Open Access News

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• A new report looks at the economics of social studies and humanities publishing in France.
• Vic Lyte, et al., describe the Institutional Repository Search project.
• Matthew Baker discusses OA publishing by libraries in developing countries.
• "The practice of [closed] academic publishing adds no value to Australian academics wishing to be heard," writes Oliver Marc Hartwich. "But it costs Australian libraries millions of dollars in subscriptions and it charges Australian taxpayers to access research that they funded in the first place."
• The November issue of the DSpace newsletter covers recent news on the repository software.
• The University of Florida Digital Collections released an iPhone application.

• Theresa Velden and Carl Lagoz, Communicating chemistry, Nature Chemistry, December 2009.
  • Also see: Theresa Velden and Carl Lagoz, The Value of New Scientific Communication Models for Chemistry, white paper, October 30, 2009.
• Sarah Callaghan, et al., How to Publish Data Using Overlay Journals: The OJIMS Project, Ariadne, October 2009.
• Michael Parker, et al., Ethical Data Release in Genome-Wide Association Studies in Developing Countries, PLoS Medicine, November 24, 2009.
• Natasha Singer, Public Database Is Urged to Monitor Drug Safety, New York Times, November 23, 2009.
• Chris Rusbridge, Data and the journal article, Digital Curation Blog, November 18, 2009.
• Andrew Turner, The need for clear data licenses, HighEarthOrbit, October 23, 2009.
• Dorothea Salo, Peer review, data quality, and usage metrics, The Book of Trogool, November 24, 2009.
• John Timmer, Partial H1N1 immunity can come without exposure to virus, Ars Technica, November 17, 2009. Excerpt:

  As the researchers acknowledge in their paper, the work couldn't have taken place if it weren't for extensive data sharing within the community of flu virus researchers.

... The difficulty in accessing learning materials for cash strapped Ugandan students is the subject of a research investigation by NABOTU. The research is exploring ways through which content providers such as commercial publishers can make available online some of their content under a flexible license such as creative commons. The research is also looking at what business models would guarantee income streams for the publishers. ...

NABOTU set up a publishing experiment at the beginning of 2009 attracting one commercial publisher and an NGO. The two have now published some of their books on the Internet, available for free downloading, sharing and reading. Fountain Publishers Ltd has three titles under a creative commons license including: Genocide by denial, handbook on decentralization in Uganda and funding and implementing universal access. FEMRITE has two fiction titles including: the invisible weevil and farming ashes.

Early reports from the two companies show that the books have been well received in Uganda and abroad. The books have been downloaded many times in different countries including Uganda. The companies are optimistic about the potential of the internet for business expansion. NABOTU is currently tracking the impact of the free downloads on sales figures for each of the titles to ascertain the viability of a free access business model. ...

Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) has become the most important collection of scientific periodicals of developing countries in line with the international open access movement. In its eleven years of operation SciELO has been progressively improving online publication methodologies and technologies thus keeping up with the international state of the art methods and technology for open access.

After a long process of analysis and consultations with experts, scientific editors and members of the Advisory Committee of the SciELO Brasil collection, the Creative Commons (CC) Licensing, with the minimum standard "Attribution – Non-commercial Use" (CC-BY-NC) was formally adopted by the SciELO collection for all of its content, and with the possibility for the editors to adopt the BY license with broader attribution.

The decision has been implemented in the Brazilian collection and should be extended progressively to all the SciELO Network of national and thematic collections of open access scientific periodicals. The management of intellectual property rights for the SciELO collection content started formally in September 2009, when Creative Commons was adopted. ...

In order to implement the Creative Commons license, SciELO Brasil editors received a letter on the adoption of the standard CC-BY-NC license for all the periodicals that are indexed in the collection, with an option to adopt the CC-BY license which is less restrictive and more in line with the open access movement.

Of the 197 editors, ten accepted SciELO’s suggestion and adopted the CC-BY license: ...

Once the Creative Commons license has been fully implemented in the SciELO Brasil collection, the license will be extended in the coming months to the other SciELO-certified collections with the support of the network coordinators.

The implementation of the Creative Commons license requires the adaptation of the procedures adopted by SciELO Brasil to the scenario of each country. The idea is to finalize the license implementation process in all certified collections by the end of 2010. ...

... Advances in knowledge depend on the open flow of information. Only if data and research results are shared can other researchers check the accuracy of the data, verify analyses and conclusions, and build on previous work. Furthermore, openness enables the results of research to be incorporated into socially beneficial goods and services and into public policies, improving the quality of life and the welfare of society.

Despite the many benefits arising from the open availability of research data and results, many data are not publicly accessible, or their release is delayed, for a variety of reasons. ...

Legitimate reasons may exist for keeping some data private or delaying their release, but the default assumption should be that research data, methods (including the techniques, procedures, and tools that have been used to collect, generate, or analyze data, such as models, computer code, and input data), and other information integral to a publicly reported result will be publicly accessible when results are reported, at no more than the cost of fulfilling a user request. This assumption underlies the following principle of accessibility:

Data Access and Sharing Principle: Research data, methods, and other information integral to publicly reported results should be publicly accessible.

Although this principle applies throughout research, in some cases the open dissemination of research data may not be possible or advisable. ... Nevertheless, the main objective of the research enterprise must be to implement policies and promote practices that allow this principle to be realized as fully as possible.

This principle has important implications for researchers.

Recommendation 5: All researchers should make research data, methods, and other information integral to their publicly reported results publicly accessible in a timely manner to allow verification of published findings and to enable other researchers to build on published results, except in unusual cases in which there are compelling reasons for not releasing data. In these cases, researchers should explain in a publicly accessible manner why the data are being withheld from release. ...

Recommendation 6: In research fields that currently lack standards for sharing research data, such standards should be developed through a process that involves researchers, research institutions, research sponsors, professional societies, journals, representatives of other research fields, and representatives of public interest organizations, as appropriate for each particular field. ...

Recommendation 7: Research institutions, research sponsors, professional societies, and journals should promote the sharing of research data through such means as publication policies, public recognition of outstanding data-sharing efforts, and funding.

Recommendation 8: Research institutions should establish clear policies regarding the management of and access to research data and ensure that these policies are communicated to researchers. Institutional policies should cover the mutual responsibilities of researchers and the institution in cases in which access to data is requested or demanded by outside organizations or individuals. ...

... Formally embracing the open access ethic, the European Commission has decided to require that results from research it funds in some fields — such as health, energy, environment, information and communication technologies, research infrastructures, social sciences and humanities — become freely available. Authors will deposit a copy of their articles in a “digital repository,” a kind of electronic library accessible through the Web.

While many institutions or subjects have their own, pre-existing repositories for published documents, these are not comprehensively linked and searchable. And some institutions hosting EC-funded researchers are without digital libraries for keeping research papers.

Stepping in to provide this open access e-infrastructure is the OpenAIRE project, which will be launched on the first of December, 2009. The project will run for three years in its first phase. OpenAIRE’s proposal, with a budget of about €5 million, was approved in September after the EC put out a call for a project that would create the e-Infrastructure to disseminate scientific results to anyone, anywhere, at anytime.

Researchers approaching OpenAIRE with a document will first be directed to the repository of their home institute, if one exists. If the researcher is in a discipline which has a repository structure for the entire discipline (the high energy physics community, for example, frequently uses arXiv.org) they will be directed there. If the document is still without a home, the researcher will use an “orphan” repository, hosted at CERN, which will provide everyone a chance to submit their results — which would otherwise be lost.

OpenAIRE technology is based on two technologies: DNET, developed by the DRIVER consortium, will connect the existing repositories, while the orphan repository technology is based on Invenio, a digital library software that has been developed by the CERN Document Server team in the IT department at CERN over the past 15 years — serving the basis for CDS. Other partners, about 35 in total, will provide service help to users. OpenAIRE will therefore be not just a technical infrastructure, but a human one as well.

“Ideally, each researcher will have a help desk in their own member state,” says Salvatore Mele, Open Access Project Leader at CERN, also working for OpenAIRE. ...

• The OA petition to the German parliament was endorsed by the German Library Association, Wikimedia Germany, and DINI (the Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformation).
• Three OA publishers (PLoS, BMC, and the Beilstein-Institut) confirmed that their journal policies permit compliance with MIT's OA policy, no addendum necessary.
• A paper from a recent Spanish workshop discusses the development of a repository for the Alhambra.
• eIFL's November-December newsletter summarizes updates on the organization and its work for OA.
• The repository at Cornell's ILR School (formerly the School of Industrial and Labor Relations) added its 10,000th item.
• SSRN released a new version of iSSRN, its iPhone application for browsing the quarter million papers in the SSRN eLibrary.
• Gallica launched a new book viewer.
• Google will digitize collections from the National Museum of Iraq.

A group of 41 Nobel Prize-winning scientists, including 16 chemists, are urging the US Congress to require the results of federally funded research to be made freely available online - a position opposed by the American Chemical Society (ACS). ...

[O]pponents say publishers deserve compensation for the value that their peer review process brings to government-funded research. ACS spokesperson Glenn Ruskin says the bill would simply take this value conferred by publishers without compensation, and make it much harder for scientific journals to sustain operations.

'Someone has to coordinate the input and critiques of the peer review community,' Ruskin says. 'The Nobel laureates are very idealistic in thinking about this, yet our approach is perhaps more practical.'

Around 40 per cent of the 34,000 peer reviewed articles published annually across ACS journals result from federal funding. ...

Robert Curl, who won the chemistry Nobel in 1996 and signed the letter to Congress, agrees that 'knowledge should be freely transmitted,' but acknowledges that mandatory open access is a 'big problem' because it would greatly reduce the revenue stream to cover publication expenses.

Curl suggests that institutions could pay a substantial annual fee for a licence for their employees to publish in existing open access journals. But this wouldn't make it any less expensive for individuals or research institutions to gain access to the information in the peer reviewed journals of ACS and other scientific organisations.

... 41 Nobel laureates are backing open access, and have written to members of the US Congress to ask them to support a bill calling for the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). The group includes four physicists — Sheldon Glashow, John Mather, Douglas Osheroff and David Politzer. ...

But are we well down that road already?

Over the past few years you may have noticed that more and more papers published in prestigious journals such as Nature and Science appear on the open access arXiv preprint server immediately after being published. I don’t know if this is done with the publisher’s blessing, but I’m guessing that it is tolerated in the hope of avoiding the sort of legislation that the US laureates are calling for.

So what about our journals here at [Institute of Physics] Publishing?

We have an open access journal called the New Journal of Physics, which fits the bill as far as the laureates are concerned. Physicists pay to publish their papers, and if the entire industry went this way, funding would have to be diverted from libraries to the researchers themselves.

Access to most of our other journals is restricted to subscribers — but most articles are open access for 30 days after publication. And I’m told that IOP Publishing is happy for authors to post the text of accepted papers on arXiv, but not the final version that appears in the journal.

So it looks to me like open access publishing is possible already — just make sure you pop your accepted manuscript onto arXiv and the Feds will be happy.

But is this sustainable — if the accepted versions of papers are freely available, why would a scientist pay to publish or a university library bother to subscribe? ...

The advent of the open access (OA) movement in publishing has been instrumental in causing a shift in the accessibility of research findings published in academic journals. The adoption of OA and other online publication models means that the results of scientific research published in journals using a free access (FA) framework are now available, free of charge, to anyone with access to the Internet. FA journals typically require a payment from the authors of a manuscript, which has raised concerns about the quality of work published in them; accepting payment from an author may compromise a journal’s acceptance criteria. This study addresses whether journal policy on the treatment of animals is influenced by whether a journal follows a FA publishing model, and whether a requirement to pay for publication has an influence. A random sample of 332 biomedical journals listed in the ISI Web of Knowledge and Directory of Open Access Journals databases were assessed for whether they had an ethical policy on publishing animal studies, and what form of publication framework they used (103 of the journals followed a FA framework; 101 charged in some way for publication). Only 135 (40.7%) of the journals surveyed demanded that submissions comply with a pre-defined ethical stance. FA journals are just as likely to have an ethical policy on the treatment and presentation of animal studies as ‘traditional’, non-FA journals (significance of there being a difference: P = 0.98), and there is no relationship between policy and whether an author is required to pay for publication (significance of there being a difference: P = 0.57). Older journals are more likely to have an ethical policy (P = 0.03). There is, therefore, no obvious compromise shown by FA journals in the explicit policies on reporting studies involving animals. However, since anyone can read published FA studies online, FA journals that do not have an explicit policy about publishing animal research are urged to consider adopting one.

For crying out loud, I am still getting crappy spammy mail from various "Bentham Open" journals. The most annoying part to me of Bentham Open is that they try to make it seem that anything published in an Open Access journal is better than anything published in a non Open Access journal. While I personally believe publishing in an OA manner is great, lying about the benefits of OA is not a good thing. ...

[Bentham suggests that] the crappiest, most boring, most idiotic article in an OA journal will receive "massive international exposure" and "high citations." ...

... On Thursday, a professor of mine received a solicitation to have him serve as Editor-in-Chief of The Open Communication Journal. For a professor in a department of communication, the first sentence should have been a clue that this publisher should hire a copy-editor. But if you read on, the financial ties between the new post and the publisher should raise some serious concerns about Bentham’s ability to separate editorial decision-making with their business model:

In recognition of your outstanding reputation and contribution in the field of Biology. We are pleased to propose your name as the Editor-in-Chief of “The Open Communication Journal”. After the selection your role as the journal’s Editor-in-Chief will be to solicit and submit a minimum number of ten manuscripts to the journal each year [...] For all the manuscripts that you submit to the journal, for the first ten that are published, we will pay you an annual royalty of 5% of all fees received on these manuscripts.

The editorial board boasts an astounding 169 names, with the expectation that board members will publish regularly in the journal. And to provide an incentive for their contributions, Bentham promises to waive their article processing fees:

We expect that Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editors, Co-Editors in an Open Access Journal will submit at least one article per year which will be published ABSOLUTELY FREE OF CHARGE. Beside, each and every submission from Editor-in-Chief will be published free of cost. ...

After two decades of repository development, some conclusions may be drawn as to which type of repository and what kind of service best supports digital scholarly communication, and thus the production of new knowledge.

Four types of publication repository may be distinguished, namely the subject-based repository, research repository, national repository system and institutional repository.

Two important shifts in the role of repositories may be noted. With regard to content, a well-defined and high quality corpus is essential. This implies that repository services are likely to be most successful when constructed with the user and reader uppermost in mind. With regard to service, high value to specific scholarly communities is essential. This implies that repositories are likely to be most useful to scholars when they offer dedicated services supporting the production of new knowledge.

Along these lines, challenges and barriers to repository development may be identified in three key dimensions: a) identification and deposit of content; b) access and use of services; and c) preservation of content and sustainability of service. An indicative comparison of challenges and barriers in some major world regions such as Europe, North America and East Asia plus Australia is offered in conclusion.

The Presidents of six public universities in New England have issued a letter of support for the Federal Research Public Access Act (S.1373), demonstrating that commitment to public access to publicly funded research resides at the top-most level of research institution administration. Together, these six land-grant universities enroll over 100,000 students, confer ~17% of the bachelor’s and 20% of the doctoral degrees in New England, and invest more than $700 million annually on research with the support of federal grants. ...

The letter, available in full text at [link], is signed by the Presidents of the University of Connecticut, University of Maine, University of Massachusetts – Amherst, University of New Hampshire, University of Rhode Island, and University of Vermont. ...

The New England Presidents’ letter is one of many being issued in strong support of the Federal Research Public Access Act from within the higher education community. Forty one Nobel Prize-winning scientists, the presidents of 57 liberal arts colleges, the chief academic and research officers from universities in the Western states, and individual institutions have recently voiced their commitment to public access to research and the success of this bill. ...

... [D]ebate still continued about the scholarly copyright resolution [in the University of Virginia Faculty Senate].

If the proposal is adopted, all faculty members would have to ask their publishers to agree to release unmodified versions of their articles to be placed in a public University repository. Faculty members unable or unwilling to do so could e-mail a University official to ask for a waiver.

Though many faculty members support the resolution, there is enough disagreement across departments that the Senate may in fact modify the resolution to reach a stronger consensus among Senate members, Chair Ann Hamric said.

“A simple majority vote would not provide the legitimacy that transformative legislation requires,” Task Force Chair Brian Pusser said. “We hope to keep up [the dialogue] and bring another resolution to the Senate.”

One common concern among faculty members is that the waiver process will pose another bureaucratic obstacle that could interfere with faculty’s ability to pursue teaching and research, Task Force Member Ed Kitch said.

The resolution also highlights the larger issue of allowing open access to scholarly work. Many professors disagree about the extent to which open access should be implemented.

Specifically, History Prof. Allan Megill said he believes that small journals in the humanities should still require readers to pay small fees to download articles to compensate for the journals’ publishing costs.

“We do not have people that could pay to subsidize us, not like the [National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation],” he said. “Forty-two percent of revenue comes from electronic access, so those pennies that are paid … fund the journal.”

While these concerns address all fields and research areas, other concerns have been more discipline-specific.

For example, the physics department already has access to open repositories but has encountered publishers who are reluctant to release article copyrights.

Meanwhile, professors from departments such as art history and architecture — where figures and drawings are often critical to their work — are worried that the repository versions of articles may not be useful, because they may not include graphics or formatting found in journal versions.

Spanish, Italian & Portuguese department members, meanwhile, are skeptical about how the resolution requires that participation be mandatory, though it includes an option to sign a waiver. Some faculty members noted that it would be more useful to simply have a resolution whereby participation is optional.

“Opt-in or opt-out is something we need to talk about,” Pusser said. “But the reason we chose opt-out was to build that critical mass [of faculty support], to make it routine.”

Pusser said the currently proposed waiver process should easily allow faculty to opt out, and their lack of participation should not endanger any individual publications. ...

Two units at Brigham Young University have adopted open access policies – both the Harold B. Lee Library faculty and the faculty in my own department, Instructional Psychology and Technology, voted to adopt the policies earlier this month. IP&T’s policy was based on the HBLL policy, which was based on existing OA policies at other universities. ...

For those who are interested, here’s the text of the IP&T policy:

... Each Instructional Psychology and Technology Department faculty member grants to Brigham Young University permission to make scholarly articles to which he or she has made substantial intellectual contributions publicly available as part of the Harold B. Lee Library’s ScholarsArchive system, or its successor ...

The term “scholarly articles” includes articles prepared for presentation or publication, whether in electronic or print media. ...

The IP&T Department Chair or the Chair’s designate shall waive application of the policy to a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need. The IP&T Chair, in consultation with the faculty, will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the faculty. This policy will be formally reviewed two years after implementation, by September 30, 2011.

As of the date of publication, each faculty member will make available an electronic copy of his or her final version of the article at no charge to a designated representative of the University Librarian’s Office in appropriate formats (such as PDF) specified by the University Librarian’s Office.

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• The revised Google Book Settlement gained preliminary court approval. The deadline for comments is January 28, 2010, with the final fairness hearing scheduled for February 18.
• A grant from the National Science Foundation will help enhance arXiv.
• The Saarland University and State Library is conducting a questionnaire on "the desirability of various features which can be implemented in repository systems".
• HathiTrust launched its search tool for Google-digitized books.
• The British Library added the 500,000th item to its digital library -- but don't expect to see it for free.
• Cameron Neylon takes a closer look at Nature Communications, the announced Nature-branded hybrid OA journal.
• LinuxInsider looks at open source science.
• T. Scott Plutchak says that everybody likes the idea of OA, but not everybody is sure that mandates for publicly-funded research are "the best way to get there".
• Wikimedia picks up plaudits: the Webby Awards named Wikipedia one of the ten most influential projects of the decade, and the Huffington Post named Wikimedia's executive director Sue Gardner the year's top "game changer" in media.

The Oberlin College General Faculty unanimously endorsed on November 18 a resolution to make their scholarly articles openly accessible on the Internet. As a result of the measure, the rich scholarly output of the Oberlin faculty will become available to a much broader national and international audience. The Oberlin resolution is similar to policies passed at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Kansas, and Trinity University. ...

Under the new policy, Oberlin faculty and professional staff will make their peer-reviewed, scholarly articles openly accessible in a digital archive managed by the Oberlin College Library as part of the OhioLINK Digital Resource Commons. Oberlin authors may opt out of the policy for a specific article if they are not in a position to sign journal publishing agreements that are compatible with the policy, or for other reasons. The resolution also creates an institutional license that gives Oberlin College the legal right to make the articles accessible on the Internet through the digital archive. The resolution further encourages, but does not require, authors to submit publications other than peer-reviewed articles in the same manner. ...

Adopted at the recommendation of the General Faculty Library Committee, the policy calls for the committee, in consultation with a faculty council, to establish procedures for carrying out the policy and to monitor its implementation. Policy implementation will be coordinated by a scholarly communications officer, a member of the library staff designated by the director of libraries. ...

The Oberlin College Student Senate recently endorsed the national “Student Statement on the Right to Research,” which expresses a similar commitment to making scholarly research information openly accessible.

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• Sharing data, editorial, Nature Cell Biology, November 2009 (not OA, at least so far).
• Johan Weigelt, The case for open-access chemical biology, EMBO Reports, November 2009 (not OA, at least so far).
• Christina Chandras, et al., Models for financial sustainability of biological databases and resources, Database, October 23, 2009.
• Thinh Nguyen, Remembering Babel: Open Data Sharing & Integration, Science Commons, November 19, 2009.
• Shadi S. Saleh, et al., The case for developing publicly-accessible datasets for health services research in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, BMC Health Services Research, October 29, 2009.
• Group on Earth Observations Meets in Washington to Strengthen Access to Data and Information on Biodiversity, Forest Carbon and Other Global Issues, press release, November 17, 2009.
• University of California, DataONE to deal with data deluge, press release, November 18, 2009.
• Vishwas S. Chavan and Peter Ingwersen, Towards a data publishing framework for primary biodiversity data: challenges and potentials for the biodiversity informatics community, BMC Bioinformatics, November 10, 2009.
  • Also see: Dorothea Salo, The basic carrot: usage statistics, The Book of Trogool, November 16, 2009 .
• Vincent S. Smith, et al., Scratchpads: a data-publishing framework to build, share and manage information on the diversity of life, BMC Bioinformatics, November 10, 2009.

The Survey of Higher Education Faculty: Use of Digital Repositories and Views on Open Access (ISBN 1-57440-137-8) presents data on how higher education faculty in the United States and Canada view the growing digital repository/open access movement. The report helps to answer questions such as: Who cooperates with requests from librarians and who does not? Who gives their articles to repositories? Who among faculty sympathizes with the aims of open access? How many scholars have had a publication fee paid for them by their library or academic department?

The report presents the results of a survey of more than 550 higher education faculty in the United States and Canada. Data is presented in the aggregate and for 12 criteria including academic field, size of college, type of college, academic title and other factors.

Just a few of the report's many findings are that:

• 13% of the faculty in the sample had ever used a college's institutional digital repository for scholarly research purposes.
• Use was greatest by faculty at specialized colleges, of whom 40% had used a digital repository at some time for research purposes
• About 28% said that they sympathize and try to help out by providing open access to their research materials as much as they possibly can.
• Although the tenured are less likely than the untenured to have heard of digital repositories, they are roughly twice as likely to have actually contributed an article to one of them.
• 74.62% of the faculty of the sample understood the meaning of the term 'open access'. Individuals on the left wing of the political spectrum were more likely than those on the right wing to understand this term.
• Older faculty were more likely than younger faculty to be mystified by open access and digital repositories. Almost 43% of faculty between the ages of 50 and 59 did not know what digital repositories or open access really were. ...

• New OA backfiles:
  • Jamaica Journal (1967-2007), via the the Digital Library of the Caribbean (announcement)
  • Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society (1958-1968), via BiblicalStudies.org.uk (announcement)
  • Vox Evangelica (1962-1997), via BiblicalStudies.org.uk (announcement)
  • Reformation & Revival (1992-2005), via BiblicalStudies.org.uk (announcement)
  • Theological Students Fellowship Bulletin (1951-1975), via BiblicalStudies.org.uk (announcement)
• Converted to delayed OA:
  • L’Orientation scolaire et professionnelle (3 year delay), via Revues.org (announcement)
• New on PubMedCentral:
  • Clinics in Orthopedic Surgery (immediate OA)
  • Korean Journal of Physiology & Pharmacology (immediate OA)
  • Advances in Bioinformatics (immediate OA) (announcement)
  • Current Cardiology Reviews (12 month embargo) (announcement)

... A few weeks ago, science blogger Lars Fischer started an e-petition on the website of the Bundestag (German parliament) calling for Open Access to publications based on research that is publicly funded. To date, the petition has been signed by over 11,000 people, making it the most-endorsed open petition currently in the system (the vote ends on November 22nd has apparently been extended to December 22nd). ...

The striking thing about the petition is not that it gives precise policy recommendations (it doesn’t) or contains meticulous explanations of what Open Access is (it doesn’t), but that is has attracted popular support extending well beyond the “usual suspects” from the OA scene.

How did that happen?

While I can’t provide absolute proof, I think the short answer is the Social Web. Fisher’s petition was scooped up by people who ordinarily have little to do with the Open Access community, which consists mostly of librarians and academics, but who are very much invested into the idea of Openness in other contexts: open (government) data, no censorship of the Internet, digital privacy rights etc. There is a budding political movement in Germany and elsewhere and the petition was interpreted as congruent with the goals of this movement and therefore spread with according speed. It was featured on Netzpolitik.org, which is frequently ranked as Germany’s most popular blog, and one prolific supporter is social media personality Sascha Lobo, who placed a banner on his website calling for support of the petition. ...

Lars makes this point in the interview with Richard Poynder:

As far as I see it, Open Access has always been treated — even by its supporters — as a niche topic for experts. But that is wrong. It is an issue that in the long run concerns everyone, and many people understand that.

My opinion (and not just mine) is that Open Access should be treated as the broad societal issue it really is, not just as a nifty way for libraries to save money or researchers to communicate more effectively. ...

If you get the Internet, Open Access is a no-brainer – in a sense the success of the petition has already proven that point. Social media appeals to people who use the Net as their primary source of information and who accordingly believe that information should be free. In other words, they believe in Open Access, even without knowing Peter Suber or having read the Berlin Declaration.

Maybe we should start talking to these people.

Every weekday, thousands of researchers around the world access the Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR), which contains the most reliable and up-to-date genomic information available on the most widely used model organism in the plant kingdom. But now, to those users' horror, TAIR faces collapse: the US National Science Foundation (NSF) is phasing out funding after 10 years as the data resource's sole supporter.

TAIR's plight is emblematic of a broader crisis facing many of the world's biological databases and repositories. Research funding agencies recognize that such infrastructures are crucial to the ongoing conduct of science, yet few are willing to finance them indefinitely. ...

Advertising and sponsorship are unlikely to bring in enough money to pay the experts needed to maintain such resources. And the superficially plausible idea of charging subscription fees is effectively unworkable for facilities such as TAIR, because the producers and consumers of data are essentially the same community. Scientists provide data and resources for free, because sharing benefits everyone. However, they would be considerably less likely to deposit the fruits of their labour if this synergy was removed from the equation. ...

The problem is acute even for modest resources. Two examples are the kidney database EuReGene and the mouse-embryo database EURExpress, both of which were launched with funds from the European Commission that have run out in recent months. The databases are currently being maintained on a hand-to-mouth basis, and the scientists who built them don't know where to turn for maintenance money. Yet the European Commission's investment will have been wasted if the databases disappear.

It is time for a whole new approach. Front-line biology cannot function without these resources, so solutions must be found at both national and international levels.

Governments must ensure that at least one of their national funding agencies has money specifically set aside for the long-term support of bioresource infrastructures. ...

But action is also needed on the international front. ... What is required is an international cost-sharing organization that could fund competitively selected infrastructures, large and small. ...

• The OA Shakespeare Quartos Archive, funded by the UK's JISC and the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, launched.
• The German SHERPA/RoMEO database of journal policies got an upgrade.
• The BioMed Central journals Journal of Hematology & Oncology and Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine have been accepted for inclusion in MEDLINE.
• The no-fee OA journal Herpetological Conservation and Biology published its 100th article, and will expand from two issues per year to three.
• D-Lib Magazine profiles the Pennsylvania Literary Journal, an OA journal hosted on Google Sites.
• And a letter in D-Lib imagines a dialogue with an author, explaining self-archiving.
• David Wiley tries to define "open" and concludes the most important freedoms for content are reuse, revision, remix, and redistribution.
• The arts and humanities faculty of the University of Buenos Aires passed a resolution condemning the criminal prosecution of an Argentine philosophy professor for allegedly violating copyright by posting the works of Derrida and Heidegger on his Web site.
• American publishers praised a plan by the Chinese government "to begin inspections of libraries, to determine whether unauthorized duplication, communication or electronic dissemination of copyrighted [academic and medical] works is occurring".

[The World Intellectual Property Organization] has launched an enhanced online patent information service that will improve public access to information on patents filed and granted around the world. WIPO’s PATENTSCOPE®, which currently hosts data on more than 1.6 million international patent applications filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), has been extended to include several collections of national and regional patent information.

In this first phase, WIPO’s PATENTSCOPE® includes the patent data collections of eight patent offices: African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO), Cuba, Israel, Republic of Korea, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa and Vietnam. WIPO has been working closely with these patent offices to ensure the data collections are fully searchable.

The expansion of WIPO’s PATENTSCOPE® data collection makes it possible to conduct high-quality, detailed and free-of-charge searches of the patent information of the participating offices. Many of these collections had previously not been digitized and were not easily searchable. ...

... Speaking of orphan works, the Unclaimed Works Fiduciary is a trustee with one hand tied. As I reported for OAN, the UWF — an independent agent entrusted to manage the works of rightsholders who haven’t claimed their works under the settlement — doesn’t have all the powers of an actual rightsholder. Whereas a rightsholder is guaranteed under the settlement the options to, e.g., set a zero price for her work, to apply a Creative Commons license, or to remove DRM, the UWF isn’t guaranteed those same options. In fact, the UWF can only exercise those options with the approval of the Book Rights Registry, which is run by publisher and author representatives. So if the UWF came to the conclusion that the best fiduciary interest of its absentee rightsholders was represented by making their works freely available, it would not necessarily be able to do so. Given the growing suggestions that making a book freely available often has no discernible negative consequence on sales revenues for that book, and in some cases may even increase sales, the settlement should not exclude that option.

This study examines 78 law journal publication agreements and finds that a minority of journals ask authors to transfer copyright. Most journals also permit author to self-archive articles with some conditions. The study recommends journals make their agreements publicly available and use licenses instead of copyright transfers.

• In a blog post for The Hill, Heather Joseph highlights the recent Nobelists' letter supporting FRPAA.
• A study presented at a recent workshop examines Spain's participation in E-LIS and finds Spanish authors have more deposits than authors from any other country.
• A proposal on improving access to patent information was approved at the World Intellectual Property Organization's Committee on Development and Intellectual Property.
• The national libraries of France and Brazil launched an OA digital library of documents on the history of relations between the two countries.
• Google Scholar now includes legal opinions. ResourceShelf has a review.
• Intellectual Property Watch profiles Bibliotheca Alexandrina's efforts on access to knowledge.
• BioMed Central released new guidelines on what it considers prior publication.
• PLoS launched a store of PLoS-branded T-shirts and other merchandise.
• Students for Free Culture is selling T-shirts, too.

MIT’s Graduate Student Council (GSC) recently added national policy to its otherwise campus-based advocacy agenda, pushing for tax exemption of graduate student stipends, open access to federally funded published research, and higher caps on H1-B visas for advanced-degree holders to members of Congress earlier this fall. ...

The GSC also felt that the pending Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009 (S. 1373) was worth lobbying for. By making federally funded research over $100 million dollars open access, it would “enhance advanced research access and ensure that taxpayer-funded research is available to those who paid for it.” ...

Executive members of MIT’s GSC travelled to Washington, D.C. to lobby for graduate student stipend tax exemptions, lifting the H1-B visa cap, and implementing open access publication policies for federally funded research as part of the [National Association of Graduate-Professional Students]’s annual “Legislative Action Days” from last September 30 to October 2. ...

[President Alex Hamilton] Chan, Vice President Kevin A. McComber, and Alex J. Evans represented MIT’s GSC lobbying interests at the annual event and independently presented their support for the three issues to the offices of eleven Congressmen. ...

Chan said the GSC chose to focus on the stipend tax exemption, open access publications, and H1-B visa reform compared to the other suggested issues because they were among the most relevant to graduate student life at MIT and best aligned with the current legislative activity on Capital Hill. ...

McComber also pointed out that “one of the big expenses [for MIT libraries] is journal subscriptions,” making federally funded research open access appealing to MIT grad students and taxpayers alike.

“Publishers are commanding a very unhealthy sum in this area,” said Chan.

Solidifying their platform on these lobbying issues, the GSC signed “The Student Statement on the Right to Research” on the Federal Research Public Access Act and plans to continue lobbying efforts in the spring. ...

The opportunities opened up by ICT and the Internet are making access to research results and data broader and more open. It is increasingly possible to add to the text of a publication by enriching it with other materials, including the relevant research data. By making that data accessible, it becomes easier to verify research results and to reproduce and reuse them.

But when reusing raw research data, it is important to know the legal status of the material. Sometimes, the consent of the “author” (i.e. the “maker”) of the data is required; however, some actions involving data can be carried out without consent.

SURFdirect wishes to clarify the legal protection applying to research data for researchers who need to know what they can do with other people’s data. That information will also allow researchers to determine whether they also need to protect their own research data.

As part of the SURFshare programme, SURFdirect requested the Centre for Intellectual Property Law (CIER) to explain the rules under which research data may be protected. The report provides an overview of the current situation on the basis of the most important legislation and case law. It consists of three sections, dealing successively with intellectual property (copyright, database right, and protection of non-original writings), privacy, and liability.

A brief guide is also provided to enable researchers to determine whether consent is required in order to reuse someone else’s research data.

... This article describes a study, involving a set of articles published in scholarly journals by faculty members of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) that have also been deposited in the HKUST Institutional Repository. The study was conducted to measure the actual effect of their open accessibility on citation rates. ...

A total of 50 archived journal articles that already have 10 or more citation counts in Scopus were randomly selected for inclusion in this study. ...

Each "full item record" in the Repository includes fields on "date.accessioned" and "date.available" which help to ascertain when a full-text journal article was actually added to the Repository and made openly accessible. Elsevier's Scopus database was then searched to get the citation counts of these 50 articles in each of the years since they were published, including the years after these articles were deposited in the HKUST IR. ...

The absolute citation counts were used to derive two average-per-year citation counts, before and after the articles are made openly accessible through the IR. ...

Of the 50 articles included in the study, 29 (or 58%) have had a higher average-citation-rate after they have been deposited in the IR and made openly accessible than they had prior to being available in the IR. The rest of the open access articles, or 42 %, have not yet experienced a similar increase in the average-citation-rate. ...

Much bigger increases for some articles suggest that the subject areas of these articles matter to a large extent. For instance, a number of articles in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in this study stand out in particular. ...

... The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has announced that it is in favour of Open Access. This was reported in the NRC Handelsblad newspaper for 27 October 2009.

According to the report: “The NWO wants scientific and scholarly publications to be freely accessible to everyone on the Internet. The organisation will provide five million euros to cover the cost of this kind of publication. This is a major policy shift for the NWO. Moreover, NWO chairman Jos Engelen has made an urgent appeal to leading scientists and scholars not to publish their articles in the established journals but to place them in an Internet journal.” ...