Open Access News

The Open Access Directory (OAD) just opened a list of Wikis about OA for community editing.

Remember that OAD is itself a wiki. You can help the cause by adding or revising entries to the OAD lists.

The Open Access philosophy has became an invaluable tool for guaranteeing free access to information in a Knowledge Society deeply marked by digital divides, copyright barriers and new forms of information illiteracy. Information has the power to improve development, to provide solutions to urgent problems, to recover identities from oblivion, to assert rights and values, and to help personal and professional growth. In short, information is a key element in the achievement of the social welfare that any people deserve. On the one hand, when information is free accessed, using new digital technologies and copyright in a way that is correct and appropriate, Open Access movement guarantees equality of opportunities to access strategic knowledge, which is within everybody’s rights. On the other, Open Access also guarantees the freedom of expression and fosters the cooperative and active creation of healthy democratic societies. Only within an informed context can new proposals be submitted and appropriate decisions made towards the development of a country, the education of a community and the personal and professional growth of the persons that make it up, with no distinctions, barriers or differences at all. The following paragraphs are intended as a general description of the fundamental concepts around this way of working and as an introduction to the main initiatives and best practices on Open Access developed in Latin America.

The OAI2LOD Server exposes any OAI-PMH compliant metadata repository according to the Linked Data guidelines. This makes things and media objects accessible via HTTP URIs and query able via the SPARQL protocol. Parts of the OAI2LOD architecture, especially the front-end, are based on the D2R Server implementation.

Further, it provides a configurable linking mechanism based on string similarity metrics. This allows the automatic linking of OAI-PMH data with other open data sets such as DBPedia or any other OAI-PMH repository exposed via the OAI2LOD Server. ...

David Robinson, Harlan Yu, Bill Zeller, and I have a new paper about how to use infotech to make government more transparent. We make specific suggestions, some of them counter-intuitive, about how to make this happen. The final version of our paper will appear in the Fall issue of the Yale Journal of Law and Technology. The best way to summarize it is to quote the introduction:

If the next Presidential administration really wants to embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency, it should follow a counter-intuitive but ultimately compelling strategy: reduce the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens. Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility. ...

[T]he wide gap between the exciting uses of Internet technology by private parties, on the one hand, and the government’s lagging technical infrastructure on the other ... is not new. The federal government has shown itself consistently unable to keep pace with the fast-evolving power of the Internet.

In order for public data to benefit from the same innovation and dynamism that characterize private parties’ use of the Internet, the federal government must reimagine its role as an information provider. Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, it should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that “exposes” the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.

Our approach follows the engineering principle of separating data from interaction, which is commonly used in constructing websites. ...

... In late April, the company officially announced its new WebShare program, which has opened the Britannica site for free access to web publishers and permits free links to full-text entries. Bloggers, webmasters, online journalists, and "anyone else who publishes regularly" on the internet can now get free subscriptions to Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. And, perhaps more importantly, sites can provide links for their readers to Britannica articles and web surfers who click on a link get the article in its entirety.

Anyone interested in participating in the WebShare initiative can apply for a free subscription ... Apparently the site was quickly swamped with requests for free subscriptions. Tom Panelas, director of corporate communications for the company, says they did their best to process the requests quickly and found that most of the people applying were qualified and received the subscriptions. The company has already granted thousands of free subscriptions. An FAQ on the site clarifies that this "does not include Web sites mainly dedicated to e-commerce or those whose postings are short and aphoristic by design." ...

The company is providing special tools, such as widgets and clusters of topical articles related to current events that are designed to make it easy for online publishers to find and use Britannica material on their sites. And the company promises additional features in the months ahead. ...

Mary Anne Kennan and Karlheinz Kautz, Scholarly publishing and open access: searching for understanding of an emerging is phenomenon, in Proceedings 15th European Conference on Information Systems, St.Gallen, Switzerland, 2007.  Self-archived June 5, 2008. 

Abstract:   Scholarly publishing is concerned with the distribution of scholarly information through journals and conferences and other information media. As such scholarly publishing can be understood as a specific part of the information industry. With the advent of advanced information technologies many possible technologically enabled futures have been posited for scholarly publishing. This paper describes the current systems, processes and actors. While technological advancements appear to be enabling access to scholarly publications, economic conditions appear to limit access. In addition, a number of alternatives, such as open access are currently in play and there is uncertainty regarding the future of the scholarly publishing system. The system appears to be in the process of being reassembled. Conceptual models of the traditional, the electronic, and some possibilities for future developments in scholarly publishing are proposed, as are topics for future research in the information systems domain.

The next issue of Policy Futures in Education is devoted to Commercialisation, Internationalisation and the Internet and will contain five articles by Chris Armbruster, two of which have a strong OA connection.  Here are links to OA editions already self-archived:

• Open Access in the Natural and Social Sciences: The Correspondence of Innovative Moves to Enhance Access, Inclusion and Impact in Scholarly Communication.  Abstract:   Online, open access is the superior model for scholarly communication. A variety of scientific communities in physics, the life sciences and economics have gone furthest in innovating their scholarly communication through open access, enhancing accessibility for scientists, students and the interested public. Open access enjoys a comparative advantage across the science and humanities and it is therefore only logical that functional innovation and structural improvements should be similar in the natural and social sciences. A variety of innovative moves in the natural and social sciences are portrayed and analysed, demonstrating correspondence of the innovative logic across the disciplines even as solutions vary.  Open access is technologically feasible and economically efficient. Moreover, open access has become vital to secure the continued advancement of knowledge. It may be expected that public and philanthropic funding will flow in the future only if public visibility and academic impact of the research results can be demonstrated.

• Cyberscience and the Knowledge-Based Economy, Open Access and Trade Publishing: From Contradiction to Compatibility with Nonexclusive Copyright Licensing.  Abstract:   Open source, open content and open access are set to fundamentally alter the conditions of knowledge production and distribution. Open source, open content and open access are also the most tangible result of the shift towards e-Science and digital networking. Yet, widespread misperceptions exist about the impact of this shift on knowledge distribution and scientific publishing. It is argued, on the one hand, that for the academy there principally is no digital dilemma surrounding copyright and there is no contradiction between open science and the knowledge-based economy if profits are made from nonexclusive rights. On the other hand, pressure for the 'digital doubling' of research articles in Open Access repositories (the 'green road') is misguided and the current model of Open Access publishing (the 'gold road') has not much future outside biomedicine. Commercial publishers must understand that business models based on the transfer of copyright have not much future either. Digital technology and its economics favour the severance of distribution from certification. What is required of universities and governments, scholars and publishers, is to clear the way for digital innovations in knowledge distribution and scholarly publishing by enabling the emergence of a competitive market that is based on nonexclusive rights. This requires no change in the law but merely an end to the praxis of copyright transfer and exclusive licensing. The best way forward for research organisations, universities and scientists is the adoption of standard copyright licenses that reserve some rights, namely Attribution and No Derivative Works, but otherwise will allow for the unlimited reproduction, dissemination and re-use of the research article, commercial uses included.

Update (10/16/08). The issue is now online.

Adam Hodgkin has done a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the carbon footprint of digital literature.

The University of Pretoria has launched an institutional repository, UPSpace.  (Thanks to ROARMAP.)

The Open Knowledge Foundation is looking for help in producing a series of public domain calculators:

For a while we’ve been planning to help to produce a set of Public Domain Calculators - which each aim to indicate whether or not a given work is in the public domain in a given jurisdiction....

The calculators will take metadata about creative works...and combine this with an algorithm which represents copyright legislation in a particular region....

Developing the calculators will require two stages:

1. The first stage will be to develop copyright flow charts such as this one from Creative Commons Canada, or this one for the US from Bromberg & Sunstein LLP. This work will be undertaken and reviewed by groups of legal experts.

2. The second stage will be to convert these charts into code. Examples of the algorithms in code form, can be found at Public Domain Works and the Open Library. This work will be undertaken by the OKF and volunteers.

More details are available at the project’s wiki page....

If you are interested in helping out with any aspect of developing a Public Domain Calculator...please get in touch at info at the OKF’s domain or on our discuss list!

Greg Rowell has blogged some notes (at Dean Giustini's blog) on the 2008 CHLA/ABSC conference (Halifax, May 26-30, 2008). Excerpt:

5. Open Access and Open Medicine

"The Conference closed with a keynote from Dr. Stephen Choi, an emergency room physician and editor of Open Medicine. As a former editor at the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Choi spoke about the failures of Canadian medical publishing which makes huge profits from publicly-funded research; the influence of big pharma; successes such as the growing open access movement and challenges (about funding not-for-profit journals).

Discussion after Choi's presentation focussed on sustainable ways to fund OA journals. Suggestions from librarians included charging small fees for article downloading (until publishing costs are recovered, then free in perpetuity) to author pay models (already the case for some journals) to institutional subscriptions. Although Choi knew these strategies, he did not embrace them because Open Medicine relies on donations at the moment. For me, this signalled a commitment to maintaining free, open access (as much as possible) to medical information. Choi also made a point of mentioning the editorial team of Open Medicine consisted of many health professionals including a health librarian (Dean Giustini)....

Catherine Rampell, iBreadCrumbs: a Social Network for Research Sharing, Wired Campus, June 4, 2008.  Excerpt:

Two California State University at Fullerton students have created a tool that allows researchers to share and annotate online research materials.

iBreadCrumbs is a toolbar download that works with Firefox. The software records all the pages you visit when you do research online and allows you to annotate them and share the materials with the users of any Web browser. The product is free.... [PS: Here omitting a demo video.]

Barbara Kirsop, Free access leads to increased research, EPT, June 5, 2008.  Excerpt:

Elsevier publisher has claimed that the WHO HINARI program (of providing free access to articles made available by collaborating publishers to registered organisations in certain low income countries) leads to a significant increase in the number of publications from researchers in the qualifying countries. This claim has been criticised by a number of e-publishing experts. The conclusions were arrived at from an informal study of ISI data carried out by a person at Elsevier publishers. Critics say that ‘without knowing the methods and the data, the conclusions are meaningless. For all we know, the increase could be due largely to open access literature being increasingly available to scientists in the developing world. There are other measures of impact other than publishing in ISI indexed journals, and these may be particularly relevant to researchers from the developing world. We desperately need good research on publishing and citation patterns of researchers from developing countries to better understand the various effects of the different means of increasing access’.

Kimberly Parker, HINARI Program Manager, has since said that “with such a simple analysis it is impossible to prove HINARI alone has caused this increase.... We believe we're a contributing factor in the growth. This particular piece of research was something that came to hand; we are pleased to be able to say that we look to be a contributing factor but we can't prove it. ... “. Others have said that increased access whether through the increasing number of open access resources or through donor programs are bound to stimulate research activity, and it requires in depth studies to show whether programs such as HINARI are the sole contributors to increases in scientific activity.

Usage figures are critical to assessing the value being made of research publications, and happily those from OA resources are increasingly being monitored and made publicly available for study (see other postings to this blog). It would be good to have access to the usage figures of the UN programs (HINARI/AGORA/OARE) so that their comparative value can be assessed.

Comments

• This seems right to me.  HINARI improves access but stops short of OA.  Any improvement in access should cause some improvement in research output.  But the increment due to HINARI must be smaller than the increment due to OA, and because the two causes are exerting their effects simultaneously, they will be difficult to disentangle.
• For background, see my post on the Elsevier study.

Ricardo Ridi, Hypertextual Library Manifesto Version 1.0, Library Philosophy and Practice 2008.  Translated from the Italian by Juliana Mazzocchi.  Excerpt:

11. Libraries respect the rights of both producers and users of documents...

In intermediating between producers and users of documents, libraries hold a "third party" position that guarantees both equity and lack of discrimination. Libraries, by respecting copyright regulations, support initiatives such as open access that help strengthen the right of the users to access information.....

24. Digital libraries will put themselves at the centre of a scientific document triangle consisting of open archives, e-journals, and digital bibliographies...

It can be assumed that in the future scientific literature will rely more and more on open archives for access, on e-journals for selection, and on bibliographies for indexing. Digital libraries could put themselves at the centre of this triangle....

Kristin Yiotis, Electronic theses and dissertation (ETD) repositories: What are they? Where do they come from? How do they work?  OCLC Systems & Services, 24, 2 (2008) pp. 101-115.  Only this abstract is free online, at least so far:

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce the electronic theses and dissertation (ETD) repository as a subset of local institutional digital repositories. The paper discusses the originating institutions and organizations including Virginia Tech Initiative, the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and the United States Department of Education.

Design/methodology/approach – This paper is informational in nature and explores the topic of ETD repositories. It provides information relevant to academic and digital librarians interested in including an ETD repository in their institution's digital library. The paper discusses interoperability among repositories and the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. The paper discusses issues related to ETD repositories including intellectual property rights, publishers' views of ETDs as prior publications, plagiarism issues, development costs, and long-term preservation issues.

Findings – It was found that library administrators who implemented ETD repositories at various universities adapted their models to the needs of their institutions and their graduate students. ETD administrators made decisions about implementation models and software and hardware infrastructure in terms of human and technical resource allocation.

Practical implications – The paper argues that ETD repositories benefit students and universities by enhancing graduate education, expanding graduate research, increasing a university's visibility, and instructing students, faculty, administration, and librarians about digital technology.

Originality/value – The value of this paper for digital and academic librarians concerned with EDT repositories is in providing a historical overview, a discussion of the benefits, and a review of the issues involved with implementing an ETD repository at their institution.

The State Library of [New South Wales] has received $10 million to digitise its catalogue of some of its oldest and most valuable works.

The budget funding, allocated over the next three years, would give libraries across the state online access to digital versions of some 18th century manuscripts.

Arts Minister Frank Sartor said: "It is a massive undertaking that will ultimately allow internet users access to the catalogue of original works such as the journals of Sir Joseph Banks, James Cook, Matthew Flinders and William Bligh.

"Many of the more than one million cards in the catalogues are handwritten; others are in faded typescript."

There are five million items in the library that could be digitally catalogued. ...

... [T]here is quite a range of services that could be offered by some combination of Library and IT services: ...

• ... a data repository, which I would see as containing all or most data in support of publication. ...
• a full-blown digital preservation system, ie with some commitment to OAIS-type capabilities, keeping the data usable. ...
• a managed publications system providing support for joint development of papers and support for publication submission, and including retention & exposure of drafts or final versions as appropriate. ...

• Modern Applied Science (science; in English; published by Canadian Center of Science and Education; start year: 2007)
• Journal of Hematology & Oncology (oncology; in English; published by BioMed Central; start year: 2008)
• Choregia (sports science; in English; published by Greek Center for Sport Science Research; start year: 2006)
• Tropical Conservation Science (ecology; in English; published by Mongabay.com; start year: 2008)
• Revista Brasileira de Meteorologia (meteorology and climatology; in Portuguese, English, Spanish; published by Sociedade Brasileira de Meteorologia; start year: 2007)
• Open Immunology Journal (allergy and immunology; in English; published by Bentham Open; start year: 2008)
• Open Magnetic Resonance Journal (medicine; in English; published by Bentham Open; start year: 2008)
• Journal of Health Informatics in Developing Countries (library and information science, medicine; in English; published by University of Otago; start year: 2007)
• Open Petroleum Engineering Journal (general and civil engineering; in English; published by Bentham Open; start year: 2008)
• Open Evolution Journal (biology; in English; published by Bentham Open; start year: 2007)
• Anali Zavoda za Povijesne Znanosti Hrvatske Akademije Znanosti i Umjetnosti u Dubrovniku (history; in Croatian; published by Hrvatska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti u Dubrovniku; start year: 1999)
• Informação & Informação (library and information science; in Portuguese, Spanish; published by Universidade Estadual de Londrina; start year: 1996)
• School Community Journal (education; in English; published by Academic Development Institute; start year: 1991)
• Biawak (zoology; in English; published by International Varanid Interest Group; start year: 2007)
• Boletín de Antropología (anthropology; in English; published by Universidad de Antioquia; start year: 2004)
• Andes (anthropology; in Spanish; published by Universidad Nacional de Salta; start year: 2000)
• Journal of International Social Research (multidisciplinary; in Turkish, English; published by Journal of International Social Research; start year: 2007)
• Informal Logic (philosophy; in English; published by University of Windsor; start year: 2006)
• BMC Medical Physics (internal medicine; in English; published by BioMed Central; start year: 2008)
• BMC Research Notes (medicine, biology; in English; published by BioMed Central; start year: 2008)
• Revista de la Construcción (general and civil engineering; in Spanish; published by Escuela de Construcción Civil, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; start year: 2002)

• Cuadernos de Neuropsicologia (neurology; in Spanish; published by Neuropsicologia.cl; start year: 2007)
• Diálogos : Revista Electrónica de Historia (history; in Spanish, English, French, Catalan, Galician, Italian, Portuguese; published by Escuela de Historia, Universidad de Costa Rica; start year: 1999)
• Maladies Chroniques au Canada (internal medicine; in French; published by Agence de la santé publique du Canada; start year: 1995)
• Engevista (general and civil engineering; in Portuguese, English, Spanish; published by Universidade Federal Fluminense; start year: 2004)
• Journal of the Indian Academy of Geriatrics (internal medicine; in English; published by Indian Academy of Geriatrics; start year: 2005)
• Texture, Stress, and Microstructure (chemistry; in English; published by Hindawi; start year: 2008)
• Ausa (history; in Catalan, Spanish; published by Patronat d'Estudis Osonencs; start year: 1952)
• Advances in Optical Technologies (optics and lights; in English; published by Hindawi; start year: 2008)
• Journal of Computer Systems, Networks, and Communications (computer science; in English; published by Hindawi; start year: 2008)
• Bulletin du Centre d’Études Médiévales d’Auxerre (history; in French; published by Centre d'études médiévales Saint-Germain d'Auxerre; start year: 2003)
• e-journal of Practical Business Research (business and management; in German; published by Berlin School of Economics; start year: 2007)
• Psychology Science Quarterly (psychology; in English; published by Pabst Science Publishers; start year: 2008)
• Journal of Artificial Evolution and Applications (computer science; in English; published by Hindawi; start year: 2008)
• Enfances, Familles, Générations (sociology; in French; published by University of Montreal; start year: 2004)

... OpenWetWare is generating a lot of interest in open research and especially in replicating the model across many different disciplines in science. Of course, in many cases, there are factors that discourage sharing pre-publication information. Would you say part of what OWW does is help demonstrate what can be shared, as well as the benefits of “baking in” sharing?

Yes, exactly. Many researchers are not opposed to sharing their work, and they do so regularly in the privacy of their labs and their departments. They generally draw the line at sharing with the world until the article is published, and they can get the attribution for the work. Attribution is the key to being successful in academia: getting tenure, getting the grant money, getting the grad students, etc. Most scientists have been taught that to talk about one’s work prematurely opens the door to “scooping,” or having your ideas stolen by another researcher, who will do the work and publish the results before you do and get what should have been your credit.

How does OWW combat that perception?

We make the argument that if you share your information publicly, it is in fact attributed to you, and if someone at some point in the future tries to present your work as theirs, you can point to a trail of content you posted. Granted, there are complexities–especially in the world of wikis where people can edit other people’s stuff. But if you post it, there’s a record that can be traced. ...

The Publius Project of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society just published two contributions on OA:

• Peter Suber, The opening of science and scholarship
• Melissa Hagemann, Open scholarship

The OA mandate at Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences made the Harvard Gazette's Highlights of the year that was.  The entry:

...February 2008...

To enhance the distribution of faculty research and scholarship, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences votes [unanimously] to give the University a worldwide license to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available and to hold the copyright for them, so long as they are not sold for profit. The move seeks in part to overcome the inhibiting effects of (1) scholarly journals that often prevent scholars from using and distributing their own work and (2) journal prices so high that many institutions and individuals cancel their subscriptions....

PS:  It was an exciting year at Harvard.  If the OA mandate hadn't made the list of highlights, the year would have had to be much more exciting.

Barbara Quint has written two good pieces on Microsoft's decision to wind down its book-scanning and academic search projects.  Each was published in Information Today on June 5, 2008.

• Microsoft Shuts Down Two of Its Google ‘Wannabe’s’: Live Search Books and Live Search Academic
• ‘It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over’: Impact of the Microsoft Shutdown

From the first:

...The reason for the cancellation was money or the lack of it. Microsoft could not foresee a sustainable business model for the service, though neither Live Search Books nor Live Search Academic had carried any ads beyond links to online booksellers....

[Brewster] Kahle was both surprised and unsurprised by the announcement. "I always knew this would happen. It’s what corporations do. I just didn’t know when. I didn’t think it would be this year. I hoped for another year or so, but I’m thrilled that they worked so long and hard and brought us to another level." ...

Ed Pentz, executive director of CrossRef, says that publishers had told him that Google Scholar was much more productive of referrals [than Microsoft Live Search Academic]. Actually, Pentz added that the main Google service supplied even more referrals than Google Scholar.

When I asked Anurag Acharya, the engineer behind Google Scholar, whether he wanted any content that appeared on Live Search Academic, he said, "I’m not sure, but as far as I know, we have everything they had." When I asked him if there were any features to Live Search Academic he would like to have, he answered, "No. If I liked it, I would have had it." ...

Libraries that seek low-cost mass digitization clearly face a harder challenge. Google remains in a growth mode, but that can hardly last forever. The OCA, with scanning operations already working at 70 libraries and the participation of several large commercial concerns even after Microsoft’s withdrawal, would like to take on as much as they can, but they do charge 10 cents a page....

From the second:

Microsoft...[will not] cease digitizing immediately....For example, according to an article in the May 29 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, librarians at Cornell University expect to see tens of thousands of more books to be digitized by Microsoft before the program ends later this summer....According to Neil Fitzgerald, project manager for the Microsoft digitization project at The British Library (BL), Microsoft "has agreed to work until the completion of the target." ...The Princeton Theological Seminary signed its agreement in January and had expected to go into full production in June, according to Don Vorp, collection development librarian. Ultimately, they hoped to scan some 300,000 books....Vorp expected the scanning to continue for at least the next 60 days, giving them a final count of 3,000–4,000 books....

...Taking advantage of a lemons-to-lemonade opportunity, LibreDigital, a division of NewsStand, Inc., announced it would allow any Microsoft Live Search publisher to migrate online content into its online repositories....

Meg Walker, Bringing Theses to the Web, University of British Columbia Public Affairs, June 5, 2008.  Excerpt:

...In early summer the 500th title will be added to the UBC Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) initiative, a program co-created by the Faculty of Graduate Studies (FoGS) and the Library.

University Archivist Chris Hives is excited about the dramatic increase in audience that the ETDs will allow. The [OA] electronic theses are fully text-searchable and will show up on internet engine searches for anyone to stumble across.

Hives expects digitization will promote interdisciplinarity. Researchers are well aware of what is happening in their particular field. Putting theses on the Internet and making them searchable “will allow researchers to access material easily in allied fields,” Hives says.

UBC theses typically were submitted in paper form and then sent periodically for microfilming and, more recently, digitization. It could easily take up to a year before a graduate student’s work would be accessible....

John Willinsky, a leading advocate for open access dissemination of publicly funded research, agrees that it is time for theses to be circulated as widely as possible....

Work by Master’s students will undergo the largest change. Until now, their theses have simply been microfiched and archived. PhD theses, on the other hand, have been both microfilmed and digitized -- and users have generally had to pay to access the information.

Read points to studies that show how scholarly articles and theses distributed online are cited much more frequently than those that aren’t. If the thesis is a graduate student’s calling card, online dissemination will make a positive difference.

But for some disciplines, such as the creative arts of film, creative writing and music, there are concerns that dissemination will have a negative effect. If a student’s thesis is a novel, for example, what rights can a publisher buy if it can already be read online? ...Through discussions with FoGS, a solution has been found for now. The title and abstract of creative writing theses will be cited online, but the work itself will remain exclusively available on microfiche at the Library....

To provide access to research in older UBC theses created prior to the ETD project, the Library is currently undertaking a pilot project to assess the feasibility of digitizing more than 33,000 theses submitted between 1919 and 2007.

Geneva Henry, Open Access Mandates: Opportunities for DLF Institutions, a presentation at the Digital Library Federation (DLF) Spring Forum 2008 (Minneapolis, April 28-30, 2008).  Only the abstract is online, at least so far.

Recent actions by the NIH and Harvard mandating open access of faculty publications have created a window of opportunity for aggressively promoting the institutional repositories on our campuses. As we work with faculty to educate them on open access and about our repositories, libraries are developing or publicizing guidelines and services to facilitate self-archiving and ensure that faculty meet emerging mandates. Discussion on listservs around these issues has been lively over the past couple of months and faculty are now very interested in the topic. Given the opportune timing, are we leveraging it to the best of our abilities? Success in this area will be realized with as many research institutions as possible adopting open access mandates for faculty publications. DLF institutions are among the top research universities that can lead this movement and bring others along with them to adopt open access self-archiving of research publications. This discussion session is intended to explore ways in which resources and activities can be shared and coordinated among DLF libraries to create favorable environments to promote self-archiving. What information can we give our faculty and administration to help them advocate an open access mandate through their faculty governance bodies? What are we learning from them as we move forward to help meet existing mandates? How do we leverage the NIH mandate to a campus-wide mandate? What has been working and what hasn't? By sharing information and ideas, DLF institutions can make a positive and powerful impact. Bring your thoughts for discussion.

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) has released its April 2008 submission on Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage to the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology.   (Thanks to the INIST Libre Accès blog.)  Excerpt:

There is a real opportunity for Canada to join a worldwide movement to improve the accessibility of research results, and increase the research impact of federal investments....

Recommendation[s]:

That all granting councils and funding agencies implement policies that require their funded researchers make their research publications available free of charge....

That the Canadian government invest in the development of a digital repository infrastructure to support access to research data and publications....

PS:  In two past posts (one, two) I've blogged  six other pro-OA submissions to the same committee.

Elisabetta Poltronieri and Paola De Castro, Taking the first steps towards institutional open access, Research Information, June/July 2008.  Excerpt:

...The Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS, the Italian National Institute of Health), which is the leading research body in Italy in the field of public health and related disciplines, is among the 81 Italian signatories (as of May 2008) of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Scientific Knowledge and of the Petition to the European Commission in support of free access to the results of research supported by public funds....

A study of the opinions of a pilot group of ISS researchers revealed that they would positively consider publishing in OA journals provided that their established habits were not undermined. This implies that subscription journals with high impact factor values continue to exert a strong appeal on the authors and affect the choice of where to place research results. Nevertheless, other key factors such as the speed with which research output can be made public are also important when deciding where to publish. The instant access to information allowed by the OA publishing model through the web should also represent a priority in order to rapidly distribute scientific results. This seems to be much more of an issue in the case of research activities that are sustained by public funds.

With this background, ISS has recently set-up an internal policy to favour full, free access to the scientific literature produced by the internal research staff. Signed by the ISS president on 17 January 2008, it mandates all ISS researchers (about 700 scientists, who collectively produce about 1,600 publications per year, mainly journal articles) to make their papers available in the DSpace ISS repository.

The policy applies specifically to peer-reviewed articles, although researchers may wish to post non peer-reviewed material too. The efforts of the internal staff in charge of the repository are now concentrated on achieving the primary goal of the newborn policy: populating DSpace ISS. This repository currently holds 19,000 items, mainly represented by metadata, with full-text papers according to the conditions stated by the publishers for copyrighted material....

The experience gained in ISS in spreading awareness on OA principles has benefitted from the intense advocacy activity promoted by CRUI (Conference of the Chancellors of Italian Universities) over the last two years in favour of full, free access to the scientific knowledge produced by Italian universities and research centres. And, within the CRUI Libraries Commission, the Italian Group for Open Access is committed to providing guidelines addressed to the whole research and academic community in order to foster the creation of open digital archives.

According to the latest data (as of May 2008) provided by the Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR), there are 38 institutional repositories currently running in Italy. Among them, two major archives should particularly be mentioned for their important roles as registers of the academic research staff of their respective institutions: Polaris, set up at the University of Trento and AIR (Archivio istituzionale della ricerca), running at the University of Milan....

PS:  For background, see our post on the ISS OA mandate.

Siân Harris, Publishing should help research, Research Information, June/July 2008.  An interview with Steven Inchcoombe, the Managing Director of the Nature Publishing Group.  Excerpt:

What is NPG’s stance on open access?

NPG believes that open access will offer something of good value and benefit to some parts of the market but we do not see the author-pays model as appropriate for the Nature-branded journals today. Anything that is Nature-branded has to be best in its field and people who buy our journals expect that selectivity. The rejection rate that accompanies being so selective would make any author-pays charge prohibitive, and we don’t wish to introduce that barrier to publication.

Although the Nature-branded journals are not open access, Molecular Systems Biology, which we publish as a joint venture with EMBO, is fully open access and partly funded by author charges. We also publish a number of hybrid journals, such as EMBO Reports.

We recently announced that content from 65 of our journals will be available for free in 20 developing countries via International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP). This agreement complements our relationships with HINARI, AGORA and OARE to provide access for 100 developing countries to the information we publish.

We have a free-to-access preprint server, Nature Precedings. We also support and encourage self-archiving of the author’s final version of accepted articles and are compliant with the mandates from funding bodies such as NIH and the Wellcome Trust.

With the Nature titles we also seek funding from non-traditional sources such as sponsors and advertisers.

What are your predictions for the future?

Open access means that authors or their funders may have to pay to publish papers and I think this will make them demand a higher level of service from publishers. They will want more visibility about what is happening in the publishing process. And once papers are published, authors will want to know who has accessed them as they might want to approach them about possible collaborations.

In addition, self-archiving mandates require authors to do more work. If publishers are clever they will offer authors more help to do this....

There are more and more versions of content available to readers. To justify their versions, publishers must offer serious value such as in forward and backwards citation linking....

Comments

• Inchcoombe didn't give a reason why Nature-branded journals shouldn't be OA, just a reason why they shouldn't use the (misnamed) "author-pays" business model to support OA.  Inchcoombe may have reasons why Nature-branded journals shouldn't be OA at all.  But he shouldn't leave the impression that the only business model for OA journals is to charge author-side publication fees, when OA journals use many different business models.  And he shouldn't leave the impression that all or most OA journals charge publication fees when, in fact, most do not. 
• Inchcoombe is right, however, that fee-based OA journals must raise their fees roughly in proportion to their rejection rates, since fees on accepted papers must cover the costs of reviewing rejected papers.  But that doesn't mean that OA journals (fee-based or no-fee) can't be highly selective or high in quality.  On the contrary, OA journals have many natural advantages over TA journals for delivering high-quality research.  For a detailed discussion, see my article from October 2006.
• "[S]elf-archiving mandates require authors to do more work."  This is true but misleading.  Log activity at a busy repository shows that the time required for deposit averages 10 minutes per paper, far less than the time required to report on the research at the end of the grant period.
• I've often praised NPG for its many experiments with OA.  In fact, my list of those experiments (July 2007) is longer than Inchcoombe's.

The Australian government is seeking public comments on the new National Innovation System.  The Open Access Law Project at Queensland U of Technology has already released its submission (April 30, 2008), calling for a strong national commitment to OA. 

In a related development, the Australian government has released a Consultation Paper (June 2008) on the country's new research assessment exercise, Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA).  Public comments are due by June 30, 2008.  (Thanks to Arthur Sale.)  The ERA replaces the Research Quality Framework (RQF).  While the RQF had implications for OA, largely negative, I haven't yet seen any comments on the OA implications of the ERA.

The University of Helsinki has adopted an OA mandate.  From the English version of the policy statement:

...Together with the Finnish Council of University Rectors, the University of Helsinki has signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities on 23rd May 2006. The goals of the University of Helsinki are

• To support open access to research results
• To make results of publicly funded research openly accessible online to anyone interested
• To encourage other funding bodies as well to require research results funded by them be made public
• To increase the visibility, use and impact of research publications of the University of Helsinki by providing open access through the University’s own repository
• To make its repository and publication records openly available online and available for linkage to other repositories internationally
• To ease the reviewing of research results with open access research publications

Open access to research publications at the University of Helsinki

The University of Helsinki requires that researchers working at the University deposit copies of their research articles published in academic research journals in the open repository of the University....

The depositing obligation does not apply to monographs.

This decision applies to articles approved for publication from 1st January 2010 onwards. The University of Helsinki recommends the depositing of articles in the repository of the University also for articles published before this date.

In addition to the research articles referred to in this decision, other kinds of publications such as popular articles, other published texts, serial publications of University departments, teaching material and, publishing contracts permitting, monographs may be stored in the open repository of the University of Helsinki.

The University of Helsinki recommends that when publishing articles, researchers working at the University favour publication channels with open access policies such as the open access journals in each discipline and open access serial publications. In addition, it is possible to store a published research article following the established norms of the discipline in question in a discipline-specific, open repository (e.g., ArXiv for physicists).

Further information and more detailed instructions are available in Appendix 1.

Open availability of research results as part of the full cost of research

The University is changing over to a full cost model in research funding. All costs of a research project must be incorporated in the research funding, including publication costs such as author fees for open access journals....

Appendix 1. The repository policy of the University of Helsinki repository...

1. Researchers working at the University of Helsinki, other University personnel and persons under their authorisation may deposit research articles in the open repository of the University of Helsinki (hereafter "the repository")....

3. The University of Helsinki requires that researchers working at the University seek to maintain the right to parallel deposit of their article in the open repository of the University of Helsinki when signing a publication contract for the article. At the moment, most academic publishers allow the deposit of the article in the open repository of the research organisation.

4. Researchers must keep a final published version of the article or a copy of the file accepted for publication for the repository....

7. An article under the depositing obligation must be submitted to the administrator as soon as it has been published....The article will be openly accessible online only after the embargo period stipulated by the publisher or the funding body has expired....

8. The final or published article or the version accepted for publishing will be primarily deposited in the repository....If the repository policy of the publisher or the discipline requires something else, a different version of the article may be deposited (e.g., preprint, draft)....

There are a few extra details in today's announcement:

...[The policy was adopted] by a unanimous decision of the university management team the University of Helsinki....

University of Helsinki is the first university in Finland to mandate open access self-archiving of its scholarly output. With its more than 38 000 students and nearly 8000 employees University of Helsinki is the biggest multidisciplinary institution of higher education and research in the country....

Comments

• This is an excellent policy.  I applaud its mandatory language; the dual deposit/release strategy or what Stevan Harnad calls immediate deposit / optional access (requiring deposit immediately upon acceptance for publication but permitting a delay in the OA release to suit publisher embargoes); the support for parallel deposits in disciplinary repositories; the exemption for monographs; the willingness to accept non-mandatory deposits (e.g. data files, monographs) in the repository; the apparent willingness to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals, at least for recipients of university research grants; and the decision to encourage but not require submission to OA journals.
• Faculty are required to deposit articles and also required to seek permission to deposit articles.  So far, so good.  But what happens when they can't obtain permission?  At the NIH and Wellcome Trust, authors in that position must look for another publisher.  At Harvard, authors may request an opt-out for that article.  But at Helsinki?
• I understand why the policy might have an effective date some time after the date of adoption, to give faculty and repository managers time to prepare.  But does this preparation require 18 months?

Update. Also see the university's English-language announcement, June 11, 2008.

Stevan Harnad, Hidden Cost of Failing to Access Information, Open Access Archivangelism, June 5, 2008.  Excerpt:

"Disseminating research via the web is appealing, but it lacks journals' peer-review quality filter," says Philip Altbach in: Hidden cost of open access Times Higher Education Supplement 5 June 2008

Professor Altbach's essay in the Times Higher Education Supplement is based on a breath-takingly fundamental misunderstanding of both Open Access (OA) and OA mandates like Harvard's: The content that is the target of the OA movement is peer-reviewed journal articles, not unrefereed manuscripts.

It is the author's peer-reviewed final drafts of their journal articles that Harvard and 43 other institutions and research funders worldwide have required to be deposited in their institutional repositories....

The journal's (and author's) name and track record continue to be the indicators of quality, as they always were. The peers (researchers themselves) continue to review journal submissions (for free) as they always did....

What is needed is more careful thought and understanding of what OA actually is, what it is for, and how it works, rather than uninformed non sequiturs such as those in the essay in question.

Comments

• Altbach's claim appeared in letter to the editor in response to an article by Zoe Corbyn.  Corbyn was talking about the costs of peer review and did not make the same mistake Altbach did.
• An earlier version of Stevan's blog post was published on the same page as Altbach's letter in the Times Higher Education Supplement.  The page also includes a good letter from Owen Stephens.  For a third letter correcting Altbach, submitted to the THE but not yet published, see Andrew Adams on the AmSci OA Forum.
• Altbach might have meant (1) that OA intrinsically bypasses peer review and that OA policies promote it in that form, or (2) that the rise of OA will jeopardize the existence of peer-reviewed journals.  Taken literally, his language asserts the first.  (From his letter, not quoted by Stevan:  "But there are several problems with [open access]. Chief among them is that peer review is eliminated - all knowledge becomes equal. There is no quality control on the internet....")  If he meant it, then he is deeply uninformed and Stevan is exactly right to correct him.  If he meant the second, then he should have been much clearer and, like others who allude to this supposed problem without connecting the dots, he should have offered a supporting argument.  For a detailed analysis and rebuttal of that objection, see my article from September 2007.
• The success of the OA movement means that every day newcomers hear about it for the first time.  One of the burdens of that success is that many newcomers pick up and spread old myths about it.  If Altbach isn't new to OA issues, then he's inexcusably careless with them, and his claim about peer review is one of the classic myths that newcomers have been picking up and spreading for years. 

Celia Jenkins, Charles Oppenheim, Steve Probets, and Bill Hubbard, RoMEO studies 7: creation of a controlled vocabulary to analyse copyright transfer agreements, Journal of Information Science, June 1, 2008.  Only this abstract is free online, at least so far.

Abstract:   This paper describes the process of creating a controlled vocabulary which can be used to systematically analyse the copyright transfer agreements (CTAs) of journal publishers with regard to self-archiving. The analysis formed the basis of the newly created Copyright Knowledge Bank of publishers' self-archiving policies. Self-archiving terms appearing in publishers' CTAs were identified and classified, then simplified, merged, and discarded to form a definitive list. The controlled vocabulary consists of three categories describing 'what' can be self-archived, the 'conditions' and the 'restrictions' of self-archiving. Condition terms include specifications such as 'where' an article can be self-archived; restriction terms include specifications such as 'when' the article can be self-archived. Additional information on any of these terms appears in 'free-text' fields. Although this controlled vocabulary provides an effective way of analysing CTAs, it will need continual review and updating in light of any major new additions to the terms used in publishers' copyright and self-archiving policies.

Comment.  This is a good idea.  As I argued in a 2004 article:

Nearly all [the] benefits [of posting journal access policies online] would be even greater if journals would post their policy details...on their own web sites with standardized terminology or tags.  Detail-harvesting, searching, and comparison could then be automated.  But for now this is too much to ask.  At least journals should put their policies on their own sites in their own words and keep them up to date.

Cécile Coursol interviewed Jean Kempf yesterday in EducPros.fr.  (Thanks to the INIST Libre Accès blog.)  He talks about OA publishing at the University of Lyon, where he is the director of the university press, and at the OAPEN consortium, of which Lyon is a member.    Read it in the original French or in Google's English.

Tracey Caldwell, SPARC gives Seal of approval to DOAJ content reuse terms, Information World Review, June 4, 2008.  Excerpt:

...SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) believes that confusion around the use and reuse of material in OA journals prevents researchers from getting the maximum benefit from them.

To qualify for Seal, a journal must use the Creative Commons BY licence and provide metadata for all articles to the DOAJ, which will then make the metadata OAI-compliant.

SPARC Europe director David Prosser said: “Those journals that do not meet the Seal criteria will still be listed in the DOAJ. We are not redefining OA or trying to be hard-line. We are attempting to make the OA journals more useful by reducing ambiguities, clarifying rights and ensuring that papers are widely seen by stipulating metadata standards.”

Prosser dismissed concerns that that the initiative was unworkable retrospectively and that the BY licence was not suitable for all disciplines.

“It is true that it would be very difficult to apply a licence retrospectively, and we are not asking journals to do that,” he said. “We do want retrospective metadata for all published articles and that is technically possible.

“It is because we do not want to get to the stage where users and reusers of articles in journals have to contact all authors individually that we want there to be clarity in the licensing. For the journals of something like two-thirds of the publishers listed in the DOAJ there are no obvious licensing terms available. It is this lack of clarity that we are trying to address.”

SPARC has already awarded Seal to some DOAJ journals.

“Some will immediately be eligible, some will not want to change to make themselves eligible, and with others we will work with them to help them meet the criteria,” said Prosser. “In the next few months we should have an idea of how many meet the criteria. In the meantime, you will see the number of journals in the DOAJ with the Seal grow on a weekly basis.”

PS:  For background, see my post and supportive comments on the launch of the program in April 2008.

From today's announcement from Oxford University Press:

Authors who have paid a fee to make their articles open access in one of our Oxford Open biomedical journals do not need to deposit their article into PMC - Oxford Journals will do so on their behalf. The final published version of their article will be freely available immediately via PMC and also directly from the journal website.

Oxford Journals is depositing into PMC all open access papers that have been or will be published in 58 journals participating in the Oxford Open initiative (a list of journals can be found here).

Regular data feeds between PMC and the journals concerned have been set up. Recently published open access content is being deposited first, followed by older content. You can refer to [this page] for the latest information on the status of PMC deposits for individual journals.

We have also prepared some information and guidelines for authors of various funding agencies....

Comment.  This is a good policy, and I'm glad to see that it applies to all OA articles in Oxford Open journals, not just those by NIH-funded authors.  All journals publishing OA articles should deposit copies of those articles in an OA repository.  Even when this doesn't lift an obligation from the author's shoulders, it increases the odds that the article will remain available, and remain OA, if the publisher should ever change its access policy or go out of business.

Peter A. Jumars, Charting a Course through the Riptides, Cross Currents, and Undertows of Scientific Journal Publishing, Limnology and Oceanography Bulletin, March 2008. Accessible only to subscribers, at least so far. (My link points to the login page for the issue, not to the article.) Excerpt:

...Gold open access is the holy grail in which users have free access to all content of a journal immediately upon its publication and in perpetuity. Nowhere to be found, however, is a publicly revealed, successful financial model for open access that can be emulated by all society journals to make them freely available upon first issue to any and all users. Like cold fusion, it would be wonderful, but is it possible? ...

Weaning authors from overly expensive journals is, in game theory terms, a coordination problem (C.T. and T.C. Bergstrom 2006). One author leaving quietly does not do the trick. As a matter of self interest and public interest, scientific societies should join with library associations to make individual users, authors, and reviewers aware of the issues.

There does not seem to be any one-size-fits-all approach to journal economics. The half-life of journal citation varies widely among fields, from the order of six months in some fields of biomedicine to over a decade in limnology and oceanography. A moving wall of six months or one year in biomedicine therefore endangers journal profitability less than it would in aquatic sciences. In a process reminiscent of biological evolution, societies large enough to support many journals intentionally diversify them to gain experience with varied models, a few of which may be best suited to the future. The American Institute of Physics (AIP) recently launched a gold open access journal in biological microfluidics to gain experience with true costs of gold open access publishing, but the AIP is meeting those costs through subscriptions of its other journals and other AIP income. Few societies have the resources and number of titles to mimic this approach, but they certainly can monitor this battle for survival of the fittest models.

Societies fear, in their most common economic models of publishing, a tipping point in mixed open access when a large majority of authors have paid for open access or in green open access when nearly all journal articles are self-archived. I think this fear is paranoia....

A fundamental question is how much [society] members are willing to pay in volunteerism or dollars to provide a [society] journal with open access. My informal discussions suggest that the answer varies widely, but that there is some latitude to increase dues with this end made the explicit cause....Your ASLO [American Society of Limnology and Oceanography] Board, however, would benefit greatly from knowing where in this spectrum you stand.

Users will likely do what is easiest, and that default continues to bode well for open access....

It is difficult to answer the question of why reviewers continue to review free of charge for journals that use that service to make a large profit at the expense of institutional subscribers....I currently decline to review for journals that my library cannot afford and give low priority to review for commercial journals unless the topic is of extreme interest to me. How do you prioritize requests for review? ...

PS: For background, see the ASLO Statement on Open Access (undated) and Free-Access Publication option (a hybrid-journal program).

Update. The article is now OA.

Reed Elsevier 1Q lobbying reached $790,000, Associated Press, June 4, 2008.  Excerpt:

The U.S. unit of Reed Elsevier Group PLC spent $790,000 in the first quarter to lobby...the U.S. federal government on...[many issues including] public access to the National Institutes of Health and more....

In the January-to-March period, the company lobbied Congress, NIH and the Health and Human Services Department, according to the report filed April 17 with the House clerk's office.

Comment.  All we have are good arguments.

Tracey Caldwell, OA in the humanities badlands, Information World Review, June 4, 2008.  Excerpt:

The field of social sciences and humanities (SSH)...faces a...crisis in publishing [similar to that in the STM fields]. In STM, this crisis has been one of the drivers for open access, but this has not been the case in SSH so far.

The dearth of funding in the SSH sector has been one the main reasons it has lagged behind in getting research online and embracing open access. There is not a lot of money around to finance author-pays models of open access (OA), although there has also been an absence of drive on the part of researchers towards open access, backed by a cultural resistance in some disciplines to any sharing of research at all.

But recently, there has been a dawning of understanding among researchers that OA can bring benefits much broader than simple speed and ease of access to research.

At the same time, publishers facing demands for open access have started to make their concerns known, citing the long tail of access to research in this sector that would threaten their business model. Compared with the STM sector, there is a much higher proportion of journal articles accessed for the first time over a year after publication in SSH....

The launch of the Open Humanities Press (OHP), an international OA publishing collective in critical and cultural theory, at the end of April is one sign of the growing realisation of the need for OA in humanities....

The EU has put its weight behind moves to hasten OA in SSH through the so-called Action 32 of the STM-based COST (Co-operation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research) European programme. Action 32 aims to create a digital infrastructure for collaborative humanities research on the web....

[Jonathan Gray of the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF)] believes the first step to OA in the SSH sector is to provide better access to research that is already in the public domain....

Many researchers in this sector simply do not know how to go about making their research open access. A survey by RIN showed that only 14% of arts and humanities researchers (compared with 30% in the physical sciences and 36% in the life sciences) think they are familiar with the options for making their research outputs open access.

[David Green, global journals publishing director for Taylor & Francis] believes it is too early to tell what the true impact of OA would be on the SSH sector.

“One of the big American medical journals found a one-time drop of around 5-10% of subscriptions when it made its back archive free to access after a couple of years. We saw something similar, if less marked, with two of our journals when they introduced their 12- and 24-month embargo postprint policies. Renewals since have been good. This seems a common experience: a small loss in the first year after introducing some form of OA, followed by a large increase in usage.”

So would it hold more widely in SSH? “Hard to say, but we would remain concerned that SSH material has a much longer half-life and much longer usage tail than STM....

[Michael Jubb, director of the Research Information Network (RIN)] is part of a concerted effort to guide institutions towards centralised arrangements to pay publishing fees. He says: “I see no sign at all that research councils have much enthusiasm for meeting the costs of publishing. I am chairing a meeting on payment of publication fees and the practicalities of how institutions might take a more strategic approach to payment for publication....

The idea of providing a quality assurance layer to open access articles deposited in institutional repositories [sometimes called "overlay journals"] may be of especial interest to the fragmented and cash-strapped social sciences and humanities communities....

PS:  For background, see my 2004 article, Promoting Open Access in the Humanities.

... web 2.0 is challenging copyright (the strict protection of intellectua property) because the open source paradigm (allowing for open access and creative remix of contents) has demonstrated important competitive advantages, allowing for more creativity and productivity ... This new open knowledge paradigm is grounded in the success of free software and the old tradition of scientific communities ... Successful uses of web 2.0 are yet an experimental field where trial-and-error is the basic approach. A considerable base of experience is being developed (and shared) by lead users and organizations that could be mined by other interested parties to gain efficiency in their processes of adoption. Basically, we could find two sources of experience: ... Other organizations involved in the adoption of web 2.0 tools and open paradigms, especially other universities and research institutions and enterprises. Universities provide some excellent experiences; to cite only a few: MIT Open Course Ware, Stanford on iTunes U ... or the recent proposal of a Harvard Open Access Policy. ... Web 2.0 is especially useful and creative when knowledge is digitized, modular and allowed to be used and distributed in a flexible way. New models of licences, as Creative Commons or ColorIuris, introduce this needed flexibility respect to the absolute restriction of uses and distribution that characterized copyright. ...

A typical situation: An author registered on the RePEc Author Service has a working paper, listed on RePEc in his profile, that got published in a journal. Now that the publisher has provided the bibliographic information about this article to RePEc, the author can add it to his profile. What should he do about the working paper?

In an overwhelming majority of cases, the answer is: nothing! Indeed, most publishers accept that pre-prints, even post-prints, remain on authors´ home pages or institution repositories ... Thus, the author should not ask the paper to be removed from wherever it was put up.

Note: removing a paper from an author profile does not remove it from the database. It only makes the system learn that the author is not the author of this particular work. The consequences can be very annoying. For example, it becomes impossible for RePEc to recognize that these are two versions (pre-print and published) of the same work, as they appear to have different authors. Then, someone stumbling on the working paper will not find a link to the published version.

For authors caring about their ranking, there are even more adverse consequences from removing the working paper from the author profile. First, many working paper series have higher impact factors [than] journals. Second, the authors [lose] the download statistics of the working paper. Remember, working papers are much more downloaded than articles. And if the article is available only to subscribers, non-subscribers do not have the option of accessing the free working paper version.

And if it is really required that the working paper be removed, ask the RePEc series maintainer to only remove the link to the full text, not the whole record.

... All around the world, without centralized planning, institutes have sprung up in response to a pressing need: non-lawyers have a real use for legal information, but can’t get it. In countries across several continents, new initiatives online are successfully giving the general public information that they wouldn’t have been able to search before, information that used to be controlled exclusively by the legal information publishing businesses. ...

[A]ccess to information, and especially legal information, are a fundamental source of our ability to be agents as humans. Our framework under which we function as humans involves our day to day knowledge of physics, social interactions, and the like, and the knowledge is necessary for us to move around in a physical world, have friends and business relationships, etc. The traditional world of legal information, however, has failed on even this basic level to provide the public information necessary to allow the public to develop to their full potential as substantively relevant agents in the legal world. ...

People become agents in a legal or legislative or judicial realm where they before would have only been relevant through hired services. They can see the reach of the established law in their countries stretching into their lives, and evaluate it on their own, looking up history or international comparisons rather than relying on talk show hysteria to guide them.

And [the initiatives are] only just starting their work. ...

Access to government data and other information often falls behind expectations due to the government's failure to use advanced technologies to meet the needs of modern day society. In "Hack, Mash, & Peer," Jerry Brito, Senior Research Fellow of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, discusses the shortcomings of government access and technological solutions to create broad access to government records.

The analysis, published May 14 in the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, shows that many government data sources are essentially inaccessible to the general public. For instance, the government only permits information regarding the financial disclosures of members of Congress to be viewed in paper format at the House or Senate offices in Washington, DC. Even though disclosure of the records is required by law, and even though those records are stored in a searchable electronic database, government denies the general public easy online access to that information.

Other data the government makes available online in centralized locations but publishes in cumbersome formats, which makes it difficult to search and find information. ...

Filling the access gap, private sector third parties have stepped in with "ingenious hacks" to provide the functionality the government has failed to achieve. ...

Often these "hacks" present the government data in a ... format that allows others to combine various data sources in "mashups" that represent new novel tools for reviewing information. ...

Third-party groups seeking to solve the problem of large amounts of information provided in cumbersome formats recently developed the "peer production" or "crowdsourcing" approach. Crowdsourcing is when massive numbers of documents or other information are reviewed en masse by a community of online users. ...

Rather than just relying on third parties to hack, mash, and peer government data, Brito recommends that government encourage the process itself by making data available online in "structured, open, and searchable formats." ...

To accomplish such access to government information, "Hack, Mash, & Peer" recommends that legislation specifically require such disclosure methods. However, if Congress fails to act, agencies should take it upon themselves to provide government information in robust and useable formats.

Computers and Composition Digital Press is a new "open access, peer-reviewed, online press" jointly supported by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Miami University, and Ohio State University and affiliated with the Institute for the Future of the Book.  (Thanks to Screen Space.)

From the about page:

Computers and Composition Digital Press (CCDP) is committed to publishing innovative, multimodal, e-books and digital projects.  The Press will also publish ebooks (print texts in electronic form available for reading online or for downloading); however, we are particularly interested in digital projects that cannot be printed on paper, but that have the same intellectual heft as a book.

The goal of the Press is to honor the traditional academic values of rigorous peer review and intellectual excellence, but also to combine such work with a commitment to innovative digital scholarship and expression.  For the Editors, the Press represents an important  kind of scholarly activism —an effort to circulate the best work of digital media scholars in a timely fashion and on the global scale made possible by digital distribution.

From the CFP:

The mission of Computers and Composition Digital Press (CCDP) is to ensure open access to information for scholars worldwide and to provide a venue for the Web publication of peer-reviewed scholarly projects in a wide-variety of forms (ranging from primarily textual/verbal ebooks to integrated multimedia projects incorporating video, audio, animation, etc.)...The editors of CCDP invite proposals that address the use, impact, and study of digital media, spaces, and practices....

While the history of the CCDP says the press was founded in 2007, the home page of Heide McKee, a member of editorial board, says it didn't officially open until March 2008.

Feb. 11 was a day that may forever change the course of online legal research. On that day, the nonprofit organization Public.Resource.Org published to the Internet 1.8 million pages of federal case law, free of copyright or other restrictions. The release included all Supreme Court cases and all U.S. circuit decisions since 1950.

Ever since 1872, when John B. West hit upon the idea of building a business around publishing and selling court decisions, commercial publishers have maintained a firm hold on the dissemination of judicial opinions. Not to knock them — legal publishers filled an essential niche and continue to provide valuable and necessary products.

But in the information age in which we now live, private control over the distribution of public case law seems anachronistic. For nearly two decades, gradual progress has been made towards greater public access. But the Public.Resource.Org release is just one of several developments whose convergence suggests that this trend is accelerating. ...

Background: This project investigates the ways in which patients respond to the shared use of what is often considered private information: personal health data. There is a growing demand for patient access to personal health records. The predominant model for this record is a repository of all clinically relevant health information kept securely and viewed privately by patients and their health care providers. While this type of record does seem to have beneficial effects for the patient–physician relationship, the complexity and novelty of these data coupled with the lack of research in this area means the utility of personal health information for the primary stakeholders—the patients—is not well documented or understood.

Objective: PatientsLikeMe is an online community built to support information exchange between patients. The site provides customized disease-specific outcome and visualization tools to help patients understand and share information about their condition. We begin this paper by describing the components and design of the online community. We then identify and analyze how users of this platform reference personal health information within patient-to-patient dialogues.

Methods: Patients diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) post data on their current treatments, symptoms, and outcomes. These data are displayed graphically within personal health profiles and are reflected in composite community-level symptom and treatment reports. Users review and discuss these data within the Forum, private messaging, and comments posted on each other’s profiles. We analyzed member communications that referenced individual-level personal health data to determine how patient peers use personal health information within patient-to-patient exchanges.

Results: Qualitative analysis of a sample of 123 comments (about 2% of the total) posted within the community revealed a variety of commenting and questioning behaviors by patient members. Members referenced data to locate others with particular experiences to answer specific health-related questions, to proffer personally acquired disease-management knowledge to those most likely to benefit from it, and to foster and solidify relationships based on shared concerns.

Conclusions: Few studies examine the use of personal health information by patients themselves. This project suggests how patients who choose to explicitly share health data within a community may benefit from the process, helping them engage in dialogues that may inform disease self-management. We recommend that future designs make each patient’s health information as clear as possible, automate matching of people with similar conditions and using similar treatments, and integrate data into online platforms for health conversations.

I don't normally blog upcoming events.  (Instead, I list them in the Open Access Directory and encourage others to do the same). 

But Open Everything is different.  It's a series of at least six events, including a three day retreat in British Columbia and half day events in cities around the world.  It will cover many kindred movements, including OA to research, and put each in a wider context.  

From a blog post by Mark Surman, one of the organizers:

Today, Toronto kicks off Open Everything: a global series of six (or more?) events about the art, science and spirit of open [including a talk by Leslie Chan about open access]....

If you are wondering what we're going to talk about, check out the Open Everything Toronto wiki or the list of speedgeeks. Also, you may be interested in my hastily compiled welcome notes:

...[T]his is the first of six Open Everythings. Similar conversations are already planned for Berlin, Cape Town, London, Singapore and Cortes Island in British Columbia. We are onto something very big and very important....

A few months ago, I looked on Google and Wikipedia domains where people were using the concept of 'open'. In 30 minutes I found about 15 examples. Obviously, some of these examples used 'open' was being well before the idea migrated from software: open systems; open societies; open standards; open space meetings. There are also fields that are taking their inspiration much more directly from things like Linux and Wikipedia: open education; open content; open innovation; open policy making; open design; open media; open philanthropy. And, then, there were a few surprises: open ethics; open religion; open fitness.

Some of this is fluff and fashion, of course. However, there are increasing examples of people very seriously and effectively applying open source thinking – intentionally and unintentionally – beyond software and encyclopedias....

As someone who thinks this is a good thing, I have two big questions: How will we know an Open Everything when we see one? and How can we do this better?

It's easy to pull out things like the Free Software Definition or the Open Source Definition to test if a piece of software is open. However, we can't just apply the same tests to a piece of architecture, or curriculum or public policy. We can't just say am I free to 'run' this law or this building. We need a set of principles broadly define the essence of open, and that we can apply much more broadly to the world. Having thought about it a bit, my guess is that the essence of open probably includes things like transparency, participation and remixability. But there are probably more and better words needed here.

Similarly, the best practices of running an open source community are becoming increasingly clear and well documented. Modular ownership. Good infrastructure for reporting bugs and submitting patches. Open and constant communication. All of these things are essential. And, only some of them work well when you port them over to areas of endeavour like education. From the business process perspective, we need to start asking what are some of the core techniques that work across different domains and what things are specific. We also need to look at ways to cross pollinate. My guess is that people skilled at facilitating open public policy process and open events have just as much to teach to open source communities as the other way around....

I've received questions about Knewco's WikiProfessional. How free it is; and if it is free as in 'free beer' or free as in 'free speech'.

Life's never simple: it's a combination of both. ...

... There are 7 pilot open access institutional repositories in Ukraine ... We invite open repositories managers from nearby countries to join us in this knowledge-sharing event. ...

Kayvan Kousha and Mike Thelwall, Sources of Google Scholar citations outside the Science Citation Index: A comparison between four science disciplines, Scientometrics, in the issue dated February 2008 but published online in November 2007.  (Thanks to Mike Ciavarella.)  Only this abstract is free online, at least so far:

For practical reasons, bibliographic databases can only contain a subset of the scientific literature. The ISI citation databases are designed to cover the highest impact scientific research journals as well as a few other sources chosen by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). Google Scholar also contains citation information, but includes a less quality controlled collection of publications from different types of web documents. We define Google Scholar unique citations as those retrieved by Google Scholar which are not in the ISI database. We took a sample of 882 articles from 39 open access ISI-indexed journals in 2001 from biology, chemistry, physics and computing and classified the type, language, publication year and accessibility of the Google Scholar unique citing sources. The majority of Google Scholar unique citations (70%) were from full-text sources and there were large disciplinary differences between types of citing documents, suggesting that a wide range of non-ISI citing sources, especially from non-journal documents, are accessible by Google Scholar. This might be considered to be an advantage of Google Scholar, since it could be useful for citation tracking in a wider range of open access scholarly documents and to give a broader type of citation impact. An important corollary from our study is that Google Scholar’s wider coverage of Open Access (OA) web documents is likely to give a boost to the impact of OA research and the OA movement.

Kevin Guthrie, Rebecca Griffiths, and Nancy Maron, Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources, a report from the Strategic Content Alliance and Ithaka, May 2008.  Excerpt:

...We define ‘sustainability’ as having a mechanism in place for generating, or gaining access to, the economic resources necessary to keep the intellectual property or the service available on an ongoing basis. This does not...presuppose any particular method for revenue generation: an Open Access resource, for example, will have a different set of revenue options available to it than a project that is willing to charge a subscription fee, but both should be expected to develop a sustainable economic model....

It does not matter if a resource is subscription-based, Open Access, or supported by budgets of a host institution. For any site, users have a choice in what they pay for, where they spend their time online, or whether to volunteer their time to help support a project. Each project must build sources of advantage that make it valuable and attractive to users, and find ways to sustain these advantages over time....

Disadvantages/risks [of the subscription model]

• A powerful values-driven preference for Open Access in many parts of the academy has resulted in challenges to the subscription model
• In the print world there was little controversy about the need to charge for journals, monographs, or other research outputs. Each customer incurred measurable (if small) incremental costs for printing and distribution, and there was a clear logic for charging fees (plus a margin to cover up-front publication costs) to users. Online, however, the marginal costs of each user are close to zero, so the linkage between variable costs and revenues is broken
• The variability of subscription fee structures can be complex for customers to understand and difficult to compare
• The wealth of competing sources of information available on the web can also call into question the ‘value’ of a particular resource....If a free competitor provides information in a fashion deemed ‘good enough’ by its users, then a subscription service may find it difficult to maintain its subscriber base, even if it can claim to have superior content or features
• Subscriptions by definition restrict usage of a resource to those who subscribe to it. This is a disadvantage from a mission perspective for not-for-profit projects with a commitment to provide as wide access to its resource as possible. It can make it harder to build a case for generating other kinds of revenue, such as advertising or grants. It can also be a disadvantage to users in developing countries, who sometimes lack both the financial resources and means (eg credit cards, bank accounts) to conduct transactions....

Disadvantages [of the pay-per-use model]

• Some would argue that putting any price on content limits its usefulness.
• Prices must be set carefully – low enough to stimulate demand, but high enough so that potential subscribers do not migrate to the pay-per-use option....
• For aggregators such as JSTOR, this may require the negotiation of different kinds of rights with content providers....

Disadvantages [of the contributor-pays model]

• The ability to use the demand-side marketplace to judge the impact of the resource, measure its success, and gain the feedback of users is absent....
• A study conducted by the Center for Studies in Higher Education in 2006 found resistance among faculty to the author pays model because of associations with vanity publishing, concerns about academic integrity, and concerns that this system might discriminate against scholars without access to publishing budgets
• The upside is essentially eliminated if the publication only accepts author fees for those works it chooses to publish: no matter how many users the content attracts, the publishers' revenues will stay the same....
• In fact, as a publication grows more prestigious, more articles will be submitted, driving up the costs of processing articles that are declined and thus publication charges for those that do get published, and as usage grows the associated access costs will increase without a commensurate increase in revenue. This can be countered by imposing fees on all works submitted for review, not just on those accepted for publication
• The author pays model provides no recurring revenue to maintain an author’s work. Long-term preservation must either be paid by charging an author a higher price at the moment of contribution that would be used either to build an endowment to fund future preservation costs, or by charging current authors a higher price to cover migration and other investments made in older content (social security model)....

Disadvantages [of the Host institutional funds / in-kind contributions model]

• Priorities of institutions can change – new academic focus areas – leaving the project without a home or support
• It can be hard to make the case for how programs other than teaching and research are at the centre of university priorities. In this sense, projects may always feel vulnerable and need to fight for support and attention, leaving them in a position of being undercapitalised. This is the situation that many university presses feel that they find themselves in....

Disadvantages/risks [of advertising]

• Securing and retaining advertisers requires skilled personnel and time
• Some site users may dislike the feel of hosting ads on the site
• Setting ad prices can be tricky when measurement criteria are so fluid
• Ad revenue is not ‘guaranteed’ and takes time to build up; it is unlikely to replace other revenue streams right away
• If a site becomes overly dependent on advertising it can undermine the editorial integrity of the project. Many people feel this is happening in the newspaper industry....

Apparently one of the greatest mysteries in science is how to make a science out of drug discovery. ... What to do to make the system more rational? Well, [Aled Edwards, head of collaboration between the University of Toronto, the University of Oxford, and Sweden's Karolinska Institute called the Structural Genomics Consortium] and his Swedish and English collaborators are studying the shapes of the body's proteins and then making their results freely available on the internet. It turns out the shape of proteins is vital knowledge when trying to develop a drug to block the actions of some disease causing body molecule. And their view is that this is knowledge that all companies need to have for free as a precursor to drug development. Their analysis suggests they can reduce early drug discovery time by as much as 18 months and do the work at anywhere from a third to an eighth of the price of traditional academic and industrial research. ...

Microsoft’s announcement last Friday that it would discontinue its book- and journal-scanning initiatives left its partners at university research libraries pondering the future of efforts to digitize materials in their archives. Analysts said the software giant was refocusing on its strengths, in effect conceding the digitization arena to Google, the company that in 2004 first started working with universities on book scanning — to some fanfare as well as controversy. Libraries increasingly see digitization as a preservation strategy. While Microsoft’s departure probably won’t cause significant upheaval, it will reinforce for universities the necessity of ensuring that they retain the rights to their scanned materials — or that their digitization projects will be around next semester, let alone forever. One way to do that is to continue pursuing internal, proprietary scanning projects which, for many libraries, existed for years before Google and Microsoft made it possible to vastly increase their scope and scale. Another is to work with nonprofit initiatives. But if there’s one thing libraries agree on, it’s that the competition between the two companies was healthy. ... One alternative, besides Google, is the realm of private, open-source scanning efforts. The major player in this arena so far is the Internet Archive, which for now is looking for stopgap funding. But Kahle, in a blog post, sounded optimistic: “Onward to a completely public library system!” ... “So now it’s time for the public sphere to build digital services,” he said in the interview. “And fortunately, a lot of the R&D is already done. But that does mean that it has to be funded and brought forward by we libraries. But that’s what we libraries are supposed to do.” Kahle added that, as “the Web has always worked,” he foresaw a return to “many different organizations” competing, or working in concert, to continue the progress made so far in digitizing library reserves. ...

With Microsoft announcing plans to jump ship on its Live Search Books and Live Search Academic last week, industry watchers are turning to Google to see what the company's next move is. ... But is Google still committed to its Book Search project? The company has been quiet about it of late. Absolutely, a spokesperson assured eWEEK. ...

The The America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science Act (COMPETES) has been cited in a couple of the responses to the extended consultation period made available by the U.S. National Institutes of Health on the new requirement aspect of the Public Access Policy.

Open Access will advance the goals of COMPETES.

American researchers will benefit from the open access impact advantage. ... This enhances the status and career of the researcher, and means the work is more likely to be built upon in the scientific process ...

COMPETES includes the goal - both wise and kind - of enhancing educational opportunities to help Americans to develop the key skill sets needed for research and innovation for the future, and particularly to reach out to assist those with low-incomes, underrepresented minorities, and to assist students and teachers at high-needs schools. ...

Open Access does not impact on research destined for the commercial market. The NIH policy clearly states that the policy applies to articles accepted for publication. If a company does not wish to make research available while a patent is pending, they will not want to publish the results! ...

Update (from PS). Also see Bob Grant's article in The Scientist for June 2, 2008. Excerpt:

...HGP will be linked to FINDbase, a public, population-specific genetic database that charts mutations and their associated disorders in several countries around the world.

"As the first journal with an affiliated database in this discipline, HGP offers a unique opportunity to authors to open up access to their research to the widest possible community," Patrinos, the newly appointed joint editor-in-chief of the journal, said in a press release....

Update (from PS). Also see Siân Harris's article about the journal, and its commitment to OA and open data, in Research Information for August/September 2008.

• Connie Foster, Foreword: Revisiting Open Access: Anything New in Four Years?
• Iryna Kuchma, Open Access, Equity, and Strong Economy in Developing and Transition Countries: Policy Perspective
• Jean-Gabriel Bankier and Irene Perciali, The Institutional Repository Rediscovered: What Can a University Do for Open Access Publishing?
• Paul Royster, Publishing Original Content in an Institutional Repository
• Alma Swan and Leslie Carr, Institutions, Their Repositories and the Web
• Stevan Harnad, et al., The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access: An Update
• Jean-Claude Guédon, Mixing and Matching the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access—Take 2
• Peter Murray-Rust, Open Data in Science

... Elsevier has agreed to make this focus issue available in its published version for the next nine to twelve months as the sample issue of Serials Review to support the intent of the authors and the concept of Open Access. ...

The Open Archives Initiative has released the beta version of the ORE specifications and user guides.  From yesterday's announcement:

Over the past eighteen months the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), in a project called Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE), has gathered international experts from the publishing, web, library, and eScience community to develop standards for the identification and description of aggregations of online information resources. These aggregations, sometimes called compound digital objects, may combine distributed resources with multiple media types including text, images, data, and video. The goal of these standards is to expose the rich content in these aggregations to applications that support authoring, deposit, exchange, visualization, reuse, and preservation. Although a motivating use case for the work is the changing nature of scholarship and scholarly communication, and the need for cyberinfrastructure to support that scholarship, the intent of the effort is to develop standards that generalize across all web-based information including the increasing popular social networks of “web 2.0”.

The beta version of the OAI-ORE specifications and implementation documents are released to the public on June 2, 2008. These documents describe a data model to introduce aggregations as resources with URIs on the web. They also detail the machine-readable descriptions of aggregations expressed in the popular Atom syndication format, in RDF/XML, and RDFa. The table of contents page with links to the following other documents is located [here].

A forum for feedback on this beta release is [here]. This feedback and further consultation with the OAI-ORE community will be considered in the evolution of this beta release to a production release scheduled for September 2008.

Nicholas Bramble, Open Access: Problems of Collective Action and Promises of Civic Engagement, apparently a preprint.  Self-archived May 13, 2008.  (Thanks to Legal Research Plus.)  Bramble is a third year law student at Harvard Law School.  Abstract:  

As universities increasingly consider open access, as an initiative and mode of scholarship, they inevitably engage with broader civic values around knowledge, authority, and the nature of traditional scholarship. How might open access act as an extension of the social and societal role that universities and libraries have traditionally played? How does it also forge a new path? These questions lurk beneath many of the arguments for and against open access, and provide an instructive way of measuring the likelihood of success of various university and Congressional open access proposals.

This article seeks first to address why academic researchers have not yet adopted open access tools in large numbers. Part II situates open access with respect to the traditional purposes of publishing - increasing a work's accessibility, publicity, and trustworthiness - and contrasts its vibrancy in fulfilling these functions with the increasingly noncompetitive and stagnant market for traditional scholarly publishing. Part III strikes up a conversation with researchers and publishers by responding to the primary concerns fueling academic resistance to open access and explaining how a shift away from subscription journal-based publishing might affect knowledge-sharing in universities. Part IV contextualizes this conversation with respect to recent institutional advocacy and legislative attempts to ensure public access to publicly funded research. Finally, Part V offers some provisional normative conclusions as to how we can most effectively use the law in conjunction with institutional advocacy to create open regimes of scholarly publishing.

NARCIS ("the gateway to Dutch scientific information") has now integrated DAREnet ("the network of [Dutch] Digital Academic REpositories").  From yesterday's announcement:

...The website [DAREnet], developed by SURFfoundation, is now a part of NARCIS. The portal offers, amongst others, everyone access to tens of thousands of academic publications in full text. Special collections in the NARCIS portfolio include Cream of Science, showcasing prominent research from the Netherlands and the collection Promise of Science, accessing docteoral e-theses from all Dutch universities.

NARCIS offers the following information:

The main NARCIS section: Search for data on researchers, research organisations and current (or recently concluded) research projects at all Dutch universities and research institutes. You can also search the more than 2,100 datasets that make up the DANS Electronic Archiving System (EASY). This section also gives you access to the full-text publications in DAREnet.

NARCIS is further divided into three sub-sections:

DAREnet: Search exclusively for full-text publications from all Dutch universities, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, and other research institutions.

Cream of Science: The familiar publication lists of 217 leading researchers, consisting of almost 50,000 documents. Approximately 60 percent of the publications are available in full-text versions and can be downloaded via NARCIS.

Doctoral theses: The Promise of Science provides access to approximately 20,000 full-text doctoral theses from all Dutch universities....

The Open Knowledge Definition has been translated into Italian.

John Dvorak, Microsoft Drops the Ball on Book Search, PC Magazine, June 3, 2008.  Excerpt:

...The shame of it is that the Microsoft scanning and the resultant search site were more useful than Google Book Search by far. For once, Microsoft was out-indexing Google....

As is often the case with Microsoft, the project was under-publicized while Google's was all over the news. According to Kahle, the Google scans are extremely restricted —libraries have to do a special deal with Google to get access to their own books in scanned form. Kahle was quite clear when he said that Google is not doing anyone any favors with its scanning efforts....

Neither company seemed interested in running advertisements on these pages....No, there seems to be no interest in any such commercialization. They are/were just loading up on content. The way I see it, Google got the idea started and has yet to show any way of monetizing it. Microsoft copied the idea —improved it, actually— but kept waiting for Google to show a way to make money on it. Since Google has not done so, Microsoft bailed out, leaving the whole scene to Google. This is seriously pathetic to watch.

There is good news, though, according to Kahle. Microsoft had claimed some sort of scanning-rights ownership of the public-domain books, thus restricting reprinting and passing around. By ending the project, Microsoft is supposedly releasing the material into the public domain where it belongs. So you can grab copies of these books if you can find them.

The problem now is finding them....

Microsoft was on the right track to perform a tremendous public service, with all the imaginable goodwill in the world attached to it. Too bad nobody noticed and Microsoft didn't really care. What a shame.

Guy G. Simoneau and Edith Holmes, JOSPT Supports Immediate Access to Publicly Funded Research, Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy, June 2008.  An editorial.  Only the first paragraph of the editorial is free online, at least so far.  Excerpt:

...JOSPT looks forward to working with authors to provide immediate open access to accepted manuscripts that result from publicly funded research....

Comments 

• If I interpret this fragment of the full editorial correctly, JOSPT will not demand any embargo at all on articles by its NIH-funded authors.  I wish I could read its argument, and I hope that other TA journals will be able to read it.
• When I read the news, I remembered that the American Diabetes Association, which publishes four TA journals, took the same position under the older, voluntary NIH policy (thanks to the late Peter Banks).  When I reviewed its policy a minute ago, it was unchanged and dated 2008, suggesting that the ADA has reaffirmed its position and that JOSPT is not alone.  Kudos to them both.

Update.  I've recently gained access to the text.  Excerpt:

...[I]n the spirit in which the statute is intended, the Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy fully supports the NIH policy and pledges to make the publicly funded research we accept for publication immediately available through PubMed Central and the JOSPT website....

Further, in an effort to meet the NIH goal “to promote science, health, and commerce in the context of a globally wired and networked world of scientific information,” JOSPT will now also provide open access to articles we publish that report on research funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the UK Medical Research Council, the European Research Council, The Wellcome Trust, and the Australian Research Council....

PS:  The ERC and MRC policies are strong mandates, but the CIHR and ARC policies, in different ways, allow resisting publishers to block OA without refusing to publish the authors subject to their terms.  JOSPT is providing OA voluntarily when it could effectively resist.  Kudos to the journal and its publishers, the Orthopaedic Section and the Sports Physical Therapy Section of the American Physical Therapy Association.

Here are two more OA-related articles from the special March issue of Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics devoted to The use and misuse of bibliometric indices in evaluating scholarly performance:

• Michael Taylor, Pandelis Perakakis, and Varvara Trachana, The siege of science.  (Thanks to Kevin Zelnio.)  Abstract:   Science is in a state of siege. The traditional stage for scientific ideas through peer-reviewed academic journals has been hijacked by an overpriced journal monopoly. After a wave of mergers and take-overs, big business publishing houses now exercise economic control over access to knowledge and free scientific discourse. Their ‘all is number’ rationale, made possible and perpetuated by single-parameter bibliometric indices like the Impact Factor and the h-index has led to a measurement of scientists, science and science communication with quality being reduced to quantity and with careers hanging in the balance of column totals. Other multi-parameter indices like the subscription-based Index Copernicus have not helped to resolve the situation. The patented and undisclosed black box algorithm of the Index Copernicus has just replaced one yardstick by another even less accessible one. Moreover, the academic as author, editor and/or reviewer, under intense competitive pressure, is forced to play the publishing game where such numbers rule, leading to frequent abuses of power. However, there are also deep paradoxes at the heart of this siege. Electronic software for producing camera-ready-copy, LaTeX style files, the internet and technology mean that it has never been easier or cheaper to publish than it is today. Despite this, top journals are charging exorbitant prices for authors to publish and for readers to access their articles. Academic libraries are feeling the pinch the most and are being forced to cut journal subscriptions. Not surprisingly, scholars in droves are declaring their independence from commercial publishers and are moving to open access journals or are self-archiving their articles in public domain pre-print servers. That this movement is starting to hurt the big publishing houses is evidenced by their use of counter-tactics such as proprietary pre-print servers and pure propaganda in their attempts to guard against profit loss. Whether or not bibliometry will be an artefact in the future depends on the outcome of this battle. Here, we review the current status of this siege, how it arose and how it is likely to evolve.

• Stevan Harnad, Validating research performance metrics against peer rankings.  Abstract:   A rich and diverse set of potential bibliometric and scientometric predictors of research performance quality and importance are emerging today—from the classic metrics (publication counts, journal impact factors and individual article/author citation counts) to promising new online metrics such as download counts, hub/authority scores and growth/decay chronometrics. In and of themselves, however, metrics are circular: They need to be jointly tested and validated against what it is that they purport to measure and predict, with each metric weighted according to its contribution to their joint predictive power. The natural criterion against which to validate metrics is expert evaluation by peers; a unique opportunity to do this is offered by the 2008 UK Research Assessment Exercise, in which a full spectrum of metrics can be jointly tested, field by field, against peer rankings.

  From the body of the paper:

  ...It has now been demonstrated in over a dozen disciplines, systematically comparing articles published in the same journal and year, that the citation counts of articles that are made freely accessible to all users on the web (Open Access, OA) are on average twice as high as the citation counts of those that are not....

  Just as peer rankings and metrics can be used to mutually validate one another, so metrics can be used as incentives for providing OA, while OA itself (as it grows) enhances the predictive and directive power of metrics....

Mike Linksvayer, LibriVox: 1500 public domain audio books, CC blog, June 2, 2008.  Excerpt:

Seven months ago we noted that LibriVox released their 1,000th public domain audio book. Now they’ve reached 1,500. That’s over 70 audio books released each month, and things are picking up — they released 115 in May.

Check out LibriVox, perhaps the most interesting collaborative culture project this side of Wikipedia — and everything on LibriVox is in the public domain, free for any use, without restriction.

LibriVox founder Hugh McGuire recently [March 31, 2008] posted an explanation of why LibriVox audio books are dedicated to the public domain rather than released under a CC license....

Joan Giesecke, NIH Public Access Policy:  Campus Implementation Strategies, a slide presentation at the 152nd ARL Membership Meeting (Coral Gables, Florida, May 21–23, 2008).  (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)

The Glasgow School of Art Library is adding OA journal records to its catalogue.  From its blog today:

We've just added Library Catalogue records for over 75 peer-reviewed open-access journals in the arts and humanities....Peer-reviewed and mostly published by professional organisations and bodies or university research departments, they provide quality and authoritative articles on a range of subjects. Subjects covered include new media and technology, anthropology, philosophy, architecture, art and design, psychology and cultural theory.

You'll now find hyperlinks for all these journals via a keyword or title search in the Library Catalogue.

Comment.  Libraries have been doing this since DOAJ started providing the records,  But I haven't heard much about it since the ERIL discussion in 2003.  Has it declined, or just become so routine that it's rarely mentioned?

Athanassios C. Tsikliras, Chasing after the high impact, Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics, March 6, 2008. 

Abstract:   In this paper, I present the perspectives of a young non-native English speaking scientist from a southern European country (Greece) on the impact factor system that is commonly used to assess the performance of countries, institutions, and scientists, including the role this plays in the selection of a journal to which to submit a manuscript. Although young scientists may not always be aware of the advantages and pitfalls of the impact factor system when it comes to the choice of which journal to submit to, journal ranking is among the selection criteria, following the journal’s general scope and rapid manuscript handling but preceding choice of a journal which allows authors to suggest potential referees, and open access journals. The impact factor system is briefly criticised and some improvements are suggested, such as adjustment among scientific disciplines, accounting for the number of authors and the position of an author among them as well as including a page (or word) count.

Comments 

• The same issue of ESEP is dedicated to The use and misuse of bibliometric indices in evaluating scholarly performance.  I haven't opened each article in the issue, but it appears that Tsikliras' article is the only one to discuss OA.  If I'm wrong, I'd be glad to add links to the others.
• Tsikliras recommends OA as one criterion among others when selecting a journal, and one fairly far down the priority list:  "A final criterion,
  not crucial but certainly important, is online access, with open-access journals generally preferred because they provide a wider audience, more citations and thus, greater impact."  But despite the topic of the paper, and despite this quotation acknowledging that OA increases audience and impact, the paper doesn't mention (1) the Hitchcock bibliography, (2) the empirical studies showing that OA correlates with, and probably causes, a 40-250% boost in citations over non-OA articles published in the same issues of the same journals, or (3) the possibility of publishing in a journal of middling impact and self-archiving to boost the impact of one's individual article.

Update (6/3/08).  There were two more OA-related articles in the issue and I just blogged them.

I just mailed the June issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.  This issue takes a close look at how open access facilitates the process of scientific self-correction and improves the reliability of inquiry, drawing on arguments made by John Stuart Mill in 1859.  Warning:  For people interested in university and funder policies, journal licensing, repository deposits, citation impact, and taxpayer rights, this could be deadly dull.  But for people with the philosophy gene, it could almost be interesting.  The round-up section briefly notes 126 OA developments from May. 

Ignasi Labastida i Juan, Let's open the university!  IPR Helpdesk, April-June 2008.  An editorial.  Excerpt:

Last March Barcelona hosted the spring conference of the European University Association (EUA), an association with 791 members in 46 countries across Europe. More than 300 rectors attended the meeting at the University of Barcelona receiving a wide coverage in the media. However the resolutions adopted there did not receive much attention. Among all of them I would like to mention the set of recommendations on open access for scientific knowledge, approved then by the EUA Council. Those recommendations are aimed to raise awareness of the importance of the open access issue within the university community....

The adoption of those recommendations follows similar initiatives from universities, institutions and funding agencies around the world especially in the UK and the USA where mandates and even laws are flourishing to require results from funded research to be published on public repositories open to anyone without toll access. At the European level, some discussion about mandates started a few years ago but only the European Research Council (ERC) has already adopted a policy on open access following the idea that the results of publicly funded research should be publicly available as soon as possible.

The current situation is the answer from the scientific community towards the evolution of the traditional publishing model where for a long time a few companies have had an exclusive copyright on scientific results and they have decided how to disseminate that knowledge and who could access it. For many years, scientists have done research, have written and have reviewed articles, and have paid for accessing journals without expecting any economic compensation because they only wanted attribution and reputation to following their career. This situation of publish or perish has been used by publishers to monopolize that knowledge, mainly created in universities and research centres, and they have used the copyright to lock it even forbidding reproductions on authors' websites or authors' institution portals. Fortunately things are changing. In order to face new emerging models as open access journals that use copyright to open not to lock or the requirements from funding agencies to publish on public repositories to any result published in peer reviewed journals, the publishing companies are opening their rules allowing some acts forbidden before as the reproduction of full-text articles on institutional repositories.

Nevertheless we should not stop our efforts here. There is still a long way to achieve a full open access where no legal barriers will be imposed to spread the scientific knowledge. We will see how the recommendations are implemented in each institution but universities should not be alone, what about public sector information? Why it has to be locked by default? ...

Comments

• Thanks to Richard Poynder for the alert, and for pointing out that IPR Helpdesk is funded by the EC to educate European businesses about intellectual property.  I don't know of any comparable pro-IP organization to embrace OA with this enthusiasm. 
• For background, see my blog post on the EUA recommendations.

Bora Zivkovic, Historical OA, A Blog Around the Clock, June 1, 2008.  Excerpt:

More and more societies are compiling their 'classical' papers.

Here is another one.

And here I wrote, among else:

"In discussions of Open Access, we always focus on brand new papers and how to make them freely available for readers around the world as well as for people who want to mine and reanalyse the data using robots. But we almost never discuss the need to make the old stuff available. Yet we often lament that nobody reads or cites anything older than five years. Spending several years reading everything published in the field in the 20th century up until about 1995 (as well as some 19th century stuff) helped me greatly in my own research. It would help others, I'm sure, especially those who are now revisiting old questions with new techniques. How are the classical papers going to be made available for today's students?

SRBR is working on it now, and I assume that this will be done piece-meal, with each society doing their own work on making old literature available. What I saw (not yet available for public) is a development of a ChronoHistory website. Yes, people will send in pictures and anecdotes and old posters and stuff (and I hope once that material is online that SRBR will get a professional historian of science to make sense of it all), but the most important part of the site will be a repository of the old papers. Services of a real science librarian have been secured to deal with everything from copyright to technical problems in order to provide copies of many old papers on the site. Probably some of the papers will be available to everyone for free while others, due to copyright, may be available only to SRBR members with a password."

I discussed this with Peter Suber and he says that we tend to focus on new literature because it's the low-hanging fruit. Yet he agrees that 'OA to past literature is highly desirable and that we should start thinking about ways to make it happen'. He wrote an article describing a *partial* solution to this problem: Unbinding Knowledge: A proposal for providing open access to past research articles, starting with the most important.

Peter says: "Ultimately we need all peer-reviewed journals to digitize their backfiles for OA. Some are already doing it. Some are digitizing their backfiles but charging for access. Some can't afford to digitize their backfiles at all."

Google is willing to digitize the backfile of any journal. Peter blogged about it in December 2006, although Google still doesn't have a web page for the program. The Google deal isn't very good. But for journals that can't find any other funds to digitize their backfile, Peter thinks it's better than nothing. Google does not have a website for this, but see this August 2007 interview (via):

Representing another effort to reach currently inaccessible content, Google Scholar now has its own digitization program. "It's a small program," said Acharya. "We mainly look for journals that would otherwise never get digitized. Under our proposal, we will digitize and host journal articles with the provision that they must be openly reachable in collaboration with publishers, fully downloadable, and fully readable. Once you get out of the U.S. and Western European space into the rest of the world, the opportunities to get and digitize research are very limited. They are often grateful for the help. It gives us the opportunity to get that country's material or make that scholarly society more visible."

Peter also said (personal communication): "As far as I know, the Open Content Alliance doesn't (yet) digitize journals, but I hope it will start. However, when Google digitizes print literature it pays all the costs (and slightly restricts use of the results); but when OCA digitizes print lit, it requires the possessor or a donor to pay the costs (and provides full OA to the results)."

Update.  Klaus Graf has sent me some evidence that the OCA has been scanning journals.  (Thanks, Klaus.)  For example, see the collection of works digitized by the OCA at the U of Toronto.  Run a blank search and the results include some journals.   Or, see this page on the OCA at the Internet Archive.  It has a box on recently scanned materials and an entry for the Revue archéologique (Volume ns vol 7).

Carol Ebbinghouse, The New Surge of Open Legal Information on the Internet, Searcher, June 2008.  The article itself is not online, but here's the online blurb for it in the table of contents: 

Carol Ebbinghouse compares the quality of legal information now available for free on the internet to the old, reliable, and fee-based services such as LexisNexis and Westlaw and discusses how these new resources can both help and hinder users.

Behemoth is a new, peer-reviewed OA journal of civilization from Leipzig University.  (Thanks to NuT.)  The inaugural issue is now online, with articles in German and English.  Here's a little more on its topic:

Behemoth - A Journal on Civilisation focuses on the general problem of fading and/or failing statecraft and the consequences resulting out of it. It aims to discuss notions of risk and order within societies where state institutions gradually lose or have already lost their integrative power. The journal is a forum for discussion of the approaches appropriate to analyse these new, contingent and sometimes even precarious regimes of (dis)order....

The incipient Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) has released a draft of its bylaws.  Excerpt:

...Section 1.02. Purpose & Mission. The mission of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association is to support and represent the interests of Open Access (OA) publishers globally. This mission will be accomplished through six main areas of activity:

• Exchange of Information - Provide a forum for the exchange of information and experiences related to OA delivery of scientific content and models to support this.
• Set Standards – Promote a uniform definition of OA publishing, set of best practices for maintaining and disseminating OA scholarly communications and a set of ethical standards.
• Advance Models – Support the development of business and publishing models that support OA journal publishing.
• Advocate for Gold OA – Promote gold OA journals and policies that support their viability.
• Educate – Educate the research community and public on the benefits of OA journals, the value publishers bring to the publication process and various policies that enhance and support the delivery of OA publications.
• Promote Innovation – Contribute to the development and dissemination of innovative approaches to scientific communications pertaining to OA and related activities that leverage the opportunities afforded by OA to scholarly content....

[PS:  The reference to "Gold OA" in the fourth bullet point calls this footnote:  "Gold OA refers to implementing open access the free and open dissemination of original scholarship by publishers as opposed to Green OA where free and open dissemination is achieved by archiving copies of scholarly publications that were previously published with restricted access."]

Section 12.O1. Interim Board. During the first year of operation, or until a first AGM [Annual General Meeting] is held, the Association shall be governed by an interim board consisting of the founding members of the Association, to include one representative from each publisher. The founding members include: BioMed Central, Copernicus, Co-Action Publishing, Hindawi, Medical Education Online, Journal of Medical Internet Research, PLoS, {Others?}....

Appendix I.  Member Classes, Criteria and Basis for Membership....

To be considered an OA scholarly publisher and eligible for full membership, the journals published by the Publisher must:

• Comply with the Statement on Open Access (By-laws, Appendix II)
• Comply with the Code of Conduct laid out by the Association
• Conduct peer review or other appropriate scholarly peer-based control of content
• Have editorial boards or other governing bodies whose members are recognized experts in the field(s) which constitute the scope of the journal
• Regularly publish original research or other scholarship content
• Publish at least one Open Access journal that contains original research or scholarship....

Appendix II.  Statement on Open Access

Full members of the OASPA shall adhere to a common interpretation of Open Access scholarly publishing inspired by the Budapest, Bethesda and Berlin Declarations on Open Access. This interpretation includes the following components:

a. The dissemination of peer reviewed manuscripts containing original research or scholarship immediately upon publication, at no charge to user groups, without requiring registration or other restrictions to access.

b. Requirement that copyright holders allow users to "copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship...."

The full members of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association have signed the Berlin Declaration and have committed their organization or him/herself, in the case of Scholar Publishers, to providing Open Access to original research according to the interpretation outlined above.

Appendix III.  Professional Code of Conduct

Full members would be expected to adhere to the Professional Code of Conduct.

• Direct marketing to individuals shall be relevant;
• Recipients of direct marketing materials shall be provided with an opt-out option;
• Any fees or charges related to publishing materials in the journal shall be clearly stated and be easy to find for potential authors;
• Publishers who impose processing fees shall provide waivers or partial waivers for authors facing financial hardship including authors from developing countries. Authors’ ability to pay shall be unknown to reviewers and editors until after the article has been accepted or rejected;
• Company contacts shall be clearly visible on website;
• All articles shall be subjected to a peer review process, including at least two reviewers not directly affiliated with the publisher. This process and policies related to peer review shall be clearly outlined on the journal website;
• An organization’s or journal’s licensing policy (including policy on re-use and redistribution) shall be clearly stated and visible on the website;
• Instructions to authors shall be available and easily located from the journal homepage;
• Publishers shall provide a contact point for handling complaints;
• Misconduct may be reported to the Board of Directors.

Comments

• The OASPA hasn't yet launched.  In fact, it appears that the draft bylaws are a key step in the collaborative, consultative process leading to launch.  The closest thing to an OASPA web site is the page, Creating a Gold Open Access Professional Organization, organizing the deliberations of the interested parties --which are still open to newcomers. 
• I like the draft bylaws, especially the parts I've excerpted.  With one exception, all my quibbles and questions are minor.  For example:
• Green OA isn't limited to "archiving copies of scholarly publications that were previously published with restricted access."  Green OA covers the archiving of preprints, which haven't yet been published at all, and it covers the archiving of articles previously published in OA journals, not just those from TA journals.  For example, when PLoS and BMC deposit their articles in PubMed Central, they provide green OA for articles that are already gold OA.
• Why require members to sign the Berlin Declaration but not the Budapest Initiative?  Both are still accepting signatures.  (The Bethesda statement is not.)
• I can't tell whether the Statement on OA (in Appendix II) is finished or unfinished.  The introductory paragraph says that the association's interpretation of OA "includes the following components", as if there might be more to come.
• Here's my one question on an important issue.  Will OASPA welcome members who differ in their access policies?  Subpoint (b) in the Statement on OA effectively requires members to use CC-BY licenses or the equivalent, permitting all uses (or all "responsible" uses) that carry an attribution.  While I support the CC-BY license as the best choice for an OA journal, I wonder whether OASPA will refuse to admit members who want to block commercial reuse, for example, or who want to remove price barriers without removing permission barriers.