Open Access News

Here's how the Chronicle frames the question for next Wednesday's discussion: "For nearly two years, the world's largest engineering association has placed restrictions on members who live in countries under a U.S. trade embargo, virtually rescinding those engineers' ability to publish research papers in the group's journals. Members have criticized the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, but it has said that U.S. trade regulations make it illegal to edit papers from engineers in those countries. Early this month, word came from the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control that the IEEE was right: A special license is required to edit papers submitted by researchers in embargoed countries. While the IEEE looks forward to resuming editing once it is granted a license, questions remain about how the embargo will affect scientific publishing more broadly. Is it correct to consider the process of academic publishing a form of trade subject to regulation? Will the Treasury Department's policies impede the flow of scientific information and impinge on academic freedom? Does the IEEE shoulder some of the blame for the Treasury Department's decisions, since it asked the department for a clarification of the trade regulations?"

The colloquy guest will be Kenneth R. Foster, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and IEEE member who has "sharply criticized" the IEEE for its treatment of members from embargoed nations.

Ojala slips twice in this generally good introduction to OA for the audience that follows the news about the conventional publishing industry. (1) She writes that PLoS "strikes a middle ground between traditional peer-reviewed scientific publishing and self-publishing." Wrong. PLoS Biology will be peer-reviewed and all PLoS journals in the pipeline will be peer-reviewed. (2) She argues that the CC attribution license used by PLoS is equivalent to the public domain. "[I]t's hard to see what types of rights the copyright holder retains." No, it's not hard; it's spelled out in the license. Authors do not consent to the making or distribution of misattributed or unattributed copies of their work.

Update. SunnComm has dropped its plan to prosecute Halderman. (PS: Either SunnComm would have won in court or it would have lost. If it had won, it would have exposed the DMCA as brutal and itself as a bully that used a bad law to suppress the truth about a bad product. If it had lost, then it would look even more foolish than it does now. The legal threat was lose-lose, and finally someone noticed.)

• Kathleen Wets, Dave Weedon, and Jan Velterop, Post-publication filtering and evaluation: Faculty of 1000
• Alastair Dryburgh, Alternative futures for academic and professional publishing
• Mats G. Lindquist, Organization and technology for the recording of science
• Kimberly Beckwith, Googled: the quest for visibility on the Internet
• Greg Tananbaum, Of wolves and and boys: the scholarly communication crisis
• Elizabeth Gadd, Charles Oppenheim, and Steve Probets, RoMEO studies 4: an analysis of journal publishers' copyright agreements

(PS: Here's a short reply to Ewing's objection. First, PLoS, BMC, and other open-access journal publishers waive their processing fees in cases of economic hardship. Second, BMC offers institutional memberships, which are roughly equivalent to prepaid processing fees at a discounted price. We don't know yet whether PLoS will follow suit. Third, as Declan Butler noted, many foundations that fund research are willing to pay these fees for their grant recipients. They are willing to consider the cost of open-access dissemination to be part of the cost of research. Fourth, while some of these solutions will not work in disciplines that are not as well-funded as medicine (in Ewing's field of mathematics, for example, or mine, philosophy), that is no objection to using these solutions in the fields where they do work. The success of this business model in biomedicine is progress for biomedicine, and does not imply that the same model will be adopted without modification in (say) mathematics or philosophy. Sixth, when foundations do not pay these fees, universities can. Ewing notes that many universities cannot afford to do so, which is certainly true today. But he doesn't note that, if open access spreads, then every university will realize large savings from the cancellation, conversion, or demise of expensive subscription-based journals. The natural use for this savings is to support the less expensive and more beneficial open-access model of archiving and publication that made it possible. Finally, there are other ways to bring about open access to research articles that do not depend on having research grants, wealthy employers, or windfall savings in the library budget. The most important is eprint archiving, which authors can do on their own, and ought to do, right now.)

Note that I'm not calling this open access. Here's a statement from the project web site: "A participating journal gives NLM permanent rights to archive the scanned material and make it freely available to the public through PMC, subject to normal 'fair use' provisions of copyright law [emphasis added]. As with existing content in PMC, copyright for the scanned material remains with the publisher or with individual authors, as applicable." As I read this, users must ask the copyright holder's permission if they want to copy an entire article e.g. to print, share with a colleague, hand out to a class, or post online. If true, this is a rare case of removing price barriers but not permission barriers to a body of literature. Open access removes both. (Can anyone clarify the user rights to this literature? Is it just fair use or is it closer to open access? I'm trying to find out, but would appreciate any help.)

Quoting Vivian Siegel, executive editor of PLoS: "The goal of this journal is to become the first destination for research in the life sciences and to compete head-on with the existing high-profile journals. It's about doing something you believe in rather than doing things the way everybody else does them and I think that's the hallmark of the best scientists." Quoting Alan Leshner, publisher of Science: "We're all scientists and we like experiments, well here's an experiment. And if it works then we'll all take the lessons from it." Quoting Jan Wilkinson, head librarian at the University of Leeds: "We need to get academics to recognise the craziness of what they've been doing. They do all this work and then they just hand it over for free, and then the publishers sell it back to us at these rip-off prices."