Open Access News

Eric Scott Sills and Jonathan D. Baum, Open access, medical research, and the internet economy of scale, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, November 2006.  Not even an abstract is free online, at least so far.

Update. I just saw the the text. It's a letter to the editor. Excerpt:

Few would gainsay Walport and Kiley’s optimistic forecast regarding academic publishing, given the Wellcome Trust’s move to require its sponsored research be made freely accessible via PubMed Central or its equivalent within six months of publication. With the issue of ‘who will pay’ thus having been largely addressed, the question of ‘how much is owed’ should be explored next.

For many years, established publishing houses have observed diminished costs per unit in response to greater production volume. But electronic publishing charges at present levels may be seen as excessive, unless special factors can be put forth to justify why US$3000 is required to publish a scholarly manuscript on the internet....

Steep surcharges in web-based publishing serve to drive away submissions from independent researchers who are not funded, not wealthy, or just not lucky enough to get a discretionary waiver. We agree that publication costs are legitimate research costs, but how high will such fees need to rise before the internet publishing community is asked for a receipt? To preserve the public trust, it may be time to audit the toll booth on the information highway.

Mark Herlihy, Informa Ends Buyout Talks, Says Bid 'Undervalues' It, Bloomberg, November 3, 2006.  Excerpt:

Informa Plc...ended talks with buyout firms Cinven Ltd. and Candover Investments Plc, saying their offer "significantly undervalues'' the company.

Springer Science & Business Media, whose main shareholders are Cinven and Candover, offered 630 pence per share, London- based Informa said today in a Regulatory News Service statement. Informa said it's terminated discussions with the bidders.

The rejection of the offer may not be the end of the deal, Lorna Tilbian, an analyst at London-based Numis Securities said in a telephone interview. Informa did not initiate the talks and were unwilling sellers, she said....

Richard Wallis has blogged some more notes on the Stellenbosch Ninth Annual Symposium (University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, November 2-3, 2006).  The only OA-related presentation in this set is Wouter Klapwijkm, Supporting a research repository information infrastructure.

Eric Kansa, This Morning’s Jaw Dropper: More on FRPAA and the AAA, Digging Digitally, November 3, 2006.  Excerpt:

The saga of the American Anthropological Association (AAA)’s response to FRPAA (Federal Research Public Access Act) continues. Rex at the Savage Minds Blog just reported that the AnthroSource Steering Committee, a group leading AnthroSource, the AAA’s digital repository system, has been DISBANDED....

What a mess! This heavy-handed action is indicative of how much the AAA is on the defensive on this issue. They’re starting to remind me of the recording industry and their rearguard actions against file-sharing and online dissemination in general. This speaks volumes about how beholden this organization is toward failing and outmoded publication business models, models that hurt AAA members, universities, libraries, students, faculty, groups with limited financial resources, and the public (see evidence: here). The current system sees publication cost escalating unchecked, and according to Rex, the AAA’s publication program is still losing money. So, I just don’t get it, why stick with a failing business model, one that is not meeting the needs of its constituents, and not explore alternatives?

Trying to horde anthropological research seems self-defeating. It seems that anthropology should do more to attract more people to its research. FRPAA, which would require government funded archives of paper drafts accepted for publication, would be a great way for anthropology to become better known to a larger community. There’s no direct financial threat to the AAA, since government agencies will foot the bill for the archives. Besides, overly proprietary and closed models become too inconvenient and expensive for people to want to use. Alternatives are already proliferating, and it is getting much easier and cheaper to set up an open, peer-reviewed, e-journal.

The AAA’s attempts to horde anthropological scholarship is bad enough, since this research is often very important for human rights activists and development. But by opposing FRPAA, the AAA is also working against the dissemination of vital knowledge in other disciplines that directly impact health, conservation, and economic development. That makes this whole affair sordid, ironic, and even somewhat tragic, especially for a discipline that positions itself in advocacy on behalf of marginalized peoples and communities.

BTW: Changing the AAA is going to require some grassroots organizing. Some anthropological bloggers want to get together at the AAA meeting in San Jose to discuss ways to push forward an Open Access agenda. Find out more here!

Stewart Brower, An open access call to arms, Professional Notes, November 3, 2006.  Excerpt:

Dean [Giustini] is very correct [here] about the need to develop new tools and new resources that circumvent our overreliance on high-dollar electronic products like UpToDate and MDConsult.

I plan on taking up the cause myself in a number of ways. Recently I announced the launch of Communications in Information Literacy, a new open access journal that I'm co-editing. This coming Wednesday I'm conducting a public forum at the University at Buffalo about developing a new open access drug resource, whole cloth, as a wiki. Potentially, it will be able to be harnessed as an alternative to pricey clinical drug information systems and online formularies, while doubling as a drug education aid for information literacy efforts.

I'm very excited about the prospect, but my most fervent hope is that my colleagues in MLA, particularly the Pharmacy and Drug Information Section, will collaborate with me in building this new site. I should have more to report very soon, but if anyone is in the Buffalo area and would like to attend the open forum, please let me know and I will gladly provide directions.

Stevan Harnad, Anthropomorphic Tail Wags Anthropological Dog, Open Access Archivangelism, November 3, 2006. 

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) has disbanded its "AnthroSource Steering Committee" because it had supported the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). Hardly a surprising outcome: Like the Royal Society and many other learned societies, the AAA, has a strong publishing tail that manages to wag the AAA dog. And that tail does not wag the AAA in the interests of anthropological research or researchers. The resolution of this (undeniable) conflict of interest between researchers and their learned societies is very simple: It will not be their learned societies who ensure that Open Access is provided, free for all, but their institutions and funders, by mandating it, just as the FRPAA proposes to do (but with a few of the policy parameters fine-tuned to optimize them).

Tom Worthington has proposed that Australia should use Creative Commons licenses for government publications.

CERN has issued a press release on the meeting it convened yesterday in Geneva, Establishing a sponsoring consortium for Open Access publishing in particle physics.  Excerpt:

The first meeting of European particle physics funding agencies took place today [November 3] at CERN...to establish a consortium for Open Access publishing in particle physics, SCOAP3 [Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics]. This is the first time an entire scientific field is exploring the conversion of its reader-paid journals into an author-paid Open Access format.

Open Access is a policy that could revolutionize the academic publishing world and have a great impact on research. By changing the traditional model of financing publications through reader subscriptions, the publications will be free to readers and financed by funding agencies via laboratories and the authors. This new concept in publishing will broaden opportunities for researchers and funding agencies in achieving greater benefit from unrestricted distribution of the results of their publicly funded research.

"DESY [Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron] fully supports open access publishing in particle physics and we would like to see it realized within a short time scale. It is of great importance that we are actively and constructively involved in these ongoing discussions aiming to establish a sponsoring consortium," stated Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Research Director at Germany's DESY laboratory. His remarks were echoed by Francois le Diberder, from the French national institute for particle and nuclear physics (CNRS/IN2P3): "CNRS, and IN2P3, fully support the SCOAP initiative and will proactively participate in its inception and operation". The delegate from Italy's national institute for nuclear physics (INFN) Graziano Fortuna, said, "INFN fully supports the move to an Open Access system for high energy physics publications." Expressions of support came from other delegates, including those of German funding agencies, notably the Max Planck Society, Greece, Portugal, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. The European Committee for Future Accelerators (ECFA) also offered support. Both national and international library consortia were enthusiastic about the initiative.

"There is a wind of change blowing and with it the possibility to experiment with new models - in this CERN is perceived as the pioneer of a new publishing paradigm and the SCOAP initiative as a pilot project for future developments in scientific publishing," said Peteris Zilgalvis of the European Commission.

Publishers also are aligning with the opportunities offered by Open Access: journals published by American Institute of Physics, American Physical Society, Elsevier and Springer have already started to offer authors the possibility to make their articles freely available to readers. Shortly before the meeting, the publishing consortium of the European Physical Journal lowered the price tag for such an Open Access option and announced an author-friendly approach to copyright. At the same time the publishers of the Journal of High Energy Physics (JHEP) stated they are ready to embrace a sponsorship policy in which they would allow unrestricted access to their articles. On the cost of this policy JHEP states: "we have managed to prove that the costs can be reduced whilst at the same time ensuring the highest rigour in peer review".

Today the first steps have been taken in developing an effective strategy to provide funding to Open Access publishing in high energy physics. An interim working party comprising physicists, librarians and legal experts from across Europe has been formed with the mandate to lay the foundations for SCOAP3 within the next few months....

Comment.  We're watching a massive transition 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.  Nothing could be more encouraging than the statement from JHEP:  "[W]e have managed to prove that the costs can be reduced whilst at the same time ensuring the highest rigour in peer review" --and of course improving access for readers and impact for authors. 

OA advocates have always argued that funding OA doesn't require new money, just a redirection of the money now spent on subscriptions.  We see small new pressures for redirection every time libraries cancel journals because of high prices or inadequate funds, and we see small actual steps toward redirection every time a TA journal converts to OA.  What's most significant about the CERN project is that it's a large-scale, discipline-wide, stakeholder-united redirection project.  If it works, it will accomplish in one move what other disciplines are accomplishing, if at all, in halting steps.  More, CERN is on track to accomplish this feat with cooperation and comity all around. 

Update (November 6, 2006). CERN has now posted the press release to its own web site (nicer format, working URLs).

Stevan Harnad, First Things First: OA Self-Archiving, Then Maybe OA Publishing, Open Access Archivangelism, November 3, 2006.  Excerpt:

Summary:  In two separate postings plus an article, Chris Armbruster...has suggested that peer review provision should be unbundled from access provision and that authors (of journal articles) should not transfer exclusive copyright to publishers. The trouble is that although both desiderata are indeed desirable (and will no doubt prevail eventually), publishers are not particularly interested in unbundling today, and authors are not particularly interested in putting their accepted articles' publication at risk by haggling over copyright retention. Hence the immediate solution is, and remains, for authors to self-archive their accepted peer-reviewed drafts, and for their institutions and funders to mandate that they do so, for the good of research, researchers, and the public that funds them.

JISC has published version 2 of its Open Access Briefing Paper (dated September 2, 2006, but apparently released this week).  The first edition from April 2005 was written by Alma Swan; the second incorporates revisions by Fred Friend.  Excerpt:

The World Wide Web has provided the means for researchers to make their research results available to anyone, anywhere, at any time. This applies to journal articles regardless of whether or not their library has a subscription to the journal in which the articles were published as well as to other types of research output such as conference papers, theses or research reports. This is known as Open Access.

Researchers publish their results to establish their own claim to the research and to enable other  researchers to build upon them. In the case of journal articles, only the richest institutions have been able to afford a reasonable proportion of all the scholarly journals published and so learning about and accessing such articles has not always been easy for most researchers. Open Access changes all this.

What Open Access is

The Open Access research literature is composed of free, online copies of peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers as well as technical reports, theses and working papers. In most cases there are no licensing restrictions on their use by readers. They can therefore be used freely for research, teaching and other purposes.

What Open Access is not

There are various misunderstandings about Open Access. It is not self-publishing, nor a way to bypass peer-review and publication, nor is it a kind of second-class, cut-price publishing route. It is simply a means to make research results freely available online to the whole research community....

Angel A. Hernandez-Borges and five co-authors, Awareness and attitude of Spanish medical authors to open access publishing and the "author pays" model, Journal of the Medical Library Association, October 2006.  Excerpt:

The investigators selected the first authors of Spanish-language articles...appearing in PubMed between June and December 2003 [and sent them a nine-item questionnaire]....The study found a low level of awareness of the OAP model (22%, N = 22) and of acceptance of journals charging author fees among Spanish authors....[O]nly nine respondents (9%) indicated they would pay author fees to publish in an OA journal, and only five (5%) had published in an open access's journal that charged fees. Nearly one-third of respondents noted that lack of funds was a significant barrier to open access publishing, while 19 (19%) indicated the prestige factor as a barrier.

Comment.  Some of these results of valid and useful, but some of the most central are not. Unfortunately, this is another study in a fairly long series that interviews authors for their attitudes about OA journals without first informing them that a majority of OA journals charge no author-side fees (see one and two) and that, when they do, the fees are often waived or paid by sponsors.  It appears that the researchers were themselves unaware of at least the first of these facts. 

We already knew that authors don't like the idea of paying fees out of pocket.  Now let's find out what they think about OA journals.  And let's kill the term "author pays" once and for all.  It's false for the majority of OA journals, which charge no fees.  It's misleading for the rest for suggesting that authors have to pay out of pocket.  It misleads both interviewers and interviewees in studies like this, and it only helps spread FUD.

Google has donated $30,000 to Creative Commons.

Comment.  Good move.  The more CC content there is, the more Google-crawlable content there is.  

There's an even more important element here, but to describe it we need a term like "net share" (by analogy to "market share").  The more some-rights-reserved content increases net share, the more all-rights-reserved content loses net share.  And the more that happens, the more the net becomes a headache-free zone for crawling, indexing, and sharing.

Ben Vershbow, making MediaCommons, if:book, November 2, 2006.  Excerpt:

Back in July, we announced plans to build MediaCommons, a new kind of scholarly press for the digital age with a focus on media studies....At its core, MediaCommons will be a social networking site where academics, students, and other interested members of the public can write and critically converse about a mediated world, in a mediated environment....At the same time, MediaCommons will be a full-fledged electronic press dedicated to the development of born-digital scholarship: multimedia "papers," journals, Gamer Theory-style monographs, and many other genre-busting forms yet to be invented.

Today we are pleased to announce the first concrete step toward the establishment of this network: making MediaCommons, a planning site through which founding editors Avi Santo (Old Dominion U.) and Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Pomona College) will lead a public discussion on the possible directions this all might take.

The site presently consists of three simple sections:

1) A weblog where Avi and Kathleen will think out loud....

2) A call for "papers" ...

3) In Media Res -- an experimental feature where each week a different scholar will present a short contemporary media clip accompanied by a 100-150 word commentary, alongside which a community discussion can take place. Sort of a "YouTube" for scholars and a critically engaged public...

Other features and sections will be added over time and out of this site the real MediaCommons will eventually emerge. How exactly this will happen, and how quickly, is yet to be seen and depends largely on the feedback and contributions from the community that will develop on making MediaCommons. We imagine it could launch as early as this coming Spring or as late as next Fall. Come take a look!

Steve Hitchcock, Publishers bury the case for exclusivity when opposing open access policy mandates, Eprints Insiders, November 3, 2006.  Excerpt:

Publishers don't like policies from government, research funders or institutions mandating OA through repository self-archiving because, ironically, these make it more likely that authors will use the self-archiving clauses that most publishers now accept. Still, it gets rather tiring to keep reading the same publisher refrain from any policy initiative - that it will harm business models, cause journal subscriptions to be cancelled, etc. - as in this example. What is the real problem?

Publishers are burying the case for exclusivity beneath speculation on business models and revenues because they know the legislators they oppose won't buy their case otherwise, and neither should anyone else....

Coincidentally, the chance to test this arose with a posting to the liblicense list by Peter Banks, former journal publisher and now industry consultant. Banks appeared to say that OA, especially self-archiving in repositories, would lead to the end of peer review as performed by publishers....In a follow-up message he raised the prospect that nonprofit and for-profit publishers might "cease providing traditional peer review services."....Banks offered a thoughtful and somewhat surprising suggestion, but which is consistent with the consequence of ending peer review, the end of conventional journals: "In the face of mandated OA, publishers should move toward a new business that has a positive ROI. This will probably involve providing context, rather than content. That is, under mandated OA, the business of publishing will no longer be creating quality content, but aggregating it and filtering it from what is freely available on the Web. It is separating the small amount of wheat from the great quantity of chaff." ...

The point is that peer review is not a bargaining tool. Its role is equally pivotal for authors and publishers. If publishers give up exclusivity, will authors have to forego journal peer review? Simply, no.

Steve Hitchcock, OpenDOAR repository policies tool, Eprints Insiders, November 3, 2006.  Excerpt:

Writing a repository policy is hard, but some help is at hand with the OpenDOAR policies tool....OpenDOAR examines policies presented as OAI-harvestable eprints.xsd definitions statements by the sites it assesses for inclusion in its repository directory. It found that over two-thirds of sites have no harvestable or defined policy (Millington slide presentation). It may be less than that. In a small recent survey of repository preservation policy, which ought to be a consequential subset of wider policy, the Preserv project found that effectively none had a policy in this area (Hitchcock slide presentation).

OpenDOAR concludes that the eprints.xsd is not working and should be updated or replaced. In fact, eprints.xsd doesn't cover preservation policy at all.

To improve matters OpenDOAR's policy tool allows administrators to produce policy by filling in a series of forms, covering policies for Metadata, Data, Content, Submission and Preservation.

On the front page of the tool users can add the repository name, URL or OAI Base URL to get the tool to retrieve current repository policy (although this didn't appear to work for repositories known to me), if there is one, or leave it blank if you just want to start exploring the tool....

How successful this tool is in raising the number of repositories with policy above the one-third level remains to be seen, but OpenDOAR could hardly have done more with this excellently conceived, practical and (nearly) comprehensive tool. Repositories have no excuse not to try it.

Rex, So much for open access: AnthroSource Steering Committee liquidated by AAA, Savage Minds, November 2, 2006.  Excerpt:

The latest edition of Peter Suber’s SOAN Newsletter is out and includes some coverage of the AnthroSource Steering Committee’s opposition to the AAA’s support of FRPAA. Given this fact and Kerim’s call for an open access event at AAA [American Anthropological Association], I figured it was time for an update on the ASSC’s progress in this regard…

I finally got the memo on 30 October making official