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• The White House consultation on public access is a "confirmation that this is an issue that is of national importance," says SPARC's Heather Joseph.
• The Association for Computing Machinery is attracting criticism (e.g. 1, 2) for its opposition to public access.
• Google lost a French copyright suit over its book digitization program, but plans to appeal.
• The University of Hong Kong upgraded its IR, adding profiles and unique identifiers for each researcher.

Following the efforts of the open access and repositories movements, many (but not all) refereed journals have reasonable copyright terms. Publishers of academic books have been subject to less direct pressure, and in at least some instances the copyright terms they try to dictate are highly unfair to authors, and should not be accepted. This document summarises the interactions between a chapter-author and one such book-publisher, which culminated in a fair deal for the author.

... [T]here is plenty of evidence of a bunker mentality among many of the scientists, grousing and plotting against the handful of climate skeptics who, as they saw it, were trying to grab “their” data and then trash it on web sites and in op-ed articles that had far greater influence than the journals in which the scientists usually reported their work. ...

[T]here could be some benefits for science from this whole incident, such as greater transparency and open data access. Whoever was responsible for the original hacking (and the supposed miscreants range from Russians in cahoots with the Kremlin to Norwich interns on a night out), the heat rose because of the context. The Canadian skeptical researcher Steve McIntyre had submitted a blizzard of freedom of information applications to the University of East Anglia, demanding access to global temperature data assembled by Jones. The e-mails appeared just as the university was preparing its case for not releasing the data.

It is worth explaining why that was so. Jones had always refused to release the data, partly, as the e-mails reveal, because he simply didn’t want to and figured those demanding it wanted to trash his life’s work. But it was also partly because he couldn’t — much of the data was obtained with confidentiality agreements attached, including data from his own government’s Met Office.

One early outcome of the fracas is that British researchers will now be moving heaven and earth to get approval to release the data. Britain’s Met Office, a government agency, released a subset of its global temperature data this week, with the rest to follow when it has secured permissions from the government bodies across the world that had supplied the data. And in a nod to a row that has simmered over demands for access to other data sets, the Met Office promised that “the specific computer code that aggregates the individual station temperatures into the global land temperature record... will also be published as soon as possible.” ...

Scientists have generally been good at sharing data within their priesthood — a somewhat closed world of publicly-employed scientists using peer-reviewed journals. What they have sometimes been dreadful at is engaging with the outside world — not just telling the world what they are up to, but allowing outsiders close enough to access and analyze their data. These days, scientists need rules of engagement for what to do when outsiders come calling, whether those outsiders are Greenpeace activists or investigative journalists or trouble-making climate skeptics.

In the climate community, and perhaps elsewhere, Climategate may lead to far greater openness about research data. It will hurt. But it is essential. Already the widely read blogsite for climate scientists, Realclimate.org, is promising to promptly post data and relevant computer codes on its site. ...

... The content of many of these e-mails is deeply disturbing, giving an insight into what the scientists were doing to massage and delete data as well as mounting a very effective campaign to marginalize or silence criticism ...

Their first instinct, when faced with a FOI request, was to hunker down and go into denial mode followed by deleting the data which was the subject of the original FOI request. For the benefit of non-British readers, this is a criminal offense under the FOI Act and if the Data Commissioner is doing their job, investigation and possible prosecutions should follow, where appropriate. What was behind this illegal deletion was the opinion of the scientists at CRU that the FOI requester was malicious in intent, that he only wanted to access the data in order to disprove it! ...

Even if the request was maliciously intended, if the information was out in the open it would have been possible for anyone else to take it up and test it to destruction too and either confirm or refute it. For God’s sake, that’s how proper science functions. ...

... Some people say that I am romanticising science, that it is never as open and honest as the Popperian ideal. Perhaps. But I know that opaqueness and secrecy are the enemies of science. There is a word for the apparent repeated attempts to prevent disclosure revealed in these emails: unscientific. ...

... Those who have most to lose if the science is wrong have perversely sought to justify the secretive and chummy ethos that some of the emails reveal. If science is not transparent and accountable, it's not science.

I believe that all supporting data, codes and programmes should be made available as soon as an article is published in a peer-reviewed journal. That anyone should have to lodge a freedom of information request to obtain them is wrong. That the request should be turned down is worse. That a scientist suggests deleting material that might be covered by that request is unjustifiable. Everyone who values the scientific process should demand complete transparency, across all branches of science. ...

• Five more U.S. libraries signed on to SCOAP3: Carnegie Mellon University, Creighton University, Macalester College, Northeastern University, and the University of Kentucky.
• Columbia University joined the HathiTrust.
• The University of Rochester released version 1.0 of its repository software, IR+.
• The software that runs PLoS journals got an update.
• Philip Davis complains that Steven Harnad is dominating the comments on the White House Policy Forum on Public Access.

• New OA journals:
  • Préhistoires Méditerranéennes (announcement), successor to Préhistoire Anthropologie Méditerranéennes
• New OA backfiles:
  • American Anthropologist, 1888-1974 (announcement)
  • Ethos, 1973-1974 (announcement)
  • PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 1973-1974 (announcement)
• New on PubMedCentral:
  • Clinics in Colon and Rectal Surgery (1 year embargo) (announcement)
  • Clinical Cases in Mineral and Bone Metabolism (immediate OA)
  • Nutrition Research and Practice (immediate OA) (announcement)

This week’s BMJ is dominated by a cluster of articles on oseltamivir (Tamiflu). Between them the articles conclude that the evidence that oseltamivir reduces complications in otherwise healthy people with pandemic influenza is now uncertain and that we need a radical change in the rules on access to trial data. ...

Only after questions were put by the BMJ and Channel 4 News has the manufacturer Roche committed to making "full study reports" available on a password protected site. Some questions remain about who did what in the Roche trials, how patients were recruited, and why some neuropsychiatric adverse events were not reported. ...

The Cochrane reviewers have told the BMJ that they will update their review to incorporate eight unpublished Roche trials when they are provided with individual patient data. ...

We don’t know yet whether this episode will turn out to be a decisive battle or merely a skirmish in the fight for greater transparency in drug evaluation. But it is a legitimate scientific concern that data used to support important health policy strategies are held only by a commercial organisation and have not been subject to full external scrutiny and review. It can’t be right that the public should have to rely on detective work by academics and journalists to patch together the evidence for such a widely prescribed drug. Individual patient data from all trials of drugs should be readily available for scientific scrutiny.

• The Chinese Academy of Sciences will pay half the article processing charges for publications by its researchers in BioMed Central journals.
• Charles Bailey released a new version of his Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography.
• Laura Briggs created a concept map of OA.
• PubMed Central has a new URL format.
• Heather Morrison compares the Open Content Alliance and Google Books.
• Librarians should "take a close look at the rights and permission statements that they have readers sign to use their special collections," argues Donald J. Waters. "Perhaps they will be as surprised as I was at the general, blanket, and highly restrictive claims their institutions make to usage rights over this material."
• Elizabeth Brown shares suggestions on how science librarians can remain relevant in the OA era.

... [T]he [White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy] considers the [NIH] policy to be in keeping with the Obama administration's open government initiatives (the OSTP blog entry was cross-posted to the OGI blog), and is considering a significant expansion. To that end, the policy discussion will focus on whether the NIH's open access initiative should be expanded to include other agencies and, if so, which ones. The NSF, which distributes grants in much the same way that the NIH does, would be the obvious choice. But many other agencies, such as the Departments of Energy and Interior, NASA, NOAA, the EPA, and the NIST all employ scientists that publish on a regular basis, and are obvious candidates for a similar policy.

The discussion on implementation of the policy went live last week, and has already attracted over 100 comments. ...

[F]or the moment at least, the OSTP is focusing strictly on publications, and not on providing access to the raw data produced during the course of these studies (although that may be subject to separate disclosure policies, depending on the agency and material). It's a rather significant distinction to make, given the recent controversy over the availability of climate data that was used to produce several peer-reviewed studies.

In any case, the actual format of the material may ultimately be just as important as which agencies are included. The ability to ingest data from these publications and make it accessible to text mining and meta-analysis that crosses disciplines has the potential to open new avenues for research and provide a higher scientific return on the public's investment.

As 2009 draws to a close advocates of Open Access (OA) will doubtless be looking back and weighing up the year's events. So what has been achieved, and what have been the main OA developments in 2009? Has it been a good year or a bad year for OA? Let's consider these questions.

First, what has 2009 been like for Green OA?

There are now 137 self-archiving mandates. ...

Mandates are currently accelerating at a fast rate (See Alma Swan's graph). ...

OpenDOAR currently lists over 1,500 repositories, and Scientific Commons — the repository aggregator service — has over 32 million items listed in its database. ...

And the bad news? There remains some doubt as to the efficacy of the mandates being introduced. ...

There are also worries about the nature and quality of some of the content being deposited in repositories, much of which appears not to be OA's target content (peer-reviewed papers). ...

What about Gold OA?

There are now over 4,500 Gold journals. As there are estimated to be roughly around 25,000 peer-reviewed journals in total, this suggests that one fifth of all scholarly journals are now OA. ...

[T]he rate of progress of Gold OA is clearly accelerating. ...

In addition, most subscription journals now offer a Hybrid OA option for some or all their journals ... And a growing number of funders and research institutions are creating Gold OA funds ...

The bad news? Today's 4,500 Gold OA journals are not the best fifth. ...

What has clearly not helped Gold OA is the fact that a growing number of start-up OA publishers have attracted criticism from the research community for their poor business practices ...

But perhaps the most serious long-term problem is that it is looking increasingly possible that OA publishing may fail to solve the affordability problem ...

[W]here OA has historically been seen as something of relevance only to scientific and medical (STM) journals this year has seen growing interest in OA for the humanities, and for books. ...

Below is a list of 17 notable developments that took place during 2009 ... [Note: omitting list.]

Introduction. The DRIVER I project drew up a detailed report of European repositories based on data gathered in a survey in which Spain's participation was very low. This created a highly distorted image of the implementation of repositories in Spain. This study aims to analyse the current state of Spanish open-access institutional repositories and to describe their characteristics.

Method. The data were gathered through a Web survey. The questionnaire was based on that used by DRIVER I: coverage; technical infrastructure and technical issues; institutional policies; services created; and stimulators and inhibitors for establishing, filling and maintaining their digital institutional repositories.

Analysis. Data were tabulated and analysed systematically according responses obtained from the questionnaire and grouped by coverage.

Results. Responses were obtained from 38 of the 104 institutions contacted, which had 29 institutional repositories. This represents 78.3% of the Spanish repositories according to the BuscaRepositorios directory. Spanish repositories contained mainly full-text materials (journal articles and doctoral theses) together with metadata. The software most used was DSpace, followed by EPrints. The metadata standard most used was Dublin Core. Spanish repositories offered more usage statistics and fewer author-oriented services than the European average. The priorities for the future development of the repositories are the need for clear policies on access to scientific production based on public funding and the need for quality control indicators.

Conclusions.This is the first detailed study of Spanish institutional repositories. The key stimulants for establishing, filling and maintaining were, in order of importance, the increase of visibility and citation, the interest of decision-makers, simplicity of use and search services. On the other hand the main inhibitors identified were the absence of policies, the lack of integration with other national and international systems and the lack of awareness efforts among academia.

The DOAJ database, with bibliographic information about nearly 5,000 open-access journals, offers more than its name implies, by virtue of also having searchable traditional bibliographic data, keywords and abstracts for 331,000 articles of 1,725 open-access scholarly journals. The software offers good browsing options for the journal records, but the search and output features should be enhanced. Adding records about journals with delayed open access (of 6-12 months moratorium) would significantly enhance this excellent database. ...

President Nicolas Sarkozy pledged nearly $1.1 billion on Monday toward the computer scanning of French literary works, audiovisual archives and historical documents, an announcement that underscored his government’s desire to maintain control over France’s cultural heritage in an era of digitization.

The French National Library announced in August that it was engaged in discussions with Google over the digitization of its collections, part of a global effort by Google to digitize the world’s literary works. This provoked an uproar among French officials and the publishing community here, and the discussions were suspended. ...

The money pledged Monday will finance a public-private partnership that will digitize the nation’s cultural works, Mr. Sarkozy said. Yet that partnership might well involve Google.

“The question remains open,” said Bruno Racine, president of the National Library, in a telephone interview. He emphasized the “necessity of a partnership with the private sector” in order to secure the capital needed for vast digitization projects.

He put the cost of digitizing the National Library’s collections, which include over 14 million books and several million other documents, at more than $1.5 billion. ...

The $1.1 billion pledged by Mr. Sarkozy is part of a $51 billion stimulus package, announced Monday ...

... [A] number of journals that use the open access model of publishing met at the University of Edinburgh in August 2009. Attendees included representatives of the following online journals: [Note: omitting list of 5 British OA law journals.] ...

The objective of the meeting was to establish a group that would represent European open access journals and act as a means of communication and support between them. This document offers a rationale for such a group, and provides a list of basic governing principles that we hope to use as the foundation for increasing its membership and activity. ...

The OLG is intended to be a formal and expanding community which represents the interests of open access journals and the free utilisation of high quality scholarship. The advantages of membership in such a group are myriad, as evidenced by the suggested remit of the OLG, which is to facilitate:

• a means of communication and cooperation amongst open access journals;
• enhancement of open access to sound technical advice and support;
• joint projects such as workshops and conferences directed both at the open access movement and, more generally, at scholarship supported by it; and
• better support and standard-setting in the open access environment.

The formal structure and constitution of the OLG will be decided at a future European Meeting to which all relevant journals will be invited. ...

In an effort to make its materials globally accessible, Cornell University Library is sharing tens of thousands of digitized books with the Internet Archive. ...

The new collaboration repurposes nearly 80,000 books that the Library has already digitized in-house or through its partnership with Microsoft and Kirtas Technologies. All the books are in the public domain, printed before 1923 mainly in the United States. ...

Internet Archive, a nonprofit group dedicated to preserving materials in all formats and well known for its “Wayback Machine” application, includes the Library’s digitized collection in its searchable database. Books are available for free in multiple formats, including PDF, flip book and full text on-screen. ...

The collaboration with Internet Archive is another step in Cornell University Library’s cutting-edge participation in mass digitization initiatives. Earlier this year, the Library announced an expanded print-on-demand partnership with Amazon.com that allows readers to pay for reprinting of books on an individual basis.

“The Internet Archive is proud to process and host the books from Cornell — these collections are priceless,” said Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive. “We are happy that Microsoft put no restrictions on the scanned public domain books and Cornell is encouraging maximum readership and research use.”

Performing a simple search for one of Cornell University Library’s digitized books now brings up both a copy on Amazon and a free online copy on the Internet Archive.

For more information and to see Cornell University Library’s contributions, visit [link].

The GFII Working Group includes representatives from the main economic stakeholders involved in Open Access: research institutes, publishers, aggregators, internet services, subscription agents, academic libraries, etc.

This statement summarizes the Group recommendations. ...

4. The Group warns about risks for the ecology of scholarly information of posting mandates for public access, without reasonable embargo periods negotiated with the relevant stakeholders and without discipline by discipline approaches.

5. The Group recommends setting up a French language, shared, standardized and transparent information site to display each publisher’s policy with regard to Open Access repositories. Publishers should be encouraged to have a clear communication with their authors.

6. Open archives managers should aim to comply with publishers’ posting policies. Automatic systems (directly asking authors for a copy of their articles) set up by managers of repositories could be damaging to current business models and disrupt relationships between stakeholders. ...

9. The Working Group calls for a permanent committee designed for consultations, studies and recommendations on these subjects. This body, working at the national level, would bring together all stakeholders: government, publishers, journals editors, research funders, research institutes, universities, library managers, etc. ...

• The PARSE.Insight project released its report on its survey of researchers, publishers, and data managers on permanent access to scientific data and publications, including questions on data sharing and OA.
• Heather Morrison released the year-end update to her Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.
• The Wellcome Library, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and King's College London will digitize and provide OA to 500 Islamic manuscripts.
• JISC released the final report on its Repositories and Preservation Programme.
• Stevan Harnad criticized the membership criteria for the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.
• The criminal charges against Argentine professor Horacio Potel were dropped. Potel had been charged with sharing copyrighted texts by philosophers Derrida and Heidegger online without authorization.

Can an information source that is free also be reliable? Or does the price of content always reflect its value?

In higher education, this debate usually takes place in the context of academic publishing, where open access journals have emerged to challenge their pricey print predecessors. ...

The same narrative is playing out in the world of scholarly reference works. Encyclopedia Britannica, the genre’s sturdiest brand, has been marginalized in the Internet age by Wikipedia and Google — tools it dismisses as untrustworthy. Quality, Britannica says, comes at a price: $69.95 per year for Web access, to be exact ($1,349 if you want the bound volumes). ...

Meanwhile, a number of academic institutions are quietly trying to do what Britannica and others say can’t be done: build online encyclopedias that are rigorous, scholarly, and free to access. ...

The first challenge of building an encyclopedia that is both free and scholarly, therefore, is finding a way to enlist expert contributors and qualified editors cheaply without compromising the rigor of the editorial process.

Eugene M. Izhikevich says the answer is to make contributing a privilege. Izhikevich, a former senior fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, is editor-in-chief of Scholarpedia — a free, “peer-reviewed” online compendium. But unlike Britannica, Scholarpedia does not pay its experts for writing and overseeing entries.

The key to attracting voluntary labor, says Izhikevich, is by persuading experts that their contributions will be lasting, and that by participating they will be peopled with intellectual royalty. ...

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which also does not pay its writers, has managed to work the prestige angle to mobilize a willing corps of more than 1,700 unpaid contributors. ...

In the absence of pay and a traditional clip for the tenure file, [SEP associate editor Colin] Allen has had to emphasize different incentives when coaxing busy professors to volunteer their time to the project. First of all, he points out that an entry in a free, Web-based encyclopedia is likely to be read by more people than an article in an expensive, narrowly tailored journal. And unlike Wikipedia, or more conventional encyclopedias, they’ll get a byline. ...

Achieving [Wikipedia's] sort of breadth while being free and expertly fact-checked is a daunting prospect. Most of the free encyclopedia projects that have come out of academe are limited by topic: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology and so on. Even Scholarpedia, whose name and tagline (“the peer-reviewed, open-access encyclopedia”) implies a broad scope, currently only publishes articles on a few specialized topics in science. Other free, online encyclopedias supported by universities, such as the Encyclopedia Virginia, the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, and the New Georgia Encyclopedia, limit themselves to a single state and focus mostly on history. ...

Citizendium, a free encyclopedia project started by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, aims for both comprehensiveness and rigorous editorial oversight; but it has managed to publish only 121 "expert-approved" articles since it went live in early 2007. The approval queue is 12,790 articles long. ...

Like a lot of free-content sites, most of these encyclopedia projects are still grappling with funding anxieties.

Since neither the New Georgia Encyclopedia nor Encyclopedia Virginia earn any revenue, both depend on foundation grants and their state governments. ...

The Encyclopedia of Egyptology, based at the University of California at Los Angeles, has to employ salaried editors since “many of the authors are non-native speakers of English, and the texts require often substantial corrections,” according to its editor, Willeke Wendrich ...

Of all the free encyclopedia projects identified by Inside Higher Ed, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is the closest to sustainability; Edward N. Zalta, the editor, says it has squirreled away about 75 percent of the $4 million endowment it estimates it needs to be completely self-reliant.

To make it that far, Zalta and his collaborators had to get clever. A key fund-raising strategy has been getting libraries to pay “membership dues” even though the whole thing is available online. ... Zalta has been able to sell it as an investment in open access — a cause many libraries, frustrated by the rising prices of academic journals, have been happy to support, he says. ...

The Université Libre de Bruxelles held elections to its Conseil d’administration (administrative council) last week. One electoral group, ACA-Interfac, included the following in its platform:

... Researchers should continue to keep the intellectual property in their works, in particular their publications. The initiatives taken by the university in this domain, like the institutional repository and negotiations with journals, cannot have the effect of limiting authors' copyrights. ... [emphasis in original; translation, and any errors, mine]

The director of the university library responded in a blog post, including the statement that

... [The principles of OA] are the best defense of scientific authors against publishers who would impose contracts that seriously harm their intellectual property. ... [translation, and any errors, mine]

According to the results posted by the university, the group won 2 seats out of 7.