Open Access News

Bear with me. Here are new copies of the six missing posts.

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Recommendations for an Oxford OA repository

Michael Fraser, Towards a Research Repository for Oxford University, version 1.1, January 23, 2006. (Thanks to Stevan Harnad.) Excerpt:

In 2005 the Digital Archiving Group, a working group of Oxford’s Information and Communication Technologies Committee (ICTC), suggested that a pilot project for the digital archiving of scholarly papers be developed. To support this suggestion, and to investigate the wider issues relating to eprints and institutional repositories, a workshop was organised on 10 June 2005 (see Programme in Appendix B). The purpose of the workshop was to investigate the opportunities and challenges of developing an open access institutional repository for research....

The following recommendations were either refined by or arose out of the workshop held on 10 June 2005. They relate to the establishment of an institutional research repository within an overall framework integrating scholarly communication and digital curation. These recommendations are intended to build upon, and bring into production, activities already being undertaken within the University (and further described below):

1. To establish a scholarly communications forum or other appropriate cross-divisional body to investigate, evaluate, facilitate and raise awareness about new models and related issues for the production and dissemination of Oxford University scholarship.
2. To develop supporting policies, guidelines and incentives to enable members of the research community to self-archive research publications within Oxford's research repository, and in any case, to provide the infrastructure to enable grant-holders to comply with current or future open access policies of the Research Councils and other funding bodies.
3. To establish an institutional research repository, led by OULS with support from OUCS and in consultation with and agreement of the academic divisions.
4. To provide recurrent central funding from an appropriate source in order to support at least 2 FTE and the necessary hardware requirements.
5. To make freely available the research output, across subject areas, of the University through provision of an open access repository.
6. To investigate the appropriate and effective place of a research repository within the overall management of the institution's research record, including bibliographic metadata and, where agreed, fulltext as part of RAE 2008.
7. To provide support and guidance on intellectual property rights to ensure that researchers have the right to deposit research publications and, where appropriate, supporting data within an institutional research repository.
8. To work in partnership with scholarly publishers to enable access to and the curation of Oxford's research output.
9. To ensure that the research repository conforms with any agreed institutional repository framework, including conformance with relevant open standards and active collaboration with other stakeholders involved in the development of institutional repository infrastructure or value-added services within the University.

(originally posted 2/18/06, 2:54 pm)

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Report on OECD meeting on access and DRM

Philipp Bohn, The Future Digital Economy: A session report on DRM, INDICARE, February 17, 2006.

Abstract: On January 30th and 31st, the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) and the Italian Minister of Innovation and Technology, Lucio Stanca, invited delegates from all OECD countries to Rome. Several speakers were scheduled to discuss digital content creation, distribution and access. One panel specifically addressed "Content diffusion: IPR, DRM, licensing, content security, standards". This article summarizes some key ideas and statements, primarily concerning DRM.

(originally posted 2/18/06, 11:00 am)

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India's president on bandwidth and access

T. Jayaraman, Enhance bandwidth immediately: Kalam, The Hindu, February 17, 2006. Excerpt:

India must aim at enhancing bandwidth immediately, and "as a nation, we must get 1 gigabit per second connectivity," President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam said here on Friday....Addressing some of India's leading scientists, he said, "I have a vision that bandwidth should be free and made available to all those who need it." Calling on the Government to take the lead in making it available, he dwelt at length on equitable access to education and knowledge in the digital era. Describing it as the "primary goal" of virtual universities, he said availability of high bandwidth would ensure that the best resources were accessible to all participants. "Bandwidth is the demolisher of imbalances and a great leveller in the knowledge society."

(originally posted 2/18/06, 10:39 am)

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Esther Dyson on open content

The Value of Attention, Open Business, February 17, 2006. An interview with Esther Dyson. After discussing open content in social networking, music, journalism, and non-academic books, Dyson makes this remark. It"s not about scholarship, but how far does it transfer?

What’s good for authors is not necessarily good for (traditional) publishers. End of story. They [publishers] have to figure out non-traditional value to add.

(originally posted 2/18/06, 9:49 am)

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New Elsevier policy on NIH-funded authors

Elsevier seems to have a new policy for NIH-funded authors. Here's a paragraph from the authors' guide for Elsevier's Reproductive Toxicology:

US National Institutes of Health (NIH) voluntary posting ('Public Access') policy: Elsevier facilitates author posting in connection with the voluntary posting request of the NIH (referred to as the NIH 'Public Access Policy') by submitting the peer-reviewed author's manuscript directly to PubMed Central on request from the author, immediately after final publication. Please e-mail us at NIHauthorrequest@elsevier.com that your work has received NIH funding (with the NIH grant/project number(s), as well as name and e-mail address of the Principal Investigator(s) and that you intend to respond to the NIH request. Upon such confirmation, Elsevier will submit to PubMed Central on your behalf a version of your manuscript that will include peer-review comments, for public access posting 12 months after the final publication date. This will ensure that you will have responded fully to the NIH request policy. There will be no need for you to post your manuscript directly to PubMed Central, and any such posting is prohibited [PS: my emphasis] (although Elsevier will not request that manuscripts authored and posted by US government employees should be taken down from PubMed Central). Individual modifications to this general policy may apply to some Elsevier journals and its society publishing partners.

Comment. The NIH request is directed to authors (grantees), not publishers. Compliance is the author's decision. Like any other publisher, Elsevier has the right to put conditions on what it will accept and to refuse to publish anything that doesn't meet its conditions. But it's the only publisher I know who explicitly prohibits its NIH-funded authors from submitting their manuscripts directly to PubMed Central, even when authors are willing to respect Elsevier's embargo. I have two objections. (1) Elsevier is making authors into the rope in its tug-of-war with NIH. Authors shouldn't have to choose between their funder and their publisher. Instead of prohibiting authors from depositing directly in PubMed Central, Elsevier could give authors good reasons to ask Elsevier to deposit their work for them and let authors decide whether take advantage of the offer. The NIH could also save authors from these dilemmas by mandating deposit and cutting publishers out of the loop, and I expect that publisher policies like this one will help NIH come to that decision. (2) Some Elsevier journals (like Reproductive Toxicology) in effect warn authors about this policy up front on their web sites, but other Elsevier journals apparently follow the same policy without warning authors. Instead, they surprise authors by showing them this paragraph only in the copyright transfer agreement after they've submitted their work and gone through peer review.

See my review of other publisher policies on NIH-funded authors (first group, second group).

(originally posted 2/17/06, 10:48 pm)

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OA to geospatial data

Public Geo Data has launched an online petition calling for OA to EU-collected geospatial data. In particular, it calls on the EU Parliament to reject the current draft of the INSPIRE Directive on European Spatial Data Infrastructure, which provides for "cost recovery" instead of OA. Only citizens of the EU may sign the petition.

(originally posted 2/17/06, 5:20 pm)