Open Access News

Scientists Without Borders launched an OA database to "coordinate science-based activities that improve quality of life in the developing world."  (Thanks to Matt Cockerill.)  From the announcement:

...In May 2008, Scientists Without Borders launched its first project, a Web portal, whose cornerstone is a database that will:

• Connect scores of public and private organizations that are currently addressing the UN Millennium Development Goals through science-based activities—and foster innovative activities among them;
• Offer a unique and empowering information source to thousands of academic and industry scientists who wish to work on global health, environmental challenges and other vital issues;
• Register needs and available resources, thus allowing scientists and organizations to connect and direct their energies for maximum impact; and
• Provide a mechanism by which organizations can build on one another's progress.

This user-friendly and easily accessible tool assembles information about the location, goals, needs, and other attributes of research-based and capacity-building projects, as well as a roster of scientists who are willing to help.

The resulting resource will foster connections among organizations working in the same region or on related problems, and it will allow scientists prepared to offer time and expertise to browse opportunities and advertise their capacities. They can be matched according to their area of knowledge and/or in a need-based manner....

As part of its 10th anniversary celebration, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society has launched the Publius Project. 

The idea is foster a public dialogue on the evolving norms for governing the internet, just as Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, under the pseudonym Publius, fostered a public dialogue through the Federalist Papers (1787-1788) on the norms which ought to govern the newly independent United States.

From the FAQ:

By gathering experts across multiple dimensions of cyberspace and asking them to identify and reflect on the rolling and diverse constitutional moments of net governance, we hope to reflect a wide range of perspectives on how the Net should—or should not—be governed....

As we highlight in our introductory pieces, norms, rules and decisions about control, power, and governance are constantly evolving and being formulated in this space. In order to effectively understand, influence, and shape those structures, we must ask the questions: what is the regime we’re traveling towards? What is our ideal? How are decisions made in this space, and who makes them? ...

All the contributions to the Publius Project are OA, under CC-BY licenses, and all are attributed.  The first 10 are now online and other contributions will be released in waves.  (Disclosure:  My own contribution, on the evolving norms for deciding who controls access to research, will be released in a subsequent wave.)

Berkeley steps forward with bold initiative to pay authors’ open-access charges, SPARC enews, May 2008.  Excerpt:

This article is the first in a series SPARC will offer to highlight change on our member campuses....

It’s one thing to say you support open-access publishing. It’s another to provide authors with a pot of money to actually pay for it.

That’s what’s happening at the University of California Berkeley. In January, the university launched the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative, a pilot program co-sponsored by the University Librarian and the Vice Chancellor for Research to cover publication charges for open-access journals.

Faculty, post-doc and graduate students can apply for up to $3,000 to cover the cost of publishing an article in an open-access publication. The fund also gives up to $1,500 for the cost of so-called hybrid publications’ paid access fees, where information is freely available but the journal limits the right to redistribute. The pilot program will last 18 months or until the initial $125,000 fund runs out. The hope – and challenge – is to find a permanent funding source.

“As a library community, if we really wanted to change behavior of faculty about where they published, we needed to put our money where our mouth was – not only talking about open access, but help them do it,” says Beth Weil, a champion of the initiative and head of the bioscience and natural resources library at Berkeley. In talking with faculty, she became aware of a wide disparity in funding and saw a need to provide financial assistance to pay for open-access fees....

Weil adds that the goal of the initiative is two-fold: To make Berkeley research free and have a greater impact. Secondly, to change the behavior of faculty to embrace Open Access and start to write it the fees into their grant processes.

[Tom Leonard, university librarian at Berkeley and professor in the graduate school of journalism] underscores that the traditional way of sharing research is no longer sufficient. And, if you are a scholar, it is a natural feature of human nature to want to let everyone know about your discoveries. “Nobody is trying to hide their light under a bushel,” he says. The push for Open Access is to encourage new avenues of disseminating information quickly and broadly to advance knowledge....

Two other U.S. universities have also established funds to pay for open-access research

The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill has an annual commitment of $10,000 and funds maximum awards of $1,000 per article. (To read more about its Open Access Authors’ Fund established in 2005, click here)  At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, $50,000 in seed money from the library’s gift fund is available to help authors pay for open-access journal fees. (For information about its program through the Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing, click here). Overseas, the University of Nottingham and the University of Amsterdam provide funds for open-access publication....

Newsmaker Interview: Shawn Martin, Penn’s New Scholarly Communication Librarian, Library Journal Academic Newswire, May 15, 2008.  Excerpt:

The University of Pennsylvania (Penn) Libraries recently announced the appointment of Shawn Martin to the newly created position of scholarly communication librarian —and what a job it promises to be. With Harvard’s faculty and law school mandating open access, institutional repositories (IRs) poised for growth, and publishers suing Georgia State University (GSU) over its electronic course content, these are, like the fortune cookie says, interesting times. At Penn, Martin, who holds a MA in history from the College of William and Mary, will be responsible for the libraries’ institutional repository ScholarlyCommons@Penn, and offering “guidance on and promoting awareness of issues” surrounding intellectual property rights and academic publishing....

LJAN: Can you tell us a little about your background, and what kinds of things you'll be addressing in your new post?

SM: ...Most recently, I worked at the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) project at the University of Michigan. There I worked with three publishers, ProQuest, Readex, and Gale, and over 100 academic libraries around the world to create searchable text for commercially available image databases of early English and American printed books. The catch was that all of the text we created eventually would enter the public domain. In essence, TCP was a model of working with publishers, librarians, and scholars to determine how all three could come together and deliver content in new and unique ways. That is the primary way that I'll be approaching open access and scholarly communication.

The IR at Penn will be a major focus of your work, I’m sure. First, your thoughts on Harvard's recent faculty OA mandate?

I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t appreciate the Harvard mandate. Obviously I would love it if Penn moved in a similar direction. Penn is a decentralized institution and will probably move more slowly. It is a goal, however, to at least educate faculty about what is going on at Harvard and elsewhere and try to get them to take a more active role in the dissemination of their scholarship. I intend this to be a major focus, and will be doing outreach with our faculty over the summer and fall.

One thing I would add is that we in the academic community really need to grapple with how this will change the scholarly communication system. How will all of this be paid for and who will be paying? Do universities or publishers have an obligation to add value to content, through enhanced disciplinary databases, for example? How does this affect the revenue streams of scholarly societies who are an important component of peer review? Open access is a major overhaul of the scholarly communication system. Regardless of how noble our goals may be, we must think about the disruptions it could cause and how we modify those disruptions.

Deposit rates for many IRs have been low, and much of that seems to be because many faculty don't seem to understand the role of IRs serve. How do you see the IR’s role?

We need to figure out what the IRs role is in terms of the larger system of research, teaching, peer review, publication, and dissemination of scholarship. IRs certainly can help make the intellectual output of any given university more accessible, but to be really successful, they need to have a more central role. As they are construed now, you’re right, some faculty see little point in them, it is just one more thing they have to do. And when faculty members are shielded by libraries from the costs of journal subscriptions, they often don’t understand how IRs differ from published journals. I'm not sure I have an answer as to what role IRs will play, but I hope to work it out with my colleagues here and elsewhere.

How will you persuade faculty to participate in Penn’s IR? Do you have a strategy you have in mind?

Any strategy has to work on two levels, I think. First, one has to work with higher administration (provosts, deans) to try to encourage mandates for deposit. Second, and perhaps more important, one has to educate faculty about the issues of scholarly communication so that they can then serve as advocates for open access within their own departments or schools. It has to be a top-down plus a bottom-up strategy in order to be successful. So far we have marketed to both individual faculty and departments at Penn. In many cases, schools have a policy encouraging deposit in the repository. I plan on working with individual faculty as well to use them to encourage their colleagues to deposit....

The Open University [of Israel] has uploaded the full text of dozens of textbooks onto its Web site, which will be available to the public free of charge beginning next Thursday.

In the first initiative of its kind to place so many full texts on-line, the university has reformatted textbooks from 10 of its courses to a readable electronic format and posted them online.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was the first to start putting materials on-line six years ago, but the Open University's project is the first to place entire books on-line. ...

Next year, the university hopes to put textbooks and other course materials from 40 more courses on-line. ...

"Regarding copyrights, the books that were written specifically for us are ours to do with as we wish. However, there are pictures or quotes from other authors [for] which we have obtained permission from them," [said Prof. Ora Limor, vice president for academic affairs].

There was an open question about what it would do to the price of books, she added.

"We print a million volumes a year, and we don't know how this will affect that. We hope that it won't hurt sales, but rather the opposite - people will become interested by reading on-line and then go out and buy the book so that they can read it more comfortably or not have to print out hundreds of pages," she said.

Limor said the project had already cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and would probably cost more.

She added that audio versions of the books would also be available as MP3 downloads ...

Yesterday the University of Oregon Faculty Senate adopted a resolution encouraging faculty to use an author addendum:

Moved, that the University Senate

1. Endorse the report of the task force on academic freedom and scholarly communication; and ask appropriate university units to implement the specific recommendations contained in the report, and
2. Strongly recommend that all UO faculty members attach an author's addendum to any copyright transfer they sign for their scholarly work.

Thanks to JQ Johnson (Director of Scholarly Communications and Instructional Support for the University of Oregon Libraries) for the alert and for this summary of the task force report endorsed by the Senate:

The implementation  report contains a number of specific recommendations, including an  expectation that the detailed rights faculty members need will vary by  discipline but will typically include adequate rights to self-archive in the UO's institutional repository.  The report also suggests that  authors begin the process of negotiating with their publishers by  using the Science Commons "delayed access" addendum.

... This week Britain's Ministry of Defence (MoD) begins releasing all its files about UFOs — in ministry parlance, "Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon" — on a government website, free for download. ...

[W]hy release the files now? A spokeswoman says the ministry gets as many as 150 or 200 requests for the files each year, and under Britain's Freedom of Information Act is obliged to answer almost all of them. "We have other priorities," she says. "The most resourceful thing to do is just get [these files] into the public domain."

It's an immensely time-consuming process. Ministry staff are now going through each file to redact personal information like names and addresses in correspondence, and then scanning each page for online publishing. The whole procedure should take about three years, with files rolled out in batches, posted online on the U.K. National Archives website. Files are available for free download for the first month; afterward, users will have to pay. ...

Today, the international medical humanitarian organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has launched a website which makes available, for free, published research based on its medical work. ...

"We were concerned that health professionals in developing countries would not be able to pay for access to our medical research and would miss information that could be highly relevant to their work," says Tony Reid, Medical Editor at the MSF office in Brussels. "The vast majority of our medical activities, and by extension our research initiatives, take place in poorer countries. We therefore applaud the willingness of medical publishers to allow us to archive the articles free of charge for the global medical community.

MSF is archiving all its peer-reviewed research and commentary articles on the site. At its launch, there are over 350 articles on HIV care, malaria, tuberculosis, leishmaniasis and other diseases, as well as more general topics such as medical care in emergencies, refugee health and health politics. As new articles are published, they will be archived on the site. ...

... Recently two derivative works of [Wikipedia] compounds were announced: [WiChempedia and Building Chempedia].

This post is primarily to welcome these developments and add some general comments.

• The style of the two sites is different and they appear to be completely independent. They are somewhat complementary ...
• I think both sites use the WP title and URL as the primary identifier in WP. WP also has a set of numeric identifiers which I think represents the internal WP uniquification system. This may matter at some time as WP entries can be deleted or moved while the identifiers are sacrosanct.
• Both sites have a search capability (I have not compared them). I may have missed it but there was no clear way to download results.
• It is not clear what the ingestion strategy is for either site. ...
• I am not clear what data transformation (if any) is carried out automatically by the ingest process. ... An ingestion program either has to deal with all lexical variants (quite a problem) or simply ingest the string. ... Scientific units are not always easy to extract.
• Does either site have an RSS feed for new entries? ...

Our own work on collections of common compounds using RDF is progressing well though it has been technically harder than we thought mainly due to variability in data input. ... We shall, of course make our results freely and Openly available, modulo the difficult issues which have been raised about data sharing are re-use.

I did a quick review of how many open access journals are covered in the Wilson database, Library Literature and Information Science Index (Library Lit). ... Here are the numbers:

Number of all journals in Library Lit.: 417
Number of open access journals in Library Lit.: 30
Number of open access journals in LIS in the DOAJ: 87

It is worth noting that the list of open access journals indexed in Library Lit. includes 13 titles that are not on the DOAJ list of LIS journals. Some of those 13 titles are now defunct. The open access journal, First Monday, is indexed by Library Lit, but the DOAJ lists it in the computer science category not the LIS one. ...

I've also marked up this copy of the DOAJ page of LIS journals to indicate which ones specifically are covered by Library Lit. ...

You may be wondering, "So, what's your point, Stephen?" I got started with this project because I was wondering how well OA journals were being indexed by the subscription databases we refer our students to. From the look of my little survey, Library Literature could be doing better. Are some subscription databases better than others for covering OA journals? ...

Stanford University Libraries has acquired the collection of books, papers and artifacts of the late Harvard paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, author of more than 20 books.

Gould ... decided before his death in 2002 that his work should go to a library that that made a commitment to digitize and cross-link all of his work, according to Rhonda Shearer, Gould's widow. Stanford was the only institution that made that commitment, she said.

"This is something that Steve wanted," Shearer said. "Even though he called himself a Luddite and really had anxiety about technology, he saw that for ideas to compete, they really had to be on the Internet." ...

In addition to writing more than 20 books, many of them best-sellers, Gould also wrote 300 consecutive essays for Natural History, the monthly magazine of the American Museum of Natural History. ...

The library's plan is to digitize Gould's articles as well as the sources he drew on, and cross-link the sources with his own writing. The goal will be make all of Gould's papers freely available over the Internet to anyone who wants to see them. ...

A new National Science Digital Library (NSDL) scholarly publication, Classic Articles in Context (CAC), was launched in April 2008 with an atmospheric science theme: “Climate Change and Anthropogenic Greenhouse Warming: A Selection of Key Articles, 1824-1995, with Interpretive Essays.” Classic Articles in Context will present additional significant scientific questions of the Twentieth Century using landmark and important legacy papers in future issues.

Semantic models for scholarly communications should allow for the creation of new context about published works while mapping relationships to original sources and allowing for materials to be widely discovered and utilized. Classic Articles in Context (CAC) does just that by leveraging NSDL’s NCore wiki plug-in to its Fedora-based data repository to capitalize on NSDL’s ongoing relationships with publishers. Classic Articles in Context (CAC) provides publishers with a way to contribute to the creation of new knowledge around published articles in support of teaching and learning.

To illustrate science as a process that builds, and often turns, on discovery and replication expressed in the archival literature of empirical findings, NSDL works with publishers to make the original, full-texts of select “classic” articles available to students whether or not their institution holds a subscription to the journals in which they appeared. Every article featured in a CAC topical concentration includes a narrative essay that provides an overview of the investigation suitable for introductory undergraduate science courses. The essays identify and/or explain particularly significant aspects of the studies (novel methods, for example) and place them within the context of the overall literature of their field (noting, for example, how a given set of findings influenced subsequent work). ...

Michael Norris, Charles Oppenheim, and Fytton Rowland, Open Access Citation Rates and Developing Countries, a forthcoming presentation at ElPub 2008 (Toronto, June 25-27, 2008).  (Thanks to Stevan Harnad.)  Excerpt:

As part of a larger study of the citation advantage of Open Access (OA) , a study was mounted to see whether a higher proportion of citations to OA articles came from authors based in countries where funds for the purchase of journals were short. Mathematics was chosen as the field to be studied, because no special programme for access in developing countries, such as HINARI, covers it. The results showed that the majority of citations were given by Americans to Americans, but the admittedly small number of citations from authors in developing countries do indeed seem to show a higher proportion of citations being given to OA articles than is the case for citations from developed countries....

One of the basic arguments for OA is that those who cannot afford access to peer-reviewed journal articles could do so if the authors of these articles self-archived their work somewhere on the World Wide Web. It should follow then that a higher percentage of those who cite these OA articles ought to come from countries where access to expensive journals is limited....

For TA articles, the highest ratio of citing to cited articles occurs for citing authors in those countries in the lower middle income bracket, regardless of the nationality of origin of the cited articles. If all but the high income level countries are taken together, then the citation ratio is 4.45 for the TA articles and 9.79 for the OA articles. However, the overwhelming majority of articles are both authored and cited from the high-income countries....

The USA cites itself more than anyone else, which is not surprising given its level of authorship. The other developed countries except for Japan are all at about the same level in terms of within-nation citation. Table 1 suggests that while there is modest difference between the citation ratios of OA and TA articles for citations given by authors in the developed world (3.84 versus 2.92), the difference becomes much greater when citations given by authors from the developing world are studied. The sample from the lowest income countries is very small, but the results from the larger sample in the lower middle income group of countries are striking: a citation ratio of 12.85 for OA articles versus 5.05 for TA articles.

An important political battle is playing out ... that pits the interests of traditional publishing against the emerging model of open access. ...

The results of this battle will have important consequences for research and for the academy, but in some ways it masks a fundamental transformation in scholarly communication that is inevitable.

The truth is that established publishing conventions and the revenues generated from them cannot be preserved. Nor should they be. Universities and their libraries have danced around this issue for at least the last decade and it is now time to be frank about what the future holds for scholarly communication and how academic libraries will spend the money they devote to collections.

We need to begin with a fundamental fact—the cost of scholarly journals has increased at 10 percent per year for the last three decades. ... Between 1975 and 2005 the average cost of journals in chemistry and physics rose from $76.84 to $1,879.56. In the same period, the cost of a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline rose from 55 cents to $1.82. If the gallon of gas had increased in price at the same rate as chemistry and physics journals over this period it would have reached $12.43 in 2005, and would be over $14.50 today.

Despite these price increases most academic libraries have continued to purchase as many scholarly journals as they possibly could and have decreased their book purchasing to do so. It is now time to ask simply: Why are we doing this? ...

My view is that the time has come to simply stop. But even if libraries wished to continue purchasing journals as they have in the past, they will not be able to do so. The money is simply not there. ...

Some journal publishers will lose income and some may suffer economic hardship as a result of library’s inability to keep up with price increases, but if publishers cannot provide a superior product at a cheaper price, then that is what should happen in the competitive market. If the cost of any other product had risen at this rate, we would have long ago found a cheaper substitute. Unfortunately, in the past there has been no good substitute for subscription-based scholarly journals. Now, fortunately, there is: open access.

... I am convinced that one piece of the puzzle will be that academic libraries will commit to curate open access digital content that is important to their campuses. What does curating content entail? There are at least three things academic libraries should do:

1. Digitize special collections, archives, and other unique material. ...

2. Establish repositories to provide access to and archive the digital documents and data that result from the research done on or of importance to the campus. ...

3. Provide the infrastructure for open access publishing, particularly of journals. ...

While there is sometime external funding available for digital projects, it is important that the curation of digital content be base funded. Libraries are in the business of keeping materials for the long term and this cannot be done on soft money. ...

I would propose a simple budget strategy something like the following:

1. Assume the library collections budget will rise at no more than the rate of inflation ...

2. Subtract 1 to 2 percent of the collections budget every year to add to the curation fund. This would slowly build this part of the budget.

3. Reserve the current percentage of the library’s collection budget that is allocated for books and use it to purchase both print and electronic books. ...

4. For the near term, databases will need to be maintained at about their current level ...

5. Spend the remaining portion of the collections budget on journals—recognizing that this will be a constant or slightly declining amount each year and that given the 8 to 12 percent rate of increase in the cost of scholarly journals, journals will have to be cut from the collection on a regular and continuing basis. While this will be painful, we can expect that over time open access alternatives to the titles we are forced to cut will emerge. ...

The Scaling Up Report presents the results of a JISC-funded scoping study to assess the feasibility of a federated model for data repositories in the domain of crystallography. It builds on earlier work in the eBank UK Project and has been based on a mix of desk-based research, a consultation workshop and a series of interviews with stakeholders.

The authors conclude that a federation-based approach is an appropriate strategy for this domain and a Checklist of Community Criteria for Interoperability, summarises the elements which contribute a solid foundation for the model. ...

In addition, a number of Recommendations are made for further investigation. ...

There is good news for those that are learning Spanish and for fans of literature in Spanish. Thanks to an initiative from the Venezuelan Ministry of Culture, literary works from the publishing house Ayacucho Library is now available online for free. For some months now, bloggers and other literary enthusiasts have been able to access and download a wide array of Hispanic literary works available in .pdf format. Bloggers are pleased with the selection and the fact that it is available for readers.

Departamento de Lengua says: ...

Venezuelan publishing house Ayacucho has one of the most interesting lists –both for its literary quality of published works and for the number of works available– in Hispano-American literature around the world. From ancient indigenous traditions to the greatest novels of the 20th century; from the writings of Christopher Columbus to the Comentarios of El Inca Garcilazo. ...

Sarah Stewart reports that

Last week Otago Polytechnic was the first educational institution in Australasia to sign The Cape Town Open Education Declaration....

Will my publisher allow self-archiving? BURP [Bradford University Repository Project], May 2008.  Excerpt:

If you wish to check what Elsevier, SAGE, Blackwell, Maney, Wiley etc permit, simply visit the SHERPA project's RoMEO database...to view publisher policies....The BURP! Team will also help you check whether your articles can be posted on the University's forthcoming repository. Occasionally this means contacting the publishers directly for permission.

Tips on copyright:

• Aim to negotiate a right to self-archive your work if the publisher's copyright agreement does not automatically provide this right.
• Use the JISC copyright tool at to get help in retaining self-archiving rights....

Bob Michaelson, The American Chemical Society and Open Access, Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, Winter 2008.  Excerpt:

...Unfortunately, serious conversation [about OA] is ill-served by some publishers’ strategies, including, regrettably, those pursued by the American Chemical Society.

Editorials in Chemical & Engineering News as far back as 2004 denounced OA as "socialized science" -- whatever that is supposed to mean. In 2005 Nobel Laureate Robert J. Richards published an open letter announcing his resignation from ACS out of disgust at the Society's opposition to OA.

In January 2007 Nature (445, 25 January 2007, 347) reported that ACS was among a group of members of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) that hired "pit bull" Eric Dezenhall to attack the Open Access movement. Dezenhall advised the publishers to focus on simple messages (more honestly: simple-minded dissembling slogans), such as "public access equals government censorship." Indeed, ACS senior Vice President Brian Crawford told Nature,"[w]hen any government or funding agency houses and disseminates for public consumption only the work it itself funds, that constitutes a form of selection and self-promotion of that entity's interests."  By mid-2007 Dezenhall had founded PRISM ("Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine" – "integrity" is presumably used in the Rovian sense), launched by the Executive Council of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the AAP. This organization proceeded to make, without evidence or plausibility, claims about OA presaged in the Nature account:  that it could "undermine the peer review process" and even "open the door to scientific censorship in the form of selective additions to or omissions from the scientific record." Such ludicrous claims led a number of publishers, including Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Columbia University Press, and University of Chicago Press, to disavow PRISM (see e.g. [the Eureka Journal Watch entry on PRISM).

If the ACS regrets its association with PRISM's misstatements, they don’t show it....

If the ACS is to be a party to discussions of OA, they must stop getting their policy advice from PR flacks and start making rational contributions to the discourse. Otherwise they will continue to poison the waters, and deservedly will be accorded no credence.

Sian Harris interviews Brian Crawford in the April/May issue of Research Information.  Crawford is the President of Publications division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and Chairman of the Executive Council of the Professional/Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP).  He was chair of the PSP/AAP Executive Council at the time it hired Dezenhall Resources and launched PRISM.  Excerpt:

What are your views on open access?

We [at the ACS] are in favour of various access models and think authors should have the right to choose. We don’t think that governments or others should mandate what authors do and require them to pay.

Immediately on publication each of our authors is given a link that they can put on their websites or funding body’s site free of charge. There is a limit of 50 downloads of their paper in the first year.

If the author wants to place the whole article on their website or funding body’s site then we have our ‘AuthorChoice’ model where authors pay to make their articles open access. Most of our revenue comes from subscriptions, with a bit from advertising. We don’t see many authors choosing the AuthorChoice option. We’ve had this model out for about a year and less than one per cent of papers are published this way. Not all authors have access to funds that they could use to pay to publish and most of our authors are pleased with the access that others have to their papers anyway.

We enable authors to submit their raw data too. We put this outside our firewall so it is open to non-subscribers too but we do not tag this information.

We left the matter of putting preprints in repositories to editorial discretion on the individual journals and the editors have chosen not to allow this. After publication there is the option to have the free authordirected link or to pay for open access. The society feels it is better to have the published version available.

Comments.  I'll limit myself to three comments here.  But for more comments on his OA position, see my blog archive.

• "We don’t think that governments or others should mandate what authors do and require them to pay."  Not a single OA mandate anywhere requires authors to pay anything.
• "[L]less than one per cent of papers are published [in the AuthorChoice hybrid OA program]."  As I've argued elsewhere, the reason is that the ACS hybrid journal program charges high fees and offers few benefits.  It doesn't let fee-paying authors retain copyright or use CC licenses, and it doesn't promise to reduce its subscription prices in proportion to author uptake (hence embracing a frank double-charge business model).  The uptake rate remains low despite the fact that the ACS requires participation, and payment of the fee, even for authors who only want green OA, not gold OA.
• "We enable authors to submit their raw data too. We put this outside our firewall so it is open to non-subscribers too..."  Peter Murray-Rust reported in April 2007 that the ACS claimed copyright on author data files.

We are proposing to undertake a synthesis of the repositories and preservation programme which will support action. This means that the outputs need to be targeted at decision makers with additional information for those that will have to implement the decisions.

We have taken as a starting point the idea that decision makers are most likely to take note of what we are saying if repositories or preservation address problems that they are already worried about, and that many of these will stem from government, funding council or similar policies which they have to implement.

We have identified policies, decision makers who are concerned with them and ways in which we think that repositories or preservation can help.

We are aware that there will be other policies out there that we should be considering, that there may be other ways in which repositories or preservation could help and there may be other people we need to address.

We would very much welcome comments and thoughts on our thinking so that we can take it forward and start the synthesis. ...

... This is the first exclusively online, open access, MEDLINE-indexed journal dedicated to otolaryngology-head and neck surgery. ...

The OTO-HNS section will feature original articles, including clinical, basic and translational research and trials, critical reviews, editorials and commentaries, policy papers and public health issues, consensus reports, expert opinions, and controversies in the fields of general otolaryngology, otology-neurotology, head and neck oncology and surgery, rhinology, pediatric otolaryngology, facial plastics and reconstructive surgery, and head and neck endocrine (thyroid and parathyroid) surgery.

One may ask: Why is this different from the other OTO-HNS journals? This is an online-only publication, giving it inherent advantages. Recently, the International Journal of Medical Informatics found that even with a rejection rate over 60%, they had a backlog of high-quality accepted papers waiting for print publication. Peer-reviewed online publishing provides the quality assurance without the potential boundaries of space limitation and page budgets. The omission of physical printing also shortens the publication process allowing for rapid turnaround time from acceptance to publication. Online publishing expands the reading audience of a journal. The subscription base of a few thousand is dwarfed by the total number of potential end users (more than 13 million) who have access to a journal through Web-based databases. Such a large potential audience could never have been reached with a print-only publication. Online publishing holds the possibility of enhancing manuscripts with additional material that is not suited for printing. The opportunity to add high-quality images in color, 3-dimensional illustrations, video clips, data sets, computational models, questionnaires, data analyses, podcasts, Webcasts, and PowerPoint presentations immeasurable enhances medical publication.

... [I]n a recent study Bhattacharyya and Shapiro found that the scholarly output (peer-reviewed publications) of young academic otolaryngologists is declining when compared with academic otolaryngologists graduating from prior generations. Leong encourages young otolaryngologists to not only read more but to respond to articles. This sharpens the scientific mind, facilitates discussion, and acts as a catalyst to further research and audit. ...

[The Library of Congress] is the largest library in the world, with more than 138 million items, including books and other print materials, recordings, photographs, maps, sheet music, and manuscripts. LC has made digitized versions of collection materials available online since 1994. ...

Digital Preservation
In December 2000, Congress asked LC to lead a collaborative project called the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). The library has been working with partners from universities, libraries, archives, federal agencies, and commercial content and technology organizations to develop a national strategy to collect, archive, and preserve the growing amounts of digital content, especially materials in digital-only formats, for current and future generations. ...

Historical Content Gets a Viewing
The Library of Congress and History (part of A&E Television Networks) have joined forces to create a multimedia partnership to showcase the library’s collections to the audience of the History brands including history.com, The History Channel, and other television properties. The partnership will also bring historical content to more than 200,000 teachers across the country that use the channel’s branded educational materials in their classrooms. ...

Progress Toward a World Digital Library
In cooperation with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and major libraries and cultural institutions around the world, LC has been leading an effort to establish a World Digital Library that will make available on the internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world. Information about the WDL can be found online. ...

LC recently announced a partnership with the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), an international, graduate-level research university that will be opening in Saudi Arabia in September 2009. The partnership will enable LC to work with KAUST and its WDL partners to develop the history of science in the Arab and Islamic worlds as a major theme in the WDL, which will be launched at UNESCO in early 2009.

Embracing Change
LC has been reaching to embrace many new technologies to fulfill its missions—including podcasting, webcasting, multimedia presentations, and more. Earlier this year it posted several important historical photograph collections through Flickr, inviting the public to tag and comment on the photos and help in providing identifying information. You can access a webcast about this Web 2.0 pilot project online. ...

Back files of last 55 years of Indian Journal of Ophthalmology are now available online (except for a couple of issues). The entire collection of over 3,500 articles is available for free access. IJO is PubMed and SCI indexed journal with a print circulation of over 10,000. ...

Earlier this year, California-based company Metamolecular, launched Chempedia, "a free and continuously-updated online" encyclopaedia of chemical compounds. The database is seen as potentially offering a new approach to overcoming some of the shortfalls of numerous well established - but restricted access - reference works: notably the limited visibility of information, slow update rate, and sometimes-limited coverage of chemical information relevant to more niche areas of specialisation.

Chempedia is built upon two of the biggest free and open chemical information repositories - Wikipedia and PubChem - whose contents the creators have sought to mash up. Wikipedia contains a growing collection of 'chemical compound monographs', which can be indexed relatively simply. However, at present further work remains to include all Wikipedia's 6,000-plus monographs in Chempedia. ...

The compound entries can be updated as soon as possible to reflect newly available information. ...

... As we reported last month, the State of Oregon isn't keen on having its Revised Statutes republished in full, for free, by Internet archives like public.resource.org and Justia. The sites got into a kerfuffle with the state over the information and have since refused to take out a "public" license. While Oregon backed down from its initial cease-and-desist notice, the two sides still cannot come to an agreement. Justia and public.resource.org have since retained counsel to deal with the issue, and their lawyer has already made clear to Oregon that his clients will be posting the entirety of the disputed material by June 2.

While you might think a state would want the laws it passes widely disseminated, the reality is that Oregon makes money licensing its statutes to publishers. State laws are not themselves copyrighted, of course, but Oregon claims that all the ancillary material in the Revised Statutes—including section numbers and headings—is copyrighted. ...

When the debate first flared up, response was quick. Google's William Patry opined that Oregon had gone "wacka wacka huna kuna," which we're pretty sure isn't a compliment. Malamud and his cohorts at Justia got on the phone with Oregon officials, who ended up proposing a "public license." In a letter dated April 30, though, Malamud pointed out that C-SPAN's copyright policy was only 318 words. By contrast, the "public license" offered by Oregon was 2,739 words long and was "incompatible with how public domain data is distributed."

On May 2, the lawyer for both Malamud and Justia informed Oregon that his clients could not accept the license and would be posting the material in question with or without an agreement by June 2. ...

PubMed Central allows users to filter or "limit" searches to OA articles.  To find the option, click the Limits tab on the search page.  (Thanks to Heather Morrison.)

One aspect of this feature seems to be new (more below in the comment), but other aspects are not. 

Here's the part of the Help file on this filter:

Full Text, Free Full Text, and Abstracts

To limit your search results to only citations that include a link to full text, a link to free full text, or an abstract, click the appropriate checkboxes [on the Limits tab].

Alternatively, you may search for citations with links to full text, free full text or include an abstract using the values: full text[sb], free full text[sb], or 'hasabstract'. No search field tag is required for hasabstract.

Comments

• Sometimes when I click on the Limits tab, I see an option labeled "Open Access Articles".  That's what Heather announced and it seems to be new.  At least I haven't seen it before.  But sometimes when I click through, that option is not available, but I see another one to limit searches to "free full text".  That option is not new and I wrote about an earlier version of it in SOAN for August 2005.
• Unfortunately, once my clicks start to bring up the second option, they no longer bring up the first.  Apart from navigation and interface confusion, this inconsistency raises doubts about the scope of the limited searches.  "Free full text" should include the "public access" articles deposited under the NIH public access policy.  But "Open Access Articles" should not.  The reason is that PMC uses the Bethesda definition of "open access", which calls for the removal of most permission barriers, but the NIH policy does not remove any permission barriers and leaves users with no more than fair use.  It's possible, then, that one of the options covers "public access" papers under the NIH policy and the other one does not.  More later, if I get new clarity on this.

The Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic has signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge. (Thanks to Anja Lengenfelder.)

Emily Murphy, French publishing group sets up rival to Wikipedia, The Independent, May 14, 2008.  Excerpt:

...Larousse, the French encyclopaedia created more than 150 years ago, is launching its own – it would say improved – version of Wikipedia.

Its first, free-access, online encyclopaedia will have the same contributor function but, to try to surmount the inherent problem of unreliability of articles, which can be modified by anyone at any time, Larousse has introduced some constraints.

Users who want to contribute have to sign up and their names will then appear on the article they submit. Unlike on Wikipedia, anonymous contributions are not allowed, and once written, contributions become protected.

Alongside the user-written pieces, Larousse will be making available 150,000 articles from its universal encyclopaedia, plus 10,000 images. Larousse is promising more in the future, along with the inclusion later this year of hundreds of video clips from channels such as National Geographic.

The Wikipedia "community" is made up of nearly 390,000 volunteer contributors and it is those that Larousse sees as one of the vital ingredients in Wikipedia's success story. It is hoping to rival this with its own online community and is drawing on its long-established print reputation to encourage people to join in.

"By becoming a contributor to Larousse, you become associated with a publisher of prestige, recognised for the seriousness and reliability of its content," says Isabelle Jeuge-Maynart, the Larousse's managing director. "Respect for an author is central to our concept. That should reassure... experts who are at the moment hesitant to publish their work on the internet." ...

Comments

• The Larousse site is down at the moment, apparently overwhelmed by traffic.  So I can't tell whether the free online edition will use any kind of open license.  If anyone gets through and figures this out, please drop me a line.
• The free Larousse will be more like Citizendium than Wikipedia, in that it will require attribution and use expert peer review.  But it's more like Google's Knols project than Citizendium, in that its articles will be written by single authors and not open to multiple user contributions.
• Remember that just last month Germany's 30-volume Brockhaus Encyclopedia started offering free online access (see our blog post) and the Encyclopedia Britannica started offering free online access for bloggers (see our blog post).
• It's fascinating to watch publishers discover that free online access allows them to retain their brands, their preferred forms of quality control, and a sufficient stream of revenue.  It's fascinating in a different way to watch them systematically explore wikispace and decide how much read-write freedom to offer alongside read freedom.  Finally, it's fascinating that re-use freedom is such a minor issue to the publisher and the press that news reports don't even bring it up.

... Are enough people using OA resources?

Apparently, there is a lot of OA material available, and I assume that there are a lot of OA articles being read and referenced. But is OA being used to directly and positively impact educational access and outcomes? Why or why not?

Is asking “What does it mean to Do OA?” a meaningful or important question?

I ask this because of a fantastic posting that Amee Godwin of OER Commons recently made, titled On “Doing OER”. In this post Amee talks about Open Educational Resources less as things and more as processes. This is a powerful and engaging direction, because it connects creation, use, and re-creation in a cycle, poking at some of the underlying principles of an ecosystem that supports the economics of “openness.”

So, is this an important question relative to OA? Has it already been asked and answered and I missed the conversation?

Are there parallels between OA and other forms of OER?

Of course, the answer is Yes, but are the parallels relevant to the questions posed above? What can practitioners of OA learn from practitioners of OER, and vice versa? ...

With extreme joy and happiness I can now announce that this past Friday (the 9th) the Utah Board of Education formally approved our request to create a new charter school to be called the Open High School of Utah. For those unfamiliar with how US charter schools work, a charter school is a publicly funded school with a specific emphasis - like a performing arts high school. OHSU will be a completely online school (or “virtual school” as they are sometimes called) that will use open educational resources exclusively.

Through partnerships we are building we hope to make the OHSU an “early college high school,” meaning that students will have the opportunity to earn an Associate’s degree at no extra cost at the same time they earn their high school diploma. Our pedagogical approach will be heavily influenced by service learning.

As you can imagine, a high school based on OERs has need of a variety of partnerships - especially partners who are also interested in locating / assembling / building an entire high school curriculum’s worth of OER content. There will be lots of opportunities for volunteers to contribute and become part of the OHSU community - finding appropriately licensed resources, assembling these in ways that conform with their various incompatible licenses (no small challenge!), creating new OERs to fill the gaps in what exists, aligning content structures to state and national standards, etc. ...

... There are a few reasons this is particularly exciting. This school will have a strong concentrated interest in supporting OERs — you can expect the administration to be vocal advocates for favorable policies, funding, etc. The staff will develop deep experience with OERs, which can be shared with colleagues at traditional schools — and carried with them to future jobs. The school’s existence will establish a precedent, encouraging other educators to consider how to use OERs.

In other words, this could be the acorn that starts a forest.

... My presentation [at the University of Bayreuth] had this busy title: "Exceptions, Limitations, Open Access: The Creation of a Copyright Public Domain." My main point: At a time of expanding copyright protection--as a result of automatic protection of nearly all works for a extensive period of years--the law is responding with gestures that attempt to create a "public domain" or at least a multi-facted zone of public protection. I focused on three developments from just the last few months:

(1) The Section 108 Study Group Report. ...

(2) Orphan Works bills just introduced into Congress. ...

(3) The NIH Public Access Policy. While the open access movement is a phenomenon that is less law and mostly copyright management, this particular policy is law. Peer-reviewed publications funded by NIH are now required to be submitted to PubMed Central for public access. This is a very good development. But again my point: Congress is creating a "public domain" be carving out space for public uses.

The contours of the "public domain" are complex. Congress continues to experiment. ... [T]hese three developments in just the last few months demonstrate that the regime of copyright has become too aggressive in its scope and reach. In reaction, Congress is struggling with innovative was to give some benefit back to the public. ...

Diane Harley and four co-authors, Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An In-depth Study of Faculty Needs and Ways of Meeting Them, a "Draft Interim Report" from the University of California Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education, Spring 2008. 

Abstract:   The Center for Studies in Higher Education, with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is conducting research to understand the needs and desires of faculty for in-progress scholarly communication (i.e., forms of communication employed as research is being executed) as well as archival publication. In the interest of developing a deeper understanding of how and why scholars do what they do to advance their fields as well as their careers, our approach focuses on fine-grained analyses of faculty values and behaviors throughout the scholarly communication lifecycle, including sharing, collaborating, publishing, and engaging with the public. Well into our second year, we have posted a draft interim report describing some of our early results and impressions based on the responses of more than 150 interviewees in the fields of astrophysics, archaeology, biology, economics, history, music, and political science.

Our work to date has confirmed the important impact of disciplinary culture and tradition on many scholarly communication habits. These traditions may override the perceived “opportunities” afforded by new technologies, including those falling into the Web 2.0 category. As we have listened to our diverse informants, as well as followed closely the prognostications about the likely future of scholarly communication, we note that it is absolutely imperative to be precise about terms. That includes being clear about what is meant by “open access” publishing (i.e., using preprint or postprint servers for work published in prestigious outlets, versus publishing in new, untested open access journals, or the more casual individual posting of working papers, blogs, and other non-peer-reviewed work). Our work suggests that enthusiasm for technology development and adoption should not be conflated with the hard reality of tenure and promotion requirements (including the needs and goals of final archival publication) in highly competitive professional environments.

Despite its mention in the abstract, there's little about OA in the body of the report:

Electronic publishing should not be used as a proxy for open access publishing, as many commercial journals are accessed predominantly online....

[W]hen choosing where to publish, the stature and selectivity of the publication organ, as well as its appropriateness for targeted audiences, are of importance to all disciplines. We suspect that the desire for “wide readership” is an outgrowth of these criteria and not the primary motivation for selecting a publication venue (i.e., an open-access online publication without a prestigious imprimatur will not usually be chosen over a prestigious commercial publisher)....

We have heard little about a crisis in scholarly communication from our interviewees, with a few exceptions. For example, some biologists exhibit a pro-open access journal bias, are well aware of the serials “crisis,” and may refuse to publish in commercial journals (especially Elsevier)....

PS:  For background, also see the July 2006 report by most of the same authors, from the same Berkeley Center, Scholarly Communication: Academic Values and Sustainable Models.  In my blog excerpts, I highlighted the findings which documented widespread faculty ignorance and misunderstanding of OA.

... [W]e’re getting more emails with questions about how best to share collections of factual data. One of the most common questions: How do I mark my data explicitly as “open access” and free for anyone to use?

In general, we encourage you to choose waivers, like the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (ODC-PDDL) or the Creative Commons CC0 waiver, rather than licenses, such as CC-BY, FDL or other licenses.

The issues surrounding how to treat factual data are complex. To help bring more clarity for those of you exploring your options, here’s a short overview of the reasons why we generally advise using waivers, prepared by Science Commons Counsel Thinh Nguyen.

Facts are (and should be) free
There is long tradition in science and law of recognizing basic facts and ideas as existing in the public domain of open discourse. At Science Commons we summarize that by saying “facts are free.”

... When Congress wrote the Copyright Act, it made sure to spell out that facts cannot be subject to copyright. ...

And there are good reasons for this. Imagine if you couldn’t reference physical constants — like the height of Mount Everest — without permission. ... We all need access to a basic pool of ideas and concepts in order to have any kind of meaningful discourse. So copyright is supposed to protect creative expression–the unique and individual ways we express ourselves–but not the invariant concepts and ideas that we need to think and carry on a conversation.

Licensing facts can cause legal uncertainty and confusion
So why is it that increasingly, especially online, there is talk about licensing factual data–assertions of rights and obligations over assertions of facts? Part of the answer is that as facts get represented in formats that look more like computer code, the impulse is to treat it like any other computer code. And that means putting a license on it. Part of the answer is that the law is still struggling with how to treat databases, and in some countries, database rights have expanded (particularly in Europe under the database directive). Other countries have loosened copyright standards to allow purely factual databases to be protected. (For a more detailed discussion of these issues, see the Science Commons paper, Freedom to Research: Keeping Scientific Data Open, Accessible, and Interoperable [PDF].)

But even if you could find a legal angle from which to impose licensing or contractual controls over factual data, why would you want to? ...

Attribution for facts can add complexity and hamper reuse
Many people cite the desire to receive attribution. In scientific papers, we have a tradition of citing sources for facts and ideas. But those traditions evolved over hundreds of years. There’s a lot of discretion and judgment that goes into deciding whom to cite and when. ... But what happens to common sense when you convert that requirement into a legal requirement? ...

Imposing licensing on data creates all kinds of unanticipated problems. If you have a database with thousands or hundreds of thousands of pieces of facts, does each fact have to come with their own attribution and licensing data? How do we aggregate and recombine such data? ... In the future, will every database need its own database of attribution? ...

This problem, which we call “attribution stacking,” can saddle science with an unbearable administrative burden. It could shut down present and future sites that aggregate and federate data from many different sources. ...

The solution: use a waiver for factual data, not a license or contract
... We think the best answer is to go back to what scientists themselves have been doing for centuries: giving attribution without legal requirements. We think Congress got it right when it excluded facts and ideas from copyright protection. And we think it should stay that way, even when those facts happen to get incorporated into databases. ...