to create data licensing solutions either financially or with your time, please contact us.

Stevan Harnad, The Hybrid Copyright Retention and Deposit Mandate, Open Access Archivangelism, February 22, 2008.  Excerpt:

Summary:  In a blog posting that I quote and comment upon below, my OA comrade-at-arms, Peter Suber, compares Harvard's Copyright-Retention Mandate, with opt-out (CMo), with an immediate Deposit Mandate, with no-opt-out (DMn).

The amendment of the Harvard mandate that I am urging, however, is not to substitute DMn for CMo but to upgrade CMo so as to jointly mandate BOTH CMo AND DMn (the former with an opt-out option, the latter without: CMo+DMn).

That way the Harvard policy will capture all the deposits that would have been made by authors who did not opt out of copyright retention PLUS the deposits that would not have been made, because the author had opted out of the copyright retention clause.

The amended mandate only gains; it loses nothing at all of what would have been generated by the original Harvard mandate alone....

• Julie Allinson, Sebastien François, and Stuart Lewis, SWORD: Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit
• Richard Green and Chris Awre, RepoMMan: Delivering Private Repository Space for Day-to-day Use
• Malcolm Heath, Michael Jubb, and David Robey, E-Publication and Open Access in the Arts and Humanities in the UK
• Dave Puplett, Version Identification: A Growing Problem

Leo Waaijers, Can the library be a publisher?  A slide presentation at Openingscongres Bibliotheek (Wageningen, February 21, 2008).  (Thanks to Wouter Gerritsma.) 

Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development began as an idea: an idea that a group of ten students genuinely and passionately believed had the potential to make this world a better place. ...

We urge you to contrast theory against practice, one discipline against another, and your ideas against the authors’ ideas. The Editorial Board of Consilience has high hopes that this exchange of ideas, sparked by the written and visual media contained in this online space, will contribute to the progress of sustainable development.

Here's another batch of comments on the new Harvard OA mandate.

From the anonymous author of Easily Distracted:

I’m very pleased by the vote in favor of open-access at Harvard. Not just because of open-access, but because it shows that it’s possible for faculty to choose dramatic changes or reforms in their way of business....

From an editorial in the Los Angeles Times:

They didn't get to Harvard by being stupid, you know. So it's not surprising that professors at the Ivy League school voted to place their scholarly articles online. They have much to gain and little to lose -- and their experiment has much for the rest of us to like as well....

[PS:  The rest of the editorial incorrectly assumes that the purpose of the policy is to "bypass scholarly journals" and peer review.  UCLA Litbrarian was the first to correct the error.]

From Andrew Lawler in Science (accessible only to subscribers):

...[P]ublishers say they doubt it will significantly affect their business....

The Harvard decision...“is not mandatory,” notes Patricia Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers in Washington, D.C. “I don’t think anyone is quaking in their boots.” Alan Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes Science), says that the new policy won’t affect publishing criteria, although it could pose “a bureaucratic problem for faculty members.” ...

Schroeder says it is too early to measure the impact of the new policy and warns that “publishers may not be quite as excited to take articles from Harvard.” ...

From John Mark Ockerbloom in Everybody's Libraries:

...I find this approach ingenious. As people maintaining institutional repositories have come to know, there are two main barriers to distributing one’s faculty’s work in one’s repository: getting hold of the work, and getting the right to publish the work. The first of these can be handled in various ways; whether the faculty, the departmental administrators, or the librarians get the content to the right place, it’s all purely a matter of local negotiation. But that’s not the case with rights. By the time we repository maintainers get content from authors, the authors have often signed their rights away to the journals that published the papers. The publishers have effectively called dibs on redistribution rights, and we can’t distribute unless they agree to it....

Some open access advocates have argued that one could design a mandate that was even more open-access-friendly. That may be, but to judge this mandate a failure (as the linked post above appears to at one point) seems to me an example of the “perfect” being the enemy of the good. This mandate is faculty-friendly as well as being open-access friendly, in that it minimizes the extra work faculty have to do and assures them the last word in access control, should they decide to exercise it. And that, I believe, is crucial to its having been adopted at all, and to its subsequent acceptance by faculty....

From Ivor Tossell in Globe and Mail:

...“It's a very interesting move, and particularly that it's Harvard that's done it,” observes Carole Moore, the University of Toronto's head librarian. Moore says she's anxious to discuss the approach with her own school's faculty, and expects it to have an impact at other institutions as well....

The Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) is funding 22 new databases of research data.  From Co-Action's English-language summary of the Swedish announcement (February 14, 2008):  

...A total of SEK 53 mil (ca $ 8.5 mil) will help build or improve databases in areas as varied as environmental ecology, linguistics, economics and health research.

DISC, the Database Infrastructure Committee of the Swedish Research Council, has a mandate not only to facilitate the creation of new databases and better coordination between already existing ones but also to optimize access to this national resource for Swedish as well as for international researchers.

“We continuously expand our aspirations and this year we have considered more research areas than previously,” says Magnus Stenbeck, chair of DISC. The entire list of databases to have won financial support in this round can be found here....

PS:  Co-Action tells me that the Research Council's goal is to make the data OA whenever that is consistent with the law and the privacy of individuals.

Rose Holley, Delivering Full Text Collections: The Journal of the Polynesian Society Digital Initiative, a PPT slide presentation at the University of Auckland, February 2007.  Self-archived February 18, 2008. 

Abstract:   Provides an overview of the digitisation of the Journal of the Polynesian Society, which is being processed using TEI XML and delivered in B-Engine at the University of Auckland.

PS:  The project is to digitize the first 100 years of the JPS backfile, from 1892 to 1991.  Current issues will apparently not be OA.

nowpublishers.com has Advantages for Authors, prominently displayed on their website! These advantages cited are high quality, high citation, liberal copyright, wide access - plus, an honorarium for authors, and for editors and reviewers who complete their tasks promptly, too.

Librarians might like the Background section, which talks about providing librarians with value for money, using modern web-based marketing and manufacturing techniques to minimize costs. ...

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded a 3-year grant for nearly a million dollars to a partnership between William Paterson University, Rutgers University Libraries and NJEDge.Net to develop and deploy a statewide academic video-on-demand repository. The digital video repository (Fedora Commons-based) will he housed in the core of the NJEDge network and will provide "lectures-on-demand", licensed commercial videos, and locally owned videos. A Video Commons collection will be publically available including history, lectures from notables, and video documenting research and scientific advances. NJVid is notable for providing a statewide video strategy to accommodate any type of organization-higher education, K12, public libraries, museums and archives. A substantial part of this project will provide the resources to develop a statewide Shibboleth-based Identity management infrastructure, supporting statewide network authentication and authorization that can be used for many content resources. This presentation will describe the open source architecture and middleware applications that are under development. Much effort will be expended for an extensible approach that can be implemented by other statewide or consortial video initiatives.

In the first year, UNC Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University will each convert 2,700 public domain books into high-resolution, downloadable, reusable digital files that can be indexed locally and by any web search engine. UNC Chapel Hill and NCSU will start by each hosting one state-of-the-art Scribe machine provided by the Internet Archive to scan the materials at a cost of just 10 cents per page. Each university library will focus on historic collection strengths, such as plant and animal sciences, engineering and physical science at NCSU and social sciences and humanities at UNC-Chapel Hill. Duke University will also contribute select content for digitization during the first year of the collaborative project.

To view content contributed by the NCSU Libraries, visit this Internet Archive page.

By collaborating on their membership in the OCA, the UNC Chapel Hill and NCSU libraries are building on long-standing TRLN cooperative arrangements and principles for sharing collections, technology, and expertise to create a rich knowledge environment that furthers the member universities' teaching, research, and service missions. Because 70% of the titles held within TRLN are unique to a single institution, cooperative digitization through efforts such as the OCA offer the opportunity to expand access to and use of the extensive research collections held within TRLN. Through the OCA partnership, TRLN is also working to develop shared principles for digitization and the long-term preservation of digitized content.

The U.S. Army said today that it would restore public access to the online Reimer Digital Library of Army publications, after having blocked the site on February 6.

Last week, the Federation of American Scientists filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking for a copy of the entire Reimer collection for publication on the FAS website or, alternatively, for renewed public access to the site.

The Army chose the latter option. ...

The Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet, or SLU) has adopted an OA policy.  (Thanks to Forskarbloggen.)  From the English-language edition:

On the 11th of February 2008 the [rector] of SLU signed a policy where SLU scholars are urged to publish Open Access when possible....Open Access publishing means that you are publishing in Open Access journals or depositing a copy of an already published article in for example Epsilon Open Archive [the SLU institutional repository]....

The notion of Open Access contains both journals and the depositing in Open Archives. Both these initiatives aim to make science available to those who are interested to take part of it. Depositing a copy of an already published article is a way to make access to the publication even though the journal where the article first appeared isn't an OA-journal.

In 2003 The Association of Swedish Higher Education (Sveriges universitets- och högskoleförbund) signed The Berlin Declaration. The declaration aims at supporting Open Access Initiatives. The SLU policy should be seen in the light of that declaration....

Comments

• The SLU policy was adopted one day before the Harvard policy, just as the University of Oregon policy was adopted one day after.  Clearly they didn't influence one another, and show the ripeness of the idea.  Kudos to all involved at SLU.
• I hope the SLU will consider strengthening its policy in light of the evidence that policies requiring OA are generally effective and policies merely encouraging it are not.

Zoe Corbyn, Low compliance with open-access rule criticised, Times Higher Education, February 21, 2008.  Excerpt:

Concerns that policies to ensure "open access" to academic research are stalling were raised this week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference.

A study presented at the conference in Boston found that less than a third of the papers generated with Wellcome Trust funding are making it into the public domain - in direct contravention of the trust's open-access policies.

Under the Wellcome Trust's policy, which came into effect in full in October 2006, grant holders are required to make their papers freely accessible in PubMed Central and UK PubMed Central, the free digital repositories of biomedical and life science papers. They should be deposited as soon as possible after final publication and no later than six months....

A survey undertaken last month by the trust reveals that compliance with the mandatory policy is low. Of trust-funded papers published in May 2007, only 27 per cent were freely available within six months.

"We want the figure to be much higher, but it should be remembered that this compliance has been achieved within eight months of the policy going live," Robert Kiley, head of e-strategy at the trust, told Times Higher Education in advance of his AAAS presentation.

The Wellcome Trust study also shows that publishers with open-access policies are failing to deposit papers....

Elsevier, the biggest single publisher used by Wellcome researchers, published 29 per cent of the papers but subsequently deposited only 14 per cent.

"The low submission rate is, to a large part, a lack of awareness on the part of the publisher as to who has funded the research they are publishing," said Mr Kiley, stressing that Elsevier had recently modified procedures to improve authors' disclosure of funding sources.

Open-access advocate Stevan Harnad, professor of electronics and computer science at the University of Southampton, said that authors should be required to deposit papers in repositories set up by their own institutions rather than to use central repositories.

Update.  Also see Stevan Harnad's detailed comment at the newspaper site (no deep link), reprinted this morning on his blog.  Excerpt:

...[The Wellcome Trust compliance rate of 30%] is considerably higher than the NIH non-mandate's 4% rate (recently upgraded to a mandate), and it is above the overall 5-15% spontaneous baseline rate for self-archiving, but it is not clear whether it is climbing as high or as fast as the compliance rate for institutional mandates (approaching 80-100% within 2 years). If it is not, then this is yet another reason for mandating institutional rather than central deposit, and deposit by the author rather than by the author-or-publisher. That way each institution can add its own weight to the funder mandates, and can monitor compliance....

(2) Arthur Sale's analyses comparing deposit rates for mandated and unmandated Institutional Repositories (IRs) show that (2a) unmandated deposits hover between 5-15%, (2b) encouraged and incentivized deposits climb toward 30% but not much higher, whereas (2c) mandated deposits approach 80-100% within about two years of adoption of the mandate....

Update. Also see the Wellcome Trust's own announcement of the compliance figures (February 21, 2008). Excerpt:

...The study, which focused on Trust-funded papers published in May 2007, showed that 27 per cent of papers published in this month complied with the Trust's open access policy, by being made available through the online databases PubMed Central and UK PubMed Central within six months of publication. This is an increase on the 15 per cent figure for research published in December 2006.

Encouragingly, over 90 per cent of papers published in May 2007 were published in journals that comply with the Trust's open access policy - a result of close cooperation between the Wellcome Trust and the major scientific, technical and medical publishers....

Yesterday Mike Carroll wrote three blog posts (1, 2, 3) which included some disagreements with Stevan Harnad about the Harvard policy and copyright.  Today Stevan wrote a response, Upgrade Harvard's Opt-Out Copyright Retention Mandate: Add a No-Opt-Out Deposit Mandate.  Excerpt:

Some Journals (Alas) Still Demand Exclusive Copyright Transfer

I think I understand fully what Michael Carroll, Peter Suber and the current draft of the Harvard Policy are saying. My shorthand descriptor -- "copyright retention" -- captures precisely the feature of the Harvard policy that should, I urge, be modified (ever so slightly).

Many journals currently require authors to transfer exclusive rights to the publisher in exchange for publication.

Let me hasten to add: I think this is deplorable. I don't think authors should have to do it. And I am certain publishers will cease to make this a condition of publication once OA prevails: some have already ceased demanding it....

In order to be able to grant Harvard the license that the current Harvard OA Mandate requires, Harvard authors would have to successfully renegotiate the retention of their rights (i.e., they must negotiate a non-exclusive license) with those journals.

And if the journal is their journal of choice, and the negotiation is unsuccessful, then the Harvard author must either opt out of the Harvard mandate or not publish in his journal of choice.

And that's exactly what my recommended amendment is intended to avert: by requiring deposit independently of requiring copyright retention (or reservation, or renegotiation). Then the opt-out can be from the copyright renegotiation requirement only, and not from the deposit requirement too.

This preserves all the virtues and intended benefits of the current Harvard mandate, and adds the further benefit of 100% deposit, with no opt-out....

Upgrade Harvard's Opt-Out Copyright Retention Mandate By Adding a No-Opt-Out Deposit Mandate: No Loss, Only Gain

Michael Carroll, Peter Suber and I are in complete agreement on every point of substance save one: What is the mandate that is the most likely to generate the most OA?

Michael and Peter (and Harvard!) think it is a Copyright Retention Mandate with opt-out (CRM). I think it is a Deposit Mandate without opt-out (DM), which can be trivially added to the Copyright Retention Mandate with opt-out (CRM).

In other words, Harvard can have its (CRM) cake, and eat it (DR) too!

That contingency is completely missing in Michael's analysis of my proposal.

Michael points out that even if a Harvard author opts out of CRM, he can still deposit his article if he wishes to.

But if voluntary deposit -- just for the sake of the benefits of OA, or just because one's university or funder had invited deposit -- had been capable of generating enough OA, then (1) mandates would not have proved necessary, (2) NIH's invitation policy would not have failed and would not now have had to be upgraded to an immediate deposit mandate, and (3) the hundreds of institutional repositories with invitations instead of mandates worldwide would not be hovering for years at spontaneous deposit rates of 5-15% while the (still few) mandated repositories approach 100% within two years.

An opt-out mandate is not a mandate....

I hope that makes the logic and the contingencies of my proposal still clearer. I might add that exactly the same logic was used in designing the ID/OA (immediate-deposit, optional-access) mandate itself (the one Peter calls the Dual Deposit/Release mandate):

There the logic was that if an institution could not reach agreement on adopting the stronger immediate OA mandate (for copyright reasons, say), then it makes no sense to adopt a delayed-deposit mandate, or, worse, an opt-out "mandate," which allows the publisher's embargo policy to determine that date at which the deposit is made:

It makes far more sense to mandate immediate deposit in every instance, with the publisher's embargo policy applicable only to the date on which the deposit is made OA ("released"), thereby allowing almost-OA to tide over the embargo, thanks to the Button....

Comments

• As I said yesterday, if the conversation continues, I'll post links but not excerpts.  The best way to follow the full dialogue is to follow their two blogs (Mike, Stevan).
• My original comments on the Harvard policy should speak for themselves, and I'll have more to say in the March issue of SOAN.  But here I can clarify one aspect of my position.  I'm not saying that the Harvard-style mandate will generate a higher level of compliance and OA than a dual deposit-release style mandate (or what Stevan calls immediate deposit / optional access).  This remains to be seen.  At Harvard, faculty will give the institution permission to host copies of their articles in the institutional repository, when they don't opt out, and Harvard will take responsibility for making the actual deposits.  If Harvard is fleet and efficient in making these deposits, then it could provide immediate OA to all the articles not subject to opt-outs (which, for the sake of argument, let's peg at 95% of the total).  If Harvard is slow to make these deposits, then it will miss a beautiful opportunity arising from the permissions it will have in hand, and may as well defer to publisher embargoes.  Likewise, if opt-outs are rare, the level of OA could approach 100%; if they are common, it would be much lower.  By contrast, under a dual deposit-release strategy, Harvard could have 100% of the articles on deposit.  But a good percentage of them would be subject to publisher embargoes and about one-third of them would be subject to flat publisher prohibitions on OA archiving.  Hence, each type of policy risks delayed OA (one through institutional sluggishness, one through publisher embargoes), and each risks incomplete OA (one through faculty opt outs and one through deference to publisher policies).  If the two key variables --speed of deposit and level of opt-outs-- work in Harvard's favor, then its policy could be better than a dual deposit-release strategy.  But if not, not.  Because this is contingent, I can't recommend one type of policy over the other without knowing more about the probabilities.  Because Harvard's is the first university-level mandate to focus on permissions rather than deposits, it deserves a chance to show how well it can work.  Can the two types of policy be blended, so that Harvard faculty give permissions (subject to an opt-out) and make deposits (not subject an opt-out)?  Yes.  But if Harvard is fleet and efficient in making the deposits, that won't be necessary.  The ball is in Harvard's court. 

Lila Guterman, Celebrations and Tough Questions Follow Harvard's Move to Open Access, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 21, 2008 (accessible only to subscribers).  Excerpt:

...Other universities (as well as other schools within Harvard), said [Peter Suber], will want to adopt similar policies in order "either to keep up with Harvard or get the synergistic benefit, because the more [institutions] do it, the more publishers will have to accommodate [it]." ...

"It changes the default position in the negotiation" between authors and publishers, says Michael W. Carroll, a professor at the Villanova University School of Law, who is an open-access advocate. "It does mean that the authors are choosing to stand closer together instead of having to deal with the publishers one on one."

The University of California has been working for several years on a policy that resembles Harvard's. Comments on its draft last year reflected "almost universal support for the concept," says Gary S. Lawrence, director of systemwide library planning, "but a great deal of concern about the implementation details." Harvard's success in creating an arrangement that faculty members agreed on, he says, "provides us a lot of encouragement."

Harvard's new policy makes no mention of any delay between the time of publication in a journal and the paper's being made free online, a provision that some publishers require, and which the NIH allows in its policy. Faculty members who choose to publish in journals with that requirement can apply to waive or modify Harvard's license to post their papers online, says [Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science who proposed the open-access policy to the faculty]....

[C]omplaints about the policy were muted. (Some have appeared on The Chronicle's Brainstorm blog.) Patricia S. Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers, has in the past criticized the push toward open access, arguing that it overlooks the potentially detrimental effects on scholarly societies' publications. This time she praised Harvard's decision to allow faculty members to opt out but wondered if hidden pressure would keep them from doing so. Have scholarly publishers sounded alarms? "No one's called here in hysterics," she says....

Sanford G. Thatcher, director of Penn State University Press and president of the Association of American University Presses, calls Harvard's policy "shortsighted" because it might result in the loss of subscription and reprint income to humanities and social-science journals. His own press receives two-thirds of its journal income through royalties from Project Muse, an online collection of journals. "If that were to collapse," he says, "so too would our journals disappear from the face of the earth."

Mr. Carroll finds that prospect unlikely. "I fear that people are unwilling to do anything innovative like Harvard's done," he says, "because of these highly speculative fears."

Besides, Harvard has an interest in maintaining the livelihood of scholarly journals, he argues. If its repository begins to hurt them, the university could take steps to reduce the impact on publishers, such as allowing a delay before posting articles online....

Mr. Thatcher and others also wonder whether Harvard faculty members will actually make the effort to comply with the policy. But open-access supporters observe that faculty members themselves were the ones who voted for it.

"My guess is that if opt-outs and forgetfulness together make compliance fall off from 100 percent to 95 percent, it's not going to bother anybody," says Mr. Suber. "It's not even going to bother me."

Update. Also see Gavin Baker's comments on Sanford Thatcher's quoted remarks.

Springer recently sent a memo to researchers on using Springer Open Choice journals to comply with the NIH OA policy.  Excerpt:

Do you receive research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)? If so, as from April 2008 you will be required to deposit the final manuscript of your journal articles in PubMed Central and ensure free availability (open access) within 12 months of publication.

You will be pleased to hear that Springer journals are fully geared up for that requirement. All you have to do is opt for open access publication of your article through Springer's Open Choice....

Springer will take care of the immediate deposit in PubMed Central and what's more, not of the manuscript, but of the final, published article. And it will also be available with open access right away, and not just after 12 months.

The cost of Open Choice is - as stated on the NIH web site - a permissible cost in your grant so please take care to budget for it....

Comments

• It's true that NIH is willing to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals, including the Springer Open Choice journals.  And it's true that if researchers choose to spend their grant funds in this way, they can ensure immediate OA to the published edition of their article, as opposed to delayed OA to their peer-reviewed (but not copy-edited) manuscript.  Springer Open Choice also uses a CC-BY license, while the NIH provides free online access but limits users to fair use.  This is a legitimate option that researchers should understand and consider.
• But the Springer memo leaves the false impression that NIH-funded researchers who want to publish in Springer journals must pay a fee to do so.  The Springer Open Choice journals publish some OA articles and some TA articles, at the author's choice.  If researchers don't want to use part of their grant funds to pay for Springer's OA option, currently $3,000, then they can still submit to Springer journals for (no-fee) TA publication.  If Springer accepts the article, the peer-reviewed manuscript will still become freely available through PubMed Central.
• Moreover, Springer is green and allows author-initiated postprint archiving without fees or delays. 
• Bottom line:  Under the new NIH policy, grantees must reserve the right to comply with the policy whenever they publish a journal article based on their research.  Hence, they never need to pay a publisher for permission to comply with the NIH policy. 
• On the other hand, some publishers may well refuse to publish work by NIH-funded authors unless the authors pay a fee.  The fee wouldn't pay for permission to comply with the NIH policy, which is already assured, but for publication in the journal.  Springer has not adopted such a policy, but I welcome information about other publishers that may start to do so.

... You have also given quite a lot of thought to online social networks and how they can be used in organizing scientists, spreading scientific information, etc.., both using the general sites like Facebook and sites specifically designed for science networking. What are your thoughts on this?

Good question. So, PLoS ONE is a network of scientists that comes together around the articles. The PLoS Facebook group on the other hand comes together to bond around issues affecting PLoS itself, web technology and the philosophy of open access. From what I can see, folks in both environments still have a fledgling relationship with the articles or with the organization, and less frequently with each other in an open environment. This is understandable given the competitive culture of science and the grip of academic tenure. Researchers who build successful relationships often do so within international collaborative project groups and for that they might use their lab pages, project wikis, or email but they aren't yet using these forums. I could see this changing over time if tools were introduced to facilitate that. At the end of the day though, I still see researchers bonding as a group around the science itself, and with each other because of their shared passion for the work and the associated career opportunities. ...

... SCOAP³ is an initiative to get libraries to redirect subscription to pay for open access to all articles in high-energy physics. As such they will turn an entire field to open access and fund open access for all authors, all over the world, in high-energy physics journals.

On February 29th, there is a meeting at Berkeley to get US libraries informed and hopefully interested in making this vision a reality.

At PhysMath Central, we want to give authors a flavour of that future reality, so March 7th is a SCOAP³ day on the site. All articles submitted to PMC Physics A on March 7th will be peer-reviewed and accepted articles will be published without incurring an Article Processing Charge. Simply request a waiver with the words 'It's SCOAP³ day!'.

In the future, an article processing charge will be levied, but authors won't have to concern themselves about payment as SCOAP³ will cover expenses related to open access publication. As such, we hope this day will give authors a feel for the future where open access publication is the norm and publication costs are covered without them having to get involved.

The University of Delaware Library announces the electronic full text availability of two books by John S. Boyer, E. I. DuPont Professor of Marine Biochemistry/Biophysics Emeritus of the University of Delaware. The two Boyer books,Water Relations of Plants and Soils (co-written with Paul Kramer) and Measuring the Water Status of Plants and Soils, are available in the University of Delaware Library Institutional Repository and are a landmark first for the library's Institutional Repository.

The library encourages UD's faculty to consider placing their research in digital form for which they hold the electronic rights in the Institutional Repository.

Boyer is the first faculty member from the University of Delaware to sign his electronic rights for his two books over to the UD Library for inclusion in the Institutional Repository. The books were published in print format by Elsevier. ...

The world of technical science is to have its own data centre for digital data sets. The 3TU.Datacentre will ensure well-documented storage and long-term access to technical-science study data. This will guarantee the long-term availability of the Netherlands’ entire technical-science heritage. The 3TU.Datacentre is an initiative of the libraries of TU Delft, TU Eindhoven and the University of Twente under the auspices of the 3TU.Federation.

In the world of science, it is already possible to gain long-term access to (digital) publications. It is generally possible to consult an article long after initial publication. Facilities to do so have been set up all around the world. The data sets which form the basis for a scientific publication, however, are not yet stored for the long term. There is a high risk of these becoming inaccessible relatively soon after the study has been completed due to, for instance, the physical deterioration of the storage medium, loss of the descriptive (meta) data (which makes it impossible to place the data in the correct context) or the inability to run old software on new computers and operating systems.

The 3TU.Datacentre will provide storage of and continuing access to technical-science study data. After all, data sets often remain highly valuable even after a study has been completed. They may be reused in a new study or used to verify the original study. The long-term storage of test data also enables studies to be held over a long period. Facilities for the long-term storage of alpha and gamma data already exist under the auspices of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO): DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services).

Update (from Peter). Wouter has written to confirm that the repository will be OA.

“We instituted a modified open access policy”, The Hindu, February 21, 2008.  An interview with Emilie Marcus and Lynne Herndon of Cell Press.  Marcus is the Editor-in-Chief and Herndon is the CEO.  Excerpt:

How does Cell Press view the rise of Open Access journals like the PLoS group?

Herndon: Well, we instituted a modified open access policy ourselves, so that our content becomes free after 12 months.

Open Access seems to be gaining in popularity rather slowly. But I think that the start-up of the PLoS group was indeed the right thing at the right time. They took money, invested it in the right way and created some fairly good journals.

Ultimately, I think open access, if it were to become the major way the people got their literature, would put more pressure on us as publishers to deliver something additional that they cannot get from the versions that are housed with government.

Marcus: From an editorial perspective I am very opposed to an author-pays based model, whether in a newspaper or a scientific journal. If an author pays to be published it undermines the editorial independence of the journal.

But doesn’t the author pay most often through institutional grants, not out of his or her pocket?

Marcus: Well, from the journal’s perspective it doesn’t matter. The money can come from anywhere. In an author-pays model the more you publish, the more the journal makes. There is no incentive really to reject anything.

And I think you can see that pretty clearly now in the events that are happening in PLoS. PLoS Biology started out by having an editorial model based on a subscription-based business model, i.e., they were very selective, and the model was not financially sustainable.

Because if you have a journal with a high rejection rate you cannot sustain a model based on author’s fees. So in order to fund the editorial efforts of PloS Biology, they have had to launch PLoS One which is an online journal of now extremely low quality, minimally peer reviewed, for which authors pay 1,500 or 2,000 dollars to have their articles published.

In three months they have published 1,000 articles! The author is responsible for copy editing, pre-press and all of that.

So you end up with a lot of publications and a lot of revenue, with no real service to the scientific community....

Comments 

• It's not true that OA journals charging author-side publication fees give up their editorial independence and no longer have incentives to reject anything.  See my detailed response to this objection in an article from March 2004, updated in October 2006.
• Cell Press is an imprint of Elsevier, which charges author-side publication fees at its hybrid OA or "sponsored-article" journals. 

Mike Carroll has written a cluster of three related posts on OA, copyright, and the NIH and Harvard policies (February 20, 2008).  Mike is a professor at Villanova University School of Law and a member of the Board of Creative Commons.

(1) NIH and Harvard - It's About Values

...[The NIH and Harvard] policies require that faculty authors treat that moment when they are about to sign a journal publisher's copyright transfer agreement as an Aretha Franklin moment. The author has to hear the members of the underserved audience who will be denied access if that form is signed. The author has to hear, "You better think (think) think about what you're trying to do to me."

We should expect that under the NIH and FAS policies, some faculty will chafe when they can't just sign the publisher's form and have have to start using a contractual addendum or some other legal notice in response....

The key point is that this really is not a technical conversation. It's a conversation about values....

(2) Harvard policy - Response to Stevan Harnad

Stevan Harnad is a forceful advocate for open access, and I agree with most of what he advocates. I do have a different view than he does about the connection between open access and copyright and his analysis of the Harvard policy calls this to the fore.

My response is essentially the same as Peter Suber's. I'll add that Stevan characterizes the policy as reservation of rights. I think that's mistaken. Under the policy, the author continues to own all of the exclusive rights under copyright and remains free to transfer all of them to a journal publisher....

All that the FAS have done is agreed that they have granted Harvard permission to post their work in the repository and that Harvard may grant others similar permission so long as copies are not being sold for a profit.

(3) Copyright and OA - Response to Stevan Harnad

Prompted by differences of opinion about the Harvard FAS policy, I want to clarify where Stevan Harnad and I agree and disagree about the relationship between copyright and open access.

I understand Stevan's position to be:

1. Open Access policies should conceptually separate a requirement to deposit an electronic copy of a post-peer-review manuscript in a repository from a requirement that the repository make that copy publicly accessible on the Web.

2. Deposit at the time the manuscript is accepted for publication should be unconditionally required.

3. Public access should be allowed any time the publisher's agreement says it may be.

4. If the publication agreement does not permit posting of the manuscript, a repository may still distribute copies by email whenever requested to do so by a user.

5. The combination of 3 and 4 effectively provide open access.

6. Those who argue that open access should also include an explicit public copyright license giving the public more than the right to read (e.g., the rights to republish or to translate or otherwise adapt the work) are mistaken. Either (a) these rights have already been implicitly granted by the public posting of the work; (b) they are not necessary to effective scholarly communication; or (c) even if they would marginally improve scholarly communication, the costs of negotiating copyright with publishers is not worth this benefit.

My response:

Points 1 and 2 are exactly right. Under U.S. copyright law, it is a fair use for an author to send, and for a repository to make, an archival copy of the post-peer-review manuscript. I think it's also a fair use to make an archival copy of the published version of the article. Copyright law in many other parts of the world also would deem this to be legal.

Deposit mandates are highly desirable. Please note that under the Harvard policy, even if a faculty author feels it necessary to seek a waiver of the copyright license to Harvard, there is no reason that author couldn't and shouldn't deposit a copy of the manuscript in the repository.

With respect to public access, I disagree that faculty authors should simply adapt themselves to the arrangements that publishers offer/demand. Moreover, I have have a different view about what those arrangements permit.

So, on point 3, I agree insofar as authors should use all legal rights they have to make their work freely accessible on the Internet....

However, I don't think that the starting point for the analysis should be what the publisher's form says. I think authors have an obligation to consider whether signing the publisher's form is ethical behavior.

Copyright is an author's right granted to the author by the public to achieve a public purpose - the promotion of science and useful arts....Authors of scholarly journal articles do not need the promise of a royalty to have an incentive to perform research or report the results and their analysis of that research....

[J]ournal article authors have a duty to consider whether they are making proper use of the copyrights that the public has given them when they agree to the terms of a publisher's agreement that limit how, when or where the author may provide free access to their work on the Internet.

I have a different understanding about the legal consequences of number 4, and therefore I also do not agree with number 5.

As for number 6, clarifying re-use rights through public licensing is desirable. If his view is (a) or (b) I disagree. If his view is (c), however, I agree that the effort necessary to achieve this goal should be subject to cost-benefit analysis. Under current circumstances, where subscription-funded publishers have shown some willingness to permit free access to post-peer-review manuscripts but have not been willing to agree to public licensing, I think an author could responsibly decide to be satisfied with a copyright agreement that permits free access but does not provide for re-use licensing.

PS:  If Stevan responds, I'll blog an excerpt and link.  If Mike and Stevan continue the conversation after that, I'll blog links only.  The best way to follow the full dialogue is to follow their two blogs (Mike, Stevan).

The Wired Campus (from the Chronicle of Higher Education) reports that the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Auburn University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Maryland at Baltimore County, Purdue University, Texas Tech University, and Vanderbilt University have launched channels on YouTube.

In addition, Ferris State University, the Institute of Construction & Management Technology, and the Milwaukee School of Engineering have launched channels at The University Tube.

Watch the comment section the the Wired Campus post. Readers are still adding new links.

Neil R. Smalheiser, Wei Zhou, and Vetle I. Torvik, Anne O'Tate: A tool to support user-driven summarization, drill-down and browsing of PubMed search results, Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration, February 15, 2008.  (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)  Abstract:

Background.  PubMed is designed to provide rapid, comprehensive retrieval of papers that discuss a given topic. However, because PubMed does not organize the search output further, it is difficult for users to grasp an overview of the retrieved literature according to non-topical dimensions, to drill-down to find individual articles relevant to a particular individual need, or to browse the collection.

Results.  In this paper, we present Anne O'Tate, a web-based tool that processes articles retrieved from PubMed and displays multiple aspects of the articles to the user, according to pre-defined categories such as the most important words found in titles or abstracts; topics; journals; authors; publication years; and affiliations. Clicking on a given item opens a new window that displays all papers that contain that item. One can navigate by drilling down through the categories progressively, e.g., one can first restrict the articles according to author name and then restrict that subset by affiliation. Alternatively, one can expand small sets of articles to display the most closely related articles. We also implemented a novel cluster-by-topic method that generates a concise set of topics covering most of the retrieved articles.

Conclusions.  Anne O'Tate is an integrated, generic tool for summarization, drill-down and browsing of PubMed search results that accommodates a wide range of biomedical users and needs. It can be accessed [here].