Welcome to the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #159
July 2, 2011
by Peter Suber

Read this issue online
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-02-11.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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Open access and copyright

From the beginning, OA struggled against the widespread assumption that it must violate copyright law.  But this has been a struggle against perception, not reality.  In fact, steering clear of infringement has always been easier than steering clear of this false assumption and the harm it has caused. 

The assumption has made some authors fear OA.  It has made some institutions skittish about committing to OA.  It has needlessly weakened some OA policies, for example, by creating loopholes for dissenting publishers.  It has even been a dishonest pretext for bad legislation.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/10-02-08.htm#nih
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/03-02-09.htm#conyers

There are bullet-proof methods for OA publishers and repositories to avoid copyright problems.  These methods are better known today than they were five years ago, but we still struggle against the same false assumption, the same fear, the same skittishness, the same needless capitulation, and the same dishonesty.  Here's an attempt to clarify the situation in a dozen propositions.

(1) Fair use is not enough to authorize OA.  Gratis OA exceeds fair use by distributing a full-text work to a worldwide audience.  Libre OA exceeds fair use by permitting users of the work to exceed fair use
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/08-02-08.htm#gratis-libre

Clarifying fair use, pushing the envelope on fair use, and expanding fair use are all desirable.  But they're insufficient for OA.

Note that fair use isn't enough to authorize conventional TA publishing either. 

(2) The public domain (PD) is more than enough to authorize OA.  But it only authorizes OA for works in the PD, and most of the works for which we want OA are under copyright.  Hence, most of the time the PD is not enough either.

Protecting the PD, preventing retroactive copyright (piracy from the PD), and expanding the PD are all desirable.  But they're insufficient for OA to works under copyright, a category that covers nearly all new research articles.

Note that the PD is not enough to authorize conventional TA publishing of works under copyright either.

(3) If fair use and the public domain aren't enough to authorize OA for full-text works under copyright, then we need permission from the copyright holder. 

Notice where we've arrived.  OA for full-text works under copyright avoids infringement in exactly the same way that conventional TA publishing avoids infringement.  For sufficiently old work, OA and TA can rely on the public domain.  For newer work under copyright, they rely on rightsholder consent.

This is the first point on which the widespread assumption goes wrong.  It presupposes that conventional TA publishers have easy and natural methods to avoid infringement, and that OA providers have nothing but dubious or convoluted methods.  But the two camps use exactly the same methods. 

If a journal publishes a new article without the author's permission, it is guilty of infringement, whether the journal is OA or TA.  The publishing agreement is the means by which the author, as the original copyright holder, grants permission to the publisher.  Rightsholder consent frees the publisher to proceed without liability or fear of liability. 

OA journals, like TA journals, use contracts with authors to secure the needed permissions and avoid infringement.  OA repositories obtain permission from the rightsholders too, although sometimes that means obtaining it from authors before they transfer rights to a journal, and sometimes it means obtaining it from publishers after they acquire rights from authors. 

(4) Authors of new work are the copyright holders until or unless they transfer copyright to someone else, like a publisher.  Publishers only hold the rights that authors voluntarily transfer to them. 

This is the second point on which the pernicious widespread assumption goes wrong.  It presupposes that publishers always hold all rights.  A related third error is to presuppose that publishers typically use the rights they hold to oppose OA. 

Initially publishers don't hold any rights.  Even after authors sign publication agreements, authors may retain some rights and transfer others.  And even after publishers acquire rights from authors, many publishers choose to permit OA.  In fact, most surveyed TA publishers permit green OA and a growing number of publishers are experimenting with gold OA (more in #8).

(5) Authors are much more likely than conventional publishers to consent to OA.  This may not be true for novels or journalism, but it's true for scholarly journal articles.  Part of the reason is that scholarly journals do not pay authors.  Hence, authors of scholarly journal articles can consent to OA without losing revenue.  Another, related part of the explanation is that authors of scholarly journal articles write for impact, not for money, and OA increases their impact by enlarging their audience.
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

Consequently, the best strategy for obtaining rightsholder consent to OA is (1) to keep the key rights in the hands of authors, or (2) to transfer rights to OA publishers rather than TA publishers, or (3) to obtain permission from authors *before* they transfer rights to TA publishers.  The worst strategy is to transfer key rights to a corporation that won't permit OA and then hope to get permission.

(6) For similar reasons, it's easier to obtain copyright holder consent to OA for still-unpublished literature than already-published literature.  When we seek consent to OA for future literature, we ask the authors before they transfer any rights to publishers, and authors are more likely to consent than publishers.  When we seek consent for past literature, we usually have to ask publishers, not authors.

When we put ##4-6 together, we see the wisdom of rights-retention OA policies.  Funders like the Wellcome Trust and NIH require grantees to retain the non-exclusive right to authorize OA to future articles arising from their research grants.  Faculty at universities like Harvard and MIT vote to grant their institution the non-exclusive right to make their future work OA, though with an easy opt-out.

Both kinds of policy obtain permission from authors, when authors are still the rightsholders.  Both obtain permission for future, still-unpublished works rather than for past, already-published works. 

(7) Rights retention works best when authors do not act alone.

Individual authors acting alone may try to retain key rights to their still-unpublished articles, but it's not always easy or successful.  If they don't have the aid of funder or university policies to back them up, at least they have the aid of lawyer-drafted author addenda to their publishing agreements.  Author addenda help authors frame their requested contract modifications in legally precise and enforceable language. 
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Author_addenda

But author addenda are merely proposed contract modifications which publishers may take or leave, and individual authors have less bargaining power than funders or universities.  Publishers reject author addenda more often than they refuse to publish work by authors subject to OA institutional OA mandates.

By contrast, all surveyed publishers accommodate the rights-retention policy at the NIH, even if they pay lobbyists to oppose it and even if they have an unquestioned right (#12) to refuse to publish NIH-funded authors.  This is one of the strongest arguments for rights-retention OA mandates at funders and universities.
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Publisher_policies_on_NIH-funded_authors

(8) Most TA publishers (64%) already consent to green gratis OA.  But we want OA for all articles, regardless of where authors choose to publish.  And we want OA regardless of how publishers may modify their access policies in the future.  These are reasons for universities and funders to require rights retention, or at least to make rights retention the new default.

For the journals and publishers granting advanced permission for green gratis OA, see the SHERPA RoMEO database and its statistics page.
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/statistics.php

In addition to green OA, more and more publishers are experimenting with gold OA.  SHERPA currently lists 92 publishers offering hybrid OA options, including all of the largest publishers.
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/PaidOA.html

(9) Most OA journals (78%) don't offer libre OA.  That is, they publish under all-rights-reserved copyrights and don't allow uses beyond fair use. 

When I checked last week (June 24, 2011), 1,448 out of 6,647 journals in the DOAJ, or 21.8%, used some kind of CC license.
http://www.doaj.org/?func=licensedJournals
As of the same date, 747 or 11.2% had the SPARC Europe Seal of Approval, which requires CC-BY.
http://www.doaj.org/?func=sealedJournals

OA repositories are rarely in a position to obtain the permissions needed for libre OA.  Hence, we can't criticize or complain when most of their deposits are gratis, not libre.  But OA journals can easily obtain the permissions needed for libre OA.  When they don't offer libre OA, they have no excuse.  This is one of the largest missed opportunities of the OA movement to date.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/10-02-09.htm#2

Today most libre OA is gold OA.  But unfortunately it's not yet the case that most gold OA is libre OA, and unfortunately it's not even close.

(10) OA does not depend on copyright reform, let alone on the violation or abolition of copyright.  However, OA would benefit from reforms of the right kind and many dedicated people are working on them.

For example, here are some copyright reforms that would help the cause: 

* Shorten the term of copyright, or at least prevent it from becoming even longer every time Mickey Mouse is about to fall into the public domain. 

* Ban the retroactive extension of copyright to works in the public domain. 

* Allow OA for orphan works, with a takedown requirement if the rightsholder steps forward and complains. 

* Permit the circumvention of DRM in pursuit of non-infringing uses. 

* Recognize that some creative works generate revenue for creators, and some don't, and that creators of the former type are harmed by unauthorized copying while creators of the latter type are harmed by the default prohibition of copying.  That is, stop making royalty-free literature collateral damage in the war against revenue leaks. 

* Allow green OA, at least for royalty-free literature, within a certain time after publication, regardless of the publishing contract the author signed with a publisher. 

* Allow digitization and search indexing without permission when they result in no dissemination, or when the dissemination consists of nothing more than fair-use snippets. 

* Make the penalties for copyfraud (false claim of copyright) at least as severe as the penalties for infringement; that is, take the wrongful decrease in the circulation of ideas at least as seriously as the wrongful increase in the circulation of ideas. 

While OA would benefit from any of these reforms, it doesn't require any of them.  OA is compatible with copyright law as it is, despite its grotesque imbalance in favor of publishers.  OA needn't wait for copyright reform and hasn't waited.  Why?  Because rightsholder consent suffices, and rightsholders are consenting in growing numbers.

(11) It follows that the OA movement needn't, and shouldn't, support tactics that depend on deliberate infringement or knowing winks at infringement. 

I spelled out the reasons in a blog post from September 2009:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/09/guerilla-oa.html

I don't accept that advancing OA through deliberate violations of copyright law would do more good than harm.  I have three basic reasons:  (1) OA is already lawful and doesn't require the reform or violation of copyright law, even if it could leap forward with the right reforms.  (2) OA activists will never match the publishing industry's funds for litigation.  (3) One of the most persistent and harmful misunderstandings of OA is that it violates copyright law.  We've come a long way in educating policy-makers out of that misunderstanding....A campaign to give the publishing lobby its first valid evidence that OA violates copyright is the last thing we need.

For more detail, see Not Napster for science (October 2003).
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/10-02-03.htm#notnapster

(12) Publishers have the right to refuse to publish any work for any reason.  This is good and we should all celebrate it.  Without this fundamental right, publishing would be a propaganda arm of the state, and all publishing would lose credibility. 

However, this fundamental right has nothing to do with copyright.  If we had to identify its legal basis, in the US, we could point to the First Amendment and freedom of the press, or the Thirteenth Amendment and abolition of slavery.

It is this background right, not copyright, which allows publishers who dislike the NIH policy to refuse to publish NIH-funded authors.  But as noted (#6), all surveyed publishers accommodate the NIH policy.

The relevance of this background right to copyright is strategic, not legal.  OA policies that go too far or too fast might encounter this kind of pushback from publishers.  For example, a green *libre* mandate (as opposed to a green *gratis* mandate) might simply trigger publisher rejections of covered work, which would hurt authors and not advance OA.  However, when large organizations or many smaller organizations adopt strong policies, publishers have little choice but to accommodate them.

When publishers own the key rights, then they can block OA and regard OA without their consent as infringement.  They can lobby Congress and argue that an OA mandate without rightsholder consent is "inconsistent with copyright".  But when they don't own the key rights, because authors have retained them, then they cannot block OA or regard it as infringement.  They can't object that it's "inconsistent with copyright".  They can't complain that it violates a right they possess, only that it would violate a right they wish they possessed. 

If they oppose a rights-retention policy, like the NIH policy, they can't ground their opposition in copyright law.  But if they choose, they can ground their opposition in the background right to refuse to publish any work for any reason.  They don't have the easy opt-out of deciding around their conference-room table that they will withhold consent to OA.  They only have the hard opt-out of refusing to publish NIH-funded authors.  If they do not exercise this fundamental right, then they should admit that they have chosen not to, and they should not allow their lawyers and lobbyists, who should know better, to pretend that the policy is a standing violation of copyright law.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/10-02-08.htm#nih

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Five years ago in SOAN

See SOAN for July 2, 2006
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-02-06.htm

* One essay in that issue:  "Open access mandates coming to the RCUK"
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-02-06.htm#rcuk

Excerpt:  "On June 28 [2006], the Research Councils UK (RCUK) issued its long-awaited open-access policy, one year to the day after it released a draft policy for public comment.  The new policy is not as strong as the draft, but is nevertheless a very significant step forward that will mandate OA to a good portion of publicly-funded research in the UK....I have two disappointments.  (1) I'm disappointed that the RCUK did not adopt a uniform policy to mandate OA and that some of the Research Councils will use their discretion to adopt weaker polices.  The result waters down the strong policy of the 2005 draft and is not consistent with the principle to which the RCUK says it is still adhering, that "publicly-funded research must be made available and accessible for public use...."  (2) I'm disappointed that the exception for publisher copyright and licensing policies is so vague, leaving everyone (publishers, researchers, and the RCUK) unsure what line publisher policies may not cross and how the RCUK will respond to publishers who go too far.... But despite that, the good news here is very good.  Before the new RCUK policy, there were OA mandates from private research funders (Wellcome Trust), near-mandates from public research funders (Germany), OA requests, exhortations, or non-mandates from public research funders (US, Finland), and proposed mandates for public research funders (Australia, Canada, South Africa, Ukraine, US, and the European Union).  But the RCUK mandates will be the world's first OA mandates from public research funders.  The BBSRC, ESRC, MRC are the first public funding agencies anywhere to take this important stance.  This is a huge step forward."

* Another essay in that issue:  "Open access mandate coming to the NIH"
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-02-06.htm#nih

Excerpt:  "The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest non-military research funder in the world, is one step closer to an OA mandate.  In the Appropriations Bill for fiscal 2007, the U.S. House Appropriations Committee directs the NIH to adopt an OA mandate, strengthening its current policy which only requests and encourages OA.  The bill was adopted by the committee and sent to the full House on June 15, 2006....Of course it would have been better for the NIH policy to be strong and effective from the start, and we should never forget that Congress asked for a mandate in its July 2004 appropriations bill.  The 14 months under the policy so far have given us OA to 3,000 research articles that we wouldn't have had without a policy.  However, we'd have OA to *26 times* as many articles if the policy had been a mandate from the start.  In the spirit of learning from experience and remaining constructive, let's use the slow start at the NIH to educate funding agencies around the world that requests and exhortations don't work.  At the same time, let's use the fast and effective start of the Wellcome Trust's OA policy to spread the word that mandates do work....Most funding agencies already get the logic of OA:  if research is worth funding, then it's worth sharing with everyone who can make use of it.  Now it's time to get the logic of implementing OA:  if OA is worth setting as a goal, then it's worth mandating so that we actually reach the goal...."

* Another essay in that issue:  "Open access to electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs)"
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-02-06.htm#etds

Excerpt:  "Instead of devaluing dissertations because they are not formally peer-reviewed, we should see a beautiful win-win situation here.  They undergo a review that is sufficiently rigorous to make them good....But at the same time, their review is sufficiently unconventional (or sufficiently unlike journal review) to carry no publisher's investment and therefore no publisher's resistance to OA....Dissertations are not just good, they're largely invisible....[D]issertations are high in quality and low in accessibility,  In fact, I'd say they constitute the most invisible form of useful literature and the most useful form of invisible literature.  Because of their high quality, the access problem is *worth solving*.  You know what I'm building up to, but let me get there step by step....Nine reasons to mandate OA for ETDs...."

* The other top stories in that issue:

"The Royal Society adopts the hybrid OA model for all its journals."
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-02-06.htm#royalsociety

Excerpt:  "The Royal Society has adopted hybrid journal policy, called EXiS Open Choice, for all seven of its journals....Like Elsevier, which has offered hybrid journals since May, the RS has lobbied hard against public OA initiatives and harshly criticized journals that accepted author-side fees.  Like Elsevier, it will have to stop arguing that accepting these fees corrupts peer review...."

"PLoS previews PLoS ONE and raises its fees."
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-02-06.htm#plos

Excerpt:  "PLoS ONE is a new kind of PLoS journal offering multidisciplinary scope, rapid turn-around, powerful personalization and discussion tools, and a new kind of peer review (or new for PLoS)...."

"Oxford shares the results of its OA experiments."
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-02-06.htm#oup

Excerpt:  "Oxford University Press is running three kinds of OA journal experiments:  (1) one OA journal supported by author-side fees, Nucleic Acids Research, (2) two OA journals supported by  institutional subsidies, the Journal of Experimental Botany and Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, and (3) 49 hybrid OA journals in the Oxford Open program.  On June 5 it sponsored a meeting in which the results of these experiments were announced and analyzed.  Beyond these, OUP also permits embargoed self-archiving...."

"AAA members protest the association's decision to oppose FRPAA."
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-02-06.htm#aaa

Excerpt:  "The American Anthropological Association (AAA) signed the May 23 letter from the Association of American Publishers (AAP) opposing FRPAA, the bill now before Congress that would mandate open access to the bulk of federally-funded research....When AAA members found out what their organization had done, they began blogging their protests....The AAA didn't consult its members before publicly committing the organization to oppose FRPAA.  In fact the AAA leadership didn't even consult its own steering committee...."

"Research institutions implement OA policies."
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-02-06.htm#policies

Excerpt:  "The University of Zurich is preparing to launch its OA repository this fall, as the first step toward implementing its OA mandate....The University of Liege will soon launch an OA repository....Arnold Migus, Director General of France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), sent a letter to the CNRS unit heads asking them to invite their researchers to deposit their research articles in HAL, the OA repository sponsored by five major French research organizations...."

"Science Commons launches Scholar's Copyright."
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-02-06.htm#addenda

Excerpt:  "Science Commons launched a major new project called Scholar's Copyright. It consists of three short amendments or Author Addenda that researchers may attach to their copyright transfer agreements with publishers. The addenda let authors retain the rights they need for OA. Like Creative Commons licenses, each of these will come in lawyer-readable, layperson-readable, and machine-readable forms...."

"FRPAA inspires more news and comment."
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-02-06.htm#frpaa

Excerpt:  "FRPAA fortunes didn't rise or fall in June.  It's still under consideration by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs, chaired by Susan Collins of Maine.  But Senator Collins has been receiving a lot of mail on the bill.  One of the most interesting letters was from Springer (not yet online), arguing the that the six month embargo permitted by FRPAA is too short to satisfy publishers and too long to satisfy researchers. In its place, Springer proposes a policy that would require full-text OA immediately upon publication, a clear insistence that publishing in peer-reviewed journals is an inseparable part of research, and a new provision making article processing fees available to researchers as a special overhead on their publicly-funded research grants.  Instead of splitting the difference between researchers and publishers, as the six month embargo does, it gives each what it wants most:  immediate OA for researchers and money for publishers....Note that Springer was the only large publisher not to sign the AAP's sophistical letter to Sen. Collins in May...."

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Ten years ago in SOAN

Ten years ago, SOAN was called FOSN (Free Online Scholarship Newsletter) and came out several times a month.  Here are excerpts from four issues 10 years ago this month.

* See FOSN for June 25, 2001
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/06-25-01.htm

Excerpt:  "Citizens should not have to pay to read the laws that bind them....Consider the case of Peter Veeck.  While rehabilitating an old building in Denison, Texas, he tried to get a copy of the local building code. Unsuccessful in a print library, he bought an electronic copy for $300. Since he also ran a regional ISP, he thought he'd make life easier for others in his situation by posting the code online.  Immediately he received an email from a lawyer for the Southern Building Code Congress International (SBCCI), informing him that SBCCI owned the copyright on the building code and demanding that Veeck remove it from his web site. Veeck went straight to federal court for what he thought would be an easy declaration that statutes adopted by the legislature were in the public domain.  He lost in district court and he lost again in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals...."

Excerpt:  "One way to preserve digital texts is to make back-up copies.  But when a publisher, journal, or library does this in some centralized way, then it must pay for large-capacity storage, staff to oversee the operation, and risk failure at the central location and its outlying storage sites.  The Stanford libraries wondered how to decentralize the preservation process and at the same time make it less expensive and more secure than its centralized alternative.  The result is project LOCKSS --Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe...."

* See FOSN for July 3, 2001
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-03-01.htm

Excerpt:  "What if you published an article supporting A's theories and criticizing B's, and found yourself sued for libel by B in B's country?  Now suppose that the United States had signed a treaty agreeing to enforce these verdicts.  Freedom of speech is our first freedom in the United States.  Is it really possible that the United States would negotiate an international agreement that would subject online speech by Americans to legal judgments by nations with no respect for the free circulation of ideas?  The answer is yes...."

Excerpt:  "PubScience is a portal and search engine for free online scholarship in the physical sciences.  Its funding comes from the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Scientific and Technical Information.  Last week a House appropriations subcommittee voted to withdraw funding from PubScience on the ground that its functions are best carried out by the private sector.  If this reasoning survives the budgeting process, and becomes government policy, then it could mean the end of all government-subsidized free online scholarship, including PubMed, MedLine, and LANL (arXiv.org)....Indeed, the House subcommittee had been lobbied by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), a trade association for commercial electronic publishers.  A spokesman for SIIA has said that PubScience is unfair competition for the for-profit publishers and that the only free information provided by government should be government documents...."

Excerpt:  "MIT has received an $11 million grant from the Mellon and Hewlett Foundations to put all 2,000 of its courses online over the next eight years.  Because the courses will be available to internet users free of charge, faculty are hailing the project as an important assertion that course materials are more like scholarly publications to be shared openly than property of the university from which it might profit.  This reading is supported by Ira Fuchs, speaking for the Mellon Foundation.  'We're hoping that this is going to reinforce the concept that ideas are the common property of all of us, and they're not just proprietary products.'..."

* See FOSN for July 10, 2001
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-10-01.htm

Excerpt:  "Six major publishers are giving third-world universities and laboratories free access to over 1,000 electronic medical journals.  The gift was coordinated by the World Health Organzation....The program is the latest phase of the larger UN effort, Health InterNetwork [HINARI], which makes all kinds of electronic information, from journals to software, freely available to underdeveloped countries....The publishers are giving away access to electronic journals they already publish.  This costs them nothing.  They gain readers in regions where they have few paying subscribers, and they do enormous good.  Makers of AIDS drugs are obviously much more constrained in giving away their product. It would be churlish to wonder why the publishers didn't do this long ago and on their own initiative...."

Excerpt:  "One unexpected benefit of putting scholarship online free of charge is that experimental web services can write applications for it to test their software, show off their cool features, and make themselves instantly useful.  For a couple of years, the huge, free Open Directory Project (ODP) was the primary beneficiary of this kind of adoption.  It seems that just about every experimental portal and search engine has used ODP data, at least in a demo, to show the world what it could do. Now there is some evidence that PubMed is receiving this kind of mutually beneficial attention...."

* See FOSN for July 17, 2001
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-17-01.htm

Excerpt:  "Standard book contracts give the publisher the exclusive right to publish the author's work in "book form".  A federal district court in New York ruled on July 11 that this contract language covers print books but not electronic books.  The effect is that even authors who have signed such contracts retain the electronic rights to their books and may shop them around or put their books online without charge and without the consent of their publishers...."

Excerpt:  "Paul Ginsparg is moving from the Los Alamos National Laboratory to Cornell, and his international e-print archive [arXiv] will move with him.  One reason for the move is that the archive needs to grow beyond the size that Los Alamos can support. Ginsparg's archive is the oldest and largest repository of free online scholarship...."

Excerpt:  "The University of California Press is experimenting with free online access to the full text of more than 60 of its e-books and one of its e-journals.  I visited one of the books and the journal to check on the experiment...."

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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. 

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

** The UK Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) officially adopted an OA mandate.  (It revealed that it planned to do so back in January 2009.)  From the new policy:  "EPSRC Council has agreed to mandate open access publication, with the proviso that academics should be able to choose the approach [green or gold] best suited to their field of research. This mandate is now being implemented:  EPSRC requires authors to comply with this mandate and ensure that all published research articles arising from EPSRC-sponsored research, and which are submitted for publication on or after 1st September 2011, must become available on an Open Access basis through any appropriate route...."
http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/about/infoaccess/Pages/roaccess.aspx

** The Open Society Foundations (OSF) (formerly the Open Society Institute, OSI) adopted a policy encouraging grantees to make their funded work libre OA.  Excerpt:  "OSF's policy is to ensure that both its own Work Product and that of its grantees furthers its mission and charitable purposes and that it benefits the public.  To that end, OSF has granted a Creative Commons license [CC-BY-NC-ND] to virtually all of its own Work Product.  Under the terms of these licenses, anyone may copy and widely distribute OSF's Work Product without charge for non-commercial purposes, provided that they do not alter it, that they credit OSF as the creator, and that they provide a link to OSF's website.  We believe that OSF's mission is enhanced when our grantees' Work Product is also made widely available to the public, with appropriate protection of legitimate interests.  To that end, OSF is introducing a new clause into its grant agreements, whereby our grantees must advise OSF whether or not they will broadly license all Work Product created with OSF funds using a Creative Commons license, or otherwise.  OSF recognizes there may be circumstances where limited or delayed dissemination of grantee Work Product or limited access to data may be appropriate to protect legitimate interests of the grantee, other funders, principal investigators or participants in research studies.  For such situations, OSF's grant letter provides grantees with the option to choose not to grant any such license to exploit their Work Product. Though OSF believes that, in most cases, intellectual property rights should not limit or deny access to grantees' Work Product, grantees remain free to determine their own policies on such matters.  A grantee's decision whether or not to grant a Creative Commons license to their Work Product will not affect grant decisions by OSF...."
http://www.soros.org/legal/intellectual-property-policy

** Emory University adopted an OA mandate.  "Each Faculty member grants to Emory University permission to capture and make available his or her scholarly articles the author has chosen to distribute as Open Access and to reproduce and distribute those articles for the purpose of open dissemination.  In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to Emory University a nonexclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles the author has chosen to distribute as Open Access, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.  The Emory Faculty author remains the copyright owner unless that author chooses to transfer the copyright to a publisher...."  At the same time, three departments at Emory announced OA mandates for theses and dissertations.
http://roarmap.eprints.org/476/1/Emory_University_Open_Access_Policy_Final_March_2011.pdf
http://roarmap.eprints.org/477/

* The University of Barcelona adopted an OA mandate.  "The 7th of June of 2011, the Governing Council of the Universitat de Barcelona (UB) approved the document entitled "Universitat de Barcelona Open Access Policy" establishing that all the members of the scholar community shall deposit a copy of any academic publication immediately after publication and no later than 6 months. The UB recommends the publication in open access journals when possible and it is committed to facilitate this type of publication, either by providing resources or dealing with publishers."
http://roarmap.eprints.org/475/
http://www.bib.ub.edu/fileadmin/arxius/diposits/2011_06_Politica_acces_obert_UB.pdf

** The University of Bath adopted an OA mandate.  "The University of Bath requires researchers to deposit full-text copies of their peer-reviewed journal articles and papers from published conference proceedings (subject to copyright provisions) in the University of Bath research repository, Opus1. The mandate applies to items published after 1 June 2011. Publications from 2008 onwards should also be added in readiness for the REF. The full-text of the paper and its details should be uploaded to Opus as close to publication as possible. Optional deposit of other research outputs such as book sections, reports, working papers and conference presentations is supported. These items will be identified as peer-reviewed or non-peer-reviewed as appropriate. Full repository policies are available from the Opus website. The Library provides support for this activity and will check copyright permissions on all deposited papers. The Mandate has the support of the University Research Committee...."
http://roarmap.eprints.org/466/
http://www.bath.ac.uk/library/services/eprints/deposit-mandate.html

** On May 9, the Faculty Senate at Washington University voted overwhelmingly to adopt an OA resolution encouraging green and gold OA.  "Faculty members are encouraged to seek venues for their works that share this ideal. In particular, when consistent with their professional development, members of the Faculty should endeavor to: [1] Amend copyright agreements to retain the right to use his or her own work and to deposit such work in a University digital repository or another depository, which is freely accessible to the general public; [2] Submit a final manuscript of accepted, peer-reviewed publications to one of the University’s digital repositories whenever consistent with the copyright agreement; and [3] Seek publishers for his or her works committed to free and unfettered access (often referred to as open access publishers) whenever consistent with his or her professional goals...."
http://facultysenate.wustl.edu/presentations/Documents/Minutes%20Faculty%20Senate%205%209%2011.pdf
http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/22458.aspx
http://news.wustl.edu/Documents/Record/OpenAccessResolution.pdf

** "The Board of Research at [Karolinska Institutet]...adopted an open access policy that encourages its researchers to make their publications to the greatest possible extent freely available taking into account publisher terms and relevant demands of grant-awarding bodies and government authorities.  To help researchers at KI comply with the open access requirements an open archive has been established, and a support function based at the University Library is available to aid the researcher in the process of depositing articles...."
http://kib.ki.se/en/node/72763
http://goo.gl/ENliu

** Ukraine's Sumy State University adopted an OA mandate.
http://roarmap.eprints.org/462/

** Ukraine's National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy adopted an OA mandate in October 2008, and posted it to ROARMAP last month.
http://roarmap.eprints.org/359/

* The California Institute of Technology adopted an OA mandate for theses and dissertations.
http://roarmap.eprints.org/451/

* The University of Waikato adopted an OA mandate for theses and dissertations.
http://roarmap.eprints.org/455/

* The Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru adopted an OA mandate for theses.
http://roarmap.eprints.org/479/

* Neelie Kroes, EU Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, called for expanding the EU's pilot OA mandate, which is currently limited to 20% of the FP7 research budget.
http://albertopen.telegrafenberg.de/?p=370

* The European Commission held a Public Hearing on Scientific Information in Europe (Luxembourg, May 30, 2011).  Diane Cabell reports that "a majority of those at the hearing were strong proponents of open access" and lists seven OA-related recommendations made by participants.  Also see the SPARC Europe comment at the hearing. http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/hearings30may2011/index_en.htm
https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/27678
http://goo.gl/a0QbY

* OpenAire released its statement to the European Commission on access to and preservation of scientific information.  Excerpts:  "OpenAIRE recommends the following actions:...The EC, national research funders and institutions should channel funds to open access infrastructures....Open Access to research results (publications, data and other supplementary materials) should be made a requirement for all research areas and all EC and ERC funding programmes....Publication costs should be made eligible for reimbursement beyond the project period....All publishers - in particular those publishing open access materials - should integrate grant reporting into their submission workflows, and deposit metadata (bibliographic data, embargo period if needed etc.) and full texts into open access repositories (disciplinary and/or institutional). Publishers should cooperate in making these full texts available under a Creative Commons License to enable text- and data mining, and further use and reuse....The EC should recommend to all authors of EC-funded research publications to retain their copyright and to use Creative Commons licenses to enable use and reuse of their articles, data and other research outputs....EC grant agreements should extend dissemination plans to data and require a data management plan....The EC should establish a prize/award for the publisher who makes the best effort to facilitate/adopt/change over to OA publishing, and/or finds the most 3 creative means to do so (prize to be awarded every year, for a period of say 5 years in total)....EC should recommend publishers / institutions / member states to develop an open access policy....Research funders and institutions should collaborate in national and crosscountry consortia to secure authors' and institutions' rights in licenses of electronic resources for the deposition of publications (final author manuscripts and/or publisher’s PDF) into institutional and/or subject repositories. Embargo periods should not exceed 6-12 months depending on disciplinary area....EC and member states should align their efforts and jointly re-enforce the support for Open Access institutional and thematic repositories and fund them so that they carry their operations on to data (data repositories, and/or provide linking of publications to data)....Work with scholarly societies and support/fund the creation, advancement and advocacy of Open Access Journals on the national and the European levels...."
http://goo.gl/NG3nq

* "LERU, the League of European Research Universities,...published its Roadmap Towards Open Access....The Roadmap was developed by a group of people mainly from LERU member universities, and covers the case for Open Access, provides practical steps for universities to take to achieve it, and cites examples of good practice from LERU institutions...."
http://www.openscholarship.org/jcms/c_7240/leru-launches-open-access-roadmap
http://www.openscholarship.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2011-06/leru_roadmap_response.pdf
http://www.leru.org/index.php/public/extra/launch-open-access/
http://www.faz.net/artikel/C30901/open-access-es-wird-zeit-alle-alles-lesen-zu-lassen-30428100.html

* Germany's Leibniz Association drew up a plan for the country's information infrastructure, at the request of the Gemeinsamen Wissenschaftskonferenz (GWK).  The plan recommends action on eight fronts, one of which is OA.
http://www.leibniz-gemeinschaft.de/?nid=infrastr&nidap=&print

* The LIBREAS Association is a new membership organization in Germany to promote OA in library and information science.  (The long name is LIBREAS:  Association for the promotion of library and information science communication, or Verein zur Förderung der bibliotheks- und informationswissenschaftlichen Kommunikation.)  The association is grounded in the Berlin Declaration on Open Access, and plans to launch an OA journal in LIS.
http://libreas.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/libreas_verein/

* The European Network for Copyright in Support of Education and Science (ENCES) officially launched on June 29, 2011.  ENCES lobbies for OA-friendly copyright laws in Europe, and was first announced at a Berlin conference in November 2008.
http://www.ences.eu/association/

* Sweden's OpenAccess.se program released an English-language version of its Strategy 2011-2013.  Excerpt:  "The Programme shall support both publishing in open access journals and parallel publishing in open archives....A national open access policy adopted by the government should provide authority and clarity to the continuing work with open access....Higher education institutions and research funders will coordinate information campaigns on open access for researchers.  All Programme participants will inform about open access via their own channels....There will be support for introducing licensing agreements that facilitate open access publishing for researchers into the e-licenses consortium negotiations....Parallel publishing shall be simplified by a continued development of the services offered by the open archives at the higher education institutions. The goals are better user-friendliness and quality. It is also important to be able to handle or link to research data and learning resources....The majority of Swedish research journals shall either be open access or allow parallel publishing within a maximum of six months after publication...."
http://www.sciecom.org/ojs/index.php/sciecominfo/article/view/5150
http://www.sciecom.org/ojs/index.php/sciecominfo/article/view/5150/4606

* "The Steering committee of the OpenAccess.se approved a statement at its meeting on May 23, 2011, about Elsevier's new policy.  Elsevier now requires specific agreements with universities or research funders if there is an open access mandate to deposit and disseminate articles in a specific open archive.  These agreements may involve long embargo periods and restrict availability of research results.  'We strongly object to Elsevier's new policy, which requires separate agreements for author's rights, and we urge Elsevier to withdraw the new clause.  We recommend that Swedish universities with open access mandates refrain from concluding separate agreements with Elsevier. Instead, this issue should be managed along with negotiations  over national license agreements with Elsevier.' ..."
http://www.kb.se/OpenAccess_english/OA-News/Statement-about-Elseviers--new-policy-concerning-authors-rights-to-self-archive-articles/
http://nile.lub.lu.se/ojs/index.php/sciecominfo/article/view/5146/4608

* "Australian Academy of Science...president Suzanne Cory, told the HES [Higher Ed Services] while her organisation was not a member of the G8+ national science academies..., it echoed the academy's sentiments about education in Australia and elsewhere....The G8+ statement called on governments to expand programs for broadening scientific knowledge with their communities, support international open access to scientific literature and help developing country governments to prioritise acquiring and maintaining science education infrastructure and resources...."
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/science-needs-a-global-boost/story-e6frgcjx-1226074369358

* The Communia Association launched in Brussels.  "After decades of measures that have drastically reduced the public domain...it is time to strongly reaffirm how much our societies and economies rely on a vibrant and ever expanding public domain. The role of the public domain, already crucial in the past, is even more important today, as the Internet and digital technologies enable us to access, use and re-distribute culture with an ease and a power unforeseeable even just a generation ago. The Communia Association aims at pursuing this discussion...."
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Communia_Association_Launch?utm_campaign=events_1106&utm_source=mailing&utm_medium=email
http://www.communia-association.org/

* "[T]he Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP)...launched at the University of Namibia in Windhoek....The programme, which is developed in partnership with the University of Cape Town as well as several other Southern African universities [University of Mauritius and the University of Botswana], is aimed at mapping the status of research dissemination at the participating institutions.  In addition, SCAP intends to further promote the use of open source platforms to improve access to research findings and improve research locally and internationally, as well as understand the cost and benefits resulting from open access approaches to scholarly communication."
http://goo.gl/FGCIf
http://goo.gl/d017i
http://scaprogramme.wordpress.com/

* Three organizations, CLARA (Cooperación Latino Americana de Redes Avanzada), CoLaBoRa (Comunidad Latinoamericana de Bibliotecas y Repositorios Digitales), and COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) announced plans to work together on the development of OA repositories in Latin America and to launch a regional branch of COAR.
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5870.html

* The Council of Canadian Academic Law Library Directors (CCALLD) released the Calgary Statement on Free Access to Legal Information (adopted May 14, 2011).  Excerpt:  "The Durham Statement [on Open Access to Legal Scholarship, February 2009] did not go unnoticed by the directors of Canadian law school libraries....We issue this statement not only as an indication of our solidarity and shared commitment to the ideal of open access in legal scholarship but also to promote and further support the Canadian ideal of free public access to legal information as embodied in the Montreal Declaration on Free Access to Law [October 2002]....We urge every Canadian law school to commit to electronic publication of its journals and to making definitive versions of journals and other scholarship produced at the school available immediately upon publication in stable, open, digital formats....We also urge every Canadian law school to commit to keeping a repository of the scholarship published at the school in a stable, open, digital format....We urge all Canadian courts, legislatures and governments to commit to electronic publication of their primary legal publications by making definitive, "official" versions available immediately upon publication in stable, open, digital formats in a stable, freely-accessible online repository....We urge faculty members to reserve their copyrights to ensure that they too can make their own scholarship available in stable, open, digital formats. Canadian law journals should rely upon Creative Commons Canada's iCommons Licence Agreement or similar model publishing agreement as a default and should respect author requests to retain copyrights in their scholarship...." http://library.osgoode.yorku.ca/documents/Calgary_Statement.pdf

* Alex Holcombe announced plans to organize group pledge, either to publish only in OA journals or to referee only for OA journals.  "Let me know if you’re interested in joining...."
http://alexholcombe.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/pioneering-open-access-pledges/

* The Australian Research Council (ARC) "dropped a former requirement that researchers either deposit their data in a publicly available repository or explain why they are not doing so, and specifically identify which publications and data they have put in a repository.   That was in there in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011...Why did the ARC move backwards on this? ..."
http://alexholcombe.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/australian-research-council-moving-backward-on-open-access-too/
http://arc.gov.au/pdf/DP12_fundingrules.pdf

 + Journals

* Pathobiology of Aging & Age-related Diseases is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from Co-Action Publishing.
http://www.co-action.net/news/pba_press_release.pdf
http://www.pathobiologyofaging.net

* Brain and Behavior is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from Wiley.  All articles appear under CC-BY-NC licenses.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)2157-9032/homepage/open_access_license_and_copyright.htm

* Humanities is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from MDPI (Molecular Diversity Preservation Initiative).
http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities

* Journal of Low Power Electronics and Applications is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from MDPI.
http://www.mdpi.com/about/announcements/120/

* Open Journal of Modern Linguistics is a new peer-reviewed OA journal.  It publishes a priced print edition alongside the OA edition.
http://www.allc.org/news-events/cfp-open-journal-modern-linguistics

* Skriptum: studentische onlinezeitschrift für geschichte und geschichtsdidaktik is a new peer-reviewed, student-edited  OA journal from the History Department at the University of Mainz.
http://www.skriptum-geschichte.de/

* Thinking Nature is a new peer-reviewed OA journal of philosophy.
http://thinkingnaturejournal.com/

* Techne: Journal of Technology for Architecture and Environment is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from Italian Society of Architectural Technology.
http://ejour-fup.unifi.it/index.php/techne/index

* The International Journal for Parasitology: Drugs and Drug Resistance is a new peer-reviewed, OA journal from Elsevier and the Australian Society for Parasitology.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/elsevier-launches-international-journal-for-parasitology-drugs-and-drug-resistance-124342174.html

* "The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust announced today that they are to support a new, top-tier, open access journal for biomedical and life sciences research.  The three organisations aim to establish a new journal that will attract and define the very best research publications from across these fields....The first issue of the journal, whose name has yet to be decided, is expected to be published in the summer of 2012....The journal will be an open access journal....The three organisations have made a commitment to cover costs of launching the journal to ensure its success. [Initially the journal will charge no publication fees but] the long-term business model will be developed by the incoming Editor-in-Chief and the team they build...."
http://www.mpg.de/4354325/New_Journal
http://www.hhmi.org/news/20110627.html
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/Media-office/Press-releases/2011/WTVM051897.htm

* QScience Connect is a new peer-reviewed journal on the model of PLoS ONE, from Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals (BQFJ).  QScience Connect "aims to provide a home for all research considered to be valid, ethical and correct....All content in the journal will be 'open access'....QScience Connect will publish original research papers of interest to specialists in all given fields. It will not set a threshold of perceived importance for the papers that it publishes; rather, it will publish all papers that are judged to be technically valid and original. All research papers will benefit from rapid peer review and publication....Authors are positively encouraged to make the most of the online environment and welcome submissions which may primarily consist of video or audio. Supplementary files can accompany text files too, and we look forward to authors using this facility to publish datasets which are reported in the main manuscript...."
http://www.ameinfo.com/269578.html

* Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease converted to OA and moved to Co-Action Publishing.  MEHD is the official journal of the Society for Microbial Ecology and Disease (SOMED).
http://www.co-action.net/news/mehd_press_release.pdf
http://www.microbecolhealthdis.net/index.php/mehd

* Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies converted to OA after 53 years of TA publication.  The new OA version is published by the Duke University Library.
http://library.duke.edu/news/main/2011/article75.html

* Andererseits: Yearbook of Transatlantic German Studies is a new peer-reviewed journal published jointly by the Duke University Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures and the Germanistik/Literatur und Medienpraxis of the Universität Duisburg-Essen in Essen, Germany.  It will convert to OA with its next issue.
http://library.duke.edu/news/main/2011/article75.html

* "Duke University Libraries...announced a new service to help members of the Duke community create and publish peer-reviewed, open-access scholarly journals....The Libraries' new service helps prospective editors establish their journal online, providing guidance and advice as editors develop the journal's structure. Journals are built on a free, open-source platform known as Open Journal Systems...."
http://library.duke.edu/news/main/2011/article75.html

* Duke University renewed its COPE fund (for paying publication fees at fee-based OA journals).  "But what makes this coming year different, and somewhat unique,...is that the COPE fund in 2012 will be a three-way partnership, with funds coming from the Libraries, the Provost's Office and the Dean of the School of Medicine.  A quick survey of colleague institutions who have COPE funds did not find any where monies were contributed by the medical school, so we have reason to believe this is not the norm...."
http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2011/06/30/cope-renewed/

* Palgrave Macmillan launched hybrid OA options at 18 of its journals in the social sciences.  The fee is "£1,500/$2,400 plus VAT where applicable"; page and color charges are extra; authors retain copyright and may choose between CC-BY-NC-ND and CC-BY-NC-SA. licenses.
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5874.html
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/palgraveopen/
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/palgraveopen/open_access_faqs.html

* The Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP) launched a hybrid OA option at 23 of its journals.  The fee will be $2,700, and articles will be published under CC-BY-NC-SA licenses.
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5852.html

* Boom uitgevers Den Haag (BuDH) adopted a green OA policy allowing authors to self-archive six months after publication.  It allows deposit of the published edition, not merely the author's peer-reviewed manuscript, and the policy applies to books as well as journal articles.
http://goo.gl/1l49e

* "AIP Publishing, a division of the American Institute of Physics (AIP), announce[d] the launch of article-level metrics for its new, open access journal AIP Advances....The COUNTER 3-compliant tool measures abstract and full-text article views and offers a graphical snapshot of cumulative usage of both, beginning with the date the article is published online...."
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/article-level-metrics-now-available-for-aip-advances-124296774.html

* "Three Scandinavian serials: Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, Nordic Journal of Migration Research and Sommerfeltia are now included in the portfolio of more than 200 Open Access journals published by Versita Open...."
http://www.ecampusnews.com/business-news/versita-open-expands-to-scandinavia/
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5889.html

* Daniel Mietchen, Heinz Pampel, and Lambert Heller released their criteria for the journal of the future.  Excerpt:  "Access: Free access to scientific knowledge, and permissions to re-use and re-purpose it, are an invaluable source for research, innovation and education. The scientific journal of the future provides legally and technically barrier-free access to its contents, along with clearly stated options for re-use and re-purposing.  Replicability: The open access to all relevant core elements of a publication facilitates the verification and subsequent re-use of published content. The scientific journal of the future requires the publication of detailed methodologies, including all data and code, that form the basis of any research project...."
http://beyondthejournal.net/

* OpenBioMed.info reports that Turkey now publishes more OA medical journals than France.  "The publishers range from  institutional sponsorship (e.g. Cumhuriyet Medical Journal (CMJ) is the official publication of Cumhuriyet University School of Medicine in Sivas) to scientific society sponsorship (e.g. Türk Nöroloji Dergisi, the Turkish Journal of Neurology, published by the Turkish Society of Neurology). My inspection of these new biomedical journal titles in 2010 found none with any sort of processing charge and most to have an explicit peer review protocol...."
http://openbiomed.info/2011/06/turkey-oa/

* "BioMed Central...launched a new free membership scheme for qualifying universities and research institutions in low-income countries. Foundation Membership will enable institutions to demonstrate their support for open access publishing and offers a range of benefits which will enhance the visibility of the institution's research output. Institutions are eligible to become Foundation Members if they are located in a country covered by BioMed Central's Open Access Waiver Fund, have an official institutional policy in support of open access, and have published at least five papers in BioMed Central open access journals within the last three years. In addition to the new Foundation Membership program, BioMed Central is also introducing a new cost-effective open access publishing and institutional repository solution targeted at low-income countries, the 'Open Access Package'. The Open Access Package provides a comprehensive and affordable open access solution that offers Foundation members the tools to support both open access publishing and self-archiving of scientific articles within their libraries...."
http://blogs.openaccesscentral.com/blogs/bmcblog/entry/bringing_open_access_to_africa
http://www.biomedcentral.com/developingcountries/libraries

* "Five journals published by BioMed Central received their first impact factors this year. BMC Bioinformatics, with an impact factor of 5.42, has reinforced its reputation as one of the top journals in its field. Launched in 2000, it is the second highest ranked bioinformatics journal, and already has an impact factor comparable to that of Bioinformatics (5.74), the most established journal in the field, which has been publishing for more than two decades and is supported by a major society. BMC Genomics enters the Journal Citation Report with a respectable 3.25. This puts it in the top third of the genetics titles, and the top 20% of biotechnology journals. BMC Molecular Biology has an impact factor of 3.12, and BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders an impact factor of 1.00, putting it in the top half of the orthopaedics listing. BMC Genetics has an impact factor of 0.92. Critical Care's impact factor jumped from 1.9 to 3.21, and the journal is now third in the critical care medicine field having leap-frogged the competitor title Intensive Care Medicine, the official journal of the major European society. Breast Cancer Research also increased it's impact factor from 2.93 to 2.98 and remains the second highest ranking breast cancer journal. Arthritis Research & Therapy maintains its rank of second in the rheumatology field with an impact factor of 4.55...."
http://www.bio-medicine.org/biology-news/Open-Access-journals-get-impressive-impact-factors-896-1/

* "Papers published under the Royal Society of Medicine's open access option (RSM Open) are now deposited in PubMed Central and mirrored to UKPMC.  The open access option is available to all authors and applies to all RSM journals.  The Article Processing Charge (APC) for RSM Open is $3000.  All papers published under this model are licenced using the Creative Commons Attribution, Non-commercial licence...."
http://ukpmc.blogspot.com/2011/06/royal-society-medicine-open-papers-now.html

* "The American Physical Society...announced a refresh of all PDFs contained in the scanned portion of [its] Physical Review Online Archive (PROLA). APS was one of the first publishers to put [its] entire backfile online, completing the scanning process in May 2001. In those early days, APS opted to put [its] content online quickly and in an inexpensive manner that would then allow [it] to take advantage of any future improvements in technology....[It has] efficiently reprocessed [its] entire scanned archive of approximately 250,000 articles, further compressing them and adding searchable text...."
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5856.html

* Several organizations announced that they will preserve their journals in the CLOCKSS  Archive, which provides libre OA when the originals are no longer  available from their original sources:  the Geological Society of America (GSA), Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals, the Joint University Librarians Advisory Committee (JULAC) of Hong Kong, the Biologic Institute, East View Information Services, and the Consorzio Interuniversitario Lombardo per l'Elaborazione Automatica (CILEA)
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5853.html 
http://www.zawya.com/story.cfm/sidZAWYA20110607135837
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5864.html
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5879.html
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5884.html
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5887.html

* "Intellectual Property Watch needs both immediate help and longer-term commitments toward sustainable financial support by the end of June in order keep going....To date, we have always made the vast majority of our content openly accessible to all. But to respond to the financial challenge, IP-Watch is launching a new subscription and marketing strategy - and new website - that will provide an opportunity for a greater number of our readers to provide support for the value our reporting provides, while still allowing those in greatest need to access our content freely. A greater proportion of our stories will be password-protected, but much will still be open access...."
http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2011/06/15/an-urgent-letter-from-intellectual-property-watch/

* Information, Wissenschaft & Praxis (IWP), Germany's leading journal of LIS, chose to move to Walter de Gruyter rather than convert to OA.
http://www.scinoptica.com/pages/posts/information-wissenschaft-praxis-iwp-ab-2012-bei-de-gruyter-die-open-access-flaute-haelt-an-22.php
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/25480595/
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/25481683/

 + Repositories and databases

* The Indian Academy of Sciences launched an institutional repository.
http://repository.ias.ac.in/

* The Dutch Universities of Applied Science (HBO) launched HBO Kennisbank, an OA repository for their research output.  HBO Kennisbank was developed by the Samenwerkende Hogeschool Bibliotheken (University Libraries Cooperative, SHB) with funding from the SURFfoundation.
http://www.hbo-kennisbank.nl/en/page/home/
http://goo.gl/94w6T

* INIST and CNRS launched OpenGrey, an OA repository to succeed OpenSIGLE, its original OA repository established "to transfer the contents of a commercial database into an open access environment - including the results of 25 years of collecting and referencing grey literature by European partners.  Since 2008, GreyNet's conference preprints complement the offer on grey literature in OpenGrey by providing full-text access to research output in this field of information science...."
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5871.html
http://www.opengrey.eu/

* "GreyNet's Collection of Conference Preprints is current and comprehensive....With the addition of GreyNet's 2010 conference preprints in the newly launched OpenGrey Repository, this unique collection of research papers in the field of grey literature now exceeds 250 metadata records along with accompanying  full-text papers, PowerPoints, and biographical information on the authors....GreyNet together with INIST-CNRS (France), DANS (Netherlands), and Pratt Institute (USA) will initiate this year a broad based project to enhance the existing collection of conference preprints...."
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5873.html

* The HTTP Archive became a section within the Internet Archive.
http://blog.archive.org/2011/06/15/http-archive-joins-with-internet-archive/
http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2011/06/15/http-archive-1m-urls-internet-archive-sponsors/

* DataCite launched a list of data repositories, in "collaboration between the British Library, BioMed Central and the Digital Curation Centre".
http://datacite.org/repolist

 + Data

* "Following the deadly outbreak of E. coli infections in Germany, scientists in Saarbruecken are providing free access to the pathogen's genetic regulation data, to spur research into new antibiotics...."
http://bulletin.sciencebusiness.net/news/75168/German-scientists-open-access-to-E.-coli-gene-database-for-use-in-drug-discovery

* "BGI [formerly known as Beijing Genomics Institute] has now formally released their data, including Illumina reads, under Creative Commons 0 (CC0) license....[A]ll the analysis posted at the GitHub E. coli O104:H4 Genome Analysis Crowdsourcing site will be available under the CC0 license too, this is being formalised today thanks to the folks at ERA7."
http://bacpathgenomics.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/e-coli-data-released-under-creative-commons-0-license/
http://climb.genomics.cn/Ecoli_TY-2482
http://www.genomics.cn/en/news_show.php?type=show&id=644

* "Springer...is offering all journal articles and book chapters which deal with the E. coli bacteria free of charge on its online information platform....A total of over 400 scientific articles are available to print out or download from now until 1 September 2011...."
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-06/s-sof060111.php

* "The Institute for Hepatitis and Virus Research ("IHVR"), the research arm of the Hepatitis B Foundation, announced...that Merck...will donate its entire natural products library, along with an undisclosed grant, to help enable open access to the library for researchers worldwide....The Merck natural products library is considered to be one of the most diverse and best curated natural products libraries in the world. It includes approximately 100,000 screen-ready extracts and represents approximately 60% of all known plant genera in the world...."Natural products" refer to compounds derived from living organisms, such as plants and microorganisms....In 2009, 45% of all U.S. FDA-approved drugs were derived from natural products...."
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/institute-for-hepatitis-and-virus-research-receives-one-of-worlds-largest-natural-products-library-from-merck-123222868.html

* "EDINA...released a fascinating dataset derived from their OpenURL Router service. The data has been made available under an ODC-PDDL licence with BY-SA community norms which allows it to be reused by anyone with an interest in the data. The OpenURL Router Data is derived from the logs of the OpenURL Router...[which] works in the background to direct student or researcher requests for academic papers to the appropriate institutional OpenURL resolver....This dataset is potentially extremely useful. The most obvious use cases are the creation of recommender services for library resources (people who searched for this paper also searched for that etc.) and analysis of search habits...."
http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2011/06/07/585/
http://openurl.ac.uk/doc/data/data.html

* "One key aspect to the success of the UK Clinical Trials Gateway (UKCTG) launched in March 2011 is the presentation of trial information in a format that can be easily understood by the general public, in the shape of a 'lay summary'. This is part of the UK Government's commitment in the NHS Constitution to ensure that more trial participants are made aware of research that is of particular relevance to them....To prepare for the inclusion of lay summaries in the corresponding trial records, a specific field has been created in the ISRCTN database. As of 7 June 2011, trialists can now provide the text of a lay summary or a link to an existing webpage as part of the submission of trial details. The lay summary information stored in this new field will be passed on to the UKCTG in the coming weeks. ISRCTN will also be working with a number of organizations including CancerHelp UK, the National Research Ethics Service and the Medical Research Council Clinical Trials Unit to ensure that lay summaries that are made visible through the ISRCTN and the UKCTG websites are of the highest quality possible...."
http://blogs.openaccesscentral.com/blogs/bmcblog/entry/read_the_lay_summary_of

* "The Structural Genomic Consortium (SGC) announced...that SGC and Cerep...will enter into a collaboration to develop open access biochemical and cell-based assays for the discovery of small molecule chemical probes and drug candidates on epigenetic targets...."
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/cerep-to-build-epigenetics-screening-and-profiling-laboratory-in-toronto-1525845.htm

* The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provided OA to the CODATA internationally recommended values of the fundamental physical constants.
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Constants/index.html

* "The data.europeana.eu pilot is part of Europeana's ongoing effort of making its metadata available as Linked Open Data on the Web. It allows others to access metadata collected from Europeana providers, via standard Web technologies, enrich this metadata and give this enriched metadata back to the providers. Links between Europeana resources and other resources in the Linked Data Web will enable discovery of semantically related resources, as, say, when two artworks are created by artists who are related to each other...."
http://version1.europeana.eu/web/lod/

* The Promoting the Quality of Medicines (PQM) program "launched the Medicines Quality Database, a collection of data on medicine samples tested for their quality as well as the commercial sources in which they were acquired. The availability of tools, such as this free, public database that provides quick and easy access to information on medicines tested for their authenticity, is key to raising awareness of and controlling the distribution of poor-quality medicines across national borders...."
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/89/8926cover5.html

* "When OpenStreetMap launched, contributions to the project were licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/ShareAlike license. That meant that anyone could copy OSM data, but if it was incorporated into another project, those same terms and conditions applied (ShareAlike) and the copyright owner had to be credited (Attribution)....After much discussion with lawyers and with the community, OpenStreetMap opted to make the move to the Open Database License (ODbL), arguing it was more suited to OSM's purposes...."
http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/06/openstreetmap-creative-commons-open-database-license.html

* Maxime Verhagen, the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation, called for Open Data Portal for public sector information in the Netherlands.
http://www.openaccess.nl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=254:minister-verhagen-omarmt-open-data

 + Books and digitization

* "[A]ll PDF versions of books published by the [US] National Academies Press [are now] downloadable to anyone free of charge.  This includes a current catalog of more than 4,000 books plus future reports produced by the Press....Before today's announcement, all PDFs were free to download in developing countries, and 65 percent of them were available for free to any user...."
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=06022011

* "OverDrive will...launch "open ebook titles" free of digital rights management (DRM). The only DRM-free books currently available via OverDrive are the "Project Gutenberg" collections. Publishers will now be able to supply books without DRM that will be integrated into OverDrive's service, similar to the arrangement Cory Doctorow made last year with Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo. OverDrive has supplied DRM-free audiobooks since 2008...."
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/home/891012-264/overdrive_to_streamline_platform_and.html.csp

* "In September 2010, the Greater Western Library Alliance Board approved the Opportunity Fund request submitted by the University of Hawai'i at Manoa Library for $3,600 to digitize Hawaii's historical water materials. The first 33 titles processed via the grant are now available in the Library's eVols digital collection repository...."
http://www.hawaii.edu/news/article.php?aId=4486

* "The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation...awarded the Council on Library and Information Resources a $46,000 planning grant to develop a prototype for the Digital Public Library of America. The prototype will be submitted to the DPLA beta sprint, which seeks ideas, models, prototypes, technical tools, user interfaces that demonstrate how the DPLA might index and provide access to a wide range of broadly distributed content...."
http://www.librarytechnology.org/ltg-displaytext.pl?RC=15747

* "The [US] National Endowment for the Humanities...awarded a grant of $300,000 to the Shelley-Godwin Archive, a digital resource comprising works of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley...."
http://www.nypl.org/press/press-release/2011/06/07/shelley-godwin-archive-offer-digital-versions-key-romantic-texts
http://shelleygodwinarchive.org/

* "The Internet Archive is on campaign to buy e-Books from publishers and authors; making more digital books available to readers....This new twist on the traditional lending model promises to increase e-book use and revenue for publishers. OpenLibrary.org offers an e-Book lending library and digitized copies of classics and older books as well as books in audio and DAISY formats for those qualified readers...."
http://blog.archive.org/2011/04/16/open-library-buying-e-books-from-publishers/

* "The colleges in 15 states and one Canadian province that make up the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) will now be able to tap into the collection of open textbook resources compiled by the international group of institutions that make up the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCW Consortium) and vice versa in a new partnership. The community college consortium, which represents 200 schools, has become an associate consortia member of OCW Consortium, and its advisory board will effectively act as a voice for the two-year colleges within the global consortium's organization."
http://campustechnology.com/articles/2011/06/22/open-textbook-groups-join-forces.aspx

* "[University of Michigan] Library users soon will have access to digital versions of some of the thousands of orphan works held in common by the U-M Library and the HathiTrust Digital Library. Making these works available in HathiTrust will render them fully searchable, viewable, and accessible to U-M researchers wherever there is a connection to the Internet. This marks the next phase in the library's orphan works project, following last month's announcement that the MLibrary Copyright Office has begun identifying orphan works from among the millions of in-copyright digitized books in the HathiTrust Digital Library.  Making these orphan works accessible to the U-M community will begin to unlock that large portion of the 20th-century scholarly and cultural digital record that is in copyright and unavailable because copyright holders cannot be found or contacted.  The library's intent is to foster these works, and make them available so they can be used. Paul Courant, university librarian and dean of libraries,...says that this sharing of orphan works falls within copyright law's "fair use" provision (specifically, section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976)...."
http://www.ur.umich.edu/update/archives/110623/orphanworks
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/u-of-michigan-tests-murky-waters-of-copyright-law-by-offering-digital-access-to-some-orphan-books/31946

* Boston University joined the HathiTrust.
http://www.bu.edu/dioa/2011/06/02/hathitrust/

* Lafayette College joined the HathiTrust, the first liberal arts college to do so.
http://www.library..edu/node/2153
http://www.lafayette.edu/about/news/2011/06/29/lafayette-joins-hathitrust-digital-library-initiative-and-approves-open-access-research-resolution/

* "The British Library and Google...announced a partnership to digitise 250,000 out-of-copyright books from the Library's collections....Selected by the British Library and digitised by Google, both organisations will work in partnership over the coming years to deliver this content free through Google Books and the British Library's website. Google will cover all digitisation costs....Once digitised, these unique items will be available for full text search, download and reading through Google Books, as well as being searchable through the Library's website and stored in perpetuity within the Library’s digital archive.  Researchers, students and other users of the Library will be able to view historical items from anywhere in the world as well as copy, share and manipulate text for non-commercial purposes...." (PS:  If you object that the digital copies of PD books are themselves PD, and that the ban on commercial use is inconsistent with their PD status, you're not alone.)
http://pressandpolicy.bl.uk/content/detail.aspx?ReleaseID=1276&NewsAreaId=2
http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2011/06/british-library-encloses-public-domain.html

* The Wildlife Information Network (WIN) converted Wildpro to OA.  Wildpro is "its electronic library and encyclopaedia...of information on the health and management of wild animals...."
http://wdin.blogspot.com/2011/06/in-spotlight-wildpro-goes-open-access_03.html

* "Charles Darwin's personal scientific library, including notes and comments scribbled by him on the pages and margins of his collection, has been made available online for the first time.  Darwin's library...has been digitised in a collaborative effort involving Cambridge, the Darwin Manuscripts Project at the American Museum of Natural History, the Natural History Museum, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.  According to the university, in total, Darwin’s library amounted to 1480 books, of which 730 contain abundant research notes in their margins. The first phase of the project has just been completed, with 330 of the most heavily annotated books launched online for all to read at Biodiversity Heritage Library...."
http://www.iwr.co.uk/reviews/3011017/Digitisation-project-puts-Darwins-personal-library-online

* "[A] group of historians, university professors, and activists is collaborating with Egypt's National Archives to document the [recent popular] uprising for posterity....By making all the materials available online, he and his collaborators also hope to offer a new model of an official historical archive, one that emphasizes public access rather than government control. Currently, says Mr. Fahmy, "archives do not belong to the people. They belong to the state." Not just in Egypt but across the Arab world, national archives and official documents are jealously guarded, and scholars face endless security clearances and bureaucratic hassles to get access to them. Nonspecialists have virtually no right to use them...."
http://chronicle.com.proxy.earlham.edu:2048/section/Home/5

* NATO provided OA to a collection of documents on Military Planning for Berlin Emergency (1961-1968).  "The documents in this series have been declassified and approved for public disclosure under the NATO Public Disclosure Programme...."
http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/70925.htm

* "Version four of the Institutional Repository Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship. This selective bibliography presents over 500 articles, books, technical reports, and other scholarly textual sources that are useful in understanding institutional repositories (see the scope note for details). All included works are in English. It is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License...."
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5867.html

* Specialised Imaging Ltd. provided OA to its online bibliography of research on the applications for its high-speed imaging equipment. 
http://optics.org/press/858

 + Studies and surveys

* Mikael Laakso and five co-authors documented the growth of OA journals (gold OA) from the early 1990s to 2009.  "The results show a very rapid growth of OA publishing during the period 1993-2009. During the last year an estimated 191 000 articles were published in 4769 journals. Since the year 2000, the average annual growth rate has been 18% for the number of journals and 30% for the number of articles. This can be contrasted to the reported 3,5% yearly volume increase in journal publishing in general. In 2009 the share of articles in OA journals, of all peer reviewed journal articles, reached 7,7%. Overall, the results document a rapid growth in OA journal publishing over the last fifteen years. Based on the sampling results and qualitative data a division into three distinct periods is suggested: The Pioneering years (1993-1999), the Innovation years (2000-2004), and the Consolidation years (2005-2009)."
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0020961

* Researchers of Tomorrow, the three-year study of 'Generation Y' doctoral students by JISC and the British Library, released its second annual report.  From the executive summary:  "As we noted in the first year of the study the Generation Y doctoral students tend to be conservative in their choices, risk averse and unwilling to share their research prematurely.   Open access Many Generation Y (and older) doctoral student respondents appear to be deeply confused about exactly what ‘open access’ and ‘self-archiving’ mean, and uncertain how to go about assessing the appropriateness and authenticity of open access channels of research communication in order to address their own primary concerns and reservations. They appear to need greater clarity, better awareness-raising, more proactive promotion of open access channels and other technology-based tools, and support in using them if they are to make sensible and informed judgments...."  For more detail, see esp. pp. 12-13 and 41-45 on OA.
http://explorationforchange.net/index.php/rot-home.html
http://goo.gl/1ksVf

* "A recent study that assessed the impact of the publisher's copyediting on open access manuscripts of scholarly articles concludes that the manuscript versions "are probably 'good enough' for use by scholars … and by teachers."  Sanford Thatcher, Director Emeritus of Penn State University Press, designed the study out of concern that archiving "less-than-final versions of articles carried a risk of corrupting scholarship" through use of "imperfect versions." His team examined manuscripts of scholarly journal articles in the humanities and social sciences which had been made openly available through Harvard's repository.  Thatcher expected to find the open access manuscripts deficient in comparison with the final copyedited and published articles, but found instead that "By and large, the copyediting did not result in any major improvements of the manuscripts" and that “the vast majority of the changes made were for the sake of enforcing a house formatting style and cleaning up a variety of inconsistencies and infelicities, none of which reached into the substance of the writing or affected the meaning other than by adding a bit more clarity here and there." ..."
http://news-libraries.mit.edu/blog/access-manuscripts/5538/

* A new study from the Publishing Research Consortium found that "[f]ew publishers have a publicly available mining policy, the large majority handles mining requests on a case-by-case basis. Approximately 30 % of publisher respondents allow any kind of mining of their content without restrictions, in most cases as part of their Open Access policies. For the other publishers, nearly all require information about the intent and purpose of the mining request....Over 90 % of publisher respondents grant research-focused mining requests, nearly 60 % of these in all or the majority of cases. The request will be granted by 60% of publisher respondents in most or all cases if it creates traffic drivers to their sites but just over half of these publishers (51%) will refuse in all or most cases if the results of the mining would compete with their own services.  A majority of publishers do not see Open Access as a prerequisite for content mining...."
http://www.publishingresearch.org.uk/documents/PRCSmitJAMreport2.30June13.pdf

* From Les Carr:  "[I]n the first quarter of 2011 the number of articles downloaded for free [from Mendeley] jumped from 300,000 to 800,000....[T]he number of members of the Computer Science discipline appears to be 2.2x larger than last August (increased to 74736 from 34230.) Of these, only 12102 appear in the Computer Science directory listing, whose contents are now filtered by Mendeley according to their "profile completion"; the gross number was kindly provided for me by Steve Dennis at Mendeley. This filtering takes care of the long tail of accounts that have never been used. Of the filtered users, 1676 are "OA active", having publicly shared at least one PDF document (up 21% on last August). The total number of PDFs shared by this group is 8014, up 16% on last August with 4.8 PDFs being shared per "active OA user" (down from 5.0 last August).  So a big increase in user numbers results in a small increase in publicly shared PDFs, confirming (I think) that Mendeley are not preaching to the choir, and are mainly attracting users who are not already "OA active"...."  From a follow-up post:  "I thought it worthwhile to check how representative my chosen discipline (Computer Science) was [in Mendeley]....The table below shows the results of this procedure for 11 disciplines....Computer Science appears to be in the 5-10% range of OA (18 or 11 PDFs out of a page of 200 results) which does seem to be just about average. Social Science, Medicine, Health Science, Economics and the Humanities appear to have fewer PDFs and Maths and Physics appear to have rather more...."
http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2011/06/mendeley-download-vs-upload-growth.html
http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2011/06/mendeley-measuring-oa-rates.html

* Edwin Henneken and six co-authors found that "articles with data links are indeed cited more than articles without these links - for this data set [the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System], articles with data links acquired 20% more citations (compared to articles without these links)."
http://anopisthographs.wordpress.com/2011/06/03/linking-to-data-effect-on-citation-rates-in-astronomy/
http://labs.adsabs.harvard.edu/ui/abs/2006JEPub...9....2H

* Sünje Dallmeier-Tiessen and Anja Lengenfelder created an overview of the data from German respondents to the SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) survey.
http://www.egms.de/static/en/journals/mbi/2011-11/mbi000218.shtml

* Brian Kelly is investigating the institutional repositories of Russell Group universities in the UK to see what percentage of their deposits are full-text.  He's filling the in numbers as he obtains them.
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2011/06/06/a-pilot-survey-of-the-numbers-of-full-text-items-in-institutional-repositories/

* Goldsmiths Research Online at the University of London launched a survey "to determine the suitability of CERIF's data schema for capturing and recording impact...."
http://goldsmiths.limequery.org/66559/lang-en

* The Scholarly Communications Task Force at the University of Central Florida Libraries launched a short survey for institutions with institutional repositories.
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5886.html

* Maryam Ghorbani launched a survey on knowledge sharing among librarians.  
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/W6LWK6B

* Helio Kuramoto is running a one-question online poll (in Portuguese).  In effect:  why have the vast majority of universities not yet adopted green OA mandates?
http://kuramoto.wordpress.com/2011/06/27/por-que-o-oa-encontra-dificuldades-na-maioria-das-instituicoes-de-ensinopesquisa/

 + Tools and software

* The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University launched PressForward, which will "[1] Develop effective methods for collecting, screening, and drawing attention to the best online scholarship, including scholarly blogs, digital projects, and other web genres that don't fit into traditional articles or books, as well as conference papers, white papers, and reports; [2] Encourage the proliferation of open access scholarship through active new forms of publication, concentrating the attention of scholarly communities around high-quality, digital-first scholarship; [3] Create a new platform that will make it simple for any organization or community of scholars to launch similar publications and give guidance to institutions, scholarly societies, and academic publishers who wish to supplement their current journals with online outlets."
http://pressforward.org/
http://chnm.gmu.edu/news/introducing-pressforward/

* "Talis...launched a new data marketplace called Kasabi...[which] should be of interest to the Open Data community....Data hosting in Kasabi is free....A number of the core APIs and services, including basic Linked Data publishing will also always be a free part of the service....Kasabi will also support publishing of commercial data. But our goal is to require a free usage level for all data that is offered within the marketplace...."  From the Kasabi about page:  "Kasabi is built natively on Linked Data: data as RDF triples that can be queried and matched to any number of graph patterns natively.  It's the W3C’s recommended way to publish data on the web, because it allows for the infrastructure of the web itself to handle the shape of the information....This community lets data providers explore business models and add value to their datasets, while allowing developers access to build their applications and services around them....It's our vision to allow developers to mix and match through use of Kasabi’s underlying Linked Data structure. This will let people actually reshape the format of information they need using web standards right in the marketplace. This avoids extra overhead of downloading hacking the data into a shape that fits your needs...."
http://blog.okfn.org/2011/06/25/open-data-and-kasabi/
http://beta.kasabi.com/
http://beta.kasabi.com/about

* "The DOE [US Department of Energy] Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) announced...a new tool in scientific discovery technology. Now citizens and researchers alike can search for both written and spoken words in a whole range of media using OSTI's new, speech-indexed multimedia within large scientific search portals. To this point, online searches for scientific information have been limited to text....The new development uses unique speech-recognition search technology in combination with OSTI's two federated search portals, ScienceAccelerator.gov and WorldWideScience.org, which search a wide range of DOE and worldwide databases, respectively...."
http://www.osti.gov/news/pressreleases/2011/june/multimedia.shtml

* OSTI also released OSTI Mobile, which "allows you to search technical reports, journal articles, conference papers, data files, multimedia, software, project summaries, patents, and e-prints from a number of OSTI databases, including Energy Citations Database, Information Bridge, ScienceCinema, DOepatents andDOE Green Energy...."
http://www.osti.gov/ostiblog/catch-research-info-while-you-wait

* "As part of the Open Repositories 2011 Developers Challenge, our team [Stuart Lewis] submitted a few different prototypes that formed our vision of 'The Future of Repositories'....One of the prototypes was a new deposit application using SWORD.  It was written for the Android mobile operating system, and was designed to deposit photographs into repositories.  The use case for this is for social scientists who want to capture photographs straight into trusted storage - a repository...."
http://blog.stuartlewis.com/2011/06/20/android-sword-deposit-mobile-app/

* "We [ChemSpider] have text mined compound names from all RSC 2008-2010 journal articles and loaded these into ChemSpider - adding about 26,000 new-to-ChemSpider compounds with links back to the published articles. We've also simplified the view of compound name and chemical/biochemical term highlighting within the Publishing Platform HTML view, so readers can link out from compound names (direct to ChemSpider for related compound information) and from chemical and biochemical terms (to other linked articles). We have also worked with the Utopia Documents team (getutopia.com) to apply these enhancements to our PDF - so with the free Utopia Documents PDF viewer (originally developed in conjunction with Portland Press for the Biochemical Journal), readers get any enhancements overlaid on top of the PDF as they're reading and can link out just as they can from the HTML0..."
http://www.chemspider.com/blog/utopia-links-chemspider-and-rsc-journal-articles.html

* "Text mining features in databases are an increasingly popular way to extract useful information that could otherwise remain hidden. A new resource has become available to allow researchers to search for particular chemical compounds in biomedical literature. This task is often confounded by multiple names for particular chemicals being used in publications. Similarly, sometimes the structure may be known but the investigator may lack a name for the compound. Compounds In Literature (CIL) helps overcome these problems, via a novel web interface, helping researchers to locate chemical names, structures, or even similar structures in over 28 million compounds of PubChem and more than 20 million citations from PubMed."
http://ukpmc.blogspot.com/2011/06/power-of-text-mining.html

* "Journalist's Resource is a free, open-access site [developed at Harvard's Shorenstein Center] whose chief goal is to make scholarly research more accessible for journalists, journalism educators and students. Our objective is to encourage journalists to utilize high-quality scholarship in their daily reporting, and we intend for the site to make that as easy as possible. I invite you to try out our searchable database where we have vetted relevant, comprehensible policy studies in many areas...."
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/romenesko/136939/harvards-shorenstein-center-launches-research-tool-for-journalists/

* "The BASE OAI-PMH Validity Checker [OVAL, beta] is a tool which helps us to integrate new repositories into the BASE index. We [at BASE, Bielefeld Academic Search Engine] release it here in order to help repository managers to easily verify if their repository is compliant with the BASE requirements...."
http://oval.base-search.net/oval

* "With the aim of providing Islandora/Fedora migration tools for a wide range of repository systems Islandora is set to begin testing a new ContentDM migration tool with simple image and PDF collections....Discovery Garden and the Islandora team continue to develop new functionality for Islandora, an open source framework that uniquely combines the Drupal and Fedora open software applications to create a robust digital asset management system...."
http://duraspace.org/new-contentdm-migration-tool-islandora

* Katarina Lovrecic and InTechWeb launched Open Access Comments, a new blog devoted to OA and related topics.
http://openaccess.co/

* "The new PLoS Search API (Application Programming Interface) allows anyone to build their own applications for the web, desktop or mobile devices using PLoS content.  By opening up our content and data through this API, we hope to encourage the development of more tools that will improve the way PLoS users discover and interact with our content, as well as their own...."
http://blogs.plos.org/plos/2011/06/announcing-the-new-plos-search-api/

* Doug Rocks-Macqueen launched an Open Access Archaeology search engine and would welcome user feedback.
http://dougsarchaeology.wordpress.com/2011/06/11/openaccessarchaeology-org/
http://www.openaccessarchaeology.org/

* "The PKP [Public Knowledge Project] Development Team...announce[d] the release of OJS 2.3.5.  OJS 2.3.5 builds upon the successful 2.3.4 release by incorporating the recommended patches...for that release...."
http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/3831

 + Awards and milestones

* PLoS ONE is the SPARC Innovator for June 2011.  From the announcement:  "For blazing a new trail in open-access journals, inspiring broader change in scholarly publishing, and thriving along the way, SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has named the Public Library of Science’s (PLoS) PLoS ONE as the SPARC Innovator for June 2011...."
http://www.arl.org/sparc/innovator/plos-one.shtml
http://www.arl.org/sparc/innovator/

* "Project Euclid --the premier platform and information community for mathematics and statistics resources from independent publishers-- received the 2011 Division Award from the Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics (PAM) Division of the Special Libraries Association. Project Euclid is jointly managed by Cornell University Library and Duke University Press...."
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5880.html

* The Machine-Assisted Reference Section (MARS) of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) of the American Library Association (ALA) announced its picks for Best Free Reference Web Sites of 2011.  Among the 25 winners were the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Cornell Lab or Ornithology, Open CRS, Open Library, Public Library of Science, and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/rusa/sections/mars/marspubs/marsbestfreewebsites/marsbestref2011.cfm

* "National Agricultural Library (NAL) Deputy Director Eleanor Frierson [was] named "Federal Librarian of the Year" for 2010 by the Federal Library and Information Center Committee (FLICC) of the Library of Congress for her leadership and direction of NAL and her service as co-chair of the Science.gov Alliance....In selecting Frierson for her award, FLICC cited her important contributions to the development of Science.gov....As co-chair of the Science.gov Alliance, she oversaw major enhancements to the site, expansion of its valuable content and the development of key policies.  In addition to her work with Science.gov, Frierson also chairs the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) Government Information and Official Publications Section and serves as the U.S. representative to the WorldWideScience.org Alliance...."
http://www.nal.usda.gov/news/frierson_award.shtml

* The author of the Scepticemia blog, who goes by  Pranab, won the Science 3.0 Open Science blogging contest for a January 19, 2011, post on PLoS ONE.
http://scepticemia.com/2011/06/07/science-3-o-blogging-contest-win/
http://scepticemia.com/2011/01/19/plos-vs-nature-the-open-access-showdown/

* "Elsevier...announced the winners of the Executable Paper Grand Challenge....Top honors went to The Collage Authoring Environment...[which is] a scalable architecture designed to support authors, reviewers, and end users as well as publishers. The system allows researchers to create papers by combining narrative discussion with snippets of executable code....Second Prize...[went to] SHARE  [Sharing Hosted Autonomous Research Environments]: A Web Portal for Creating and Sharing Executable Research Papers....By deploying a copy of the required operating system in SHARE as well as relevant software and data, authors can make a conventional paper fully reproducible and interactive...."
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/elsevier-announces-winners-of-the-executable-paper-grand-challenge-123335843.html
http://goo.gl/uPsL6

* "The Public Library of Science...joined Mendeley in co-sponsoring the Binary Battle, the contest to build the best apps that make science more open using PLoS and Mendeley's API's. This brings the prize money to be won up to $16,000 plus other cool gifts and the opportunity to get your entries in front of a panel of influential judges from technology, media and science...."
http://www.mendeley.com/blog/developer-resources/plos-joins-mendeley-as-co-sponsor-of-the-binary-battle/
http://blogs.plos.org/plos/2011/06/build-an-app-that-makes-science-more-open/

* "Spurred on by a German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, [Wikipedia] will launch a petition this week to have the website listed on the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization's world heritage lists. If accepted, Wikipedia would be afforded the international protection and preservation afforded to man made monuments and natural wonders...."
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/is-wikipedia-a-world-cultural-repository/239274/

* "E-LIS, the subject repository for library and information science, passed the 12,000 document mark today [6/22/11]...."
http://oalibrarian.blogspot.com/2011/06/e-lis-subject-repository-for-library.html

* RePEc "surpassed 400’000 working papers listed in our services, of which a third of a million are available online. We counted for the month of May 769,517 file downloads and 2,608,098 abstract views....Finally, these a the threshold we passed over the passed month: 600’000 paper announcements disseminated through NEP; 400’000 listed working papers; 333’333 listed online working papers; 12’000 listed books...."
http://blog.repec.org/2011/06/06/repec-in-may-2011/

* ROARMAP passed the milestones of listing 200 OA mandates.
http://roarmap.eprints.org/
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/814-ROARMAPs-Green-Open-Access-Mandates-Pass-200-Mark.html

* Springer announced the launch of its 50th full (not hybrid) OA journal, the International Journal of Disaster Risk Science.  IJDRS is a no-fee OA journal funded by Beijing Normal University.
http://www.springer.com/about+springer/media/pressreleases?SGWID=1-11002-6-1175922-0

* Heather Morrison released her quarterly update (June 2011) on the dramatic growth of OA.
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/06/let-competition-begin-dramatic-growth.html

 + Other

* The Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS) launched the Open Access Map, showing the location of OA projects around the world.
http://www.openaccessmap.org/
http://www.openoasis.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=614&Itemid=414

* The Spanish government created an OA database of more than four million Spanish judicial opinions, the largest collection of OA case law in Europe.
http://www.elpais.com/articulo/espana/millones/sentencias/disposicion/ciudadano/elpepiesp/20110628elpepinac_15/Tes
http://www.poderjudicial.es/

* Berkeley Electronic Press announced 3 new OA repositories, 6 new OA journals, 44 new OA image galleries, and 13 OA book galleries.
https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5888.html

* "YouTube...added the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) as a licensing option for users! Now when users upload video, they can choose to license it under CC BY or to remain with the default “Standard YouTube License.” Users may also change the license on existing videos by editing each video individually. In conjunction with the implementation, YouTube has launched a Creative Commons video library containing 10,000 videos under CC BY....The YouTube Video Editor now contains a CC tab that allows users to search the Creative Commons video library and select videos to edit and remix. Users may remix videos directly on the editor platform, and any video that is created using CC BY-licensed content will automatically display the linked source videos' titles underneath the video player. Since CC BY is enabled as a licensing option, the library will grow as more users choose to license their work under CC BY...."
https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/27533

* The Patient Voices project provides OA to first-person stories "written by patients, carers or healthcare workers in workshops run by Pilgrim Projects. The aim is to give a voice to those who are sometimes voiceless and has resulted in a rich library of stories....One of the most important facets of the project is that the stories are made available through the patient voices website, with the permission of the storytellers, under a creative commons licence...."
http://blogs.plos.org/speakingofmedicine/2011/06/29/patient-voices-a-digital-library-of-healthcare-stories/

* "Creative Commons and the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) announce[d] the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative, a project aimed at improving education search and discovery via a common framework for tagging and organizing learning resources on the web. The learning resources framework will be designed to work with schema.org, the web metadata framework recently launched by Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, as well as to work with other metadata technologies and to enable other rich applications....Creating a common metadata schema will accelerate movement toward personalized learning by publishers, content providers and learners, and help to unleash the tremendous potential of OER and online learning...."
https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/27603

* "An international team of researchers...collected 160 statements from former deportees [to Soviet Gulags from European territories annexed by the USSR], photographs of their lives, documents from private and public archives and films. Many of these witnesses had never spoken out before. In these statements and these documents, the [Virtual Museum of the Gulag] invites you to explore a neglected chapter of the history of Europe." 
http://museum.gulagmemories.eu/en/home/homepage

 ----------

Coming this month

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

* July 19, 2011.  Date for the parties to the Google book settlement to agree on a revised settlement.  In the absence of a new settlement, the plaintiffs will resume their lawsuit against Google.
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/google-settlement-revision-due-next-month.html

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

* 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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