Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, October 11, 2008

OA is green and gold, not just gold

Stevan Harnad, OA Publishing is OA, but OA is Not OA Publishing, Open Access Archivangelism, October 10, 2008.  Excerpt:

Many silly, mindless things have been standing in the way of the optimal and inevitable (i.e., universal Open Access) for years now (canards about permissions, peer review, preservation, etc.), but perhaps the biggest of them is the persistent conflation of OA with OA publishing: OA means free online access to refereed journal articles ("gratis" OA means access only, "libre" OA means also various re-use rights).

OA to refereed journal articles can be provided in two ways: by publishing in an OA journal that provides OA (OA publishing, "Gold" OA) or by publishing in a non-OA journals and self-archiving the article ("Green" OA).
Hence Green OA, which is full-blooded OA, is OA, but it is not OA publishing -- just as apples are fruit, but fruit are not apples.

Hence the many OA mandates that are being adopted by universities and research funders worldwide are not Gold OA publishing mandates, they are Green OA self-archiving mandates.

It is not doing the OA cause, or progress towards universal OA one bit of good to keep portraying it as a publishing reform movement, with Gold OA publishing as its sole and true goal.

The OA movement's sole and true goal is OA itself, universal OA....

(I post this out of daily frustration at continuing to see OA spoken of as synonymous with OA publishing, and of even hearing Green OA self-archiving mandates misdescribed as "OA publishing mandates" [e.g., 1, 2].) ...

The value of OA metadata for non-OA books

Stevan Harnad, Open Access Book-Impact and "Demotic" Metrics, Open Access Archivangelism, October 10, 2008. 

Summary:  Unlike with OA's primary target, journal articles, the deposit of the full-texts of books in Open Access Repositories cannot be mandated, only encouraged. However, the deposit of book metadata + plus + reference-lists can and should be mandated. That will create the metric that the book-based disciplines need most: a book citation index. ISI's Web of Science only covers citations of books by (indexed) journal articles, but book-based disciplines' biggest need is book-to-book citations. Citebase could provide that, once the book reference metadata are being deposited in the IRs too, rather than just article postprints. (Google Books and Google Scholar are already providing a first approximation to book citation count.) Analogues of "download" metrics for books are also potentially obtainable from book vendors, beginning with Amazon Sales Rank. In the Humanities it also matters for credit and impact how much the non-academic (hence non-citing) public is reading their books ("Demotic Metrics"). IRs can not only (1) add book-metadata/reference deposit to their OA Deposit Mandates, but they can (2) harvest Amazon book-sales metrics for their book metadata deposits, to add to their IR stats. IRs can also already harvest Google Books (and Google Scholar) book-citation counts today, as a first step toward constructing a distributed, universal OA book-citation index. The Dublin humanities metrics conference was also concerned about other kinds of online works, and how to measure and credit their impact: Metrics don't stop with citation counts and download counts. Among the many "Demotic metrics" that can also be counted are link-counts, tag-counts, blog-mentions, and  web mentions. This applies to books/authors, as well as to data, to courseware and to other identifiable online resources. We should hasten the progress of book metrics, and that will in turn accelerate the growth in OA's primary target content: journal articles, as well as increasing support for institutional and funder OA Deposit Mandates.

Comment.  I support OA metadata for all non-OA literature and the development of book metrics from open metadata.  But I depart from Stevan on one premise:  he says that OA for full-text books cannot be mandated, but I think it can.  There are reasons why book mandates are more difficult than article mandates to implement well and fairly, and why none yet exist.  But the difficulties can be met.

German perspectives on open data

Richard Sietmann, Open Access 2.0: Freier Zugang zu Forschungsdaten, Heise Online, October 10, 2008.  Read it in German or Google's English.

Audio about OA

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

Like the lists of Video about OA, Educational materials about OA, and the official list of Events celebrating Open Access Day, this one is timed to support Open Access Day (October 14, 2008) and capture the many new resources now under development for it.

The first version of the list is short, just enough to justify a launch.  If you know of audio recordings about OA (not just recordings which happen to be OA), please take a moment to add them.  OAD contributors must register, but registration is free and easy.

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OfficeSWORD plug-in for Word

Savas Parastatidis has released the Word plug-in, OfficeSWORD.  (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)  From Parastatidis' announcement:

When we started thinking about what we could do to support researchers with tools and services, interoperability with existing formats, protocols, and services was amongst our primary goals. The Conference Management Tool (CMT), eJournal, Chem4Word, Creative Commons plugin for Office 2007, “Famulus”, etc. are all trying to implement as many of the community standards that are out there (as time/resources allow us of course). We also wanted to support the entire research lifecycle, from client tools to services....

During discussions with the Fedora Commons and DSpace communities, it was suggested to us that an open source plugin for Word 2007 that talks with any repository service through SWORD would be a good idea. I finally managed to put some time aside to develop such a plugin and upload it to Codeplex. You’ll need VS.NET 2008 SP1 to load the code and run it (there is currently no separate installer I am afraid but we are working on one). Please let me know if you have any issues. I am sure the code is not perfect and it only covers the basic cases. I hope that the community will pick it up and evolve it.

Parastatidis works with the Technical Computing @ Microsoft group and released the source code for OfficeSword under a Microsoft public license.

Microsoft's repository platform now in beta

Microsoft Research has released Beta 1 of its Research-Output Repository Platform.  (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)  From the site:

MSR’s Research Output Repository Platform (codename “Famulus”) aims to provide the necessary building blocks, tools, and services for developers who are tasked with creating and maintaining an organization’s repository ecosystem. Furthermore, it provides an easy-to-install and maintain experience for those who want to quickly set up a research output repository for their project, team, or organization. The platform is based on Microsoft’s technologies (SQL Server 2008 and .NET Framework version 3.5 SP1) hence taking advantage of their robustness, their quality support infrastructure, and the plethora of developer-focused documentation. New applications on top of the platform can be developed using any .NET language and the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 environment. The platform focuses on the management of research assets—such as people, papers, lectures, workflows, data, and tags — as well as the semantic relationships between them. Support for various services such as full-text search, OAI-PMH, RSS and Atom Syndication, BibTeX import and export, SWORD, AtomPub, and OAI-ORE are included as part of the distribution.

Microsoft is releasing the source code under the Microsoft Research License Agreement, which allows essentially all uses except commercial use and has a share-alike clause.

PS:  For background, see our past posts on the Microsoft repository platform.

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CERN's LHC papers are popular downloads

CERN's Large Hadron Collider papers at the OA Journal of Instrumentation were downloaded 55,000 times in their first two months online.  (Thanks to Enrico Balli.)

More on the Springer-BMC deal

Andrea Gawrylewski, A match made in open access heaven? TheScientist, October 10, 2008.  Excerpt:

...According to an Email sent to editors at BMC by the BMC publisher Matt Cockerill, BMC will be an autonomous operating unit within Springer, and everything remains business as usual....

"If BMC's presence within the organization means Springer moves closer to the BMC model and not BMC closer to the Springer Open Choice model -- then this will be a very good thing for open access," Rebecca Kennison, director of the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship at Columbia University, told The Scientist in an Email. "Time will tell."

With BMC under its wing, Springer will offer authors three publishing choices, depending on the journal they choose in which to publish their [work]: the traditional subscription model, the Open Choice model, and the BMC automatic open access model. "All of the business models are going to grow in the future," Eric Merkel-Sobotta, spokesperson for Springer told The Scientist, adding that they aren't going to stop adding journals under the subscription model, or the BMC model. There's no publishing model that fits all, he added, and no publishing business model is for free. "We don't refer to them as business models for nothing -- they're not an ideology."

"I think people are very interested in seeing how you put these two diff publishing models together," Patricia Schroeder, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), told The Scientist. The AAP has been a vocal opponent of the National Institutes of Health's mandate requiring federally-funded researchers to deposit a copy of their papers into PubMed Central. "It's exciting to see [the two publishing models] get out of silos," Schroeder added. "I'm anxious to see how it all evolves."

Another chance to request anti-circumvention exemptions

The Library of Congress is calling for public comments on new exemptions to the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause.  (Thanks to Kevin Smith.)  Comments are due by December 2, 2008.

What are librarians worrying about?

Top Concerns Survey 2008, a report from SCONUL (the UK Society of College, National & University Libraries), 2008.  (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)

See esp. Table 2.2 on p. 18. Of eight surveyed concerns, institutional repositories ranked fourth and OA publishing ranked last in the level of "high concern" they raised.  The top three concerns were "access management", "provision of e-resources", and "other".

Brochure and slides on the European OA pilot project

The EC just released two documents about its OA pilot project for FP7:

  1. Open Access Pilot in FP7.  A brochure (undated).
  2. Open Access Pilot in the European Commission’s Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7).  A slide presentation (September 2008). 

OAPEN receives a major grant from the EC

The EC has agreed to fund OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) .  From yesterday's announcement:

The European Commission has reached agreement with the OAPEN consortium to fund the OAPEN project with €9000,000 from the eContentplus Programme. The project started in September 2008 with a kick off meeting in Göttingen. A Scientific Board has been established and an External Stakeholders Group is currently being formed.

OAPEN is a 30-month target project to develop and implement an Open Access (OA) publication model for peer reviewed academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS). The project, which is the first of its kind, aims to achieve a sustainable European approach to improve the quantity, visibility and usability of high-quality OA content and foster the creation of new content by developing future-oriented publishing solutions, including an online library dedicated to HSS, and new business models....

The OAPEN consortium welcomes other publishers in the Humanities and Social Sciences to join OAPEN's network, make use of OA publications models and to expand the available OA content....

PS:  For background, see our past posts on OAPEN.

U of Glasgow adopts an OA mandate

The University of Glasgow has adopted an OA mandate.  The proposal to the University Senate is dated June 5, 2008, and was apparently approved in time to take effect at the start of the current (08-09) academic year.  The policy was announced late last week.  From the policy proposal:

...A key element in the University’s plans to maximise the impact of peer-reviewed research publications is the need to make such publications as widely available as possible. It is the University’s policy to develop and implement a comprehensive publications database recording bibliographic information and providing access to, where possible, the full text, for all peer-reviewed, published research outputs produced by university staff. As research assessment moves towards bibliometric based metrics, this will support internal bibliometric analysis.

At present, the University strongly encourages authors to deposit copies of their peer-reviewed published work into the University’s Institutional Repository, Enlighten, and while this has had some effect on increasing the number of full text papers made available it is only a fraction of the University’s potential research output....

In order to achieve these objectives Senate is asked to approve a policy requiring staff to deposit:

  • electronic copies of peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings
  • bibliographic details of all research outputs, and to encourage staff to provide the full text of other research outputs where appropriate....

Staff are asked to deposit a copy of peer-reviewed, published journal articles and conference proceedings into Enlighten, where copyright allows, as soon as possible after publication. Other research outputs such as book chapters and books can also be deposited if desired by authors. Where a publisher has placed an embargo on making an item openly available, the item will not be made publicly visible until the embargo period has expired....

Staff will only be asked to provide copies of publications where publisher agreements permit deposit in online repositories. Repository staff will check publishers’ copyright agreements to ensure that deposit is permitted. Under no circumstances will staff be required to make publications available in contravention of UK copyright law....

Repository staff can check funders’ Open Access policies and where staff are already required by their funders to deposit in a subject based repository such as UK PubMed Central, repository staff will ensure that links are made from Enlighten to the relevant repository. There will therefore be no requirement for staff to deposit in more than one repository.

Staff, or their representatives, can easily deposit items themselves via Enlighten or can email items directly to repository staff who will deposit them....

Comments

  • I applaud the mandatory language and the university's determination to improve upon its previous, non-mandatory policy.  I like the way the university will integrate the OA repository and bibliometrics and the way it sees a well-populated OA repository as serving institutional interests directly, not just indirectly by serving faculty interests.  I like the way Glasgow staff will help faculty deposit their articles and check to see whether copies already exist in funder repositories.  (But when copies do already exist at funder repositories, wouldn't it make more sense for Glasgow to harvest its own copies rather than merely link to copies elsewhere?)
  • Glasgow leaves a loophole or opt-out for resisting publishers (deposit is only required "where publisher agreements permit deposit").  That will defeat much of the purpose of upgrading the policy from discretionary to mandatory.  The Wellcome Trust and NIH policies, for example, close this loophole completely, and the Harvard policy shifts the opt-out from the publisher to the author.  (In all those cases, authors must retain the key right to authorize OA and publisher permission is never needed.)  If Glasgow receives fewer deposits than it wants, I hope it will follow one of those strategies and close the loophole.

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Housekeeping

I just returned from a trip and Gavin is in the middle of a move.  Please bear with us as we catch up on recent news.


Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Housekeeping

I'll be on the road Thursday and Friday with few opportunities for blogging or email.  I'll start catching up on the weekend.

Funding for research on "open innovation"

JISC has announced funding for "a comprehensive landscape and feasibility study investigating the current and recommended future state of open innovation practice". The deadline on the call for proposals is November 11, 2008.

Retroactive OA for three papers by new Nobel laureate

The American Physical Society has provided retroactive OA to three articles (1, 2, 3) by Yoichiro Nambu, one of this year's three Nobel laureates in physics.  More details in yesterday's announcement.

Comment.  APS did the same thing last year for three papers on the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory of superconductivity, the prize-winning discovery.  See my October 2007 blog post for details and comments.

On the IR at UNAM's anthro institute

Juan Manuel Zurita Sánchez, Open Access en el IIA, El falso letrado, October 8, 2008. Blog notes on a presentation on the IR at the Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas [Institute of Anthropological Research] at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

U.S. presidential candidates support OA to debates

Barack Obama and John McCain, the major party candidates for president in the U.S. elections, have responded to the call by Lawrence Lessig and others that the video footage of presidential debates should be in the public domain. Both endorsed the idea. See the letter by McCain and the letter by Obama.

See also our previous post on the call for OA to the debates, as well as our earlier post on the call for OA to the debates during the primary campaign.

More than peer-reviewed manuscripts in UKPMC

Tracey Caldwell, UK PubMed goes beyond journals, Information World Review, October 8, 2008.  Excerpt:

Best known as an access gateway to biomedical research journals, the UK incarnation of the PubMed Central website is to introduce access to additional types of content, such as clinical guidelines, and mining and linking facilities.

There will also be direct links to the 18 million records on the US version of PubMed....

The British Library is providing access to additional content as a pilot project. Lee-Ann Coleman, head of STM information at the British Library, said: “Researchers benefit from having access to content such as clinical guidelines, clinical trials data, images, patents and PhD theses through the Ethos service.”

But providing access to research data is proving a thorny issue, according to Coleman. “Data is not easy to find. There does need to be some co-ordination and management, and we are thinking about what to do in this area.”

The UKPMC team is hoping to have a new search interface demo ready this year. It is expecting to make access to additional content available in a year, and text mining and data facilities in two or three years.

Comments on the Springer-BMC deal

Here are some comments from around the blogosphere on Springer's acquisition of BioMed Central.

From Rafat Ali at paidContent.org:

This is akin to the adoption of Linux and open source software by mainstream IT companies....

From Michael Eisen at It's NOT Junk:

I am sure some will lament the sale of the innovative BMC to a publishing behemoth, but this is an unambiguously good thing for open access. This proves what we at PLoS have been saying since we launched - that open access is not just a crusade to do what’s right and best for science - it’s also good business....

Back when the open access movement started, a lot of people in the academic publishing world were hostile to PLoS, BMC and open access in general. Most of their objections fell flat - but the one that stuck in the minds of most scientists was the idea that open access might be a nice idea, but it was not a sustainable business model. But Haank - who was then the head of Elsevier - adopted a more practical attitude. He said to me at a meeting once (and I paraphrase):

We make a lot of money selling subscriptions to our journals. We’re not just going to stop. But if the scientific community wants open access and can prove it is good business, we will [change] gears and embrace open access publishing. And we’ll make a lot of money publishing open access journals.

Well, with this transaction it’s clear that we’ve succeeded. Springer sees open access as the future of scientific publishing. While PLoS now has a bigger and richer open access competitor than we had before, a major psychological obstacle for authors has been overcome, and I expect we’ll see more and more commercial and non-profit publishers move towards open access in the near future.

From Adam Hodgkin at Exact Editions:

...I am sure that Springer are not intending to close down BMC (well 95% sure!). I agree with Suber that the really interesting aspect to this acquisition is that the big commercial publishers are now beginning to feel their way into a situation in which giving away content, making it freely available, is actually good for the profit-oriented business which also sells subscriptions to some highly prized content. And provides other services. It's what those other services are that is perhaps most unclear at this point....I am sure that publishers have scarcely begun to think about the ways in which making content freely accessible may be an effective and strange-as-it-may-seem profitable way of publishing. Locking it all up as tight as possible will not work well. Publishers need to go to bed with this mantra buzzing in their brains: the marginal cost of access is approaching ..... zero.

From Revere at Effect Measure:

...At the outset it was not clear if [the BMC] business model could work in scientific publishing, and its early years BMC struggled to make a profit. The sale of BMC to Springer Science+Business Media, the world's second largest scientific publisher (1700 journals), seems to have answer the question of viability. But it leaves some other questions open....

The handwriting is on the wall for scientific publishers [due to OA policies like those at NIH and Harvard] and the Springer acquisition can be seen as an acknowledgement of this....

The part I worry about is that we will see a continuous increase in the processing fees, just as we have seen rapacious scientific publishers increase subscription costs to levels that made it unaffordable for libraries to subscribe....If we get to the point where reading is free but it is too expensive to write, we won't be better off....

The same [BMC] management team will operate under Springer direction and in the future the implied promise is that BMC journals will benefit from Springer's extensive resources. Maybe. I hope so....

Springer may not be committed to open access for ideological reasons, but I am....If I see the goal of free accessibility to scientific research threatened by practices like ramping up processing fees, the only ramp I'll be taking is the off ramp.

Brisbane Declaration on OA

The participants in the Open Access and Research Conference 2008 (Brisbane, September 24-25, 2008) have issued the Brisbane Declaration.  Here it is in full:

Following the conference on Open Access and Research held in September in Australia, and hosted by Queensland University of Technology, the following statement was developed and has the endorsement of over sixty participants.

Brisbane Declaration

Preamble

The participants recognise Open Access as a strategic enabling activity, on which research and inquiry will rely at international, national, university, group and individual levels.

Strategies

Therefore the participants resolve the following as a summary of the basic strategies that Australia must adopt:

  1. Every citizen should have free open access to publicly funded research, data and knowledge.
  2. Every Australian university should have access to a digital repository to store its research outputs for this purpose.
  3. As a minimum, this repository should contain all materials reported in the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC).
  4. The deposit of materials should take place as soon as possible, and in the case of published research articles should be of the author’s final draft at the time of acceptance so as to maximize open access to the material.

Brisbane, September, 2008

Comments

  • This is not the first call for OA to publicly-funded research.  But I particularly like the way it links that call to (1) OA repositories at universities, (2) national research monitoring programs, like the HERDC, and (3) the value of early deposits.  Kudos to all involved.
  • See our past posts on the Brisbane conference.

Update (10/9/08).  Also see Stevan Harnad's comments:

The Brisbane Declaration on Open Access at last puts some real practical policy content and substance into the Budapest/Bethesda/Berlin series, along the lines of the UK Select Committee Recommendation and Berlin 3....If this is implemented planet-wide, we have universal Open Access within a year.

And see the comments of Arthur Sale, one of the declaration drafters, quoted by Harnad:

...May I tease out a few strands of the Brisbane Declaration for readers of the list, as a person who was at the OAR Conference in Brisbane.

1. The Declaration was adopted on the voices at the Conference, revised in line with comments, and then participants were asked to put their names to it post-conference. It represents an overwhelming consensus of the active members of the repository community in Australia.

2. The Conference wanted a succinct statement that could be used to explain to senior university administrators, ministers, and the public as to what Australia should do about making its research accessible. It is not a policy, as it does not mention any of the exceptions and legalisms that are inevitably needed in a formal policy.

3. The Conference wanted to support the two Australian Ministers with responsibility for Innovation, Science and Health in their moves to make open access mandatory for all Australian-funded research.

4. Note in passing that the Declaration is not restricted to peer-reviewed articles, but looks forward to sharing of research data and knowledge (in the humanities and arts).

5. At the same time, it was widely recognized that publishers' pdfs ("Versions of Record") were not the preferred version of an article to hold in a repository, primarily because a pdf is a print-based concept which loses a lot of convenience and information for harvesting, but also in recognition of the formatting work of journal editors (which should never change the essence of an article). The Declaration explicitly make it clear that it is the final draft ("Accepted Manuscript") which is preferred. The "Version of Record" remains the citable object.

6. The Declaration also endorses author self-archiving of the final draft at the time of acceptance, implying the ID/OA policy (Immediate Deposit, OA when possible).
While the Brisbane Declaration is aimed squarely at Australian research, I believe that it offers a model for other countries. It does not talk in pieties, but in terms of action. It is capable of implementation in one year throughout Australia. Point 1 is written so as to include citizens from anywhere in the world, in the hope of reciprocity. The only important thing missing is a timescale, and that's because we believe Australia stands at a cusp.

What are the chances of a matching declaration in other countries?

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Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Student newspaper editorializes in favor of OA at NIH

Publicly funded research should be publicly accessible, editorial, The Collegiate Times, October 6, 2008. (The Collegiate Times is a student newspaper covering Virginia Tech.)

Comment. Unfortunately, several of the editorial's arguments are deeply flawed:
  • The biggest gaffe is confusing HR 6845, the Conyers bill (which we have covered previously), with supporting OA; in fact, the opposite is true.
  • The editorial also seems to assume that manuscripts subject to the NIH policy could not be published by commercial publishers. But there are extensive resources for authors on publishers' policies to allow authors to comply; a long list of journals even handles submission to PubMed Central on the author's behalf.

California to launch OER pilot program for community colleges

Jane Park, Bill Enabling Community Colleges to Establish OER Pilot Program is signed into law, Creative Commons blog, October 6, 2008.

Last week, a bill enabling the California Community Colleges to integrate open educational resources (OER) into its core curriculum was signed into law by Governor Schwarzenegger. AB 2261 authorizes the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges “to establish a pilot program to provide faculty and staff from community college districts around the state with the information, methods, and instructional materials to establish open education resources centers.” The program would provide a structure by which community college faculty and staff could vet and repurpose OER in order to create high quality course materials and textbooks for college students. The resulting materials would themselves be openly licensed or available in the public domain so that they could be further adapted and repurposed for future and individual contexts. ...

This legislation is spearheaded by Assemblyman Ira Ruskin and Hal Plotkin, President of the Foothill and De Anza Community College District’s Governing Board of Trustees. Hal writes,

This is the first legislation that puts the state of California squarely behind those of us who are working to create free, high-quality, vetted public domain — or “open” — educational resources for community college students, who stand to save literally hundreds of millions of dollars over the coming decade as a result. ...

See the news article on this here, and the latest version of the bill here. ...

More notes on the Repository Fringe

John MacColl, The repository that isn’t there, hangingtogether.org, October 6, 2008. Notes on the Edinburgh Repository Fringe (Edinburgh, July 31-August 1, 2008).

... Niamh Brennan, Programme Manager for Research Information Systems & Services in Trinity College Dublin ... revelled in the opportunity both to reveal how well-developed the Irish research architecture is ...

In a paper entitled CRIS Cross: the Repository in the Research Information System, she describes a nationally coherent research information infrastructure which is being built in Ireland. In this system, the humble institutional repository is so invisible to the researchers whose work is deposited in it, that it might almost be dead, for all that it intrudes into their consciousness. What is visible is its Research Support System (confusingly known as RSS), in which researcher images and CV details are accompanied by publication citations drawn from the repository. Some of the information in turn feeds expertiseireland, the island’s national research expertise portal. Records in the repository have been created in a variety of ways, including by purchase from Thomson Reuters. Academics feed the RSS, unaware that the repository sits behind the system. There is just the occasional hint, however, that there might be some other system lurking in the shadows, as in the invitation to upload the full-text. ...

See also our past posts on the Repository Fringe.

Interview with a repeat OA-authoring researcher

Peter Binfield, An interview with one of PLoS ONE’s most frequently published authors., PLoS blog, October 6, 2008.
Jeremy Farrar, from the Centre for Tropical Medicine, Oxford University, Oxford, U.K. and the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam has published seven articles with PLoS ONE which makes him one of our most frequently published authors.

I caught up with him via email as he sped around the world to ask him why he published with us, what his experience was like and whether he would do it again. Here’s what he said:

“We have chosen to publish a number of manuscripts in PLoS ONE for a variety of reasons. We are committed to the concept of truly open access journals, open from day one following publication and available to everyone anywhere. ...

Open access is crucial and whatever the complexities of the business model for the PLoS journals I hope the idea survives and builds on its initial success. In my area of work in international health true open access at the time of publication is a vitally important concept, crucial to the building of science and encouragement of research globally and one which we will support fully by continuing to sending our work for consideration for publication.”

India's Centre for Internet and Society

Bangalore's Centre for Internet and Society, launched in August 2008, is a new home for OA activism in India.  It's also the new home of Subbiah Arunachalam, India's leading OA activist.  According the CIS advocacy page, the organization is devoted to open standards, FLOSS, and open access.  Also see the CIS FAQ and blog.

Three engineering journals convert to OA

AAA adopts 35 year embargo on OA backfile

AAA Creates "Open Access" to Anthropological Research, a press release from the American Anthropological Association, October 6, 2008.  Excerpt:

In a groundbreaking move aimed at facilitating greater access for the global social science and anthropological communities to 86 years of classic, historic research articles, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association announced today that it will provide, free of charge, unrestricted content previously published in two [of] its flagship publications – American Anthropologist and Anthropology News.

The initiative, among the first of its kind in the humanities- and social science-based publishing environment and made in coordination with publishing partner Wiley-Blackwell, will provide access to these materials for the purposes of personal, educational and other non-commercial uses after a thirty-five year period.

Starting in 2009, content published from 1888 to 1973, will be available through AnthroSource, the premier online resource serving the research, teaching, and professional needs of anthropologists. Previously, this information was only available via AAA association membership, subscription or on a so-called “pay per view” basis.

“This historic move, initiated by the needs and desires of our worldwide constituency, is our association’s pointed answer to the call for open access to our publications. This program, I believe, is an important first step in answering the call to un-gating anthropological knowledge,” AAA Executive Director Bill Davis said in a statement issued today.

The initiative, which will be re-evaluated by internal AAA committees in the next year (the Committee on Scientific Publication as advised by the Committee for the Future of Electronic Publishing), may be expanded in the future....

Update (10/7/08).  Here are a few comments from the blogosphere and press.

From Alex Golub on Open Access Anthropology:

Amazingly, I agree with Bill Davis that this is an ‘important first step in answering the call for un-gating anthropological knowledge’ — although I’d put the emphasis on ‘first step’....

Is this a big deal? It is hard to say. First, opening Anthropology News is trivial — it should have been done a long time ago, and everyone has agreed about this since the days when I served on the AnthroSource Steering Committee. The AAA should not be congratulated on taking four years to implement a change that could have taken a week.

Secondly, a 35 year window gives the world access to _most_ of American Anthropologist, including some of the most important work in our discipline. At first glance, this is not just good news, it is utterly superb news and the AAA should be commended for doing the right thing. But there are still lots of important questions to be answered: what license will this material be released under? In what form will it be made available? Can it be included in other repositories or only downloaded from the AAA website? ...[T]here is still plenty of time for this good news to turn sour....

There is one other thing to note: This decision clearly represents the success of the OA community’s decision to hold the AAA accountable, in public, for its actions. I honestly do not think this decision would have been made if the OA community had not called out the AAA and demanded to know what the hell it thought it was doing....

From Chris Kelty on Savage Minds:

Breaking News! Stop the Presses!!! OMGWTF!!!! ... [T]his is great, really, despite my snarkiness. The AAA has realized that opening up 35 year old scholarship is not a threat to their publishing revenue, and it may well improve public understanding of anthropology. This is a huge step forward....

However...It sucks that this is being called “open access”....[W]hat is happening here is a dissolution of the term open access and a pretty shameless use of this opportunity to issue a press release that might repair some of the damage the association has suffered on this issue. Fair enough, they are trying. Try harder, I say.

From Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Ed:

The anthropology association has been divided for years over open access....Many rank-and-file anthropologists embrace the idea, seeing it as a way to most effectively communicate without imposing huge financial burdens on their libraries. But the association relies on revenue from subscriptions to its journals and has resisted repeated pushes from its own members to move in the direction of open access.

These tensions are not unique to anthropology, but the discipline has seen more than its share of flare-ups over the the issue, with pro-access scholars horrified that their association lobbied against open access legislation in Congress and that the scholarly society replaced a university press as its publishing agent with a for-profit publisher....

Several members of [the AAA Committee on Scientific Publication and Committee for the Future of Electronic Publishing], asking that their names not be revealed, said that some members of those panels had wanted the association to open up more recent scholarship, but that association leaders were cautious about going any further.

In an interview, Oona Schmid, director of publishing for the association, said, “We know we have members who really care about open access,” and that the shift amounted to “a really substantial offer.”

Asked about the 35-year time delay, Schmid cited research showing that the half life of articles in anthropology journals (meaning the time in which half of the scholarly citations they receive are made) is 12-15 years, and that the association wanted a time period that would keep journals for subscribers only while they were being cited....

Patricia Kay Galloway, an associate professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, has previously served on anthropology association committees on digital publishing but left because of disputes over her support for open access. She said that the idea that open access involves a 35-year delay is “just crap.”

She said that “it’s nice to get” the older material, but noted that the field of anthropology has changed radically in the last 35 years on such issues as how indigenous people should be studied and the need to avoid “elitist bias.” She said “the most exciting work” is not going to be available in this program. “And that’s why people are not going to be impressed.”

The primary reason the association won’t go open access, she said, is to preserve revenue. And that’s not an appropriate reason, even if it means that the association might end up with a smaller operation....

Comments

  • The anthropology bloggers speak my mind, especially Chris Kelty:  "Fair enough, they are trying. Try harder, I say."  Thirty-five years is the longest embargo or moving wall I've ever seen a publisher boast about.  It's more than 10 times longer than the runner up.
  • Jaschik is right that "anthropology association has been divided for years over open access."  For the blow by blow, see our many past posts on the AAA and OA.

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Finding a dissemination system that doesn't distort science

Neal S. Young, John P. A. Ioannidis, and Omar Al-Ubaydli, Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science, PLoS Medicine, October 7, 2008. 

Summary:  The current system of publication in biomedical research provides a distorted view of the reality of scientific data that are generated in the laboratory and clinic. This system can be studied by applying principles from the field of economics. The “winner's curse,” a more general statement of publication bias, suggests that the small proportion of results chosen for publication are unrepresentative of scientists' repeated samplings of the real world. The self-correcting mechanism in science is retarded by the extreme imbalance between the abundance of supply (the output of basic science laboratories and clinical investigations) and the increasingly limited venues for publication (journals with sufficiently high impact). This system would be expected intrinsically to lead to the misallocation of resources. The scarcity of available outlets is artificial, based on the costs of printing in an electronic age and a belief that selectivity is equivalent to quality. Science is subject to great uncertainty: we cannot be confident now which efforts will ultimately yield worthwhile achievements. However, the current system abdicates to a small number of intermediates an authoritative prescience to anticipate a highly unpredictable future. In considering society's expectations and our own goals as scientists, we believe that there is a moral imperative to reconsider how scientific data are judged and disseminated.

From the body of the paper:

...For most published papers, “publication” often just signifies “final registration into oblivion”. Besides print circulation, in theory online journals should be readily visible, especially if open access....

If “the striving for knowledge and the search for truth are still the strongest motives of scientific discovery”, and if “the advance of science depends upon the free competition of thought”, we must ask whether we have created a system for the exchange of scientific ideas that will serve this end.

Update (10/7/08).  Also see Richard Smith's comments on this article.  Excerpt:

...[The authors argue that] the fact that it is so important [to publish in high-prestige journals] is distorting science. And I think that the authors are right....

[The winner's curse] phenomenon operates in science publishing because the elite journals that accept only a fraction of papers submitted to them go for the “best” and are thus likely to be publishing papers that are suffering from the winner's curse — for example, in that they give dramatic results that are a considerable distance from the “true” results. They are exciting outliers....The articles that the high impact journals publish are bound to be atypical....

Most scientists read a few high profile journals — and so are fed a systematically distorted view of the evidence. It's also these journals that are most widely reported in the media and fed to policy makers, so increasing the impact of the distortion....

For me this paper simply adds to the growing evidence and argument that we need radical reform of how we publish science. I foresee rapid publication of studies that include full datasets and the software used to manipulate them without prepublication peer review onto a large open access database that can be searched and mined. Instead of a few studies receiving disproportionate attention we will depend more on the systematic reviews that will be updated rapidly (and perhaps automatically) as new results appear.

Update (10/10/08).  Also see Stevan Harnad's comments.  Excerpt:

There are reasons to be skeptical about the conclusions of this PLoS article. It says that science is compromised by insufficient "high impact" journals to publish in. The truth is that just about everything gets published somewhere among the planet's 25,000 peer reviewed journals, just not all in the top journals, which are, by definition, reserved for the top articles -- and not all articles can be top articles. The triage (peer review) is not perfect, so sometimes an article will appear lower (or higher) in the journal quality hierarchy than it ought to. But now that funders and universities are mandating Open Access, all research, top, middle and low will be accessible to everyone. This will correct any access inequities and it will also help remedy quality misassignment (inasmuch as lower quality journals may have fewer subscribers, and users may be less likely to consult lower quality journals). But it will not change the fact that 80% of citations (and presumably usage) goes to the top 20% of articles, though it may flatten this "skewness of science" (Seglen 1992) somewhat.

Update (10/12/08).  Also see the anonymous story in The Economist about this article.  Excerpt:

...Ioannidis and his colleagues argue that the reputations of the journals are pumped up by an artificial scarcity of the kind that keeps diamonds expensive. And such a scarcity, they suggest, can make it more likely that the leading journals will publish dramatic, but what may ultimately turn out to be incorrect, research....

The researchers are not suggesting fraud, just that the way scientific publishing works makes it more likely that incorrect findings end up in print. They suggest that, as the marginal cost of publishing a lot more material is minimal on the internet, all research that meets a certain quality threshold should be published online....

Update (10/13/08).  Also see John Timmer's comments.

Update (10/13/08). Also see Jake Young's comments:

...This is a ringing endorsement of open access journals -- partially because they can publish more results (including negative ones) and partially because they give greater access to papers about large data sets. Hear, hear for PLoS!

Springer buys BioMed Central

Scientific American has the scoop:  Open access publisher BioMed Central sold to Springer, October 7, 2008.  Excerpt:

Open access pioneer BioMed Central has been acquired by Springer, ScientificAmerican.com has learned.

BioMed Central publisher Matthew Cockerill announced the news in an email today to editors of BMC's journals.

Those in the open access movement had watched BioMed Central with keen interest. Founded in 2000, it was the first for-profit open access publisher and advocates feared that when the company was sold, its approach might change. But Cockerill assured editors that a BMC board of trustees "will continue to safeguard BioMed Central's open access policy in the future." Springer "has been notable...for its willingness to experiment with open access publishing," Cockerill said in a release circulated with the email to editors....

PS:  I'll post more details when I have them.

Update (10/7/08).  Also see the joint Springer/BMC press release.  Excerpt:

...BMC is the largest open access provider in the world with over 180 peer-reviewed journals.

BioMed Central’s flagship journals include Journal of Biology, BMC Biology, BMC Medicine, Malaria Journal, BMC Bioinformatics andGenome Biology.  BioMed Central has revenues of approximately EUR 15 million per year.  The company is based in London, with a second office in Liverpool, and has approximately 150 employees.

Derk Haank, CEO of Springer Science+Business Media said:  “This acquisition reinforces the fact that we see open access publishing as a sustainable part of STM publishing, and not an ideological crusade.  We have gained considerable positive experience since starting Springer Open Choice in 2004, and BioMed Central’s activities are complementary to what we are doing.  Additionally, this acquisition strengthens Springer’s position in the life sciences and biomedicine, and will allow us to offer societies a greater range of publishing options.”

Matthew Cockerill, Publisher of BioMed Central said:  “...BioMed Central has demonstrated that the open access business model can work, and we look forward to continued rapid growth as part of Springer...."

Comments

  • There's lot of fascinating room for conjecture here.  But one speculation we can rule out is that Springer will convert BMC's OA journals to TA.  First, it's clear from Derk Haank's statement that Springer wants BMC because it's OA, not despite it.  Second and more important, BMC has an Open Access Charter precisely to prevent an acquisition or take-over from reversing the company's commitment to OA:
    BioMed Central has established an independent Board of Trustees. If and when a change of ownership should be considered, the Board of Trustees will be asked to judge and advise whether sufficient guarantees to continue a policy of unconditional open access for research articles are being offered and agreed by any prospective new owner. BioMed Central will not enter into a change of ownership agreement unless the Board of Trustees accepts these guarantees.
  • Nor do I take this as a sign of BMC's failing health.  On the contrary.   If BMC were failing, Springer would not want to buy it.  BMC would not qualify either as a good investment or as a rival worth sidelining.  The purchase is a sign of Springer's confidence that BMC will continue its long, steady climb from the red to the black.
  • As the world's largest OA publisher, BMC was already in a unique position to benefit from economies of scale.  Joining Springer will enable it to realize even greater economies of scale --unless the efficiency of BMC's comparatively lean and mean corporate structure, optimized for OA publishing, is cut by Springer's legacy overhead.  But either way, get used to saying it:  Springer is now the world's largest OA publisher.
  • If Derk Haank says that OA publishing is a "sustainable part of STM publishing", then it's harder for anyone to say that it isn't.  That includes the publishing lobby, which for years has played on fears of unsustainability in its campaign to derail or dilute national commitments to OA for publicly-funded research.
  • Questions:  Will BMC's publication fees go up, down, or stay the same?  Will other giants look for OA acquisitions?  Will Springer use its corporate muscle to lobby for green and gold OA?
  • A prediction to remember:  Five years ago, the financial analysts at BNP Paribas studied the world of journal publishing and concluded that there was a 50% chance that in ten years the major commercial firms would dominate OA publishing as they then dominated TA publishing, but with lower profit margins.

Update (10/7/08).  Also see Andrew Albanese's story in Library Journal.  Excerpt:

...Financial terms were not disclosed. On the balance sheet, adding BioMed Central would seem to be a very minor deal for Springer; BioMed Central publishes some 193 open access journals with revenues of roughly $24.5 million, while Springer publishes over 1700 journals in addition to 5500 new books annually, with revenues nearly $1.25 billion. It is a significant event in the history of open access publishing, however, as a leading commercial publisher has now expressed confidence in a business model once deemed, at best, experimental, and often called untenable....

Industry watchers have long expected that BMC founder Vitek Tracz was building up to a sale, much as he did when he sold BioMedNet to Elsevier in 1996. While at Elsevier, meanwhile, Haank was rather agnostic about the future of OA, supporting “green” self-archiving policies. When he joined Springer, Haank hired BMC’s first CEO, Jan Velterop, in 2005, and Velterop oversaw the company’s initial foray into open access publishing, Open Choice, before leaving for KnewCo in March 2008.

As an upstart business, BMC has had its growing pains. The company, founded in 2000, had yet to turn a profit, instead choosing to bet on a longer-term strategy of growing its publishing program and OA. Although BMC individual author charges more than doubled in recent years, it kept its author processing charges (APCs) below the rates of its competitors, a strategy that helped yield significant growth in submission rates and articles published, if not short-term profits....

The question now, is will BMC have more of an effect on the way commercial giant Springer publishes, or vice versa....

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Monday, October 06, 2008

New database of animal drugs approved in U.S.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Center for Veterinary Medicine released Animal Drugs @ FDA, a new database of approved animal drugs, on October 1, 2008. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) From the press release:
"Animal Drugs @ FDA" replaces the "Database of Approved Animal Drug Products," or Green Book, a database that was previously developed and managed by the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine (VMRCVM) Drug Information Laboratory at Virginia Tech University.

The application allows users to search for detailed descriptions of all FDA-approved new animal drugs. The search tool not only allows users to conduct simple word searches, but is also capable of more complex searches through the following eight specific search criteria: NADA/ANADA, Sponsor, Ingredients, Proprietary, Dose Form, Route, Species, and Indication.

Under the Generic Animal Drug and Patent Term Restoration Act (GADPTRA), CVM will continue to make available electronic files of listed drugs previously provided through the Green Book on its web site.

New Nobel laureates published in PLoS journals

The Nobel prize for physiology or medicine was announced today.  According to the Associated Press,

...French researchers Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier were cited for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV; while Germany's Harald zur Hausen was honored for finding human papilloma viruses that cause cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women....

According to Jonathan Eisen, two of the three have published OA articles in PLoS journals:

...[C]heck out the recent PLoS One paper by Françoise Barré-Sinouss [and four co-authors]..., The CD85j+ NK Cell Subset Potently Controls HIV-1 Replication in Autologous Dendritic Cells [April 9, 2008]....

Also see PLoS Pathogens paper by Harald zur Hausen [and seven co-authors], Recognition of Conserved Amino Acid Motifs of Common Viruses and Its Role in Autoimmunity [December 16, 2005]

Update. Harald zur Hausen and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi are also members of the editorial boards of BMC's OA journals, Infectious Agents and Cancer and Journal of the International AIDS Society.

New OA journal of artificial general intelligence

The Journal of Artificial General Intelligence is a new, no-fee, peer-reviewed OA journal which started accepting submissions on September 30, 2008.  JAGI gives authors a choice between traditional and open peer review.

Interview with Dorothea Salo

John Dupuis, Interview with Dorothea Salo of Caveat Lector, Confessions of a Science Librarian, October 5, 2008.  Excerpt:

...Dorothea Salo [is the] Digital Repository Librarian at University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the blog Caveat Lector. Dorothea is well known for her role in the institutional repository and scholarly communications communities; she's the author of the widely read eprint on IRs "Innkeeper at the Roach Motel," forthcoming in the Fall 2008 Library Trends....

Q1. ...[W]hat do you think about "libraries' feasible and proper roles in scholarly communication?"

I think a lot of things. I think the institutional repository was a noble and worthwhile experiment, but as a tool for redressing the imbalances in the scholarly-communication system, it is a failure. It may be reborn if the Harvard experiment succeeds, but that very much remains to be seen. This doesn't mean that I think IRs are useless; they don't have to be, though they often are. It does mean that we're going to have to go after the serials crisis in other ways.

I think we libraries have a lot of market power that we are not using properly. I've heard publishers talk about their industry, and what they invariably say is "we will follow the money." That means libraries; as individual subscriptions dwindle, WE are the ones with the money. They'll follow us -- but we aren't leading them toward open access. We're squealing like stuck pigs about the stalemate, yes, but we're not reallocating any of our serials funds to support gold open access. I think this is a serious mistake....

There is also a serious and ugly undercurrent of anti-OA backlash among faculty....Librarians trifle with that at our peril, and we know it. So we sigh, and put every cent we have toward subscriptions, and feel backed against the wall....

I want to see us cancelling overpriced journals, regardless of their impact factors or usage statistics, and standing up to faculty when they ask why. We need to say "no" loudly and clearly more often, and we need to divert some of the serials money we save thereby to gold open access. (Some should go back to monographs, of course.)

As a matter of strategy, then, the open-access movement needs to target serials and e-resources librarians with requests for support of gold OA....

I think some of us [librarians] have futures as publishing support specialists. Open Journal Systems isn't going away. I don't know how big this will become, truthfully, but I do know that I trust librarians a lot more than I trust other potential and actual players in this space. Big-pig publishers lost credibility as scholarship's dutiful handmaidens long ago, and I'm nearly as cynical about scholarly societies, which had their chance to stand with us but stuck by the big pigs instead. A pox on both their houses; if the scholarly societies are right and open access sinks some of them, I'm perfectly baffled as to why I as a librarian should care....

Q7. In terms of the future of IRs over the next, say, five years, what would the best and worst case scenarios be?

Worst case is easy: they are defunded and die. Harvard delayed that, but I don't think they have prevented it. If the software remains obtuse and difficult, if the goals remain socio-culturally impractical, if the services remain under-resourced and poorly understood, IRs are doomed. At a good many institutions, I believe this is inevitable, still; it's just going to take a little longer than I initially thought. The five-year time horizon you specify should suffice.

Best case: IRs shift from "warehouse at the end of the digital train tracks" to a set of services and systems that manage, safeguard, and shepherd the digital products of the research process all the way through, soup to nuts. We have successful examples of this already, particularly in Australia, and Europe is starting to build them as well. In this country, I suspect they aren't going to grow out of IRs -- they'll be part of the funder-initiated and IT-spearheaded movement to cope with research data locally. This is my warning call to libraries: if we're not in on these discussions, we'll be shut out of the resulting services, and that's bad for all concerned....

Q8. ...What major changes do you see happening in the next few years in terms of some of the major issues such as journal publishing, publishers' business models, the role of scholarly societies, and the open access movement? ...

The publishing lobby will continue its stunning mendacity, largely though not entirely unopposed by rank-and-file publishers. There will be more open-access journals. It is likely to become harder to assert that open-access journals are unsustainable, but that won't stop the publishing lobby from trying -- and it won't stop a few gold journals from folding, either. We will continue to argue about citation advantages, and just what a citation is worth. Faculty will continue to feel whipsawed by all this....

NISO meeting on research data

NISO brings together Data Thought Leaders, an announcement from NISO, October 3, 2008.  (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)  Excerpt:

We held the last of the Mellon-funded Thought Leader Meeting series Wednesday.  The topic of this meeting was on Research Data and explored many of the issues surrounding the use, reuse, preservation, and citation of data in scholarship....

Some work done by the JISC had been focused on mandating deposit of materials for the purpose of preservation. Unfortunately, the project didn’t succeed and was withdrawn in 2007. One of the potential reasons that more than $3 million investment turned out to be a disappointment was possibly its focus on archiving and preservation of the data deposited and not focused on reuse and application of deposited data. In order for the preservation to be deemed worth the investment, simultaneous focus on the reuse of the data is critical to ensuring that the investment sees some form of return — apart from developing a large repository of never-accessed data.

While there was some discussion during the day that related to encouraging use and sharing of research data and methodologies, technical standards will not help with what is inherently a political question.  Many of the rewards and recognition in the scholarly process come back to the formalities of publication, which have developed over centuries.  As with many standards-related questions, the problems are not normally related to technologies per se, but often hinge on the political or social conventions that support certain activities.  That said, the development of citation structures, descriptive metadata conventions, discovery methodologies, and curation strategies will add to the growing trends of utilizing these data forms in scholarly communications.  By expanding their use and ensuring that the content if preserved and citable, NISO could help encourage expanded use of data in the communication process.

The report of this meeting will be publicly available in a few weeks on the NISO website....

Events celebrating Open Access Day

The Open Access Directory (OAD) now hosts the official list of Events celebrating Open Access Day

The list is sponsored by the Open Access Day founding partners, PLoS, SPARC, and Students for Free Culture

Because OAD is a wiki, you can edit and enlarge the list and we hope you will.  If your group or institution is planning something for OA Day, or if you know of an event not already included, please take a moment to add it.  Editing OAD is limited to registered users, but registration is free and easy.

Joint statement in support of Richard Poynder

Statement in support of the investigative work of Richard Poynder, October 5, 2008.  Excerpt:

Richard Poynder, a distinguished scientific journalist specializing in online-era scientific/scholarly communication and publication, has been the ablest, most prolific and most probing chronicler of the open access movement from its very beginning. He is widely respected for his independence, even-handedness, analysis, careful interviews, and detailed research.

Richard is currently conducting a series of investigations on the peer review practices of some newly formed open access journals and their publishers. In one case, when a publisher would not talk to him privately, Richard made his questions public in the American Scientist Open Access Forum....

That posting elicited public and private threats of a libel suit and accusations of racism....

Those groundless threats and accusations appear to us to be attempts to intimidate. Moreover, Richard is being portrayed as an opponent of open access, which he is not. He is an even-handed, critically minded analyst of the open access movement (among other things), and his critical investigations are healthy for open access.

He has interviewed us both, at length. While the resulting pictures were largely favorable, he didn't hesitate to probe our weaknesses and the objections others have raised to our respective methods or styles of work. This kind of critical scrutiny is essential to a new and fast-growing movement and does not imply hostility to the subjects of his investigation or opposition to open access.

Trying to suppress Richard Poynder's investigations through threats of legal action is contemptible. We hope that the friends of open access in the legal community will attest to the lawfulness of his inquiries and that all friends of open access will attest to the value and legitimacy of his investigative journalism.

Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad


Sunday, October 05, 2008

Call for contributors to OA music theory textbook

Musopen is looking for volunteers to write an OA textbook for music theory. (Thanks to Open Text Book.)