Welcome to the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #111
July 2, 2007
by Peter SuberRead this issue online
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-02-07.htm
Contents
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SOAN is published and sponsored by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).
http://www.arl.org/sparc/Additional support is provided by Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL), experts in converting research documents to XML.
http://www.dclab.com/public_access.aspProblems and opportunities (blizzards and beauty)
What makes you interrupt important work? We all have our provocations and temptations. For me, two recurring excuses are very bad weather and very good weather. A blizzard will make me drop everything and shovel snow. A beautiful moment of late-afternoon sunlight will make me drop everything and take pictures. Your answers may fall into roughly the same two categories, which we could call solving problems and seizing opportunities.
I think about OA in the same terms, perhaps because it's interrupting my work in philosophy. There are two deep reasons to pursue OA, even to interrupt important work to pursue it: to solve problems and to seize opportunities. They're not the same thing. One is duress and one is pleasure. One is a push from behind and the other a pull from the front. We work on problems with dutiful determination and on opportunities with creative unconstraint. Even when they stress us, there's a difference between worry that a nagging problem will persist and worry that a beautiful opportunity will slip through our fingers.
I'd like to think that we'd pursue OA even if historical circumstances gave us only one of these motivations rather than both at once --that is, if we suffered from access problems and had no new technology to exploit, or if we had a spectacular new technology to exploit but no particular problem to solve.
But we have both and we should acknowledge it more often. Too much of our conversation is problem-oriented. Let's complement it with a conversation that is opportunity-oriented.
Yes, OA solves problems. There's the access-to-authors or knowledge problem for readers. There's the access-to-readers or impact problem for authors. There's the affordability problem for libraries. There's the unfairness problem of making taxpayers pay a second time for access to research they funded. There's the inefficiency problem of funding useful research that isn't accessible to everyone who can make use of it. There's the perversity problem of making a public commitment to use public money to expand knowledge and then hand control over the results to businesses who believe, correctly or incorrectly, that their revenue and survival depend on limiting access to that knowledge.
Then there are the problems arising from the subscription business model itself. The chief problem is not that subscriptions cost money, because the alternatives also cost money. It's not even that subscriptions in the sciences cost a *lot* of money. The subscription model has problems even if we assume that the OA alternative will cost exactly the same (which I don't think is true). The subscription model makes a publisher's method of cost recovery function as an access barrier. It requires artificial scarcity for information when digital technologies can abolish information scarcity altogether. It makes publishers insist on controlling access to research they didn't perform, write up, or fund. It makes them act (to use the wonderful PLoS analogy) like midwives who insist on keeping the baby rather than midwives who deliver the baby, hand it back to its parents, and take payment for services rendered. It means that after publishers add value through peer review and copy editing they feel financial pressure to subtract value by imposing password barriers, locking files to prevent copying or cutting/pasting, freezing data into images, cutting good articles solely for length, and turning gifts into commodities which may not be further shared. Because journals don't publish the same articles, they don't compete for readers or subscribers (even if they compete for authors), removing market pressures for publishers to keep subscription prices low or even correlated with their size, costs, impact, or quality.
The subscription model doesn't scale with the explosive growth in the volume of published research, and it wouldn't scale even if prices were low. It entails that as the volume of published research grows, the accessible percentage of it for the average library shrinks, and that the faster the literature grows, the faster the accessible percentage shrinks. It means that despite their growing access gaps, libraries end up paying for bundles of journals when local patrons only use a subset, and whole journals when they only use certain articles. It means that when they pay for electronic journals, which are increasingly replacing print journals, they license rather than own copies and suffer under licensing terms and software locks that limit usage much more than they were ever limited in using paper journals. It means that subscribers pay for more than they need and get less than they need, a problem severely aggravated by hyperinflationary price increases. Finally, it means that different universities pay redundantly for access to the same literature, instead of sharing the costs so that each pays for part and together all pay for all.
There's a lot of snow to shovel here. But...
There are also beautiful opportunities to seize. There's the fact that the internet emerged just as journal subscription prices were reaching unbearable levels. There's the fact that the internet widens distribution and reduces costs at the same time. There's the fact that digital computers connected to a global network let us make perfect copies of arbitrary files and distribute them to a worldwide audience at virtually no cost. There's the fact that unrestricted access to digital files supports forms of discovery and processing impossible for paper texts and DRM-clamped digital files. There's the fact that for 350 years, scholars have willingly (even eagerly) published journal articles without payment, a custom that frees them to consent to OA without losing revenue. There's the fact that OA is already lawful and doesn't require copyright reform, even if it would benefit from reforms of the right kind. There's the fact that OA is within the reach of authors acting alone and needn't wait for publishers, legislation, or markets. There's the fact that, for researchers acting on their own, the goal of OA is even easier to accomplish than the goal of affordable journals.
Let me elaborate on one of these opportunities a bit. The Budapest Open Access Initiative said that "[a]n 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." OA is the name of the beautiful opportunity created by this convergence of the willingness of scholars to give away their work and the existence of a medium for delivering that work at vanishing marginal cost to a worldwide audience. If you have the willingness of authors but not the medium, then you have scholarship in the age of print. If you have the medium but not the willingness, then you have music and movies in the age of the internet (so far). The beautiful opportunity for researchers is that we now have both.
Here's a less obvious but even more fundamental opportunity. Knowledge is "non-rivalrous" (to use a term from the economics of property). That means we can share it without dividing it, and consume it without diminishing it. My possession and use of some knowledge doesn't exclude your possession and use of the same knowledge. By contrast, familiar physical goods like land, food, and machines are all rivalrous. To share them, we must take turns or settle for portions.
We're very fortunate that knowledge is non-rivalrous. We can all know the same facts or ideas without my knowledge blocking yours or yours blocking mine. We're even more fortunate that speech is non-rivalrous, since this allows us to articulate and share our knowledge without reducing it to a rivalrous commodity. We can all hear the same spoken words without my listening blocking yours or yours blocking mine.
But for all of human history before the digital age, writing has been rivalrous. Written or recorded knowledge became a material object like stone, clay, skin, or paper, which was necessarily rivalrous. Even when we had the printing press and photocopying machines, and could make many copies at comparatively low cost, each copy was a rivalrous material object. Despite its revolutionary impact, writing was hobbled from birth by this tragic limitation. We could only record non-rivalrous knowledge in a rivalrous form, much as we could only translate one poem into a different poem.
Digital texts, however, are non-rivalrous. If we all have the equipment to support them, then we can all have copies of the same digital text without excluding one another, without multiplying our costs, and without depleting our resources. Digital writing is the first kind of writing that does not reduce recorded knowledge to a rivalrous object.
I've heard physicists refer to the prospect of room-temperature superconductivity as a "gift of nature". Unfortunately, it's not quite within reach. But the non-rivalrous property of digital information is a gift of nature that we've already grasped and put to work. We only have to stand back a moment to appreciate it. To our ancestors, the prospect of recording knowledge in precise language, symbols, sounds, or images without reducing the record to a rivalrous object would have been magical or miraculous. But we do it every day now and it's losing its magic.
The danger is not that we already take it for granted but that we might stop short and fail to take full advantage of it. The point is not to marvel at its potential but to seize the opportunities it creates. It can transform knowledge-sharing if we let it.
We take advantage of this gift when we post information online and permit free access and unrestricted use for every user with an internet connection. But if we charge for access, enforce exclusion, create artificial scarcity, or prohibit essential uses, then we treat the non-rivalrous digital file like a rivalrous physical object, dismiss the opportunity, and spurn the gift.
I don't want to create an artificial distinction between solving problems and seizing opportunities, which are intimately connected. In our case, we're solving access problems by seizing the opportunities created by digital computers connected by digital networks exchanging non-rivalrous digital information. So if you're working on solving a problem, don't stop. But if you find yourself thinking that the task of promoting OA is just a battle against problems, take a step back. It's a lot more than that. It's also the creative and open-ended process of seizing a beautiful opportunity.
This dual perspective matters for morale. It also matters for strategy, since it affects our conception of the goal and our conception of who our natural allies are in the larger cause of taking advantage of the opportunities created by digital information and digital technology. It affects our horizons.
When publishers argue that there are no access problems, and that we shouldn't fix what isn't broken, there are two answers. First, that's mistaken; there are deep and serious access problems; publishers who really don't know this should should talk more to the libraries who subscribe to their journals, and even more to the libraries who don't. But second, leaving that quarrel entirely to one side, there are good reasons to pursue OA anyway, even reasons urgent enough to interrupt important work.
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Round-up
Here's what happened, or what I noticed, since the last issue, emphasizing action and policy over scholarship and opinion. I put the most important items first, with double asterisks, and otherwise cluster them loosely by topic. Most of the time, I link to my blog postings, not to the sources themselves, because I only want to include one link and my blog postings usually bring many relevant links together.
** The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) announced its long-anticipated OA mandate for research publications by HHMI employees. HHMI will also pay publishers, starting with Elsevier and Wiley, to allow deposits of the HHMI-authors' peer-reviewed manuscripts (not the published editions) into PubMed Central.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#4844153973344694117
** The UK Medical Research Council added a data access policy to its larger open access policy.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#6230922837205900386
** Spain's Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (or Spanish National Research Council, CSIC) converted 12 of its 32 journals to OA and plans to convert the rest.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#2426741570139280278
** A bill introduced in the Brazilian Parliament would mandate public universities to mandate OA to their research output. Brazilian OA advocates are circulating a petition to support the bill.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#3819319683389064030
** The Senate Appropriations Committee approved an appropriations bill that would strengthen the NIH public access policy from a request to a requirement. We still need approval from the full Senate, similar action from the House, and a signature from the President.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#2598595384408785627
** The US Department of Energy launched WorldWideScience.org (previously called Science.World), an OA portal and federated search engine for scientific research in 15 countries.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#3292285190593019343
** Sweden launched a project to improve the infrastructure for the nation's research output and at the same time to increase the OA portion of that output.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#3737996908083406134
** Lund University launched Journal Info, an online tool to help scholars evaluate journals where they might submit their work. It covers OA and non-OA journals, and shows the journal's publisher, ISSN, for- or non-profit status, and how it rates on some quality and impact metrics. For non-OA journals, it recommends some OA alternatives and indicates the journal's self-archiving policy, subscription price per article, and subscription price per citation.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#2666478138185810596
** In April, the American Geophysical Union launched a hybrid OA program for most of its 19 journals.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#6413015584944115039
** In January 2007, the University of Amsterdam launched an Open Access fund to help cover publication fees charged by fee-based OA journals.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#7571355509646480273
** The University of Nottingham also set up an OA publishing fund.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#308245843037850029
* WIPO unexpectedly agreed to revise its mandate to include "access to knowledge" (A2K) issues. This improves the prospects for the draft A2K Treaty (May 2005), which includes a provision (Article 5-2) mandating OA for publicly-funded research.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#617318795328819360
* The German government is using public money to fund scientific articles for the German Wikipedia.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#44206676402628259
* The Ethics Committee (Comité d'éthique or COMETS) of France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) issued an opinion recommending the broadest possible dissemination of research publications and data.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#7613456567010100067
* The EC released minutes of the April meeting of its High Level Expert Group on Digital Libraries. One of the main agenda items was "how to ensure more open access to scientific research...."
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#6846466226851031600
* The Australian Research Quality Framework (RQF), despite earlier expectations and relevant national policy, will discourage rather than encourage OA archiving by Australian researchers.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#6047246339506004534
* Norway's State Secretary for the Ministry of Education and Research, Lisbet Rugtvedt, publicly endorsed OA.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#9177158592490223270
* The Rector of the University of Oslo, Geir Ellingsrud, publicly endorsed OA.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_07_01_fosblogarchive.html#2319545587839270964
* Cases in Public Health Communication and Marketing is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#8226194281617681035
* COnTEXTES: Revue de sociologie de la littérature is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from Revues.org and the Department of Languages and Romance Literature at the University of Liege.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#6556493614072943263
* The Tehran University of Medical Sciences publishes 22 journals, all of them OA. (Not new but new to me.)
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#5881941974403222378
* The Canadian Library Association will convert most of its publications to OA and encourage its members to self-archive.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#8463547314670509168
* Canada's Atlantic Provinces Library Association will convert the APLA Bulletin to OA.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#5946080347866302436
* The European Respiratory Society is converting its journal, European Respiratory Review, to OA.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#3105692660421513106
* Charles Ellwood Jones reported that three more journals have converted to OA: AIGIS: Elektronisk tidsskrift for klassiske studier i Norden; Geochronometria; and the Middle East Technical University Journal of the Faculty of Architecture.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#7195696415700592537
* OpenDemocracy.net has converted its publications to OA.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#5335190080007057710
* Five researchers asked the executive committee of the Association for Computational Linguistics to convert its journal, Computational Linguistics, to OA.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_05_27_fosblogarchive.html#2352428322953159927
* ETH Zurich is digitizing and providing OA to the backfiles of the technical journals of the Schweizerischer Ingenieur- und Architektenverein (SIA, Swiss Engineers and Architects Society).
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#1087999643260567628
* The Canadian Anthropology Society provided OA to the back issues (2002-2005) of its journal, Anthropologica.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#1551089007343266131
* Libertas Academica added five new titles to its list of OA journals: Bioinformatics and Biology Insights; Clinical Medicine: Arthritis; Clinical Medicine: Cardiology; Clinical Medicine: Respiratory and Pulmonary Medicine; and Clinical Medicine: Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Disorders. Two have editors but all five are still recruiting members for their editorial boards.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#1456440980621789486
* The Journal of Medical Sciences Research (JMSR) is a forthcoming OA journal now calling for papers and recruiting members of its editorial board.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#1036565849429716232
* The Canadian Games Study Association (apparently no web site yet) is launching a new peer-reviewed OA journal, "Loading...". It's looking an editor, an editorial board, and referees.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#8671897284863264315
* Eric Mockensturm launched a wiki, Open Source Publishing 2.0, outlining a proposal on which he is inviting collaboration.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#1577850726645914769
* The Royal Society announced new, lower publication fees for its EXiS Open Choice (hybrid OA) journals.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#524001675594050817
* The Journal of Experimental Botany (one of the 50 Oxford hybrid journals) now waives its publication fee for authors from institutions that pay for a subscription.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#8849322637791721469
* Springer and the Dutch library consortium UKB (Universiteitsbibliotheken en de Koninklijke Bibliotheek) announced a joint OA initiative. Springer's OA hybrid journals will waive their publication fees for authors from UKB institutions, and these OA articles may appear immediately in the institutional repositories of UKB institutions.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#2045050536723218835
* The Public Library of Science announced a price increase for next year and annual price reviews.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#8080634300767591290
* The Public Library of Science announced a new crop of high impact factors for its OA journals.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#1335898804943001228
* BioMed Central announced that its Malaria Journal now has the highest impact factor of any journal in the category of Tropical Medicine.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#4443448986493334108
* Thomson Scientific agreed to track five more independent OA journals published by BioMed Central for impact factors.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#3785015385895183212
* INASP and the Lund University Library announced a partnership to increase the visibility of OA journals published by developing countries.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#1767958575291013660
* In May, JSTOR's Bruce Heterick gave an interview in which he said that JSTOR was considering open access. But in June Heterick clarified that he meant broadening access, not open access.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#6488467510590719465
* SciTalks is a new portal for OA videos about science.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#8581700008464540195
* The Wellcome Trust launched a collection of OA images from the history of medicine.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#2956398261301786566
* Although the Depot was announced in April, it officially launched in June.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#1909207502292749184
* DRIVER launched a wiki for sharing information on European repositories.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#8098944916837126029
* DRIVER is working with Spain's e-ciencia project and expects that by September all the repositories at Madrid universities will comply with the DRIVER Guidelines.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#8513339822498997598
* Dean Giustini reports that, according to unnamed sources, the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) are planning to launch a Canadian version of PubMed Central.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#2285740524497231035
* AgEcon Search is an OA repository for agriculture and applied economics at the University of Minnesota, and now it's also a SPARC Partner.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#6151277499012560082
* The Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance converted to OA.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#2496559553064295455
* Nature launched three OA resources at once: Nature Reports Climate Change, Nature Reports Stem Cells, and Nature Precedings. The last a preprint exchange for biology, medicine, chemistry, and geoscience, using CC licenses, DOIs, RSS feeds, and Web 2.0 features like user tags, ratings, and discussions.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#6813576335628605867
* Nature launched Scintilla, an OA news aggregator for RSS and Atom feeds. It supports user ratings, recommendations, and interest groups.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#616081849089404129
* Nature created another OA supplement, this time on Glycochemistry & Glycobiology.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#7707899528117087071
* Citizendium is planning major changes in governance and scope. Founder Larry Sanger thinks they are large enough to warrant the label Citizendium 2.0.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#2935407061431934614
* The Internet Archive will harvest, manage, search, and preserve the OA content of the E-Print Network from the US Department of Energy's Office of Scientific and Technical Information. The network currently embraces more than one million full-text OA research papers.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_07_01_fosblogarchive.html#1034654103769435892
* The US Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) reported the first wave of OA documents from its Microfiche Digitization Project.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#7783189519897973939
* OMB Watch launched an action alert to prevent the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from gutting its OA database on toxic pollution in the United States.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#3600077443570573746
* Starting in August, New Zealand will make public statistics OA, reversing a long-standing to charge for access.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#2216849932441181748
* Google announced a Public Sector Initiative to improve its crawling of OA databases hosted by federal, state, and local government agencies in the US.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#4125548949627658402
Two new UK government reports support wider access to UK public sector information but without endorsing full OA.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_07_01_fosblogarchive.html#1751805123879542818
* The UK Department of Trade and Industry issued the Government Response to the Office of Fair Trading Study on removing access barriers to public sector information. On OA to research literature, the government response inconsistently supports both the RCUK policy (an OA mandate) and cost-recovery access fees.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#562637516488078685
* A new JISC report by Liz Lyon recommends OA for research data. It also summarizes the public statements supporting OA policies and the data access policies for major research funders, data centers, and repositories in the UK.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#6091796389894225341
* JISC released the final report on project SPECTRa project (Submission, Preservation and Exposure of Chemistry Teaching and Research Data), which ended its work in March.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#1162433140923305146
* EDINA announced the DataShare project to enhance institutional repositories for handling OA datasets.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#2707830362118423450
* DataLibre is a new "group blog, inspired by CivicAccess.ca, which believes all levels of Canadian governments should make civic information and data accessible at no cost in open formats to their citizens."
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#676691085515792896
* Akamai opened up its real-time web monitor, formerly restricted to paying customers. The monitor shows real-time traffic volume, latency times, and attack frequencies around the world.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#8463067671220890856
* Two projects began offering OA to carbon emissions data gleaned from their online carbon footprint calculators: (1) Zerofootprint, in collaboration with BusinessObjects, and (2) the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#5462838582826994502
* The Open Knowledge Foundation released its Guide to Open Data Licensing.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#769000484896114512
* The Open Knowledge Foundation launched its Open Textbook Project.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#8073523585917509231
* A new book digitization project from Kirtas Technologies, maker of a book-scanning machine, and BookSurge, a subsidiary of Amazon specializing in print-on-demand (POD), will digitize rare public-domain books and sell POD versions through Amazon. The libraries at Emory University and the University of Maine are two of the first to open their rare book collections to the project and both say that they will provide OA to their copies of the resulting ebooks.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#1757609993755923316
* All 12 universities in the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) joined the Google Library project.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#8425344660065680694
* McGraw-Hill added a Google Book Search box to its web site even though it's still suing Google to halt the Google Library Project.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#13411880071430295
* Richard Charkin, CEO of Macmillan, took two laptop computers from the Google booth at BookExpo America because the owners "had not specifically told us not to steal" them. He returned the machines and proudly confessed on his blog, arguing that the laptop theft was analogous to the Google Library Project.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#8193891538753976103
* Tim O'Reilly published a detailed case study of how the OA edition of an O'Reilly title affected the sales of the print edition.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#3491093617879187766
* Project Gutenberg Canada officially launched yesterday (Canada Day).
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#8121918634460376395
* The German UNESCO Commission (Deutschen UNESCO-Kommission or DUK) published an OA handbook, Open Access: Chancen und Herausforderungen - ein Handbuch, with separate sections by 38 authors.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#76404306002003177
* Polimetrica's 2006 book, Open Access, Open Problems (edited by Giandomenico Sica) was OA from birth, and in June the publisher self-archived it in E-LIS.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#5173632897722600261
* Washington's Center for Hellenic Studies is making an ultra-high-res digital and OA copy of the world's oldest edition of Homer's Iliad.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#16231397857136173
* Starting yesterday (July 1, 2007), all scientific publications of the Hamburg University Press will be OA. The press will also sell print-on-demand editions from its own web site and through traditional booksellers.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#8187318866458204590
* Austria's International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#1511650272310540934
* The University of Minnesota Libraries created a page of Q & A on Author's Rights. Six of the questions cover the CIC Author Addendum, which UMN adopted on May 3.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#6633741678787045570
* A new DINI report says (without detail) that the University of Oldenburg has committed itself to OA.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#3059942350667453401
* Canada's University of Victoria streamlined its process for the electronic submission for electronic theses and dissertations. (In most cases, when theses and dissertations are submitted electronically, they become OA.)
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#5852527127888221869
* Roger Schonfeld presented, and then posted, some of the results of an Ithaka study of author attitudes toward OA journals.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#7311028512721345481
* Susanna Powers reported the results of her online survey of how and whether libraries catalog OA journals.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#6481607547750047849
* The Research Information Network (RIN) announced a new study of the data access practices in different fields. The study will be funded by JISC and the Natural Environment Research Council, and performed by Key Perspectives.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#5126844806703166372
* The Primary Research Group is planning a survey of institutional "depositories" and posted a call for help in framing the questions.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#7244208785241594865
* The UKSG released its final report on the feasibility of developing a Usage Factor for journals and journal articles. (I've argued that usage measurements will systematically undercount the usage of OA articles, a problem the UKSG acknowledges but says is "not...insurmountable".)
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#6731884814176328244
* SPARC named Ted and Carl Bergstrom the SPARC Innovators for 2007.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#76003651946435649
* SPARC announced the SPARC Discovery Awards, a video contest for videos on information sharing. Winners will receive a cash award and a Sparky, and have their videos screened at the American Library Association Midwinter Conference.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#2864517652190707709
* Reportlinker, the search engine specializing on OA market research, won a Best Hope 2007 award from France's IE Club.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#1377955976434635493
* PMC now hosts more than 1,000,000 free online full-text research articles.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#6349592961301768282
* SHERPA's RoMEO database now contains more than 300 publisher policies on self-archiving, doubling the number of entries since last year.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#70098054654104924
* BMC Bioinformatics received 105 manuscript submissions in May 2007, the first time the submissions tally for any BMC journal reached triple digits in a single month.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#6538350148107299137
* Submissions to Hindawi OA journals topped 500 in May 2007, up 70% from May 2006.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#5852577866479224355
* Elsevier and FAST announced a joint project to offer free online "topic pages" on scientific topics.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#3123729169767777826
* Two UK universities, a UK hospital, and an anonymous US donor have launched an OA research project to restore sight to those blinded by Age-Related Macular Degeneration.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#2330234969155123804
* The Abbey Library of St. Gallen --the oldest library in Switzerland-- created a free online digital library, Codices Electronici Sangallenses, containing high-res digital copies of 144 manuscripts (57,500+ pages). It plans to add many more from its collection dating back to the 8th century.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#3936858742187872819
* ProQuest will complete the migration of its dissertation database to its new platform on July 22, 2007. The new platform includes an option for OA theses and dissertations called PQDT Open.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#4981267946283350089
* Public Resource has set up web interface to help citizens buy public domain documents sold by US federal government agencies. It asks buyers to donate a copy to Public Resource, which will then provide OA to it from its own web site.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#7553021972233952999
* Sara Kuhn launched a new blog, OATES : Open Access To Eye and Skin, on ophthalmology and dermatology.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#1294018054586349016
* In the Technobabble list of the Top 50 analyst bloggers, the top three positions went to James Governor, Stephen O’Grady, and Michael Coté, all of them open-source analysts at RedMonk. All RedMonk research is OA.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#4739668437521261158
* OA champion Sharon Terry was named to the Google Health Advisory Council.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#8724653706074110657
* Ismael Peña López translated the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing into Catalan and Spanish.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_10_fosblogarchive.html#1975288376477171774
* Creative Commons retired its DevNations license because it conflicted with the principles of open access. The license provided free online access only for developing countries.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#1064113901166249663
* The People's Open Access Education Initiative is a new OA project to improve healthcare and health education in developing countries.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_24_fosblogarchive.html#3513919287544040570
* The Indian Consortium for Educational Transformation launched a national open education project called Virtual Schools and Learning Home.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#6130986660864719493
* The SURF Foundation annual report summarizes (among other things) the foundations OA-related activities from 2006, including the DARE program, the Promise of Science site, and the HBO Knowledge Bank.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#6638455665337380050
* The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) annual report summarizes the many OKF projects from the past year, including the Open Knowledge Definition, Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN), KForge, Open Shakespeare, Open Economics, and campaigns on INSPIRE, OfCom, and WIPO.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#3610865493401681870
* At the iCommons summit in Dubrovnik, Lawrence Lessig announced that he is shifting his scholarship and activism from copyright and OA-related issues to the corruption of the political process. One of his reasons (as he elaborated in a blog post) is that "we will not solve the IP related issues until these 'corruption' related issues are resolved."
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_17_fosblogarchive.html#8177427601385238487
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Erratum
In the round-up section of the June SOAN, I mistakenly said that Michael Geist's inquiry under Canada's Access to Information Act discovered a lack of interest in OA at the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). I should have said that he discovered a lack of interest in OA at the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
The NHMRC is an Australian agency which encourages OA archiving for the research it funds.
My erroneous newsletter sentence was summarizing my accurate blog post of May 28, 2007. (So what was I thinking?) My apologies to the NHMRC. Thanks to Jim Till for his sharp eye.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#3060380083201983050
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Coming this month
Here are some important OA-related events coming up in July.
* July 4, 2007. Start of Second Annual World eBook Fair, which will highlight over 680,000 OA books.
http://www.resourceshelf.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/ebookfair_1.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_06_03_fosblogarchive.html#5672029435886644035
* July 31, 2007. The OpenLOCKSS project ends its work of recruiting OA journals in the UK to be preserved in the LOCKSS system.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/3715.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_04_01_fosblogarchive.html#117571784650588892
* Notable conferences this month
Caribbean Digital Libraries Workshop (sponsored by UNESCO and NALIS) (OA is among the topics)
http://library2.nalis.gov.tt/Default.aspx?tabid=267
Port of Spain, Trinidad, July 10-13, 2007
Transitioning to Open Access: Action and Advocacy (sponsored by CARL, SPARC, and the CLA's Task Force on Open Access; this is a pre-conference to the PKP meeting, below)
http://oalibrarian.blogspot.com/2007/03/cla-open-access-pre-conference.html
Vancouver, July 11, 2007
Legal Framework for eResearch Conference 2007 (OA is among the topics)
http://www.apo.org.au/webboard/items/2007/03/139783-upload-00001.pdf
Queensland, July 11-12, 2007
First International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference (OA is among the topics)
http://ocs.sfu.ca/pkp2007/
Vancouver, July 11-13, 2007
--Transitioning to Open Access: Action and Advocacy, a pre-conference, July 11, 9:00 - 12:00 (sponsored by SPARC, CARL, and the Canadian Library Association's Task Force on Open Access)
http://ocs.sfu.ca/pkp2007/cla-pre-conference.php
The Fifth Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning
http://www.london.ac.uk/pcf5
London, July 13-17, 2007
Improving Access to Australian Publicly Funded Research - Advancing Knowledge and the Knowledge Economy (sponsored by Australia's National Scholarly Communications Forum)
http://www.humanities.org.au/Events/NSCF/NSCF2007/NSCF2007.htm
Canberra, July 16, 2007
Institutional repositories: a workshop on creating an information infrastructure for the scholarly community (sponsored by eIFL)
http://www.eifl.net/cps/sections/services/eifl-oa/oa_calendar/event/20070625T125207-storage-200@openxchange
Johannesburg, July 16-19, 2007
* Other OA-related conferences
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/conf.htm
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Housekeeping
* I've added 16 new conferences to my conference page since the last issue. In the next few days I'll delete the second asterisk marking them and the new entries will blend into the rest of the collection.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/conf.htm
==========
This is the SPARC Open Access Newsletter (ISSN 1546-7821), written by Peter Suber and published by SPARC. The views I express in this newsletter are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of SPARC or other sponsors.
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Timeline of the Open Access Movement
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm
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Peter Suber
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters
peter.suber@earlham.edu
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