Open Access News

Lee C. Van Orsdel and Kathleen Born, Periodicals Price Survey 2008: Embracing Openness, Library Journal, April 15, 2008.  The latest installment in the superb series of annual reports on journal prices and the state of OA (2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003...).  Van Orsdel is the Dean of University Libraries at Grand Valley State University, and Kathleen Born is Director of the Academic Division at EBSCO Information Services.  Excerpt:

They have argued about it for years. It's been touted as the liberator of information that wants to be free, the arbiter of shared intellectual property rights, and an engine that can drive discovery, invention, cures, and economies. It has also been vilified as an assault on capitalism, a catalyst for the collapse of responsible publishing and the rise of junk science, and a naïve invention of some pointy-headed idealists who have no idea how the real world works. “It,” of course, is open access (OA)....

[The OA] campaign has produced a series of startling successes in recent months, with potentially profound implications for the journal publishing industry.

First came a long-awaited mandate, signed into law on December 26, requiring the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide open access to grantees' peer-reviewed research articles within 12 months of publication. As blogs hummed with speculation about how libraries would be affected and whether publishers would take it to court, another shoe dropped. The European Research Council announced the first European Union (EU)–wide mandate on January 10, calling for grant recipients to put research articles and supporting data on the web within six months of publication. As that news was being absorbed, 791 universities in 46 European countries voted unanimously to endorse OA mandates for faculty at their institutions and to support other mandates for access to publicly funded research.

The OA tsunami crested on February 12. In a move few anticipated, Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted unanimously to give the university permission to post their scholarly articles in an institutional repository....

On other fronts, the pace of publisher experimentation with open access and other alternative publication models picked up a bit in 2007, with CERN's SCOAP3 project attracting the most attention....

There was little relief to be had from the high cost of journals, with Oxford University Press offering the rare exception when it used income from author fees to reduce subscription costs in its hybrid journals for the second year in a row, just as it promised....

Before NIH even posted its operational guidelines, statements from the American Chemical Society (ACS), Professional/Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP/PSP), and International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers condemned the measure, claiming among other things that it takes away the intellectual property rights of publishers without compensation and threatens the practice of peer review.

Guidelines published by the NIH describe a different reality. Adherence to copyright law is required....

The terms of the Harvard decree are similar to those of the NIH's, but publisher response is more muted—perhaps because it was created by the very scholars whose manuscripts fuel the current publishing system....If other universities follow suit, the Harvard mandate may well end up as a for-profit publisher's biggest nightmare —the hole in the dike through which a deluge may pour....

The numbers seem to support [Roger Clarke's] findings [that publishing OA journals cost less than publishing TA journals]. This is the first year any of the large STM publishers have offered a full OA journal—among others, Elsevier launched OncologySTAT and Springer, Neuroethics. By contrast, a large number of nonprofit society publishers already have established OA journals. A study by Peter Suber and Caroline Sutton reported in SPARC's Open Access Newsletter (11/2/07) found that 427 societies publish 496 fully OA peer-reviewed journals....

The most notable experiment in flipping both commercial and society publications to an OA business model is CERN's SCOAP3 project, in which all of the partners that support publishing in particle physics, including libraries, are being asked to redirect subscription monies into a common fund that will pay publishers for open access to particle physics research. The end goal is to make the literature of the discipline fully open to any researcher. As of mid-March, 50 percent of the needed funds had been pledged by libraries in 13 countries....