Open Access News

For more on the pricing crisis, see the recent stories (for example, 1, 2, 3) on cutbacks at OhioLink, which I haven't been blogging because of the volume of more directly OA-related news.

(PS: If the NIH really wants "maximum participation", then the policy should require participation, not merely request it. The "flexibility" introduced by reducing the requirement to a request will not ensure full participation. It will ensure that some grantees will participate and some won't.)

Update. The same story appears in Forbes for February 3, attributed to Amanda Gardner. Did the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reprint her story and delete her name?

My bottom line: There are three main problems with today's version of the policy. First, it's a request and not a requirement. Taxpayer access to publicly-funded medical research should be guaranteed. Second, it lengthens the delay on public access beyond six months, at the grantee's discretion. Previous versions of the policy used a six-month embargo, which was already a compromise with the public interest. And third, it puts grantees in the painful and risky position of having to choose between their funding agency and their publisher. The NIH will ask grantees to choose public release as soon as possible after publication, and many publishers will ask grantees to choose public release as late as possible. It's better than nothing but a lot less than the taxpayers deserved. In the end it looks like the publishers had more clout with the NIH than scientists or taxpayers.

Jan Velterop, publisher of BioMed Central, wrote this testimonial to Ziman: 'May his insight that "scientific research is essentially a corporate activity, in which the community achieves far more that the sum of the efforts of its members" and his observation that "the failure to be aware of some small piece of published knowledge may be very costly indeed" (both expressed in the 1960's, well before the internet made open access a potential reality), live on and motivate many to help bring about open access to science.'

Here's an excerpt from Ziman's book, Public Knowledge (Cambridge, 1968): 'There is not much doubt that, in a purely factual sense, Science is a form of Public Knowledge. The whole procedure of publication and citation, the abhorrence of secrecy, the libraries full of periodicals and treatises,...Freedom to learn and freedom to teach, cosmopolitanism and internationalism, conferences, abstract journals and encyclopedias -- all are in the service of the mutual exchange of information. If there is, indeed, a technical crisis in these procedures,...then Science itself will be severely hampered....The absolute need to communicate one's findings, and to make them acceptable to other people, determines their intellectual forms.'

Update. I'm having trouble with the list software. So at least for the next few hours, the February issue will only be available online.

(PS: This response suffers from the same problems as the government's November response. First, it focuses more on OA journals than OA repositories, when the committee report did the reverse. Second, it dismisses the primary recommendation --for mandated OA for taxpayer-funded research through OA repositories-- without addressing the committee's evidence and arguments. In November the committee criticized the government for precisely these two failings, and in this response the government is repeating them.)

1.1. All works created by governmental authorities should be in the public domain.
1.2. Published works resulting from government-funded research should be publicly available at no charge within a reasonable time frame.
1.3. Facts and other public domain materials, and works lacking in creativity, should not be subject to copyright or copyright-like protections.
1.4. Consistent with the Berne Convention, the term of copyright should be the life of the author plus 50 years. The term of copyright should not be extended retroactively. [...]
3.2. Copying of individual items for or by individual users should be permitted for personal research and study. [...]
4.2 The goals and policies set out in this document are important statements of national and international principle and should not be varied by contract.

The principles were formulated in December 2004 and released onlaine January 26, 2005, by American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), American Library Association (ALA), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), Medical Library Association (MLA), and the Special Libraries Association (SLA).

(PS: These principles are excellent: brief yet comprehensive, clear, and with perfect pitch for policy. The library groups welcome the endorsements of other organizations. Please talk to your group about signing on.)

(PS: The first quotation in this article is taken my blog posting of 1/10/05, which I wrote before I confirmed that Nature was indeed trying to introduce a six-month embargo on self-archiving. My position now is that the policy makes an advance by encouraging self-archiving, and not just on personal web sites, but that it makes a very regrettable retreat by attempting to add a six-month embargo on self-archiving. I'll say more in the February SOAN, which will mail in a day or two.)

• Sophia Ananiadou and four co-authors, The National Centre for Text Mining: Aims and Objectives
• Alastair Dunning, Tracing Help with Copyright: New AHDS Case Studies on Copyright Issues
• Stevan Harnad, Fast-Forward on the Green Road to Open Access: The Case Against Mixing Up Green and Gold (also see Harnad's unabridged edition, the Jean-Claude Guédon article to which Harnad is responding, and a Japanese translation of Harnad's article)
• Plus regular columns on SOSIG, EEVL, BIOME, and search engines.