Open Access News

• Sally Morris and René Olivieri, The secret life of STM publishing
• Nick Twyman, Launching PLoS Biology - six months in the open
• Mary Ochs, Barbara Aronson, and Jane Wu, HINARI and AGORA: revolutionizing access to scientific information in the developing world
• Pippa Smart, Two-way traffic: information exchange between the developing and developed world
• Frederick Friend, Zwolle's contribution to good copyright relationships

• P.S. Adusumilli and M. Mullerad, Open access publishing: a digital bridge for developing nations?
• R. King and P.S. Tamber, Is open access to medical research literature relevant to low- and middle-income countries?

Restrictions on access to research data. --The Committee is concerned by reports that there has been a significant change in the availability of research data internationally and a dramatic rise in medical research data subscription costs. NLM is encouraged to examine how the consolidation of for-profit biomedical research publishers, with their increased subscription charges, has restricted access to vital research information to not-for-profit libraries. The Committee would like a report by March 1, 2004, about potential remedies to ensure that taxpayer-funded research remains in the public domain and steps that can be taken to alleviate this restrictive trend in information technology.

The report was due March 1, 2004, but NLM got an extension on the deadline. In May, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni sent a 12-page report to Congress titled Access to Biomedical Research Information, and today SPARC made a copy available on its web site. It's no coincidence that the request for the report came from the same House Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies that proposed earlier this month (July 14) that starting in FY 2005 NIH require open access to all NIH-funded research. The May report is a key part of the NIH OA plan proposed by the House Appropriations Committee. Excerpt from the report:

NIH supports the widespread availability of the results of the research it funds through a variety of mechanisms and publishing channels. PubMed Central serves as a trusted repository for long term electronic access to the biomedical literature and provides a key component of the infrastructure needed to support open access. NIH grant policies that foster sharing of research findings, permit use of grant funds to pay for publication costs, and emphasize high quality research as the basis for evaluating professional success contribute substantially to achieving the goals of open access. NIH will continue to pursue policies and support a variety of publication mechanisms that ensure that the public interest in advancing research, improving health, and achieving an effective return on federal investments is served.

As for the aims that I think future scientific journal publishing should take? Simple. It shouldn't get in the way. By that I mean, the amount of red tape should be kept to a minimum. That is not to say that peer review should not be rigourous or that it should be easy. But it shouldn't be more complicated than it needs to be. Activists working to prevent the introduction of creationism in school biology standards could, perhaps, find sharper tools to fight creationists if they had access to more original sources for free or low-cost. Certainly, work like EvoWiki could be far, far extended if interested members of the public could read the original texts.

Agence France Presse in the July 21 ChannelNewsAsia: "Shares in [Reed Elsevier] rose 10-1/2 to 496-1/2 following a benign House of Commons Select Committee investigation into scientific publications, in which the Anglo-Dutch group is a major player. The market had feared that the Select Committee would recommend a move away from a subscription-based model to one based on open-access for all. However, the report fell far short of recommending the mandatory adoption of open-access."

Update. The Genetic Alliance issued a press release on July 21 to accompany this open letter.

From PLoS: "The report released today by the Science and Technology Committee of the United Kingdom's House of Commons, 'Scientific Publications: Free for All?' insists that the 'published output' of UK higher education institutions must be made available such that 'it can be read, free of charge, online,' and provides a practical roadmap for achieving this goal. 'The report makes clear that open access is the only acceptable outcome for publicly funded science,' said Public Library of Science (PLoS) co-founder Dr. Michael B. Eisen, 'and challenges scientists, publishers and research funders to make open access happen rapidly.'...In conjunction with other recent developments in the UK and the United States, this report suggests an international consensus growing in support of the open access movement."

From BMC: "Crucially, the report recommends that UK research funding bodies mandate free access to all their research findings. 'This will lead to a profound change in the way that scientific literature is published, and validates the author-pays "Open Access" publishing model which we at BioMed Central pioneered,' Tracz remarked....Some UK funders have already shown great support for the Open Access publishing model. By signing agreements with BioMed Central, JISC and NHS England have made it possible for many UK researchers to publish free of charge in Open Access journals. The Committee recommends that UK Research Councils follow this lead and make funds available to pay author charges. This would mean that all publicly funded UK researchers would be able to make their research findings Open Access, at no cost to themselves. 'This support will help to ensure the success of the author-pays model of publishing,' said Tracz."

From JISC: "JISC today welcomed the Report of the Science and Technology Select Committee and indicated its support for its recommendations, published today. These recommendations will enable research funded by the UK taxpayer to be made available to a wider readership than the present scholarly publication system allows....In particular the Science and Technology Select Committee’s support for institutional repositories will build upon the work of the JISC FAIR (Focus on Access to Institutional Resources) Programme. The institutions participating in the FAIR Programme have established repositories for the work of their academic staff, and the Committee’s support for these developments will encourage all UK academic authors to improve access to the results of publicly-funded research through this route."

1. The government should provide funds for all UK universities to launch open-access institutional repositories.
2. Authors of articles based on government-funded research should deposit copies in their institutional repositories.
3. The government should appoint a "central body" to oversee the launch of the institutional repositories, their networking needs, and their compliance with "technical standards needed to provide maximum functionality" (presumably the OAI metadata harvesting protocol).
4. The government should create a fund to help authors pay the processing fees charged by open-access journals. The committee is not yet ready to endorse the upfront funding model for OA journals (which it calls the "author-pays" model), but wants to create such a fund in order to promote further experimentation with the model.
5. The government should develop a wider, long-term open-access strategy, including open-access journals, "as a matter of urgency".
6. Universities should develop their "capacity to manage" the copyrights that faculty will increasingly retain in the future.
7. These steps can and should be undertaken without jeopardizing "rigorous and independent peer review".
8. The government should fund the British Library to take on the long-term preservation of digital scholarship.
9. Because the market for science and scholarship is international, the government should "act as a proponent for change on the international stage and lead by example".

The full report (a 118 page PDF file) will soon be available at the committee's page of reports. (It's still night time in England.) In a posting to SOAF, I've quoted extensively from the report's conclusions and recommendations, for those who don't have time to read the full report.

Update. The full report is now online (HTML or PDF).