Open Access News

The word contest in my March newsletter is generating some enthusiastic responses.  In the first 24 hours, I've received 79 suggestions from 16 people. 

Here's the contest again if you didn't see it:

English speakers need a verb that means "to provide OA to".  It should be as succinct as "sell" for use in sentences such as, "We sell the print edition but ____ the digital edition." 

I use "to provide OA to" for lack of anything obviously better.  But I don't like it.  It's long, dry, and awkward.  Making a digital work OA is a fairly elemental act, and the verb for that act shouldn't take four words.  I'm hoping that someone out there can do better.  

We could say "open up" or "make OA".  These are shorter than four words, but they're still phrases and I'm hoping that creative people can find or invent a single word.  We could say simply "open", but that would be ambiguous, since we already say "open the journal" and "open the book" with another meaning in mind.  "Give away" (or "giveaway") is also ambiguous, since we sometimes give away priced, printed literature.  "Disclose" is a nice fit etymologically but has similar ambiguities.  "Liberate" is a little ambiguous, a little precious, and suggests an overcoming of resistance which is by no means intrinsic to OA.  

We could revive and hijack a rare word like "derestrict" or "debouche" (the way gamers revived and hijacked "avatar"), but could we find one that is less dry and technical-sounding?  We could coin a familiar-sounding new term like "openize" or "accessibilitate", but could we find one that is less nauseating?  We could coin an utterly new word like "fazz" or "jirp", but could we find one that actually suggests the intended meaning?

There's no prize in this contest except glory.  I'll summarize the results in the next issue, and may also post them to the SPARC Open Access Forum for further discussion.  

If the submissions aren't any better than "open", "debouche", "accessibilitate", and "fazz", then I won't pick a favorite or a winner, but I'll still share the results.  If there's an array of plausible contenders, one of them may catch fire with some of you and start to spread, becoming more acceptable as it goes.  But you can already sense some of my personal criteria:  Would the word be ambiguous (bad), pretentious (bad), sound like insider jargon (bad), or make OA itself sound technical and difficult (bad)?  Would it be short (good), sweet (good), and more or less self-explanatory (good)?

If other languages already have elegant solutions to this problem, I'd love to hear about them.  

Send me your ideas (peter dot suber at gmail dot com).  I'll assume that I may name and quote you unless you tell me otherwise.  

I just mailed the March issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.  This issue takes a close look at how "market-oriented" economic sectors differ from "mission-oriented" sectors, and where scholarly publishing belongs on this spectrum. 

The roundup section briefly notes 112 OA developments from February.

Labels: Hot

Happy birthday to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which is eight years old today.

The BOAI "statement of principle,...statement of strategy, and...statement of commitment" was the first to offer a public definition of OA (combining gratis and libre access, though not in those terms), the first to use the term open access, the first to call for green and gold OA as complementary strategies (though not in those terms), the first to call for OA in all disciplines and countries, and the first to be accompanied by significant funding.  A good number of OA projects were already under way, but it helped catalyze the OA movement and give it energy and unity.

The BOAI was hammered out in a December 2001 meeting convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute, which committed $3 million to carrying out the vision.  The BOAI public statement was released on February 14, 2002.

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment....The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it....

Happy birthday, BOAI, and many happy returns.  And to all OA activists around the world, Happy Valentines Day.

(Disclosure:  I helped draft the BOAI and have received support from the Open Society Institute.  I'm probably not neutral on the subject, which is a reason to write your own birthday greeting!)

Prepping for your Graduate Record Exams? Here's a sample essay topic from a GRE study guide:

All results of publicly funded scientific studies should be made available to the general public free of charge. Scientific journals that charge a subscription or newsstand price are profiting unfairly.

See GRE Exam 2009 Edition Comprehensive Program, Kaplan Publishing, June 2008, p. 231. (Thanks to Amber Smith for the discovery.)

I just mailed the February issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.  This issue takes a close look at four analogies between the political fortunes of open access and the political fortunes of clean energy. 

The roundup section briefly notes 116 OA developments from January.

Here's a quick overview of the four analogies:

1. The gap between breakthrough and uptake
2. Putting obstacles in our way
3. Slowing down to protect the incumbents
4. Some pay for all

Update (3 hours later).  A list problem has snagged delivery of the email edition.  Apologies for the delay.  Meantime, the online edition (link above) is the same as the email edition and already available.

Labels: Hot

The public comment period on the Obama administration's consultation on OA for federally-funded research expires this Wednesday.  The original deadline was January 7, but was extended until January 21.

If you haven't already submitted a comment, use your weekend to write one and send it off no later than Wednesday.  You can submit your comment by email or through the OSTP blog. 

All signs suggest that the Obama administration is willing to generalize the NIH policy in some form and extend it across the federal government.  Show your support for this move!  You know that opponents are showing their opposition. 

And please spread the word to others who might write comments. 

Now that Gavin has departed, and my time is still occupied with other OA work, what will become of Open Access News?

To understand my answer, first allow me to recap a little history.  When Gavin came aboard two years ago, there was already more OA news than one person could cover alone, and with his help we made a substantial gain on adequacy.  But soon there was too much news for two people to cover together. 

If the problem was to cover the news comprehensively, one solution was to add more people.  But it was clear that OAN was already too long.  We couldn't capture everything, but what we did capture was too much for people to read.  The rapid growth of the OA movement made both problems worse because it made the inadequacy and volume of the blog grow at the same time.  (That's why I had to keep reminding myself that this was a side effect of success.) 

So there were two problems to solve --enlarge the scope and reduce the volume.  To solve both at once I decided that we needed a very different kind of alert service, and launched the OA tracking project (OATP) as a scalable alternative.  OATP is more comprehensive than a large blog because it is crowdsourced and distributes the labor to all who want to take part.  It's leaner than a large blog because most of its news alerts are just citations, links, and brief descriptions. 

I could look for other news bloggers to do what Gavin and I had been doing.  But that would replicate one or both of the problems that plagued OAN. 

You knew I was going to say this:  the future of OAN is OATP. 

I'll continue to blog, but only sporadically.  OAN will continue to exist, but its output will be greatly reduced.  Meantime, OATP is a daily, comprehensive source of OA-related news.  OATP's austere format doesn't do what good blogs do.  But it supports good bloggers in doing what good bloggers do.  Bloggers can be selective in what they cover in depth, knowing that OATP is taking care of breadth.  And when they do cover the news in depth, OATP itself will point us to their coverage.

OATP is still in Phase 1, with relatively few taggers and most of them using just one tag (the one official project tag, oa.new).  In Phase 2, which I hope to roll out later this year, we'll have more taggers, more of them will use "subtopic tags", it will be easier for taggers to avoid adding duplicates to the project feed, it will be easier for taggers to use convergent rather than divergent tags, and it will be easier for users to subscribe to versions of the feed covering just the subtopics they care to follow.

As I note in the sidebar to the right,

You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter.  You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.

Please take part, as a reader, a tagger, or both. 

If you've had a widget on your blog running the headlines from OAN, please replace it with a widget running the headlines from the OATP.

Am I deliberately steering readers away from my blog?  Not exactly.  I'll keep blogging, at a low level, and will appreciate any eyeballs that linger here.  But I am deliberately recommending another news source over my own.  I'm doing it to be useful:  it's a better way to track new developments.  It's not a better way to comment thoughtfully on new developments.  But it doesn't interfere with any of the existing ways to comment thoughtfully on new developments, and it will helps all of us find the thoughtful comments people are moved to make.

Labels: Meta

Gavin Baker joined Open Access News as assistant editor in February 2008, two weeks shy of two years ago.  When he started, there was already too much news for me to cover alone.  His help was indispensable to the blog and to me personally.  After July 2009, when I took a new position and had to curtail my own blogging, he carried virtually the whole, still-growing load at OAN on his own.  Today is his last day, and OAN will not be the same.

Gavin was highly qualified for this job on Day One.  As I described his background in my blog post introducing him to my readers (February 3, 2008):

Gavin is the founder of the Open Students, the only blog about OA directed to students.  He's also the force behind The Right to Research, the SPARC web site on the student campaign for OA, and the author of some first-rate blog posts (one, two, three), presentations (one, two, three), and articles on OA.  When he was still a student, he co-founded the Florida chapter of Free Culture, and organized a successful campaign to get the University of Florida Student Senate to adopt a strong resolution in support of OA.  It's no surprise that when SPARC honored the student campaign for OA with its Innovator Award in December 2007, it singled out five students as notable agents of change and named Gavin "The Professional".  He was interviewed last week in Library Journal Academic Newswire.

In the past two years, his understanding of this topic and the worldwide campaign behind it grew even further, embodied in a daily stream of succinct posts.  Behind the scenes he was skilled and dogged at the time-consuming tasks required to blog well:  finding the relevant policies of the journals, publishers, projects, institutions, or countries we were covering; discovering whether a development in the news was really new; deciphering gibberish and PR-speak and restating it clearly; gaining access to articles that were not OA; understanding stories or documents not written in English; finding URLs for items to which we'd like to link; and reading long documents in order to select the most relevant excerpts.  When a news article or press release was vague on a point important to us and our readers, Gavin often took the initiative to ask the right questions and track down people who might be in a position to answer.

His work at OAN --as well as the OA tracking project-- has been valuable to me, our readers, and the wider OA movement.  I'm grateful to him and wish him the best in the next chapters of his life and career, starting with graduate school in the fall.

Postscript 1.  For an idea of what he's been up to, see his article, Open access: Advice on working with faculty senates, published just this week in the January issue of College & Research Libraries News.

Postscript 2.  I'll soon post more on the future of OAN itself. 

Labels: Meta

For the past two years, my work on Open Access News has been funded by SPARC. My funding ends today, and with it my tenure at OAN.

I'll leave it to Peter to say what becomes of OAN from here. The Open Access Tracking Project, which we launched last year, continues. (Anticipating this moment was one motivation behind the project: anyone can contribute to the OATP feed, allowing the workload to be distributed.)

I give my sincerest thanks to Peter and to SPARC for affording me this incredible opportunity. There are few better ways to engage so deeply and globally with the topic of open access. I've learned so much.

I hope my work has also been useful to you, our readers. It has been a challenge and a privilege to make sense of the world of open access and communicate it to you. Thank you for your support and engagement.

As for me, I intend to begin work on my Ph.D. in the fall. Until then, I'm available to work on new projects: if you have any ideas, please contact me.

Thanks for reading, and for all you do.

Keep in touch,

Gavin

Labels: Hot, Meta

• PLoS launched a new collection of research from the Tagging of Pacific Predators group of the Census of Marine Life.
• The National Library of Finland made two of its catalogs OA: LINDA, the union catalog of Finnish university libraries, and ARTO, an index of Finnish scholarly journals.
• Lars Juhl Jensen looks for correlations among PLoS' article-level metrics.
• Leigh Blackall proposes a journal with open post-publication review, free reuse, and OA to the underlying data.

... The National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR), part of the National Institutes of Health, announced today it has issued the first 11 research and technology grants of its new FaceBase Consortium. The five-year initiative will systematically compile the biological instructions to construct the middle region of the human face and precisely define the genetics underlying its common developmental disorders, such as cleft lip and palate. The mid-face includes the nose, upper lip, and the palate, or roof of the mouth.

As a key part of the initiative, a one-stop, encyclopedic database of head and skull, or craniofacial, development will be created and maintained to allow scientists to mine the riches of the information enabling them to more rapidly and effectively generate hypotheses and accelerate the pace of their research. The database, called FaceBase, will be free and publicly accessible to the scientific community. Its organizers anticipate that FaceBase will have a prototype ready within the next year and a fully functioning database soon after. ...

Open Data Commons are happy to announce the first draft of an attribution license for data/databases.

A commentable version of the text is available here.

Feedback is actively sought and we would be grateful for any assistance in circulating this announcement to relevant communities and networks.

The license is heavily based on the Open Database License (ODbL), though obviously without the share-alike provisions! ...

The present plan is to start out with this first comments round based ending around the start of February. Based on the feedback received we will then assess how many further rounds of revision and consultation will be needed.

Some particular questions that it would be good to have feedback on:

• Is there any irrelevant matter that can be cut from the license (shorter is better!)
• Is attribution wanted for produced works (at the moment it is)
• What flexibility in attribution format/requirements should be supported

The drafting of this license has been prompted by a clear need in several communities for an open license for data/databases that provides for attribution but does not impose share-alike requirements. ...

... [U.S. House of Representatives] Committee on Science and Technology Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN) offered the following statement:

The Committee on Science and Technology hosted a Scholarly Publishing Roundtable in June of 2009 to bring together key stakeholders from the academic and publishing communities. To allow a more frank and productive discussion, the Committee asked that Members come to the table with their deep expertise and their own viewpoints, but not as representatives of their home institutions or organizations.

I applaud this group for taking such a thoughtful approach to a difficult and divisive issue. After the group met at the event hosted by the Committee, the members of the roundtable volunteered to continue meeting on their own to produce a report that would be useful to Congress, the White House and the agencies.

I believe these recommendations strike a good balance by allowing public access to the results of research paid for with federal funds, while preserving the high quality and editorial integrity of scholarly publishing so critical to the scientists and seasoned science writers on whose expertise we all depend.

Our collective goal is to advance both scholarship and public access. I commend the members of this group for putting aside self interest to reach a compromise that will benefit us all.

... Mendeley [is] the current market leader for potential filesharing of scholarly papers and materials. ... The problem is that they’ve built filesharing into their system with little to no oversight over copyright infringement. Since Mendeley claims it has 8 million research papers uploaded to its site, if you’re a scholarly publisher, it’s likely that your copyrighted material is already hosted on their servers.

I first met with representatives from Mendeley back in late 2008, and was fairly stunned at their apparent naïveté towards copyright law and the legal precedents that had been set in cases involving music sites (particularly since one of their major backers is the founder of Last.FM). Their FAQ and terms of service at the time were clearly offering the sorts of infringement inducements that got Grokster in so much legal trouble, and after some correspondence with Victor Henning, Mendeley changed the language on these pages to better reflect copyright law and leave the company some hope of a safe harbor defense. The big problem they still haven’t resolved is the fact that all uploading and downloading takes place through the company’s servers. ... Mendeley not only connects users through their servers but actually hosts and redistributes the potentially infringing files. ...

Maney Publishing is pleased to announce the launch of a new open access (OA) business model, MORE OpenChoice. Twenty-four materials science and engineering journals and fifteen health science titles are initially included in MORE OpenChoice, with the intention to expand this to humanities journals in the future.

MORE OpenChoice represents a new business model which will co-exist with Maney’s traditional subscription business ...

Gaynor Redvers-Mutton, Business Development Manager at Maney Publishing, is leading the open access project: "We have priced our article charge competitively to help to stimulate the OA market and offer our authors real choice. ..."

With the launch of Optics Express in 1997, the Optical Society of America (OSA) created an open-access journal that has stood the test of time to become a both a scientific and financial success. The journal, now entering its second decade of publication, is consistently ranked among the top titles in its field. And, it has proved to be such a successful financial venture that the Society is this year rolling out three more publications that follow the same open-access business model.

For being a shining example of community-driven creativity and innovation in scholarly communications, the Optical Society of America has been named the first SPARC Innovator of 2010. ...

Optics Express publishes original, peer-reviewed articles in all fields of optical science and technology twice a month – within an average of 47 days after article acceptance. The quick turnaround, along with creative ways to highlight content – such as electronic cover images for every issue and Focus issues – have made Optics Express a sought-after publishing destination for authors and a top journal in the field. OSA is introducing three new journals under the Optics Express brand and publishing model over the next year: Biomedical Optic Express, Optical Material Express and Energy Express. ...

• New OA journals:
  • Silence (announcement)
  • Codex: the Journal of the Louisiana Chapter of the ACRL (announcement)
• Converted to OA:
  • Journal of Korean Medical Science (announcement)
  • Recherches en psychanalyse (announcement)
  • Revue géographique de l’Est (announcement)
• Converted to delayed OA:
  • Formation emploi (announcement) (2 year delay)
• New on PubMedCentral:
  • Journal of Veterinary Science (immediate OA) (announcement)
  • Journal of Ocular Biology, Diseases, and Informatics (immediate OA) (announcement)
  • Asian Journal of Transfusion Science (immediate OA) (announcement)
  • Indian Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (immediate OA) (announcement)
  • Journal of Indian Association of Pediatric Surgeons (immediate OA) (announcement)
  • Indian Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences (immediate OA) (announcement)
  • Indian Journal of Pharmacology (immediate OA) (announcement)
  • Mental Health in Family Medicine (1 year embargo)
  • Medical Education Online (immediate OA)