Open Access News

The Copyright Office seeks to examine the issues raised by "orphan works," i.e., copyrighted works whose owners are difficult or even impossible to locate. Concerns have been raised that the uncertainty surrounding ownership of such works might needlessly discourage subsequent creators and users from incorporating such works in new creative efforts or making such works available to the public. This notice requests written comments from all interested parties. Specifically, the Office is seeking comments on whether there are compelling concerns raised by orphan works that merit a legislative, regulatory or other solution, and what type of solution could effectively address these concerns without conflicting with the legitimate interests of authors and right holders.

Comments are due by March 25. Reply comments are due by May 9.

(PS: The problem of orphan works is a serious one that keeps many works under copyright, or out of the public domain, much longer than necessary. The problem is aggravated by the fact that nowadays every scribble is copyrighted by default and requires no registration or renewal, and even further by the fact that the term of copyright is unconscionably long and likely to lengthened retroactively every decade or two. I support a policy solution through the Copyright Office. But at the same time I put more stock in the legislative solution represented by the Public Domain Enhancement Act and the judicial solution sought in Kahle v. Ashcroft.)

Objective To explore authors' attitudes towards open access publishing and author charges, their perceptions of journals that charge authors, and whether they would be willing to submit to these journals.
Design Semistructured telephone interviews.
Participants 28 randomly selected international authors who submitted to the BMJ in 2003.
Results Authors were more aware of the concepts of open access publishing and author pays models than previously reported. Almost all authors supported the concept of open access, but few had submitted to an open access journal, other than the BMJ. Reasons for not submitting included lack of awareness of which journals publish with open access, and journal quality taking a higher priority in decision making than the availability of open access. Authors disliked the idea of author charges without institutional support and were concerned about implications for authors from developing countries and those without research funding. However, many said they would probably continue to submit to journals they perceived as being of high quality even if they charged authors.
Conclusions Authors consider perceived journal quality as more important than open access when deciding where to submit papers. New journals with open access may need to do more to reassure authors of the quality of their journals.

#1. If you thought the internet has nearly all the information anyone could ever want, consider this: it's about to start adding high-value content that previously was not online, or that was undiscoverable because it was behind a "pay wall." Several initiatives are particularly noteworthy. Google Scholar, launched in 2004, is making premium content from some of the most important academic and scholarly sources discoverable via its search engine. While users will still need to pay for the content once they find it (at terms set by each content provider), the discoverability of such content enhances the value of the internet enormously, and could increase the number of customers for premium content. At the same time, universities and research institutions are becoming publishers by implementing institutional repositories that make articles from their researchers available online directly as a complement to aggregators. These types of initiatives will alter the value proposition of intermediaries, such as aggregators, as search engines take over the content discovery role that such intermediaries have provided heretofore. Another Google initiative is even more ambitious. It will begin digitizing the physical collections of five top libraries....The project eventually will allow an internet user to search inside millions of volumes, seeing the pages exactly as they appear in the original works, including illustrations, charts and photos. While this project won’t bring much content online this year, eventually it will add rare content to the internet and expand the frontiers of information available online.

#8...A number of major city libraries and state library consortia have cut deals to allow their patrons free access to premium databases from such providers as Thomson and EBSCO, among others. Importantly, these deals allow library patrons to access the databases from outside the walls of the libraries -- via the internet, with a library card number. So far, public access to such databases seems to remain a well-kept secret. Sooner or later, though, savvy politicians will try to take credit for it and the word certainly will get out.

SEN. WYDEN: [...] The second point is the press in the last few days has been reporting that the National Institutes of Health is going to reduce substantially a proposal to make research that the taxpayers have funded available to the country. Now, I'm sure you're just starting to get into this. But I would find it helpful if you could just tell us about your commitment to making sure that the public does get access to this information, because these reports in the last couple of days that come from sources within the department are pretty troubling.

MR. LEAVITT: I know very little about the specifics of this issue, but I can just tell you in principle that I believe that research that's made available by government funded research ought to add to the knowledge of an informed public generally and ought to be readily and easily available.

SEN. WYDEN: I appreciate that. Let's try to get it down to that short turnaround time, the six months, because otherwise the taxpayer pays twice. The taxpayer pays first when their tax dollars go for the research, and then they've got to shell out more to a scientific publisher. And those publishers fought the department. There's no question about that. And I appreciate your answer. [...]

MR. LEAVITT: Thank you.

Update. See Mark Chillingworth, JISC secures IoP archive deal, Information World Review, January 28, 2005.

Here are some excerpts from my proposal: 'Signatory nations should put an open-access condition on publicly-funded research grants. By accepting a grant, the grantee agrees to provide open access (OA) to any publications that result from the funded research. The funding agency should give the grantee a choice of methods for providing OA to the resulting publications. Grantees should be able to choose between OA journals and OA archives (also called OA repositories). The OA archives should meet certain conditions of accessibility, interoperability, and long-term preservation. The interoperability condition could be satisfied by complying with the metadata harvesting protocol of the Open Archives Initiative....Signatory nations should provide funds and technical assistance for all universities and research centers in the country to set up and maintain their own OA repositories. One condition of government assistance should be that the institution adopt a policy to encourage or require its researchers to deposit their research output in the repository....Signatory nations should provide funds and technical assistance for digitizing and providing open access to the nation's cultural heritage. Signatory nations should sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.'

(PS: Henk is right. There are other considerations missing from this kind of calculation as well. (Cornell's isn't the only one; there was another at Yale last year.) One of the main considerations is that universities will not be the only institutions to pay OA journal processing fees. Funding agencies will pay many of them, especially in biomedicine. Another is that many OA journals --most of the journals listed in the DOAJ-- do not charge any processing fees at all. Another is that universities can provide OA, through institutional repositories and policies encouraging their use, without having to fund OA journals. There are also many miscellaneous considerations that are difficult to take into account. For example: processing fees are highly variable; universities already pay an array of page charges and other fees that would disappear under OA; universities can reduce some of the processing fees for their faculty with institutional memberships at BMC and PLoS; OA will reduce many library expenses beyond subscriptions, such as ILL, licensing, and user authentication; and finally, high-output universities tend to subscribe to more journals than low-output universities, and therefore as OA journals spread, high-output universities will save more than other universities through the conversion, cancellation, or demise of subscription-based journals.)