Open Access News

A record-setting $400 million gift announced yesterday will provide financial permanence for the Broad Institute, a Cambridge genomics research center that in just four years has become a worldwide leader in the effort to unravel the genetic basis of diseases. ...

[S]ince its inception, it has been "a leading partner in this whole landscape of developing genomic resources that we really do think has already revolutionized our understanding of biology," said Dr. Alan Guttmacher, acting director of the National Human Genome Research Institute.

Broad Institute researchers have "worked very well with others, which is very important," he said, and the institute has also been a strong advocate of the idea of free and open access to research results. "The Broad has been a real proponent of that view, and lived up to it," said Guttmacher, whose federal agency helps fund much of the Broad's research. ...

... The structural papers not only represent an advance for the epigenetics field, but also an advance for how the science was done. The concurrent publication of the three papers highlights the competitive nature of this field, but in fact these papers were made possible because the [Structural Genomics Consortium], in keeping with its policy of making its data freely and immediately available, made the underlying information available in the Protein Data Bank (PDB) late in 2007. The availability of this information allowed the other groups to make more rapid progress in their own work.

"By releasing the structural information into the public databases as soon as it was available, we have ensured that other research groups could make immediate and maximum benefit from the shared knowledge," says Professor [Sirano] Dhe-Paganon [of the SGC].

[Masahiro] Shirakawa openly acknowledges that the SGC data was crucial to his team's paper, which also appears in the journal Nature. "Structural biology is a complex, but very important field, with the potential to drive forward important research in many areas. The information provided by the SGC significantly speeded up our own work."

The SGC's "open source" policy contrasts with the accepted practice in the structural biology field, which is to make the underlying data available only after the work appears in print. However, Professor Al Edwards, Director of the SGC, believes strongly that data such as the 3D structure of proteins should be made freely available as soon as they are discovered.

"From the outset, it's been important to us to release our structural data immediately," says Professor Edwards. "This is contrary to the way many scientists work, but we believe it is crucial for facilitating scientific and medical progress, and our policy has not inhibited our ability to publish our work in the top journals. All the protein structures studied by the SGC have medical relevance and making them freely available ensures that scientists are able to use them to make progress in our understanding of disease and the development of new drugs."

• Geoffrey F. Salanje, Digital Repository at Bunda College Library
• Hasina Afroz, BRAC University Digital Institutional Repository: Some experiences
• Sunethra Perera, Towards a National Network of Institutional Repositories of Science & Technology Information: Sri Lankan experience

I'll be on the road September 6-11 with few opportunities for blogging or email.  But Gavin will be on the job, and I'll start to catch up as soon as I return.

Today the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) announced grant awards to four institutions through the Advancing Knowledge: The IMLS/NEH Digital Partnership grant program, a funding opportunity that encourages digital innovation by bringing humanities scholars together with museum, library, archives, and IT professionals. ...

The grants announced today are:

• $250,609 to the Alexandria Archive Institute for its project, Enhancing Humanities Research Productivity in a Collaborative Data Sharing Environment. The Alexandria Archive Institute, in collaboration with the UC Berkeley School of Information, will create best-practice guidelines for the development of humanities data-sharing software to meet user needs, as well as continue to develop Open Context, a collaborative, free, open-access resource to facilitate online sharing of archaeological field research among excavators, scholars, and cultural heritage institutions.
• $175,000 to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) for its project, AIHEC American Indian Collections Portal. AIHEC ... will federate databases focused on Native American collections and share the data in new ways with tribal colleges and community members.
• $108,882 to the City of Philadelphia, Department of Records, for its project, A Partnership to Increase Access to Our Nation’s Historical Records. The City of Philadelphia, Department of Records, in collaboration with the Free Library of Philadelphia, will develop an enhanced Web site (www.PhillyHistory.org) featuring historically significant collections at the City of Philadelphia’s Department of Records and the Free Library of Philadelphia, and will create tools to increase the level of access to and usefulness of these collections for researchers, students, and members of the general public. ...

Alma Swan and Katarina Jander are live-blogging the Second European Conference on Science Publishing in Biomedicine and Medicine (Oslo, September 3-6, 2008).  Follow the conference blog for details.

Bloomsbury Publishing has announced a new OA imprint, Bloomsbury Academic.  From today's press release:

...All books will be made available free of charge online, with free downloads, for non-commercial purposes immediately upon publication, using Creative Commons licences. The works will also be sold as books, using the latest short-run technologies or Print on Demand (POD).

The imprint will initially publish in the Social Sciences and Humanities building thematic lists on pressing global issues, with approximately fifty new titles online and in print by the end of 2009....

Bloomsbury Academic...will provide editorial selection, peer-review, copy-editing and formatting, along with marketing and distribution worldwide. Authors will retain their copyright. Authors will also benefit by attracting more readers and gaining greater peer recognition. Their works will come faster to publication, and not be hidebound by long production and promotion cycles. They can be searched more easily, and need never go out of print.

Bloomsbury Academic's Advisory Board is almost complete; the following have agreed to serve on the board:

• Professor Hal Abelson -Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT
• Dame Lynne Brindley - CEO British Library
• Professor Reto Hilty - Director, Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law
• Professor Robin Mansell - Head of Media and Communications Department, London School of Economics
• Professor John Naughton - Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology, Open University
• Shira Perlmutter - Executive Vice-President, IFPI
• Winston Tabb - Dean of University Libraries, Johns Hopkins University

The Bloomsbury Academic platform will also be available to showcase and promote other publishers' titles. The initiative is not exclusively in the English language and Bloomsbury's German partner, Berlin Verlag, will be participating actively....Bloomsbury [is also] in discussion with Melbourne University Publishing....

Frances Pinter will be Bloomsbury Academic's Publisher, joining Managing Director Jonathan Glasspool. Pinter, who set up her own academic publishing house (Pinter Publishers) at the age of 23, was Publishing Director at the Soros Foundation and has recently been involved in promoting Creative Commons licencing in projects in South Africa and Uganda....

Andrew Albanese, NIH Public Access Policy To Face Copyright Challenge in Congress? Library Journal, September 5, 2008.  Excerpt:

In less than a week, on Thursday, September 11, the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property of the House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on what sources tell LJ is a legislative attempt to redress publishers' concerns that public access policies —namely the recently enacted policy at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)— conflict with copyright and intellectual property laws. No text has yet been released for the legislation, tentatively titled the “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act.” Nor has the hearing appeared on the subcommittee's schedule.

The legislative hearing comes after publishers succeeded in adding a key phrase to the NIH public access mandate just before the bill’s passage in December, 2007 —that the NIH policy be implemented “in a manner consistent with copyright law.” As LJ reported then, that simple phrase appeared to position publishers for a possible legal or legislative challenge to the policy.

In recent months, the possibility of a legal or legislative challenge began to seem almost certain: in comments to the NIH on implementation this spring, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) included a legal memo from law firm Proskauer Rose backing publisher claims that the NIH policy conflicts with copyright law, and in June, NIH director Elias Zerhouni denied publishers’ request that the policy go through a federal rulemaking process.

Shortly after passage of the NIH public access policy, AAP’s VP for legal and government affairs Allan Adler reiterated publishers’ position that the measure was “unprecedented” and “inconsistent” with intellectual property laws, and vowed publishers would continue opposition. “[The policy] undermines publishers’ ability to exercise their copyrights in the published articles…threatens the intellectual freedom of authors, including their choice to seek publication in journals that may refuse to accept proposed articles that would be subject to the new mandate,” he said. AAP officials, contacted today, were unavailable for comment.

Anticipating such a challenge, officials at SPARC and the Association of Research Libraries, however, have strongly denied that the NIH public access policy conflicts with copyright, last year preparing a memo of their own. “Contrary to the STM publishers’ assertions, this policy does not create a statutory exception or limitation to an investigator’s copyright,” the memo states. “Rather, it merely requires the NIH to condition its grant of funding to the investigator on his agreement to provide PMC [PubMed Central] with a copy of his article for the purpose of making the article publicly available via PMC.” ...

Comments

• Here it comes.  Albanese is right that publishers have been giving signs that they'd do this, and he's right that friends of OA have been preparing.  He cites the SPARC memo from last year, but you should also see the latest version of that memo, from this year.
• Read Allan Adler's words carefully:  "[The policy] undermines publishers' ability to exercise their copyrights in the published articles…threatens the intellectual freedom of authors, including their choice to seek publication in journals that may refuse to accept proposed articles that would be subject to the new mandate."  The most important thing to notice is that he doesn't even allege that the policy infringes copyrights.  There's a good reason for that:  the policy doesn't infringe copyrights.  NIH grantees retain the right to authorize public access through PubMed Central, even if they transfer all other rights to a publisher.  Hence, public access through PubMed Central is authorized by the copyright holders.  As I put it when describing the NIH policy in February, "publishers cannot complain that this infringes a right they possess, only that it would infringe a right they wished they possessed." 
• The other allegations are easily dealt with.   For example, does the NIH policy really limit author freedom to publish in journals that refuse to publish NIH-funded authors?  Or should we lay that one at the feet of publishers?
• The publisher complaint boils down to this:  "OK, the policy doesn't violate the letter of copyright law, but it violates the spirit, which is that our ability to profit from research we didn't conduct, write up, or fund should not be put at risk just so that publicly-funded research can be made more useful, by reaching everyone who can make use of it, or just so that taxpayers don't have to pay twice for access.  OK, it's true that authors are the initial copyright holders in their work, and they are free to transfer all, some, or none of their rights to publishers.  But the spirit of copyright law is that they should transfer all of their rights to publishers.  We've grown to depend on it.  OK, it's true that we don't really know that the NIH policy will reduce our revenues, and there may be good reasons to think it won't, but at least the policy creates a risk.  The government should protect us from risks created by new new and better ways of doing things.  It violates the spirit of copyright law for a government agency like the NIH to put the taxpayers' interests ahead of our private interests as an industry." 
• I'm just about to leave the country for a week, during which I'll have limited opportunities for blogging and email.  But I'll try to stay on top of this story.  Gavin and I will blog the developments as they unfold, and I'll have a lot more to say in the October issue of SOAN.

Update.  Alert to US Citizens:  If your representative is a member of the House Judiciary Committee, please contact him/her before the end of business on Tuesday, September 9, and express your support for the NIH policy.  There are committee members from AL, AZ, CA, FL, GA, IA, IL, IN, MA, MI, MN, NC, NY, OH, TN, TX, UT, WI, and VA.  Some members know nothing about the policy but what the publishing lobby has told them.  Explain why the policy matters to you and make it personal.  Send copies of your message to the committee leadership (John Conyers, Chairman, D-MI, and Lamar Smith, Ranking Member, R-TX).  If your representative is not a member of the committee, then you can send a message to the committee leadership alone.  For the contact info on any member, see Congress Merge.  If you can address copyright issues, do.  This committee has jurisdiction over copyright issues, and copyright is the hook publishers used to get the committee's attention.  It's tiring to mobilize all over again, but it's necessary.  Please write and spread the word.  Keep a copy of your message.  You may need it again.

Labels: Hot

The Fall 2008 issue of Libreas is now online.  Here are the OA-related articles:

• Klaus Graf, Review of Rainer Kuhlen's Erfolgreiches Scheitern – eine Götterdämmerung des Urheberrechts?  (Also see Google's English.)
• Karen Schumann, Lifestyle of Open Access  (Also see Google's English.)

PS:  Also see our March 2008 post on Kuhlen's book.

Ireland is launching a national OA platform or portal which harvest the contents of the country's new network of institutional repositories.  See the announcement by Dublin City University (undated but this week):

A Window to Irish Research: the Creation of a National Research Website...

Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation, Dr Jimmy Devins opened a Research Information Systems Conference at the Science Gallery in Trinity College Dublin yesterday. The conference is an integral part of the Irish Universities Association (IUA) project to develop a national research website. The goal of IUA's National Research Platform Project is to provide a web based platform where all publicly funded research projects and information can be found....

Commenting on the value of the project Minister Devins said: "Effective implementation of the Strategy for Science Technology & Innovation (SSTI) will require enhanced visibility and accessibility of the national research effort. We need more effective identification and classification of the research being conducted in the Irish higher education sector and research establishments and more effective dissemination of the results of that research to potential users, in Ireland and globally"....

The National Research Platform feasibility study will run for one year and is funded equally by the HEA Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) and the higher education sector....

Data from expertiseireland.com will provide the cornerstone for the new National Research Platform. Under the banner of the expertiseireland.com website considerable progress has been made in mining the research information systems of the higher education institutions and creating, in a single web-based location, more than 5700 profiles of knowledge experts and access to the opportunities available for licensing from this sector. Other administrations are now considering similar approaches, including the Australian government.

The expertiseireland.com portal also represents an important national resource of data capable of feeding into initiatives such as benchmarking exercises, or bibliometric analysis. The value of expertiseireland.com has been affirmed by an international peer review process which resulted in the IUA securing funding from SIF for a project to provide open access to research papers of university researchers which would use expertiseireland.com as a national access point. For the first time, Irish research will be freely available worldwide. This access will ensure Irish research has a greater impact by significantly increasing the visibility of Irish research and the concomitant increased citations and awareness....

While these efforts are underway, information on much of the national research effort remains largely inaccessible and inconsistent; either being subsumed into the strata of individual university websites, or spread across disparate and uncoordinated sites devoted to individual research projects. The National Research Platform will provide a window to Irish Research by gathering the information from these projects and presenting it in a user friendly format.

Comments 

• If I understand it, the new OA research portal will harvest its contents from university repositories and other distributed sources, rather than require direct deposits in the central database.  If so, it's the first national OA research portal anywhere to take that promising approach.
• Ireland's Higher Education Authority (HEA) adopted an OA mandate just last month, and funded at least the feasibility study behind the new portal.  The Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET) adopted an OA mandate in May 2008.  Both the HEA and IRCSET mandates allow grantees to meet the OA requirement by depositing their work in their own, local institutional repositories, and both plan to make use of the network of IRs at every Irish university now under construction by the Irish Universities Association. 
• This looks like the result of a careful three-step plan:  (1) launch IRs at every Irish university, (2) require OA to new articles resulting from publicly-funded research, understanding that most of them will land first in the author's IR, and (3) launch a national platform to harvest the contents of the IRs and use it to promote the visibility of national research, preserve it, organize it, and crunch it for benchmarking, bibliometric analysis, and quality assessment.  The system is a little more complicated than requiring deposit in special repositories hosted by the funding agencies (such as PMC and UKPMC).  But it's within reach for small countries with relatively few funding agencies and universities.  And it has the benefits of (1) helping universities to disseminate and analyze their own research output, (2) adding local incentives to funder mandates to increase and reward author participation, (3) adding robustness to digital preservation, and (4) ensuring that the system will scale with the growth of published research, regardless of what happens to the national platform.  To me, the greatest benefit is (5) nurturing local cultures of self-archiving at every university, which will carry over to non-funded research and magnify the impact of the funder OA policies.

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New from the Open Knowledge Foundation:

After discussions with Cameron Neylon of Open Wetware and Kaitlin Thaney of Science Commons we’ve set up an open science mailing list.

As far as we could tell, there wasn’t a general mailing list for people interested open science. Hence the new list aims cover this gap, and to strengthen and consolidate the open science community.

We hope it will be a relatively low volume list for relevant announcements, questions and notes. We also hope to get as full as possible representation from the open science community - so please forward this to anyone you think might be interested to join!

Over at the main Creative Commons blog, Diane Peters has the scoop on draft 3 of the CC0 public domain waiver, a tool for those who wish to relinquish their rights under copyright to a work, and mark it with machine-readable metadata for harvesting as part of the public domain. It is this type of tool that Science Commons advocates using in our Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data, a method for legally integrating scientific databases regardless of the country of origin. The goal of the protocol, to use Catriona MacCallum’s phrase: increasing the “Lego factor” for scientific data.

The news, in brief: Creative Commons had added additional language to the CC0 waiver to ensure that it makes sense and can be useful for people across the globe. ...

Creative Commons plans to take CC0 out of beta in late October or early November, and comments on this draft are due on September 26. If you’d like to check out the waiver or weigh in, visit the newly updated CC0 Wiki and subscribe to the cc-licenses mailing list.

Yesterday was the first, but probably not last, Southampton Open science workshop [Southampton, August 31-September 1, 2008] organised and run by Cameron Neylon (School of Chemistry University of Southampton) which brought together people for a variety of backgrounds who have an interested in open science. ...

The workshop started by discussing some very interesting new web 2.0 tools which have been designed to help researchers in various aspects of the scientific processes, followed by an equally interesting afternoon. The discussion revolved around where to go next and discussed some of the problems and issues that need to be addresses before open access research becomes widely accepted. The discussion supported the recommendations made in our To share or not to share: Publication and quality assurance of research data outputs.

Here is a list of some of the projects that were discussed:

• Myexperiment is more than just a social networking site, it is platform which enables researchers to share digital items associated with research
• Chemtools LaBlog is an electronic lab notebook, designed to give you a complete and reproducible record of the research undertaken for the researcher and the research team.
• Inkspot science, which is being set up to enable collaboration between scientists anywhere
• Open notebook science which uses a number of different existing sites under one umbrella to put all the collected/relevant data online
• Mendeley which is about managing sharing and discovering research papers. Sort of like last.fm, but will be so much more. It is still in the beta stages, but one will be able to ‘cite-while-you-write’ similar to EndNote, there will be recommendations such as one has on Amazon, and eventually you will be able to search databases directly through the programme.
• Journal of visualised experiments . Thought it wasn’t discussed specifically, it was brought up a few times and is definitely worth a mention. It is a peer reviewed, open access, online journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a video format.

... PK’s 2008 IP3 awards will also be presented to Free Press Policy Director Ben Scott, Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann and Public.Resource.org founder Carl Malamud.

Awards are given to individuals who over the past year (or over the course of their careers) who have advanced the public interest in one of the three areas of “IP” – Internet Protocol, Intellectual Property and Information Policy. The awards will be presented Oct. 16 in Washington, D.C. ...

Malamud was nominated for his work providing public access to government documents. He founded Public.Resource.org in April 2007. Since then, Malamud has, among other activities, found that the Smithsonian Institution was selling public-domain photographs, and then bought copies and posted them to Flickr, and later in the year began scanning new judicial opinions and hosting open access copies. Malamud will be recognized for his contributions to Information Policy. ...

OCLC is piloting a new service for libraries that encourages librarians and other interested parties to discover and share information about the copyright status of books.

The WorldCat Copyright Evidence Registry is a community working together to build a union catalog of copyright evidence based on WorldCat, which contains more than 100 million bibliographic records describing items held in thousands of libraries worldwide. In addition to the WorldCat metadata, the Copyright Evidence Registry uses other data contributed by libraries and other organizations.

... [B]ooks whose copyright status is unknown are destined to remain in print and on shelves until their status can be determined. The process to determine copyright status can be lengthy and labor intensive. The goal of the Copyright Evidence Registry is to encourage a cooperative environment to discover, create and share copyright evidence through a collaboratively created and maintained database, using the WorldCat cooperative model to eliminate duplicate efforts. ...

The Copyright Evidence Registry six-month pilot was launched July 1 to test the concept and functionality. Users can search the Copyright Evidence Registry to find information about a book, learn what others have said about its copyright status, and share what they know. ...

Geoff Brumfiel, Physicists aflutter about data photographed at conference, Nature News, September 2, 2008.  Excerpt:

An Italian-led research group's closely held data have been outed by paparazzi physicists, who photographed conference slides and then used the data in their own publications.

For weeks, the physics community has been buzzing with the latest results on 'dark matter' from a European satellite mission known as PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics). Team members have talked about their latest results at several recent conferences (see Nature 454, 808; 2008), but beyond a quick flash of a slide, the collaboration has not shared the data. Many high-profile journals, including Nature, have strict rules about authors publicizing data before publication.

It now seems that some physicists have taken matters into their own hands. At least two papers recently appeared on the preprint server arXiv.org showing representations of PAMELA's latest findings (M. Cirelli et al., and L. Bergstrom et al.)....

The preprints fully acknowledge the source of the data and reference the presentation photographed.

Piergiorgio Picozza, PAMELA's principal investigator and a physicist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, says he is "very, very upset" by the data being incorporated into a publication. But Cirelli maintains that he and others have done nothing wrong. "We asked the PAMELA people [there], and they said it was not a problem," he says.

Photography or videotaping of conference presentations is common in some fields, such as biology, but is relatively rare in physics. Falkowski says he can't recall another case. Still, he says, "I personally don't find anything wrong with it."

Also see the growing number of comments at the end of the article.  There are more comments here, here, and here.

MBooks Becomes HathiTrust, a press release from the University of Michigan, August 21, 2008.  Excerpt:

The University Library is pleased to announce that MBooks - the collection of books digitized [by Google] from the University Library's collections - will become part of HathiTrust on September 3, 2008.

HathiTrust, launched by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) libraries, is a shared digital repository for storing university library digital content, incorporating all the content from MBooks plus new content from other HathiTrust partners. (For background information, see Google and CIC Partnership news.)

The UM community will now have access to books, journals, and other documents previously unavailable through MBooks. MBooks links in the Mirlyn Library Catalog will now be renamed HathiTrust Digital Library. The options for viewing, printing, and creating collections will be the same as in MBooks....

PS:  For background, see my June 2008 post on the CIC consortial repository, which wasn't called HathiTrust at the time.  Also see Indiana University's announcement of HathiTrust, August 8, 2008.

Update.  Read about Roy Tennant's experiment to make HathiTrust searchable, August 25, 2008.

NIH Update: PubMed Central Numbers Surge Dramatically in July, Library Journal Academic Newswire, September 4, 2008.  Excerpt:

PubMed Central submissions are quickly approaching another milestone number, falling just one submission short of 4000 for the month of July. According to National Institutes of Health (NIH) statistics, monthly (??) submissions as of July 31 were 3,999, a significant 65 percent spike from the 2610 submissions in June. With the latest numbers yet to be assessed, it is too early to tell whether the major uptick in submissions in July is an anomaly, but the latest numbers make clear that since the official enactment of the NIH's mandatory public access policy in April, 2008, submissions are rising significantly—and rapidly.

As LJAN reported in July, beginning in the first month following passage of the new policy, January 2008, monthly submissions to PMC have risen quickly. Just before the policy officially took effect, submissions spiked to 1852 total submissions in March, then to 2,765 in April (the policy became mandatory April 7) and 2,593 in May. The April/May 2008 figures represented well over double the number of submissions for the same months in 2007 under a "voluntary" submission policy (1,198 PMC submissions in April '07; 948 in May '07). Numbers for August were not yet posted.

Alex Steffen, Cory Doctorow: The WorldChanging Interview, World Changing, September 3, 2008.  Excerpts (from Doctorow):

...The choice is not simply one of piracy or monopoly. There is a whole rich middle ground of public domain and open information regimes which could give developing world countries the tools they need to serve humanitarian purposes, while protecting the legitimate interests of authors, performers and inventors. WIPO could have created a global knowledge goods regime which protected both the commercial and the humanitarian fairly....

The Brazilians and the Chileans and the Argentines have been showing up and kicking a lot of ass, particularly on a treaty proposal that the EFF and CPTech and a lot of other groups helped draft: the Access to Knowledge, or A2K treaty, which starts from the premise that all the copyright, patent and trademark treaty instruments to date have got it all wrong -- they set out a mandatory minimum set of rights that everyone who's a rightsholder gets, and an optional set of rights that the public gets. As a result, you have global harmonization of the restrictions to the public access to knowledge, and you have no harmonization around the world on the rights that the public gets....

PS:  Article 5-2 of the draft A2K treaty mandates OA for publicly-funded research.  (Disclosure:  I participated in the drafting of 5-2.)

Pippa Smart, SPEC Kit 299: Scholarly Communication Education Initiatives, August 2007 and SPEC Kit 300: Open Access Resources, September 2007, Learned Publishing, October 2008.  Excerpt:

...The report on Scholarly Communication (SC) Education Initiatives shows that increasing numbers of US libraries are employing a SC librarian, and that the topics on which they educate faculty and promote to their library users have changed; where fair use and copyright once predominated, the emphasis is now on author rights, institutional repositories, and scholarly publishing economics (with particular reference to open access (OA) publishing).

The survey on OA reports that the majority of US academic libraries are now incorporating OA literature (journals, government reports, etc.) into their OPACs (online public access catalogues, and their linked websites, and undertake to promote these with their other (purchased) resources. The majority of libraries also report that their budgets subsidize OA journal author fees – mostly through ‘subscriptions’ to BioMed- Central and PLoS....

The surveys only report on about 70 of ARL’s member libraries [in 2007] (the surveys were sent to 123 libraries in total), so they may not be entirely representative of all institutions – but they do capture findings from many of the important academic libraries in the US....

PS:  For more details, including excerpts from the two SPEC Kits, see our blog post on Kit 299 and our post on Kit 300.

Donald W.King and Frances M. Alvarado-Albertorio, Pricing and other means of charging for scholarly journals: a literature review and commentary, Learned Publishing, October 2008.  Only this abstract is free online, at least so far:

Abstract:   There has been a clear upward trend over the past 50 years in traditional listed print subscription prices. The more recent trend towards electronic publishing has made possible new ways of charging for journals, such as differential pricing structures and bundling of journals which are purchased through license fees/charges (both of which enable libraries to buy significantly more journals, but at the same time make it more difficult to analyze prices). We are now also seeing a new emphasis on the 'author-side payment' model. This article analyzes pricing and charging policies and trends, illustrating how these are affected by the complexities of the evolving journal system.

Stevan Harnad, SHERPA/RoMEO: Publishers with Paid Options for Open Access, Open Access Archivangelism, September 3, 2008.  Excerpt:

Summary:  ">SHERPA/RoMEO is listing the paid OA charges of non-Green publishers. On no account should any author have to comply with any mandate to provide Open Access (OA) by having to pay money to a publisher. That would be a grotesque distortion of the purpose of both OA and OA mandates; it would also profoundly discourage funders and institutions from mandating OA, and authors from complying with OA mandates. SHERPA has an outstanding record for supporting and promoting OA, worldwide. The OA movement and the global research community are greatly in their debt. However, SHERPA alas also has a history of amplifying arbitrary, irrelevant and even absurd details and noise associated with publisher policies and practices, instead of focusing on what makes sense and is essential to the understanding and progress of OA. I urge SHERPA to focus on what the research community needs to hear, understand and do in order to reach 100% OA as soon as possible -- not on advertising publisher options that are not only unnecessary but counterproductive to the growth of OA and OA mandates.

Comments

• I wholeheartedly agree that "on no account should any author have to comply with any mandate to provide Open Access (OA) by having to pay money to a publisher" and I've often criticized publisher policies which would charge authors for the right to comply with their own prior funding contracts. 
• But it doesn't follow that SHERPA shouldn't list publishers who charge for their OA option, including those who require the paid OA option for authors bound by a funder OA mandate.  I want to know who those publishers are, and listing their policies is not the same as endorsing them.  I'm happy to say that I'm the one who wanted the OAD list of Publisher policies on NIH-funded authors to include annotations to identify the publishers who demand a fee for the right to comply with the NIH policy.
• Note that I've only excerpted the summary to Stevan's post.  In the full body of the post he replies to three objections to his conclusion:  from Charles Oppenheim, Peter Millington, and Andria McGrath.

Dorothea Salo, Two-thirds full?  Caveat Lector, September 3, 2008.  Excerpt:

...I’m going to dissect an often-rehearsed green-OA refrain and how I’ve seen it play out in practice. “About two-thirds of TA journals already give blanket permission for [self-archiving] and many of the others will give permission on request,” Suber says.

This just isn’t true, not unadorned, and I wish we’d stop waving it around. For it to be true, SHERPA/ROMEO (from whose database of publisher policies this datum is derived) would have to cover the entire toll-access journal universe. It doesn’t. It doesn’t even come close. Sure, it covers the behemoth toll-access publishers, but there are two problems with extrapolating from a set of data weighted heavily toward them: first, disciplinary coverage on SHERPA is extra-spotty in areas the behemoths can’t profit from (notably the humanities); and second, I have to date seen zero evidence presented that the behemoths’ policies are typical of non-behemoth publishers. I don’t think they are, myself, though I’m willing to be wrong....

The glass is not two-thirds full, folks. For the faculty I’ve dealt with, it’s often more than half-empty.

Comments

• Dorothea starts out with some praise for the article in my September newsletter, which I appreciate. 
• I do often say that about two-thirds of TA journals permit postprint archiving.  I'll defend the claim, at least after I correct it.  But first I can acknowledge that it's shorthand.  When I have time and remember to add them, I add these qualifications:

  First, it represents surveyed journals. Among unsurveyed journals, there are likely to be journals that do, and journals that don't, permit postprint archiving. We don't know their proportions yet. Second, the number represents journals that consent in advance to postprint archiving without requiring case-by-case requests. Many that do not consent in advance will still consent if asked individually, however. Elsevier routinely granted individual requests until mid-2004 when it decided to offer blanket permission instead. Third, it represents the journals that consent to postprint archiving, not preprint archiving. If we count the journals that consent to preprint or postprint archiving (or both), the figure rises to 93% [written in February 2006].

• I base the claim on the numbers reported by SHERPA.  The numbers are also summarized by EPrints.  But be careful when comparing the two sources, because they use the color signifiers differently.
• Dorothea is right that SHERPA doesn't survey all publishers, although it's steadily increasing the number it does survey.  As of today, it surveys 418.  Dorothea suggests that the SHERPA numbers are "weighted heavily" toward the "behemoth" publishers.  But while there are many commercial publishers, there are only half a dozen behemoths.  Any survey of 418 publishers covers far more than the behemoths.  (Maybe we differ on what counts as a behemoth.)  However, it may still be true that the SHERPA numbers reflect some kinds of publishers more than others.  I don't know and I'd like to know.
• She says, "I have to date seen zero evidence presented that the behemoths’ policies are typical of non-behemoth publishers...." If we revise this to refer to the SHERPA-surveyed publishers, rather than behemoth publishers, then I agree.  We're in the same boat and we'd both like to see someone do the research.  Meantime, I'm sure we both want SHERPA continue its long-term survey of publishers.
• The numbers fluctuate as SHERPA adds more publishers to the survey.  I used to give exact percentage figures, but when I noticed the fluctuation I decided to use looser expressions like "about two-thirds".  When I started using the expression, the SHERPA percentage was between 62 and 67%.  Today it's 56% (publishers allowing postprint archiving alone or both preprint and postprint archiving), which I would not say is "about two-thirds".  This is a reason to downsize my loose expression (and check the latest number more often).  But...
• The journals published by the half-dozen behemoths may outnumber the journals published by the next 400+ publishers in line.  However, the SHERPA number I've been using refers to the percentage of publishers who allow postprint archiving, not the percentage of journals.  This suggests that when I want to talk about the percentage of journals, as opposed to publishers, I should revise my number upward, not downward.  At the moment, I don't know how the upward correction and downward correction net out.  If anyone has done the math (if 56% of this set of publishers permits postprint archiving, then what percentage of the journals they represent permits postprint archiving?), I'd like to hear from them.
• One more thing I don't know and would like to know:  Is the reported percentage of publishers who allow postprint archiving in decline, or is this just an artifact of the order in which SHERPA surveys publishers?  Does it mean that publishers are retreating to less-green policies, or does it mean that unsurveyed publishers are less often green than the surveyed publishers?
• I fully agree that the limited number of green journals, and the complex and arbitrary restrictions which even some greenish publishers put on self-archiving, are obstacles to progress. 

Update.  Klaus Graf has some evidence that SHERPA hasn't yet surveyed the principal publishers of German-language history journals.  Read his post in German or Google's English.  This is a useful piece of the mosaic, and I wish we had more detail about the publishers SHERPA hasn't yet surveyed.  BTW, he also reports that the same publishers don't provide the relevant copyright and self-archiving information on their web sites. 

Update (9/5/08).  Also see Dorothea Salo's response.

Jia Hepeng, Make China journals open access, says top scientist, SciDev.Net, September 2, 2008.  Excerpt:

A leading Chinese scientist has appealed for funding to make many Chinese journals open access and give priority to domestic science publications to boost the country's scientific journals.

"We can invest billions of yuan in big science projects, but we also need to invest a tiny 200 million yuan (US$29.4 million) in an open access fund to help the growth of our journals," said Zhu Zuoyan, the recently retired deputy head of the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC) at a forum on journal development last week (27 August).

He says government-funded open access journals would be a breakthrough for science publishing in China....

He added that open access journals prioritise academic merits over commercial interests....

Zhu's remarks come amidst complaints that Chinese scientists are publishing more in overseas journals than domestic ones, which some say endangers the existence of the 5,000 scientific journals published in China....

Comment.  If the goal is OA for Chinese research, to boost its audience and impact, then green OA would be faster and cheaper than gold OA.  But if the goal (or part of the goal) is to publish the articles in China, and keep China's 5,000 peer-reviewed journals alive, that's a reason to consider the gold strategy.  But why not both?  A gold strategy without a green one is not likely to absorb the whole research output of the nation, especially as that research output grows rapidly over the next decade.

Andrea Foster, What Google's New Encyclopedia Means for Students and Professors, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 5, 2008.  Excerpt:

...[I]n July, when Google unveiled Knol, another Web-based collection of user-generated articles that the company calls "authoritative," the question for faculty members...was whether students might begin to turn to this new source.

The answer from those who study online encyclopedias is, Not likely.

"On balance I just can't see Knol as an entity or as a group of articles really having the stature of Wikipedia," says Andrew Lih, an independent researcher who helped start Columbia University's new-media program. He observes that Knol, which the site defines as "a unit of knowledge," has many policies that run counter to those that give Wikipedia a certain amount of authority. For example, Knol does not insist that articles maintain a neutral tone. It welcomes opinions. It allows multiple entries on a subject. It offers authors the chance to earn money from their entries. And inaccuracies could crop up because authors have ultimate authority over their articles' content.

Mr. Lih, who is writing a book on the history of Wikipedia, says Knol isn't even trying to outdo Wikipedia....

Google, for its part, says the main difference between Knol and Wikipedia is that Knol authors affix their names to articles. For this reason Knol is designed to be a "primary source" of information. Wikipedia, which maintains authors' anonymity, is a "secondary source," a Google spokesman wrote an e-mail message....

Knol's policy of allowing authors to earn money from their entries is a major reason for scholars' skepticism....

Comments 

• There's another difference between Wikipedia and Knol that I was surprised to see omitted here:  Wikipedia doesn't allow original research but Knol does. 
• I suggested in December 2007 that Knol could be used for postprint archiving.  But I haven't seen any evidence that anyone is using it that way.

Nathan Halverson, He's giving you access, one document at a time, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, September 3, 2008.  Excerpt:

California's building codes, plumbing standards and criminal laws can be found online.

But if you want to download and save those laws to your computer, forget it.

The state claims copyright to those laws. It dictates how you can access and distribute them -- and therefore how much you'll have to pay for print or digital copies.

It forbids people from storing or distributing its laws without consent.

That doesn't sit well with Carl Malamud, a Sebastopol resident with an impressive track record of pushing for digital access to public information. He wants California -- and every other federal, state and local agency -- to drop their copyright claims on law, contending it will pave the way for innovators to create new ways of searching and presenting laws.

"When it comes to the law, the courts have always said there can be no copyright because people are obligated to know what it says," Malamud said. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse in court."

Malamud is spoiling for a major legal fight.

He has begun publishing copies of federal, state and county codes online -- in direct violation of claimed copyright.

On Labor Day, he posted the entire 38-volume California Code of Regulations, which includes all of the state's regulations from health care and insurance to motor vehicles and investment.

To purchase a digital copy of the California code costs $1,556, or $2,315 for a printed version. The state generates about $880,000 annually by selling its laws, according to the California Office of Administrative Law....

PS:  For background, see our past posts on Malamud's heroic efforts to provide OA to public domain information, including the documents of US law. 

Also see our past posts on the Veeck case, the tendency of building codes to be written by industry lobbies and copyrighted, and the Supreme Court's refusal to review a Fifth Circuit decision that, qua public law, those codes are in the public domain even if, qua proposals of private organizations, they are not.

Update (9/4/08).  Excerpt from Free Government Information:

...Code city is now open and the readme file is a graphic novel (view it as a Flickr slideshow here!) explaining the travesty of state and local codes being copyrighted rather than in the public domain and freely available online. Code city included full-text scans of 43 state codes -- including the entire California Title 24 Safety Codes! -- and several city codes (Little Rock, Denver, Phoenix, Wilmington, Honolulu, St Louis, Las Vegas)....

A small, digital book startup thinks it has a solution to the age-old student lament: overpriced textbooks that have little value when the course is over. The answer? Make them open source -- and give them away.

Flat World Knowledge is the brainchild of two former textbook industry executives who learned from the inside about the wacky economy of textbooks.

In a nutshell, there is a huge, inelastic demand for college texts, even though textbook prices are high. Because of this there is a lot of piracy and a robust secondary market for textbooks -- but not for long, because they are updated every couple of years, rendering old editions virtually worthless.

Flat World's business plan aims to exploit the inefficiencies: Its books are online and free. Instead of charging for content it aims to make money by wrapping content up in "convenient" downloadable and print wrappers and selling those, along with study aides and related items. ...

... This marks the culmination of a two year project to convert the JDE to a fully online, open access journal. It consolidates three separate and different web presences for the journal and allows readers to search all the journal issues using the Open Journal System search tools. ...

Secrecy and competition to achieve breakthroughs have been part of scientific culture for centuries, but the latest Internet advances are forcing a tortured openness throughout the halls of science and raising questions about how research will be done in the future.

The openness at the technological and cultural heart of the Internet is fast becoming an irreplaceable tool for many scientists, especially biologists, chemists and physicists — allowing them to forgo the long wait to publish in a print journal and instead to blog about early findings and even post their data and lab notes online. The result: Science is moving way faster and more people are part of the dialogue.

But no one agrees yet on whether this extreme sharing among scientists and even the public is ultimately good for science or undermining it. ...

Medpedia, a new online [OA] medical encyclopedia to be written and edited by a collaborative group of thousands, with support from several leading medical schools, is calling for volunteers. But not everyone will be accepted. Only those who hold an M.D. or Ph.D. in a biomedical field need apply.

That is one way in which the ambitious project, which plans to go live by the end of this year, hopes to set itself apart from existing medical Web sites. In return for contributors' efforts, Medpedia expects to provide them with a reward. Contributing to the encyclopedia will be a career-booster, its founders say, and participants could gain international reputations as experts. ...

Medpedia aims to create pages for more than 30,000 known medical conditions, as well as for the thousands of drugs being prescribed each year. All the available information on a subject will be presented in a single entry, and each topic will have an accessible version for the lay public and a more technical account for health professionals and other knowledgeable readers. ...

First reactions to the Medpedia project announcement seem enthusiastic: The online-encyclopedia team received about 3,000 applications during the project's first 24 hours.

Smitha Ramachandran and Gayatri Doctor (eds.), Digital Institutional Repositories: Case Studies, Icfai Books, 2008.  The table of contents:

1. Collection Development in Digital Information Repositories in India
2. Open Access Initiatives in India - An Evaluation
3. Institutional Repository Enhances Visibility and Prestige of the Institute - The Case of National Institute of Technology, Rourkela
4. Re-engineering of Library and Information Services through Web Modeling at Delhi College of Engineering
5. Design and Development of an Institutional Repository at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
6. Enhancing Digital Repository of Scholarly Publications at Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IITB) India
7. Development of ETD Repository at IITK Library using DSpace
8. Experimenting with a Model Digital Library of ETDs for Indian Universities using DSpace
9. Implementation of a Digital Institutional Repository DSpace@IBSA
10. Digital Library of SIP Reports using Greenstone at IBS Ahmedabad
11. Scholarly Communication in a Digital World: The Role of the Digital Repository at the Raman Research Institute
12. Institutional Repository at National Aerospace Laboratories: A Case Study
13. Enhancing Knowledge Innovation Culture of Libraries through Union Catalogues
14. Digital Library of ISAC
15. Digital Collection Building: A Case Study
16. Digital Library of India: A Testbed for Indian Language Research
17. Index

It doesn't appear that there is an OA edition of the book, although there is a detailed, OA overview. 

The presentations --papers or slides, and links to recommended reading-- from Digital Libraries à la Carte 2008 (Tilburg University, 25- 29 August, 2008) are now online. 

See especially those from Module 4 (Libraries - Partners in Research and Open Access), Module 5b (Put Yourself in the DRIVER's Seat - Practical Training for Building a European Repository Network), and Herbert Van de Sompel's two presentations, on MESUR and ORE, from Module 2.

Strange Case: Publisher Threatens OA Reporter with Lawsuit, Charges Racism, Library Journal Academic Newswire, September 2, 2008.  Excerpt:

Livening up a quiet Friday before Labor Day, a long, rambling post entitled “Lies, Fear and Smear Campaigns against SJI” appeared on Yale University’s Liblicense-l electronic discussion list, suggesting that a well-known U.K.-based reporter covering open access (OA) issues is facing a lawsuit from a relatively unknown publisher. The legal threats stem from a