Welcome to the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #144
April 2, 2010
by Peter SuberRead this issue online
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/04-02-10.htm
Contents
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SOAN is published and sponsored by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).
http://www.arl.org/sparc/Additional support is provided by Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL), experts in converting research documents to XML.
http://www.dclab.com/public_access.aspThe winter coat factor: A small spring thought
Look at how people decide to put away their winter coat as spring arrives. It's a small decision, but it shows how people differ in their readiness to change. Some put on their winter coat every morning until the weather has been warm for a week or even a month. Some eagerly put it away on the first warm day, even if they have to spend the next week or month shivering in their shirt sleeves. The late changers put up with some sweat and the early changers put up with some chill. The two types differ, but not in their intelligence or understanding.
In any given neighborhood, the weather changes for everyone at the same rate, even if the rate itself is jerky and uneven. So why do we see the variation in response, even within the same neighborhood? Part of the answer is that we're comfortable at different temperatures. Granted. We also differ in our predictions of what will happen tomorrow, next week, and next month. The rest is complicated, but for convenience we can call it temperamental. We differ in our readiness to accept change, when change might be costly, and in our readiness to resist change, when resistance might be costly. Eventually everyone behaves as if winter is over and spring is here. But we're not all ready at the same time.
People respond differently to the case for OA in part because they understand it differently, including some clear cases of misunderstanding. Here I don't even want to try to estimate the size of that fraction. But whether we consider it to be large or small, we should make room for another large fraction that we could call temperamental. Call it the winter coat factor.
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A verb for the act providing open access
I'm not sure what I expected when I called for a verb to replace "to provide OA to" last month.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/03-02-10.htm#contest
I think I'd have guessed that 5-10 people might send 5-10 ideas. In fact, 51 people sent 170 ideas. Thanks to all who wrote in. Thanks for your ideas and thanks for having fun with this.
I really do want a better verb to use in my own writing than the dry and awkward phrase "to provide OA to". Once I decided to take my appeal public, I thought I might as well set the bar high. My dream verb would be short, sweet, unambiguous, and at least somewhat self-explanatory. It wouldn't sound like insider jargon or make OA sound esoteric, technical, or difficult. I didn't know whether my dream verb might be out there, waiting for adoption, but I wanted enlist a bunch of creative people to help explore the territory.
The thought crossed my mind that no single word could meet all my criteria. It appeared that any contender would face a dilemma. If the word already existed, then it would already carry a meaning, and probably more than one. Since no single word already means "to provide OA to" --let alone that and nothing else--, then it would have to be ambiguous. But if the word didn't already exist, then it would be unfamiliar, at least at first, and sound like insider jargon.
But I knew that sometimes an elegant coinage could pass through the horns of the dilemma. A few examples are "debug" (verb), "online" (adjective), and "software" (noun). As new coinages, they didn't carry the freight of older meanings; and as apt and suggestive coinages, they didn't carry an insider odor or they quickly lost it. I also knew that familiar words could take on new meanings without confusing ambiguity, for example "crash" and "flame" (verbs) and "bit" and "hardware" (nouns). I knew that older words could be revived and retargeted and still remain comfortably familiar and unambiguous, for example "avatar" (noun).
The reader nominations fell into five categories:
1. Existing verbs
For example: disseminate, free, open, post, unbound, uncork, and unlock. (The examples I list here are actual nominations.) The advantage of using an existing verb is its familiarity. The disadvantage is that the new meaning must coexist, perhaps ambiguously, with the existing meaning. We may not speak of "uncorking" TA literature, but we do speak of "disseminating" TA literature.
2. Existing nouns or adjectives used as verbs
For example: common (as a verb), gift (as a verb), open-access or OA (as verbs), public or publick (as verbs), and suber (not my idea!). Like existing verbs, these words are familiar, at least as nouns and adjectives. Their unfamiliarity as verbs is two-edged: it helps them avoid ambiguity, but it also burdens them with the awkwardness of verbification. However, if we're starting to accept talk about "open-sourcing" a software project, as several readers pointed out, then we could start to accept talk about "open-accessing" an article, journal, or book.
3. Rare or obsolete verbs revived and repurposed
For example: beteem, exburse, expone, manumit, and ope. (Look them up!) Because these words already exist, they might be familiar; and because they're rare, they might be unambiguous in their new roles. The risk is that they might reverse this. Insofar as they're rare, they'll be unfamiliar, and insofar as they're familiar, they might be ambiguous.
4. New variations on existing verbs
For example: commonize, defetter, enopen, freeline, freeport, freeshare, oapen, opaccess, and openize. These variations can always be unambiguous. When they succeed, they're familiar enough to be comfortable; and when they don't, they can be unfamiliar and awkward.
5. New coinages
For example: abra, apertize, ceecee, exorn, oacce, oclone, and oplish. As new coinages, these words can be completely unambiguous. The question is how far their use of familiar roots or allusions makes them comfortable and somewhat self-explanatory.
Last month I criticized a few possibilities in advance. I thought "open" would be ambiguous. ("We already say 'open the journal and 'open the book' with another meaning in mind.") But that didn't stop three readers from suggesting "open". And I'm glad they did. Dave Puplett, David Solomon, and Tom Wilson made a good case that "open" can usefully serve this role, despite the ambiguity, and that context can usually make the intended meaning clear.
I criticized "liberate" for being "a little ambiguous, a little precious, and suggest[ing] an overcoming of resistance which is by no means intrinsic to OA." But three readers didn't share my objections and put it forward anyway.
I also criticized "openize" and "accessibilitate" for being ugly. But one reader didn't share my objection to "openize". Another, while steering clear of "accessibilitate", nominated "accessorize" and "accessitate".
In case we needed it, this is evidence that we don't share the same criteria, adding to the difficulty of finding a word that might gain wide acceptance.
Bottom line: I didn't find my dream verb. But I did find several that I already use. I found several that I can imagine using when the context makes the meaning clear. And I found several that I can imagine becoming less ambiguous and more familiar, and hence more acceptable, after some uptake and circulation.
For example, here some of the nominated terms that I find I already use on occasion:
* "Open" and "open up" (Dave Puplett, David Solomon, Tom Wilson)
Tom Wilson: "I suggest that simply using 'open' will do fine: e.g., 'Cambridge UP has announced that it will open the Journal of Fuzzy Thinking...' or 'Elsevier will open 40% of its journals...' It is short, sweet, to the point and probably uses many fewer letters than any reasonable alternative." Dave Puplett: "I agree that it's best not to look too far afield for the right word. We have it already - 'open' is the most important part of 'open access' anyway. I'm sure you'll get more detailed suggestions, but just this word alone carries enough weight now I think, and would make perfect sense in every context relating to disseminating research." Douglas Carnall: " 'open up' is probably the most colloquial solution."
* "Post" (Stevan Harnad, Peter Pennefather, Arthur Sale)
Stevan Harnad: "I think the word for 'providing OA to' already exists, and it's 'post' (as it is now used in the online age)....'Post' also has the virtue of stressing that it is really authors who are providing OA to their work, even if the way they do it is to publish with an OA publisher who posts...it for them." Peter Pennefather: "I believe that early newspaper printers use to 'post' runs of their newspapers in the the print shop widows for all to read. The word 'post' refers to placing information in public view."
* "Share" (Graeme Baldwin, Denise Troll Covey, Alexa McCray, Jared Myers, P0lyM0rpH)
Alexa McCray: "I submit that it is short, sweet, and rather more than less self-explanatory." Graeme Baldwin: " 'share'...has the important connotation of no money changing hands." Denise Troll Covey: "Share is what academics are supposed to do with their work....Yes, we can share non-OA literature, but the context in which OA advocates will be speaking / writing should make clear our particular meaning."
* "Unbound". Sue Kriegsman nominated "unbound" and reminded me that I used the related term "unbind" in a 2004 essay --both "unbinding" as an adjective ("an unbinding project") and "unbind" as a verb ("asking a journal to unbind a given article").
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/unbind.htm
If some politicians are social liberals and fiscal conservatives, then I suppose I'm an access liberal and diction conservative. I know that language evolves, and that unacceptable words can become acceptable over time through nothing more complicated than usage and acceptance. In fact, that's how I defend my use of new terms against diction Neanderthals. But while I'm an early adopter of new software, I'm a late adopter of new words. I'm still reluctant to use "access" as a verb, even though I've watched it grow in acceptance over the past decade. I don't think I'll ever use "impact" as a verb, even though it too has grown in acceptance during the same period.
Another symptom of my diction conservatism: I didn't use the terms "green OA" and "gold OA" for years after Stevan Harnad introduced them and they began to spread. I agreed that we needed good, short terms for what these terms now designate, and I agreed that they did the job well, or that they would do the job well once they were widely accepted as doing the job. But they were not self-explanatory, and I couldn't afford to use terms that readers wouldn't understand. I knew that I could use them along with definitions, but I preferred to use self-explanatory phrases that didn't need definitions. However, the terms are now widely understood, and have been for a few years, even if they're also widely misunderstood. (Unfortunately we can't insist on words that are widely understood but not also widely misunderstood; then we'd have to do without essential terms like "evolution" and "socialism".)
I departed from my diction conservativism when I introduced "gratis OA" and "libre OA". But I departed reluctantly and perhaps even late. There was an urgent need for terms to articulate that distinction, and I felt its urgency almost every day. I decided that it was more important to fill that need than to let diction conservativism stand in the way. Even when proposing the terms, I worried that they might not be familiar or self-explanatory and wondered whether that might be turned to advantage. At the same time I resisted more familiar terms (like "free" for "libre") on the grounds of ambiguity.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/08-02-08.htm#gratis-libre
The handful of terms above already pass my filter of diction conservatism: open, open up, post, share, and unbind. I've used them on occasion and will look for occasions to use them more often, starting in the Roundup section below. Here's another handful that don't pass my filter of diction conservatism today but that I can imagine passing the filters of writers more ready than I to be early adoptors.
* "Enopen" (Tony Locke)
* "Freeline" (Grelda Ortiz)
* "Freeport" (Bob Kobres) (But for now, this reminds Mainers like me of L.L. Bean.)
* "Freeshare" (Matt Hodgkinson, Mark Kriegsman)
* "Open access" or "OA" (as a verb) (Brad Baxter, Jet Cloud, Benjamin Geer, Susan Lafferty, Gabrielle Mackey, Miriam Rigby, Dana Roth, Mark Siegal)
Finally, if you don't trust your own diction filters and want to count votes, 10 terms out of the 170 were nominated by more than one person. In descending order:
* "Open access" or "OA" as a verb (8 nominations: Brad Baxter, Jet Cloud, Benjamin Geer, Susan Lafferty, Gabrielle Mackey, Miriam Rigby, Dana Roth, Mark Siegal)
* "Share" (4 nominations as an ordinary word: Graeme Baldwin, Denise Troll Covey, Alexa McCray, Jared Myers; one nomination as an acronym: P0lyM0rpH; as an acronym it would be "show how academics reposit, or access reposits, education")
* "Disseminate" (5 nominations: Michael Fayez, Mark Forster, Cherry Gordon, Matt Hodgkinson, Susan Wortman)
* "Liberate" (3 nominations: Douglas Carnall, Mark Forster, Matt Hodgkinson)
* "Oapen" (3 nominations: Anne Bindslev, Fumio Iwamura, Kay Vyhnanek)
* "Post" (3 nominations: Stevan Harnad, Peter Pennefather, Arthur Sale)
* "Open" (2 nominations: David Solomon, Tom Wilson)
* "Copyleft" (2 nominations: Mark Forster, Matt Hodgkinson)
* "Free" (2 nominations: Jörgen Eriksson, Mark Forster)
* "Freeshare" (2 nominations: Matt Hodgkinson, Mark Kriegsman)
Of these plural nominations, six are existing verbs (share, disseminate, liberate, post, open, and free), two are existing nouns used as verbs (open access, copyleft), and two are coinages (oapen, freeshare).
I've posted a summary of the nominations and nominators to the SPARC Open Access Forum for further discussion. If you have new suggestions, please send them to the forum as well.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5433.html
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Correction
In the January issue, I wrote, "The University of Michigan Press was put under the control of the library, and moved to a model in which its monographs will be TA digital and POD (as opposed to OA digital and POD)."
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-10.htm#2009
I'm happy to report that this is only half the story. It's true that the press will charge for the digital editions as well as the POD editions. But the same digital editions will also be OA through the HathiTrust. (Thanks to Maria Bonn.)
According to Bonn, "In fact, all of our scholarly monographs are or soon will be available for free viewing in HathiTrust almost contemporaneous with publication (a link from each book takes the user to a print sales point). UMP currently has almost 800 books available for free, with more added almost weekly. Certain trade books (mostly regional titles) are embargoed for six months, and certain high-use text books, mainly in English as a Second Language are exempt while we assess the impact of open availability. You can view the current collection here: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis;c=622231186 ."
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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. (Remember that the Roundup section no longer includes new developments on open educational resources or public sector information.)
+ Policies
** The Academic Council at Duke University voted unanimously to adopt an OA mandate.
http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2010/03/accessvote.html
http://library.duke.edu/blogs/scholcomm/2010/03/19/open-access-at-duke/
** The University of Lincoln University Research Committee agreed to adopt an OA mandate, starting with the 2010-11 academic year.
http://research.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2010/03/30/use-of-repository-to-become-universal-practice-at-lincoln/
** The University of Kansas revised its OA mandate. The new version requires deposit as well as permission (both subject to waiver). The previous version only required permission (subject to waiver).
http://www.lib.ku.edu/public/ScholComm/documents/OA_policy_passed_Fac_Sen_2-11-2010.pdf
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2010/mar/01/ku-pushes-increase-public-access-published-researc/
** Oregon State University's College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences (COAS) adopted an OA policy to encourage, not require, green OA. After a COAS faculty meeting expressed unanimous support for the policy, a COAS administrative meeting voted unanimously to adopt it.
http://www.coas.oregonstate.edu/media/OpenAccessPolicy_web.pdf
* Martin Halbert and two colleagues released a preview of the draft OA mandate under consideration at the University of Northern Texas.
http://openaccess.unt.edu/sites/default/files/03-10/UNT_OA_Admin_Retreat_Presentation_Revised_25Mar2010_0.pdf
* The University of Pennsylvania launched a Committee on Open Access Publishing, charged to make policy recommendations before the end of the current academic year. http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/volumes/v56/n26/openaccess.html
* Students are pushing for an OA policy at the University of Saskatchewan.
http://thesheaf.com/2010/03/print-your-own-textbooks/
* RAND Europe released a briefing paper on the benefits of OA repositories for higher educational institutions.
http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/2009/RAND_RB9411.pdf
* SPARC released a guide to university-based OA journal funds.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5409.html
http://www.arl.org/sparc/openaccess/funds/
* SPARC asked US citizens to post comments to US government agency web sites calling for OA to publicly-funded research.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5417.html
* Mike Rossner, Executive Director of Rockefeller University Press, sent an letter to the House Committee on Science and Technology, rebutting objections to FRPAA from the publishing lobby.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5430.html
* After the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) closed its blog-based public comment period on OA for publicly-funded research (January 21, 2010), it removed the blog and the comments it had collected. Last month it relaunched the blog and restored the comments, including all those submitted by email and never posted to the blog. (OSTP asks for patience while it "continue[s] the process of analyzing the literature and comments.")
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/03/08/public-access-policy-update
* In February, Rep. David (D-OR) introduced the Open College Textbook Act of 2010 (H.R. 4575), a new bill "to authorize grants for the creation, update, or adaption [sic] of open textbooks...."
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=111_cong_bills&docid=f:h4575ih.txt.pdf
* Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) introduced the Public Online Information Act (POIA, HR 4858), a bill to require US administrative agencies to adopt policies for assuring OA to their PSI.
http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/policy/poia/
* The new broadband plan from the US Federal Communications Commission would provide OA to the court records in the PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) database.
http://www.internetnews.com/government/article.php/3867876
* Sólveig Thorsteinsdóttir summarized the OA mandates in the Nordic countries: four funder mandates from Norway and Sweden, and 32 institutional mandates from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden.
http://www.sciecom.org/ojs/index.php/sciecominfo/article/viewFile/3548/3127
* The National and University Library of Iceland launched OpenAccess.is, a central location for OA information and advocacy in Iceland.
http://openaccess.is/
* By a wide margin (633 for, 13 against, 16 abstentions), the European Parliament approved a resolution criticizing the secrecy and substance of ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement).
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4857/125/
http://bit.ly/aqkLcG
* Michael Geist argued that if ACTA is adopted, "it could threaten the institutional repository movement...."
http://ow.ly/1fAnA
+ Journals
* The Ethiopian electronic Journal on Research and Innovation Foresight is a new peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary journal from NES-Global.
http://www.abugidainfo.com/?p=13933
* Rationality, Markets and Morals is a new peer-reviewed OA journal "at the Intersection of Philosophy and Economics" published by Frankfurt School Verlag.
http://www.rmm-journal.de/index.html
* The Journal of Intellectual Property, Information Technology and E-Commerce Law is a new peer-reviewed OA journal with financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).
http://www.jipitec.eu/
* Portal, the LIS journal from Johns Hopkins University Press, is converting to OA. The peer-reviewed and copy-edited articles will become OA as soon as the copy-editing is complete, and prior to publication. The final published editions will still be TA. (It's not clear how the OA and TA versions will differ.)
http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/press_releases/summaries/PLA_access.pdf
* Nature News converted to gratis OA.
http://www.nature.com/press_releases/naturenews.html
* Nature released an OA supplement on Ageing.
http://www.nature.com/nature/supplements/insights/ageing/index.html#editorial
* Popular Science opened its entire 137-year backfile.
http://www.popsci.com/announcements/article/2010-03/new-browse-137-years-popsci-archive-free
* The Public Library of Science added Pubget links to all its journal sites, enabling PLoS readers to click through from reference links to full-text articles. When the articles are OA, the links take users directly to full-text. When the articles are TA, the links take users either to the publisher site or to a special PubGet site where more than 200+ institutions support subsidized access.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5403.html
* Standpoint magazine released a free mobile app and new business model supporting OA to some content in each new issue and fremium access to the rest.
http://exacteditions.blogspot.com/2010/03/standpoint-app-released.html
* Charlie Rapple pointed out a new problem with hybrid OA journals: link resolvers often treat the OA articles as TA.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/20100213
* The 2008 agreement between the Max Planck Society and Springer allowing Max Planck authors to publish without publication fees in Springer hybrid OA journals has expired. But the two organizations are discussing a new agreement.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5413.html
* India's Inflibnet Centre (Information and Library Network) is providing Indian universities with subsidized access to 4,000 TA journals in the same channel as 1,000 OA journals.
http://beta.thehindu.com/education/article213813.ece
+ Repositories and databases
* Poland's Adam Mickiewicz University AMUR (Adam Mickiewicz University Repository), its IR. The university adopted Poland's first ETD mandate in November 2009.
http://www.eifl.net/cps/sections/services/eifl-oa/oa-news/2010_03_26_launch-amur-open-access
* India's Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute launched an institutional repository.
http://eprints.cmfri.org.in/
* Trinity College Dublin upgraded TARA, its institutional repository.
http://bit.ly/aWCMu9
* The OA repository of Ireland's Health Service Executive, Lenus, joined the OA WorldWideScience Alliance.
http://www.hse.ie/eng/services/news/lenus.html
* The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released the Health and Environmental Research Online (HERO) database, an OA collection of 300,000+ research articles underlying EPA's regulatory decisions.
http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/d0cf6618525a9efb85257359003fb69d/cb9fdf7b44e21cd8852576f000537a25!OpenDocument
* The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced plans to create a Genetic Testing Registry (GTR), an OA database of "information submitted voluntarily by genetic test providers".
http://www.nih.gov/news/health/mar2010/od-18.htm
* Researchers at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven launched CHDWiki, an OA wiki-based repository for exploring the relationships between genes and congenital heart defects (CHDs).
http://genomemedicine.com/content/2/3/16
* GreyNet is gradually buying the rights to deposit the papers from its past conferences into its OA repository, OpenSIGLE, and expects to finish the series by autumn 2010. It just deposited the 21 papers from the Second International Conference on Grey Literature (Washington D.C., November 2-3, 1995.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5415.html
+ Data
* Chilean seismologists shared data on the earthquake which hit central Chile on February 27.
http://www.scidev.net/en/news/chile-to-open-up-quake-data-to-global-community.html
* The UK Geological Society released a collection of OA research on Chilean tectonics.
http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/gsl/publications/lyellcollection/page7188.html
* Students at Columbia University's School of Public Administration (SIPA) are organizing "crisis information" gathered from text messages, emails, and Twitter feeds, to assist with humanitarian aid to victims of the Chilean earthquake.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/17/student-volunteers-map-cr_n_502957.html
* An editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) concluded that "it is now time for all [medical journal] editors to require that academic researchers have full access to all trial data and that all industry-sponsored trials include independent statistical analysis and assurance."
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/303/12/1196
* The Open Knowledge Foundation launched a working group on open bibliographic data.
http://blog.okfn.org/2010/03/03/new-working-group-on-open-bibliographic-data/
* Six libraries in Cologne became the first German libraries to commit to OA for their bibliographic data. The libraries used CC0 to assign more than 5.4 million records to the public domain.
http://www.hbz-nrw.de/projekte/linked_open_data/english_version/
http://www.hbz-nrw.de/dokumentencenter/presse/pm/datenfreigabe_engl
* The Texas Digital Library (TDL) launched the OA Texas Water Digital Library (TWDL), which will use OAI-ORE to harvest water research from databases and websites across the state.
http://blogs.lib.utexas.edu/texlibris/2010/03/09/texas-water-researchers-working-with-the-texas-digital-library/
* The Harvard School of Public Health launched the Firearms Research Digest, a database of OA summaries (not full-texts) of research articles on firearms violence from journals in medicine, criminology, and the social sciences.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/2010-releases/hsph-public-online-library-firearms-research.html
* Elysium Open Access is a new platform for data sharing through health information exchanges (HIS).
http://bit.ly/dB8Fg2
+ Books
* John Hilton III's doctoral dissertation, providing new evidence that full-text OA books stimulate sales of print editions, was just approved by Brigham Young University.
http://www.johnhiltoniii.org/free-e-books-dissertation-published/
http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd3433.pdf
* John Hilton III and David Wiley interviewed ten book authors who consented to allow OA editions of their books (one novelist and nine scholars in the sciences, law, and humanities). The authors explain their motives and whey they believed that the OA editions increased the sales of the print editions and the impact of their work.
http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/IR&CISOPTR=809&CISOBOX=1&REC=4
* OAPEN released a major report on business models for OA books in the humanities and social sciences.
http://www.oapen.org/images/OpenAccessModels.pdf
* Google started funding scholars in the humanities to text-mine the Google Books corpus.
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Google-Starts-Grant-Program/22190/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
* The University of Virginia expanded its partnership with Google (as Stanford did the month before).
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/03/university-of-virginia-expands-google.html
* Three French book publishers announced that they will sue Google for digitizing their books without permission.
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/115133-french-publisher-gallimard-to-sue-google.html.rss
* Flat World Knowledge, the OA textbook publisher, announced a deal with Barnes & Noble College Booksellers and NACS Media Solutions. After professors revise and remix a Flat World textbook to suit their needs, an affiliated college bookstore will create an inexpensive POD edition for students who want print editions.
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Flat-World-Knowledge-Partners-With-Barnes-Noble-NACS-Media-Solutions-Lower-Cost-College-NYSE-BKS-1141424.htm
* The Apple iPad will allow users to upload and read OA books from Project Gutenberg. (Was this in doubt?)
http://appadvice.com/appnn/2010/03/exclusive-ipad-ibooks-features-gutenberg-project-library/
* Charles W. Bailey Jr. just published published Digital Scholarship 2009, a print book containing the latest editions of four of his large, OA bibliographies: the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2009 Annual Edition, the Institutional Repository Bibliography, the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography, and the Google Book Search Bibliography.
http://digital-scholarship.com/digitalkoans/2010/03/28/digital-scholarship-2009-published/
* Berlin Academic is a new publisher of OA books in the humanities and social sciences, in German and in English.
http://www.buchmarkt.de/content/41758-berlin-verlag-gruendet-berlin-academic.htm
* Every book published by Rice University Press is OA + POD.
http://bit.ly/bb2Qsr
* Harvard's Open Collection Program launched a new exhibit, is Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History.
http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/reading/
* Six Swiss libraries launched the the e-rara project, which digitizes and opens books from the 16th to the 19th centuries. At launch it had 800 titles and by next year plans to have several thousand.
http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/schweiz/bibliotheken_stellen_kostbare_buecher_und_karten_ins_netz_1.5228405.html
* The Swiss e-rara project (previous item) initially disseminated the digital copies of its public-domain books under CC BY-NC-SA licenses. Digital Allmendring objected that PD works couldn't have CC licenses, and e-rara agreed to remove the licenses and acknowledge that the digital copies were themselves PD.
http://blog.aPDllmend.ch/2010/03/25/601/
http://blog.allmend.ch/2010/03/29/e-rara-antwort-zu-unserer-anfrage-bezueglich-lizenzen-fuer-werke/
* The third edition of Open Notebook Science Challenge book is now available from the Bradley laboratory at Drexel University.
http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2010/03/17/ons-solubility-book-available/
* Collaborative Futures is a new, collaboratively-written OA book about collaboration.
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/21374
+ Studies and surveys
* The latest version of John Houghton's analysis of the economic costs and benefits of large-scale OA policies was published in Prometheus (co-authored with Charles Oppenheim), along with five commentaries by other scholars.
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all?content=10.1080/08109021003676359
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g920250275~tab=toc
* A survey of scholars in the field of communications found that a third avoided topics raising copyright issues, a fifth faced publisher resistance to scholarly use of copyrighted work, and a fifth abandoned research in progress because of copyright problems. Many are told to obtain permission to discuss or criticize copyrighted works. The survey authors attribute the problems to "misinformation and gatekeeper conservatism".
http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/publications/clipping_our_own_wings_copyright_and_creativity_in_communication_research
* A new study by Donald King shows that if all TA journals converted to fee-based OA, and if the average fee is $1,500, then one-year cost of paying the fees for US authors would be $427.5 million (or 0.76% of of the US R&D budget). If the average fee is $2,500, the cost would be $712.5 million (or 1.27% of the US R&D budget). Heather Morrison uses King's data to calculate that the conversion could result in $3.4 billion in savings in the US alone.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march10/king/03king.html http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2010/03/us-systemic-savings-from-full-shift-to.html
* A new survey showed that about 30% of scholars at the University of Kashmir have published in OA journals and 10% have deposited in OA repositories.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00012531011035008
* Alma Swan released an analysis of the studies to date on the OA impact advantage.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18516/
* Ben Wagner released an annotated bibliography of the studies to date on the OA impact advantage.
http://www.istl.org/10-winter/article2.html
* Arthur Sale wrote up the lessons from his experience on persuading authors to deposit their work in an institutional repository.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5427.html
* Siddharth Singh, Michael Witt, and Dorothea Salo are writing a comparison of DSpace, EPrints, Fedora, and Zentity, and invite institutions which have recently chosen a repository package to tell them what criteria they used to make the choice.
http://scienceblogs.com/bookoftrogool/2010/03/rfc_repository_platform_compar.php
* Daniel Mietchen announced the results of his reader survey of the Open Science Breakthroughs of 2009.
http://ways.org/en/blogs/2009/dec/16/breakthroughs_of_the_year_2009_in_open_science_the_polymath_project_and_articlelevel_metrics
+ Software and tools
* DSpace released version 1.6.
http://blog.stuartlewis.com/2010/03/05/dspace-1-6-released/
* The newly upgraded repository software at the the University of Rochester (IR-Plus or IR+) is designed to encourage deposits by connecting with the process of writing.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/03/02/repositories
* The University of Bielefeld released an update on two of its ongoing projects to use personal publication lists as the source for automated repository deposits.
http://libreas.wordpress.com/2010/03/25/projektbericht-automatische-aggregation-wissenschaftlicher-volltexte-fur-die-anreicherung-von-oa-repositorien/
* IBIMA Publishing, which publishes 25+ OA journals, now supports formats for access from mobile phones.
http://www.i-newswire.com/academic-research-is-now-published/25065
* ScienceStage.com added a multimedia search engine and recommendation system.
http://sciencestage.com/resources/grand-unified-solution-scientists-powerful-universal-search-engine-makes-scientific-research-easy-fi
* BioMedSearch is a new free search engine biomedical research, indexing PubMed and "a large collection of theses, dissertations, and other publications not found anywhere else". It also supports saved searches, saved documents, and comments.
http://www.biomedsearch.com/
* Google added data visualization tools to its public data search engine.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/statistics-for-changing-world-google.html
+ Awards and milestones
* Alex Batement won the 2010 Benjamin Franklin Award from the Bioinformatics Organization for his work on OA databases in biology.
http://www.bio-itworld.com/2010/04/01/franklin-award.html
* John Willinsky won the 2010 Kilgour Award based in part on the OA work of his Public Knowledge Project.
http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/2842
* NIH Director Francis S. Collins is one of the winners of this year's Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, for his work in mapping the human genome and providing OA to its data.
http://www.nih.gov/news/health/mar2010/od-10a.htm
* The Internet Archive won the Free Software Foundation's 2010 award for a Project of Social Benefit.
http://www.fsf.org/news/2009-free-software-awards
* RePEc passed the milestone of 500,000 journal articles indexed and 30,000 registered people, and 6,000 books indexed books.
http://blog.repec.org/2010/03/03/repec-in-february-2010/
* The CC-licensed photos at Flickr increased from 10 million to 135 million over four years. Among CC licenses, restrictive licenses are more common than CC-BY, but the frequency of restrictive CC licenses is decreasing and that of CC-BY is increasing.
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/20870
* Heather Morrison posted her quarterly update on the growth of OA. The DOAJ is adding more than two titles per day and the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine is adding more than 13,000 OA documents per day. ROARMAP lists more than 200 OA mandates.
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2010/03/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-march-31.html
* This year's International Day Against Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) will be May 4, 2010.
http://www.fsf.org/news/may-4-day-against-drm
* The Sunlight Foundation launched a Design for America contest "to reimagine government websites and to visualize government data and processes" in order "to make government data more accessible and comprehensible to the American public".
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/21361
* PLoS Computational Biology called for designs for its 2010 T-shirt.
http://www.plos.org/cms/node/516
* YouTube EDU turned one year old.
http://www.resourceshelf.com/2010/03/26/youtube-edu-celebrates-its-first-birthday/
* The MIT OA mandate turned one year old. During year since the policy was adopted, 850+ articles were deposited in the IR and more than 16 publishers signed on to support the policy.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/open-access-policy.html
* This newsletter turned nine years old. I launched it in March 2001 as the Free Online Scholarship Newsletter and in July 2003 renamed it the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/archive.htm
+ Other
* The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) adopted a new rule requiring members to disclose where they are registered, and adopted a new procedure for handling reports of misconduct by any of its members.
http://oaspa.org/blog/2010/03/19/oaspa-assessment-of-new-applications-and-complaints-procedures/
* The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) called for applications for funding to support OA repositories.
http://www.dfg.de/download/pdf/foerderung/programme/lis/ausschreibung_repositorien_100222.pdf
* JISC called for two sorts of funding proposals: "Strand A - Deposit. Ensuring take-up of solutions that enable and encourage author deposit of Open Access research outputs into repositories by embedding deposit into research or related practice....Strand B - Expose. Projects that enable content to be made available on the Web using structured data, in particular linked data which increases its potential value to researchers, teachers and learners...."
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5414.html
* LibriVox, the maker of OA audiobooks, launched a fund-raising campaign.
http://librivox.org/2010/02/24/librivox-needs-your-help/
* Librophile is a new tool from LibriVox for searching and browsing OA books and OA audio books.
http://lifehacker.com/5493850/librophile-makes-quick-work-of-finding-free-audio-and-ebooks
* Carl Malamud launched the International Amateur Scanning League, an "experiment in crowd-sourced digitization" which will digitize and open 3,000 DVDs from the US National Archives.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/technology/15fedflix.html?hp
* In the last eight months, Springer added 500,000+ images to SpringerImages. Some of the images are OA and some are not.
http://www.iwr.co.uk/information-world-review/news/2259525/two-million-scientific-medical
* BenchFly is a new site devoted to OA scientific lab videos. It has a novel method for using free searching to raise funds for research; see the video on the front page to learn how it works.
http://www.benchfly.com/
* C-Span digitized and opened nearly all of its video archive.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/arts/television/16cspan.html
* Wikipedia began adding libre OA videos to its articles and called for more.
http://videoonwikipedia.org/
* This month Wikipedia will introduce a range of enhancements to make editing easier.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2010/03/25/wikimedia-gets-ready-for-some-big-changes/
* Walter De Gruyter will publish OA editions of the proceedings of the semi-annual Dahlem Conferences, according to a new deal with the Free University of Berlin.
http://idw-online.de/pages/de/news359517&tbb=1
* The Swedish museum, Historiska Museet, adopted CC-BY-NC-ND and CC-BY-NC-SA licenses for its digital works.
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/20922
* The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin is digitizing the archive of David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) and will post it for OA in the fall.
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/press/releases/2010/dfw/
* The Berkman Center for Internet & Society and eIFL.net released Copyright for Librarians, an OA curriculum for librarians in developing countries.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5423.html
* Creative Commons called for public help in enlarging its Open Database of Educational Projects and Organizations (or ODEPO).
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/20868
* In two public letters, major US library associations called for "an open, public discussion of the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)" and argued "public access is an integral part of copyright law".
http://www.acrl.ala.org/acrlinsider/2010/03/25/arl-ala-and-acrl-call-for-openness-in-copyright-negotiations-and-enforcement-efforts/
* Musical Theatre Online! is a new OA archive of musical and music theatre from the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.
http://mith.umd.edu/announcing-musical-theatre-online/
* The Infrafrontier consortium, working on OA for "high-quality mouse models", added six new institutional members, including its first from outside Europe.
http://cordis.europa.eu/wire/index.cfm?fuseaction=article.Detail&rcn=21570&rev=0
* SPARC launched a Twitter feed.
http://twitter.com/SPARC_NA
* The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) launched a YouTube channel.
http://www.youtube.com/cnivideo
* The Wellesley College Library is conducting its first systematic journal cancellation review since 2003, to prepare for a $200,000 (8-9%) budget cut for the coming year.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6723367.html?nid=2673&source=title&rid=17392268
* Colorado State University will cut its library budget by $600,000 for the coming year.
http://www.collegian.com/index.php/article/2010/03/032410_library
* The Deutscher Hochschulverband [German Association of University Professors] called for an "education- and science-friendly" copyright policy that would rule out OA mandates. http://www.hochschulverband.de/cms1/pressemitteilung+M5eacaf755f9.html
----------
Coming this month
* OA-related conferences in April 2010
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/2010#April
* 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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Peter Suber
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters
peter.suber@gmail.com
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