Open Access News

On 9 March 2005 the European Parliament and the Council approved the eContentplus Programme, a multiannual Community programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable. The 4-year programme (2005–08), proposed by the European Commission, will have a budget of € 149 million to tackle organisational barriers and promote take up of leading-edge technical solutions to improve acessibility and usability of digital material in a multilingual environment. The Programme addresses specific market areas where development has been slow: geographic content (as a key constituent of public sector content), educational content, cultural, scientific and scholarly content. The Programme also supports EU-wide co-ordination of collections in libraries, museums and archives and the preservation of digital collections so as to ensure availability of cultural, scholarly and scientific assets for future use. The programme aims at facilitating access to digital content, its use and exploitation, enhancing quality of content with well-defined metadata, and reinforcing cooperation between digital content stakeholders. It will tackle multilingual and multicultural barriers....In the area of cultural content, scientific information and scholarly content, eContentplus will support the development of interoperable collections and objects from cultural institutions (archives, libraries and museums...), and solutions to facilitate exposure, discovery and retrieval of these resources.

The call for independent experts is now open. The call for project proposals is not, although the draft call and related documents are already online. There will be an Information Day on the new program in London on July 21. (Thanks to Alma Swan.)

[T]he first post on Wikipedia [went up] at a little after 10 am London time....It takes 10 minutes for someone else to join [the first contributor] in making changes. Nine minutes later, someone adds external links [and an obscenity]. A minute later, the [obscenity] has been removed. A couple of minutes later, a table of contents is added, which is then edited out, only to return 2 minutes later. In the eight minutes between 10:18 and 10:26 am, 52 edits are made. Within the next hour, 46 (by my count) other contributors join in and the post grows to about 650 words. Now, here we are a day and a half later. At this writing the article just crossed 2,500 edits and is nearing 3,500 words in length. I'm not going to count how many different contributors there have been, but it's easily in the hundreds. The amount of information is once again amazing. And I would argue the accuracy of the article is probably as good as you'll get from any major media outlet (although the writing may not be as good.) I find all of this amazing, and I find myself thinking more and more about what it means. The teachers in the class yesterday pushed back a bit against this whole open content concept. I showed them the South African curriculum wiki and they were amazed, yes, but concerned too. (As am I....) Our whole concepts of accuracy and trust and truth are being challenged and redefined. This feels like such a big shift, such a HUGE shift for educators. And it's just totally manic right now. The beauty of Wikipedia. The ugliness of spammers and other ne'er do wells. Opening things up creates both, unfortunately. I don't think we can fight these changes. The question then becomes how do we best navigate them.

Abstract: Graham Taylor, director of educational, academic and professional publishing at the Publishers Association, criticises the Research Councils UK (RCUK) proposal to require that the author of every published article based on RCUK-funded research must "self-archive" an "open access" version on the web so it can be freely read and used by any researcher worldwide whose institution cannot afford the journal in which it was published. The purpose of the RCUK policy is to maximise the usage and impact of research. Taylor argues that it may have an adverse affect on some journals. This critique points out that there is no evidence from 15 years of open-access self-archiving that it has had any adverse affect on journals and a great deal of evidence that it enhances research impact.

In an era when the ability to read a document, watch a video, or run a simulation could depend on having a particular version of a program installed on a specific computer platform, the usable life span of a piece of digital content can be less than 10 years. That's a recipe for disaster when you consider how much we rely on stored information to maintain our scholarly, legal, and cultural record and to help us with, and profit from, our digital labor. Indeed, the ephemeral nature of both data formats and storage media threatens our very ability to maintain scientific, legal, and cultural continuity, not on the scale of centuries, but considering the unrelenting pace of technological change, from one decade to the next. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, in Cambridge, where I am associate director for technology, we are attacking the problem of maintaining and sharing digital content over the long haul with a project called DSpace, which we embarked on with Hewlett-Packard Co., in Palo Alto, Calif., in 2000. For this digital repository we have built a simple, open-source software application that not only accepts digital materials and makes them available on the Web but also puts them into a data-management regime that helps to preserve them for generations to come....DSpace is storing and preserving materials just like these at MIT and 100 other organizations worldwide. Among them are Cornell University; the University of Toronto; the University of Cambridge, in England; the Australian National University; and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Like Linux and other open-source software projects, DSpace has a growing group of committed programmers distributed across the globe who continually maintain and improve it....Finally, [after DSpace asks for metadata and checks the file format] the researcher clicks through a license that grants DSpace the right to store, preserve, and redistribute the article, and if she retained the copyright to the article, asks whether she wants to assign a Creative Commons License to it. This license gives other researchers the right, among other things, to include the article as part of their course readings or quote it in their own scholarly writings, without asking for her explicit permission.

This article compares the manner in which vendors of full-text databases deal with charts, diagrams, figures, and tables that were originally part of the periodical articles in print. Significant differences were found with some vendors providing PDF format and some only HTML/Text format. Among those that supply only HTML/Text format, some manage to include tables, etc., in one way or another, while others do not. Among those who do not, some leave marks or traces where the tables had been; others act as if the tables never existed. In one instance, databases provided directly from the owning vendor have both PDF format and HTML/Text-plus-graphics format, while the same databases in a third-party vendor's interface have neither PDF nor HTML/ Text-plus-graphics. Information professionals should be aware of the differences among vendors and call for them to include tables, etc., in order to provide end-users with the complete information expected.

In that era [17th century England], members of Parliament, courtiers, and even the king himself came in for abuse at the hands of anonymous commentators who expressed their sentiments in pointed, frequently rude poems known as libels....[M]ore than 350 Stuart-era libels [are] now available online in Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry From Manuscript Sources....Early Stuart Libels is the product of 15 years of archival research and transcribing....The scholarly work, which was financed largely by Britain's Arts and Humanities Research Council, represents an effort to make these manuscript sources more widely available. Many have never before been published. There are no plans for a print version, nor will the current edition be subject to augmentation or additions; the editors hope that there will be a "sense of fixity" about it, and that it will be referenced by scholars just as a traditional book would be. In that, it may be on the leading edge of a new, electronic approach to studying and disseminating source material. "This edition seeks in many ways to be a pathbreaking endeavor," the editors note in their introduction. "The electronic medium ... provides a superb opportunity to offer scholarly editions of works otherwise largely inaccessible or unknown to both the academic community and the layperson alike." There is no charge to access Early Stuart Libels, which can be either browsed online or downloaded.

The Open Access movement seeks to make scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles freely available to anyone, anywhere over the World Wide Web. There were some very significant developments in the area of Open Access (OA) in 2004, including statements by major funders in support of Open Access. There are now so many Open Access scholarly journal articles freely available, that, in the author’s opinion, being aware of, and using, the resources and related tools is now essential for libraries. Libraries can provide more resources faster for users by supplementing paid resources with ones that are Open Access. Library resources, such as link resolvers, are beginning to incorporate Open Access materials and web searches for Open Access materials. For example, the reSearcher software suite includes Open Access collections along with subscription-based resources in the CUFTS journals knowledgebase, and a web search for an Open Access copy of an article in the GODOT link resolver. SFX also incorporates Open Access journals. After exhausting more traditional resources, interlibrary loans staff are beginning to include Google searching in their workflow. This article will discuss what Open Access is, the dramatic growth of Open Access, and major collections, resources and tools. Implications, issues, and leadership opportunities for resource sharing specialists will be explored.

Update. Heather updated the growth numbers in an 8/19/05 blog posting.

Starting in October, all investigators funded by the big eight research agencies in Britain may be required to put their papers and meeting talks in a free public archive "at the earliest opportunity, wherever possible at or around the time of publication."...Despite the mandatory tone, journals will find some wiggle room that may allow them to keep their usual embargoes. RCUK says its mandate is "subject to copyright and licensing arrangements" that can restrict what authors do....RCUK spokesperson Heather Weaver said this phrase recognizes that "publishers vary" in how they handle rights, and the government is setting no fixed time frame for free data release --other than "as soon as possible." Advocates for the open-access movement praised the RCUK announcement. Some think it comes closer to their goals than a policy announced earlier this year by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), which merely encourages authors to put papers in the U.S. PubMed Central database within 12 months of publication....Peter Suber --a professor of philosophy at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, and leader of the Public Knowledge advocacy group in Washington, D.C.-- described it as "an excellent policy" because it is mandatory, unlike NIH's. But he says the copyright "loophole … will allow publishers to impose embargoes." Publishers, whose revenues are threatened by the open-access movement, found fault with the RCUK approach. A group representing 320 nonprofit, academic, and scientific society journals --the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers in Clapham, U.K.-- released a critique on 30 June by Executive Director Sally Morris. Among other concerns, it warns that the open-access trend may "siphon off" subscriptions to society publications.

Copyright is not about just protection but was from its early days meant to balance the need to protect creators and entrepreneurs in the work with the user's right to access information and the expression of ideas. The mechanism that makes copyright work is in fact the exceptions and limitations are combined with adequate protection of copyright....We call for WIPO to establish global minimum mandatory exceptions and limitations to copyright and related rights because there is an imbalance in power due to the rightsholder having exclusive rights leading to the creation of monopolies of information. Libraries have a duty to facilitate access to information and knowledge and this does not mean simply making it easy to get permission to use a work for which the user often is required to pay or is otherwise restricted. Libraries also have a duty to support and develop a learning culture, the local and national economy and free civil societies, which means that a certain level of access to information needs to be by right which is what the limitations and exceptions to copyright ensure for the greater public good.

(PS: Although IFLA has endorsed OA and the draft A2K treaty calls for OA to publicly-funded research in Sections 5-1 and 5-2, the IFLA statement on the A2K treaty does not mention the OA provisions.)

Celera Genomics made hundreds of millions of dollars by selling access to its proprietary genome sequence information. But this month, Celera discontinued its database subscription service and made its 30 billion base pairs of genomic data of humans, rats, and mice freely available through GenBank, operated by the US National Center for Biotechnology Information. Some see Celera's decision to exit the sequence business as proof of the adage that information wants to be free, and yet another sign that selling access to data is no longer a viable business model. "The trend is perfectly clear. It would be surprising to find any company setting up a business plan that was based on a subscription database of precompetitive information," says Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute and leader of the Human Genome Project, Celera's publicly funded rival in the race to sequence the human genome....Not anxious to see its Chemical Abstracts Service Registry follow in the footsteps of Celera's database, the American Chemical Society (ACS) is aggressively lobbying federal officials to curtail development of PubChem, a free online resource on the biochemical structures and properties of some 650,000 small organic molecules....NIH officials say PubChem will complement, not compete, with the CAS. The data overlap will be minimal, they say, and PubChem will not offer the detailed manual curation that makes the CAS valuable to its subscribers. "It's all about money," Collins fumes. "It's hard to see how this very small effort on the part of NIH could represent a significant threat. I am astonished by their very strong negative reaction, especially for a database that's run by a supposedly scientific society."..."Twelve people at NIH will put 1200 people at ACS out of business? That's absurd," says Stephen Heller, a consultant and expert in numerical databases who has extensive U.S. government experience. "There is minor overlap between PubChem and the CAS Registry, but basically they are two separate things. One is for chemists and the other is for biologists...There are structural changes going on in the dissemination of scientific information because of the Internet and because everything has become computer-readable. It's not the same sort of business it used to be. Either you adjust or you have problems."

In a decision that essentially marks the end of the genome wars, Celera Genomics will release its formerly proprietary human, mouse, and rat genome sequences to the public domain. The decision goes into effect on July 1. Launched in 1998, Celera's original business model sought to charge hefty subscription fees to its proprietary genome data from biopharmaceutical companies. While allowing limited access to academic users, Celera declined to deposit its data into the public archive, GenBank. The timing of Celera's decision to release the genomes into the public domain was entirely financially based. "It was pure cost-benefit analysis," says David Speechly, Celera's senior director of investor relations and corporate communications. The subscription revenue no longer justified the cost of maintaining the online service, he says. Celera's turnabout has generated some kiss-and-make-up feelings from former rivals. Francis Collins, who led the public human genome consortium and is director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, told Nature, "They have done a generous thing here and should be getting a lot of credit."

RCUK's statement notes that the Research Councils have a responsibility to ensure that "Ideas and knowledge derived from publicly-funded research are made available and accessible for public use, interrogation, and scrutiny, as widely, rapidly and effectively as practicable," and sets out plans for several practical steps to make this happen. The statement proposes that RCUK will require that all research articles arising from Council-funded work should be deposited in Open Access repositories. It also confirms that the cost of publishing in Open Access journals such as those published by BioMed Central can be included in grant applications to the research councils. BioMed Central welcomes these proposals, and encourages researchers to make the final version of their research accessible immediately on publication, by choosing an Open Access journal. Publishing in any of BioMed Central's 130 Open Access journals will also make life easier for RCUK-funded researchers as BioMed Central already deposits a copy of the official final version of every research article that it publishes in a suitable Open Access repository (PubMed Central). As a result, authors who publish with BioMed Central will automatically meet the requirements of the RCUK policy, saving themselves the effort of having to deposit a separate copy of their research article....Matthew Cockerill, BioMed Central's Director of Operations, noted: "Wellcome, the UK Research Councils and the NIH between them fund a major fraction of all world-wide biomedical research. Each of these funders has now made a clear public statement supporting Open Access to the research literature, and is taking practical steps to make this goal a reality. Researchers and laypeople alike will benefit profoundly from this revolution in scientific communication".

• Chris Taylor, Criteria for choosing repository software, June 29, 2005
• Kevin Bradley, APSR Sustainability Issues Discussion Paper - version 1, January 2005 (released in June)
• The new APSR brochure, June 2005 (2 pp. PDF)

Three of the nation's leading voluntary health organizations have joined a group of scholarly and medical publishers to launch a pilot program to provide patients, caregivers, and the general public direct access to medical research on some of the most serious diseases and medical conditions. The free online information resource called patientINFORM, will provide consumers with the ability to read the latest original research articles published in medical and scientific journals, find assistance in interpreting the information and access additional materials on the Web sites of participating voluntary health organizations....In its pilot phase, patientINFORM will initially focus on cancer, diabetes, heart disease and stroke through the participation of the American Cancer Society, American Diabetes Association, and in the near future, the American Heart Association. As the resource becomes firmly established, it will expand to include other organizations in these and other areas, including psychiatric, respiratory, neuromuscular, renal, and gastrointestinal disorders, as well as infectious diseases including AIDS and rare genetic disorders. The creation of this free online information resource has been driven by recent trends indicating that public awareness of clinical research, heightened by media coverage and fueled by the spread of broadband Internet access, has led more and more patients to go online to find the latest information about treatment options. The problem is even well-educated, knowledgeable consumers can find it difficult to fully understand and evaluate scientific findings, and make sound decisions on what they learn.

It is well known that copyright law can impede the effective reuse of digital and non-digital resources. A means of addressing this problem is for public sector organisations to publish some of their resources under common licences which would grant more permissive use. Intrallect Ltd and the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in IP and IT Law are currently organising a users' workshop in order to determine how such common licences could allow more effective reuse of resources. The workshop will be aimed at any individuals who would use resources produced by the public sector in their day to day activities. Examples of people who may be interested include: school, college and university teachers; college and university students; academics; librarians; content aggregators; genealogists; artists; authors; journalists; social workers; sociologists; etcetera.

Sens. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and John Cornyn (R-Tex.) are pushing a package of legislative proposals that would create, for the first time, penalties for agencies that ignore Freedom of Information Act requests. They also want to create a position for an independent arbiter -- an ombudsman for FOIA -- who would help referee conflicts between the public and the government while requiring departments to provide more information on how quickly they process requests. "A number of the reforms included in these bills are pretty basic in a lot of places, including my home state of Texas," said Cornyn, a former state attorney general. "In Washington, there's no real presumption of openness in the culture."....While it is easy to find supporters of the plan, it is much more difficult to scare up its opponents. "A number of my colleagues have been very skeptical about any of this because they don't view it like I do as a right of the citizenry to know what the government is doing. They view it as a favor we would be doing the press," Cornyn said, without naming names. "The problem with this issue is it's such a good government position that it's hard to drag people out into the light of day where they'll have a debate with you. . . . What happens is that you get a passive-aggressive attitude where people seemingly are willing to work with you, but when it comes to actually moving legislation, it's pretty tough slogging."

Crucially, the NIH policy only "requests" researchers to deposit their articles, whereas RCUK uses the word "require". The statement stresses that "a copy of any resultant published journal articles or conference proceedings should be deposited in an appropriate e-print repository (either institutional or subject-based) wherever such a repository is available to the award-holder." However, this statement is hedged around by some translucent statements about two key issues: how to address the problem of publishers who hold the copyright to post-print articles restricting deposit, and the timing of deposit. The draft statement includes the phrase "subject to copyright and licensing arrangements", which suggests that authors require publisher consent to deposit. In addition, the statement requires deposit "at the earliest opportunity, wherever possible at or around the time of publication", refusing to place a time limit on deposit and actively contradict the typical current publisher policy of stipulating an embargo of six months to a year on deposit....Open access enthusiasts such as Peter Suber have celebrated the strong language, while the response from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) has concentrated hard on the need to preserve publisher embargo times of a year (and sometimes beyond). Clearly most publishers are not going to allow articles which have been peer-reviewed, formatted, surrounded by metadata and linked accurately to other articles to be immediately deposited in a place where they can be easily found by search engines, if they believe that this will lead to their deriving too little revenue for the value-add efforts....Apart from a handful of enthusiasts, the academic community has not shown major levels of interest in the open access movement.

I understand the fears [of book publishers], but I think most of them are unfounded. And I think they could lead publishers to miss some crucial opportunities....[T]he control of intellectual property by publishers is not threatened by Google Print or Library. My own National Academies Press started participating in Google Print early in the program. Google has already scanned more than 1,300 of our titles, with another 1,000 pending, and we are sending it more all the time. It isn't displaying advertisements beside images of our works because we asked it not to. It will take down any book we ask it to, and our contract leads us to believe it will always do so. It would be madness not to -- and thus launch a full-scale copyright war. Further, based on our own experience over the last seven years, I can predict with confidence that online-search capabilities will boost book sales: A university press that joins Google will find itself using "print-on-demand" technology to fill orders from its backlist for that 1958 tome on the Maginot Line that it never dreamed would have a life in the 21st century....At our press, we already make more than 3,400 books available free online, and we began using the "page-image" approach Google is taking in 1998: presenting a picture of the page, with searchable text behind it. Every new book we published was scanned and made navigable online, free, at the same time it was available for sale. To our delight, we found that page images with searchable text behind them actually seemed to increase sales, not replace them with online reading....For the last few years, I've heard (mostly older) scholars and librarians moan, "If they can't Google it, it doesn't exist for these kids." That's a reality publishers should be loath to deny. In the next three to five years, as the most-productive young faculty members publish their works, I think we'll see what I call a "Google access citation effect. "Citation indices let us know how well referenced any document is -- what books or articles or essays are most influential -- by measuring their references in new scholarship. If the new digitally driven scholars can Google an essay or book, then they'll use it for further research. If they can't, they may well not....I can speak only for myself, not my press, but in general I think that it's in the best self-interest of scholarly publishers to relax a bit about how we respond to intellectual-property issues raised by digitization plans like Google's. We need a bit more trust, so that we can take advantage of the new capabilities of a networked society....Google is offering something marvelous, if imperfect; its model is more likely to help more people find library resources and publishers' works than anything else on the horizon.

An institutional repository (IR) is a set of services for storing and making available digital research materials created by an institution and its community. The National Library of New Zealand set up a steering group and expert working party with representatives from across the research sector to carry out a feasibility study and recommend actions for a national institutional repositories framework for New Zealand's research outputs....Repositories support the open access goal of transforming scholarly communication by making it easier for researchers to find and share the results of research, through free and unrestricted on-line availability....Various factors have led policy-makers and research institutions in other countries to establish repositories; for example...They want to increase research impact and consider that publicly funded research should be publicly accessible. Placing copies of research outputs in an open access institutional repository lowers the barriers to, and cost of, access....Institutional research repositories can create positive outcomes for all interested groups. Authors gain visibility; information seekers find research more easily; institutions raise their research profile; and funders see wider research dissemination. To achieve an active and sustainable network of institutional research repositories in New Zealand requires suitable repository software installed in, or available to, all New Zealand research institutions, supporting on-line availability of most published and unpublished research outputs....[Five recommendations for bringing about "cultural change" and filling the repositories:] [1] Support a national framework. The distributed repository architecture enables local institutional decision-making while facilitating the emergence of national services which join up the local collections. [2] Create incentives for authors to deposit their works. This appears to be the biggest issue for an institution to consider, as the value of a research repository depends on the number of authors contributing to it. [3] Link to the PBRF (performance-based research funding) process. There are 2 distinct linkages to consider between institutional research repositories and PBRF --at a policy level and at an operational level. [4] Build repository management capability. All projects investigated have highlighted resource constraints as a major issue. Implementation involves policy makers, library staff, and IT staff, as well as academic staff. [5] Copyright must allow open access deposit. Authors are properly worried about infringing agreed copyright arrangements with publishers and institutions need to help them comply with publishers' agreements.

SciDev.Net recently reported on an action plan drawn up by the coalition of 132 developing countries known as 'G77 and China' that "stresses the need for developing countries to build scientific capacity and close the technological gap between them and industrialised nations." (See G77 developing countries pledge to promote science.) The article then says, "achieving this will depend in part on increased scientific cooperation between developing countries, including setting up networks of researchers and institutions, and a G77 consortium on science and technology." If information is key to science development, the bedrock of increased scientific cooperation is sharing information. What better way to share such information than to establish institutional open access archives?...All major higher educational and research institutions in the South should set up such archives and place the full text of all the research papers written by their own scientists and students. Papers made available through open access archives can be read and cited by more people than those that are available only through subscriptions to journals. Not only would open access increase the visibility of scientists from the South, but it would also enable them to access relevant information at a low cost....

(PS: As far as I can tell, the spec does not include the OAI PMH.)

Thanks to the Government Open Code Collaborative for the link. I like the comment on this service by the GOCC's James Willis: 'It is simply unacceptable at this point in history that a citizen can use web services to track the movies he is renting, the weather around his house, and the books he's recently purchased but cannot as easily monitor data regarding the quality of his drinking water, legislation or regulations that will directly impact his work or personal life, what contracts are currently available to bid on for his state, or what crimes have recently occurred on his street....[GovTracker services is] a step towards resolving this dissonance.'

With regard to your news story 'India opens door to foreign science magazines' a few low-cost Indian editions of foreign journals might indeed hit the market and it could have some impact. However, what would have a greater impact for science in India is a much simpler initiative. If all funding agencies in India insisted that research papers resulting from their funding be archived in an open-access archive, Indian research papers would be more visible and more frequently cited. In the United Kingdom, for example, the funding agency The Wellcome Trust has already adopted such a policy. In fact, India should have taken a strong position on open access and promoted such initiatives sooner rather than concentrating only on forming library consortiums and subscribing to collections of foreign journals. Statistics show that articles archived in the Indian Institute of Sciences ePrints archive — which holds in digital format the research output created by the institute's researchers — are frequently downloaded by scientists from more than 100 countries. Scientists in India and other developing countries should be active in the promotion of open access. Only free and unhindered flow of knowledge can lead to rapid growth of knowledge.