Open Access News

P. R. van Emburg, Rationale for Advanced Generalism in Science, Advanced Generalism in Science, April 2008.  A preprint.  Excerpt:

...The necessary self-education of the individual scientist...can be realized only if every barrier to access to scientific documents is maximally reduced....To realize optimal facilitation for advanced generalistic learning in science, state governments must collectively and so, globally, insist on open access publication of all state-funded scientific research....

I just mailed the May issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.  This issue tries to get specific about what we don't know about open access and poses a series of research questions in need of researchers.  The round-up section briefly notes 125 OA developments from April.

... We are entering a web 2.0 world - a world where networked communities inform decisions on both the individual and societal level. These networked communities involve a significant amount of discussion. This posting is made in that spirit. The purpose is not to provide answers but to raise questions. ...

What is the relationship between university faculty and intellectual property rights?

If the role of faculty is to produce knowledge, do faculty have a right to the protection of their intellectual property? ...

... [D]oes the OER community demand that the university faculty member give up their intellectual property and place their creations into the open space? If not, does OER demand that the university faculty member give up part of their intellectual property rights? If so, which part? ...

... The [World Health Organization] Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property (IGWG) is meeting from 28 April to 3 May, as a part of its resumed second session (the second session begin in November 2007)(IPW, WHO, 9 November 2007). The current round of negotiations is under mandate to create a consensus document for presentation at the World Health Assembly, which will take place later this month. ...

The morning’s negotiations focussed on element two, promotion of research and development. Convergence was reached on ... article (2.4.c) on the creation of open databases and compound libraries. The United States sought to delete the ... article as it felt it was redundant, sparking discussion on the issue. ...

The encouragement and promotion of traditional knowledge (and traditional medicines) was another key debate. Suriname wanted to ensure that traditional medicine is protected from being carried away from its nations of origin and brought back as patented matter. The traditional knowledge clause in element 5, Article 5.1.f, on the creation of digital libraries of traditional knowledge in order to prevent misappropriation, caused much disagreement. Some delegates were uncertain if discussions on traditional knowledge even belonged in the WHO negotiation. Others could not see how a digital database could prevent misappropriation, as it would offer greater access to the knowledge. Several new suggestions were offered, but after lengthy discussion no convergence was forthcoming so the chair suggested interested parties meet outside the plenary. Kenya is chairing this side session. ...

As expected RePEc beat traffic records in the past months, with both EconPapers and IDEAS posting records. Over all services, LogEc recorded 749,918 file downloads and 2,815,159 abstract views.

... [T]he following institutions joined RePEc with new archives: Academy of Economic Studies (Bucharest), Academia Romana, University of Strathclyde, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Wolters Kluwer Health, Robert Schumann Centre, Institute of Development Studies (Brighton), Lebanese Economic Association, Institute of Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the EC (IAAEG).

And now the various thresholds we passed last month, with plenty of important ones this time:
30,000,000 cumulated downloads
10,000,000 article downloads
700,000 monthly downloads
475,000 online items
175,000 paper abstracts
100,000 papers announced through NEP
16,000 registered authors
2,000 online chapters
1,600 software components

Six library, student, and advocacy organizations today announced the Second Annual Sparky Awards, a contest that recognizes the best new short videos on the value of sharing and aims to broaden the discussion of access to scholarly research by inviting students to express their views creatively.

This year’s contest is being organized by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) with additional co-sponsorship by the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, Penn Libraries (at the University of Pennsylvania), Students for Free Culture, and The Student PIRGs. ...

The 2008 contest theme is “MindMashup: The Value of Information Sharing.” Well-suited for adoption as a college class assignment, the Sparky Awards invite contestants to submit videos of two minutes or less that imaginatively portray the benefits of the open, legal exchange of information. Mashup is an expression referring to a song, video, Web site, or software application that combines content from more than one source.

To be eligible, submissions must be publicly available on the Internet – on a Web site or in a digital repository – and available for use under a Creative Commons License. The Winner will receive a cash prize of $1,000 along with a Sparky Award statuette. Two Runners Up will each receive $500 plus a personalized award certificate. At the discretion of the judges, additional Special Merit Awards may be designated. The award-winning videos will be screened at the January 2009 American Library Association Midwinter Conference in Denver.

Entries must be received by November 30, 2008. Winners will be announced in January 2009. The Winner of the First Annual Sparky Awards in 2007 was Habib Yazdi, a student at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for “Share”. ...

Today the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET) adopted its long-awaited OA mandate.  From the policy:

...Where a research publication arises in whole or in part from IRCSET funded research..., the following policy will be adhered to with effect from 1st May 2008.....

1. This publication policy confirms the freedom of researchers to publish first wherever they feel is the most appropriate.

2. The effect of the policy is intended to increase the visibility of, and improve access to, the research funded by IRCSET and the State, where such research is intended to be published by the researcher(s) concerned.

3. The policy is based on recognised best practice. It is in keeping with the recommendations of the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB) Policy in relation to scientific publication. It is also in keeping with the combined OECD Ministers’ Declaration entrusting the OECD to work towards commonly agreed Principles and Guidelines on Access to Research Data from Public Funding.

Conditions to which IRCSET funded Award Recipients
should adhere:

1. All researchers must lodge their publications resulting in whole or in part from IRCSET-funded research in an open access repository as soon as is practical, but within six calendar months at the latest.

2. The repository should ideally be a local institutional repository to which the appropriate rights must be granted to replicate to other repositories.

3. Authors should deposit post-prints (or publisher’s version if permitted) plus metadata of articles accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals and international conference proceedings;

4. Deposit should be made upon acceptance by the journal/conference. Repositories should release the metadata immediately, with access restrictions to full text article to be applied as required. Open access should be available as soon as practicable after the author-requested embargo, or six month, whichever comes first;

5. Suitable repositories should make provision for long-term preservation of, and free public access to, published research findings....

Also see today's press release:

...The requirement will from now on form part of IRCSET’s terms and conditions in offering and providing funding to researchers. IRCSET is now funded under the National Development Plan and will allocate approximately €26.0 million in 2008 to the development of early stage research careers....

A number of Irish universities currently provide open access repositories of their own and a consortium of Irish universities is engaged in the development of a national open access repository system- connecting the repositories of each participating institution for fuller public accessibility....

“This is intended to be a highly beneficial policy which is fully in line with European and OECD guidelines,” commented Professor Jane Grimson, Chair of IRCSET....

Comment.  This may be the best funder mandate anywhere.  All the strengths of the exemplary September 2007 draft policy have been preserved in this final version.  Here's what I said about it at the time:

I particularly applaud the mandatory language, the firm six month deadline with no loopholes for resisting publishers, the equal standing of central and distributed repositories, and the full implementation of the dual deposit/release strategy (or what Stevan Harnad calls immediate deposit / optional access).

Xavier Bosch, An open challenge. Open access and the challenges for scientific publishing, EMBO Reports, 9, 5 (2008) pp. 404-408.  (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.)  Bosch is in the Department of Internal Medicine at Hospital Clinic of the University of Barcelona.  This is a long article and my short excerpt cannot do justice to it; I encourage you to read the whole thing.  However, I believe my comments address all of Bosch's major objections.  Excerpt:

In December 2001, proponents of open access (OA) to peer-reviewed literature established a new set of ideals for scientific communication. The model they proposed would make accepted scientific papers freely accessible on the world wide web and, to cover the costs for editorial services, would charge the authors instead of relying on traditional subscription-based income (Budapest Open Access Initiative). More than 3,000 journals now publish under this model....

[T]he impact and future of OA in scientific publishing and the economic sustainability of OA models are so far unclear. Other questions also remain: which journals are most likely to be affected —negatively or positively— by OA? If OA has to rely partly on subsidies from public or private funders to survive, and if legislation mandates authors to post accepted papers on government-run repositories, is there a danger that OA publishers could lose their independence?

Here, I review the history and current status of OA publishing, discuss its advantages and disadvantages....and propose a business model that both provides the public with access to user-friendly summaries of the latest research....

Another argument in favour of OA, which has been attracting authors, is that OA publications potentially reach more readers and could thus receive higher citation rates. However, a comprehensive review of the recent bibliometric data and literature found little evidence that OA publication of articles increases their citation rates (Craig et al, 2007)....

At a glance, it seems that OA online articles are cheaper to produce than printed articles. However, this does not take into account the editorial costs that increase with a journal's rejection rate [and therefore would require higher author-side publication fees]....

It remains unclear whether OA journals could ever raise enough revenue to maintain the high standard of editing that is currently provided by high-quality subscription journals....

Finally, the AAP stated that there might also be legal consequences with respect to intellectual property and copyright. The AAP argued that, "journal publishers who have opposed the NIH mandatory policy will continue to pursue their concerns with Congress regarding the policy's negative impact on science publishing and the protection of related intellectual property rights"....

Another argument against OA, namely that financial dependence on one or few funding agencies or organizations could threaten editorial independence, is not as far-fetched as it seems. There are many examples of how the current US administration has tried to meddle with scientific findings that do not support their political goals....

It is scholarly journals published by smaller societies, many of which depend on the journal's income to finance their activities, which are likely to be hurt by OA....

Is it really essential and practical for taxpayers to have free, immediate access to the full contents of all publicly funded research findings published in peer-reviewed journals? A more pragmatic model could take into account the societal relevance of the information. For example, it is unlikely that a paper on the fundamental molecular mechanisms of a rare genetic disorder will immediately influence a physician's practice or be of great interest to the layman. It might be more useful to give the general public immediate, free access to user-friendly summaries of the latest research, such as patientINFORM, a partnership of publishers and voluntary health organizations....

Comments

• Bosch's history of OA is generally well done (in passages not excerpted here).  But for someone as familiar with OA as he is, it's surprising to find that he still believes that all OA journals charge author-side publication fees, something known to be false since the AAAS/ALPSP/Highwire report on OA journals came out in 2005 (and which Bosch himself cites later in his article).  Not only do some OA journal charge no fees, but the majority of OA journals charge no fees.   A full 67% of the journals listed in the DOAJ charge no publication fees, and 83% of OA journals from society publishers charge no publication fees. 
• Bosch cherry-picks his evidence that OA does not increase citation impact.  He disregards the many studies unfavorable to his conclusion, including studies (Hajjem 2005 and Eysenbach 2006) addressing the doubt that there is correlation here without causation, and including responses to the one study he does cite.
• "[I]t seems that OA online articles are cheaper to produce than printed articles. However, this does not take into account the editorial costs that increase with a journal's rejection rate...."  It's true that editorial costs (per accepted paper) rise with with the journal's rejection rate.  But this affects OA and TA journals equally.  For journals of equal quality and equal rejection rates, the OA journal would be less expensive to produce.  Apart from dispensing with print (which many TA journals do as well), OA journals eliminate subscription management, eliminate DRM and user authentication, eliminate lawyer fees for licenses and enforcement, and reduce or eliminate marketing.  In their place they add back little more than the cost of collecting publication fees or institutional subsidies.  If Bosch's point is that journals with high rejection rates would find it hard to support themselves on author-side publication fees, that may be true.  But that's irrelevant to the proposition that OA publication costs less than TA publication.
• Bosch uncritically accepts the AAP complaint that the NIH policy violates copyright.  If he had looked closely, he'd see that the NIH policy requires grantees to retain the rights needed to comply with the policy, and therefore that the NIH use of grantee articles is authorized by the copyright holders.
• "Another argument against OA, namely that financial dependence on one or few funding agencies or organizations could threaten editorial independence, is not as far-fetched as it seems...."  If Bosch is saying that government OA mandates could interfere with peer review or journal decisions about what to publish, then he's forgetting that OA mandates regulate grantees, not publishers, that they only apply to articles already published in independent (non-governmental) peer-reviewed journals, and that they do not dictate the peer-review methods, business models, or access policies of scholarly journals.  If instead he's saying that ideological government officials could censor conclusions they dislike, by removing them from a government repository, he's forgetting the differences between OA archiving and OA publishing.  It's depressingly true that the Bush administration (for example) has interfered with the government funded science on ideological grounds.  But so far Bush appointees haven't monkeyed with repository content; and even if they did, they would not censor the scientific record.  Here's how I put it in SOAN for February 2007:

  [FRPAA, like other OA mandates,] only applies to articles that have already been published in peer-reviewed journals....[I]t's about archiving copies, not manipulating originals.  Hence, the possibility of censorship doesn't come up.  The originals will be in libraries and independent web sites around the world, wherever the publisher's market reach, distribution system, and preservation back-ups have managed to place them.  If some of the published originals are not in fact copied for OA archiving, or if some copies are removed after deposit, that would be regrettable (and violate the policy).  But it would not affect the originals at all.  It would not delete them from libraries and independent web sites around the world, shrink the range of their distribution, change their access policies, or reduce their visibility.  To use the word "censorship" to describe the incomplete copying of literature already published, distributed, stored, curated, and preserved in independent locations is incoherent newspeak.  Or (to play along), if occasional non-archiving really is a kind of censorship, then publishers who want to defeat an OA archiving mandate like FRPAA want systematic non-archiving and mass censorship.

• "It is scholarly journals published by smaller societies, many of which depend on the journal's income to finance their activities, which are likely to be hurt by OA...."  Bosch is apparently unaware that at least 425 scholarly societies publish 450 OA journals.  (There are many more, and Caroline Sutton and I are about to release new numbers and new evidence.)
• "Is it really essential and practical for taxpayers to have free, immediate access to the full contents of all publicly funded research findings published in peer-reviewed journals?"  Bosch is assuming that the primary purpose of OA policies is to make peer-reviewed literature accessible to lay readers.  But the primary purpose is to make it accessible to researchers who don't have access through their institutions.  Or to be more precise, policy-makers want to make the literature available to everyone who can make use of it, whether they are professionals or not.  And most of them happen to be professionals.  Lay readers who care will have direct access.  Lay readers who don't care will benefit indirectly because researchers will benefit directly.
• "It might be more useful to give the general public immediate, free access to user-friendly summaries of the latest research, such as patientINFORM...."  This might be true for most lay readers, but it isn't true for most beneficiaries of existing OA policies.  Because most of the unmet demand is from professional researchers, OA to mere summaries is far from adequate.  For more detail, see my many past comments on patientINFORM.

Marji McClure, Case Study: Open Access Yields Solid Growth for Hindawi, Information Today, May 1, 2008.  Excerpt:

...Hindawi, which was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Cairo, Egypt, was just like any other publisher for its first 10 years of business. But that changed in February 2007 when Hindawi, which had started to test the waters of open access (OA) journal articles a few years earlier, completed its full conversion to an OA publishing model....

Hindawi’s OA initiative and the company’s commitment to the pro­cess received a boost last November when it formed a partnership with SAGE....The alliance calls for the publishers to jointly publish a collection of OA journals....

SAGE will develop and market the journals, while Hindawi will provide the technological, editorial, and production infrastructure that will run the journals, according to [Paul Peters, head of business development for Hindawi]. He says the companies will each have 50% ownership of the journals and will equally split revenues generated by the publications....

Peters adds that Hindawi doesn’t have any other partnerships in place, but the company is interested in building additional alliances....

On its own, Hindawi currently publishes more than 100 peer-reviewed journals in the STM space and expects to publish roughly 3,000–4,000 journal articles in 2008....

Hindawi’s journals are published under the OA model...[and] distributed under the Creative Commons attribution license, which allows for the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction of the articles. Article authors maintain the copyright to their work....

A print-on-demand service enables readers to access the journals in printed form....Authors pay for the publication of their work through article processing charges, which can range from € 400 to € 1,000 (about $600 to $1,500) per article, says Peters.

“Apart from their business model, these journals are run much the same way that traditional subscription-based journals are run,” he says. “All of our journals have a thorough peer-review process, and we reject about 60% of the articles that are submitted to our journals.” ...

[T]he company has grown substantially since the total OA conversion. Hindawi received about 6,000 submissions in the 12 months after the conversion, a 60% increase from the previous year, Peters says. Hindawi also launched about 40 new journal titles during that time....“We have been very pleased with [our] ability to grow since converting to open access, and we expect to maintain very rapid growth over the next several years,” he says....

“Although many of our journals are only a few years old, we have seen quite a few of them become very successful in terms of visibility, prestige, and reputation,” he says....

Scotland's Queen Margaret University adopted an OA mandate on February 19, 2008.  From the description in ROARMAP:

...2. We have accordingly adopted the policy that all research output is to be archived in the departmental institutional repository before or after peer-reviewed publication. This archive forms the official record of the institutions research publications

3. Our policy is compatible with publishers' copyright agreements as follows:

a. The copyright for the unrefereed preprint resides entirely with the author before it is submitted for peer-reviewed publication, hence it can be self-archived irrespective of the copyright policy of the journal to which it is eventually submitted

b. The copyright for the peer-reviewed postprint will depend on the wording of the copyright agreement which the author signs with the publisher

c. Many publishers will allow the peer-reviewed postprint to be archived. The copyright transfer agreement will either specify this right explicitly or the author can inquire about it directly. If you are uncertain about the terms of your agreement, a directory [SHERPA RoMEO] of journal self-archiving policies is available to guide you. Wherever possible, you are advised to modify your copyright agreement so that it does not disallow archiving

d. In the rare case where you have signed a very restrictive copyright transfer form in which you have agreed explicitly not to self-archive the peer-reviewed postprint, you are encouraged to archive, alongside your already-archived preprint, a "corrigenda" file, listing the substantive changes the user would need to make in order to turn the unrefereed preprint into the refereed postprint

e. Copyright agreements may state that eprints can be archived on your personal homepage. As far as publishers are concerned, the institutional repository is a part of the institutions infrastructure for your personal homepage

4. We do not require you to archive the full text of books or research monographs. It is sufficient to archive the references along with the usual metadata

5. Some journals still maintain submission policies which state that a preprint will not be considered for publication if it has been previously 'publicised' by making it accessible online. Unlike copyright transfer agreements, such policies are not a matter of law. If you have concerns about submitting an archived paper to a journal which still maintains such a restrictive submission policy, please discuss it with the institutional repository....

Comments.

• This is a very strong policy.  The requirement is clear; the copyright information in 3.a-c and 5 is correct and not widely understood; and the exception for books is justified.  This is the first policy I've seen to encourage the old "corrigenda" strategy (3.d) and first to declare that the university IR counts as the faculty member's "personal home page" for the purposes of publisher self-archiving policies.  Kudos to all involved.
• I can think of only two tweaks.  (1) The policy now requires deposit of the preprint OR the postprint.  It should require deposit of the postprint, no matter what, and then encourage or require the deposit of the preprint.  Right now, preprint deposit could take the place of postprint deposit, which would be regrettable.  (2) In the case covered by 3.d, when faculty have signed restrictive copyright agreements, faculty should still deposit their postprints in the IR, but initially make them closed or dark (not OA).  They can make the metadata OA immediately and make the full texts OA as soon as they can obtain permission to do so, e.g. after the journal's embargo runs.  This is compatible with the recommended "corrigenda" strategy.

Copyright and Academic Research:  Guidelines for Researchers and Publishers in the Humanities and Social Sciences, a joint report from the British Academy and the Publishers Association, April 2008.  Excerpt:

13.2.  In the digital era various ‘open-access’ or ‘creative commons’ licences have been developed for use with works whose authors wish to see them distributed more freely in electronic or digital form, often via the Internet, with models along such lines as -

(a) Attribution licence - ‘all usage allowed including reuse for commercial purposes so long as the source is identified’

(b) Commercial use limited licence - ‘all usage allowed except for commercial purposes’

(c) Licence under which the author keeps exclusive commercial exploitation rights - ‘all rights reserved (by the author) apart from those specifically granted’.

Publishers, and the Publishers Association, have significant reservations about any general use of such licences, particularly if they affect normal use or re-use of the work for commercial purposes. They may have their place for creators who wish to disseminate their work widely but completely non-commercially, but should only be entered into on a fully informed basis, particularly if the licence purports to be irrevocable....

Comments

• It's notable that the British Academy and the Publishers Association could agree on copyright guidelines.  On the other hand, it's also notable that this section (13.2) only refers to the concerns of publishers and does not say that the British Academy shares those concerns.  It's the only section in the report addressing OA issues.
• It looks like the academy and the publishers couldn't agree on this section and reached a kind of compromise:  the section was included in the report but with an annotation suggesting that it is only endorsed by the publishers. 
• In August 2005, the British Academy publicly supported the OA principles expressed in the draft RCUK policy.  It even wanted to extend them to the social sciences and humanities. However, it did defend the copyright loophole in that draft of the policy (mandating repository deposit "subject to copyright and licensing arrangements").  In September 2006 it released a report on Copyright and research in the humanities and social sciences recommending that "authors...should understand that their interests in copyright are not necessarily identical with those of publishers and should not rely on publishers to protect them" and that "the law should be clarified - statutorily if necessary – to make clear that the use of copyright material in the normal course of scholarly research in universities and other public research institutions is covered by the exemptions from the copyright act" (such as fair use or fair dealing).  If the British Academy shares the publisher concerns expressed in 13.2, then it would appear to have changed its position since its September 2006 report and should explain why.

Emma Hill and Mike Rossner, You wrote it; you own it!  Journal of Cell Biology, April 30, 2008.  An editorial.  Excerpt:

Authors of papers published in Rockefeller University Press journals (The Journal of Cell Biology, The Journal of Experimental Medicine, or The Journal of General Physiology) now retain copyright to their published work. This permits authors to reuse their own work in any way, as long as they attribute it to the original publication. Third parties may use our published materials under a Creative Commons license, six months after publication....

Preying on authors' desire to publish, and thus their willingness to sign virtually any form placed in front of them, scientific publishers have traditionally required authors to sign over the copyright to their work before publication....

At The Rockefeller University Press, we have followed this tradition in the past and obtained copyright from authors as a condition of publication. Several years ago, however, we recognized that the advent of the internet had irrevocably changed the nature and mechanisms of knowledge distribution, and we returned some of those rights to authors. Since July 2000, we have allowed our authors to freely distribute their published work by posting the final, formatted PDF version on their own websites immediately after publication.

With the growing demand for public access to published data, we recently started depositing all of our content in PubMed Central. In a further step to enhance the utility of scientific content, we have now decided to return copyright to our authors. In return, however, we require authors to make their work available for reuse by the public. Instead of relinquishing copyright, our authors will now provide us with a license to publish their work. This license, however, places no restrictions on how authors can reuse their own work; we only require them to attribute the work to its original publication. Six months after publication, third parties (that is, anyone who is not an author) can use the material we publish under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License....

The Creative Commons License will apply retroactively to all work published by The Rockefeller University Press before November 1, 2007....Authors who previously assigned their copyright to the Press are now granted the right to use their own work in any way they like, as long as they acknowledge the original publication....

Full text of our new copyright policy is available here.

Comment.  What's remarkable about this new policy is that these are non-OA or subscription-based journals.  They aren't the first subscription journals to remove price barriers after six months, but I believe they are the first to remove some permission barriers as well.  Kudos to all involved in the decision, especially Mike Rossner, Executive Director of Rockefeller University Press.

Update.  I said that the three RUP journals weren't the first subscription journals to remove price barriers after six months.  But I just learned from the press that they were among the first, having adopted this policy in January 2001.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2007 Annual Edition is now available from Digital Scholarship.

Annual editions of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography are PDF files designed for printing. Each annual edition is based on the last HTML version published during the edition's year.

The SEPB 2007 Annual Edition is based on Version 70 (12/18/2007). The printed bibliography is over 260 pages long. The PDF file is over 1 MB.

In addition to updated URLs, hundreds of additional URLs have been added to the SEPB 2007 Annual Edition. (The additional URLs will be added to Version 72 of the SEPB HTML edition.) ...

... [B]elow is the first profile in our series on people and organizations working at the frontiers of open science: a look at the pioneering work of the UK-based Wellcome Trust. ...

Dear Members of the NIH Research Community:

I am writing to remind you that the mandatory NIH Public Access Policy applies to final peer-reviewed manuscripts accepted for publication on or after April 7, 2008. Making published research funded by NIH accessible to everyone, including health care providers, patients, educators and scientists, helps advance science and improve human health. We all have a role to play in achieving this goal, and I appreciate your efforts to make the NIH Public Access Policy successful.

... Compliance with this Policy is a legal requirement and a term and condition for all active grants and contracts awarded as of April 7, 2008. Failure to comply may trigger one or more enforcement actions, depending on the severity and duration of the non-compliance.

Please see the Public Access Web site for the tools you need to comply with the Policy. The Web site houses Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), training information, and other resources.

To ensure compliance with the Policy, please remember to:

Address Copyright ...

Submit Papers upon Acceptance for Publication ...

Cite Papers ...

Key Services
This briefing paper gives an overview of some of the key services currently available to repository managers and provides further details on how to access and use them.

Metadata
This paper explores the topic of metadata in the repository and includes advice and information on metadata schemas and application profiles.

Making Effective Use of Your Repository
Repositories are both part of an institution’s local information provision and part of the developing global open access information environment. This briefing paper discusses these contexts, helping the repository to serve the institution’s business needs effectively.

Repository Policy Framework - Updated
Updated information about giving structure to your repository planning through the implementation of a policy framework. ...

I came back from a meeting of the Academy of Science (ASSAF) Committee on Scholarly Publishing in South Africa (CSPiSA) last week feeling bouyed up and looking forward to a period of rapid developments in Open Access scholarly publishing in South Africa. We were told that the Department of Science and Technology (DST) has now dedicated a substantial three-year budget to fund the implementation of ASSAF's recommendations for the development of scholarly publication in South Africa. ...

The ASSAF Report on Scholarly Publishing in SA ... was commissioned by the DST and produced what was probably the most coherent account of the state of scholarly journal publishing in South Africa, concluding with a set of 10 recommendations which included strong support for the development of a 'gold route' Open Access approach to journal publishing in South Africa.

The central vision of the report is for quality-controlled and government supported publication of open access journals of a sufficient quality to deliver local impact and international recognition. ... Financial support for open access journal publication, it proposed, would be by way of the dedication of a small percentage of the revenue paid to journals through the Department of Education (DoE) publication grant system, for the purpose of paying per-article author charges through the institution where the author is based.

Backing this up is a recommendation for the creation of a national technical and promotional platform for hosting and profiling the best South African journals, possibly along the lines of SciELO in Latin America. ...

It seems that the DST's motivation in offering this support is linked to its 10-year plan for human capital development, which proposes a radical growth in the level of postgraduate degrees, publications and innovation levels in higher education. The ASSAf scholarly publication programme is thus seen as a key to the process of raising the bar for the quality and output of research in the country and leveraging upwards the profile of the country in the international research rankings, while at the same time improving the positive impact of research on economic growth and social development.

... [T]his is a major step forward simply because it puts publication of South African research in South Africa in the spotlight and, through links with the African Academies of Science, connects this to a broader effort to raise publication levels on the continent. (The creation of an African citation index is one of the recommendations in the ASSAf Report on Scholarly Publishing in South Africa.) And, even more important, this intervention at last recognises that scholarly publishers need support if South Africa research is to be properly disseminated.

We understand that the DST accepts that this model may require long term subsidisation for Open Access journal support and this support is perceived as part of a national service project to build capacity and serve every scholar. ...

A further intervention being undertaken over the next six months, this time with DoE support, is the production of a Report on a Strategic Approach to Scholarly Book Publishing by a selected panel of experts, following a fact-finding investigation by CREST at the University of Stellenbosch. Provisional findings should be available for presentation at the National Scholarly Journal Editors' Forum in July and it is hoped that the final report should be ready for release in November. ...

This presentation deals with the issues of copyright and open access in the context of scholarly communication. Scholarly communication is the process of dissemination of the outcomes coming from research in universities, private organizations or institutions or research centres. These results are presented in the form of intellectual outputs. Each barrier to the dissemination of scientific research is a barrier to the access to knowledge. There is a clash between the aim of research and the access to its outcomes in journals where you are allowed to information only through the payment of subscription fees. Nowadays 11 publishers hold and manage the 75% of the publishing market and the 90% of the published articles can be accessed only through the payment of fees. As far as copyright is concerned, authors have to gain awareness that they don’t have to release copyright to the publisher because they could need it back again in case of publishing their works in an open access archive or using them for educational purpose. So, the issue of copyright is not an obstacle to open access, but authors should be aware of the importance to keep their rights preventing them to release copyright to publishers. This presentation offers an overview on the history and development of the Open Access movement at the national and European level (European Research Council’ Guidelines on Open Access). With regard to the Open Access Initiative, the paper gives a brief introduction to Padua@research, the University of Padua’s institutional open repository for the deposit of the intellectual research outputs where PhD thesis, as intellectual production, are deposited as well. At the national and international level, it is fundamental that authors knows how it is important to keep copyright for their own purposes and both the universities and the governments should create policies in order to protect and guarantee scientific copyright and the world of research.

JISC & SCONUL Library Management Systems Study:  An Evaluation and horizon scan of the current library management systems and related systems landscape for UK higher education, March 2008.  A new report from JISC and SCONUL.  Excerpt:

...Key insights into the needs of the academic community were provided in early 2006 by Schmoller and Ferguson in their 98-page report ‘Review of the information environment for social science researchers’, commissioned by ESRC in 2005. The report was never published by ESRC but seems to have affected the thinking of at least one agency, as judged by public statements of their response....Below are some of the key extracts from the Review that are particularly relevant to this Study....

• We note that the mandatory deposit in open access repositories of all ESRC research results and resulting publications (and all PhD theses) is supported by the community and we recommend this should be pursued with vigour....

Summary of key points...

• The moves by publishers towards more open access to electronic versions of journals will continue, extending slowly to books, but progress will be patchy and inhibited by cost barriers....

In terms of e-content the rise of Open Access (OA) means that HE libraries are playing a growing role in managing (via some kind of institutional repository) the scholarly output of their institution. Institutional repositories however are not part of the scope of this study....

How do you make school textbooks cheaper? The government has turned to a combination of old traditions and modern technology to beat book prices, considered one of the sources for the high cost of education in this country. Let's hope it works.

The new book policy, introduced in 2005 but for some reason still not widely known to the public, involves lengthening the shelf life of a book to a minimum of five years, buying up the copyrights of as many school textbooks as the government can afford and uploading them in digital form to the Internet and making them available for free download to those who need them. ...

The government has allocated Rp 20 billion (US$2.19 million) this year to buy the copyrights of widely used school textbooks and upload them to the Internet.

Students will then be free to download and print the books. The government is even encouraging people to print them out and resell them, knowing they cannot charge too much or people will simply turn to the original source. With the One Laptop For Every Child concept soon coming to Indonesia, perhaps there will be no need for anyone to print books, with e-books taking over. ...

The Winter 2007 issue of SCONUL Focus is now online.  Here are the OA-related articles:

• Irena Kriviene and ?ibute Petrauskiene, Co-operation amongst Lithuanian academic librarians to increase and promote access to information
• Isabel Bernal, eIFL.net: empowering libraries and strengthening the information society in developing and transition countries
• Hans Geleijnse and Peter Williams, NEEO and Economists Online
• John Murtagh, Brunel University Resource Archive - a year in the life of an institutional repository

eIFL.net (Electronic Information for Libraries, www.eifl.net) is a not for profit organisation that supports and advocates for the wide availability of electronic resources by library users in transitional and developing countries. In its 8 years of existence, eIFL.net has managed to build up a dynamic and sustainable network of more than 2000 libraries in 50 countries, has developed a varied agenda in favour of a wider availability of educational e-resources and enhanced skills base of eIFL.net library consortia. Its core activities are negotiating affordable subscriptions on a multi- country consortial basis, supporting national library consortia and maintaining a global knowledge sharing and capacity building network in related areas, such as open access publishing, intellectual property rights, open source software for libraries and the creation of institutional repositories of local content.

I'm very happy to introduce you to the Open Access Directory.  First an excerpt from today's announcement:

Peter Suber and Robin Peek have launched the Open Access Directory (OAD), a wiki where the open access community can create and maintain simple factual lists about open access to science and scholarship. Suber, a Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and Peek, an Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, conceived the project in order to collect OA-related lists for one-stop reference and searching.

The wiki will start operating with about half a dozen lists --for example, conferences devoted to open access, discussion forums devoted to open access, and journal "declarations of independence"-- and add more over time.

The goal is to harness the knowledge and energy of the open access community itself to enlarge and correct the lists. A list on a wiki, revised continuously by its users, can be more comprehensive and up to date than the same list maintained by an individual. By bringing many OA-related lists together in one place, OAD will make it easier for users, especially newcomers, to discover them and use them for reference. The easier they are to maintain and discover, the more effectively they can spread useful, accurate information about open access....

The wiki is represented by an editorial board consisting of prominent figures in the open access movement. The Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at Simmons College hosts and provides technical support to the OAD....

Comment.  And now a few personal notes, even longer than the official announcement.

• I've been maintaining online lists about OA for years.  Some, like my list of OA-related conferences and workshops, are pretty current, but others, like my lists of OA-related discussion forums, journal declarations of independence, and university actions to support OA, are far from current.  Three years ago I knew that the OA community could maintain these lists on a wiki far better than I could maintain them alone, and I started looking for a suitable partner to host a wiki and help with the administration.  Unfortunately the same heavy workload which made it impossible for me to keep all my lists up to date also delayed my search for a good wiki partner.  But earlier this year the spark lit with my friend and colleague Robin Peek at the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science. 
• Robin and Simmons have been wonderfully energetic in getting this project off the ground.  I especially want to thank her, Athanasia Pontika, a doctoral student working with Robin, and Terry Plum, Simmons' Assistant Dean for Technology.  I'm very grateful to Charles Bailey, Leslie Chan, Heather Joseph, Melissa Hagemann, Alma Swan, and John Wilbanks for their willingness to serve on the editorial board.
• OAD starts today with with a handful of my lists, taking a load off my shoulders and giving each list a good chance to thrive.  Over time we'll add more --some from my crypt of neglected projects and others suggested by new users.  If it succeeds, then very soon the information I contributed will be dwarfed by the information contributed by others.  Robin and I are thrilled to give this project an initial shove, but now it's your project too. 
• I'm excited that OAD will improve the information resources about OA available to everyone --faculty, students, librarians, administrators, funders, publishers, journalists, and policy-makers.  And I'm excited that it will bring Web 2.0 methods to bear on the task of keeping track of the rapidly growing and almost intractably large OA movement.  Stop by, register, start improving the lists we already have, suggest new ones for us to include, consult it when you need to answer a factual question about OA, and spread the word.

The American Physical Society is providing retroactive OA to the most important papers published during the past 50 years by Physics Review Letters.  From the April 10 announcement:

As part of the celebration of PRL's 50th anniversary, we will be presenting throughout 2008 a series of milestone Letters that made long-lived contributions to physics, either by announcing significant discoveries, or by initiating new areas of research. A number of these articles report on work that was later recognized with a Nobel Prize for one or more of the authors. Starting the week of January 2, we will present a few important Letters from PRL in 1958, and the next week from 1959, etc., continuing up through the year 2000.

Selection of these important papers is not an easy task. There is an overabundance of highlights in each year, and efforts have been made to obtain a distribution of such articles in the various fields of physics. It is inevitable that some very important work will not be featured, and this may be taken as an indication of the breadth and high quality of the contents of Physical Review Letters....

Comment.  I applaud this project and called for something similar in a 2004 article.  Excerpt:

[Journals providing retroactive OA for their landmark articles] will become more visible as journals that published landmark articles. They will also become visible as journals willing to share knowledge and accelerate research....It shouldn't take an expensive marketing department to convert this kind of reputation into advantage in the competition for submissions, advertising, and subscriptions....

Stevan Harnad, Optimal Institutional Open Access Mandate: SPARC/SCIENCE-COMMONS White Paper, Open Access Archivangelism, April 28, 2008. 

Summary:  The SPARC / SCIENCE COMMONS WHITE PAPER on "what faculty authors can do to ensure open access to their work through their institution" proposes the key modification that will upgrade the Harvard self-archiving mandate to the optimal alternative -- a universal, no-opt-out, Deposit Mandate, plus a licensing clause with an opt-out option -- making the mandate suitable for adoption by all universities and funders worldwide. The crucial difference is that the deposit clause must be no-opt-out -- a true mandate. (I hope Harvard too will consider making the tiny change that would upgrade its mandate to this optimal alternative.) This upgraded mandate, more powerful even than what the White Paper notes, should now also make it more evident why it is so important to integrate university and funder mandates, both converging deposit on (and then harvesting from) the repositories of the institutions that are the providers of all the research (attention NIH!).

From the body of the post:

...It is such a pleasure (and relief!) to be able to endorse this paper unreservedly.

There are distinct signs in the text that the drafters have been attentive, and paying close heed to what has proved empirically to work and not work elsewhere, and why....

Stevan Harnad, Optimizing the European Commission's Open Access Mandate, Open Access Archivangelism, April 28, 2008.

Summary:  The European Commission (EC) Grant Agreement mandates that "an electronic copy of the published version or the final manuscript accepted for publication shall also be provided to the Commission" but does not specify how to provide it.

This is an implementational detail. The only thing the Commission needs to do is to specify that the electronic copy should be provided by providing the Commission with the URL of the deposit in the grant-recipient's Institutional Repository (IR).

That will create a synergy with the European University Association's recommendation that its 791 universities in 46 countries mandate that their research output (in all disciplines, whether or not EC-funded) be self-archived in each university's IR.

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which likewise needlessly requests direct central deposit, should adopt exactly the same implementational detail. Institutional IR deposit and central harvesting would extend the power and reach of the NIH mandate far beyond just the research NIH funds, and would help to universalize OA and OA mandates.

The International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) has released a major statement of its Goals, Structures, Policies, & Guidelines, April 2008.  (Thanks to Francis Ouellette.)  Excerpt:

...POLICY: To minimize the risk of patient/individual identification, the ICGC has established the policy that datasets be organized into two categories, open and controlled-access. Table 1 includes a list of data elements and the data access category within which they will be available.

The first category, Open Access Datasets, will be publicly accessible and contain only data that cannot be aggregated to generate a dataset unique to an individual. The second category, Controlled Access Datasets, will contain composite genomic and clinical data that are associated to a unique, but not directly identified, person....

An International Data Access Committee (IDAC) will be established as a policy-making group....

ICGC members will not have privileged access to data from other members of the Consortium. Rather, all data shared by the Consortium members will be obtained from the data that has been released to public databases.

Investigators outside of the ICGC are free to use data generated by ICGC members, either en masse or specific subsets, but are asked to follow the guidelines developed at the Ft. Lauderdale meeting. Specifically, data users should cite the source of the data and should acknowledge the clinical contributors and the data producers from the ICGC....

POLICY: All ICGC members agree not to make claims to possible IP derived from primary data (including somatic mutations) and to not pursue IP protections that would prevent or block access to or use of any element of ICGC data or conclusions drawn directly from those data....

Jean-Claude Guedon, Accès libre, archives ouvertes et États-nations : les stratégies du possible, Ametist, Number 2, 2008.  Read it in French or in Google's English.

... JDSupra.com, a new site, is stocking a free, virtual law library by persuading lawyers to do something highly unusual: to post examples of their legal work online for use by one and all, no strings attached. Many of the documents are articles and newsletters that can be understood by ordinary mortals who want more background on a legal issue, or who would like to find lawyers with expertise in a particular area.

It works like this: Lawyers who contribute to JD Supra dip into their hard drives for articles, court papers, legal briefs and other tidbits of their craft. They upload the documents, as well as a profile of themselves that is linked to each document. Site visitors who have a legal problem and are thinking about finding a lawyer can use an easily searchable database to look up, say, “trademark infringement,” find related documents and, if they like the author’s experience and approach, perhaps click on his or her profile.

Contributing lawyers get publicity and credit for the socially useful act of adding to a public database, and visitors get free information, said Aviva Cuyler, a former litigator in Marshall, Calif., who founded the business. “People will still need attorneys,” Ms. Cuyler said. “We are not encouraging people to do it themselves, but to find the right people to help them.”

The site opened at the end of February and has attracted about 200 contributors, including small, midsize and large firms, as well as academics and groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Cato Institute. The basic service of posting documents and linked profiles is free to these contributors; the site charges $240 a year if contributors want to add links in their profiles to their e-mail addresses, Web sites and blogs. The site will also carry advertisements. ...

Other innovations in virtual law libraries are concerned with new search technology for legal information on the Web. Thomas Smith, a law professor at the University of San Diego, is the co-creator of a search engine called PreCYdent, now in the beta, or testing, stage, that uses legal citations to find related information ...

... This week, dozens of professors from colleges across the country are meeting with representatives from nonprofit groups and for-profit companies that are in the digital textbook market to talk about ways of developing and promoting online content.

The first phase of the “Community College Open Textbook Project” is being funded by a one-year, $500,000-plus grant to the Foothill-De Anza Community College District from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

As part of the project, community college professors will receive training on how to find and customize material. One objective is for participants to create online textbooks, largely culled from existing resources, in high-demand courses such as statistics.

Baker, director of the project, is also bringing together professors to review the academic quality of the material, with the idea of coming away with peer-reviewed textbooks. These are faculty members who are part of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, a group that has met since last summer and operates a Web site for faculty looking to get information about open access textbooks. ...

This service provides the opportunity for institutions to participate in RePEc even if they are unable to provide metadata in the standard way, that is by opening a RePEc archive. This service is meant to be a last resort. It is limited to working paper series. This service only hosts the metadata about these working papers, not the full texts. Individuals should use MPRA.

Recently Anthropologi.info blogged a new anthropology site, American Ethnography. American Ethnography is a very pretty site with monthly thematic collections of articles from AAA journals. My initial response was: “wow, how happy will the AAA be to see entire articles they are selling for money on AnthroSource being reproduced on the web for free?” So I was surprised—astonished would be a better word—when Martin, the proprietor of AE, pointed out a paragraph on the AAA website’s permissions page which states that:

AAA article content published before 1964 is in the public domain and may be used and copied without permission. The AAA asks only that you include a complete reference to the original publication and a link to AnthroSource.

I would actually prefer a little more specification of what “public domain” means exactly here, but its still an extremely positive step forward—well done AAA! And as for the rest of us, I we should take this opportunity to start making some of the foundational works in our discipline available as soon as possible. Not only will this enable everyone to learn about anthropology as a discipline, but it will also be interesting to see if subscriptions to AAA journals are affected. And if they are not, then perhaps we could convince AAA to make the moving wall on their content shorter than its current forty-four years…

... [W]e chose four systems for further, detailed investigation. These four systems were:

• DPubS (Digital Publishing System) (Cornell and Penn State)
• GNU EPrints (University of Southampton)
• Hyperjournal (Net7 and University of Pisa)
• Open Journal System (University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University)

Three other systems, while not fully evaluated here (for reasons discussed below), merit special mention:

• Connexions/Rhaptos (Rice University)
• DiVA (Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet) (Uppsala University)
• Topaz (The Topaz Project)

The evaluation of these first four systems—Dpubs, EPrints, Hyperjounral and OJS—consisted of local installation, reading supporting documentation, and consideration of four broad areas:

• Institutional affiliation and other indicators of the viability of the open-source project
• Technical requirements, maintenance, scalability, and documented APIs
• Submission, peer review management, and administrative functions
• Access, formats, and electronic commerce functions ...

The term "open access" is now widely used in at least two senses.  For some, "OA" literature is digital, online, and free of charge.  It removes price barriers but not permission barriers.  For others, "OA" literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of unnecessary copyright and licensing restrictions.  It removes both price barriers and permission barriers.  It allows reuse rights which exceed fair use. 

There are two good reasons why our central term became ambiguous.  Most of our success stories deliver OA in the first sense, while the major public statements from Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin (together, the BBB definition of OA) describe OA in the second sense. 

As you know, Stevan Harnad and I have differed about which sense of the term to prefer --he favoring the first and I the second.  What you may not know is that he and I agree on nearly all questions of substance and strategy, and that these differences were mostly about the label.  While it may seem that we were at an impasse about the label, we have in fact agreed on a solution which may please everyone.  At least it pleases us. 

We have agreed to use the term "weak OA" for the removal of price barriers alone and "strong OA" for the removal of both price and permission barriers.  To me, the new terms are a distinct improvement upon the previous state of ambiguity because they label one of those species weak and the other strong.  To Stevan, the new terms are an improvement because they make clear that weak OA is still a kind of OA.

On this new terminology, the BBB definition describes one kind of strong OA.  A typical funder or university mandate provides weak OA.  Many OA journals provide strong OA, but many others provide weak OA.

Stevan and I agree that weak OA is a necessary but not sufficient condition of strong OA.  We agree that weak OA is often attainable in circumstances when strong OA is not attainable.  We agree that weak OA should not be delayed until we can achieve strong OA. We agree that strong OA is a desirable goal above and beyond weak OA.  We agree that the desirability of strong OA is a reason to keep working after attaining weak OA, but not a reason to disparage the difficulties or the significance of weak OA.  We agree that the BBB definition of OA does not need to be revised.

We agree that there is more than one kind of permission barrier to remove, and therefore that there is more than one kind or degree of strong OA. 

We agree that the green/gold distinction refers to venues (repositories and journals), not rights.  Green OA can be strong or weak, but is usually weak.  Gold OA can be strong or weak, but is also usually weak. 

I've often wanted short, clear terms for what I'm now going to call weak and strong OA.  But I also wanted a third term.  In my blog and newsletter I often need a term which means "weak or strong OA, we don't know which yet".  For example, a press release may announce a new free online journal, digital library, or database, without making clear what kind of reuse rights it allows.  Or a new journal will launch which makes its articles freely available but says nothing at all about its access policy.  I will simply call them "OA".  I'll specify that they are strong or weak OA only after I learn enough to do so.

Stevan and I agree in regretting the current, confusing ambiguity of the term, and we agree that the weak/strong terminology turns this ambiguity to advantage by attaching labels to the two most common uses in circulation.  I find the new terms an especially promising solution because they dispel confusion without requiring us to buck the tide of usage, which would be futile, or revise the BBB definition, which would be undesirable.

Postscript.  Stevan and I were going to write up separate accounts of this agreement and blog them simultaneously.  But when he saw my draft, he decided to blog it verbatim without writing his own.  That's agreement!

Update.  Stevan's version is now online.

Update.  Some questions and comments prompt me to add this point of clarification.  As I said in the original post, "there is more than one kind of permission barrier to remove, and therefore...there is more than one kind or degree of strong OA."  BBB OA is definitely strong OA, but not all strong OA is BBB OA. 

As soon as we move beyond the removal of price barriers to the removal of permission barriers, we enter the range of strong OA.  Hence, an article with a CC-NC license is strong OA because it allows some copying and redistribution beyond fair use (even if it doesn't allow all copying and redistribution).  My own preference is still for the CC-BY license, but we shouldn't speak as if CC-NC were not strong OA or as if there were just one kind of strong OA.

Update. Stevan and I now agree on one further point: we picked infelicitous terms ("weak" and "strong" OA) for describing this fundamental and widely-recognized distinction. We're not using them while we look for better ones.

Update (8/2/08). I've now made a personal and provisional decision to use "gratis/libre" in place of "weak/strong". For more detail, see my article in the August 2008 SOAN.

Antony Williams, Public Chemical Compound Databases, Current Opinion in Drug Discovery & Development, 11, 3 (2008) pp. 393-404.  Not even an abstract is free online at the journal web site.  However, Williams has posted the abstract on his blog:

The internet has rapidly become the first port of call for all information searches. The increasing array of chemistry-related resources that are now available provides chemists with a direct path to the information that was previously accessed via library services and was limited by commercial and costly resources. The diversity of the information that can be accessed online is expanding at a dramatic rate, and the support for publicly available resources offers significant opportunities in terms of the benefits to science and society. While the data online do not generally meet the quality standards of manually curated sources, there are efforts underway to gather scientists together and "crowdsource" an improvement in the quality of the available data. This review discusses the types of public compound databases that are available online and provides a series of examples. Focus is also given to the benefits and disruptions associated with the increased availability of such data and the integration of technologies to data mine this information.

... [The collection] lays an even stronger foundation for other [digitization] projects involving comics. PS is especially important because these early issues were well read, well loved, and well used. They’re excellent sources for any study of visual rhetoric, technical writing, literature, media studies, the military, American culture, and more. Will Eisner is the father of the modern graphic novel, popularizing the term and showing what it could be, and his work in all fields is so relevant and so important that it’s essential to have access to materials like PS. ...

College students and their families are rightly outraged about the bankrupting costs of textbooks that have nearly tripled since the 1980s, mainly because of marginally useful CD-ROMs and other supplements. A bill pending in Congress would require publishers to sell “unbundled” versions of the books — minus the pricey add-ons. Even more important, it would require publishers to reveal book prices in marketing material so that professors could choose less-expensive titles.

The bill is a good first step. But colleges and universities will need to embrace new methods of textbook development and distribution if they want to rein in runaway costs. That means using digital textbooks, which can often be presented online free of charge or in hard copies for as little as one-fifth the cost of traditional books. The digital books can also be easily customized and updated. ...

Schools are beginning to balk at outrageous pricing. Rice University offers textbooks for some classes free online and charges a nominal fee for the printed version. A new company called Flat World Knowledge, based in Nyack, N.Y., plans to offer online textbooks free and hopes to make its profit by selling supplemental materials like study guides and hard copies printed on demand.

A study being carried out by the geographer Ronald Dorn at Arizona State University suggests that students who use free online textbooks perform as well academically as students who buy expensive copies from traditional publishers. Colleges and universities should take advantage of these new developments. ...

Encyclopedia Britannica often is used in case studies as a definitive example of how new technology can disrupt a business. ... According to Comscore, for every page viewed on Britannica.com, 184 pages are viewed on Wikipedia (3.8 billion v. 21 million pave views per month). ...

You can purchase the 32 volume Britannica, which has 65,000 articles and 44 million words, for just $1,400. Or you can access it on the web for $70 per year.

And now, you can get access to the online version for free through a new program called Britannica Webshare - provided that you are a “web publisher.” The definition of a web publisher is rather squishy: “This program is intended for people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers. We reserve the right to deny participation to anyone who in our judgment doesn’t qualify.” Basically, you sign up, tell them about your site URL and a description, and they review it and decide if you’ll get in. I wonder if Facebook, MySpace and Twitter users are eligible? They all certainly “publish with some regularity on the Internet.”

Once you’re in, you get to link to the full version of articles - people clicking the link can read that article but they can’t go and read other parts of the Britannica site. ...

We present Quambo, a recommender system add-on for the DSpace open source repository platform. We explain how Quambo generates content recommendations based upon a user selected set of examples, our approach to presenting content recommendations to the user, and our experiences applying the system to a repository of technical reports. We consider how Quambo could be combined with the peer-federated DSpace add-on to extend the item-space from which recommendations can be generated; a larger item-space could improve the diversity of the set from which to make recommendations. We also consider how Quambo could be extended to add collaboration opportunities to DSpace. Publication Info: Submitted to Open Repositories 2008, Southampton, UK, April 1-4, 2008

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the papers presented at the international conference “Berlin5: from practice to impact. Consequences of knowledge dissemination”, 19-21 September 2007, Padua, Italy.

Design/methodology/approach – Discusses the content of papers presented at the conference, all dedicated to aspects of Open Access.

Findings The papers debate the challenges of Open Access and the possibilities of achieving a winning solution suitable for all stakeholders participating in the scholarly communication process.

Originality/value – A valuable review of the conference papers and current debate on Open Access.

... Nottingham was the first UK university to set up an institutional open-access repository, making its research available online. That was seven years ago, but since then open access has grown significantly in higher education. Nottingham's Sherpa Project has helped create academic repositories in a host of research-led universities and today there are 118.

Bill Hubbard, the project's manager, forsees all publicly-funded research becoming available in this way within a decade. As the momentum for open access grows, he says, so it will reach a tipping point. "You remember the adoption of email? One year people were saying what's this techie thing - it will never catch on. A year later everybody was emailing like crazy. "I would expect that within the next 10 years, the use of repositories will be an expected and natural part of a researcher's work habits." ...

SPARC and Science Commons have released a white paper, Open doors and open minds:  What faculty authors can do to ensure open access to their work, April 2008.  From the paper's overview:

...[D]espite...opportunities for increasing access to knowledge, the prices of scholarly journals have risen sharply over the past two decades, often forcing libraries to cancel subscriptions.  Today even the wealthiest institutions cannot afford to sustain all of the journals needed by their faculties and students.

To take advantage of the opportunities created by the Internet and to further their mission of creating, preserving, and disseminating knowledge, many academic institutions are taking steps to capture the benefits of more open research sharing. Colleges and universities have built digital repositories to preserve and distribute faculty scholarly articles and other research outputs. Many individual authors have taken steps to retain the rights they need, under copyright law, to allow their work to be made freely available on the Internet and in their institution’s repository....

Most recently, on February 12, 2008, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) at Harvard University took a landmark step.  The faculty voted to adopt a policy requiring that faculty authors send an electronic copy of their scholarly articles to the university’s digital repository and that faculty authors automatically grant copyright permission to the university to archive and to distribute these articles unless a faculty member has waived the policy for a particular article. Essentially, the faculty voted to make open access to the results of their published journal articles the default policy for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University.

As of March 2008, a [similar] proposal is also under consideration in the University of California....

Inspired by the example set by the Harvard faculty, this White Paper is addressed to the faculty and administrators of academic institutions who support equitable access to scholarly research and knowledge, and who believe that the institution can play an important role as steward of the scholarly literature produced by its faculty.  This paper discusses both the motivation and the process for establishing a binding institutional policy that automatically grants a copyright license from each faculty member to permit deposit of his or her peer-reviewed scholarly articles in institutional repositories, from which the works become available for others to read and cite.

From the summary in today's announcement:

The white paper...offers a concise explanation of U.S. Copyright Law and how it relates to the scholarly publishing process, and makes specific suggestions for faculty and advocates to pursue a campus-wide policy. The guide offers a detailed plan of action, a series of institutional license options, and a 10-point list of actions for realizing a policy and adopting the right University License to meet the institution's particular needs.

Three different licenses, which are granted to the institution by the author, are offered for consideration.

Case 1. Broad license grant - a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise all of the author's exclusive rights under copyright, including the right to grant sublicenses.

Case 2. Intermediate license grant - involves license restrictions that modify the scope of the license grant in Case 1.

Case 3. Narrow license grant - grants to the university only the right to deposit the article in the institutional repository, and to make it available through the repository Web site.

The paper also recommends mandatory deposit of articles in institutional repositories. Mandatory deposit may be adopted regardless of the licensing policy chosen....

As we move towards the end of the OpenLearn pilot phase, there’s a lot of evaluation and reflection to do, especially on what business models might take us forward. I spent some time this month at the Economies of the Commons conference in Amsterdam. (Other people have blogged the event here so no need to post my 14 pages of notes). Since I’ve returned the Ithaka report on Sustainability and revenue models for online academic resources has been published in draft form for comment.

The conference, as the name suggests, was about how you make money from open content so you can sustain its production. Refreshingly, it wasn’t just about fab shiny young startups making tons of cash for a good idea that’s cheap-ish to produce. Speakers included those managing the digitisation projects for National Archives and the scale of these projects was overwhelming. ...

Interesting questions were raised such as: Are we creating a commons for a rich community? Who is paying for the gift economy? Is free culture just a fad? If scarcity of information is now over, might it return? How do we tip the idea of openness so it becomes commonplace? Are the community the new archivists? When will copyright die?

Free is not an option for digital businesses, it’s a reality. The value of what is easily copyable is low and getting lower. So we need to monetise the uncopyable ... We’ve understood this from the beginning - OpenLearn makes our educational resources freely available but doesn’t replicate the experience of being a student at the University. ...

At this point in the lifecycle of OpenLearn we need to do more than experiment and start work on the new business models. OpenLearn can’t be seen to be a nice standalone experiment that makes everyone at the OU feel good about working here - although it is and does - but as something that presents an ongoing challenge that needs to be worked out for the future sustainability of our entire business. Economic equilibrium takes time as we move from one cultural paradigm to another - it doesn’t happen overnight ...

When we originally launched Sitemaps, we included support for the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) 2.0 protocol, an interoperability framework based on metadata harvesting. In the meantime, however, we've found that the information we gain from our support of OAI-PMH is disproportional to the amount of resources required to support it. Fewer than 200 sites are using OAI-PMH for Google Sitemaps at the moment.

In order to move forward with even better coverage of your websites, we have decided to support only the standard XML Sitemap format by May 2008. We are in the process of notifying sites using OAI-PMH to alert them of the change. ...

... There are a few ways of looking at this. Perhaps 'open access' repositories are less concerned with Google rankings than the typical website owner. Perhaps the penetration of OAI-PMH in the world is still below any level that Google could find particularly interesting - certainly they never went to great lengths to advertise this support while it lasted. Clearly, Google have come to the end of a 'trial period' for their support for this protocol in their main indexing service.

Can we conclude anything from this? Probably not - surely OAI-PMH can thrive without Google Sitemap support? ... Or should we view this as a symptom of decline...? ...

Nature Publishing Group is to provide free access to more than 65 of its journals to developing world countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Journals including the flagship publication Nature will be made available to more than 20 partner countries through the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP). ...

Through its Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information, INASP works with publishers in the developed world to improve access to their publications within developing and emerging countries. ...

• ... Access will be the current year plus access to the content published in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007.
• For clarity: Institutions will not have post cancellation rights or access to the full NPG archives. ...

Advocates of the Open Access movement claim that removing access barriers will substantially increase the diffusion of academic research. If successful, this movement could play a role in efforts to increase utilization of psychotherapy research by mental health practitioners. In a pair of studies, mental health professionals were given either no citation, a normal citation, a linked citation, or a free access citation and were asked to find and read the cited article. After one week, participants read a vignette on the same topic as the article and gave recommendations for an intervention. In both studies, those given the free access citation were more likely to read the article, yet only in one study did free access increase the likelihood of making intervention recommendations consistent with the article.

"An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good". Recent events are transforming the possibility of this unprecedented public good into a reality, with medical literature leading the way. The Directory of Open Access Journals lists close to 3,200 fully open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals as of February 2008. More than 400 of the journals in DOAJ are in the health sciences. DOAJ is growing rapidly, adding more than 1.5 titles per calendar day. PubMedCentral (PMC) is the world’s largest open access archive, with well over a million items. An international network, PMC International, is envisioned, with copies of the whole archive around the world for preservation and security, as well as a local option for deposit. Watch for rapid growth of PMC as medical research funders, including the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Wellcome Trust, the U.K. Medical Research Council, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, among others, are requiring public or open access to the research they fund. There are implications, and leadership opportunities, for librarians in the open access environment.

• Science 2.0 generally refers to new practices of scientists who post raw experimental results, nascent theories, claims of discovery and draft papers on the Web for others to see and comment on.
• Proponents say these "open access" practices make scientific progress more collaborative and therefore more productive.
• Critics say scientists who put preliminary findings online risk having others copy or exploit the work to gain credit or even patents.
• Despite pros and cons, Science 2.0 sites are beginning to proliferate; one notable example is the OpenWetWare project started by biological engi­neers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

• Clinical Medicine : Pathology (pathology; in English; published by Libertas Academica; start year: 2008)
• Research Letters in Nanotechnology (engineering; in English; published by Hindawi; start year: 2008)

Breitband released two podcasts on OA, both in German and both on April 25, 2008:

• Wissenschaftliches Publizieren zwischen Tradition und Open Access.  An interview with Peter Schirmbacher on OA.  Schirmbacher is director of the Computer and Media Service at Humboldt University Berlin.
• Würde Einstein seine Aufsätze frei im Internet publizieren?  A five-part podcast on OA, based on a discussion with Peter Schirmbacher.

Switzerland's Molecular Diversity Preservation Initiative (MDPI) is moving toward CC-BY licenses for its journals.  See Dietrich Rordorf's announcement on ChemSpider:

We are aware that our current MDPI copyright statement is not in line with the BBB definitions on open access. We are currently smoothly moving to a CC By Attribution License v3.0. Marine Drugs has already been published under that license since January 2008. IJMS and other MDPI journals will start publishing under this license in the May respectively June 2008 issues. All previous content published by MDPI will be released under the CC By license within a couple of months on our new publication platform (now under testing). So this discussion about MDPI and open access will soon be part of history.

Comment.  Kudos to MDPI.  I'm pleased in part because CC-BY is the most open license short of assignment to the public domain, and in part because this move is independent of last week's launch of the SPARC Europe seal program, which encourages OA journals to adopt CC-BY licenses.  The MDPI action arose from its own history of OA and a recent professional discussion of OA in chemistry.  The two moves together suggest some convergent momentum for CC-BY licenses at OA journals.

Update. The MDPI editorial announcing the new policy, Changes Coming to MDPI Journals: Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and Creative Commons Attribution License (May 2, 2008), is now online.

Copyright & Education in Africa: Launch of the ACA2K Network, a press release from the ACA2K Network, April 25, 2008.  Excerpt:

As the global community marks World Intellectual Property Day 2008 (26 April), an eight-country African research network is being launched with a mandate to investigate the relationship between copyright and education in African countries.

The network, called the African Copyright & Access to Knowledge network (ACA2K network), is a multi-disciplinary team of researchers from Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda, supported by a team of international advisors.

Between now and early 2010, the ACA2K team will gather research evidence, and engage with policymakers, in an effort to ensure maximum use of copyright law flexibilities that have the potential to increase learning materials access in the study countries. Access to both digital and hard-copy resources will be probed....

The network held a Methodology Workshop in Johannesburg in January 2008, and has just finalised a Methodology Guide. The Guide is the roadmap for the project's research and policy engagement activities between now and early 2010....

Maria H. Andersen at Muskegon Community College writes:

...Our Board of Trustees recently asked the faculty association to look into using all open-access materials for our classes to cut down on the book costs to the students. I don't think that materials on the Internet (or our students) are quite ready for it ... yet. But ...

John Wilbanks, The Control Fallacy:  Why OA Out-Innovates the Alternative, Nature Precedings, a preprint deposited April 25, 2008. 

Abstract:   This article examines the relationship between Open Access to the scholarly literature and innovation. It traces the ideas of “end to end” network principles in the Internet and the World Wide Web and applies them to the scholarly biomedical literature. And the article argues for the importance of relieving not just price barriers but permission barriers.

From the body of the paper:

...OA’s wellspring is the idea that innovation in education and science is best served by access to information. That’s often buried in the debate over prices and profits, business models and legislation.  In the end, OA isn’t even about money. It’s about innovation. It’s always been about innovation....

Just to be clear, here’s what I mean by a knowledge web: it’s when today’s web has enough power to work as well for science as it currently works for culture...

A knowledge web is predicated on access, and not control, of knowledge....

The most obvious layer of control is the use of copyrights to control the articles themselves. The articles are creative expressions by the authors, transferred to the publishers – that part is easy to understand. But those copyrights on expressions are being used to control and limit the impact of the ideas that are contained in the articles. This is an inversion of the original conception of copyright – it was never supposed to restrict the movement of ideas, and certainly not to restrict the movement of scientific facts like the one cited above....

[P]ublishers are happy to rent access to the knowledge heritage. Rent is the key word here, though. When the scientific publishing industry went online, they stopped selling journals to people and started renting them....

This control culture is not the result of bad people making evil decisions. It’s simply an antique system. It made sense when it started, and it actually made sense until the Internet came along and changed everything. But the control culture is a powerful drag on innovation when you’re in a networked reality....

Nature makes papers describing the full genome sequence of an organism available under a Creative Commons license....That’s empowering the user. And it’s smart. It dramatically increases the odds that a scientist comes along and innovates on the content. It doesn’t limit the universe of innovators through a series of controls and contracts and invoices.

This is in the end the fallacy of knowledge control. The power of the closed system is rooted in coherence, consistency, quality control – things that are vital and important in the right context. But these are powers that frequently fail to scale when you’re dealing with a problem of great complexity....

So what can you do? You can start by exercising your rights – even with the present culture of control, many journal publishers permit self archiving of the author's final manuscript, and many authors fail to act on this right. The first is to exercise this right and to contribute to the knowledge web right now. Second, there’s a good chance you are members of scholarly societies. Your societies should be the leading the charge towards the knowledge web – are they? It’s worth asking that question.

And last,...[w]e each have the choice, each time we publish, as to how our own individual actions make up the global activity of scientific communication. The environmental movement can teach us – our individual, local actions can actually bring about larger changes in the social perceptions and actions of our cultures. It’s time that we begin our own movement of scientific environmentalism: it’s about choosing access and rejecting the control fallacy.