Open Access News

(PS: This is ominously reminscent of the SIIA lobbying to kill PubScience.)

(PS: I don't care if the motive is cooperation or competition. The more digitized books, especially free online digitized books, the merrier.)

(PS: On the last point, let's distinguish labels from context-sensitive links for link-resolvers. Labels would help. Searchers would like to know which articles coming up in a search are OA. But the OA content in repositories won't need context-sensitive links like the priced content. That's the whole point of OA. All users have access already and needn't be steered to a copy their library has bought or licensed.)

(PS: This is very encouraging, especially for the signs that the UN may increase its support for OA. The only thing missing is an approciation for the role of OA archiving alongside OA journals.)

(PS: Medline is OA and ISI Web of Knowledge is not. This is a good case study in the commercial re-use of OA content.)

• Tony Hammond and three co-authors, Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Overview
• Ben Lund and two co-authors, Social Bookmarking Tools (II): A Case Study - Connotea

(PS: It's misleading to depict this strategic disagreement as a rift, as if some OA proponents were happy with the weakened form of the NIH policy and some were not. All the parties Albanese discusses are unhappy with it. The fact that some see some forward steps to accompany the backward steps doesn't change that.)

Two of the CISTI strategic goals push in the right direction, though without committing the organization to OA: 'Goal 1: Provide universal, seamless, and permanent access to information for Canadian research and innovation. Goal 2: Enable researchers and entrepreneurs to advance and exploit knowledge through accelerated, innovative scientific communication.'

(PS: Wren's question is interesting and important, and I trust his results as far as they go. But we should beware of concluding that most high-demand or high-quality articles already exist in some OA form, or that high-impact leads to OA more than the reverse. I'm not saying that Wren himself makes these mistakes. On the first: many articles are not self-archived because their authors are unfamiliar with the process or too busy, variables entirely independent of the article's demand or quality. On the second: many archived articles may be highly cited because they are OA, not vice versa. To supplement Wren from this point of view, see the evidence that OA increases citation impact.)

(PS: This is a beautiful argument for OA in history. I wish every discipline had a high-profile essay of this cogency to kick the ball forward.)

From the SBML site: 'Advances in biotechnology are leading to larger, more complex quantitative models. The systems biology community needs information standards if models are to be shared, evaluated and developed cooperatively. SBML's widespread adoption offers many benefits, including: (1) enabling the use of multiple tools without rewriting models for each tool, (2) enabling models to be shared and published in a form other researchers can use even in a different software environment, and (3) ensuring the survival of models (and the intellectual effort put into them) beyond the lifetime of the software used to create them.'

(PS: Dotinga gives a lot of space to the objection that OA journals corrupt peer review and very little space to the PLoS rebuttal. There's a lot more that can be said to answer this canard, apart from the fact that only 47% of OA journals even charge author-side fees.)

Update. Wired has published two short letters to the editor on Dotinga's article, one from Patrick Cates and one from Stevan Harnad. Both correct misimpressions left by Dotinga and strengthen the case for OA.

RP: Which, in your view, is the optimal way of providing OA: green or gold?

AS: You ask this as though it's an either/or situation, yet both methods co-exist at the moment, both are growing, and both have their place. For instance, some journals have already converted to gold, some are in transition, and there are now plenty of born-gold journals. But it will not be possible to successfully convert all existing journals to a gold model, at least not without major disruptions to the businesses of some publishers, and not in a hurry. For this reason alone the Green Road is also important. [...]

RP: What does 14 years of arXiv tell us about the impact of self-archiving on traditional journals? Can the two things co-exist?

AS: It appears so. I asked both APS and IoPP what their experiences have been in carrying out their business activities alongside this massively successful example of a self-archiving repository. They both said that they had not noticed any greater downturn in subscriptions to those journals that cover the same sort of physics as arXiv than for any of their journals covering other areas of physics. [...]

RP: How do mean: minimal? [AS had just said, "governments should only get involved in the most minimal way."]

AS: I mean that if research is funded by a government (i.e. the public) then that government has the right and duty to make sure the results from it are available to all. Governments shouldn't have any role, however, in dictating how commercial publishers operate in a free market economy. And neither party needs to start interfering with a researcher's right to choose which journal they publish in. [...]

RP: My final question then: Reed Elsevier's CEO Sir Crispin Davis implied — if not directly stated — in The Guardian recently that the simple answer to solving the scholarly communication crisis is for governments just to pump more money into libraries? Does he have a point?

AS: No.

Resolution 2005-7. On Faculty Ownership of Research. Be it resolved that, to the extent permitted by law, UNC-CH faculty are the owners of their research and should retain ownership, or use other means to foster open access publication wherever possible.

Resolution 2005-8. On Scholarly Communications. Be it resolved that the Faculty Council encourage the Provost to:

1. create a task force on scholarly communications to continue the work of the Scholarly Communications Convocation and to report back on the issues, problems and an on-going mechanism to propose and implement solutions,
2. create a task force on establishing an institutional repository to determine the feasibility of such and to outline potential contents, indexing, etc.,
3. work with department chairs to review tenure and promotion standards to recognize publishing in non-traditional sources, and
4. urge department chairs to discuss the problems in scholarly communications with their faculties.

Some of the Faculty Council discussion of the resolutions is included in the minutes of the March 4 meeting. Excerpt: 'Prof. Laura Gasaway (Law) reported on the Scholarly Communications Convocation that took place at the Friday Center, January 27-28, 2005. She said that the planning committee’s report (attached to these Minutes) [PS: not yet online] is preliminary; the committee intends to prepare a full, comprehensive report that should be ready in April. She said that is likely that the full report will contain recommendations in addition to those included in the preliminary report. Prof. Gasaway singled out for special praise the disciplinary white papers that were presented at the Convocation by Professors Robert Peet (Biology), Frank Dominguez (Romance Languages), Jack Snoeyink (Computer Science), James Peacock (Anthropology), and Jocelyn Neal (Music). She said that papers of this nature have not been done elsewhere in American higher education....Prof. Richard Weinberg (Cell & Developmental Biology) said...that he could not imagine why his work, which had been supported by federal funding, should become the property of a privately-owned journal.'

Update. I've now re-blogged the major news stories from the two SOAF postings.