Open Access News

(PS: This is a very welcome first. Novartis is gambling that this will help Novartis; we already know it will help others. Let's hope that Novartis is right --or that this kind of OA is a win-win rather than one-sided charity. If Novartis proves that giving away the research it funds is a greater net gain than locking it up, then other companies will start to follow suit. That could open another front in the funding of OA.)

GPL Platforms 881

GSM Samples 25413

GSE Series 1306

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The Association of Independent Research Institutes (AIRI) is an association of independent, not-for-profit biomedical and behavioral research institutes conducting federally funded research. Its mission is to enhance the ability of its members to improve human health and advance knowledge. AIRI endorses the NIH proposal for increased public access to NIH-funded research results.

Scientists and the general public will greatly benefit from free access to a comprehensive, centrally located base of medical knowledge. Making research results freely available through NIH's PubMed Central (PMC), six months after the study's publication, necessarily enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of the biomedical research enterprise and provides the public with access to credible and timely information.

In the process of formulating the best plan for implementing open access, AIRI urges NIH to make a priority the preservation of information quality through peer-review. In addition, AIRI encourages NIH to establish a process to ensure that there is no confusion surrounding an author's final version-of-record of a submitted publication. Finally, in undertaking this enormous data load, AIRI hopes that NIH is prepared to maintain PMC archives in perpetuity.

AIRI realizes that many actors and interested parties in the science and publishing communities will be affected by a new NIH open access policy. As such, AIRI applauds NIH efforts to include all of the relevant stakeholders in the planning process, and hopes that dialogue will remain open throughout the course of implementation.

Excerpt from the Jan Velterop interview: "In science there is also a very practical reason [for OA]: a shift towards data intensive papers that cannot really be read in the same way as they were in the past. And in many cases they shouldn't be. They are records of what the researcher has been doing. But the record is not read in a linear fashion; it is referred to and is mixed with a big chain of other papers. As more analysis gets done, the data is rehashed and reinterpreted in different ways. To bring this ever growing body of research together by hand is an enormous amount of work. But this can be reduced to a fraction if the material is made available electronically - which means text and data can be mined. The preparatory work for further analysis can be done automatically. But for that to work properly you need to have the full-text available without barriers....Some say governments are deciding how publishing should take place. But that is not the case. Governments are simply saying that, where it is they who fund the research, they want to see it openly available. We mustn't forget that it is tax payers' money that is being invested, which means it should be freely available to the public."

Excerpt from the Peter Banks interview: "To have governments create repositories of primary biomedical literature would create major problems as far as the integrity of the literature is concerned. Under the National Institute of Health (NIH) proposal a parallel universe of publications would be created. The publishers would have the final version of a publication, while the NIH would get the early version. So before we launch this program we'd better figure out how to reconcile these various versions....Non-profit and learned society publishers make a tremendous amount of information available already. In my case, two of our American Diabetes Association journals are freely available. In two other peer-reviewed journals, content is available after six months, and the most clinically relevant material is available immediately. We aren't unique in this. The non-profit publishing community puts a lot of effort into making content available for free....I think [governments considering OA policies] been sold a false bill of goods. They've been sold the idea that you can increase the reward from your investment and research by just having open access. They think there is some magical way of extracting more value from the research dollars they're spend now. The open access model they are advocating would do a disservice to the public they pretend to serve."

• Tim Rix, Crisis? What crisis? The university presses
• Ian Rowlands, Dave Nicholas, Paul Huntington, Scholarly communication in the digital environment: what do authors want?
• Kate Worlock, Scoping the STM publishing market
• Stephen Pinfield, What do universities want from publishing?
• Kent R. Anderson, Comparing print and online readership: matching perception to reality across media
• Michael Sosteric, The International Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publication - an idea whose time has come (finally!)
• Science & Technology Committee report: the ALPSP response

(PS: One the one hand, it's true that users from the U.S. or any other country can download the book from the Australian site. On the other hand, if that were a reason for the Australian site to take down the book, then suddenly all countries in the world would have a term of copyright effectively equal to the longest term in force anywhere. Conversely, of course, if it were not, then all countries in the world would have a term of copyright effectively equal to the shortest in force anywhere. Since either resolution is likely to equalize copyright terms around the world, de facto if not de jure, this issue is much too important to depend on a lawyer's cease-and-desist letter to a cash-strapped non-profit. Project Gutenberg of Australia needs some serious legal and financial help.)

[CompTIA] What should federal policy be toward protecting intellectual property on the Internet --recognizing the harmless role played by mere conduits-- and facilitating the free flow of ideas based on those creations?

[Bush] I strongly support efforts to protect intellectual property and will continue to work with Congress to ensure all intellectual property is properly protected. Technology is a critical conduit of information and sometimes can be misused for illegal copyright infringement. Blaming the technology does not address the issue. We must vigorously enforce intellectual property protections and prosecute the violations, not the technology. My Administration has launched the Strategy Targeting Organized Piracy (STOP) initiative to do just that. I have also worked to obtain China's support for stricter enforcement and more severe penalties for piracy and counterfeiting of American ideas and innovations.

[Kerry] I do not condone the illegal sharing of copyrighted material. We must ensure that our laws protect the creations of individuals and companies while not unreasonably stifling technological innovation. I am open to examining whether legislative action is necessary to ensure that a person who lawfully obtains or receives a transmission of a digital work may back up a copy of it for archival purposes or transfer it to a digital media device for the purpose of non public performance or display.