Open Access News

[Vaknin] The long-heralded transition from free content to fee-based information may revive the fortunes of online reference vendors. But as long as the Internet -- with its 2,000,000,000 visible pages (and 5 times as many pages in its databases) -- is free, encyclopedias have little by way of a competitive advantage. Could you please comment on these statements?

[Spain] I agree. Still, Open Directories and free powerful search engines (which, let's remember, make their money by trying to sell you goods and services relating to the keywords used in your search) only constitute 5 percent (or less) of what amounts to "research."

• Pritpal S. Tamber, Fiona Godlee, Peter Newmark, Open access to peer-reviewed research: making it happen. After reviewing several approaches to OA and their business models, the authors conclude: "Scientific research should be freely accessible to all. Free access is a public good --much research is publicly funded and involves members of the public as participants. Authors and peer reviewers provide their their work free of charge. The cost of peer review and dissemination can, and should be, covered in ways that do not limit access to information and so do not hinder scientific communication. Funding agencies, academic institutions, promotion and tenure committees, and authors can all work to promote open access. Funding agencies and institutions can encourage their researchers to publish in open-access journals. They can also explore a range of ways of shifting budgets away from journal subscriptions, including allowing processing charges to be routinely payable from research grants. Promotion and tenure committees can encourage their members to judge each piece of work for what it is rather than where it is published, and can give credit for open-access publication. And authors? For the sake of equity and science, send your next paper to an open-access journal." Tamber and Newmark are employees of BioMed Central. Godlee is an editor at BMJ and the outgoing president of WAME.
• Brian Crawford, Open-access publishing: where is the value? Excerpt: "In exchange for orchestrating the process of peer review and publication, the publisher derives sale value from the copyright or publishing rights transferred for the authored work. The typical author of a journal research paper willingly assigns such rights, to communicate the work to his or her peers, and to thereby achieve maximum use value for the author and the scientific community. Contrary to some rhetoric surrounding the merits of copyright transfer, this exchange is hardly a Faustian bargain. First, the publisher has no reason to limit the dissemination of information. On the contrary, the broadest possible distribution, if achieved at an acceptable cost, enhances publishing revenues and profits and, therefore, facilitates maximum sale value of the information. Second, when the researcher discloses information (via publication), this usually entails the transfer of publishing rights via the assignment of copyright, which imparts sale value to the publisher. But in electing voluntarily to do so, the researcher seeks to maximise further the use value of the information, and (importantly) continues to benefit from that added value postpublication through documentation of priority of the research discovery, prestige, and publicity, which all promote career advancement." Brian Crawford is the Vice President and Publishing Director of John Wiley and Sons.
• Richard Horton, Commentary: 21st-century biomedical journals: failures and futures. Excerpt: "Open-access initiatives, especially non-profit organisations such as the Public Library of Science, are welcome because they will encourage traditional publishers of medical journals to re-evaluate their contribution to the medical research and clinical communities. The long-term goal for any editor of a primary research medical journal is to strengthen the culture of scientific inquiry and to improve human health. These are the ultimate yardsticks by which readers, authors, funding agencies, librarians, and publishers should judge the success of journals. In the sometimes divisive debate about open access, let us not lose sight of the fact that the publishing model is simply a means to a much greater end, an end that has far too long been neglected." Richard Horton is the editor of The Lancet.

(1) The first (Defamation online) is an unsigned editorial noting that an article by CERN physicist Alvaro De Rújula, posted to arXiv on October 27, accuses Martin Rees, Britain's astronomer royal, of "claiming credit for other researchers' ideas". In the US, this would only be libellous if false, but in the UK it might be libellous even if true. Moreover, in the UK both the archive and the author might be liable, even though the archive does not read or approve the articles it hosts. In the OA movement, we usually distinguish archive deposits from true "publications", but any kind of exposure to third parties counts as "publication" for the purposes of defamation law. The editorial is accompanied by a short note by Jim Giles (Critical comments threaten to open libel floodgate for physics archive) reporting that arXiv founder Paul Ginsparg would remove a defamatory paper from the archive if advised by a lawyer to do so. Quoting Ginsparg: "ArXiv is just a mindless redistribution system. It's not implemented to be a global police force to detect or enforce professional ethics."

(2) The second (Preprint server seeks way to halt plagiarists by Jim Giles) reports that 22 papers by Ramy Naboulsi were recently removed from the archive when some were discovered to be plagiarized. They were removed by the colleague who had submitted them to arXiv under the good-faith but mistaken belief that they were original. However, Paul Ginsparg is exploring ways to block plagiarized articles in the future by using software to measure the similarity of new submissions to articles already in the collection. Quoting Fintan Culwin, an expert in anti-plagiarism software at London’s South Bank University: "The technology is there. The question is how much does the archive want to pay to have this service."

Update (11/07). The link to my letter is now dead. Here's a new one that works (thanks to Jull Livingston).