Open Access News Substitute

There is a problem with FTP'ing to the Open Access News site. Peter Suber is temporarily posting to the SPARC Open Access Forum instead.

Here are the two most recent posts:

Here's another installment of the email version of Open Access News, since I still can't update the blog < http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html >. Feel free to forward this widely, especially to people who might not know that OAN is temporarily frozen.

Items are roughly in the order in which I discovered them, with the most recent at the top the order in which they would have appeared on the blog.

Peter Suber

Permission to harvest data from online files

Peter Murray-Rust, Nature: How much content can our robots access? A Scientist and the Web, September 12, 2007. Excerpt:

In this blog (Copyrighted Data: replies [1], Wiley and eMolecules: unacceptable; an explanation would be welcome - [2]) , and elsewhere we have been discussing the “copyright” of factual information, or “data”. In [2] I ask a major publisher whether copyright applies to some or all of the factual scientific record they publish. So far I have had no reply. Here I ask another, Nature, who - at least through Timo Hannay - have been very helpful in discussing aspects of publication (most other publishers have been silent).
The issue arises in “supplemental data” or “supporting information” which is the factual record of the experiment - increasingly required as proof of correctness. Some major publishers (Royal Soc Chemistry, Int. Union of Crystallography, Nature) do not claim copyright over this; others such as American Chemical Society and Angewandte Chemie (Wiley) appear to do so, though I haven’t had a definitive public statement from either.
Our vision for the future is that a large part of published scientific data could be made directly machine-understandable, if the publishers collaborate in this....
So I am going to ask Nature what I can do and what I can’t. What my robots can do and what the can’t. If the answer is not “YES” to a question it is “NO” - there can be no “middle ground” for robots. If you don’t know then the answer is NO. If I have to ask for permission the answer is NO.

PMR elaborates in a follow-up post, showing the kinds of data and images he'd like to be able to harvest and re-use.



OA to 500 scientific memoirs

The US National Academy of Sciences is providing OA to 500 scientific memoirs representing 150 years of scientific history. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) From yesterday's announcement:

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is making 150 years of American scientific history available by publishing its entire collection of Biographical Memoirs on the Internet. Biographical Memoirs are brief biographies of deceased NAS members written by those who knew them or their work.
Since 1877, NAS has published over 1,400 memoirs. Although the memoirs published since 1995 have been freely available on the Academy's Web site, over 900 memoirs were available previously only through archives and libraries. "This is a ‘historic’ event that will have substantial scholarly value and be of general interest to the public.
Among the additional 500 memoirs published online are those of famed naturalist Louis Agassiz; Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; Thomas Edison; Alexander Graham Bell; noted anthropologist Margaret Mead; and psychologist and philosopher John Dewey. More memoirs will be published regularly until the entire collection is available online.



OA repositories in China

ShuYong Jiang, Open Mind, Open Access, a preprint, self-archived March 24, 2007. (Thanks to Law Librarian Blog.)

Abstract: Open access is a modern notion of resource sharing in the technology era. It began as a bold reaction of the academic community to the rapidly increased cost of scholarly publishing, and it is now an important concept in digitization and digital libraries. It has hanged the way in which scholarly information is disseminated. While the development of electronic resources and digitization in China in recent years provides rich opportunities for scholarly information exchange, open access both as a concept and as a practice, is yet to be accepted. Open access repositories are very limited in number. Open access as a concept was not on the agenda for digital resource development until 2005 and the first open access library and information repository by National Library of China was launched in July 2006. Prior to this, there were very few open access resources available. Most of them were experimental in nature and inoperable with mainstream Internet tools. Not only do these open access resources not carry the same academic value as other scholarly publications, but also they lack support from both information providers and consumers. By looking at the current status of open access resources in China, this paper will examine some of the primary open access resources in China, such as Qiji Wenku (“Miracle Library”). It will raise issues related to open access in China such as scholarly resource sharing; the cooperation among information providers, creators and consumers; the implication of online copyright in a digital environment; and, the promotion of the idea of resource and technology sharing in the global information transition.



18 OA journals from the ABA

John Reidelbach, American Bar Association Online Journals, Criss Library Focus on Online, September 12, 2007. Excerpt:

Who would have thought that the ABA would have any online journals freely available? Well, not me that's for sure. I have completed my review of 44 ABA journals in the American Bar Association Online Journals database in Serials Solutions and found that 18 of those journals allowed open access. These freely accessible journals seem to be primarily what I would consider newsletter types of publications, but hey, I don't turn down anything that gives our users free access. [PS: Omitting the list of 18.]



Time to contact the Senate

An alert from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access:

As the Senate considers Appropriations measures for the 2008 fiscal year this fall, please take a moment to remind your Senators of your strong support for public access to publicly funded research and ­ specifically ­ ensuring the success of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy by making deposit mandatory for researchers.
Earlier this summer, the House of Representatives passed legislation with language that directs the NIH to make this change. The Senate Appropriations Committee approved a similar measure. Now, as the Appropriations process moves forward, it is critically important that our Senators are reminded of the breadth and depth of support for enhanced public access to the results of NIH-funded research. Please take a moment to weigh in with your Senator now.

Contact information for your Senator is included below. Please fax a letter with your support no later than Friday, September 28, 2007.
Feel free to draw upon the following talking points:
* American taxpayers are entitled to open access on the Internet to the peer-reviewed scientific articles on research funded by the U.S. government. Widespread access to the information contained in these articles is an essential, inseparable component of our nation's investment in science.
* The Fiscal Year 2008 Labor/HHS Appropriations Bill reported out of committee contains language directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to change its Public Access Policy so that it requires NIH-funded researchers to deposit copies of agency-funded research articles into the National Library of Medicine's online archive.
* Over the more than two years since its implementation, the NIH's current voluntary policy has failed to achieve any of the agency's stated goals, attaining a deposit rate of less than 5% by individual researchers. A mandate is required to ensure deposit in NIH's online archive of articles describing findings of all research funded by the agency.
* We urge the Senate to support the inclusion of language put forth in the Labor/HHS Appropriations bill directing the NIH to implement a mandatory policy and ensuring free, timely access to all research articles stemming from NIH-funded research ­ without change ­ in any appropriate vehicle.
(We'll be making additional resources for patient advocates ­ including the recording of our August 30 Web cast and specific talking points ­ available shortly as well. Watch the ATA Web site or email me directly for updates.)
Again, please take a moment to express your support for public access to research to your Senator as soon as possible and no later than September 28. As always, we'd appreciate it if you'd let us know of what action you're able to take, or send a copy your letter to the ATA through (202) 872-0884 (fax). Thank you!

Comments

* Publisher associations are lobbying hard against this bill. For example, the AAP/PSP launched PRISM, the behemoth Copyright Alliance weighed in, and Elsevier hired another lobbying firm. It's critical that we show the Senate our support for a stronger OA policy at the NIH. If you're a US citizen, please contact your Senators and spread the word to others who could do so.
* I've omitted the list of Senators with their fax numbers, but it's in the ATA message if you need it. For other kinds of contact info for your Senators (DC office, DC phone, local offices, local phones, email), use CongressMerge. Remember to act before September 28!

Peter Suber
Senior Researcher, SPARC
Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge
Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College
Author, SPARC Open Access Newsletter
Author, Open Access News blog
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/
peter.suber@earlham.edu




OA math, not meth
Martin Smith is the coordinator of a Canadian methadone treatment community called Camp One. Its motto is Math Not Meth. He wrote to me recently to explain that

Camp One is successful because Open Access is successful. We are the largest consumer on the arXiv server, averaging 250 downloads a week.

Here's a little more background from the Math Not Meth blog:

MATH Not METH is based on a premise developed in 1994 to break a cycle of Heroin addiction within an institutional setting. The premise was a simple one – If you can divert the attention of an addict away from the ‘Game of Getting’ and focused on the ‘Game of Knowledge’ the Pleasure associated with the ‘Score’ followed by the inevitable disappointment in the High, is replaced by the quest for Knowledge.

And a little more from one of Smith's emails:

Camp One started in 2003 to answer the need for a sanctuary for people who had made it back from the abyss that is Chrystal Meth addiction. It is a 196 Room Float Camp at the Moya Bay Bulkhead at Hesguait on Nootka Sound near Gold River British Columbia. The facility is fully integrated with a 960 processor Xserve core and 256 PowerBook workstations. There is a resident Mathematica 6 Program as well as Open implementations of several other of the major programs available for grid infrastructures. We also have a 32 Tbyte Raid array which has a growing library of Open Software and educational resources which are growing exponentially as people discover the benefit of Learning for the Joy of it, rather than a means to an end.

Finally, some detail from a recent Smith comment on another blog:

Allow me to share what the profound power of Open Access can achieve –
‘When ‘Dave’ first asked me for help...he had a $250.00/Day Meth habit. I introduced him to the Zome tool and hooked him up to my network. In time he became interested in High Energy Physics and devoured everything available from the folks at SLAC, Fermilab, and CERN. He the discovered arXiv and more recently Eprintweb at Cornell and read every dispatch, sometimes sent running to our data miner to find out more on topics he could not grasp.
‘He discovered he could Email the authors of the reports and started asking questions about things he could not understand. A sort of Adhoc support group formed around the questions he asked because he had asked questions they had not thought of. This relationship as grown to the point that ‘Dave’ has been invited to the first firing of the LHC next Spring at CERN. All this from a young man who I was told by the local Judicial authorities was a dead loss.’

Open Access has a thus affected the people I have contact with and as I have said in a few other venues, anyone who opposes it, can either Lead, Follow or Get out of the way, for change, it comes.

Comment. This is a remarkable story. I'm used to hearing about unexpected benefits of OA, but this one tops my list. Bravo to Martin Smith and all the good people at Camp One.



Siva Vaidhyanathan on Google's book-scanning program
First Monday is distributing a podcast of Siva Vaidhyanathan's 2007 Ted Samore Lecture at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, The Googlization of Everything: Digitization and the Future of Books. It's also distributing a podcast and transcript of an interview with him and a preview edition of his article from next month's issue of First Monday, The State of Copyright Activism. (Thanks to Brock Read.)

From the interview:

.So one of my big fears is that if Google either settles out of court and decided not to digitize all these copyrighted works in such an aggressive fashion, or loses in court, then every other player is going to be coward away from doing this. In other words, it’s going to be that much harder to convince libraries that they should be doing it. It’s going to be that much harder to convince the other open access advocates, like Brewster Kahle, to push forward and digitize copyrighted material.
The fact is this is a massive privatization of a public good. It is a massive privatization of years of collection development, years of choice and investment by the public and by librarians in these collections. And Google is getting all of this stuff essentially for free without any sort of quality control built into the system.

And so what I would like to see? I would like to see all the major public universities, public research universities, in the country gather together and raise the money or persuade Congress to deliver the money to do this sort of thing because it’s in the public interest, not because it’s in Google’s interest. If it really is this important we should be able to mount a public campaign, a set of arguments and convince the people with the purse strings that this should be done right.



Elsevier hires another US lobbying firm
Reed Elsevier Hires Lobbyist, Associated Press, September 10, 2007. Excerpt:

The U.S. unit of Reed Elsevier Group PLC, the Anglo-Dutch publishing and information company, hired Barbour Griffith & Rogers LLC to lobby the federal government, according to a disclosure form.
The firm will provide advice on policy issues important to the publishing industry, according to the form posted online Friday by the Senate's public records office.

Comment. Elsevier's budget for lobbying Congress increased 610% from 1998 to 2006, and this is another escalation. The apparent cause is the bill now before Congress to strengthen the NIH policy from a request to a requirement.



Identifying OA works for link resolvers
The British Columbia Electronic Library Network (BC ELN) has launched an Open Access Collections Group. (Thanks to Heather Morrison.) From today's announcement:

BC ELN and SFU Library invite all CUFTS libraries to participate in an Open Access Collections Group. The purpose of this group is to collaborate on the development and maintenance of open access title lists for CUFTS (for link resolving through GODOT, and inclusion in A to Z journal lists for CJDB users). Lists created to date include the SFU-developed Open Access Journals and Free Government Serials, and the BC ELN-inspired Open Access Magazines.
For more information, please see the draft Terms of Reference, available for download [here].



CFHSS launches a series of OA books
Yesterday the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CFHSS) launched a new project, Books in Open Access. (Thanks to Jean-Claude Guédon.) From the site:

The scholarship of academics working with the Federation is designed to add to the body of humanity's knowledge and enrich the social, cultural and intellectual life of Canada and the world. Since 1941, the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program (ASPP) has helped scholars disseminate their research by supporting the publication of nearly 5,000 scholarly books in the humanities and social sciences.
The advent of new communications technology now allows scholars to share their research on a greater scale than ever before imagined. Placing scholarly books online in open access format makes their treasures available to millions of people, allowing users to read entire works online and conduct searches within them. The ASPP seeks to play its own part in this increasingly-important dissemination movement, with a particular view to bringing back into the light the many rich and valuable works it has supported in the past that are now difficult to find.
Since 1989, the ASPP has awarded four annual Scholarly Book Prizes to the finest books it supports each year. We now feature four of our past Scholarly Book Prize winners here in open access format. We hope these will be just the first in a long line of ASPP-supported books to appear in open access through the Federation's site. Click here to see and read these titles-and keep your eyes open for more to come in the near future!



More dissents from PRISM
Jennifer Howard, University-Press Leader Quit Publishers' Panel Over Anti-Open-Access Campaign, Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog, September 11, 2007. Excerpt:

At least one top university-press director spoke out against the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine, or Prism, a controversial new anti-open-access campaign sponsored by the Association of American Publishers, before it went public.
In an e-mail message, James D. Jordan, president and director of Columbia University Press, told The Chronicle today that he had tendered his resignation from the Executive Council of the AAP's Professional and Scholarly Publishing division on August 28, five days after Prism was announced. A task force of the Executive Council put the campaign together.
"I resigned from the Executive Council because I did not feel that serving at this time was the best use of my time or Columbia resources," Mr. Jordan wrote, "and because I had vocally opposed the launch of the Prism Web site and did not subscribe to arguments supporting it and opposing the NIH's public-access proposals."

Mr. Jordan said that his press remained "a member of PSP and the AAP, as both associations serve important educational missions for the scholarly-publishing community even though we do not always agree with every majority view of such a diverse community."
Another university-press leader, Stephen Bourne, chief executive officer of Cambridge University Press, has also made clear his displeasure about Prism. In an e-mail message to The Chronicle, he wrote that Cambridge "has in no way been involved in, or consulted on, the Prism initiative." He added that "Prism's message is oversimplistic and ill-judged, with the unwelcome consequence of creating tension between the publishing community and the proponents of open access."



DBpedia upgrade
DBpedia 2.0, Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog, September 10, 2007. Excerpt:

DBpedia recently released the new version of their dataset. The project aims to extract structured information from Wikipedia so that this can be queried like a database. On their blog they say:

The renewed DBpedia dataset describes 1,950,000 “things”, including at least 80,000 persons, 70,000 places, 35,000 music albums, 12,000 films. It contains 657,000 links to images, 1,600,000 links to relevant external web pages and 440,000 external links into other RDF datasets. Altogether, the DBpedia dataset now consists of around 103 million RDF triples.

As well as improving the quality of the data, the new release includes coordinates for geographical locations and a new classificatory schema based on Wordnet synonym sets. It is also extensively linked with many other open datasets, including: “Geonames, Musicbrainz, WordNet, World Factbook, EuroStat, Book Mashup, DBLP Bibliography and Project Gutenberg datasets”.
This is probably one of the largest open data projects currently out there - and it looks like they have done an excellent job at integrating structured data from Wikipedia with data from other sources. (For more on this see the W3C SWEO Linking Open Data project - which exists precisely in order to link more or less open datasets together.)

Comment. DBpedia harvests from Wikipedia because Wikipedia is large and free. But something similar could be done with unfree databases. The trick (apart from access) is to extract uncopyrightable facts and paraphrased assertions, not copyrighted expressions. Wikipedia may be the inexpensive way to prove the concept, but the concept is of much wider application. See some examples of DBpedia fact and assertion harvesting, and let your imagination run free.



A teaching moment on campuses
Marc Meola, Use PRISM To Start A Dialogue On Open Access, ACRLog, September 10, 2007. Excerpt:

PRISM, an anti-open access group of the Association of American Publishers, has launched a nasty PR campaign that attempts to demonize open access publishing by using simple slogans to equate open access with lack of peer review, government censorship, and theft of intellectual property. (I know, it’s funny, but they are actually saying this stuff. Good thing librarians know how to evaluate information, right?)

As noted in the SPARC letter to members,

the launch of this initiative provides a timely opportunity for engaging faculty members, researchers, students and administrators in dialogue on important issues in scholarly communications.

Most encouragingly, the Association of Research Libraries has produced an excellent issue brief with talking points that effectively counter the PRISM propaganda. ARL points out: On peer review-

The peer review system, based almost completely on the voluntary free labor of the research community, is independent of a particular mode of publishing or business model.

[I]f you need more ammo or a broader overview of the issue, Open Access and the Progress of Science is a well-written argument for open access to science literature in general and proposes the simple solution that scientists just deposit their papers in repositories as soon as they are peer reviewed.

Peter Suber, of course, is always a good source for debunking anti-open access arguments. One of the anti-open access claims is that open access will result in journal cancellations by libraries and collapse of the whole scholarly publishing system....Suber points out, however, that open access in physics has not led to journal cancellations by libraries.
The question for librarians, higher ed administrators and scholars then, is why hasn’t open access in physics led to journal cancellations? Do we really want to set up two systems, an open access repository system while maintaining the old system with publisher embargoes so that libraries will have to maintain subscriptions? Do we really want to “partner” with the kind of companies that have launched such a deceptive and distorted PR campaign?



US plan to digitize more archived documents for OA
The US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is soliciting public comments on its draft Plan for Digitizing Archival Materials for Public Access, 2007-2016. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)

If you have comments, send them by November 9, 2007, to Vision@nara.gov.




Library group supports new OA policy at CIHR
The British Columbia Library Association (BCLA) has sent a letter of congratulations to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) on the new CIHR OA policy. (Thanks to Heather Morrison.) Excerpt:

This is an enlightened policy. As you yourself note in the press release, results of this policy will accelerate the understanding of human health and disease, and leverage the Canadian health research dollar.
The Open Access to Research Outputs policy means expanded access to health research across the country, and around the globe. Physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals outside the major centres will have access to this literature, increasing their ability to provide evidence-based care. Smaller colleges will be better equipped to train new nurses.
This policy will, in many respects, be seen as a model for other funding agencies.
BCLA and its members look forward to ongoing developments as the policy is implemented. Libraries and librarians throughout British Columbia will be working with researchers and readers to raise awareness of this wonderful initiative.



Evaluating OA law projects in Africa
Ivan Mokanov, Are LIIs making lawyers more competent? Slaw.ca, September 10, 2007. Excerpt:

The question is now being asked in Western Africa. The International Development Research Center of Canada (IDRC) has engaged in an assessment of the outcome of free access to law initiatives in four African countries – Burkina Faso, Niger, Senegal and Togo.
The evaluation will be focused more specifically on the impact of free circulation of legal information on the competence of lawyers.
In all those countries, where access to legal information is limited, if any, the local Bar Associations supported by the IDRC are involved in free access to law projects. In two of the countries, free access to law websites are already up and running (JuriBurkina and JuriNiger).
IDRC hopes to deliver an indicator-based framework that will assist Law Societies and other stakeholders involved in the free access to law movement worldwide in measuring the outcome of their efforts.




OA in the Earth sciences
Andrea Bollini and Andrea Marchitelli, Communicating Earth: open access in Earth sciences, a slide presentation at Geoitalia 2007 - W05: I luoghi e i modi dell'informazione sulle scienze della terra: dalla biblioteca al web (Rimini, September 11, 2007). In Italian but with this English-language abstract:

Earth sciences are among the most data-intensive sciences, with a remarkable cooperative work at international level. Data collecting and experiments are often expensive and last long years. So, logistics and system costs are very high. A main reason for publishing data and results is to maximize access and enable potential reuse in many more contexts than with traditional communication means. Fast availability of data and results is a must that cannot attend the traditional publishers’ timeline. Open access is the simplest choice to facilitate fast access to and reuse of scholarly communication and data about Earth sciences: publications and related primary data have to be freely accessible in the broadest and fastest way. A system of OAI-PMH-compliant data and service providers is the most effective way to improve the dissemination and impact of research. CILEA (a non-profit consortium of Italian universities) supports Open Access and is among the first signatories of the Berlin Declaration. Since 2003 CILEA operates the AePIC service, providing innovative solutions for electronic publishing and digital libraries at very competitive costs and timetable, employing open-source and OAI-PMH-compliant software. In the field of Earth sciences, CILEA-AePIC holds a significant role. It provides technical support and hosting to Earth prints http://www.earth-prints.org/, the open archive created and maintained by Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) with the collaboration of Programma Nazionale Ricerche in Antartide. Earth-prints started in the last quarter of 2004 and grows rapidly and steadily. The goal of this repository is to collect, capture, disseminate and preserve the results of research in the fields of Atmosphere, Cryosphere, Hydrosphere and Solid Earth. In the last months CILEA-AePIC is working on the new archive of National Research Council - Research area of Potenza, called ArchEnviMat, that will allow scientists from Potenza Research Area to post and disseminate on-line, at no cost, their scientific work in electronic format.




Timo Hannay on PRISM and some of the debate about it
Timo Hannay, PRISM: Publishers' and Researchers' Intensifying Sense of Mistrust, Nascent (a Nature blog), September 10, 2007. Excerpt:

For anyone who's interested here is Nature Publishing Group's (NPG's) take on PRISM: Although Nature America is a member of the AAP, we are not involved in PRISM and we have not been consulted about it. NPG has supported self-archiving in various ways (from submitting manuscripts to PubMed Central on behalf of our authors to establishing Nature Precedings), and our policies are already compliant with the proposed NIH mandate.
Those are facts. What follows is just my personal opinion.
PRISM has understandably provoked a great deal of anger among those scientists who care about how the fruits of research are communicated. (In this sense, PRISM has achieved the exact opposite of dog-whistle politics: the only people to sit up and take notice have been those who were outraged by it. Nice work, guys.) My main emotion, however, is closer to bewilderment. Do PRISM's proponents (whoever they are) really think that their approach will do anyone, including themselves, any good? It's tempting to suggest that they are out of touch (e.g., with the ways in which technology is changing science and scientific communication), but it's equally possible that I'm out of touch (e.g., with Beltway politics), so I guess all I can conclude is that they inhabit a different universe to the one I'm in.
The things that I find most ill advised about PRISM are the needless belligerence of the message, the crude them-and-us stance, and the distortion of complex issues into unrecognisable caricatures. I wouldn't mind so much if the issues themselves were inconsequential, but they're not. Questions about how scientific communication should be funded, and what roles government should or should not play, are central to scientific progress.
It therefore troubled me that the initial counterattacks on PRISM were themselves often lacking in nuance and discrimination. Given the high emotion generated, this was understandable, but that's not the same as saying it was correct or helpful. The most general error has been to lump all publishers together in declaring them "evil", "afraid", "money-grabbing", and so on. True, PRISM seems to have come out of the AAP, which is a publishing industry body, but right from the beginning (when I also didn't have a clue what was going on) it was fairly clear to anyone who cared to make the distinction that PRISM was not the same as the AAP.
In reinventing scientific communication for the 21st Century we face genuinely difficult challenges. Many of us, in our own different ways, are trying to find solutions. PRISM certainly doesn't help, but nor do some of the more indiscriminate responses. The best antidote to its crude belligerence is not more of the same, but an open, fair and grown-up debate. These issues are too important to be addressed in any other way.





Peter Suber
Senior Researcher, SPARC
Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge
Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College
Author, SPARC Open Access Newsletter
Author, Open Access News blog
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/
peter.suber@earlham.edu

Monetized Open Access? Elsevier's Move Into Ad Profits

With its revenues flat and business models changing, Reed Elsevier has made a bold move into offering free journal content via a web portal in oncology called www.OncologySTAT.com - the site provides free access to current journals from Elsevier's expensive journal titles, paying for it using ads. While Web adverts are nothing new, this combination of open access and ads is new.

www.OncologySTAT.com asks health workers (including librarians) to register and, in exchange, provides immediate access to current cancer-related content from Reed Elsevier's gold standards such as The Lancet and Surgical Oncology. Elsevier wants to sign up 150,000 professional users in the first year to attract advertising from pharmaceutical companies. Is this a new publishing model?

Even though Elsevier posted profits of billions in 2006, it obviously is aware of the impact of open access on the industry and the search enterprise. This move into providing free oncology content using ads might be a viable business model, and may mean a move away from its traditional expensive subscriptions-based model. Time will tell.

Reshaping Scholarly Communication: Major OA-related study at the University of California libraries

The University of California Libraries, a noteworthy leader in the transition to open access, has released the results of a major survey of faculty, Reshaping Scholarly Communications.

Thanks to John Ober on the SPARC Open Access Forum.

Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR): Open Access to Research Outputs

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has just announced their Policy on Access to Research Outputs. Français.

Under this new policy, as of January 1, 2008, grant recipients must make every effort to ensure that their peer-reviewed research articles are freely available as soon as possible after publication...by depositing the article in an archive, such as PubMed Central or an institutional repository, and/or by publishing results in an open access journal. A growing number of journals already meet these requirements and CIHR-funded researchers are encouraged to consider publishing in these journals...grant recipients are now required to deposit bioinformatics, atomic, and molecular coordinate data, as already required by most journals, into the appropriate public database immediately upon publication of research results.. Researchers are encouraged to make use of the SHERPA RoMEO Publisher Copyright Policies and Self-Archiving service to determine whether publishers policies are compliant with the policy, and the policy clarifies that article processing fees for open access publishing are an eligible expense under the Use of Grant Funds.

Notable Quotes from the Press Release:
Timely and unrestricted access to research findings is a defining feature of science, and is essential for advancing knowledge and accelerating our understanding of human health and disease," stated Dr. Alan Bernstein, President of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. "With the development of the internet it is now feasible to disseminate globally and easily the results of research that we fund. As a publicly-funded organization, we have a responsibility to ensure that new advances in health research are available to those who need it and can use it - researchers world-wide, the public and policy makers.

This open access policy will serve as a model for other funding agencies, said Dr. James E. Till of the Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto [Chair of the Task Force that developed this policy]. The policy will leverage taxpayers' investment by accelerating research and by fostering its broader application.

Strengths of this policy include strong support for immediate open access, and support for open access publishing, including economic support for article processing fees. Traditional subscription-based journals can easily comply with the policy through an enlightened self-archiving policy, as the vast majority of journals also do, and making this clear through the Sherpa Romeo list. Another area of strength is the expectation of no more than 6 months delay before open access.

Kudos to the CIHR, President Dr. Alan Bernstein and Task Force Chair Dr. Jim Till for yet another stellar example of Canadian Leadership in the Open Access Movement.

For further commentary, please see The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics.

Huge hopes for the long term: Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web

Tim Berners-Lee, in an awesome 8-minute video on YouTube, explains succinctly and beautifully the potential of open access and open data, to make possible what was previously impossible, why standards and openness are needed to make this happen. Imagine epidemiologists having ready access not only to medical data, but also data about nutrition and air traffic patterns. Thanks to Dean Giustini on UBC Google Scholar Blog.

OA Advocacy: a fun way to help out

Open Access has advanced to the point where advocacy need no longer focus just on philosophy, debate, and public policy, important as these continue to be!

There are already a very great many wonderful open access initiatives that deserve highlighting, celebration - and friendly critique for continued improvement, of course.

I try to highlight successes as much as I can, through my series The Dramatic Growth of Open Access, occasional blogposts and other messages such as my recent Open Access: Quick Stats, Fast Facts, my celebration of OA Librarian heroes, and most recently, my feature on PubMedCentral, and OA leadership at NIH / NLM, and the occasional formal review, such as the review of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for The Charleston Advisor, a highly regarded traditional journal with an interesting approach to combining an ongoing subscription basis while experimenting with OA.

There are now well over 800 open access repositories around the world, more than 2,800 fully open access journals, and many very fine OA initiatives and projects of many types, all over the world, and OA advocates and heroes around the world, too.

To express this another way: as we more rapidly towards an open access future, writing about OA will become no less than writing about the world's scholarship as a whole; the world's academic library, the public library of science (broadly conceived, including but not limited to PLoS as a publisher).

Or - as we move towards as OA future - writing about OA in all its aspects, resources and projects - becomes almost synonymous with writing about librarianship. I will continue to write about as much as I possibly can about The Dramatic Growth of Open Access, one of my favorite series. I will celebrate as many projects, initiatives, and resources as I possibly can. It is already, however, far too much for just one person. Help would be most welcome. If this is of interest and you'd like to chat, please send me an e-mail, at heatherm at eln dot bc dot ca. Or, if you know of a great OA initiative, resource, or hero - write away!

Open J-Gate: portal - or library?

Open J-Gate is the world's biggest english-language portal to open access journals, featuring article-level searching of over 4,230 OA journals. This is, virtually, an open access library!

Many thanks to the commenter who reminded us at OA Librarian of the need to point to this important OA resource. I would like to post more, but after your comment was approved, I can't find it - it is not easy to search for comments on blogger. Could you get in touch with me by e-mail, heatherm at eln dot bc dot ca?

September 2007 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

In the September 2007 SPARC Open Access Newsletter, Peter Suber's feature article is Will Open Access Undermine Peer Review? If you are an OA librarian who needs to explain to your faculty why this argument is bunk, this is highly recommended for reading, bookmarking, and linking to from your library's OA or scholarly communications website.

Article in Salon on OA

Andrew Leonard writes a great column in Salon.com on "How the world works". Today there was this:

Science publishers get even stupider

For fans of increased public access to taxpayer-funded scientific research, 2007 got off to an eye-opening start when Nature broke the news in January that Eric Dezenhall, a public relations high flier, was advising a group of scientific publishers to start pushing the theme that "public access equals government censorship."

I had some fun with that tidbit: "... any publisher of scientific research who even begins to entertain the notion that free access to scientific information can or should be equated with government censorship should be mocked mercilessly in every publication, online or off, free or subscription required, evanescent as a blog or solid as a hard-copy Encyclopedia Britannica, from now until they beg forgiveness from every human on this planet for their disingenuous mendacity." A few days later I was similarly unkind while reviewing Dezenhall's book "Damage Control."

Despite my rhetoric, I can't say I actually believed that the publishers would take Dezenhall's advice. But that is exactly what has happened, reports Peter Suber, the author of a blog exquisitely focused on the topic of open access. On Aug. 23, the Association of American Publishers announced that it was forming a lobbying organization, the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM), to fight back against the perfidious influence of the open access revolutionaries.

A specter is haunting commercial science publishers:

Policies are being proposed that threaten to introduce undue government intervention in science and scholarly publishing, putting at risk the integrity of scientific research by ... undermining the peer review process by compromising the viability of non-profit and commercial journals that manage and fund it [AND] opening the door to scientific censorship in the form of selective additions to or omissions from the scientific record.

Peter Suber's own demolition of PRISM's press release is recommended as a starting point for discussion. Interested parties would also do well to review the terrific conversation that broke out in the Salon comments area when this topic came up in January, before making ill-considered assertions as to how open access will lead to the death of peer review and the end of civilization as we know it.

I stand by my original opinion. The American Association of Publishers and everyone associated with it should be ashamed of trying to protect their profit margins by slandering the open access movement as government intervention and censorship. Research paid for with government funds should be freely accessible to the general public. Peer review will survive. PRISM, however, will be doomed by its own weasel words, which represent a betrayal of everything science stands for.

A taste of Suber, responding to one of the talking points in PRISM's press release:

3. "Recently, there have been legislative and regulatory efforts to compel not-for-profit and commercial journals to surrender to the Federal government a large number of published articles that scholarly journals have paid to peer review, publish, promote, archive and distribute." The word "surrender" here is false and dishonest. Recent legislative and regulatory efforts have encouraged free online access to peer-reviewed manuscripts within 12 months of publication. A few efforts, which have not yet passed, would require this kind of free online access. But every one of these efforts (1) has applied to the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript, not to the published edition, and (2) has been scrupulous to avoid amending copyright law or interferring with the transfer of copyright.

And let us stress again. This is for research that the public paid for, not Monsanto or Merck.

Let the mocking begin.

Andrew Leonard

LIS literature and the gold road: 30% there!

The Directory of Open Access Journals currently lists 77 fully open access, peer-reviewed scholarly LIS journals. This list includes 2 titles with title changes, so the actual total is 75.

An Uhlrich's search for active, scholarly / academic refereed journals with "library" as a subject yields 246 titles.

This means that librarianship is already 30% of the way on the gold road, full open access publishing.

Analysis of recent journal start-ups is even more encouraging! For example, all of the journals listed in either DOAJ or Ulrich's with a start year of 2007 are open access. There are 9 journals in Uhlrich's with a start year of 2006, 8 in DOAJ (88%). There are more scholarly LIS journals with a start year of 2000 or later in DOAJ (39) than there are in Uhrich's (31)!

Full data are available in the open access spreadsheet LIS and the Gold Road.

JASIS pushing to liberalize author agreements

The Journal of the American Society for Information Science (JASIS) is pushing Wiley to liberalize its author agreements, according to Editorial Board member Christine L. Borgman. Good for you, Christine and JASIS!!!

Excerpt from Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed Aug. 22: Publishing and Values (main focus is Anthrosource moving to Wiley Blackwell):

Christine L. Borgman is a professor of information studies at the University of California at Los Angeles and author of Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet, to be published in October by MIT Press. She is also on the editorial board of a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell, The Journal of the American Society for Information Science.

That editorial board, she said, has been pushing Wiley to liberalize its author agreements, so that authors have more leeway to place their papers in online repositories. Currently, they have wide access to place their writings on their own Web sites, but limits elsewhere. Borgman said this model no longer makes sense competitively. More and more scholars, she said, “want repository-friendly journals” and won’t publish in places they don’t view as committed to some measure of open access. Why publish in a journal that is closed off, she said, when you can be in a journal where more people will find your research?

Borgman said that the journal’s editorial board is still waiting for a response from the publisher.

Hat tip to Peter Suber, Open Access News.

Persian blog for E-LIS

A Persian blog for E-LIS is now available.

Thanks to Alirezi Noruzi, E-LIS Editor for Afghanistan and Iraq, Editor-in-Chief of Webology

The Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communications and Cyberinfrastructure

CTWatch Quarterly has just published a very interesting special issue, The Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communications and Cyberinfrastructure. Highly recommended reading! Thanks to Peter Suber of Open Access News for the tip - and a handy clickable table of contents!

Internet Archive is now officially a library!

According to a June 25, 2007 Announcement, the Internet Archive is now officially a library! It's about time, congratulations!

Thanks very much to Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive for archiving OA Librarian and other blogs such as The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics. In my opinion - this is library work!

CARL and SPARC offer Canadian authors new tool to widen access to published articles

CARL and SPARC have teamed up to provide a Canadian version of the SPARC Author Addendum. Please spread the word! This message is an important example, and recognition, of Canadian Leadership in the Open Access Movement

Le texte français suit le texte anglais

For immediate release
August 15, 2007

For more information, contact:
Tim Mark, CARL
(613) 562-5385
carl@uottawa.ca

Jennifer McLennan, SPARC
(202) 296-2296 ext. 121
jennifer@arl.org

CARL AND SPARC OFFER CANADIAN AUTHORS NEW TOOL
TO WIDEN ACCESS TO PUBLISHED ARTICLES
Popular author copyright addendum adapted for use in Canada

Ottawa, ON and Washington, DC - August 15, 2007 - The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) today announced the release of the SPARC Canadian Author Addendum, a new tool for authors in Canada to retain key rights to the journal articles they publish.

Traditional publishing agreements often require that authors grant exclusive rights to the publisher. The new SPARC Canadian Author Addendum enables authors to secure a more balanced agreement by retaining select rights, such as the rights to reproduce, reuse, and publicly present the articles they publish for non-commercial purposes. It will help Canadian researchers to comply with granting council public access policies, such as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Policy on Access to Research Outputs. The Canadian Addendum reflects Canadian copyright law and is an adaptation of the original U.S. version of the SPARC Author Addendum.

"The SPARC Canadian Author Addendum allows researchers to have maximum impact and visibility for their publications - with the comfort of knowing important rights still belong to them," stated Carolynne Presser, Chair of the CARL Scholarly Communication Committee and Director of Libraries at the University of Manitoba.

"The Canadian Addendum is an important contribution to the ongoing international movement to support authors in making research articles accessible to all who may benefit from their findings," said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. "Canada has been a leader in the move toward increased access to research and we're pleased to have played a role in collaborating with CARL on this important initiative."

An explanatory brochure complements the Addendum. Both the brochure and addendum are available in French and English on the CARL and SPARC Web sites and will be widely distributed. SPARC, in conjunction with ARL and ACRL, has also introduced a free Web cast on Understanding Author Rights. See http://www.arl.org/sparc/author for details.

For more information, please see the CARL Web site at http://www.carl-abrc.ca or the SPARC Web site at http://www.arl.org/sparc.

CARL
CARL is the leadership organization for the Canadian research library community. CARL's members represent Canada's 27 major academic research libraries, Library and Archives Canada, the Library of Parliament and the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI). For more information see www.carl-abrc.ca.

SPARC
SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international alliance of more than 800 academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. SPARC's advocacy, educational, and publisher partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of research. SPARC is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/sparc.

Publication immédiate
Le 15 août 2007

Renseignements :
Tim Mark, ABRC
(613) 562 5385
carl@uottawa.ca

Jennifer McLennan, SPARC
(202) 296 2296, poste 121
jennifer@arl.org

L'ABRC ET SPARC OFFRENT AUX AUTEURS CANADIENS UN NOUVEL OUTIL POUR ÉLARGIR L'ACCÈS AUX ARTICLES PUBLIÉS
Un addenda populaire sur le droit d'auteur est adapté pour utilisation au Canada

Ottawa (Ontario) et Washington, DC - le 15 août 2007 - L'Association des bibliothèques de recherche du Canada (ABRC) et SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) ont annoncé aujourd'hui le lancement de l'Addenda de l'auteur canadien SPARC, un nouvel outil permettant aux auteurs du Canada de conserver d'importants droits sur les articles de revue qu'ils publient.

Selon les ententes traditionnelles de publication, les auteurs doivent souvent concéder des droits exclusifs à l'éditeur. Le nouvel Addenda de l'auteur canadien SPARC permet aux auteurs de conclure une entente plus juste du fait qu'ils conservent certains droits, comme les droits de reproduction, de réutilisation et de présentation publique des articles qu'ils publient à des fins autres que commerciales. Il permettra aux chercheurs canadiens de se conformer aux politiques d'accès public des conseils subventionnaires, comme la Politique sur l'accès aux résultats de la recherche des Instituts de recherche en santé du Canada. L'Addenda est conforme à la loi canadienne sur le droit d'auteur et il s'agit d'une adaptation de la version originale américaine du Author Addendum de SPARC.

« L'Addenda de l'auteur canadien SPARC permettra aux chercheurs d'avoir une influence et d'obtenir une visibilité maximales pour leurs publications, tout en sachant qu'ils en conservent certains droits importants, » a déclaré Carolynne Presser, présidente du Comité de la communication savante de l'ABRC et directrice des bibliothèques à l'Université du Manitoba.

« L'Addenda est une contribution importante au mouvement international actuel visant à aider les auteurs à rendre leurs articles savants accessibles à tous ceux qui pourraient tirer avantage de leurs découvertes, » a dit la directrice exécutive de SPARC, Heather Joseph. « Le Canada a été un chef de file dans le mouvement visant à élargir l'accès à la recherche et nous avons été heureux de jouer un rôle en collaborant avec l'ABRC à cette initiative importante. »

Une brochure explicative complète l'Addenda. La brochure et l'addenda sont disponibles en français et en anglais sur les sites Web de l'ABRC et de SPARC et ils seront largement diffusés. SPARC, en collaboration avec l'ARL et l'ACRL, a aussi lancé un webcast gratuit pour expliquer les droits d'auteur (Understanding Author Rights). Voir http://www.arl.org/sparc/author pour plus de renseignements.

Pour plus d'information, consultez le site Web de l'ABRC à http://www.carl-abrc.ca ou le site Web de SPARC à http://www.arl.org/sparc.

ABRC
L'ABRC est l'organisme chef de file pour l'ensemble des bibliothèques de recherche au Canada. Ses membres représentent les 27 grandes bibliothèques de recherche universitaire au Canada, Bibliothèque et Archives Canada, la Bibliothèque du Parlement et l'Institut canadien de l'information scientifique et technique (ICIST). Pour plus d'information, voir www.carl-abrc.ca.

SPARC
SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), avec SPARC Europe et SPARC Japon, est une alliance internationale regroupant plus de 800 bibliothèques universitaires et de recherche qui s'efforcent d'établir un système plus ouvert pour la communication savante. Avec ses programmes de promotion, d'éducation et de partenariat, SPARC favorise une plus grande diffusion de la recherche. On peut trouver SPARC sur le Web à http://www.arl.org/sparc.

The Hybrids Continue: ALPSP Open Choice

I'm a little late on this and it has been blogged elsewhere but I thought I should at least mention the latest entry into the hybrid journal pool, "Open Choice" from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). Beginning with the July 2007 issue, authors of articles in the ALPSP journal Learned Publishing will be able to make their accepted articles openly accessible with a submission fee $2500 US for members and $3000 for non-members.

Some notes:

*This is being run as a trial for 12 months, "to see if it provides a viable way of sustaining the costs of peer review, editing and other aspects of journal publication". They will also look at amending subscription costs after the year is up, a good thing, IMHO.

*The fees are at the high end of the hybrid spectrum. The $3000 non-member fee matches that of Springer's hybrid program, which is at or near the top. My gut feeling is that this might be too pricey for the average Learned Publishing author but I could be wrong.

*The ALPSP does permit all Learned Publishing articles to become freely accessible after a year so the addition of the OA option for the current year means that at least some of the journals will be OA regardless of date of publication.

Dean Giustini interviews John Willinsky

OA Librarian blog team member Dean Giustini interviews noted open access advocate John Willinsky on Google Scholar Blog. Topics include Willinsky's move to Stanford (while still maintaining a partial post at UBC), use of blogging within journals, and sustainability for open access journals, possibly through cooperatives.

Library Fund for Open Access Publishing at University of Wisconsin-Madison

Kudos to the library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for establishing a Fund for Open Access Publishing!.

Hat tip to Peter Suber on Open Access News for the tip.

Oxford adjusts open access pricing adjustments

I saw this first on the liblicense-l list on the afternoon of August 12 (it hadn't appeared in the liblicense-l archives as of writing - http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/). OUP announced that some of the 2008 prices for the journals with "Oxford Open" content have been amended; corporate rates were presented instead of academic ones. I gave the new list (http://www.oxfordjournals.org/oxfordopen/2008%20online-only%20price%20adjustments.doc) a once-over and I can't see too much difference between the revised rates and the previously-posted numbers though I may be missing something (others may be better able to pick out any notable variances; let me know if you see anything). Anyway, it's still a very good thing that the submission fees collected via the Oxford Open program are being taken into account in subscription pricing. OUP is certainly one of the earliest publishers to do this, if not the only one so far; I hope others will follow suit soon. Maybe we'll see more of this as 2008 subscription prices are released in the next few months?

DOAJ Review for The Charleston Advisor: Request for Comments

I am working on a review of The Directory of Open Access Journals for the October 2007 issue of The Charleston Advisor (TCA).

Comments from libraries, publishers, members, and sponsors of DOAJ would be most appreciated.

TCA is a peer-reviewed publication, with a primary focus on review of products of interest to libraries. Some articles in each TCA issue are open access, particularly those on open access initiatives (kudos to TCA for inviting reviews on OA products and initiatives).

TCA uses a 5-star rating system (with 5 stars representing the highest possible rating), based on 4 elements: Content, Searchability, Pricing, and Contract Options.

I have a particular interest in exploring economic models for sustainability of open access initiatives. Your comments on the DOAJ membership / sponsorship model would be most appreciated. Better yet - why not have your library or organization sign up as a member or sponsor now, and render the question moot?

Some preliminary thoughts on the elements:

1. Content: is DOAJ sufficiently comprehensive, and does the vetting process result in a list that we can trust for certain elements of quality, particularly peer review and open access status? How does DOAJ as a package of journals compare with subscription packages?

2. Searchability: can you find what you need on DOAJ? Is it easy or hard? Are there types of searches not currently supported that you would like to see?

3. Pricing: free access cannot be beat! However, here is where comments on the membership / sponsorship model would fit. One way to think of this: how does the cost of DOAJ membership compare with libraries paying for staffing to manage this kind of list on their own? Organizations in developing countries have expressed an interest in membership, but the initial suggestions do not fit their circumstances. Is there a way of defining a membership contribution that makes sense everywhere? How about a suggested membership fee based on X number of average days' salary? That is, DOAJ could calculate the initial suggestion based on number of day's salary, based on average salaries in Sweden. An organization in a developing country could then calculate the same amount of salary time based on salaries in their own country, and be confident that their contribution, while different in dollar amount, is fully equivalent to the contributions of others.

4. Contract options: this element may be more obvious with subscription resources, but is important with OA resources as well. Do we know everything we need to know about how we can use the resources in DOAJ? Journals and articles are free to read, of course - but what about inclusion in coursepacks or e-reserves, distribution in class?

Please post comments by August 12, or send to:
Heather Morrison
heatherm dot eln dot bc dot ca

Updated August 12, 2007

E-LIS: the Open Archive for Library and Information Science

reposted from The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics:

E-LIS: the Open Archive for Library and Information Science, by Heather Morrison, Imma Subirats Coll, Antonella de Robbio, and Norm Medeiros, has just been published in The Charleston Advisor (TCA), Volume 9, Number 1, July 2007 , pp. 56-61(6).

As noted in the article, we are E-LIS Editors and Administrators,although we have followed the format of the peer-reviewed TCA reviews and aimed for objectivity.

In brief, E-LIS is the largest of the open access archives for LIS, by far; as of July 31, 2007, E-LIS has more than 6,200 documents. Strengths of E-LIS include support for any language (currently there are 22 languages, however more will be added if needed), strong English and Spanish language content, and high quality of contents. More than half the documents in E-LIS are peer reviewed, and many of the remainder are scholarly in nature, e.g. theses, conference proceedings. As an LIS e-prints archive, it is perhaps only natural that E-LIS is exemplary in its organization and searchability, including extensive browsing capabilities, and the JITA classification team specially developed by the E-LIS team, for E-LIS.

From a personal perspective, what is most amazing to me is E-LIS as a global, almost entirely volunteer organization. Hardware and personnel support provided by CILEA in Italy is most appreciated. The Editorial Team consists of volunteers from over 40 countries. Participating as a member of the E-LIS team is highly recommended, as a way to work collaboratively with librarian colleagues from around the globe.

This global participation highlights one of the reasons why I recommend searching E-LIS first: the results of an E-LIS search have a much broader, more diverse perspective than many of the search tools we may be more familiar with. Even though many languages are supported, every article includes an English abstract - and sometimes, the abstract is enough. Enough, at least, to give us an idea of the commonalities and differences between our efforts, and those of our colleagues.

Recently, I am proud to say, the Canadian Library Association approved a policy which included investigating a partnership with E-LIS. [Disclosure: I am the Convenor of the CLA Task Force on Open Access].

Jasco reviews DLIST

Reference guru Dr. Péter Jacso reviews DLIST in his Digital Reference Shelf for June 2007.

Thanks to Peter Suber on Open Access News for a very helpful excerpt and comments.

Engineering Open Choice

Another hybrid OA journal program was announced yesterday. This one is from Professional Engineering Publishing in the UK and is called Engineering Open Choice. It's the usual sort of thing; a submission fee is paid in order for an accepted article to become openly accessible. There are a few aspects of this program worth mentioning, both good and bad:

*The fee for Engineering Open Choice is 1700 pounds, which, as of this morning, works out to $3643 CAN or $3494 CAN. Don't hold this to me but I think this is the most expensive hybrid OA submission fee, more than Springer Open Choice, which is $3000 US. On top of this hefty fee, there are also colour charges (but no other fees).

*Engineering Open Choice applies to all of the Professional Engineering Publishing journals, including the well-known Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

*Interestlingly, the publisher will guarantee that Engineering Open Choice articles will be freely available online via their website for a period of 10 years from the date of publication minimum. Unless I've missed something, this is the first time I've actually seen a specific guarantee of availability in years given by a publisher. I would hope that it would be much longer than 10 years in practice but it's good to see some sort of promise of accessibility.

*Authors who take part in Engineering Open Choice will be able to use a Creative Commons license and deposit the published version in repositories. This is good.

*Not so good is the lack of any mention of subscription price decreases in response to the take-up of Engineering Open Choice, as other publishers have indicated. Perhaps that will come later.

On that note, Oxford University Press has announced that, in response to the take up of their OA option, will apparently be reducing the subscription costs of some journals for 2008. Details are forthcoming. I'll post these to OA librarian as soon as I can after they are released.

More information about Engineering Open Choice from Professional Engineering Publishing can be found at http://www.pepublishing.com/pep/guidelines/Engineering_Open_Choice.PDF.

Naina Pandita and Open Access in India

Librarian Naina Pandita and Suhkdev Singh of the Government of India's National Informatics Centre recently spoke at the First International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference about the "free access" services of the Indian Medlars Centre, and the key role of the centre in leading the transition to open access.

The small group of 4 staff at the centre manage a union database of holdings of health libraries throughout the country to facilitate resource sharing, the freely available INDMed bibliographic database of Indian biomedical journals, the first phase in the transition to open access, as well as fulltext to 38 of these journals, through the medIND service. MetaMED provides a means to cross-search INDmed along with PubMedCentral.

Congratulations to Naina and her team for an outstanding example of combining the very best of traditional library services with leadership in the transition to open access.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

'Free' is Not Necessarily Open Access

The Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) has just published:

Stanbrook et al. Congratulations to our colleagues at Open Medicine [commentary]. CMAJ • July 3, 2007; 177 (1).

We, at Open Medicine, appreciated the endorsement but felt the need to clarify some confusion introduced by the commentary which you can read about at the Open Medicine blog.

It's important for librarians of all stripes to articulate the differences between free access and open access.

Dean Giustini
OM blogger
OA blogger

July SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber has just released the July 2007 issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. The feature this month is called Problems and Opportunities - Blizzards and Beauty.

Journal Info

In my email this morning, posted to the American Scientist Open Access Forum, was a message about a just-released tool called Journal Info. Designed as a partner website to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ, at http://www.doaj.org/), Journal Info presents information for about 18,000 journals. Some of the data is basic stuff (e.g. ISSN, publisher URL, etc.) but there is also a nifty section that lists fields dealing with "reader accessibility", most of which are OA-connected. Here's the "reader accessibility" information for the Haworth journal Serials Librarian:

Open Access: No
Allows self-archiving of reviewed manuscript: Yes
Hybrid: No
Alternative journals with Open Access:Journal of Medical Internet Research
Journal of the Medical Library Association
D-Lib Magazine
Information Research: an international electronic journal
more alternative journals ...

There's also a section called "quality" which lists the indexes a journal appears in and something called the Frida Score (Serials Librarian has a "low" Frida score). To be honest, I'm not sure what a Frida Score is; I'll have to do some digging...

Though Journal Info treads into territory held by Ulrich's and others, I think it could be a handy tool, especially the "reader accessibility" section.

The URL for Journal Info is http://jinfo.lub.lu.se/. I was created by the good folks at Lund University Libraries, with financial support from the National Library of Sweden.

Canadian Library Association Moves Open Access

From today's CLA Digest

CLA Moves Open Access

CLA Executive Council has approved some recommendations from the Open Access Task Force that move CLA towards providing virtually all of its intellectual property free of charge, in digital form, online and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. The revised policy has four parts:

CLA will provide for full and immediate open access for all CLA publications, with the exception of Feliciter and monographs The embargo period for Feliciter is one issue, and the embargo policy itself will be reviewed after one year. Monographs will be considered for open access publishing on a case-by-case basis.

CLA actively encourages its members to self-archive in institutional and/or disciplinary repositories and will investigate a partnership with E-LIS, the Open Archive for Library and Information Studies.

CLA will generally provide for the author's retention of copyright by employing Creative Commons licensing or publisher-author agreements that promote open access.
CLA will continue its long-standing policy of accessibility to virtually all CLA information except for narrowly defined confidential matters (e.g. certain personnel or legal matters).

The Task Force's Report is available by clicking here

Disclosure: I am the Convenor of the CLA Task Force on Open Access. Many thanks to Greg Linnell for preparing the report, and to the CLA Executive for moving on the recommendations!

Peter Jasco's Review of E-LIS

Peter Jasco's Review of E-LIS on Peter's Reference Shelf is available at: http://www.galegroup.com/reference/peter/200705/e-lis.htm

Peter compares E-LIS with other LIS Open Access Resources, such as the smaller DLIST repository and the larger EBSCO's LISTA. Both E-LIS and DLIST contain documents not available in LISTA.

Strengths of E-LIS include international and multilingual coverage, the JITA Classification scheme, and exceptional browsing functionality. More than half of the over 5,800 documents in E-LIS are peer-reviewed.

Thanks to Dirk Lewandowski, E-LIS Editor, Germany.


[Disclosure: I am on the E-LIS Administration Team, and an enthusiastic E-LIS contributor!]

OA Submission Waiver for the Journal of Experimental Botany and Package Deals

It's been reported well in a variety of places that the Journal of Experimental Botany, an Oxford University Press hybrid journal, will be waiving submission fees for authors who work at an insitution that has a current subscription to the journal. When this announcement first came out (June 19), I wondered if this applied to libraries that received the journal as part of a consortial or package deal; this may be particularly important in Canada (where I am), as many of the university libraries are part of a consortial deal for the OUP journals via the Canadian Research Knowledge Network arrangement. A follow-up message on June 20, posted to the LIS-E list (this was the only place I saw it; it may have appeared elsewhere), indicated that participants in deals of this nature are also entitled to the waiver. Good news, I think.

SPARC VIDEO CONTEST TO SHOWCASE STUDENT VIEWS

Competition invites students to apply new media to ongoing discussion; offers educators and librarians creative way to encourage campus engagement

Winner will receive $1,000, a public screening and a "Sparky Award"

Washington, DC - June 21, 2007 - SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) today announced the first SPARC Discovery Awards, a contest that will recognize the best new short videos illustrating the importance of sharing information and ideas.

The contest, details for which are online at www.sparkyawards.org, encourages new voices to join the public discussion of information policy in the age of the Internet. Contestants are asked to submit videos of two minutes or less that imaginatively show the benefits of bringing down barriers to the free exchange of information. While designed for adoption as a college or high school class assignment, the SPARC Discovery Awards are open to anyone over the age of 13. Submissions will be accepted beginning in mid-July and must be received by December 2, 2007. Winners will be announced in January 2008.

The Winner will receive a cash prize of $1,000 along with a "Sparky Award." Two Runners Up will each receive $500 plus a personalized award certificate. At the discretion of the judges, additional Special Merit Awards may be designated. All the award-winning videos will be publicly screened during the January 2008 American Library Association Midwinter Conference in Philadelphia.

"The YouTube generation has a critical stake in how information can be used and shared on the Internet," said SPARC Executive Director Heather Joseph. "The SPARC Discovery Awards provide an outlet for their views and an opportunity for the rest of us to understand their perspectives. We hope these videos will help spark an expanded, informed, and energetic discussion."

SPARC expects to sponsor the Discovery Awards annually, as a means of supporting public discussion of critical information issues. The 2007 contest theme is "MindMashup." Mashup is an expression referring to a song, video, Web site or software application that combines content from more than one source.

The contest takes as its inspiration a quote from George Bernard Shaw: "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."

For details, please see the contest Web site at http://www.sparkyawards.org.

SPARC

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and its affiliated organizations, SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, are an international alliance of academic and research libraries whose advocacy, educational, and publisher partnership programs encourage a more open system of scholarly communication utilizing the Internet. SPARC is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/sparc/.

Nature Precedings - Digital assets for free

The speed of change in scientific and biomedical publishing is surprising sometimes (and the uptake of the use of Web 2.0 tools by the journal community).

Perhaps you know about PLoS One? Now, here's Nature Precedings:

"Nature Precedings is a place for researchers to share documents, including presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and manuscripts. It provides a rapid way to disseminate emerging results and new theories, solicit opinions, and record the provenance of ideas. It also makes such material easy toarchive, share and cite. The whole service is free of charge."

And, even an editorial on this new project, intended to cover biomedicine, chemistry and the Earth sciences.

Will Google scholar crawl all of these knowledge objects? Where will all this fragmentation leave our searching? Boggles the mind. - Dean

Open access, medicine and academic freedom

Here, some of my Open Medicine colleagues discuss the circumstances that led to the launch of the Journal, and its existence as an example of open access's contribution to academic freedom.

Willinsky J., Murray S., Kendall C., Palepu A. Doing Medical Journals Differently: Open Medicine, Open Access, and Academic Freedom. - Working paper.

Notable, quotable quotes:

1. "Open Medicine was born of an editorial interference incident in the field of medical publishing, a field which is distinguished by its own professional and commercial influences." (You can say that again. DG)

2. "For all of the attention spent on finding the perfect economic model for increasing access to knowledge, it is important not to lose sight of scholarly communication’s other basic principles, beyond dissemination, namely editorial independence, intellectual integrity, and academic freedom." (What models will survive?)

3. "The ability to start a new journal that is able to establish its intellectual, as well as financial, independence from forces and traditions that might otherwise compromise that independence remains a critical factor in guaranteeing academic freedom within the global scholarly community."

4. ..."opening science to a larger world has always been a motivating force in scholarly publishing, [but] this openness is not just a matter of journals. Today, it includes initiatives focused on open data, open source biology, open encyclopedias, and a number of different “open science” projects." (Don't forget open search.)

5. "Open Medicine has raised the stakes for open access by demonstrating how this new approach can be used today to reassert editorial independence, intellectual integrity, and academic freedom." (And raised the stakes for librarians, I say.)

SPARC Innovators

Ted and Carl Bergstrom have been recognized as SPARC Innovators.

Excerpt from the SPARC announcement:

Father-son team named for pivotal work on journal pricing and assessing the value of scholarly information

Washington, DC - June 5, 2007 - SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has recognized Ted Bergstrom and Carl Bergstrom as the new SPARC Innovators. The father-son team advances the open sharing of scholarly information through original research and the creation of innovative tools that are used widely by the academic community to assess the value of research.

Ted and Carl are best known for their collaborations on Ted's journal pricing Web pages and, more recently, on the Eigenfactor.org Web site produced by Carl's research lab. Ted's journal pricing page, which offers data reporting price per article and price per citation for about 5,000 academic journals, has centralized pricing information so it can be explored and compared in ways that were previously impossible. The site has become a vital resource for researchers and librarians alike. Carl's Eigenfactor.org site offers a completely new and innovative approach to assessing the value of journals; it provides researchers, librarians and others a new mechanism to evaluate based on a diverse array of criteria.

Ted, an economist, holds the Aaron and Cherie Raznick Chair of Economics in the Economics Department at the University of California Santa Barbara. Carl, a theoretical and evolutionary biologist, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. To read in more detail about the Bergstroms' contributions to scholarly publishing, please see the SPARC Innovator Web page.

June SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber has just released the June 2007 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Highlights include a feature on author's rights and open access, 99 open access developments in May, and clarification of OA-related acronyms with more than more meaning.

IGLOO Library: open access to documents for innovation in international governance

The IGLOO Library of The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) provides free access to documents in the area of International Governance. Topic areas include economics, environment, health, humanitarian issues, international institutions, international law, peace and security, science and technology, social and political development.

Thanks to Melissa Fraser.

SCOAP3 Progress Towards Open Access Publishing in High Energy Physics

The SCOAP3 Working Party, Towards Open Access Publishing in High Energy Physics Report of the SCOAP3 Working Party, CERN, April 19, 2007 (but released today)

CERN and its library, led by library director Jens Vigen, is helping to lead the effort to coordinate a move to full open access publishing in high energy physics (HEP), through a consortium of purchasers and publishers.

This initiative is noteworthy in many respects. For example, economic analysis has determined that the annual budget required for full OA publishing for HEP would be no more than a maximum of 10 million Euros per year; about what the 500 purchasing members of the consortium would pay in subscriptions for about 2 journals.

Peter Suber comments:


We're watching a massive transition to OA in process. This is not only the first project to convert all the TA journals in a field to OA; it's also succeeding. It's succeeding in pulling together the needed stakeholders and it's succeeding in raising the money. It's also succeeding in showing that the final result will cost the stakeholders less than the current system.

OA advocates have always argued that funding OA doesn't require new money, just a redirection of the money now spent on subscriptions....What's most significant about the CERN project is that it's a large-scale, discipline-wide, stakeholder-united redirection project.

Finally, CERN is on track to accomplish this feat with fusion, not fissionor with cooperation and comity all around rather than antagonism and division.

For more details, see Open Access News

Branding the library

A post on noted open access expert Alma Swan's new blog, Optimal Scholarship, on Branding the Library, may be of interest; particularly since Alma is not a librarian, but rather an academic researcher and consultant.

It seems that in the UK, libraries are seen as peripheral, which is unfortunate for scholarship. Where I come from, the library is seen as the heart of the campus, which makes sense given the importance of information for research and education throughout all academic disciplines.

Alma's blogpost is, as usual for her, based on a 6-month research study by Key Perspectives.

Be Open - Or, Be Irrelevant

I recently had a stimulating discussion with a medical faculty member about open access, and why being truly open may be important to the advancement of medicine. This is both an access issue, and a philosophical one. With all of the excitement and media coverage of Open Medicine, the faculty member was, in a sense, asking about intent and why researchers want to publish in open-access journals as opposed to one of the many pre-eminent, fee-based journals. It's important to be clear about how open access fits into our professional lives, and our emerging global society.

Excellent questions, ones we all should consider as open access advocates. First, I think it's important to conflate trends in information technology and society in general with the principles of open access. They enjoy symbiosis, I think. We live in an increasingly global world, where transnational communities and connections are now possible due to technology, and social software. Efficient, decentralized and inexpensive models of information dissemination were not available to us, even a few years ago.

Which brings me back to Open Medicine. I've been asked by colleagues to comment on our business model. At this point, we operate on very little money and are seeking philanthropic support, as well as reviewing other models of support. What propels us is a firm belief in openness, integrity in published research and transparency - ideals free from interference and conflicts. Is open access symbolic of changes in society? I believe it is. Those who try to ignore these changes, including the for-profit publishers, will increasingly risk irrelevancy. My new mantra: be open - or be irrelevant.

Elsevier charging more for hybrid journals?

William Walsh has put together a table of Subscription Costs for Elsevier Hybrid Journals. While Elsevier has promised to reduce subscription costs based on author payments, the average cost increase for Elsevier hybrid journals (6.39%) is higher than that for Elsevier journals overall (5.5%).

Thanks to William, and to Peter Suber on Open Access News for the alert and comments.

To me, this illustrates well why librarians should be involved in coordinating author processing fee charges (regardless of whether these are paid by funding agencies, departments, or the libraries). It is only when the two forms of payment (subscriptions and article processing fees) are brought together, that the payee is in a good position to understand what is happening, and effectively negotiate the best solution.

Any opinion expressed in this post is that of the author alone, and does not reflect the opinion or policy of BC Electronic Library Network or Simon Fraser University Library.

Why you’re crazy if you’re NOT submitting your LIS output to E-LIS

According to Laurie the Librarian, if you are not submitting your LIST output to E-LIS, you are crazy!

An Open Window Heralds Open Medicine

This is a good day for academic librarians who want to be equal partners in the academic enterprise. Those open access (OA) librarians who have been following the story will be pleased to learn that Open Medicine, a peer-reviewed, independent, international medical journal supporting academic freedom and open access, was launched today.

Open Medicine is open to all, doctors and the general public, and there are no strings attached - no political interference, no pharmaceutical patronage, no conflicts of interests and no exorbitant subscription costs or pay-per-article restrictions. Direct access to real content - openly-accessible.

The editorial team of consists of a group of academics and scientists, including co-editors Stephen Choi and Anita Palepu, associate editors Dean Giustini (OA librarian), John Hoey, Anne Marie Todkill, Claire Kendall and others, as well as our volunteer publisher John Willinsky ( author of The access principle: The case for open access to research and scholarship and founder of the Public Knowledge Project ). We are committed to “the equitable global dissemination of high-quality health research; to promote international dialogue and collaboration on health issues; to improve clinical practice; and to expand and deepen the understanding of health and health care”.

Web 2.0 and scholarly publishing in DC

The Allen Press' Emerging Trends in Scholarly Publishing seminar (held last week in Washington, D.C.) focussed on the practical uses and application of social software in scientific, medical and technological domains - but also the real and possible social impact of Web 2.0 tools. Prominent ideas for me? egalitarianism in publishing and peer review vs. reconciling the need for viable business models and maintaining efficiency and high standards in publishing. See my thoughts in progress about Web 2.0 and medicine.

Two of the speakers, Richard Akerman, the only other Canadian, and Konrad Förstner, are bloggers - check out their posts. A number of medical publishers were in attendance such as the New England Journal of Medicine, and several association publishers, who expressed interest in the launch of Open Medicine.

Researchers' Use of Academic Libraries and Their Services

This major study involving over 2,250 researchers and 300 librarians will be of interest to librarians everywhere for a number of reasons, including of course open access:

Researchers' use of academic libraries and their services, was commissioned by Research Information Network (RIN) and Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) and carried out by Sheridan Brown and Alma Swan of Key Perspectives.

This report shows that we have educational and promotional work to do! Findings include:

About 1 in 10 researchers fully understand open access

Researchers' awareness of institutional repositories is lagging; 52% of librarians said their institution had an IR, but only 15% of researchers.

Thanks to Peter Suber, who provides a useful extract and comments.

Open Libraries blog

Jay Datema, incoming technology editor for Library Journal, has a very cool Open Libraries blog.

Thanks to Peter Suber of Open Access News

Open Medicine (forthcoming OA journal)

Open Medicine is a forthcoming OA journal worth noting! Open Medicine has attracted an extremely prominent Editorial Board. It is currently comprised of 26 outstanding academics and scientists who are leaders in their respective fields.

The editorial team includes noted OA Librarian and Canadian Health Librarian of the year, Dean Giustini, as well as John Willinsky, principal investigator of the Public Knowledge Project.

From the web site:
The mission of Open Medicine is to facilitate the equitable global dissemination of high-quality health research; to promote international dialogue and collaboration on health issues; to improve clinical practice; and to expand and deepen the understanding of health and health care.

SSHRC Aid to Open Access Journals

It's been mentioned on other blogs (Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, Peter Suber, etc) but I thought a note about the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council's (SSHRC) recently-released Aid to Open Access Journals would be appropriate here (most of the bloggers on OA Librarian are Canadian and this is a Canadian program so...).

Anyway, as noted, SSHRC recently came out with a support program for Canadian OA journals in the social sciences and humanities. Details are at http://www.sshrc.ca/web/apply/program_descriptions/open_access_journals_e.asp#5.

Wearing my Serials Librarian hat, I have to say that this program may be very welcome; I certainly think it's a good idea. Some Canadian publishers of social sciences and humanities journals (societies, associations) have been a little freaked out about OA and how it can be supported so hopefully the Aid to OA Journals will alleviate some worries. Of course, the program is aimed at already-OA journals that have been around for at least two years; maybe a program to support conversion to OA is coming sometime in the not-too-distant future? It also remains to be seen if the amount of the grant ($850 CAN per article published plus up to $5,000 CAN to help defray distribution costs) will be adequate. Finally, the grant is only for one year and is not renewable; what affect will this have on journals? How many journals will get "hooked" on the grant and face "withdrawl" at the end of the 12 months?

OA Librarian's Dean Giustini Wins Award

Congratulations to Dean, selected as the 2007 recipient of the Canadian Hospital Librarian of the Year Award. About the CHLA award.

John Willinsky: Open Access: the Sea Change audio recording available

The University of Alberta Libraries is pleased to make available an audio recording of our March 20th forum with Dr. John Willinsky - Open Access: The Sea Change in Scholarly Publishing (mp3 format) - http://www.library.ualberta.ca/audio/openaccess.mp3


Dr. Willinsky’s award-winning Public Knowledge Project is the world’s leading open source software for journal publishing, and his recent book The Access Principle (MIT Press, 2006) has won this year’s Blackwell Award for Scholarship.

To learn more about support available from the University of Alberta Libraries, visit our Open Access Publishing Information Site - http://blogs.library.ualberta.ca/oa/

Thanks to Pam Ryan