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Friday, July 01, 2005

Playing catch-up: June 24 blog postings

Here are the major blog postings I made by email to SOAF while OAN was down last week. June 24, 2005:

Best OA health sites for consumers. Consumer Health WebWatch is a new web site that rates the 20 most-visited health information sites for consumers. All 20 sites are OA. Each site is rated on 10 parameters: overall, identity, advertising and sponsorships, ease of use, corrections and currency, privacy, design, coverage, accessibility, and contents. The service is sponsored by Consumer Reports and the Health Improvement Institute. (Thanks to Faster Cures' SmartBrief.)
Inaugural column on OA. Elizabeth L. Fleischer, Perspectives on Open Access, Science Editor, May-June 2005 (accessible only to subscribers). This is the first installment of Unbound, the new column on open access to appear in every issue of Science Editor. The column itself is not OA, at least so far. Excerpt: 'The term open access causes heartburn in some, elation and hope in others, and a look of bewilderment in the rest. Science Editor is therefore starting a new column, Unbound, to appear as needed, to expand on the issue of open access. What does it mean? What can it accomplish? How can it be achieved? What are the pitfalls? What are the implications for editors?...An assumption in the vision is that users of the information will be able to sort through and understand what they read and know how to apply it. "Free" and available seem to be the goals, but...[f]ree information is of no value if it is not understandable. The higher goal is to communicate scientific information, without barriers, to those who need or want it. That is where CSE can play a particularly important role. Free information can be life-threatening if it is wrong or misinterpreted. Clear writing and editing can make information more valuable. Free information is also of no value if the right information cannot be found quickly and does not get into the hands of the people who need it. In a growing mountain of information, an important thrust is toward the development of standards, search tools, and other mechanisms to find information efficiently....Open access is not a fad that is likely to fade, but both the end point and the route to it are far from certain. Issues of copyright, standardization, and cost models are still in flux. How it will be used in different disciplines, for government-supported vs commercially supported work, and across international borders is a pertinent question. For editors and publishers, the issues will include determining a value for copy-editing and review coordination, keeping publishing honest as cost models change (for instance, watching for bias based on sponsor or government pressure), and balancing the moral high ground with fiscal responsibility. We hope to visit many of those issues from the points of view of authors, readers, editors, librarians, vendors, doctors and scientists, publishers, associations, industry, advertisers, government agencies, and others. Please join in the "open" discussion.'
Comment. Congratulations to Science Editor on the good decision to launch a regular column on OA. But please make it OA! Just one comment on the substance of Betsy Fleisher's inaugural column: She's asking the right questions, but the discussion of communication and intelligibility seems to presuppose that the intended audience of OA literature is the lay public. Not true. For peer-reviewed research literature, the intended audience is the research community. The same literature should be available to lay readers who care to read it, especially lay readers who paid with their taxes to fund the underlying research. But the primary readers will always be researchers, especially those who lack access through their institutions. Having said that, I welcome all efforts to improve intelligibility and worry only about efforts to move literature unintelligible to lay readers into a non-OA safe zone.
German licenses for OA articles. Ellen Euler, Licences for open access to scientific publications: � a German perspective, INDICARE, June 24, 2005. Abstract: 'Scientific research depends on easy and timely access to and use of existing scientific and scholarly research results, which in our times are mostly in digital form. Open Access promises to be a solution to this problem. To realise Open Access it is not enough to archive publications on a server. Rights have to be granted to the general public by applying licenses. The state and role of CCPL, DPPL, SCPL is discussed with respect to scientific publishing and research. What is also required to make Open Access successful is awareness of authors to which this article wants to contribute.'
OA archaeology service using Google Maps. The OA Archaeology Data Service has started using Google Maps to enhance the usefulness of its ArchSearch catalog. (Thanks to Paul Miller.)
Launch of PLoS Computational Biology. PLoS has announced the debut of its newest OA journal, PLoS Computational Biology. From yesterday's press release: 'The Public Library of Science (PLoS) and the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) are pleased to announce the June 24 launch of PLoS Computational Biology (www.ploscompbiol.org), a new open-access, peer-reviewed journal reporting major biological advances achieved through computation. Unique in its scope, the journal publishes research from one of the most rapidly growing and exciting areas of scientific inquiry. As a collaboration between a scholarly society and an open access publisher, the journal also provides further momentum to the shift towards unrestricted access and use of all scientific and medical literature. "Today we have taken a very important first step to a new era of data and knowledge integration which has the potential to fundamentally change the way we do science," says Dr. Philip E. Bourne, editor-in-chief of PLoS Computational Biology. Bourne is a professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of California San Diego, co-director of the Protein Data Bank and senior advisor to the Life Sciences at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. In the inaugural issue, founding editors Philip E. Bourne, Steven E. Brenner, and Michael B. Eisen explain the vision behind PLoS Computational Biology: "What motivates us to start a new journal at this time? Computation, driven in part by the influx of large amounts of data at all biological scales, has become a central feature of research and discovery in the life sciences."...Open access�free availability and unrestricted use --to all articles published in the journal is central to the mission of PLoS Computational Biology, and distinguishes this new journal from most scientific journals which still needlessly restrict access to their contents. Open access revolutionizes the way we use research literature, and takes much inspiration from the field of computational biology itself. Gribskov reminds us that "free availability of protein and nucleic acid sequences, protein structures, and other biological data is critical to practitioners of computational biology." '
Launch of UK Data Archive. New UK Data Archive website launched, a JISC press release, June 24, 2005. Excerpt: 'The new UK Data Archive (UKDA), the curator of the largest collection of digital data in the social sciences and humanities in the UK, has launched its new website at the Economic and Social Research Council Week (June 20th - 24th). This follows several months of development work and usability testing. The UK Data Archive is curator of the largest collection of digital data in the social sciences and humanities in the UK.'
Conference statement endorses OA. Participants in a JISC-sponsored colloquium (London, June 21-22, 2005) have issued a Statement on Scholarly Communication and Publishing. Excerpt: 'Although not unanimously agreed a statement of principles emerged for which there was an overwhelming consensus of support. [1] We believe that communication of results is an essential part of the research process and that research outputs should be disseminated widely and readily, giving access to all. [2] Research results are wide in scope, and access to datasets, background documents and other information are as essential as access to the article. [3] There are many effective routes to do this; traditional publishing models are only one route. [4] Of the emerging models, open access journals and subject repositories and institutional repositories show potential and further development and deployment should be encouraged. [5] Institutions and publishers need to investigate the potential of models that allow a graceful and sustainable transition from old to new paradigms....[8] Authors or authoring institutions should retain the rights to their intellectual property....Further details including presentations and a report will be available on the JISC web site in due course.'
Scientist attitudes toward ejournals. The Science Advisory Board has conducted a survey of scientist attitudes toward ejournals. Either the survey questions and full text of the study are not online or they are well hidden. But see this summary from Sciscoop. It seems that the survey questions represented OA journals as charging author fees, which naturally elicited negative reactions. (Most OA journals charge no fees at all. When they do charge fees, the fees are usually paid by the author's funding agency or employer, or waived, not paid out of the author's pocket.) There is a link to the survey questions, but it leads to the questions for a different, earlier study on the NIH public-access policy --which BTW showed overwhelming support from respondents.

Posted by Peter Suber at 7/01/2005 11:17:00 AM.