Welcome to the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #154
February 2, 2011
by Peter Suber

Read this issue online
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/02-02-11.htm


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SOAN is published and sponsored by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).
http://www.arl.org/sparc/

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Another US federal OA mandate

Less than two weeks ago, the US Department of Labor announced a new OA mandate.  It's not an OA mandate for peer-reviewed research articles, but for open educational resources (OER). 

The OA mandate is built into the new Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) program, a new funding initiative administered by the Department of Labor in consultation with the Department of Education.  The money is considerable:  $2 billion over the next four years, with plans to spend $500 million in 2011. 

The goal is to build OER that will help US community college students graduate with marketable skills.  But since these will be *open* educational resources, they could help English-speaking, college-level students everywhere.  Because they will be released under CC-BY licenses, they may be translated and adapted ad lib, without payments or permission, and should eventually help students of many other kinds as well.

The announcement from the Department of Labor, January 20, 2011
http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/press/eta/eta20101436.htm
The solicitation of grant applications
http://www.doleta.gov/grants/pdf/SGA-DFA-PY-10-03.pdf
The White House blog post on the initiative, January 20, 2011
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/01/20/new-job-training-and-education-grants-program-launched

I want to make five quick points about TAACCCT.

1.  When the NIH policy was made mandatory by Congressional action in late 2007 (to take effect in 2008), after several years of bruising struggle, many of us wondered whether the Congressional action was even necessary.  Some of us thought that the NIH could have adopted the policy on its own.  The policy merely changed the agency agreement with grantees, and agencies do that sort of unilateral tinkering all the time.  Nevertheless, if the NIH had acted alone, both the agency and the policy would have faced severe political pushback, and it was prudent to give them the political protection of a Congressional directive signed by the President.  Of course, the agency and policy faced severe political pushback anyway.  That may prove the prudence of the political protection, but it doesn't prove that US federal agencies couldn't adopt OA mandates on their own. 

TAACCCT proves that they can.  This mandate was not directed by Congress, even though two bills that died without votes in the last session would have mandated federally-funded OER.  Moreover, this agency-initiated OA mandate came from two cabinet-level departments.  I suspect that all federal agencies already knew that they could adopt OA policies on their own.  But now they can be sure of it, and so can the American public.  If anyone expresses doubt, we can all cite the precedent set by two cabinet-level departments. 

This doesn't merely clarify a bureaucratic matter of permission and procedure.  It's a green light for agencies to adopt OA policies on their own.  Hence, it opens up a third front in US federal OA policy.  In the legislature, we had bipartisan support for FRPAA in two previous Congresses.  We still have the bipartisan support, and time will tell what new form it takes.  In the executive branch, we have the White House public consultation on expanding the NIH policy across the federal government.  Now we have independent action from agencies.

BTW, there are a *lot* of US federal agencies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_agencies

More on the two bills that would have mandated federally-funded OER.
--LOW COST (Learning Opportunities With Creation of Open Source Textbooks), introduced in the House, March 12, 2009
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.111hr1464
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/03/bill-in-congress-would-require-agency.html
--Open College Textbook Act, introduced in the Senate, September 24, 2009
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.111s1714
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/09/new-us-bill-proposes-oer-mandate.html

More on the OSTP public consultation on generalizing the NIH policy across the federal government.
--The solicitation for public comments, December 9, 2009
http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2009/E9-29322.htm
--The public comments themselves, released March 8, 2010
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/03/08/public-access-policy-update

More on FRPAA (Federal Research Public Access Act)
--FRPAA in the Senate (S. 1373) in the 111th Congress
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.111s1373
--FRPAA in the House (H.R. 5037) in the 111th Congress
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.111hr5037
--my articles on FRPAA in the 111th Congress
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/05-02-10.htm#frpaa
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/08-02-09.htm#frpaa

2.  This is not the first agency-level OA mandate in the US adopted without a Congressional directive.  Two small agencies got here first:  the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) within the Department of Education, and the Agricutural Research Service (ARS) within the Department of Agriculture.  However, TAACCCT is the first agency-level OA mandate from large agencies, the first from cabinet-level departments, and the first co-sponsored by two at once.  The Departments of Labor and Department of Education have the size and stature to give their own kind of political cover to other agencies wishing to adopt OA policies. 

More on the OA mandate from the IES
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/06/does-us-dept-of-education-have-oa.html

More on the OA mandate from the ARS
http://www.afm.ars.usda.gov/ppweb/PDF/152-1-ARS.pdf
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5656.html

(Here I'm not even counting the agency-level *open-data* mandates, both for research data and government data.) 

3.  This is the first *libre* OA mandate from the US federal government.  It doesn't merely require an open licence on the new OER.  It requires the least restrictive open license of all, the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license.  Of course the immediate benefit is that these OER will be maximally reusable for adaptation, translation, mashups, and purposes no one has yet imagined.  One longer-term benefit may be even more significant:  the US federal government has broken the ice and mandated libre OA. 

The NIH policy only mandated gratis OA.  You could say this was despite the political cover provided by Congress or because of the compromises imposed by Congress.  Or you could argue (as I often have) that gratis OA is often attainable in circumstances when libre OA is not, and that in those circumstances we shouldn't delay gratis OA while waiting or working for libre OA.  But no matter how you slice it, the circumstances have changed enough to permit this outcome.  Two cabinet-level departments not only saw the opening and took it, but cleared the way for other agencies to mandate libre OA as well. 

More on the gratis/libre distinction.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/08-02-08.htm#gratis-libre

4.  According the White House blog, the initiative was "developed and designed in consultation with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy" (OSTP). 
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/01/20/new-job-training-and-education-grants-program-launched

This matters for two reasons.  First, under the new America COMPETES Reauthorization Act, the Director of the OSTP will name the members of the new Interagency Public Access Committee.  TAACCCT is not the first evidence that OSTP supports OA, but it's the latest and strongest evidence.  This doesn't mean that OSTP will name a pro-OA committee, but it does tend to answer worries that the publishing lobbying might lead it to name an anti-OA committee.  (The committee members have not yet been named.)

Second, OSTP is developing the White House policy response to last year's public consultation on a plan to generalize the NIH policy across the federal government.  TAACCCT shows that the OSTP is willing to support OA mandates, even libre OA mandates, and is ready to help agencies develop and implement policies even without a specific Congressional directive.  TAACCCT improves the prognosis for the incipient White House OA policy response.

More on the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 (passed by Congress in December 2010, signed by President Obama in January 2011, and now Public Law 111-358)
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.111hr5116

For more on the OSTP public consultation on a cross-agency federal OA mandate, see #1 above.

For earlier evidence that OSTP is OA-friendly, see its May 2008 guidelines on research data ("Research data produced by scientists working within [15 named] Federal agencies should, to the maximum extent possible and consistent with existing Federal law, regulations, and Presidential directives and orders, be made publicly available....")
http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/ostp-scientific-research-28may08.pdf
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/06/white-house-calls-for-open-data-from-15.html

5.  There are couple of reasons to curb enthusiasm.

Rob Abel argues that TAACCCT is flawed for requiring the new OER to be in the SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) format.  Others say that the TAACCCT may allow more format flexibility, and there's now a lively debate on the size and seriousness of the SCORM problem.  I have no opinion on SCORM or on the flexibility allowed by TAACCCT.  I just want to point out the controversy for those who want to follow it. 
http://www.imsglobal.org/community/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=58&threadid=592
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/technology-leaders-balk-at-technical-guideline-in-federal-grant-program/29262

Sara Gast at the Department of Education gave a different reason to lower some of the very high expectations.  She said this in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/2-billion-federal-program-could-be-windfall-for-open-online-learning/29167

[A]t this point, as the solicitation phase is just beginning, we don't know how much of the $2B (or even $500-million in the first year) will be spent on open educational resources....All of the intellectual property that is created as a result of the grants has to be shared as OERs, and it would be accurate to say that the money is available to fund open educational resources, but there is no guarantee all those funds —or even any of those funds— will be spent for that purpose. The applicants have to make their case that what they propose will help students finish college more reliably with market-ready skills, degrees and certificates. We think OERs will be an important part of that. But how much? We can't say yet.

* Here are some major comments on TAACCCT, apart from those already cited.  (Thanks to Open Education News for many that I wouldn't have seen otherwise.)

Beth Noveck, Open Grantmaking in Practice, Not Just In Principle, Cairns Blog, January 20, 2011.
http://cairns.typepad.com/blog/2011/01/open-grantmaking-in-practice-not-just-in-principle-1.html

Timothy Vollmer, New federal education fund makes available $2 billion to create OER resources in community colleges, Creative Commons blog, January 20, 2011.
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/26100

Nancy Scola, Obama Puts Dollars Behind Open-Sourcing Education, TechPresident, January 21, 2011.
http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/obama-puts-dollars-behind-open-sourcing-education

Dave Cormier, $2billion for OERs could end the textbook industry as we know it..., Dave's Educational Blog, January 21, 2011.
http://davecormier.com/edblog/2011/01/21/2billion-for-oers-kills-the-textbook-industry/

Geoff Cain, OER, Open Textbooks, and Innovation, Brainstorm in Progress, January 22, 2011.
http://cain.blogspot.com/2011/01/oer-open-textbooks-and-innovation.html

Lisa Cheney-Steen, $2B in Federal Funds for OER objects, Second Star to the Right, January 22, 2011.
http://secondstar2010.blogspot.com/2011/01/2b-in-federal-funds-for-oer-objects.html

Anon., Big $2 Billion Vision for OER, Yet Short-Sighted, Kairosnews, January 22, 2011.
http://kairosnews.org/big-2-billion-vision-for-oer-yet-shortsi

Anon., How to Fund Open Educational Resources: Department of Education or Kickstarter?  ECTimes, January 24, 2011.
http://ectimes.com/?p=73732

Michael Feldstein, OER and Standards, e-Literate, January 24, 2011.
http://mfeldstein.com/oer-and-standards/

Tim Martin, Obama’s award and misplaced vitriol, Rustici Software, January 25, 2011.
http://scorm.com/blog/2011/01/obamas-award-and-misplaced-vitriol/

Charles Severance, OER Rant 2.0 (Angry teacher and student), Dr. Chuck's Blog, January 25, 2011.
http://www.dr-chuck.com/csev-blog/2011/01/oer-rant-2-0-angry-teacher-and-student/

Greg DeKoenigsberg, Obama bets big on open ed -- with one little catch, OpenSource.com, January 26, 2011.
http://opensource.com/education/11/1/obama-bets-big-oer-one-little-catch

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Word contest #2

Last March I called on your help to find an English verb meaning "to provide open access to".  I hoped to find a word as short and sweet as "sell" to use in sentences such as, "We sell the print edition but ____ the digital edition."  I published the nominations with comments in April 2010.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/03-02-10.htm#contest
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/04-02-10.htm#verb

I'm calling on your help again.  English speakers need a noun and adjective meaning author-side openness, the way that "open access" is a noun and adjective for reader-side openness.  For example, a wiki is open in both ways.  If we had the new term, then we could say, "A wiki is OA for readers and ____ for authors." 

We could also make nuanced assertions such as:  "For some scholarly purposes, OA must be complemented by ____, but for other scholarly purposes it needn't."

Allow me a quick digression on the claim that "open access" is both an adjective and a noun.  We use it as an adjective when we talk about "open-access articles" (or journals, repositories, or books...).  We use it as a noun when we talk about "providing open access" or "converting from toll access to open access".  I mention this primarily because I'd like the author-side counterpart to be just as flexible.  But I also mention it for those who never quite appreciated that the phrase had this dual use.  I wish I could tell you how many journal editors have asked me not to use "open access" as a noun, since under their house rules it's only an adjective.  But it's a noun too.  "Access" is a noun like "speech", and "open access" is a noun phrase like "free speech".  Open access is a kind of access, just as free speech is a kind of speech or a wet dog is a kind of dog.

I want this new term for several reasons.  For example, some OA resources which originally lacked author-side openness add it later, and I (and they) need a succinct way to describe what they've done.  Sometimes I speak about OA to audiences that know wikis better than they know scholarly journals, and I'd like to say that OA articles have reader-side openness but generally don't have author-side openness.  Likewise, I want a short and non-pejorative way to say that Wikipedia is not the poster-child of the OA movement. 

I like Wikipedia (and even served a term on the Wikimedia Foundation advisory board), and I like wikis (and even co-founded the Open Access Directory wiki with Robin Peek in 2008).  I wish Wikipedia Happy 10th birthday and many happy returns.  But wikis have some features, including author-side openness, that OA resources sometimes don't have and sometimes don't want.

My search for a good term here is strictly about vocabulary, not policy.  The existence of a clear, well-understood term won't tilt the arguments for or against author-side openness.  It will only make those arguments a little clearer.  I have no interest in reducing real disputes to verbal disputes; on the contrary.

In any case, I'm not building up to an argument for or against author-side openness.  In some kinds of resources, like wikis, author-side openness is more than useful; it's essential.  In others, like empirical observations written up by the observers, or interpretations of literature written up by the interpreters, it's more than unnecessary; it's harmful.  Nobody should be able to change your report of what you saw, or change your articulation of your reading.  In these cases it's enough for other scholars in the discussion to quote, cite, and respond.

While I'm not building up to an argument for or against author-side openness, I would like to write an article on wikis as a medium for scholarship and research.  I could make up some terminology for the article.  But if there's already a good term struggling for acceptance, I'd like to boost it; and if there isn't, I'd like to ask a lot of creative people for their good ideas before falling back on my own.

In the early days of wikis, I thought that "any day now" someone would come up with a good term for author-side openness.  I had the same thought in the early days of Web 2.0.  But if a widely used and widely understood term has emerged, I've missed it. 

A few years ago, some people used "open source publishing" for works that went beyond reader-side openness to author-side openness.  But it didn't catch on.  In any case, like the term "wiki", it aimed to cover both kinds of openness rather than isolate author-side openness. 

Some people formerly used "open content" for works that went beyond "open access" by adding author-side openness.  It didn't catch on in that specific sense, though it did catch on in a more generic sense.  In any case, it was like "open source publishing" and tried to cover reader- and author-side openness together, not author-side openness alone. 

"Web 2.0" definitely covers author-side openness, but it covers much more as well.  I even suspect that it became popular precisely because people wanted to describe the combination of reader- and author-side openness.  But unfortunately, it's far broader than author-side openness alone.  It's barely fluent as a noun and very clumsy as an adjective. 

Sometimes it's enough to have a term that means both reader- and author-side openness.  But I want separate terms for those occasions when I want to speak precisely about the two properties on their own.  For example, a private wiki has author-side openness but not reader-side openness, while an article in an OA journal or repository has reader-side openness but not author-side openness.  The two properties don't always occur together.

If author-side openness ever received the kind of sustained attention that reader-side openness has received, then it would likely need a larger vocabulary than one umbrella term, just as OA has had to distinguish green and gold OA, and gratis and libre OA.  Some author-side contributions are vetted or moderated and some are not; some resources are author-side open to everyone and some only to registered users or other subsets of the population.  And so on.  But for now, I'd be happy with an umbrella term.

BTW, I realize that "reader-side openness" isn't a four-square synonym for OA.  I'm only using it for symmetry with "author-side openness" to help zero in on the author-side meaning for which we don't yet have a good term.  I know very well that OA serves more than readers.  It serves *users* who have more on their minds than reading, and it serves *machines*, like search engines, translators, summarizers, text-miners, and other tools to facilitate access, discovery, retrieval, use, and reuse for a wide range of human beings and other machines. 

Likewise, I know that the kind of author-side openness for which I want a term serves more than authors.  It serves all the humans and machines who want to add, delete, or revise information on online resources, reorganize them, mash them up, integrate texts and data, or add metadata, tags, links, or other modifications and enhancements. 

"Editable" might do the trick.  But I'd prefer a term that suggests *openly* editable.  The private wiki, a Google Doc with sharing turned off, or for that matter a doc in an offline word processor, is editable but not openly editable.  Ditto with similar terms like "modifiable", "mutable" and so on.

As before, there's no prize in this contest except glory.  I'll summarize the nominations in the next issue, and post the submissions to the SPARC Open Access Forum for further discussion. 

In my last contest, I knew that I was in no position to declare a winner and change the language.  But I should have said so more clearly.  The most I can expect is a word already widely used for this purpose that has somehow escaped my notice, or a word that I'd be willing to use myself.  By making the discussion public, it's also possible that we can create some communal acceptance and momentum for a new term and clarify all our conversations.

Send me your ideas (peter dot suber at gmail dot com).  I'll assume that I may name and quote you unless you tell me otherwise. 

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Corrections and updates

* Here are three corrections to errors in my year-end review of OA in 2010, from the January 2011 issue.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-11.htm#2010

1.  I wrote that InTech published its first OA book in 2010.  But in fact InTech has been publishing OA books since 2005.  (Thanks to Katarina Lovrecic.)

2.  I wrote that the Kindle doesn't support internet access.  It does, though awkwardly, and the Kindle software is now available for general-purpose computers that have full-bore internet access.  (Thanks to Stephen Clark.)

3.  I wrote that the Swiss National Library uses public funds to digitize public-domain books, and then sells the digital copies rather than making them OA.  For that reason I gave it the #6 position on my list of the worst developments of 2010.  I was partly wrong about the library's practices and I offer my full apologies, not only for the error but for the unwarranted ranking on the worst of 2010 list. 

The library does use public funds to digitize PD books, does charge a fee for a related service, and does not yet make the digital editions OA.  But it plans to make them OA.  The library announced its OA plans in its July 2009 digitization strategy, which my source (World Radio Switzerland) didn't mention but which I should have discovered on my own.  The library has not yet provided OA to any of its digitized PD books, and will do so when it finishes the infrastructure for the OA editions, including procedures for OCR'ing the image scans.  It offers a digitization-on-demand program (eBooks on Demand, EOD), along with more than 20 other European libraries, and charges a fee to users who submit digitization requests.  The fee is not to buy the digitized book but to move the requested book to the top of the queue and cover the cost of digitization.  The resulting digital editions are not for sale and will soon be made OA.  The library will continue to charge for EOD requests even after the digital editions become OA.  When the print books to be digitized are in the public domain, the library will regard the digital editions as in the public domain as well and impose no usage restrictions; any ambiguous language about this in the digitization strategy will soon be clarified.  When the books are under copyright, and the library has permission to make them OA, it will use CC licenses to be designated later.  (Thanks to Marie-Christine Doffey.)

For more detail, see the Swiss National Library's digitization strategy, July 30, 2009
--Landing page
http://www.nb.admin.ch/themen/02074/02076/index.html?lang=en
--Strategy itself (downloadable PDF)
http://bit.ly/eCUA7i

* Finally, here's an update to last month's Roundup section.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-11.htm#roundup

I reported that India's National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) adopted an OA.  But I couldn't discover when and asked readers for help on the date.  The policy was adopted on May 29, 2009.  (Thanks to Satya Ranjan Sahu.)

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Five years ago in SOAN

See SOAN for February 2, 2006
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/02-02-06.htm

* One essay in that issue:  "Six things that researchers need to know about open access"
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/02-02-06.htm#know

Summary of the six things researchers need to know, omitting details, background, arguments, and links:

1. What OA journals exist in your field?
2. OA journals are not the whole story of OA.  There are also OA archives or repositories.
3. OA archiving only takes a few minutes.
4. Most non-OA journals allow authors to deposit their postprints in an OA repository.
5. Journals using the Ingelfinger Rule are a shrinking minority.
6. OA enlarges your audience and citation impact

Update:  I'd no longer put #5 in the top six.  But the other five still need frequent repetition.

* Another essay in that issue:  "Google AdSense ads for open-access journals"
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/02-02-06.htm#ads

Excerpt:  "[Google AdSense ads] may not suffice to pay the bills, but every little bit helps and this is another little bit....Journals pay nothing for them....The journal doesn't know in advance what ads Google will select for a given page, only that the ads will be keyword-relevant to that page....[J]ournals cannot warp their objectivity in order to ingratiate advertisers if they don't know, at the time their editorial decisions are made, whom to ingratiate....AdSense ads won't compromise editorial decisions or peer review, and for readers who understand how they work, they won't even present the appearance of a conflict of interest...."

Update:  I still like the idea and for all the same reasons.  For most journals these ads will create only a trickle of revenue.  But it's an easy and low-risk trickle, and could be a much-needed trickle.

* From the other top stories in that issue:

"The first major OA position statement of 2006 was from the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM).  The ERCIM statement, published in the January issue of the group's newsletter, calls for OA to all funded research, whether the funding agency is public or private."
http://www.ercim.org/publication/Ercim_News/enw64/ercim-oa.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006/01/ercim-statement-on-open-access.html

"The session on open access at the 93rd Indian Science Congress (Hyderabad, January 3-7, 2006) produced a recommendation for an Optimal National Open Access Policy, which includes a call for all publicly-funded research in India to be deposited in OA repositories."
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/2713.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006/01/oa-policy-recommendation-for-india.html

"California's Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights published a report by John M. Simpson calling for many kinds of public access to the results of state-funded stem cell research.  For example, it would discourage patents; but when grantees did patent their discoveries, they would have to allow royalty-free use by other California researchers and pay the state 25% of the net royalties beyond $100,000.  However, the report does not call for OA."
http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/resources/StemCellReport.pdf
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006/01/call-for-public-benefits-but-not-quite.html

"The University of California released five white papers and a draft policy on OA-related issues.  These were drafted in December but apparently not posted online until January.   One recommendation is that faculty give publishers only a non-exclusive right to publish and retain the right to post their work in an OA repository.  Another would give the university a non-exclusive right to archive the work of its faculty, though faculty would have the right to opt-out or add embargoes.  Another calls on journals to demand fewer rights from authors and to rest their business models on added value rather than ownership.  The white papers are the work of a special committee of the 10-campus UC system, not just a committee of a single campus."
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/committees/scsc/reports.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006/01/california-proposes-oa-policy-for.html

* The issue also listed 27 repository and green-OA developments from the previous month alone.

* Postscript.  "Five years ago..." is a new idea for SOAN and I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.  Time permitting, I could do it again in future issues.  Starting next month I could even do "Ten years ago...."  (SOAN will be ten years old at the end of this month.) 

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Roundup

Here's what happened, or what I noticed, since the last issue of the newsletter, emphasizing action and policy over scholarship and opinion.  I put the most important items first, with double asterisks, and otherwise cluster them loosely by topic.  I thank Katharine Dunn for her assistance in restating many of these developments in the brief Roundup format. 

For a more comprehensive picture of recent OA developments, see --and help build-- the project feed of the OA Tracking Project.
http://www.connotea.org/tag/oa.new
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/OATP_FAQ

 + Policies

** Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory adopted an OA policy.  The university hasn't yet released the text, but its announcement compares the policy to Harvard's.  The policy was adopted by a unanimous vote of the observatory's Executive Committee and takes effect on March 1. 
http://cdrs.columbia.edu/cdrsmain/?p=1467

** Denmark's Roskilde University adopted an OA mandate in September 2009, and posted it to ROARMAP last month. 
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=Roskilde%20University http://rudar.ruc.dk/handle/1800/5149

** The Australian Research Council announced new Funding Rules to take effect in 2012.  The new rules permit the use of grant funds for publication fees at fee-based OA journals (Section 5.2.2), require grantees to justify any failure to make funded work green OA within 12 months of publication (Section 13.3.2), and require grantees to describe how data from funded projects was made OA "where appropriate" (Section 13.3.2).
http://www.arc.gov.au/pdf/DP12_fundingrules.pdf

** The July 2010 update to the Cancer Research UK Guidelines for Research Grants and Awards added a provision allowing grantees to use grant funds to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals.
http://science.cancerresearchuk.org/prod_consump/groups/cr_common/@fre/@gen/documents/generalcontent/cr_016279.pdf

** The US Departments of Labor and Department of Education announced the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT), a four-year, $2 billion funding program for open educational resources (OER).  The program includes a libre OA mandate, requiring the funded OER to be released under CC-BY licenses.  (See the lead article in this issue, above.)
http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/press/eta/eta20101436.htm
http://www.doleta.gov/grants/pdf/SGA-DFA-PY-10-03.pdf
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/01/20/new-job-training-and-education-grants-program-launched

* In January, President Obama signed the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act, which passed both houses of Congress in December.  The new law creates an Interagency Public Access Committee to coordinate federal agency policies on OA, but does not direct or recommend any particular policy.  (The committee will be appointed by the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which has given evidence that it supports OA; see the lead article in this issue, above.)
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/01/06/america-competes-act-keeps-americas-leadership-target
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/home/888910-264/as_competes_act_is_signed.html.csp

* Tom Kalil, deputy director for policy at OSTP, told Federal News Radio that the COMPETES Act "requires OSTP to play a larger role in making scientific and technical data more accessible to the public."  (He also said that PubMed Central receives 420,000 unique visitors per day, with two-third coming from outside the NIH.)
http://federalnewsradio.com/index.php?nid=110&sid=2250604

* The American Association of Publishers (AAP), DC Principles Coalition (DCPC), and International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM), which have all lobbied against strong federal OA policies in the US, applauded the new COMPETES Act and Interagency Public Access Committee.  (The organizations have not changed their positions; the OA provision of COMPETES is vague on policy and requires a new round of stakeholder consultations.)
http://www.pspcentral.org/documents/PressReleaseAmericaCOMPETES1711.doc
http://www.stm-assoc.org/2011_01_06_STM_press_release_America_COMPETES_Act.pdf

* The US Department of Commerce's Internet Policy Task Force received nearly 900 comments on its review of access to online copyrighted works and the effect of access on innovation in the Internet economy.  Creative Commons, the Mozilla Foundation, Public Knowledge, and others filed comments in favor of OA and lawful sharing of copyrighted work.  The Task Force report will contriute to the Obama administration's policy position on copyright.
http://icommons.org/post-archive/1346

* The International Federation of Medical Students' Associations (IFMSA) joined the Right to Research Coalition, an international alliance of student organizations working for OA.  IFMSA is the world's largest medical student association, and represents over 1.2 million medical students.  The R2RC now represents nearly 7 million students around the world.
http://www.righttoresearch.org/blog/IFMSAannouncement.shtml
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5725.html

* The EU's Reflection Group or Comité des Sages issued its report, The New Renaissance, on digitizing Europe's cultural heritage.  Among its recommendation:  "Cultural institutions should make  public domain material digitised with public funding as widely available as possible for access and re-use....In principle the mere digitisation process should not generate any new rights....Member States should ensure that all public funding for digitisation is conditional on the subsequent free accessibility  of the digitised material through Europeana....The  digitised public domain material should be free of charge for the general public and  available in all EU Member States [even when co-funded by private partners]...."
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/doc/reflection_group/final-report-cdS3.pdf

* EIFL-OA announced that its focus for 2011 "will be on strengthening advocacy for open access, at the national and international level...[and] will include: consulting and coordinating open access policies in the EIFL network; providing small grants (up to 4,000 USD) to support open access advocacy campaigns...; encouraging student engagement in the open access movement (in partnership with SPARC Right to Research coalition); and implementing the OpenAIRE project...."
http://www.eifl.net/no-49-january-february-2011#OAfocus2011

* At the Academic Publishing in Europe conference (Berlin, January 11-12, 2011), Jos Engelen, chairman of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, NWO), predicted that OA mandates for publicly-funded research will be the norm, not the exception.  (Take this as further evidence that NWO is considering its own OA mandate.)
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Freier-Zugang-zu-wissenschaftlichen-Veroeffentlichungen-gefordert-1168057.html

* Austria's Fund to Promote Scientific Research (Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung, FWF) became the latest organization to register its support for the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE).
http://www.oacompact.org/news/2011/1/25/fwf-austrian-science-fund-supports-cope.html

* The German Parliament's Copyright Project Group issued a report in support of OA.
http://www.bundestag.de/internetenquete/Urheberrecht_Bericht_PG_2011_01_21_Geistiges_Eigentum__Open_Access__Schutzdauer/index.jsp

* Eve Gray points out several ways in which the South African government is promoting OA to research, despite the retrograde IPR Act for Publicly Funded Research of 2008.
http://www.gray-area.co.za/2011/01/16/the-state-of-the-nation-2011-%E2%80%93-government-policy-and-open-access-in-south-africa/

* A group of young African scientists and scholars adopted the Cape Town Declaration urging that "scientific and technical data and information should be openly available and freely accessible at national, continental, and international levels...."  (Not to be confused with the Cape Town Open Education Declaration of January 2008.)
http://www.codata.org/10Conf/Cape%20Town%20Declaration.pdf
http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/

 + Journals

* The Nature Publishing Group (NPG) launched Scientific Reports, a new peer-reviewed OA journal emulating PLoS ONE in its plan to "publish all papers that are judged to be technically valid and original", and to use article-level impact metrics including the "most-downloaded, most-emailed, and most-blogged" articles.  All published papers will deposited in PubMed Central, and be published under CC-BY-NC-ND and CC-BY-NC-SA licenses (PLoS ONE uses CC-BY).  The journal will charge a publication fee, initially $1,350/article.  NPG will donate $20 to Creative Commons for each fee paid to any of its journals with an OA option.
http://www.nature.com/press_releases/scientificreports.html
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/25925
http://www.iwr.co.uk/academic-and-humanites/3010666/NPG-extends-its-support-for-Creative-Commons

* The Public Library of Science published an open letter of welcome NPG's Scientific Reports, urging it to remove usage restrictions on the new journal. 
http://blogs.plos.org/plos/2011/01/welcome-nature-seriously-2/

* The Nature Publishing Group (NPG) issued a major new (January 6, 2011) statement supporting green and gold OA.  Excerpt:  "80% of our academic journals offer an open access option or are fully open access....We encourage self-archiving of the authors' accepted version, [but] with a release date of 6 months post-publication....We have, to date, found author self-archiving compatible with subscription business models, and so we have been actively encouraging self-archiving since 2005...."
http://www.nature.com/press_releases/statement.html

* BMJ reported that five publishers withdrew more than 2,500 medical journals from the World Health Organization's HINARI program serving Bangladesh and other developing countries.  The five publishers were Elsevier (1,610 titles), Springer (588 titles), Lippincott Williams and Wilkins (299 titles), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2 titles) and the American Society for Animal Science (3 titles).  A HINARI spokesperson said that withdrawing titles is a common practice when publishers start to gain "active sales" in a country, and in any case that "Access is still available through those institutions which purchase the journals."  (More in this story in the following seven items.)
http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.d196.full

* Springer denied that it withdrew any journals from HINARI.  "Bangladesh has not had access to Springer content through HINARI since 2006. However, since 2006, institutions in Bangladesh...have had access to over 1700 Springer journals through the International Network for Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP)...."  Access to Springer journals through INASP is not free of charge.
http://www.springer.com/about+springer/media/pressreleases?SGWID=0-11002-6-1067521-0
http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/1101/msg00072.html

* When criticized for withdrawing titles from HINARI, Elsevier and the American Association for the Advancement of Science reversed their decision.  http://download.thelancet.com/flatcontentassets/pdfs/S0140673611600664.pdf

* An editorial in The Lancet deplored the publisher decisions to withdraw journals from HINARI, including Elsevier's decision to withdraw The Lancet itself.  "For our part, we have asked Elsevier to assure us that the editors will be consulted on all future HINARI access negotiations involving The Lancet. That assurance has been given."
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(11)60066-4/fulltext

* A statement by Elsevier clarified that it regards Bangladesh as "a country that could move from access under Research4Life [the umbrella program embracing HINARI] to access under a discounted commercial agreement" and hopes to complete the transition in 2012.
http://www.download.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(11)60068-8/fulltext

* Richard Gedye of STM, an HINARI partner, confirmed that Elsevier and AAAS restored access through HINARI, and reported that "Lippincott Williams and Wilkins...emailed me to confirm they will be reinstating access....[T]he inclusion of the ASAS [American Society for Animal Science] in the list of access excluders was incorrect - an error in the HINARI administration system for which, on behalf of HINARI, I apologise.  ASAS's Journal of Animal Science continues to be available throughout Bangladesh in 2011 as it has been in 2010...."
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind1101&L=LIS-E-RESOURCES&F=&S=&P=52089

* A comment by Tracey Pérez Koehlmoos and Richard Smith in the Lancet described the inadequacies of HINARI, concluded that "[t]rue open access is the long-term answer to access to scientific studies in low-income and middle-income countries in a way that HINARI can never be...." and called on publishers to continue to participate in HINARI as an interim solution.
http://download.thelancet.com/flatcontentassets/pdfs/S0140673611600676.pdf

* The Guardian reported that the HINARI has imposed access restrictions "in 28 of the 64 poorest countries in the world. As with the free trials offered by online DVD rental companies, the period of grace has run out and it's time to pay...." Elsevier, in a letter also published on the Lancet site, says it will charge from 2012, arguing that countries like Bangladesh will need to move from free access to affordable but commercial deals. Other publishers are moving down the same road."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/sarah-boseley-global-health/2011/jan/18/medicine-doctors

* Wiley launched Wiley Open Access, a new line of full OA (not hybrid OA) journals, most from learned societies.  Each will charge publication fees and be published under the CC-BY-NC license. 
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=94856&CultureCode=en
http://www.wileyopenaccess.com

* Physical Review X (PRX) is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from the American Physical Society.  PRX will use CC-BY licenses. 
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5723.html

* Íslenska ţjóđfélagiđ is a new peer-reviewed OA journal on the sociology of Iceland, and the second OA journal to be published in Iceland.
http://thjodfelagid.is/index.php/Th

* The Journal of Feminist Scholarship is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
http://www1.umassd.edu/jfs/

* Printer's Devil Review is a new OA journal of fiction, poetry, essays, and visual art.  The launch includes a clear, funny video clearly explaining the benefits of libre OA and open licensing.
http://pdrjournal.org/index.php/pdr http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/8276090/

* Psychiatrische Forschung is a new peer-reviewed OA journal of psychiatry.
http://www.psychiatrische-forschung.de/index

* Antiqua is a new, peer-reviewed, OA journal of archaeology. 
http://www.pagepress.org/journals/index.php/antiqua/index

* The Journal of Integrated Pest Management is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from the Entomological Society of America.
http://www.entsoc.org/

* Cell & Bioscience is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from the Society of Chinese Bioscientists in America and published by BioMed Central.
http://blogs.openaccesscentral.com/blogs/bmcblog/entry/cell_bioscience_launches_with_biomed

* The Journal of Clinical Bioinformatics is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from BioMed Central.
http://www.jclinbioinformatics.com/

* Biology of Mood & Anxiety Disorders is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from BioMed Central.
http://www.biolmoodanxietydisord.com/

* Skeletal Muscle is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from BioMed Central.
http://blogs.openaccesscentral.com/blogs/bmcblog/entry/new_journal_gives_skeletal_muscle

* Neural Systems & Circuits is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from BioMed Central.
http://blogs.openaccesscentral.com/blogs/bmcblog/entry/neural_systems_circuits_a_forum

* PLoS Medicine launched an OA supplement on malaria eradication.  The Malaria Eradication Research Agenda (malERA) Leadership Council posted a statement on the PLoS Medicine site in support of the supplement.
http://blogs.plos.org/speakingofmedicine/2011/01/25/malera-supplement-a-research-agenda-for-malaria-eradication/
http://blogs.plos.org/speakingofmedicine/2011/01/25/joint-statement-of-the-malera-leadership-council-on-supplement-in-plos-medicine/

* Heather Morrison calculated that PLoS One is now the world's largest research journal, publishing 6,749 articles in 2010.
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/01/plos-one-now-worlds-largest-journal.html

* TextPraxis is a new peer-reviewed OA journal of literary studies launched by graduate students at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster (WWU).
http://idw-online.de/pages/de/news403067 http://www.uni-muenster.de/Textpraxis/

* The Polish Academy of Sciences converted 21 of its journals to OA, and hired Versita to provide the technology and publishing services.
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5717.html

* Utah State History, run by the State of Utah, converted two of its publications, Utah Archaeology and Antiquities Section Selected Papers to OA.
http://history.utah.gov/archaeology/publications/archaeology_publications.html

* Historical Studies in Education converted to OA. 
http://christophermoorehistory.blogspot.com/2011/01/wave-of-present.html

* Chiropractic & Osteopathy changed its name to Chiropractic & Manual Therapies, converted to OA, and moved to BioMed Central.  CMT is the official journal of the European Academy of Chiropractic (EAC) and the Chiropractic & Osteopathic College of Australasia (COCA), which will subsidize publication fees on articles submitted before January 2013. http://blogs.openaccesscentral.com/blogs/bmcblog/entry/chiropractic_manual_therapies_journal_relaunched

* The Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine (SJTREM) reported that its conversion to OA three years ago "resulted in a substantial rise in submissions, and not least citations...."
http://goo.gl/07bIA

* Hindawi announced that it received more than 3,000 submissions in December to its OA journals, an increase of more than 40% from a year ago.
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5715.html

* Maney Publishing, which created a hybrid OA option for its STM journals in January 2010, extended the option to its humanities journals.
http://www.iwr.co.uk/academic-and-humanites/3010672/Maney-Publishing-extends-open-access-to-humanities

* The Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) adopted a delayed OA policy with a 12-month moving wall. 
http://www.newswise.com/articles/top-ranked-informatics-journal-takes-new-direction

* Physik Journal provided OA to the first 57 years of its backfile, from its launch to 2001. The journal is published by the German Physical Society (Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft) and Wiley-VCH.
http://www.newswiretoday.com/news/84062/

* Genes, Genomes, and Genetics (G3) is a forthcoming peer-reviewed OA journal from the Genetics Society of America.
http://www.genetics-gsa.org/

* BioMed Central described the cluster of steps it is taking to realize Iain Altman and Douglas Chalmers' 1999 model of "threaded" digital publications of clinical research. 
http://blogs.openaccesscentral.com/blogs/bmcblog/entry/towards_threaded_publications_helping_to

* Centaurus Verlag adopted a green policy allowing author self-archiving. 
http://www.idw-online.de/pages/de/news405163

* Elsevier's latest copyright agreement includes this section:  "[You, the author, have]...the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal or institutional web site or server for scholarly purposes, incorporating the complete citation and with a link to the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the article (but not in subject-oriented or centralized repositories or institutional repositories with mandates for systematic postings unless there is a specific agreement with the publisher...)...."
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/786-Rights-Reductio-Ad-Absurdum.html
http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind11&L=american-scientist-open-access-forum&D=1&O=D&F=l&S=&P=393

* Elsevier and the Robert Koch Institute announced a deal under which Koch authors will be allowed to deposit their Elsevier manuscripts in their institutional repository.  Elsevier said it hopes to strike similar deals with other institutions in 2011.  (PS:  It's not clear how this differs from Elsevier's standing permission for green OA through institutional web sites.)
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/elsevier-and-the-robert-koch-institute-partner-to-broaden-access-114472979.html

* Following a discussion on the open-science list about whether OA articles should be published under open licenses or assigned to the public domain, the OA journal, Cellular Therapy and Transplantation, published its first article in the public domain (under CC0).
http://www.ctt-journal.com/2-6-en-gratwohl-2011jan14.html

* Heinz Pampel made a list of seven OA journal funds at German universities.
http://wisspub.net/2010/12/29/open-access-publikationfonds-in-deutschland/#comment-238

* Rosie Redfield launched Science Leaks to link to "peer-reviewed scientific papers that been liberated from behind journal-subscription paywalls."  (PS:  It appears that ScienceLeaks will happily link to both authorized and unauthorized editions.)
http://scienceleaks.blogspot.com/2010/12/introducing-science-leaks.html
http://rrresearch.blogspot.com/2011/01/announcing-scienceleaks.html
http://www.nctimes.com/app/blogs/wp/?p=11888

 + Repositories and databases

* The Council of India's International Institute of Technology (IIT) authorized the launch of an institutional repository.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Hiring-of-IIT-directors-to-be-made-more-transparent/articleshow/7315952.cms

* Keita Bando relaunched MyOpenArchive, originally launched in September 2007.  MOA is an "individual" rather than "institutional" OA repository. 
http://MyOpenArchive.org/
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=135397439857139

* The California Digital Library (CDL) launched a version of its OA site for mobile devices. 
http://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/2011/01/11/cdl-on-the-go/

* The University of Exeter released its advocacy plan for eliciting deposits in its institutional repository.
http://jiscreposit.blogspot.com/2011/01/university-of-exeter-advocacy-plan.html http://goo.gl/4ePsn

* The University of St Andrews described some of its strategies for boosting deposits to its institutional repository. 
http://rspproject.wordpress.com/2011/01/10/guest-post-by-jackie-proven-increasing-repository-content-at-st-andrews-using-merit-data/

* The Montana State Library (MSL) finished moving its 3,070 born-digital state publications from CONTENTdm to the Internet Archive, in effect treating the IA as part of its institutional repository.  In December, MSL called for comments on its partnership with IA.
http://blog.archive.org/2011/01/14/montana-state-library-adopts-the-internet-archive-as-its-institutional-repository/
http://blog.archive.org/2010/12/30/how-montana-state-library-uploaded-batches-of-digital-objects-to-the-internet-archive/

* The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library launched an OA archive that includes more than 200,000 pages, 300 reels of audio tape, 300 museum artifacts, 72 movie reels, and 1,500 photos.
http://web.resourceshelf.com/go/resourceblog/63170

* EBSCO Discovery Service now includes metadata from arXiv.
http://www.charlestonco.com/index.php?do=Press+Room&pg=pr_details&pr_id=2266

* The January 2011 edition of Ranking Web of World Repositories is now online.  (As in the past, the project only counts PDFs as deposits, undervaluing some very successful repositories and skewing incentives for institutions trying to improve their rankings.)
http://repositories.webometrics.info/

 + Data

* Seventeen public and private funders of medical research issued a statement on data sharing.  Each funder will develop its own policy, but together they vow to improve data sharing among researchers and call on governments to do the same.
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/Media-office/Press-releases/2011/WTX064132.htm
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/Policy/Spotlight-issues/Data-sharing/Public-health-and-epidemiology/Signatories-to-the-joint-statement/index.htm
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(10)62234-9

* The Open Knowledge Foundation's Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data launched the OpenBiblio Principles.  Principle #4:  "Where possible, we recommend explicitly placing bibliographic data in the Public Domain via the Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL) or CC0...."
http://openbiblio.net/principles/
http://blog.okfn.org/2011/01/24/open-biblio-principles-announced/
http://blog.okfn.org/2011/01/18/launch-of-the-principles-on-open-bibliographic-data/
http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/01/08/launch-of-%E2%80%9Cprinciples-on-open-bibliographic-data%E2%80%9D-at-pmr-symposium/

* The Open Knowledge Foundation launched GetTheData, a project "to field questions and answers relating to the practicalities of working with public open data: from discovering data sets, to combining data from different sources in appropriate ways, getting data into formats you can happily work with, or that will play nicely with visualisation or analysis tools you already have, and so on....[I]f you publish data via some sort of API or queryable interface, why not considering posting self-answered questions using examples from your FAQ? ...If you're looking for data as part of a research project, but can't find it or can't get it in an appropriate form that lets you link it to another data set, post a question to GetTheData...."
http://getthedata.org/
http://blog.okfn.org/2011/01/20/introducing-getthedataorg-ask-and-answer-data-related-questions/

* FigShare released an alpha version of its scientific figure- and data-sharing platform.  The project goal is "to get all researchers to publish all your data" --in particular the raw data tables and figures that would otherwise go unpublished.
http://figshare.com/figblog/2011/01/12/figshare-alpha-release/

* The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) launched the Deepwater Horizon Library, an OA collection of "maps, wildlife reports, scientific reports and other previously released public information used by emergency responders, fishermen, mariners and local officials during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill." http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20101229_dwh_library.html
http://www.noaa.gov/deepwaterhorizon.

* The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Data Library and Archives is now one of three international libraries that will house and offer OA to the archives of GLOBEC, a study of Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics, which closed at the end of 2009.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/whoi-data-library-to-house-and-preserve-ocean-ecosystem-archives

* The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) launched the Chemical Data Access Tool to provide OA to health and safety information about chemicals made in or imported by the US.
http://www.epa.gov/oppt/existingchemicals/pubs/transparency.html

* The Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) launched an OA data archive of records from oil and gas research supported by the US Department of Energy (DOE) over nearly 40 years. The OnePetro repository includes reports, datasets, and project summaries from SPE and about 10 other professional societies.
http://www.favstocks.com/access-expanded-to-doe-database-of-oil-and-natural-gas-research-results/1331195/

* A team of European researchers created Eurexpress, an OA digital atlas of gene expression for the mouse embryo.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-01/plos-aoa011811.php

* Medical researchers at Northwestern University launched BTECH (Brain Tumor Epigenomics/Genomics Database at Children's Memorial Hospital), an OA database of molecular data from brain tumor studies integrating multiple datasets for simultaneous viewing.
http://goo.gl/vaari

* An international group of botanists launched The Plant List, an OA database of 1.25 million plant names.  According to Britain's Royal Botanic Gardens: "Without accurate names, understanding and communication about global plant life would descend into inefficient chaos, costing vast sums of money and threatening lives in the case of plants used for food or medicine."
http://news.discovery.com/earth/plant-database-library-101229.html

* BuiMetria Partecipativa (BMP), the OA database on light pollution launched in 2008, announced plans to improve its usability and raise funds.
http://blog.okfn.org/2011/01/10/buiometria-partecipativa/

* A group of information-science researchers launched an OA database of literature on library value and return on investment.
http://media-newswire.com/release_1138070.html
http://libvalue.cci.utk.edu/

* The Tatoeba Project, now in beta, is a new OA database of human-translated sentences, for use by humans or for use as data by statistical machine-translation software. http://tatoeba.org/
http://yoyodyne.cc/tatoeba/

* The Open Database Licence was translated into French.
https://mben.co-ment.com/text/kU4BUwdRhx2/view/

 + Books and digitization

* Brewster Kahle talked with Icelandic officials about digitizing all the country's literature, making the public-domain works OA and working out a digital lending system for the works under copyright.  "[Iceland's] 50,000 books [are] easily scannable in 2 years by 12 people using...scribe scanners of the Internet Archive. David Lesperance...has offered to  fundraise for this project, the Internet Archive has offered scanning technology, training, and backend software, and the [National Library of Iceland] has offered to administer the project....Iceland could be the first country to have its complete literature go online...."
http://blog.archive.org/2011/01/29/all-icelandic-literature-to-go-online/

* The Vatican library has started digitizing and providing OA to parts of its vast collections, including images of hand-painted illuminations in manuscripts. http://gonzobrarian.wordpress.com/2011/01/06/open-access-goes-papal/

* After digitizing and providing OA to the Yad Vashem Archives documenting the Holocaust, a Google announcement seemed to generalize the company's archive-digitization program.  "If you have a digital collection that's important to world history and culture and you'd like to present it online using Google tools, we'd like to hear from you...."
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/explore-yad-vashems-holocaust-archives.html
https://spreadsheets.google.com/a/google.com/viewform?formkey=dHk5S2l3d1p0dlR4dFVJS0FnRHBobEE6MQ&ndplr=1

* All the negotiators on both sides of the Google Book Settlement have since left their positions.  (PS:  This could cause trouble if the still-unapproved settlement must undergo further revision.)
http://www.openbookalliance.org/2011/01/sarnoff-leaves-bertelsmann-%E2%80%93-no-gbs-negotiators-left/

* Klaus Graf updated his screencast showing how non-US residents can use a US proxy to gain access to books in the HathiTrust.  (Many digitized European books are in HathiTrust and not Google.)
http://screenr.com/Uxt
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/11553592/

* Elsevier added 780 books to Research4Life, the umbrella project for HINARI, AGORA and OARE.  (Most Research4Life resources are journals, not books.)
http://www.knowledgespeak.com/newsArchieveviewdtl.asp?pickUpID=12030&pickUpBatch=1604

* InTech released 10 new OA books.
http://intechweb.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/10-new-open-access-books-now-available-on-intechopen/

* Europeana released its Strategic Plan for 2011-2015.
https://app.e2ma.net/app/view:CampaignPublic/id:1403149.6932525501/rid:f5e679e7b498f9daab7182a7a6f3b4c7

* Flat World Knowledge, the world's largest publisher of OA textbooks, received $15 million in venture funding.  The company will use the money to expand its line of OA textbooks beyond business and economics to "the 125 highest-enrolled courses on college campuses."
http://goo.gl/Ot6cg

* Kaplan Publishing offered OA to 130 books from January 5-10.  Although the download window was temporary, access was not.  Users could keep the downloaded OA editions indefinitely. 
http://web.resourceshelf.com/go/resourceblog/63094

* The John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester began digitizing an unusually large, hand-written copy of the Koran, thought to be more than 500 years old, and plans to make the digital copy OA.  The library is blogging the whole process, with photos.
http://gatewaytothekoran.wordpress.com/

* The environmental science news site, Mongabay.com, posted an OA copy of the Oxford University Press (OUP) book, Conservation Biology for All.  OUP gave permission to Mongabay to post the book, which includes chapters on deforestation, biodiversity, and invasive species.
http://news.mongabay.com/2011/0120-free_conservation_book.html

* Zohar Efroni provided green OA to three chapters (more than 250 pages) of his TA book, Access-Right: The Future of Digital Copyright Law (Oxford University Press, 2010).
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6595

* The UK eInformation Group (UKeiG) published the 2011 Guide to Free or Nearly-Free e-Books.  The book itself is not OA.
http://www.ukeig.org.uk/content/publications

 + Studies and surveys

* The SOAP project (Study of Open Access Publishing) released the final results of its survey of 40,000 published scholars, an article summarizing them, a report on the conference announcing them, and the raw data under a CC0 waiver in a variety of formats.  This is the most comprehensive study of gold OA to date.  Among the findings:  "The number of OA articles published in 'full' or 'hybrid' OA journals was around 120,000 in 2009, some 8-10% of the estimated yearly global scientific output....Journals offering a 'hybrid' OA option had a take-up of around 2%. OA journals in several disciplines (including Life Sciences, Medicine, and Earth Sciences)...have Impact Factors in the top 1-2% of their disciplines....[A]pproximately 90% [of respondents] are convinced that OA journals are or would be beneficial for their field....The vast majority disagrees with the idea that OA journals are either of low quality or undermine the process of peer review."  The two largest barriers to authors were funding funding (39%) and perceived quality (30%).  Of surveyed authors publishing in OA journals charging publication fees, only 12% paid the fee out of pocket; 59% paid it out of a research grant (28% had grants which included money for fees and 31% used grant money not specifically intended for fees); and 24% had it paid it by their institution.  In its own summary of the findings, Science Magazine emphasized that "Although 53% of respondents said they had published at least one open-access article....Almost 40% said that a lack of funding for author fees was a deterrent. And 30% cited a lack of high-quality open-access journals in their field...."
http://project-soap.eu/highlights-and-data-of-the-soap-survey-now-available/
http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.5260
http://project-soap.eu/report-from-the-soap-symposium/
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/01/quandary-scientists-prefer-readi.html?ref=hp

* eIFL released the updated third version of its survey of open licensing practices in developing and transition countries.  Among the findings:  "94% of the access journals we surveyed [from eIFL countries] are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution license....Using open content licenses by open access repositories:  We identified nine open access repositories that are licensed under open content licenses [in Argentina, China, Kenya, Poland, South Africa, Thailand]....Some repositories in Botswana, Poland and South Africa recommend the depositors to use Creative Commons licenses. As a result a number of publications in these repositories are licensed under Creative Commons licenses....The first version of the report was released on July 7, 2010 with request for comments and a call for more case studies....The second revised version...was released on September 7, 2010. This is the third version with updated case studies from China, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, South Africa and Ukraine and new case studies from Ghana, Lithuania, Thailand, Kenya and Slovenia...."
http://www.eifl.net/news/implementation-open-content-licenses

* The Medical Library Association's Ad Hoc Committee for Advocating Scholarly Communications released the results of its 2010 survey on the impact of OA on journal cancellation decisions.  "When asked what influences decisions to keep or cut journal subscriptions with open or public access content [e.g. at hybrid OA journals], the top 5 factors rated as "very important" or "important" were journal use (94%), subject area of the journal (87%), cost (84%), length of embargo period (78%), and the journal’s inflation rate (77%). The percentage of open or public access content was rated as "important" or "very important" by 61% of respondents.  According to the survey, one of the factors that limits the effect of public or open access on collection decisions is that the full content of journals is not always freely available [e.g. at hybrid OA journals]....4% would consider dropping a subscription if up to 60% of content were freely available; 21% would consider dropping a subscription if 60%-90% of content were freely available; 49% would consider dropping a subscription if 90%-100% of content were freely available; 26% said this would not influence their decision....Respondents reported that they would consider dropping a paid subscription if all content were freely available after 1 year (8%), 6 months (12%), or 3-4 months (41%)...."
http://ics.mlanet.org/
http://www.mlanet.org/resources/publish/sc_2010_survey_results.html

* Graham Stone released his report on the first four years of the University of Huddersfield's IR.  Among the findings:  "November 2010 saw a record number of full text open access downloads from the Repository, 9,122. Downloads have been rising steadily over the past year to 62,694....There is still work to do, to date only 29% of the Repository is available as full text and only 20% of items are available on open access, this figure rises to 35% of content published since 2008 on open access....88% of those who responded were in favour of the principles of Open Access and 86% were in favour of adding their research to an Open Access Repository....[T]here is still some misunderstanding about the copyright implications of adding research to the Repository....25% did not read the copyright transfer agreement which usually transfers all copyright to the publisher....81% stated that they would be prepared to deposit the author version in the Repository...."
http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/9257/

* MIT reports that the compliance rate with its 2009 OA mandate is 30%.  "The Libraries staff is developing collection methods with a few departments and hopes to later put these methods into use across the Institute."
http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N63/fnl.html

* The Primary Research Group published a (TA) Survey of Library Database Licensing Practices.  Among the findings:  "17% of higher education libraries in the sample have paid a journal processing fee for an author....Nearly 43% of libraries with annual licensed electronic content spending of greater than $1.2 million annually track patron use of open access journals. Digital repositories now account for 17% of the journal articles obtained when libraries need an article that is not in their own collection...." http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/Digest/PRG-Publishes-emThe-Survey-of-Library-Database-Licensing-Practicesem-73340.asp

* The Research Information Network (RIN) released Part 2 of its report on the use of ejournals in the UK.  (Part 1 came out in in April 2009.)  Among the findings:  "A very high proportion of journal articles are now available online[:] 96 per cent of journal titles in science, technology and medicine, and 86 per cent of titles in the arts, humanities and social sciences...."  Access problems were least severe in physics and most severe in history.
http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/communicating-and-disseminating-research/e-journals-their-use-value-and-impact

* John Hilton III and David Wiley published another article analyzing the impact of full-text OA books on the sales of their print editions.  "We used BookScan sales data for four categories of books (a total of 41 books) for which we could identify the date when the free digital versions of the books were made available to determine whether the free version affected print sales. We analyzed the data on book sales for the eight weeks before and after the free versions were available. Three of the four categories of books had increased sales after the free books were distributed...."
http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0013.101

* JISC announced its new Digital Monograph Technical Landscape study for OA books on multiple devices.  At the same time it revealed that it is "formulating an 'Open Agenda' which will align the various open movements and their value for UK Higher and Further Education. This technical work should begin to establish how open access monographs can fit within the overall ecosystem of scholarly communication..... "
http://jiscpub.wordpress.com/2011/01/06/context/

* Wouter Gerritsma created an OA spreadsheet of all the journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals which had impact factors in 2009.  There are 782 of them.
http://wowter.net/2011/01/06/the-impact-factor-of-open-access-journals/

* Brian Kelly released a draft statement of best practices for making OA repository contents handicap-accessible. 
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5726.html

* The University of Nottingham's Research Communications Strategy released its third annual report to JISC.
http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/502/
http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2011/01/05/oa-news-from-nottingham/

* Urban Ericsson launched a qualitative survey "on what changes can be noticed by the single researcher with the shift from non-OA publishing of research articles to self-archiving."  Responses will be accepted until March 2, 2011.
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5733.html

* Derk Haank, the CEO of Springer, the world's largest OA journal publisher, revealed to Richard Poynder that Springer lobbies against green OA mandates, though Haank seemed to object to short embargoes more than mandatory deposits.  Haank argued that short embargoes could force TA publishers to convert to OA, argued that gold OA will remain a "niche" and that TA journal publishing will remain "dominant", argued that OA "makes no material difference" to publishing costs, and defended the big deal:  "The Big Deal is the best invention since sliced bread. I agree that there was once a serial pricing problem....But it was the Big Deal that solved it."
http://www.infotoday.com/IT/jan11/Interview-with-Derk-Haank.shtml

 + Software and tools

* The Internet Archive released a beta of the new open-source edition of the Wayback Machine.
http://web.resourceshelf.com/go/resourceblog/63432

* CollabRX, the for-profit start-up by cancer survivor and web entrepreneur Marty Tenenbaum, launched Cancer Commons, an OA app pulling together data and research to help patients find treatment options for their type of cancer.
http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/cancer-survivor-aims-to-805985.html http://www.cancercommons.org/

* OCLC and HathiTrust launched WorldCat Local, a tool allowing users to discover HathiTrust deposits from WorldCat records.
http://www.oclc.org/news/releases/2011/20114.htm

* Martin Johnson opened up the source code for Researchpages, his still-running 2006 social networking site for scientists, and called for someone to take over the site or help run it.
http://martwine.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/researchpages-code-set-free/

* Wolfram Alpha released version 2.0 of its open API.  
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/WolframAlpha-Releases-API-Version-20-1383529.htm

* Joomla, the open-source content management system, released version 1.6.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000762

* Creative Commons (CC) launched a guide to license metadata called CC Rights Expression Language (CC REL) by Example. The guide, primarily for developers and publishers, gives examples of HTML to use for various licenses and types of works.
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/25962

 + Awards and milestones

* Ventura R. Pérez was named the first SPARC Innovator of 2010 for his work on the new multidisciplinary OA journal, Landscapes of Violence.
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5716.html
http://www.arl.org/sparc/innovator/ventura-perez.shtml

* Brewster Kahle received the Zoia Horn Intellectual Freedom Award for his successful 2008 court battle against the FBI's demand for information about a user of the Internet Archive. 
http://blog.archive.org/2011/01/04/brewster-kahle-receives-the-zoia-horn-intellectual-freedom-award/

* Barbara Godard was posthumously inducted into the Royal Society of Canada in recognition of her lifetime of feminist scholarship, including her work in providing OA to the full backfile of the feminist literary journal, Tessera.
http://www.yorku.ca/yfile/archive/index.asp?Article=16191

* The Open Folklore project received the 2011 Outstanding Collaboration Citation from the American Library Association's Association of Library Collections and Technical Services.
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/17094.html
http://jasonbairdjackson.com/2011/01/28/outstanding-collaboration-citation-for-open-folklore/

* Outsell named Flat World Knowledge to its list of the top "30 to Watch" in 2011.  Flat World is the world's largest publisher of OA textbooks.
http://pressitt.com/smnr/Outsell-Names-Flat-World-Knowledge-Among-Top-30-to-Watch-Innovators-Disruptors-in-2011/3133/

* Daniel Mietchen released 15 candidates for open science breakthroughs of the year 2010.  The voting is open until February 7, 2011.
http://goo.gl/jhY0z

* DuraSpace announced that there are now more than 1,000 DSpace installations in almost 100 different countries worldwide.  "[W]ell over a third of the known institutional repositories [use] DSpace [and] each month over the last year, the DSpace registry...added between 20-30 new repositories...."
http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/duraspace/2011/01/27/dspace-user-community-reaches-milestone/

* Open Journal Systems announced that the software now has at least 8,300 installations around the world, not just for journals but also for "reports, learning management systems, monographs, and more...."
http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/3512

* The University of British Columbia passed the milestone of 30,000 deposits in its institutional repository.
http://blogs.ubc.ca/circle/2011/01/31/celebrating-circle%E2%80%99s-30000th-item/

* In January, RePEc passed the milestone of indexing one million works in economics, of which 88% can be downloaded. The database includes nearly 60% journal articles, 39% working papers, and a small number of books, book chapters, and software. The material has been indexed by volunteers in nearly 1,300 institutions. http://blog.repec.org/2011/01/25/repec-now-indexes-over-one-million-works/

* In December, RePEc added 14 new archives and passed several milestones:  6,000,000 references extracted, 2,500,000 citations linked within RePEc, 400,000 downloads through New Economics Papers.
http://blog.repec.org/2011/01/06/repec-in-december-2010-and-a-look-back-at-2010/

* The SHERPA/RoMEO database now lists more than 900 publisher copyright and self-archiving policies.
http://romeo.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2011/01/21/sherparomeo-announces-its-900th-publisher/

* Wikipedia turned 10 years old. 
http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

 + Other

* The EIFL Open Access program called for tenders for OA advocacy campaigns from EIFL partner countries.  "Of particular interest are scholarly and scientific researchers, universities and colleges, and university presses and society publishers....The deadline for applications is February 28th, 2011."
http://www.eifl.net/no-49-january-february-2011#callforproposals
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5732.html

* European Network for Copyright in support of Education and Science (ENCES) signed the May 2010 the Copyright for Creativity declaration. 
http://www.ences.eu/newsarchive/9ab41da27dc9c4d82241af33157b5a85/?tx_mininews_pi1[showUid]=37

* The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) announced it is fighting a 1,200% increase from Access Copyright in the fees charged to universities for using copyrighted materials for course packs and handouts.
http://thesheaf.com/blog/news/2011/01/06/6564/

* The International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) proposed a workshop on OA to be part of the May 2011 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Forum.  For those interested in supporting the workshop, IFLA launched a community group to discuss OA issues.
http://www.ifla.org/en/news/open-access-at-the-wsis-forum-2011

* The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) is accepting applications to host its five "Scholarly Communication 101" road shows during 2011.  As usual, OA is among the topics.  Applications are due by February 7, 2011.  
http://ala.org/ala/newspresscenter/news/pr.cfm?id=5935

* The Library of Congress chose Cornell University's Legal Information Institute (LII) to develop new methods to preserve, analyze, organize and retrieve OA versions of bills, public laws, and presidential documents.
http://blog.law.cornell.edu/blog/2011/01/05/library-of-congress-taps-lii-for-expertise-in-legislative-information/

* The Open Knowledge Foundation launched a Working Group on Open Legislation.
http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/openlegislation

* Benjamin Hennig created a world map showing each country in proportion to the number of events it hosted for Open Access Week 2010.
http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/?p=1092

* The Norman Rockwell Museum launched ProjectNORMAN (New Online Rockwell Media Art & Archive Network), which catalogues, digitizes, and provides OA to its entire collection. The project now includes thousands of photos, sketches, and paintings.
http://www.nrm.org/2011/01/norman-rockwell-museum-announces-online-debut-of-projectnorman/

* BMJ converted its blogs from gratis to libre OA under CC-BY-NC licenses.
http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj-journals-development-blog/2011/01/28/bmj-blogs-become-fully-open-access/
http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/

* The Association of American Publishers and DC Principles Coalition charge that NIH Images, a new OA database, uses images from journal articles without permission. http://www.pspcentral.org/documents/PSPDCPrinciplesLettertoNIHreImagesDatabase.doc
http://www.dcprinciples.org/news/collins.pdf

 ----------

Coming this month

Here are some important OA-related events coming up in February.

* February 7, 2011.  Deadline for applying to host one of the 2011 "Scholarly Communication 101" road shows by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).  
http://ala.org/ala/newspresscenter/news/pr.cfm?id=5935

* February 28, 2011.  Deadline for submitting grant proposals to the EIFL Open Access program.
http://www.eifl.net/no-49-january-february-2011#callforproposals

* February 28, 2011.  Project SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) comes to an end.
http://project-soap.eu/

* OA-related conferences in February 2011.
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/2010#February

* Other OA-related conferences
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Events

 ==========

This is the SPARC Open Access Newsletter (ISSN 1546-7821), written by Peter Suber and published by SPARC.  The views I express in this newsletter are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of SPARC or other sponsors.

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http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/archive.htm

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http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm

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Peter Suber
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters
peter.suber@gmail.com

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/

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