Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association Launches

ANNOUNCING THE LAUNCH OF THE OPEN ACCESS SCHOLARLY PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION, OASPA

14 October 2008, London. The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, OASPA, announces its official launch today in conjunction with an OA Day celebration hosted by the Wellcome Trust in London. The mission of OASPA is to support and represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journals publishers globally in all scientific, technical, and scholarly disciplines through an exchange of information, setting of industry standards, advancing business and publishing models, advocating for gold OA journals publishing, education and the promotion of innovation.

From having first emerged as a new publishing model over a decade ago, OA publishing has become an embedded feature of the scholarly publishing landscape: The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists over 3500 peer-reviewed journals; a growing number of professional organizations offer OA publications; university libraries increasingly support OA publishing services; funding organizations support and encourage OA publishing; and a long tail of independent editorial teams and societies now publish their titles OA. Professional OA publishers such as BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have been in business for over five years, while some scientist/scholar publishers (editorial teams operating independently of a professional publisher) have published their OA journals for a decade or more. Moreover, a number of traditional publishing houses are now engaging in Open Access activities, the recent acquisition of BioMed Central by Springer and the SAGE-Hindawi partnership being two cases in point. By bringing together those who share an interest in developing appropriate business models, tools and standards to support OA journals publishing, it is hoped that success in these areas can be achieved more quickly to the benefit of not only OASPA members, but more importantly, for the scholarly community that OA publishers serve.

Membership in OASPA is open to both scholar publishers and professional publishing organizations, including university presses and for profit and non-profit organizations. Members are expected to demonstrate a genuine interest in OA journals publishing by having signed either the Berlin or Budapest Declarations and must publish at least one full OA journal. Other individuals and organizations who support OA journals publishing or who are interested in exploring opportunities are also welcome. Membership criteria and an application form can be found on the OASPA website, www.oaspa.org.

The founding members of OASPA represent a broad spectrum of OA publishers and include: BioMed Central, Co-Action Publishing, Copernicus, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, Journal of Medical Internet Research (Gunther Eysenbach), Medical Education Online (David Solomon), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), SAGE, SPARC Europe and Utrecht University Library (Igitur). Representatives from each of these publishers will form an interim board until a first General Meeting is held during 2009.

###

Open Access Scholarly Publishers’ Association, OASPA, is launched today 14 October 2008 in response to long-time informal discussions among Open Access publishers, and aims to represent the interests of OA journals publishers globally. For more information about the organization, visit the OASPA website at: www.oaspa.org.

The Wellcome Trust is the largest charity in the UK. It funds innovative biomedical research, in the UK and internationally, spending over £600 million each year to support the brightest scientists with the best ideas. The Wellcome Trust supports public debate about biomedical research and its impact on health and wellbeing.

Open Access (OA) scholarly publication refers to the dissemination of peer-reviewed manuscripts containing original research or scholarship immediately upon publication, at no charge to user groups, without requiring registration or other restrictions to access. OA publications also allow users to "copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship...."

(From the SPARC Open Access Forum

Happy Open Access Day!

Follow the events on the Open Access Day website!

In the Library with a Lead Pipe

Check it out! A new open access, peer-reviewed blog by librarians, called In the Library with a Lead Pipe.

Thanks to Peter Suber on Open Access News.

October 2008 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber has just released the October 2008 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Highlighted this month: an attempt to overturn the NIH policy with a bill that makes the ludicrous claim that copyright in published results of publicly funded research belongs to the publishers.

If publishers make a little money from publishing the results of publicly funded research, that's fine - as long as this does not interfere with the purpose of funding the research. In medicine, the purpose is advancing our understanding so that we can prevent, cure, and treat illnesses.

This is a topic I've written about in more depth in my open letter to the American Association of Cancer Research, In lieu of flowers.

First Open Access Day to be held on October 14th

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and Students for FreeCulture have jointly announced the first international Open Access Day. Open Access Day will create a key opportunity for the higher education community and the general public to understand more clearly the opportunities of wider access and use of content.

The First Open Access Day will invite researchers, educators, librarians, students, and the public to participate in live, worldwide broadcasts of events. In North America, events will be held at 7:00 PM (Eastern) and 7:00 PM (Pacific) and feature appearances from:

• Sir Richard Roberts, Ph.D., F.R.S.
  Joint winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1993 for discovering split genes and RNA splicing and one of 26 Nobel Prize-winners to sign the Open Letter to U.S. Congress in support of taxpayer access to publicly funded research, and currently at New England Biolabs, USA. [broadcast: 7PM Eastern]



• Philip E. Bourne, Ph.D.
  Philip E. Bourne is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Computational Biology and the author of the popular PLoS Computational Biology Ten Simple Rules Series. He is Professor in the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego, Associate Director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank, Senior Advisor to the San Diego Supercomputer Center, an Adjunct Professor at the Burnham Institute, and Co-Founder of SciVee. [broadcast: 7PM Pacific]

The event will also mark the launch of the new “Voices of Open Access Video Series.” Key members of the research community, including a teacher, librarian, researcher, student, patient advocate, and a funder, will speak on why they are committed to Open Access.

For details and to participate, visit: http://www.openaccessday.org/

SECOND INTERNATIONAL PKP SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING CONFERENCE July 8-10, Vancouver, British Columbia: Preliminary Announcement and Call for Papers

Quick link to 2nd International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference Website:
http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp/index.php/pkp2009

SECOND INTERNATIONAL PKP SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING CONFERENCE
PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT

The Public Knowledge Project is pleased to announce that the second international PKP conference will be held from July 8 – 10, 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The first PKP conference was an overwhelming success with presentations and participants from around the world. A selected set of conference papers was subsequently published in the October 2007 issue of First Monday.

The conference will appeal not just to members of the PKP community, but to anyone interested in trends and developments for scholarly publishing and communication. There will be a wide range of topical sessions on new reading and publishing technologies; open access initiatives; alternative publishing and funding models; national and international collaborative projects; new roles and partnerships for libraries, scholarly publishers and others; and sustainability for open access publishing and open source software. Prospective and first time users of OJS and other PKP software will be able to learn more about the systems and establish contacts with the PKP community. Experienced implementers, developers, and system administrators will have an opportunity to participate in technical sessions and exchange information.

The conference will commence with an opening keynote session on the evening of July 8 convened by John Willinsky, the founder of the Public Knowledge Project. There will be several pre-conference workshops on July 8, and the main conference program will present a combination of concurrent and single track sessions during on July 9 and 10. The conference will conclude with three special symposia on community and network building intended for each of the core PKP constituents: journal editors and publishers; librarians; and software developers.

The conference will be hosted at Simon Fraser University’s downtown campus and will be adjacent to a wide range of accommodations, restaurants, and other popular tourist destinations. Please mark the July 8 – 10 dates on your 2009 calendars. The PKP partners look forward to welcoming you to the second PKP conference.
Session proposals will be accepted until January 15, 2009 and conference registration opens October 15, 2008. For more information, please visit the conference web site: http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp/index.php/pkp2009

The Public Knowledge Project is a federally funded research initiative at Simon Fraser University, Stanford University, and the University of British Columbia. It seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality of academic research through the development of innovative online environments. PKP has developed free, open source software for the management, publishing, and indexing of journals and current conferences. The PKP software suite is comprised of three modules in production: Open Archives Harvester, Open Journal Systems, and Open Conference Systems, and two in development: Lemon8-XML and Open Monograph Press.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Public Knowledge Project is pleased to announce that the second international PKP conference will be held from July 8 – 10, 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The first PKP conference was an overwhelming success with presentations and participants from around the world. A selected set of conference papers was subsequently published in the October 2007 issue of First Monday.

The conference will consist of a mixture of plenary talks and parallel conference streams intended for the following groups:

- journal editors and publishers
- researchers in scholarly publishing
- librarians and information specialists
- open source software developers and system administrators

Papers and presentation proposals that address one or more of the following topics are especially encouraged:

- New reading and publishing technologies, e.g. integration of Web 2.0 features;
- Open access initiatives;
- Alternative publishing and funding models;
- National and international collaborative projects;
- New roles and partnerships for libraries, scholarly publishers, and others;
- Sustainability for open access publishing and open source software.

Parallel sessions will each be up to 1 hour in length. They may consist of a workshop, a case study, a research report, a set of 3 presentations on a single theme, a panel discussion as well as other options.

Proposals for papers or presentations should be submitted by January 15, 2009, using the submission guidelines and form available at http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp/index.php/pkp2009/

The conference will be hosted at Simon Fraser University’s downtown campus and will be adjacent to a wide range of accommodations, restaurants, and other popular tourist destinations. Please mark the July 8 – 10 dates on your 2009 calendars. The PKP partners look forward to welcoming you to the second PKP conference.

The Public Knowledge Project is a federally funded research initiative at Simon Fraser University, Stanford University, and the University of British Columbia. The partnership brings together faculty members, librarians, and graduate students dedicated to exploring whether and how new technologies can be used to improve the professional and public value of scholarly research. Its research program is investigating the social, economic, and technical issues entailed in the use of online infrastructure and knowledge management strategies to improve both the scholarly quality and public accessibility and coherence of this body of knowledge in a sustainable and globally accessible form. It seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality of academic research through the development of innovative online environments. It continues to be an active player in the open access movement, as it provides the leading open source software for journal and conference management and publishing. The research and publishing activities of the project have been reviewed and cited in Inside Higher Ed, Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Science, The Scientist and others.

PubMed Central Canada (PMC Canada) initiative

Over the summer, NRC-CISTI and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) finalized the first step in the partnership for the PubMed Central Canada agreement process, a national digital repository of peer-reviewed health science research. With CIHR funding now in place, CISTI plans to contribute its technological expertise to build & host the infrastructure and manage & develop the e-repository.

Before this can go forward, however, the second and final step of the agreement process must be completed. That would be for CISTI and CIHR to jointly approach the US National Library Medicine to co-sponsor the service, as a mirror site to PubMed Central therefore obtaining a 3-way agreement between CISTI, CIHR and the US National Library of Medicine to ‘officially’ enter into the PubMed Central International (PMCI) network. Once the final agreement is in place, development will begin on the first phase of PMC Canada thus enabling CIHR researchers to deposit their publications into PubMed Central.

As the process unfolds, the initiative’s progress and latest developments will be published on CISTI’s Partnership Development Office website and in CISTI News, CISTI’s quarterly newsletter on events and happenings at CISTI.

Thanks to Donna Meighan, Partnership Development Officer, Health Portfolio, NRC. Email: Donna.Meighan@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca

Thinking about Prestige, Quality, and Open Access

Here is a great article to send to faculty and university administrators! Peter Suber's Thinking about Prestige, Quality, and Open Access covers in some depth the reasons TA journals are so entrenched, even in comparison with newer OA journals of equal (or better) quality - and some thoughts on what can be done about this. For example, university hiring procedures could either focus on quality instead of surrogates such as the impact factors of journals faculty have published in, or, at the very least, at some of the newer surrogate measures that don't oversimplify as much as IF.

My own comments on this topic are posted on The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics.

PKP Conference 2009: July 8-10, Vancouver

Mark your calendar!

The 2009 Public Knowledge Project (PKP) conference dates and venue have been announced: July 8-10, 2009, in Vancouver. The event will begin with a keynote by PKP principal John Willinsky. Papers from the First International PKP Conference were published in the October 2007 First Monday.

Knowledge Exchange: Licensing and Open Access Exchange across borders

Knowledge Exchange combines national initiatives across four countries: Denmark, Germany, the UK and the Netherlands - to support multi-national licensing and support for open access initiatives.

Excerpt from About Knowledge Exchange:
Vision and goals
The agreed vision for Knowledge Exchange is:

To make a layer of scholarly and scientific content openly available on the Internet.

The goals that have been set to achieve that vision include:
* Building an integrated repository infrastructure
* Exploring new developments in the future of publishing
* Facilitating integrated management services within education and research institutions
* Supporting the European digital libraries agenda.

Looks an initiative to watch!

Two More OA Mandates

Two more OA mandates have been announced this week, by the European Commission for 20% of its research budget, and Ireland's Higher Education Authority.

Please follow the links above to Peter Suber's posts for details, comments and related links.

RSS Feed Aggregator About Open Access

Vedran Vucic has created an RSS Feed Aggregator for blogs, websites etc. on open access.

Thanks, Vedran!

ARL Releases Publisher-Author Agreements and the NIH Public Access Policy

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has just announced release of a new study on publisher/author agreements and the NIH Public Access Policy, by Ben Grillot.

IFLA award for OA Librarian pioneer

IFLA has recognized librarian and open access pioneer Rima Kupryte. Rima was among the original signatories to the Budapest Open Access Initiative

Excerpt from the IFLA Press Release:

Rima Kupryte, Director of Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL.net) was honoured by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) at the 74th World Library and Information Congress in Quebec, Canada. The IFLA Medal is one of the highest professional accolades and is awarded to an individual for their distinguished contribution to international librarianship.

Rima Kupryte received the award in recognition of her groundbreaking work with the Open Society Institute (OSI) and eIFL.net in sharing information at a global level. “IFLA applauds the outstanding commitment of Rima in promoting international cooperation throughout her professional career”, said Claudia Lux, IFLA President. “We are delighted to bestow this honour for her dedication in expanding access to knowledge internationally through libraries”.

Thanks to Peter Suber on Open Access News.

Gratis and libre open access

Peter Suber, in the August 2008 SPARC Open Access Newsletter just released, has found an elegant solution to the emerging need for definitions to clarify the two basic concepts of open access, free as in free to read and free as in free for use. The distinction between gratis and libre mirrors a similar distinction in open source software. While the terms may be unfamiliar, this could be an advantage, as there would not be conflicts with preexisting uses of words.

This is an important, and useful, distinction. There is much discussion about gratis open access, as this is often the focus of open access policies.

Libre access, or freedom for use, is a very important concept. It is a reflection of the maturity of the open access movement that this distinction needed to be made, from my perspective. Now that we have 50 open access mandates with more coming, and a scholarly communications system well on the way to transition, it is time to be talking about libre access.

The Libre concept, to me, is very similar to what we librarians have been talking about for years even with subscription resources. Even when we pay, we may or may not be able to make certain uses of material, from printing and downloading to interlibrary loans. Creative commons licensed material is beginning to show up in our subscription resources; so far, this is likely only occasional, but this is the tip of the iceberg.

Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) Advises Copyright Retention

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has issued an Intellectual Property Advisory, advising scholars to retain their copyright, and providing advice as to how, including use of the SPARC Canadian Authors Addendum!

Excerpt (Conclusion)

Journals require only your permission to publish an article, not a wholesale transfer
of the full copyright interest. To promote scholarly communication, autonomy, integrity
and academic freedom, and education and research activities more generally, it is
important for academic staff to retain copyright in their journal articles.

Thanks to Paul Jones, CAUT and Kenneth D. Gariepy, University of Alberta.

Nature Letters to the Editor

Update July 10 - see Peter Suber on Open Access News for more on the story.

It seems that Nature ran a Letter to the Editor claiming that open access is harmful to developing countries, but is not publishing critical letters from scholarly authorities in this area (Peter Suber, Stevan Harnad, Subbiah Arunachalam, Leslie Chan, and Barbara Kirsop). In the interests of both open access and intellectual freedom, following is the text of the letters, thanks to the American Scientist Open Access Forum.

A number of people responded to the letter to
Nature, from Dr Gadagkar, IISc Bangalore, India,
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7194/full/453450c.html
by sending corrections of the impression given by Nature's headline
(Open Access more harm than good for developing countries) and the
misunderstandings of the policies of OA journals.

Unfortunately none of the letters I know about were published by
Nature. Other letters may have been sent unknown to me. Therefore,
so that misunderstandings may be corrected, I attach the letters sent
by Peter Suber, Stevan Harnad and three of the EPT Trustees (Subbiah
Arunachalam, Leslie Chan and myself).

It is important the Nature headline and the misunderstanding are
corrected as the EPT and many other colleagues are very concerned that
the economically poor countries do indeed benefit from the very significant
benefits that OA offers.

Here are the letters, in the order in which they were sent to Nature:



[1] Text of letter sent to Nature by Professor Stevan Harnad, Canada
Research Chair at the University of Quebec at Montreal, and Professor of
Cognitive Science at the University of Southampton, UK

Sir,

Open Access (OA) means free online access to peer-reviewed journal
articles. There are two ways to provide OA:

(1) either by publishing one's article in an OA journal that makes all
articles free online ("Gold OA")
http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html

(2) or by publishing one's article in a non-OA journal and
self-archiving it to make it OA ("Green OA")
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13309/

R. Gadagkar (Letter to Nature, 22 May 2008) suggests that although
denying access to users because of unaffordable subscription fees
to the user-institution is bad, denying publishing to authors because
of unaffordable OA publishing fees to the author-institution is
worse, especially in the Developing World.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7194/full/453450c.html

The usual reply is that (1) many Gold OA journals do not charge
a publishing fee and (2) exceptions are made for authors who
cannot pay. More important, there is also Green OA self-archiving,
and the self-archiving mandates increasingly being adopted by
universities (e.g. Harvard) and research funders (e.g. NIH).
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

Self-archiving costs nothing, and if it ever makes subscriptions
unsustainable it will by the very same token generate the windfall
institutional savings out of which to pay for OA publishing instead.

Nor are the costs of publishing likely to remain the same under
self-archiving: If journal subscriptions are ever no longer in
demand (because users all use authors' self-archived drafts
rather than publishers' subscription-based versions) journals
will not convert to OA publishing under its current terms (where
journals still provide most of the products and services of
conventional journal publishing), but under substantially
scaled-down terms.

Current costs of providing the print and PDF edition, of access-provision
and of archiving will all vanish (for the publisher). Those
functions will have been off-loaded onto the distributed network of
OA institutional repositories, each hosting its own peer-reviewed,
published output. The only service that peer-reviewed journal
publishers will still need to provide then will be peer review itself
http://www.nature.com/nature/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html and the
windfall institutional cancellation savings will be more than enough to
pay for that.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm

But until then, Green OA is OA enough - and free.

Sincerely,

Stevan Harnad



[2] Letter sent to Nature by Trustees of the Electronic Publishing Trust
for Development

Sir,

As Trustees of the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development working
with research scientists and publishers in developing countries* for
over a decade, we write to correct misunderstandings conveyed in the
correspondence from Raghavendra Gadagkar (Nature, 453, 450, May 22nd,
2008).

First, the choice for researchers in the economically poor regions is not
between 'pay to publish' versus 'pay to read' since by far the majority of
'Gold' Open Access (OA) journals make no charge to authors whatsoever.
Most are therefore free to both authors and readers.

Second, the alternative 'Green' route to OA for universities is to create
low-cost institutional repositories (IRs) - in which their researchers
can self-archive their publications to make them freely available to
all users with Internet access - and this has already been adopted by
about 1300 institutions worldwide.

A growing number (44) of universities and funding organisations (including
Harvard, Southampton, Liège, CERN, NIH, Wellcome Trust, 6 of the 7 UK
research councils, and India's National Institute of Technology) have
already gone on to officially mandate Green OA self-archiving for all
their research publications.

Usage of these resources by developing countries is now well recorded.
As examples, usage of journals published in developing countries
(and making no charge to authors or readers) was recorded by Bioline
International as having reached 3.5 million full text downloads in
2007. Usage of research publications archived in IRs shows India, China,
Brazil and South Africa among the top15 most active user-countries, and
smaller developing countries to a lesser degree. Full text downloads
from just one of the 1300 registered repositories showed UK: 10,174;
India: 5,733; China: 5,070; South Africa: 1155. Detailed usage of 4
such IRs by 6 countries is shown in the EPT Blog.

It is clear from these small but representative examples of usage that OA
has huge benefits for the progress of research in the developing world,
and advances steadily.

Sincerely,

Subbiah Arunachalam, Flat No. 1, Raagas Apts, 66 Venkatakrishna Road,
Chennai 600 028, India. Tel: +91 44‰? 2461 3224, Mobile: 97909 23941

Leslie Chan, University of Toronto, Department of Social Sciences, 1265
Military Trail, Scarborough, Ontario, M1C1A4, Canada, Tel: +1 416 287
7505

Barbara Kirsop, Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, Wilmots,
Elmton, Worksop, S80 4LS, UK Tel: +44 1909 724184, Mobile 07773677650

Electronic Publishing Trust for Development,
http://www.epublishingtrust.org
University of Otago, New Zealand, http://eprints.otago.ac.nz/es/
Bioline International, http://www.bioline.org.br)
EPT Blog: http://epublishingtrust.blogspot.com/2008/03/bring-on-irs.html




[3] Letter sent to Nature by Peter Suber, Professor of Philosophy,
Earlham College, USA

Dear Sir/Madam,

Re: Raghavendra Gadagkar's letter in the May 22 issue, Open-access more
harm than good in developing world.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7194/full/453450c.html

Nature gave Gadagkar's letter a misleading title. His argument is
not against open access (OA) as such, or even OA journals as such, but
against fee-based OA journals or "the 'pay to publish and read for free'
business model".

However, Gadagkar's argument is misleading in its own right. He is
apparently unaware that most OA journals charge no publication fees [1].
As of late 2007, 67% of the journals listed in the Directory of Open
Access Journals charged no publication fees [2], and 83% of OA journals
from society publishers charged no publication fees [3].

Gadagkar writes that "A 'publish for free, read for free' model may
one day prove to be viable..." as if it were untried, when in fact it
is the majority model around the world. Moreover, it's the exclusive
model in his own country. All OA journals published in India are of
the no-fee variety.

He also fails to mention that OA archiving already follows the model
of no fees for readers and no fees for authors. In the same week that
Nature published Gadagkar's letter, the OA repository at his institution,
the Indian Institute of Science, passed the milestone of 10,000 deposits.

Peter Suber
Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College
Visiting Fellow, Yale Law School

1. http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/newsletter/11-02-06.htm#nofee

2.
http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/2007/12/new-data-showing-that-most-
oa-journals.html

3. http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/newsletter/11-02-07.htm#list

Open Access Subject Guides & Tutorials

Students in the 2008 University of British Columbia SLAIS Open Access class have created open access subject guides on a variety of topics, including the environment, chemistry, HIV/AIDS, environmental and occupational health, media studies, as well as a tutorial on preserving OA materials and a draft OA research project. Links to the projects can be found here.

July 2008 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber has just released the July 2008 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. The feature article this month is Open Access and the Last-Mile Problem for Knowledge, and begins with the "tarmac problem" for disaster relief - emergencies such as Katrina where badly needed supplies were almost within reach, but never delivered. Peter compares this "last mile" problem with the problems of access to (stage one problem), and understanding of (stage two problem), scholarly knowledge.

Peter argues (and I agree) that paid access to the published literature is not a scalable solution, as the volume of this literature grows, while the money to purchase essentially does not. Open access is the only scalable solution to full access to our scholarly knowledge.

Peter's Stage Two problem is understanding of the knowledge that is available. Open access is a necessary precondition for full resolution of this problem, but it is not enough. Learning or growing in knowledge is not just about having access; it is about finding the right article, how to sift through mazes of often conflicting data and opinions to find the information that will really answer your question. Some of the answers, as Peter argues, are technological - alerting services, machine translation, automated summarizers for long articles we don't have time to read, text mining and so forth.

All really good ideas. What I'd like to add: We librarians have much to add to resolving this Stage Two problem - building understanding, such as our skills in helping people to build information literacy, one-on-one help with finding answers (reference and research assistance), and our skills at designing and building systems to facilitate making the connections between author and reader. As our global storehouse of knowledge grows, with more research being done and published, data and new formats of publications made available, the need for our skills will only grow in the coming years.

As Peter Suber says:
It's staggering to think about what could happen if the knowledge we have painstakingly discovered, articulated, tested, refined, validated, gathered, and delivered to the tarmac were systematically distributed to all who need it. Imagine if what was known became more widely known, especially among those who could put it to use.

E-LIS passes 8000 documents

As of about 8:45 am MST today, E-LIS, the open archive for library and information science (http://eprints.rclis.org/) contained 8023 documents. When I looked on Friday, the total was just under 8000 which means that E-LIS went over the 8000 mark sometime in the last few days. While it's not as an auspicious number as, say, 10,000, I think it's worth recognizing.

(disclosure: I am part of the E-LIS editorial team for Canada)

Andrew