Open Access News

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• The Open Knowledge Commons received $1.5 million to digitize 30,000 volumes of public domain medical literature.
• SURFshare is accepting nominations for its Open Access Award, with a prize each for outstanding strategic and practical contributions to OA in the Netherlands.
• NITLE launched a prediction market to estimate when the DOAJ will hit 4,700 journals.
• EP2DC is a new service to deposit datasets in a separate repository from inside EPrints.
• Ina Smith launched a new mailing list on OA and IRs in Africa.
• Jonathan Eisen asks for advice on OA conference publishing.
• "Publishers are allowed to get away with keeping science closed, holding it back, and wasting public money," says Joe Dunckley, "because there are still sufficient numbers of scientists who let them".

Medical Education Online (MEO) to be published by Co-Action Publishing, press release, December 11, 2009.

Co-Action Publishing is pleased to announce that Medical Education Online (MEO) joins the publisher’s portfolio as of today.

Medical Education Online (MEO) was launched in 1996 as the first ever freely available online journal in the field of medical education and has grown to become a highly ranked source of information in this area of medicine, with indexing in PubMed/MEDLINE and inclusion in PubMed Central. ... From 1996-2009 the journal has been self-published by Scholar Publisher and Chief Editor David Solomon of Michigan State University and more recently Co-Editor Ann Frye, University of Texas Medical Branch.

Chief Editor David Solomon is extremely pleased MEO is being published by Co-Action Publishing. “... Joining Co-Action will significantly improve the quality of the journal as well as free up Ann Frye and I to focus more closely on what we do best, the editorial process.” ...

Until 2008, MEO was a no-fee OA journal. In May 2008 (note: the link contains a typo), it implemented a $100 publication fee for articles and no fee for letters. The fee was increased $250 in June 2009. After the change in publishers, MEO now charges a $600 fee for articles and $375 for letters.

Updated to correct the note about the journal's historical APC.

PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine), the aggressive, deceptive, anti-OA lobbying arm of the AAP/PSP launched in August 2007, has allowed its domain name (prismcoalition.org) to lapse.

See our past posts on PRISM.

• The Public Knowledge Project released version 2.3.1 of its Open Journal Systems publishing software.
• A collection of OA German-language texts will be added to Wikimedia.
• PLoS released the results of its author surveys, which asked authors who submitted to a PLoS journal for their views about the service.
• PKP posted a new case study of how the University of the Basque Country uses its open journal and conference software.

In general, publishers are motivated by social values rather than by profit. They provide a service by transforming a manuscript into an exploitable literary property targeted at a known market. STM journal publishers distinguish themselves by extracting maximum profit based on the potential financial value of the need-to-know research they report. In the 1990s and aided by the Internet, scholars began to reassert control of journals and journal publishing. Scholarly effort has focused on transmission, that is to say, production and creation of the public record. Full control by the scholarly community must embrace the transformative nature of publishing, and reinvolving publishers to provide a full range of publishing services would seem desirable. The journal Scholarly and Research Communication is being founded to document the developing study and technology involved in this quickly expanding field.

This volume will stay open until we have published all remaining articles pertaining to the PKP 2009 conference. Watch for more articles in January.

• Several of BioMed Central's OA journals perform well in the just-released ScImago Journal Rank.
• Fedora released version 3.3 of its repository software.
• freetable.org is a new project to build a "public commons for shared data".
• Stuart Shieber thinks that paying fees for hybrid journals from OA funds is a risky proposition.
• Jordan S. Hatcher explains licenses for databases.
• Stephen Friend of open medical project Sage Bionetworks professes his support for Creative Commons.

Authors publishing with Sciyo in 2010 will be the first in academic publishing to receive royalties based on the number of downloads of their publication. For every 10 downloads, 0.2 euro will be accredited to author’s account on an annual basis.

Sciyo operates under the open access publishing model, replacing subscription fees with publication fees paid by the authors or their funders. All Sciyo’s publications are available online, free to view, download, print, copy and share under Creative Commons Attribution License and without sign up, which increases their visibility and citation rates.

Author royalties will be accredited directly to the author's account, with the exception of royalties under 100 euro, which will be deducted from the author's publishing fee head on the next time he or she decides to publish with Sciyo. ...

Sciyo's publishing fee of 470 euro is among the lowest in the open access publishing industry. ...

• Sciyo was formerly known as In-Tech (see our past post) and, before that, I-Tech (see our past post).
• If my math is right, an author would need 23,500 downloads to offset the publishing fee.

A review of the empirical literature on access to scholarly information. This review focuses on surveys of authors, article download and citation analysis.

... In reviewing the literature, there is surprising consistency in the conclusions of these studies: access to the published literature is improving, and those who generate knowledge view access issues as largely unimportant. We should emphasize the phrase “those who generate knowledge,” since there has been very little work on the dissemination of scientific information to those who use – but do not contribute to – the literature (i.e. teachers, medical practitioners, industrial researchers, and the lay public).

Moreover, most studies have focused on access to the formal, published literature and assume that access is provided either directly from the publisher or through a library intermediary. We should not ignore the many informal ways academics share documents among informal networks of peers. Lastly, we should understand that most of the surveys and interviews cited below were conducted prior to the recent economic downturn, which have resulted in significant material reductions in major academic libraries. ...

... Retrovirology launched in February 2004 and since then has published more than 550 papers. ... The quality of the journal has been monitored stringently by the editors and the editorial board and has improved over time. The latter assertion is supported by several observations. For instance, in November 2004, Retrovirology received 6 submissions and published 5 papers that month. By contrast, in November 2008, Retrovirology received 27 submissions and published 10 papers; and in November 2009, the journal received 29 submissions and published 10. In parallel, the rate of annual citations to Retrovirology has also increased steadily with a healthy upslope.

... Retrovirology, as measured by SCImago journal rating using data from Scopus, ranks in the top quartile of all virology journals. ... The visibility of Retrovirology papers is attested by the citation numbers to recently published papers. ...

Periodically, emails arrive to me from colleagues in South America and graduate students in Africa conveying thanks for Retrovirology’s fee-free full text Open Access format. ... The Retrovirology Open Access experience has been good for science, good for authors, and good for readers. The journal is doing well by doing good.

[December 20] marks the last day of Phase One of OSTP’s forum on public access to published, federally funded research. ...

[T]hanks and kudos to everyone for making the first ten days of this process such a success. Together you weighed in with almost 200 substantive comments, many complete with links to studies and other valuable data sets that promise to keep our discussion and policy planning process evidence-based, as it should be. ...

[W]e have heard from many of you that this schedule [for Phases Two and Three] poses difficulties, especially because of the intervening holidays. ... So we have decided (and will soon announce in the Federal Register) to add two weeks beyond the scheduled end of [the Phase Three] forum. We will use those last two weeks to revisit, on a more detailed level, all three focus areas that will have been addressed by then—perhaps asking you to dive deeper into a few areas that, by then, show themselves as deserving additional attention. ...

This morning OSTP is launching Phase Two of our forum on public access publishing, which will focus on Features and Technology. ...

It is one thing to talk about the philosophy of public access and open government generally, and quite another to get serious about how, exactly, to implement some of those ideas. So through the waning hours of 2009—until midnight of Dec. 31, that is—OSTP is inviting you to weigh in on some of the nuts and bolts aspects of public access publishing. Among the questions we hope you will address:

• In what format should published papers be submitted in order to make them easy to find, retrieve, and search and to make it easy for others to link to them?
• Are there existing digital standards for archiving and interoperability to maximize public benefit?
• How are these anticipated to change?
• Are there formats that would be especially useful to researchers wishing to combine datasets or other published results published from various papers in order to conduct comparative studies or meta-analyses?
• What are the best examples of usability in the private sector (both domestic and international) and what makes them exceptional?
• Should those who access papers be given the opportunity to comment or provide feedback?
• What are the anticipated costs of maintaining publicly accessible libraries of available papers, and how might various public access business models affect these maintenance costs?
• By what metrics (e.g. number of articles or visitors) should the Federal government measure success of its public access collections? ...