Open Access News

It costs more than three times as much to publish an article in a humanities or social-science journal as it does to publish one in a science, technical, or medical, or STM, journal, and the prevailing model used by many publishers of STM journals will not work for their humanities and social-sciences counterparts. Those are some of the eye-opening conclusions released today in a report on an in-depth study of eight flagship journals in the humanities and social sciences.

The report, "The Future of Scholarly Journals Publishing Among Social Science and Humanities Associations," was conducted by Mary Waltham, an independent publishing consultant, at the request of a committee organized by the National Humanities Alliance in 2007. The panel was charged with trying to understand how the rapid evolution of scholarly communication, particularly the rise of open access, will affect the alliance's members, many of which are scholarly societies that rely on traditional subscription models to run their publishing operations. ...

"The cost per article of publishing in the humanities and social sciences appears to be almost four times the cost of publishing in the STM field," [William E. Davis, chairman of the committee and executive director of the American Anthropological Association] said in an interview. "That creates a very different dynamic for figuring out models to support our programs."

One model not likely to provide that support is the "author-pays" approach, in which scholars come up with money to help journals cover the costs of publishing their articles. That template works well enough in STM fields, in which grant money is easier to come by—not the case in the chronically underfunded fields covered by the study. ...

The study also appears to undermine the notion that doing away with print "would make the open-access model financially viable," the panel noted. So-called first-copy costs—"collecting, reviewing, editing, and developing content"—added up to about 47 percent of the total outlay among the eight journals studied. Abolishing print versions of the journals would reduce costs, the study found, but not enough. ...

Does that mean that the scholarly associations that participated in the study reject the idea of open access? Not at all, Mr. Davis said. Instead, the findings are "pointing us away from author-pays open access" toward figuring out what other open-access models could work for humanities and social-sciences journals. That's the next step. Will learned societies that publish such journals figure out how to take that step? "We will," Mr. Davis said, "because we have to." ...

Markham Erickson, Executive Director and General Counsel of NetCoalition, has released NetCoalition's August 12 letter in support of FRPAA.  If you're not familiar with NetCoalition,

NetCoalition's members include Amazon.com, Ask.com, Bloomberg, eBay, Google, Yahoo!, and Wikipedia, as well as state and local ISPs....

From the rest of the letter:

...It is the mission of NetCoalition companies to help their users locate and access the information they need. FRPAA furthers this mission by placing valuable publicly funded research in an online location where search engines operated by NetCoalition members can index and link to it. FRPAA thus simultaneously assists the broad dissemination of important scientific information and promotes the growth of the Internet.

Some have argued that a public access policy such as FRPAA is inconsistent with copyright law because it requires the involuntary transfer of copyright. This argument threatens to disrupt the fundamental relationship between authors and the entities that pay them for the creation of content. A wide variety of entities, including Internet companies, book and magazine publishers, and marketing departments, pay authors in advance to create works such as articles, novels, and photographs. In exchange for the advance, the author agrees to transfer the copyright to the entity, or to grant the entity a license to use the work.

This system is beneficial to both the author and the entity. The entity receives the content it needs, and the author receives payment while she is creating the content. Because creation of high quality content can take months or even years, this system is particularly important to individual artists or small production companies.

Once the author receives the advance, she must live up to her end of the bargain. She must create the content, and she must transfer the rights she agreed to transfer....If FRPAA constitutes an unlawful involuntary transfer, so does the system of advances relied upon by authors and businesses....

PS:  Also see NetCoalition's September 2007 letter in support of the NIH policy.

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The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published Author Addenda, SPEC Kit 310, which explores how ARL member libraries are promoting the use of author addenda by researchers at their institutions. ...

This survey was distributed to the 123 ARL member libraries in February 2009. Respondents were asked to provide information on the use of author addenda at their institutions, which rights authors were encouraged to retain, and the methods by which libraries were conducting promotion and outreach efforts on the topic of author rights and addenda. Seventy libraries (57%) responded to the survey. Of those respondents, 35 (50%) indicated that authors at their institutions were using author addenda ...

The majority of respondents (77%) did not formally collect information on the use of author addenda on their campuses at the time of this survey. ... Fifty-two percent (36) of the responding libraries reported that an author addendum had been endorsed by administrators or a governing body at their institution or by their consortia, while 62% (43) responded that there had been no endorsements. There had been more endorsements at the consortial level than at the institutional level. Eight libraries (12%) reported that an institutional endorsement was under consideration at the time of the survey. A larger number of libraries (46 or 68%) reported that their institution or consortium had worked to promote the use of an author addendum by providing links to an author addendum and copyright information on library Web sites or making faculty presentations on author rights (particularly pertaining to the NIH Public Access Policy). ...

In many academic and research institutions, libraries have taken the lead in developing resources and services to support authors who are required to comply with public access policies. This survey was designed to explore the role libraries are playing in supporting public access policies in their institutions. ...

The survey was distributed to the 123 ARL member libraries in February 2009. Seventy libraries (57%) from 67 institutions responded ...

The majority of the libraries responding to this survey provide, or plan to provide, resources and services that help authors affiliated with their institution (and/or their support staff) to comply with public access policies (PAP). ...

[T]he top four library activities are monitoring PAP developments, developing resources and programs, coordinating services, and consulting with authors and/or their support staff on PAP compliance. ... A less common practice among individuals or committees is providing mediated deposits for authors in the form of third-party submissions. ...

It was clear from the survey responses that library staff members involved in supporting PAP compliance in their institutions rely on a number of different resources to stay current on PAP developments. The top resources used by librarians — listed by over three-quarters of the respondents — were Web sites of national/international organizations, electronic discussion lists, and attendance at conferences. Over 50% utilize blogs and in-house presentations, workshops, and/or discussions to stay current. Academic newsletters and RSS feeds were used by over 40% of respondents. SPARC (Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition) was also cited as a source for current information about PAP compliance. ...

It is evident from the responses that interactions with authors who are required to comply with PAPs have allowed ARL libraries many opportunities to introduce peripheral issues such as author rights, copyright and intellectual property, open access publishing, and institutional repositories ...

While PAPs in general are a relatively new development, the level of resources and services developed by the responding libraries and their alliance-building collaborative efforts provide a prime example of how libraries are evolving to address the complexity of research in the 21st century coupled with the transformation of information technology. Such targeted program efforts to leverage expertise and resource sharing for PAP compliance support is evidence that libraries are poised to quickly and efficiently respond to possible future mandates, including the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA).

For the past year, Creative Commons has been working on tools to help increase access to works in the public domain. Often, it is not clear whether a work has entered the public domain or is still covered by copyright protection. This lack of clarity can cause a lot of problems, and Creative Commons is not the only one concerned about the issue.

For example, WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization) has begun research on tools for increasing access to the public domain, which relates to what we do at CC in several ways. Part of the WIPO research includes a comparative Scoping Study that will look at different countries’ legislation to see how how the public domain is defined and how public domain works are located. ...

Also of interest to our work at CC is WIPO’s expansion of a previous survey that takes an in-depth look at how deposits work as counterparts to a copyright registration system. One effect of registration, especially with a deposit requirement, is that it helps accrue a central collection location of works. These collections then contain copies of the works as well as relevant information necessary to make a determination of whether or not a work is in the public domain. ...

Furthermore, finding information about non-registered or non-deposited works can be very difficult. For this reason, Creative Commons has begun building tools to identify, tag, and increase access to public domain works. Two of these tools, CC0 and the Public Domain Certification Tool, are already in existence and available for your use. A third, the Public Domain Assertion Tool, is on its way.

CC0 allows a copyright owner to waive rights in a work, effectively placing it as close as possible to being in the public domain. Finding works placed in the public domain through the CC0 waiver is easy, because CC0 is machine-readable just like the CC licenses. Our Public Domain Certification Tool can currently be used to indicate that a particular work is already in the public domain. But we are also working on a more robust version of this tool called the Public Domain Assertion tool. This tool will allow anyone to indicate facts about a particular digital instance of a work, giving individuals and institutions a way to participate in making our cultural heritage more user-friendly.

The tool’s output will link to relevant facts and a human-readable deed to assist users in deciding whether a work is in the public domain, and thus available for use without copyright restriction in one or more jurisdictions. ...

The public domain: as it keeps mushrooming in this digital age, so does the challenge of accessibility, which accounts for the rising use of the term transparency. President Obama has promised to provide it: “We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency.” Even so, the flood of information rises ever higher, and the word public becomes ever more corrupted. Government officials can proclaim that endless file cabinets are available to the public while knowing full well that if it’s hard to open them, in practical terms their contents remain private.

The president’s commitment to transparency received a boost from Vivek Kundra, whom the president has called on to serve as chief information officer of the United States. To applause from a thousand open-government activists at the recent Personal Democracy Forum in New York, Kundra announced the creation of an “I.T. dashboard” on the Web site USASpending.gov. It enables anyone anywhere to track the $70 billion the federal government spends on information technology annually.

That open spirit is not, however, universally honored, which is why Andrew Rasiej, a technology entrepreneur, urges a federal law that redefines “public” to mean searchable and readable online. Representative Steve Israel, a Democrat of New York, is drafting just such legislation. ...

Elsevier has just published its 2010 print journal price list. We estimate the median price increases at 5% with key titles such as The Lancet up 9.5% and Cell Press up 4%. While these price increases only pertain to print-only subscriptions (c 10% of divisional revenues), we believe they suggest that Elsevier has maintained an aggressive pricing policy despite current library budget constraints. Its main competitor, Springer, also announced a 5% price increase for 2010. ...

We see Elsevier's decision to cuts prices for its nuclear physics journals by 20% as a reflection of the progress of Open Access, which prevails in this discipline. Should Open Access reach critical mass in other disciplines, similar pricing pressure is likely. With the FRPAA act likely to pass in the US, Open Access will continue to grow. ...

A new public-private partnership which aims to provide industrial property offices, universities and research institutes in least developed countries with free access and industrial property offices in certain developing countries with low cost access to selected online scientific and technical journals was launched at WIPO’s headquarters on July 23, 2009.

The Access to Research for Development and Innovation (aRDi) program was rolled out by WIPO in partnership with various prominent science and technology publishers including the American Institute of Physics, Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, National Academy of Sciences, Oxford University Press, Royal Society of Chemistry, Sage Publications, Springer Science+Business Media, and Taylor & Francis. The World Health Organization (WHO), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) provided advice and expertise gained from their similar programmes offering access to journals in their respective fields of activity.

The aRDi program will support developing countries in realizing their creative potential and facilitate their integration into the global knowledge economy in line with the objectives of WIPO’s Development Agenda. A key recommendation of the WIPO Development Agenda, which seeks to integrate the development dimension into the IP system and WIPO’s activities, calls on WIPO to facilitate “national offices of developing countries, especially LDCs, as well as their regional and sub-regional intellectual property organizations to access specialized databases for the purposes of patent searches.” ...

... I learned from a colleague that arXiv is looking for a new funding model, as Cornell is wearying of picking up the entire tab. Various options are on the table, and I'm not competent to opine on their feasibility. I'm more interested in the larger question: how are we, we libraries and we researchers, organizing to shoulder the burden of electronic archives, especially open-access ones?

Historically, the answer has been "not effectively." I can name scads of dead digital projects without having to think hard, and I daresay you can too. This is no longer an acceptable answer, if indeed it ever was. I'm just a little bemused and worried about the models that seem to be emerging—again, especially for open-access archives. If Cornell can't underwrite arXiv, arguably the most successful preprint archive ever, what does that mean for disciplinary repositories generally? (See also the move of OAIster from the University of Michigan to OCLC.) What does it mean for library support of open access, to data as well as documents?

There's more in those questions than I can unpack in a single post, so suffice it to say I think librarianship's stance on this question is a bellwether. Are we tethered to the past or working for the future? Are we really memory organizations, or are we only memory organizations for print? Will we pay for human access to knowledge, or only institutional access? ...

The European Science Foundation and EUROHORCs (European Heads of Research Councils) in July released their EUROHORCs and ESF Vision on a Globally Competitive ERA and their Road Map for Actions.

Visions: A globally competitive European Research Area (ERA) of excellence, to facilitate the advancement of science and help create a knowledge-based society in Europe, requires: ...

8. Open access to the output of publicly funded research and permanent access to primary quality-assured research data ...

EUROHORCs and ESF and their Member Organisations will take their responsibility in contributing to the construction of the ERA and will initiate the following actions, involving others as appropriate: ...

9. Implement a common policy on Open Access to research results and Permanent Access to research data by:

• Developing a joint policy and a statement on Open Access and putting it into action;
• Supporting the necessary infrastructures for Open Access;
• Promoting awareness of the importance of Open Access amongst researchers and administrators;
• Initiating a dialogue with other national and European associations and possibly other non-European research organisations and with publishers to redefine the responsibilities and cost distribution of the publishing system;
• Ensuring that permanent preservation and Open Access will be the rule for data repositories.

More details are available in the document, including joining the Berlin Declaration, mandating OA as a grant requirement, and a long-term transition to "an author- or institution-paid system".

See also our past posts on the European Research Area.

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The August 2009 issue of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization features an article and three reactions on OA:

Leslie Chan, Subbiah Arunachalam, and Barbara Kirsop, Open access: a giant leap towards bridging health inequities.

It is difficult to see how the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals can be achieved without free international access to the world’s publicly funded research findings ...

The United Nation’s HINARI, AGORA and OARE programmes, whereby registered libraries or qualified institutions in countries with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of < US$ 1250 per capita are provided free access to journals contributed by partner commercial publishers, have successfully filled information gaps for selected users. However, such donor programmes have several limitations. They are not driven by science (journals are donated by publishers at their own discretion rather than selected by researchers); they are only available to the poorest countries (as countries’ economies improve, they no longer qualify); some low-income countries are excluded (e.g. India, even though its GDP level qualifies it for access) because publishers fear damage to their existing sales; access is only available from registered libraries and on provision of a password controlled by libraries; publications may be withdrawn and there are no contractual arrangements regarding content continuity. ...

A key to resolving the deep knowledge gap lies in creating a global knowledge base that includes essential research emanating from both research communities in developing countries as well as from “international” research. Without regional knowledge, the picture is incomplete and may result in inappropriate programmes. ...

Services that have focused on providing maximum visibility to regional journals, such as Bioline International (70 open access journals from 17 developing countries), SciELO (approximately 500 journals from Latin American and other Spanish and Portugese-speaking countries) or MedKnow Publications (79 journals mainly from India), show high usage both from neighbouring developing countries and from wider international communities alike. ... The usage of full-text material from institutional repositories that have installed statistical data packages shows low-income countries are among the top users – again demonstrating a real need for previously unattainable information. ...

It has been said that the connectivity problems in developing countries render open access inappropriate, yet these problems, while real, apply equally to non-open access online publications. Moreover, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) recently reported that the research needs for access to new information drive connectivity and vice versa. ...

It is our view that the United Nations and other international organizations should give strong support to the open access movement, which holds such promise for both research and public health. ...

Responses:

• Alma Swan, A key piece of the jigsaw for improving world health
• Robert Terry, Building a bridge for research
• T Scott Plutchak, Collaboration, not confrontation

Yesterday I created a Twitter account for the OA tracking project (OATP),  using RSStoTwitter. 

It's not working yet.  The problem seems to be the DDoS attacks now crippling Twitter and the services using its API (1, 2).  But stay tuned.  When life at Twitter gets back to normal, you'll have one more way to follow the OATP project feed.