Open Access News

The US Open Access Working Group has posted an OA proposal to the Obama transition team's Citizen's Briefing Book.  Excerpt:

Public Access to the Published Results of Publicly Funded Research Will Benefit the Economy, Science, and Health

Every year, the federal government funds tens of billions of dollars in basic and applied research with the expectation that the results will accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, stimulate innovation, and improve the public good.  These research results typically are reported in articles published in a wide variety of academic journals.  However, the high cost of journal subscriptions and restrictive licensing terms severely limits public access to these articles.

Because U.S. taxpayers underwrite this research, they have a right to expect its dissemination and use will be maximized....

Expanding access to the universe of publicly funded scientific research in the U.S. offers the potential for downstream economic stimulus....

Open sharing of scientific data has already revolutionized life science research and helped establish new fields such as genomics and proteomics. For example, GenBank, the publicly accessible database of DNA sequences operated by NIH, has played a critical role in the genomics revolution.  Public access and cooperative sharing played a key role in the sequencing of the SARS virus in just seven days, expediting the development of diagnostic tests to identify the virus.  A broader public access policy will hasten progress in all scientific fields.  An accelerated pace of discovery in climate change research, the search for sustainable energy sources and hundreds of other critical areas will directly benefit the public.

Peer-reviewed articles reporting the results of scientific research funded by U.S. tax dollars should be made publicly available online no later than six months after publication.  Additionally, articles written by scientists and researchers employed by the U.S. government should be placed online simultaneously to publication.  

One U.S. agency has taken the lead in successfully implementing such a policy and serves as an excellent benchmark. After careful examination of the issues and extensive consultation with stakeholders, the National Institutes of Health implemented a reasoned policy that appropriately balances the interests of all stakeholders, requiring that the results of the $29 billion in research that it funds annually be made freely accessible to the public in its online database. The policy will lead to new and increased usage by millions of physicians, public health officials, patients, students, teachers, and scientists.

Comment.  Like Obama CTO, which also has an OA proposal, the Citizen's Briefing Book allows you to vote for the posted proposals and add your own comments.  Unlike Obama CTO, Citizen's Briefing Book lets you vote for all the proposals you like, not just your highest priorities.  Log in, vote for the OA proposal, browse around and check out the other good ideas, and spread the word.

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Heather Joseph, the Executive Director or SPARC, has released her December 1 letter to Howard Berman, answering five of his follow-up questions and supplementing her testimony at the September 2008 hearing on OA, the NIH policy, and the Conyers bill ("Fair Copyright in Research Works Act").  Berman is the last chairman of the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, which held the hearing.  John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has since abolished the subcommittee.

Comment.  At the time of the hearing, Berman was said to have some doubts about the bill, which would overturn the NIH policy and forbid other federal agencies from adopting similar policies.  While his subcommittee is now gone, shifting power to Conyers, the bill's sponsor, Berman remains an influential member of the Judiciary Committee.  It's a good sign that he asked for these five follow-up questions and a good sign that he now has these five strong answers.

Update.  Berman also had follow-up questions for Martin Frank, one of the publisher representatives who opposes the NIH policy and supports the Conyers bill.  Frank has also released his December 1 answers to Berman.  Last October, Frank submitted another written supplement to his oral testimony, and I commented on it at the time.

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Dorothea Salo wrote on Monday:

...SWORD is not a harvesting protocol; it is a deposit protocol. The party that initiates a SWORD deposit is the party with the material in hand. SWORD offers no way for a repository that wants material from another repository to request it, much less do so in an �automatic� fashion....

(If PubMedCentral or arXiv or RePEc or SSRN were to implement SWORD, it would be a gigantic step forward. Please, will someone in the know suggest it to them?)...

Paul Ginsparg replied by email (posted with permission):

arXiv has implemented the SWORD protocol for ingests (in collaboration with Microsoft) -- it's currently used for the direct upload from the Microsoft Word plug-in and is also being tested for upload from CS conference software (which manages only up to the point of the conference, so needed some way to pipe output to archival holder of proceedings).

In principle, IRs would be able to "push" content to arXiv if they were set up to export via SWORD, and were able to map to the arXiv metadata format via atom extension elements (vanilla SWORD doesn't mention metadata mapping). Though according to the Xia article the holdings in some of those IRs may currently be problematic (spotty metadata, broken links to full text). Current self-archiving authors could perhaps be spared some duplicate effort via this route, but they'd likely want to see some natural functional advantage to it, rather than viewing it as a requirement.

Anyway we agree this is all in the noise, and the real issue is the current 85% non-self-archivers. Ultimately they shouldn't need to be required to deposit open access content any more than people needed to be forced to deposit to youtube ...

Update.  Here's a follow-up from arXiv's Simeon Warner (posted with permission):

I think that SWORD can significantly reduce duplicate effort. I think the most logical direction is for IRs to have the facility to assist with push to arXiv. Of course there is some arXiv specific stuff that is likely not normally present in the IR so there will be some additional effort, however quite a bit could be reduced to the "push to arXiv" button. This way one can use local effort/expertise (perhaps even with advantage of local language) to help with submission to centralized facilities such as arXiv.

You might also want to add a link to arXiv's SWORD documentation.

Update (1/8/09).  Also see Dorothea's response.

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The Wellcome Trust is taking steps to increase the compliance rate with its OA mandate.  From the January issue of its Grantholders Newsletter:

Open access: compliance audit

Early in 2009 the Trust will be undertaking an audit to assess the level of compliance with its open access (OA) mandate. In cases where we find that papers have not been made available through PMC/UKPMC, in line with our mandate, we will be contacting grantholders (and their institutions) and asking them to explain why this grant condition has not been adhered to.

Grantholders are reminded that it is a condition of grant funding to ensure that all research papers funded in whole or in part by the Wellcome Trust must be made freely accessible through PubMed Central (PMC) and UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) as soon as possible, and in any event within six months of publication. Further information can be found in the authors� guide and FAQ....

The Trust has produced a list of the journals frequently used by Wellcome Trust grantholders, along with advice - at the journal title level - on how to comply with the Trust�s open access (OA) requirements in a way that also meets the journals� publishing policy....

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At its December 16-17 meeting, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure (ACCI) adopted this statement, drafted in its previous meeting:

In order to help catalyze and facilitate the growth of advanced CI [cyberinfrastructure], a critical component is the adoption of open access policy for data, publications and software.

(Thanks to Tony Hey.)

Comment.  The NSF should be the next agency after the NIH to adopt an OA mandate.  This important recommendation carries special weight because it comes from the ACCI.  Kudos to all the ACCI members. 

Also see our past posts on the NSF's cyberinfrastructure policy deliberations.

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Universit� de Li�ge has adopted an OA mandate.  (Thanks to Stevan Harnad.)   Bernard Rentier, the Rector at Li�ge, has posted an English translation of his November memo to the Li�ge faculty on the AmSci OA Forum.  Excerpt:

...Here below is the English translation of the message I have sent to the whole University Community on November 26, 2008. I believe that, rather than a lengthy explanation of how the Li�ge mandate works, this message tells it all much better. It can perhaps be useful as well for those who wish to find a way to obtain compliance within their universities. It demonstrates also that the Li�ge Mandate is indeed IDOA/DDR (Immediate-Deposit/Optional- Access -- Dual Deposit/Release), to use the latest definitions coined in this forum.

Happy New Year to all !

Bernard Rentier

----------

"Madame, Monsieur, Cher(e) Coll�gue,

The increase in international visibility of the ULg [Universit� de Li�ge] and its researchers, mainly through their publications, as well as the support for the worldwide development of an open and free access to scientific works (Open Access) are two essential objectives at the heart of my action, as you probably know.

At my request, the Institutional Repository "ORBi" (Open Repository & Bibliography) has been set up at the ULg by the Libraries Network to meet these objectives.

[1] The experimental encoding phase based on volunteerism being now successfully completed, we can step forward and enter the "production phase" this Wednesday November 26th, 2008. I take this opportunity to thank all the professors and researchers who have already filed in ORBi hundreds of their references, 70% of them with the full text. Thanks to their patience, ORBi's fine tuning could be achieved. From today on, it is incumbent upon each ULg member to feed ORBi with his/her own references. In this respect, the Administrative Board of the University has decided to make it mandatory for all ULg members:

• to deposit the bibliographic references of ALL their publications since 2002;
• to deposit the integral text of ALL their articles published in periodicals since 2002. Access to these full texts will only be granted with the author's consent and according to the rules applicable to author's rights and copyrights. The University is indeed very keen on respecting the rights of all stakeholders.

[2] For future publications, deposit in ORBi will be mandatory as soon as the article is accepted by the editor.

[3] I wish to remind you that, as announced a year in March 2007, starting October 1st, 2009 only those references introduced in ORBi will be taken into consideration as the official list of publications accompanying any curriculum vit� in all evaluation procedures 'in house' (designations, promotions, grant applications, etc.)....

 Comments

• This is an excellent policy.  I applaud the mandatory language, the dual deposit/release strategy (or what Stevan Harnad calls immediate deposit / optional access), the decision to apply it retroactively to 2002 (but for the immediate deposit rule, of course), and the much-needed and still-too-rare provision that only articles on deposit in the IR will be used for the purposes of promotion and other internal evaluations.  Kudos to Rentier and all others involved in this decision at Li�ge.
• The November 2008 announcement is the latest step in a process that started with a mandate announcement in March 2007.  See Rentier's blog post about the evolving policy at the time, in French or Google's English.  One reason why Li�ge didn't start implementing the policy in March 2007 was that it still had to launch its IR, which happened in June 2008.
• Also see our past posts on Bernard Rentier and the University of Li�ge.

Update.  Also see the license (in French or Google's English) that Liege will use for articles on deposit in the IR.

• Klaus Graf has raised some objections to the license and the practices surrounding its use.  Read them in German or Google's English, or read his own English summary.  Here's my paraphrase of two of them:  First, during an embargo period when Liege doesn't provide OA to the world, it does provide access to users at Liege.  Klaus believes this is illegal.  Second, the license quotes the BOAI on the importance of removing permission barriers, and then makes two exceptions:  it blocks commercial use and derivative works without the author's permission.  Klaus objects that the bar to commercial use is not consistent with the BOAI. 
• I have no opinion on his first objection.  On his second:  he's right that the bar to commercial use is not consistent with the BOAI.  But although I'm a strong supporter of the BOAI (and its chief drafter), I'm not troubled by what Liege has done.  First, as it read the license, it quotes the BOAI and then makes exceptions.  It doesn't assert that the exceptions are contained in the BOAI itself.  Second and more importantly, most IRs provide gratis, not libre OA.  They don't remove any permission barriers at all.  Indeed, there are good reasons why most green OA is gratis and not libre, and because I understand those reasons I applaud any institution, like Liege, which goes beyond gratis OA to any degree and removes even some permission barriers.  One of the important reasons to distinguish gratis and libre OA was to recognize the OA movement's many gratis OA success stories, such as the vast majority of IRs which remove no permission barriers, without disparaging them for falling short of libre OA.  But if we value gratis OA, without disparaging it for falling short of libre OA, then (a fortiori) we should value libre OA, without disparaging it for falling short of BBB OA. Of course this is consistent with valuing BBB OA most of all.

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I just mailed the January issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.  This issue reviews the notable OA developments from 2008.  The round-up section briefly notes 143 OA developments from December. 

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Harold Varmus, co-founder of the Public Library of Science and former director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, has been selected by President-elect Barack Obama to co-chair the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. (Thanks to Heather Joseph.)

The other co-chair will be Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute. Lander was also a lead researcher in the Human Genome Project.

Coverage here:

• Press release from the Obama transition team
• Scientific American
• Reuters

Comment. This puts a strong voice for OA inside the Executive Office of the President. Varmus is one of the most high-profile advocates of OA, including of the role of government in providing OA, notably as a signatory on the Nobelist letters supporting the NIH policy. Both the Human Genome Project and the Broad Institute are practitioners of open data.

See also our past posts:

• on Harold Varmus
• on the Human Genome Project
• on the Broad Institute

See also:

• Obama's Energy nominee and OA
• Obama's NOAA nominee and OA

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The MacArthur Foundation adopted a research access policy, which took effect on September 18, 2008.  (Thanks to Donna Okubo.)  Excerpt:

...The Foundation's policy is to ensure that the Grant Work Product furthers charitable purposes and benefits the public. To that end, the Foundation seeks prompt and broad dissemination of the Grant Work Product at minimal cost or, when justified, at a reasonable cost.

The Foundation encourages openness in research and freedom of access to underlying data by persons with a serious interest in the research. Grantees are also encouraged to explore opportunities to use existing and emerging internet distribution models and, when appropriate, open access journals, Creative Commons license or similar mechanisms that result in broad access for the interested field and public.

The Foundation recognizes there may be circumstances where limited or delayed dissemination of Grant Work Product or limited access to data may be appropriate to protect legitimate interests of the grantee, other funders, principal investigators or participants in research studies. Such circumstances will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Intellectual property rights (including copyright and patent rights) should not be used to limit or deny access to the Grant Work Product, to result in exclusive use of such Grant Work Product, or to create revenue that is not used for charitable purposes. While copyright to the Grant Work Product will ordinarily remain with the grantee, the Foundation will require that it be granted a no-cost assignable license to use or publish the Grant Work Product. The Foundation will exercise the license only if the grantee does not or cannot provide for broad and prompt dissemination consistent with this Policy. The Foundation may forego a license if the Foundation is reasonably satisfied that other appropriate arrangements will be implemented that will assure prompt public dissemination of the Grant Work Product.

Comment.  Kudos to all involved.  While the Foundation uses the language of encouragement, the policy operates more like a mandate with case-by-case exceptions.  I like the enforcement mechanism:  a license for each Grant Work Product, which the Foundation will use when grantees do not provide sufficiently open or early access on their own.  I also like the way the policy applies to "Grant Work Products" without restriction --hence, covering data as well as publications.

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The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation adopted an open data policy on September 18, 2008.  (Thanks to Donna Okubo.)  Excerpt:

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation�s (GBMF) goals of scientific advancement, environmental conservation, and healthcare improvement will best be served through a culture of open access to data. It is our philosophy that:

• All data used in or developed in whole or in part by GBMF funded projects (and that can be shared in a manner consistent with applicable laws) will be made widely available and freely shared as soon as possible[1]. If data used in GBMF-funded projects are owned by an additional party other than the grantee, GBMF does not require it to be released, but the grantee will use its best efforts to encourage the data owners to make it openly and freely available.
• Data are shared with full and proper attribution to the data provider.
• Data developed in whole or in part by GBMF grant funding are the property of the grantee unless otherwise specified. The grantee may protect its property through patent, copyright and/or other intellectual property protection instruments, except that it may not impede the effective access and use of the data by the public.
• GBMF is not responsible for any liabilities associated with errors in the data or misrepresentations or misinterpretations of publicly available data.
• GBMF supports grant funding for costs associated with data sharing and open access publication of scientific findings, where appropriate.
• GBMF and prospective grantees will jointly develop a Data Management and Sharing Plan prior to the finalization of a grant agreement.

The Data Sharing Philosophy applies to all activities that are financially supported in whole or in part by GBMF....

As part of the GBMF grant development process, potential grantees are required to develop a Data Management and Sharing Plan (the Plan) with their GBMF program officer....

[1].  Examples of when data should be released: For data created for scientific and environmental conservation purposes, six months from the time of collection, defined as the time when data enters an electronic database....Date of acceptance for publication of the main findings....For DNA sequence data, public release (as defined by submission to an appropriate public database) must occur not more than six months after �completion� (defined specifically in Grant) of the DNA sequence determination.

Comment.  Kudos for this strong policy.  Note that it only applies to data, not to peer-reviewed articles (except for the offer to pay publication fees).  But I hope the Foundation will consider extending it to cover peer-reviewed articles as well.  Note too that it does not require the data to be assigned to the public domain, as Science Commons would.  While I support the SC approach, the Moore approach is a reasonable second-best:  letting grantees hold whatever IP rights in their data the law allows, but not letting them use those rights to impede effective public access.  That may take some refinement in practice.  For example, does an attribution license impede effective public access for a collaborative, public dataset with thousands of contributors?

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The EU's Information and Communication Technologies Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) has released its Draft Work Programme 2009.  If the EC approves the draft in January, then it should open a call for proposals from January 29 to June 2, 2009.  According to the draft, one thread of the new funding program is devoted to OA.  Excerpt:

Objective 2.4: Open access to scientific information

Funding instrument: Pilot B It is intended to support several actions.

Focus and outcomes:

Within the framework of the actions on scientific information initiated by the Communication on scientific information in the digital age the objective is to improve the spread of European research results. This objective is sought not only in the context of the Digital Libraries Initiative, but also within the 7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7).

The term "scientific/scholarly content" refers to the results of scientists' or scholars' research work in the EU Member States or other countries participating in the programme, which in the traditional publishing paradigm have been published as articles in learned journals, papers, conference proceedings, monographs or books.

In this context pilot B actions will be funded to carry out conclusive experiments with open access to digital libraries of scientific/ scholarly content, including experiments exploring new paradigms for peer reviewing, rendering, querying and linking scientific/scholarly content and (optionally) the related underlying datasets.

Conditions and characteristics:

• The quality and quantity of the digital content (and related metadata) to be effectively contributed to the pilot by each content provider, as well as the criteria for its selection, must be clearly identified. The consortium and its members must ensure the necessary availability of the content to be contributed to the pilot. In particular, the input content should not depend on proprietary third- party rights or any other constraints, which would limit its use for the execution of the pilot.
• The consortium and its members must agree on the necessary licensing or clearing arrangements for any Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) arising from the pilot to ensure wider use and dissemination of the project output.
• The actual content should be accessible and retrievable at item level. Projects dealing only with catalogues of content will not be funded. The results of the pilot must be accessible by the target users beyond the end of the pilot.
• The consortium must include content providers. It should also include or involve explicitly in the project different types of relevant stakeholders, i.e. academic community, libraries, institutional repositories, scientific publishers and the funding bodies.
• The users, i.e. researchers, and their needs, also beyond the consortium participants, must be clearly identified. Proposers must present an analysis of demand based as much as possible on quantified evidence. The users and their needs should also be at the centre of the proposed approach.
• The issues addressed and the way to tackle them should have a European dimension, i.e. they should impact on a large number of users in the largest possible number of EU countries.
• Proposers should demonstrate that the underlying content constitutes the critical mass necessary to make a significant impact in terms of increasing access and use in the concerned area or that the experiments exploring new paradigms can have a considerable impact on the future development of the scientific information area.
• Specific and realistic quantified indicators should be provided to measure the envisaged improvements in availability, access and use at different stages in the pilot lifetime.
• A clear exploitation plan should be presented to ensure the sustainability of the proposed solutions, i.e. their capability of developing and surviving without Community funding after the end of the project. Sustainability comprises both economic and organisational aspects.
• A clear dissemination plan should be established to ensure optimal use of the pilot results, also beyond the participants in the pilot.

Expected impact: 

Open access to more scientific/scholarly content and/ or the development of new ways to review, render, query and link scientific/scholarly content.

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Portugal's publicly-funded Reposit�rio Cient�fico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP) was officially launched yesterday at the 3� Confer�ncia sobre o Acesso Livre ao Conhecimento (Minho, December 15-16, 2008).  RCAAP harvests content from 10 institutional repositories from around the country.

For more details, see the RCAAP about page, in Portugues or Google's English, or yesterday's article in Tek, in Portuguese or Google's English.  Also see Ricardo Vidal's blog post (in English).  Excerpt:

...[RCAAP] is currently indexing over 13091 documents from 10 repositories has been announced as a project funded by the Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) and will be technically maintained by the National Scientific Computations Foundation (FCCN)....

The 10 repositories that are currently contributing to this main centralized repository are mainly university DSpace-based repositories or similar....

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Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services (Nasjonalt kunnskapssenter for helsetjenesten, NoKC) adopted an Institutional Policy for Open Access to Scientific Publications, November 25, 2008. 

Unfortunately the online version of the policy is an image-scan and I don't have time to rekey an excerpt.  However, it is in English.

Here's the gist of it:  All scientific publications by NoKC research staff "must" be deposited at the time of acceptance in Helsebiblioteket's Research Archive (HeRA), the new institutional repository launched by the NoKC health library (Helsebiblioteket).  HeRA contents are also retrievable through NORA (Norwegian Open Research Archives) and OAIster, as well as Google and Yahoo.  For each deposit, HeRA will release as much as it can as soon as it can.  For example, HeRA will respect publisher embargoes, but will release OA metadata during the period when the full-text may be embargoed. 

For more details, see the HeRA guidelines, which are in English and HTML.

The NoKC is an independent agency within Norway's Directorate of Health.  Its mission is to research the quality of the Norwegian health services.

Comment.  Kudos to all involved at NoKC.  I applaud the mandatory language, the immediate deposit requirement, and the dual deposit/release strategy.

Update (12/15/08).  Also see the NoKC press release (in Norwegian).  For some reason Google won't translate this doc into English.

Update (12/18/08).  NoKC signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge on November 25.  (Thanks to Anja Lengenfelder.).

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U.S. President-elect Barack Obama this week announced his selection for Secretary of Energy, physicist Steven Chu. Being a physicist, it might come as little surprise that Chu has a number of publications OA in arXiv -- 11, to be specific. (I haven't looked at all the publications naming "Steven Chu" as an author, but most seem to be from the same Chu.)

But arXiv isn't Chu's only connection to OA. PubMedCentral also has 14 OA articles with Chu as an author. (See my disclaimer above about possible confusion with names.)

Chu has also published in the OA journal Nucleic Acids Research and chosen the OA option in the hybrid PNAS.

Finally, Chu's lab at Berkeley has a list of almost 50 publications by the group -- each with a link to an OA copy.

On the other hand:

• Chu wasn't the submitter or an endorser on any of the arXiv papers bearing his name.
• I also found examples when Chu didn't choose an available OA option, such as this publication in RNA. (The article is now OA, as are all RNA articles, after a 6 month embargo.)
• Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics, wasn't a signatory to the three Nobelist letters on public access I reviewed (1, 2, 3) -- although all the signatories to those letters were in chemistry or physiology/medicine, not in physics.

Comment. It's hard to draw the conclusion from this data that Chu is a die-hard OA supporter; for instance, I didn't find a single public statement by Chu in favor of OA. But the pattern suggests Chu has an intimate familiarity, as an author, with OA.

In his November newsletter, Peter called for energy research to become the next priority for a federal OA funder mandate. Chu's background might mean OA advocates will have a sympathetic ear at the top of the Department of Energy.

See also our past posts on the U.S. Department of Energy.

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According to the December 2008 issue of NISC News (not online), South Africa's NISC has adopted a hybrid OA policy for its 10 TA journals.  (Thanks to Barbara Kirsop.) 

Comment.  The policy scores well on my criteria for hybrid journal programs.  It allows participating authors to retain copyright, it promises to reduce subscription prices in proportion to author uptake, and it puts no restrictions whatsoever on the author's distribution of the published article.

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Napier University adopted an OA mandate in April 2008 to take effect in January 2009.  (Thanks to Stevan Harnad.)  Excerpt:

A - Material which represents the total publicly available research and scholarly output of the University is to be located and deposited as fulltext in the digital Repository@Napier. It is University policy to maximise the visibility, usage and impact of its research output by enabling central online access to that corpus of work for all potential users and for researchers throughout the world.

B - In contrast, exceptionally, mandatory deposit of descriptive metadata for open access and identification of intellectual output will apply, where academic outputs are deemed suitable for commercial exploitation, where individual or institutional, royalties or revenues legally accrue from such outputs, or where ownership of output is complex as in the film industry.

C � All research output is to be self-deposited, so that the repository forms the official record of the University�s research publications; all publication lists required for administration or promotion will be generated from this source.

D � The comprehensive, online, University repository will be used in future to respond to bibliometric research assessments with reduced input and effort from staff.

E � Academic staff, research associates, research assistants, research students and other members of University staff are entitled and required to deposit digital copies of refereed and accepted research documents, or material which has been displayed, performed or publicly shown, to the extent that such documents or materials constitute work carried out by you during the course of your employment and which relates or is capable of relating to the business of the University.

• Journal articles or conference papers may be submitted as accepted drafts not yet refereed (preprints) but it is mandatory that the refereed, final, submitted, accepted, version (postprint) is later entered into the repository as the last university owned version of the document. If publishers prohibit deposit in that form then the preprint plus corrigenda should be submitted instead....
• Post graduate students are required to deposit a digital copy of their thesis, but may apply for a two year embargo on access as laid down in University regulations for submission of theses.
• Staff and students in the School of Creative Industries are required to make and deposit a representative, descriptive, record of their intellectual output. Images, films, exhibition catalogues, sound or visual recordings of performances or events are acceptable, although fuller records of work may be supplied at their discretion....

Approved by Academic Board, 25th April 2008.

Comments

• Kudos to Napier for this strong, clear policy.  I particularly applaud one feature seen in almost no other university policies to date:  "all publication lists required for...promotion will be generated from" the institutional repository.  This is a crucial incentive for authors and administrative convenience for the P&T committee. 
• I also like the way the policy deals with works that cannot be made OA because of copyright holder objections or risks to author royalties.  First, it requires OA metadata at the very least.  Second, for research articles, it requires OA for the preprint and corrigenda (differences between the preprint and the peer-reviewed postprint).  This is much better than simply creating an exception for such works and letting publisher interests overrule university interests. 
• One more tweak could improve the policy.  For research articles, it could require deposit of peer-reviewed postprints immediately upon acceptance, require immediate OA release of the metadata, and allow delayed OA release of the full text, for example to respect a publisher's embargo.  (The policy could still require immediate OA release of the preprint+corrigenda.)  This is what Stevan Harnad calls immediate deposit / optional access and what I call the dual deposit/release strategy.

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Temple University has decided to require OA to all its doctoral dissertations, starting with those completed August 2008.  (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)  From the announcement (December 4, 2008):

The Temple University Libraries, in partnership with the Temple University Graduate School, is pleased to announce that all doctoral dissertations completed at Temple University will be freely available online through the University Libraries newly launched Digital Collections website. All dissertations completed at Temple, beginning August 2008, are added to this digital repository....

As part of this shift to all-digital dissertations the Libraries will no longer add paper copies of Temple dissertations to the Library stacks nor will it collect dissertations on microfilm....

All Temple Dissertations will continue to be indexed by the authoritative international database Digital Dissertations (formerly known as Dissertation Abstracts) to which Temple and many other universities subscribe, but now they will also be directly accessible to any Web user free of charge. Many other leading research universities have created similar �open-access� electronic dissertation repositories and have found that cutting-edge doctoral research is more frequently read and cited as a result of making dissertations globally available in an open-access repository. For example, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln recently reported their open-access dissertations are downloaded sixty times more frequently than are restricted versions offered through the institutional subscription to Digital Dissertations....

Comment.  Kudos to Temple.  I hope that all universities will consider an OA mandate for ETDs and that Temple will now consider an OA mandate for peer-reviewed journal articles by faculty, for example, like the Harvard policy.

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Japan's Digital Repository Federation signed a Memorandum of Agreement with DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research).  From today's announcement:

As part of the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008 held in Baltimore Maryland from 17-18 November 2008, DRF (Japan) and DRIVER have agreed to work closely together on promoting federated repository infrastructures....

DRIVER is a joint initiative of European stakeholders, co-financed by the European Commission, setting up a technical infrastructure for digital repositories and facilitating the building of an umbrella organisation for digital repositories. DRIVER relies on research libraries for the sustainable operation of repositories and provision of high quality content through digital repositories.

Digital Repository Federation (DRF) is a federation consisting of 86 universities and research institutes which aims to promote Open Access and Institutional Repository development in Japan. Under the auspices of the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, DRF is a collaborative program for institutional repositories, based on one of the research and development projects of the national framework of Cyber Science Infrastructure (CSI).

DRF and DRIVER share the vision that the Open Access movement in Europe and in Japan contribute to better scholarly communication in the world; and that each should contribute actively and cooperatively to a global, interoperable, trusted and long-term data and service infrastructure based on Open Access digital repositories.

Collaboration between DRF (Japan) and DRIVER is framed by their joint support for an Open Access model for repositories in research and higher education institutions. They present a common strategy to enable research libraries - pressed to improve scholarly communication by establishing digital repositories - to expose institutional research outputs to the world. Networks of individual repositories and overarching information services for aggregation, retrieval, share and re-use are being built on the basis of institutional, national and regional location, or by subject areas....

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I just mailed the December issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.  In this issue I offer my predictions for the coming year, focusing on what to expect from the Obama administration and the worldwide recession.  The round-up section briefly notes 137 OA developments from November.

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Catherine Jones and four co-authors, Report of the Subject and Institutional Repositories Interactions Study (SIRIS), from JISC and STFC, November 2008.  Excerpt:

This report was commissioned by JISC to produce a set of practical recommendations for steps that can be taken to improve the interactions between institutional and subject repositories in the UK....

Key findings

• The majority of institutional repositories (IRs) are at an early stage of development and the desired �critical mass� of content is far from having been achieved;
• despite the declared interest of IR administrators in a co-ordinated approach to the gathering and sharing of information, there is in fact very little interaction between repositories;
• most deposit is initiated and mediated by repository staff, while self-archiving is not yet embedded in author workflows. Technical and administrative solutions for management of research outputs, developments in reporting of article usage statistics, and the requirements of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) are likely to drive cultural change;
• content collection is strongest in established subject/funder repositories;
• there may be scope for greater collaboration with publishers in the development of deposit and distribution procedures;
• repository administrators struggle to identify relevant content/metadata in external sources because identification by author or organisational association is highly problematic;
• content transfer between repositories requires a relationship of trust, which must in turn be based on explicit metadata standards, clear provenance and rights statements, and agreed protocols for transfer and updates to objects and metadata;
• there is considerable interest throughout the community in creating aggregations of content held in repositories and other sources by linking to data and related items. The OAI-ORE web content aggregation specification represents one potentially valuable model of a user-centred content organisation technology;
• there is no coherent approach to content preservation among repositories, and in many cases long-term preservation policy appears underdeveloped. This is a critical issue for the long term;
• there is wide variation between repositories in metadata formats and quality;
• for pragmatic reasons many IRs collect largely metadata-only records. The extraction of metrics to support local and national assessment and administration is an important driver for collection. There is a different imperative to acquire, preserve and make freely available full-text content. There is evidence of a trend towards integration of institutional repositories with research management systems.
• Funding organisations and HEIs share many common purposes and would each benefit from collaboration. That such collaboration is not as yet taking place on any significant scale is attributable less to technical barriers than to the absence of any established structure for the negotiation of co-operative working practices.

Recommendations

We make a total of seven recommendations, which are intended to be achievable in whole or in part in the immediate future. They are variously addressed to a number of stakeholder groups: JISC, funding organisations, repository managers, software developers and creators of content.  This report recommends:

with regard to standardisation

1. that continued support be given to implementation of national standards for unambiguous identification of authors, funders and higher education institutions;
2. that the community work towards the adoption of common information interchange standards;
3. that a watching brief be kept on the Trusted Repository certification process and that all repository managers participate in this scheme when fully established;

   with regard to best practice

4. that records transferred from one repository to another contain clear provenance information;
5. that repositories implement version identification at object and metadata levels;

   with regard to community engagement and dialogue

6. that a UK repository community forum be established where representatives of subject/funder and institutional repository communities can work to agree and implement standards and protocols for co-ordinated information management;
7. that continued efforts be made to engage with users and ensure that developments address user needs in viable ways.

Also see the appendix of survey questions and responses.  The report and appendix are also available as DOC files.

Update (11/30/08).  Also see Stevan Harnad's comments:

The JISC/SIRIS report...fails to make clear the single most important reason why Institutional Repositories' "desired �critical mass� of content is far from having been achieved."

The following has been repeatedly demonstrated (1) in cross-national, cross-disciplinary surveys (by Alma Swan, uncited in the report) on what authors state that they will and won't do and (2) in outcome studies (by Arthur Sale, likewise uncited in the report) that confirm the survey findings, reporting what authors actually do:

Most authors will not deposit until and unless their universities and/or their funders make deposit mandatory. But if and when deposit is made mandatory, over 80% will deposit, and deposit willingly. (A further 15% will deposit reluctantly, and 5% will not comply with the mandate at all.) In contrast, the spontaneous (unmandated) deposit rate is and remains at about 15%, for years now (and adding incentives and assistance but no mandate only raises this deposit rate to about 30%).

The JISC/SIRIS report merely states: "Whether deposit of content is mandatory is a decision that will be made by each institution," but it does not even list the necessity of mandating deposit as one of its recommendations, even though it is the crucial determinant of whether or not the institutional repository ever manages to attract its target content....

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Amazon Web Services has launched Hosted Public Data Sets. (Thanks to ReadWriteWeb.)

AWS Hosted Public Data Sets provide a convenient way to share, access, and use public data within your Amazon EC2 [Elastic Compute Cloud] environment. Select public data sets are hosted on AWS for free as an Amazon EBS [Elastic Block Store] snapshot. Any Amazon EC2 customer can access this data by creating their own personal Amazon EBS volume from a publicly shared Amazon EBS public data set snapshot. They can then access, modify, and perform computation on these data sets directly using an Amazon EC2 instance and just pay for the compute and storage resources that they use. Common use cases for these public data sets would include scientific research, academic studies, and market research. Our goal is to provide easy access to commonly used public data sets like the human genome, astronomy data, and the United States census information.

As ReadWriteWeb points out:

If you have a public data set and hold the rights to the distribution of it, you can submit a request on the AWS Public Hosted Data Sets site to have it included.

See also our past posts on Google's entree into the same business: 1, 2, and 3.

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Today the European Digital Library Foundation launched Europeana, the OA digital library of European literature, art, history, and culture.  From today's announcement:

...Internet users around the world can now access more than two million books, maps, recordings, photographs, archival documents, paintings and films from national libraries and cultural institutions of the EU's 27 Member States....[A]nyone interested in literature, art, science, politics, history, architecture, music or cinema will have free and fast access to Europe's greatest collections and masterpieces in a single virtual library through a web portal available in all EU languages. But this is just the beginning. In 2010, Europeana will give access to millions of items representing Europe's rich cultural diversity and will have interactive zones such as communities for special interests....

[S]aid Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media[:]  "I now call on Europe's cultural institutions, publishing houses and technology companies to fill Europeana with further content in digital form....My objective is that in 2010, Europeana will include at least 10 million objects." ...

Europeana makes it possible to search and browse the digitised collections of Europe's libraries, archives and museums all at once. This means users can explore themes without searching for and visiting multiple sites and resources.

Europeana was initiated by the Commission in 2005 and brought to fruition in close cooperation with national libraries and other cultural bodies of the Member States as well as with the strong support of the European Parliament. Europeana is run by the European Digital Library Foundation, which brings together Europe's major associations of libraries, archives, museums, audiovisual archives and cultural institutions. Europeana is hosted by the Dutch national library, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek

Over 1,000 cultural organisations from across Europe have provided material for Europeana. Europe's museums, including the Louvre in Paris and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, have supplied digitised paintings and objects from their collections. State archives have made important national documents available, and France's Institut National de l'Audiovisuel supplied 80,000 broadcasts recording the 20th century, right back to early footage shot on the battlefields of France in 1914. National libraries all over Europe have contributed printed and manuscript material, including digitised copies of the great books that brought new ideas into the world....

PS:  For background, see our past posts on Europeana.

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A group of OA-supporting researchers from 12 countries launched ENCES (European Network for Copyright in support of Education and Science) at the recent conference, Copyright Regulation in Europe � An Enabling or Disabling Factor for Science Communication (Berlin, November 13-15, 2008).  (Thanks to the Informationsplattform Open Access.)

Read the founders' press release in German or Google's English.  Also see Stefan Krempl's article in yesterday's Heise online, in German or Google's English.

ENCES will be an EU-wide counterpart to Germany's Aktionsb�ndnis ,,Urheberrecht f�r Bildung und Wissenschaft" (Coalition for Action "Copyright for Education and Research"), founded by Rainer Kuhlen in 2004.  For background, see our past posts on Kuhlen and the coalition.

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Autism Speaks (AS) has adopted an OA mandate for AS-funded research.  From today�s announcement:

Autism Speaks, the nation's largest autism advocacy organization, today announced that effective December 3, 2008, all researchers who receive an Autism Speaks grant will be required to deposit any resulting peer-reviewed research papers in the PubMed Central online archive, which will make the articles available to the public within 12 months of journal publication. This new policy will make the results of Autism Speaks-funded research easily accessible - at no charge - to individuals with autism, families and other advocates, as well as interested researchers. Autism Speaks is the first U.S.-based non-profit advocacy organization to institute this public access requirement.

Posting articles on PubMed Central not only makes the results of research more accessible, it also integrates them with other research and data, making it easier for scientists worldwide to pursue autism research and make discoveries....

"Families with autism are, by nature, motivated advocates constantly seeking new and reliable information to educate themselves," said Sophia Colamarino, Ph.D., Autism Speaks Vice President of Research. "They are also particularly sophisticated in their ability to read and interpret scientific literature pertaining to autism. This is an effort to give those families and their physicians access to important information about the latest developments in autism research."

"With each additional paper added to PubMed Central, the archive's value grows, and the peer-reviewed scientific literature becomes more open and better integrated with other data resources," said David J. Lipman, M.D., director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, the National Library of Medicine division that maintains the archive. "I'm pleased that Autism Speaks approached us - I know their public access program will be good for research, and for patients and their families."

[Quoting] Heather Joseph, executive director of SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)...: "By taking advantage of the opportunity for open information sharing on the Internet, they will both accelerate the pace of research and address the public's need to better understand autism. We hope other research funders will emulate this powerful example." ...

Comment.  Kudos to AS.  This is not just another funder mandate.  AS is primarily a non-profit advocacy organization, not a foundation, but it uses some of the money it raises to fund research on autism.  While 29 funding agencies have adopted OA mandates, AS is at the leading edge of a new breed of OA-mandating organizations.  As it points out, it's the first U.S.-based non-profit advocacy organization to adopt an OA mandate.  If we look beyond the US, it's hard to to know who was the very first in this category, but it might be the Arthritis Research Campaign, a UK non-profit with no public funds which adopted an OA mandate in January 2007.  If you know other examples, please drop me a line.

Update (11/13/08).  Also see Andrew Albanese's story in Library Journal.  Excerpt:

The move constitutes significant �and very public� support of the NIH public access policy. In 2007, Autism Speaks committed an unprecedented $30 million in new research funding to autism research. It has also generated significant attention to its cause via outreach efforts and resources for families. And, the group clearly has friends in Congress. Last year, Congress approved full funding of the Combating Autism Act, providing $162 million for programs at the NIH, Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA).

The new policy comes at a crucial time for public access advocates. In September 2008, the NIH policy came under attack from the publishing community, whose support yielded the Fair Copyright in Research Act, which would prohibit the government from instituting public access policies like the one at NIH. In addition, Elias Zerhouni, the NIH executive director who spearheaded the public access policy and strongly defended it in hearings this year, announced in October that he will step down.
Adding a major new proponent to the public access cause is a welcome development for advocates, as indications are that the Fair Copyright in Research Act, shelved for now, will likely be revived in the next Congress. Heather Joseph, executive director of SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), told the LJ Academic Newswire the Autism Speaks mandate was a �terrific affirmation of the power of public access, as well as the NIH policy,� specifically �and concurred that such support can only help in Congress. �Autism Speaks is demonstrating great vision and leadership,� Joseph said. �We hope other research funders will emulate this powerful example.� ...

Update (11/13/08).  For the variety of research grants awarded by Autism Speaks, and their budget lines, see the Annual Report for 2007, p. 10.

Update (12/7/08). Also see John Wilbanks' comments.

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New Open Access Archive Focuses on Open Educational Resources Movement, Blog Twidox, November 5, 2008.  Excerpt:

This is fantastic news for anyone involved in open access. William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has partnered with IssueLab to create the OER Research Repository to ensure that all the valuable knowledge created through Open Educational Resources (OER) projects is readily accessible to a broad audience.

Envisioned is a vibrant and vital knowledge management center where the materials and documentation that OER professionals, supporters, and enthusiasts use in their work to further the cause of OER are easy to share and access....

Any nonprofit organization or university-affiliated research center/lab can create a free research contributor account with IssueLab and add unlimited materials. Presentations, white papers, data sets, evaluations, surveys, and other materials related to furthering OER are welcome. Ownership rights remain with the contributing organization and contributors maintain full control over how their materials are described.

Anyone can search, browse and access materials shared through this open access archive. To further spread the material, an RSS feed is available and IssueLab provides a very simple way to carry the titles included in the OER Research Repository on any blog, website, or other web property with just one line of HTML code....

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I just mailed the November issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.  This issue includes an open letter to the next President of the United States, arguing that a national policy to require OA for publicly-funded research would serve the national priorities to reduce our carbon footprint, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and create jobs in a burgeoning economic sector devoted to green technology and green energy.  The round-up section briefly notes 143 OA developments from October. 

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The Open Access Directory (OAD) just opened a list of Author addenda.  Excerpt:

An author addendum is a proposed modification to a publisher's standard copyright transfer agreement. If accepted, it would allow the author to retain key rights, especially the right to authorize OA. The purpose is to help authors who are uncomfortable negotiating contract terms with publishers or who are unfamiliar with copyright law and don't know the best terms for a modification to support OA. Because an addendum is merely a proposed contract modification, a publisher may accept or reject it.

The list launches with 15 different addenda, but there are undoubtedly more out there.  Remember that OAD is a wiki, and counts on users to keep its lists comprehensive, accurate, and up to date.

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EU supports open access to scientific and scholarly information, an announcement from SURF, October 29, 2008.  Excerpt:

The European Commission has thrown its weight behind the movement to make science and scholarship more transparent and socially responsible. The European Commissioner for Science and Research, Janez Poto?nik, supports the call for open access, which will make scientific and scholarly information freely available via digital storage areas (�repositories�) on the Internet. SURF has been pressing for open access since 2004 and actively promotes this development in the Netherlands. Mr Poto?nik has now written to SURF�s director, Wim Liebrand, telling him that the Commission will encourage all recipients of EU subsidies to make published scientific/scholarly articles available to the public. This will prevent similar research being duplicated, thus saving researchers time and resources. Mr Liebrand is extremely gratified by the EU�s support: �After years of verbal support for the idea that the results of publicly financed research should also be publicly accessible, the EU is now actually taking steps to make that idea a reality.�

Mr Poto?nik also speaks highly of the powerful open access initiatives by Knowledge Exchange, the European partnership of national education and research institutions, which resulted in the Berlin Declaration, a widely supported call for public availability of publically financed research results. The European Commission has taken the petition to heart and the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (�FP7�) includes a pilot project for open access. The programme obliges researchers to make the results of subsidised research available via a digital repository. The pilot project is evidence of the European Commission�s commitment to making the results of research carried out within FP7 available as widely and effectively as possible with the aim of achieving the optimum impact both inside and outside the world of science and scholarship.

The Commission is also helping to build up the infrastructure for providing access to scientific/scholarly information. Examples of this action include financing infrastructural projects such as DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research) and a variety of studies to examine the effect of new business models for scientific publication. Mr Poto?nik concludes that the Member States intend formulating joint policy on access to scientific/scholarly information....

Comment.  As SURF says, the EU announced a pilot OA project in August 2008.  What it didn't mention is that the pilot project mandates OA for only 20% of the EU's research budget for 2007-2013.  That's why it matters that Poto?nik told Liebrand that "the Commission will encourage all recipients of EU subsidies to make published scientific/scholarly articles available to the public" (emphasis added).  The other good sign here is Poto?nik's public statement that "Member States intend formulating joint policy on access to scientific/scholarly information".

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Google and the book publishers who sued to stop the Google library project have reached a settlement.  See the AAP's settlement page and press release, as well as Google's settlement page, press release, and blog post.  The two press releases use the same text.

From the common press release  (October 28, 2008):

The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and Google today announced a groundbreaking settlement agreement on behalf of a broad class of authors and publishers worldwide that would expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the U.S. from the collections of a number of major U.S. libraries participating in Google Book Search.  The agreement, reached after two years of negotiations, would resolve a class-action lawsuit brought by book authors and the Authors Guild, as well as a separate lawsuit filed by five large publishers as representatives of the AAP�s membership.  The class action is subject to approval by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York....

The agreement acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright owners, provides an efficient means for them to control how their intellectual property is accessed online and enables them to receive compensation for online access to their works.

If approved by the court, the agreement would provide:

• More Access to Out-of-Print Books -- Generating greater exposure for millions of in-copyright works, including hard-to-find out-of-print books, by enabling readers in the U.S. to search these works and preview them online;
• Additional Ways to Purchase Copyrighted Books -- Building off publishers� and authors� current efforts and further expanding the electronic market for copyrighted books in the U.S., by offering users the ability to purchase online access to many in-copyright books;
• Institutional Subscriptions to Millions of Books Online -- Offering a means for U.S. colleges, universities and other organizations to obtain subscriptions for online access to collections from some of the world�s most renowned libraries;
• Free Access From U.S. Libraries -- Providing free, full-text, online viewing of millions of out-of-print books at designated computers in U.S. public and university libraries; and
• Compensation to Authors and Publishers and Control Over Access to Their Works -- Distributing payments earned from online access provided by Google and, prospectively, from similar programs that may be established by other providers, through a newly created independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry that will also locate rightsholders, collect and maintain accurate rightsholder information, and provide a way for rightsholders to request inclusion in or exclusion from the project.

Under the agreement, Google will make payments totaling $125 million. The money will be used to establish the Book Rights Registry, to resolve existing claims by authors and publishers and to cover legal fees....

Holders worldwide of U.S. copyrights can register their works with the Book Rights Registry and receive compensation from institutional subscriptions, book sales, ad revenues and other possible revenue models, as well as a cash payment if their works have already been digitized.

Libraries at the Universities of California, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Stanford have provided input into the settlement and expect to participate in the project, including by making their collections available....

It is expected that additional libraries in the U.S. will participate in this project in the future....

From the parties' joint FAQ:

1. Why did the Class Plaintiffs, the Authors Guild, Association of American Publishers (AAP), and Google come to an agreement?

This agreement will enable us to do more together than copyright owners and Google could have done alone or through a court ruling. Our agreement promises to benefit readers and researchers, and to enhance the ability of authors and publishers to distribute their content in digital form, by significantly expanding online access to works through Google Book Search. It also acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright owners, provides an efficient means for them to control how their intellectual property is accessed online and enables them to receive compensation for online access to their works. The agreement opens new opportunities for everyone - authors, publishers, libraries, Google, and readers....

12. How much will it cost to get full access to a book?

The price of purchasing online access to a book will be set in one of two ways, at the rightsholder�s option.  Google will automatically set and adjust prices through an algorithm designed to maximize revenues for the book. This algorithm will be based on multiple factors; it is not a subjective evaluation of each individual book....For the Institutional Subscription, Google will work with the Book Rights Registry to set the price based on the type of institution and the expected number of users at an institution....

13. Will advertising be shown with the books included in this project?

As with advertising currently offered through Google�s Partner Program, advertising may be displayed on books.google.com webpages.  Advertising will not be overlaid on pages from a book.  Rightsholders will receive the majority of the revenue from the advertising on web pages for specific books....   

From Google's blog post on the settlement:

...[The] Book Rights Registry...will help address the "orphan" works problem for books in the U.S., making it easier for people who want to use older books. Since the Book Rights Registry will also be responsible for distributing the money Google collects to authors and publishers, there will be a strong incentive for rightsholders to come forward and claim their works....

The agreement gives public and university libraries across the U.S. free, full-text viewing of books at a designated computer in each of their facilities. That means local libraries across the U.S. will be able to offer their patrons access to the incredible collections of our library partners -- a huge benefit to the public....

It is important to note that the agreement does not affect users outside the U.S., but it will affect copyright holders worldwide because they can register their works and receive compensation for them. While this agreement only concerns books scanned in the U.S., Google is committed to working with rightsholders, governments, and relevant institutions to bring the same opportunities to users, authors, and publishers in other countries....

Comments.  I'm still digesting this.  But here are some first  impressions.

• What looks good here? Google will continue to scan copyrighted, OP books (as well as public domain books) and make them full-text searchable.  Those searches will continue to be free of charge and may now display much more than short snippets (20% of the text by default, less if publishers individually object).  Publishers are dropping their objection to future scans, which will encourage more libraries to participate in the program and enlarge Google's book index.  Publishers of non-OA books have found a way to enter the 21st century without shunning the internet or losing money.
• What looks bad here?  Other book scanners may have to pay to play as well, even if Google's original fair-use claim was valid.  The settlement may reduce scanning of copyrighted books by everyone except Google.
• Some of Google's $125 million will set up the Book Rights Registry and some will be "compensation" to publishers whose books have already been scanned.  Google will also share revenues with publishers going forward.  I can't tell whether Google will "compensate" publishers for future scans or merely share revenue with them.  That may look like a fine point.  But if Google will compensate publishers for future scans, then it has relinquished its fair-use claim:  that the scanning was lawful without permission or payment provided the company displayed only short snippets.  But if Google is merely sharing revenue, then it hasn't necessarily relinquished that claim.  Giving up a valid fair-use claim would be a serious loss and could tie the hands of search engines forever.  Moreover, the claim seemed valid to a gaggle of copyright specialists including Jack Balkin, Susan Crawford, William Fisher, Lawrence Lessig, Jessica Litman, Fred von Lohmann, and William Patry (now also Google's chief copyright counsel and persumably one who signed off on the settlement).
• See our many past posts on this lawsuit and my article from October 2005, Does Google Library violate copyright?  In that article I called the publisher lawsuit a shakedown, and so far I see no reason to change my mind.

Update. Read the full-length settlement document or Google's three page summary.

Update (10/31/08).  I just heard from Derek Slater, a policy analyst at Google.  (Thanks, Derek.)

You wondered, "I can't tell whether Google will 'compensate' publishers for future scans or merely share revenue with them." As you know, under the settlement we will be compensating rightsholders for past scans with a fixed payment of at least $60 per book (and at least $45 million total). For future scans, we will *not* be paying any such compensation, though we will have a revenue share for all the new access models (Preview, Purchase, Institutional Subscription).  Preview is free to the user, and the revenue share involves advertising on Preview pages.

Update (11/6/08). I add some second thoughts to my first impressions in a new post.

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Stijn Hoorens, Lidia Villalba van Dijk, and Christian van Stolk, Embracing the future:  Embedding digital repositories in the University of London, RAND Europe, October 2008.  A report prepared for the SHERPA-LEAP Consortium.  (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)  From the blurb:

Digital repositories can help Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to develop coherent and coordinated approaches to capture, identify, store and retrieve intellectual assets such as datasets, course material and research papers. With the advances of technology, an increasing number of Higher Education Institutions are implementing digital repositories. The leadership of these institutions, however, has been concerned about the awareness of and commitment to repositories, and their sustainability in the future.

This study informs a consortium of thirteen London institutions with an assessment of current awareness and attitudes of stakeholders regarding digital repositories in three case study institutions. The report identifies drivers for, and barriers to, the embedding of digital repositories in institutional strategy. The findings therefore should be of use to decision-makers involved in the development of digital repositories. Our approach was entirely based on consultations with specific groups of stakeholders in three institutions through interviews with specific individuals.

From the body of the report:

We identified seven motivations for investing in digital repositories, listed below:

1. fear of missing the boat [PS: more in Section 2.1.1]
2. providing a shop window for a HEI [more in 2.1.2]
3. enabling archiving and preserving institutional assets [more in 2.1.3]
4. facilitating the open access of scholarly outputs: democratising research [more in 2.1.4]
5. decreasing dependence on traditional cost model of publishing [more in 2.1.5]
6. providing an up-to-date overview of an institution�s scholarly output [more in 2.1.6]
7. exploiting the added value of digital content: cross-fertilisation and knowledge
   management [more in 2.1.7]

Also see Table 2 (p. 16) for the authors' sense of which stakeholder groups (lecturers, researchers, heads of departments, publishers, librarians, IT department, senior HEI management, and external relations) are motivated by which of these seven incentives.

Comment.  I've only had time to skim, but it seems very well done.  One exception is that in Section 2.1.4 the authors assume that all OA journals charge publication fees when in fact most do not. 

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JISC has released its Open Access Publication Charge Surveys.  The report is undated but was apparently completed in September and released this week.  Excerpt:

During May and June 2008 JISC conducted two surveys, one sent to 160 UK HEIs and the other to 4055 biomedical authors, to investigate the situation regarding the payment of publication charges to journal publishers for articles to be available on open access....The surveys were supported by the JISC Scholarly Communications Group and undertaken in collaboration with the RIN/UUK Working Group on the Payment of Open Access Publishing Fees. Representatives from the Society for Endocrinology, the publisher BioMed Central and the Wellcome Trust who are members of the RIN/UUK Group assisted JISC in sending the survey form request to their authors and grantees....Some of the key results from the surveys are given in bullet-form below.

Author survey key findings ...

• 72% of the responding authors have published in a fully-OA journal in the last five years, 64% in a hybrid OA journal during the same time-period.
• Of all authors who have published an article in a journal in the last five years 43% have on at least one occasion paid an OA publication charge, and 47% have had to pay colour charges or other charges to a publisher of a subscription journal.
• Of those responding authors employed by an HEI, 43% stated that their HEI has an OA policy, 20% that it does not, and 36% do not know, while 31% feel that their HEI has a policy that encourages OA publication by its staff.
• Asked whether their employer has an OA fund, 16% replied �yes at a central level�, 4% �yes at a Faculty level�, 4% �yes at a departmental level�, while 40% replied �no OA fund� and 36% �do not know�.
• 12% of responding authors acknowledged a restriction upon the use of grant funding for OA � of which the most common restriction mentioned was use during the lifetime of the research grant � but 39% felt that there are no restrictions and 48% �do not know�....
• 25% of responding authors feel that their employing institution assists in accessing a research funder�s OA grant, 38% feel that the assistance is not there, and 37% �do not know�.

UK Higher Education Institution survey key findings ...

• 23 institutions stated that they have an OA policy, 34 do not and 4 were unsure.
• 5 institutions mandate OA, 13 encourage it, 10 allow it, and 1 discourages it.
• 6 institutions have a central OA fund, 4 have a School or Faculty or Departmental OA fund.
• All 10 Russell Group institutions responding claim to be dealing with the payment of OA publishing fees.
• Of the 55 institutions which responded that they do not have an OA fund, 11 responded that they are likely to set up an OA fund in the future, 21 responded �not very likely�, and 4 �not at all likely�.
• 44 responding HEIs allow researchers to make an application for OA publication charge funding up to the point of publication, 9 after publication, but 15 allow no application for funding and 21 �do not know�.
• 15 of the 46 institutions allowing applications will authorise a purchase order �within a few days�.
• Asked about any restriction upon use of a research grant for OA publication charges, 5 institutions acknowledged restrictions (of which for 2 the reason given is �limited by the availability of funding�), 47 responded that there are no restrictions, and 9 �do not know�.
• Asked about including OA publication charges in FEC [full economic costing] calculations, 8 institutions replied that they do this, 21 replied �no�, and 13 replied �planning to do so in the future�.
• 17 of the 61 responding institutions believe that no member of their research staff has used a research grant for the payment of OA publication charges over the past 12 months but 16 institutions estimate up to 99 instances and 4 institutions estimate over 500....

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The Open Access Directory (OAD) has launched a list of Journals that converted from TA to OA.  It already identifies 104.

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BMJ converted to OA on Open Access Day.  From the announcement:

The BMJ [formerly, the British Medical Journal] reiterates its commitment to open access publishing on the first international Open Access Day.

After 10 years of providing free access to its peer reviewed research online, the BMJ is now officially an open access journal. The BMJ's unique business model means that all research articles are freely available immediately on publication, regardless of whether or not they are publicly funded, with no charges to authors or readers....

In 1998, the BMJ became the first major general medical journal to provide free full text online access to its research articles, to deposit the full text in PubMed Central, and to allow authors to retain the copyright of their articles.

Since then, the BMJ Group has introduced BMJ Unlocked, which allows authors who submit research to 19 BMJ specialist journals to pay an author fee and make their work open access.

Changes to the BMJ's processes this year have brought it into full compliance with international open access policies but with a unique mixed revenue model, whereby access to research articles is currently funded through income from subscriptions and advertising rather than from author charges....

Comments 

• BMJ is an OA pioneer and has modified its business model several times over the years.  After almost 10 years of completely gratis OA, it began charging for non-research articles in January 2005 (announced in August 2003).  In January 2006 it put non-research articles behind a year-long moving wall, instead of offering their first week free of charge.  I'm very glad to see BMJ move back to immediate OA for all its contents, and very glad it is able to use other revenue to dispense with author-side fees.
• Curious to know which license BMJ chose for its OA articles, I looked at a sample research article published since October 14 (this one, published October 17).  I could find no licensing information or copyright statement in the article.  Users must apparently fall back on BMJ's general page on Website Terms and Conditions, which essentially requires written permission for all uses beyond fair use or fair dealing.  BMJ's new OA is gratis, not libre.

Update (10/21/08).  A colleague points out that the article I examined for licensing info yesterday has been deposited in PMC, and that the PMC copy has a CC-BY license.  (The whole BMJ backfile, from 1840 to July 2008, is on deposit in PMC.)  This suggests that BMJ intends to make its OA research articles libre OA, not merely gratis OA, and that it hasn't yet added the licensing info to the journal copy of the article.

As long as I'm writing an update, let me add that in the first version of my post I mistakenly said that BMJ was making all its articles OA, when in fact it's only making its research articles OA.  I noticed and corrected the error a couple of hours later.  But I've since heard from several correspondents responding to the original version.  I'm glad to take this opportunity to draw attention to the error and its correction.

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Switzerland's ETH Z�rich (Eidgen�ssische Technische Hochschule Z�rich) has adopted an OA mandate.  Thanks to Stevan Harnad for the alert and these details:

It is the policy of the ETH Z�rich to maximise the visibility, usage and impact of their research output by maximising online access to it for all would-be users and researchers worldwide.

Therefore the ETH Z�rich:

Requires of staff and postgraduate students to post electronic copies of any research papers that have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal (post-prints), theses and other scientific research output (monographs, reports, proceedings, videos etc.), to be made freely available as soon as possible into the institutional repository �ETH E-Collection�, if there are no legal objections. The ETH Z�rich expects authors where possible, to retain their copyright. For detailed information see the rules of the ETH E-Collection.

The policy statement (September 29, 2008) adds that:

• [The university] encourages their researchers to publish in a suitable Open Access Journal where one exists; the ETH Z�rich will cover the publication costs, if any.
• The ETH library is the contact for all questions regarding Open Access.

The policy FAQ adds that:

The ETH Zurich does not support hybrid journals. This model is criticised for the fact that the library / organization has to pay double, namely, on the one hand, for the journal subscriptions and licences and, on the other, for the Open Access publication fees of the authors.

Comments 

• I applaud the mandatory language, the inclusion of theses and dissertations alongside peer-reviewed postprints, the requirement for early deposit, the willingness to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals, and drawing the line at hybrid OA journals using a double-charge business model. 
• I'd only recommend two refinements:  (1) recognize that some hybrid OA journals don't use the double-charge business model and actually reduce subscription prices in proportion to author uptake of the OA option, as Oxford has done for three years in a row; and (2) before mandating OA for monographs without qualification, consider making an exception for royalty-producing works.  The policy could welcome monographs from authors persuaded either (2a) that the benefits of OA outweigh meager royalties or (2b) that OA will stimulate a net increase in sales of the print edition.

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John Bacon-Shone and five co-authors, The Open Access Advantage, a preprint dated October 3, 2008 and self-archived today.  The six authors compose the Hong Kong Open Access Committee and represent four research institutions in the Hong Kong area:  Hong Kong Baptist University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and the University of Hong Kong.  Excerpt:

In Hong Kong, the University Grants Commission (UGC) recently asked universities to respond to a letter on how best to assess research quality and impact (UGC, 2008)....Clearly, this will ensure that universities look carefully at how to maximize the measurable impact of their research. One possibility is to encourage open access publication. In addition, UGC is now reviewing how best to measure and increase Knowledge Transfer (KT) in Hong Kong universities. For any reasonable definition of KT, increasing public access to research done inside universities clearly increases KT and should be encouraged, which suggests another reason to encourage open access publication....

While the motivation for [existing OA mandates ] by research funders is often the principle of maximising public access to and public benefit from research findings, open access has broader advantages. There is now good research showing that it increases citations across disciplines....

The key question is how to encourage Hong Kong authors to use OA. All HK universities have now established an open access IR. For example, HKU Library is contacting HKU authors one by one to ask permission for inclusion of their articles. How can we create a system whereby Hong Kong authors will pro-actively self-archive into an IR? Funding agencies, such as those listed above, have mandated that authors deposit into an OA repository. In a policy similar to the one by the Wellcome Trust, the University of Nottingham has set up a Central Open Access Fund to support staff across the university in achieving OA.... Recently...Harvard University�s College of Arts and Sciences announced a decision to place their academic papers online in open access, unless the author opts out....

Specific proposal

As the majority of research in Hong Kong is funded by the RGC/UGC, their policies are critical. We would like to propose the following specific actions for the RGC/UGC�s consideration:

a) State clearly that all researchers funded by an RGC grant should aim to publish their results in the highest quality journals or books so as to maximize the influence and impact of the research outcome and that to achieve this when publishing research findings:

i. Researchers should look for suitable OA journals so that, where there is a choice between non OA and OA journals that are equally influential and high impact, the choice should be to publish the results in an OA journal.

ii. When a comparable OA journal does not exist, they should send the journal the Hong Kong author�s addendum (University of Hong Kong, 2008), which adds the right of placing some version (preprint or postprint) of the paper in their university�s institutional repository (IR). If necessary, seek funds from the RGC to pay open access charges up to an agreed limit....

iii. For books and book chapters that are published without a royalty agreement, send the publisher the Hong Kong author�s addendum to seek the right of placing some version in their university�s IR.

iv. Deposit all published papers in their IR, unless the journal refuses in writing. If the published version is refused, deposit the preprint or postprint, as allowed in number ii above....

b) For existing RGC grant holders, set aside some money to cover the publication of papers in OA according to (a) (ii) above, where necessary.

c) Add a notional element, to a set maximum limit, to all new successful RGC grant applications (similar to the existing conference component of the grant) to cover open access charges.

d) Write to the other major research funders in Hong Kong (e.g., Food and Health Bureau, Commission for Innovation and Technology, Croucher Foundation) to encourage similar strategies.

In the meantime, we also hope that universities in Hong Kong will play their role in encouraging researchers to place all output, not just that funded by RGC, in their local IRs, and also help pay open access charges where appropriate to maximize the output placed in the IR.

Also see the authors' announcement of their paper:

...The HKU [Hong Kong University] URC [University Research Committee] found that there is an Open Access Advantage, and that if policy is adopted in favour of open access it will achieve RGC and HKU stated goals of Knowledge Transfer.  They agreed to endorse the arrangements suggested in this paper under, �Specific Proposal�, for how RGC and the UGC funded institutions can likewise place their research results in open access.

We ask that recipients of this email make this result widely known, with the goal of requiring open access on Hong Kong tax-payer funded research, for Hong Kong citizens, and the world.  We encourage other relevant authorities and committees to likewise consider and make policy to require open access on publicly funded research....

Comments

• This is a strong policy even if it falls short of a mandate:  it tells grantees that they should deposit "all published papers" in their institutional repository "unless the journal refuses in writing" and in that case to use an author addendum and try again.  It says "should" rather than "must", and it gives publishers an opt-out if they want it:  they may still refuse the author addendum.  But it's stronger than typical "request/encourage" policies, and even stronger than mandates weakened by loopholes creating unqualified exceptions for journals with contrary in-house policies.
• Note in particular (1) that the policy suggests gold OA before green OA, and only calls for green OA when there isn't a suitable, high-impact OA journal in the author's field, (2) that the policy would apply to "published papers" rather than "peer-reviewed manuscripts", (3) that all Hong Kong universities now have IRs, and that the policy would direct deposits to them, (4) that it would provide funds for publication fees at fee-based OA journals, and (5) that while this language is just a proposal to the Research Grants Council / University Grants Committee, it has already been endorsed by the University Research Committee of Hong Kong University.
• In June 2007, the Hong Kong RGC decided not to adopt an OA mandate for its grantees, but instead to encourage OA and to encourage Hong Kong universities to adopt their own OA policies.  For details, see my blog post at the time. 

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The American Anthropological Association (AAA) and eight other society publishers in  the social sciences and humanities have received Mellon grants to explore OA options for their journals.  From the AAA announcement (October 13, 2008):

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is pleased to announce today that it has been awarded a $50,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to conduct preliminary research on the economic issues faced by scholarly society publishers in the humanities and social sciences as consequence of the demand for open access to their peer reviewed journals.

The grant, will provide support for an examination of the publishing programs of nine social science and humanities societies and the development of an information base from which publishing model options might be derived to assure societies of the ability to sustain their publishing programs in an open access environment.

Work on the effort will begin immediately, with a final report expected to be released in the first quarter of 2009.

�This study is another step in AAA�s effort to better understand the conditions under which the future of our journal publishing program must operate, to learn from the experiences of other social science and humanities journal publishers and to carefully examine the issues, opportunities and problems presented by open access,� AAA Executive Director Bill Davis said in a statement released today.

AAA Director of Publishing Oona Schmid commented today, �Current open access models were developed within the Scientific, Technical, and Medical publishing communities. However, scholarly publishing in the social sciences and in the humanities differs in substantial ways. This study is our first step in understanding these differences, in order to locate a model that supports our discipline fully.�

AAA is joined in this effort by the Modern Language Association, the American Sociological Association, the American Historical Association, the American Economic Association, the National Communication Association, the American Statistical Association, the Political Science Association and the American Academy of Religion, under the auspices of the National Humanities Alliance Task Force on Open Access and Scholarly Communication.

Comments

• The grants are a very good idea, and I applaud Mellon for making them.
• For example, the AAA's most recent step in thinking about OA options for its journals was to adopt a 35 year embargo.  See our many past posts on the AAA and OA.
• I believe that the National Humanities Alliance Task Force on Open Access and Scholarly Communication was launched in 2006, although it still doesn't have a web site and isn't mentioned on the NHA site.  At the time of launch, its director was William Davis, who is also the Executive Director of the AAA.  Does anyone know more about it? 
• If I may, I suggest that the grantees take a look at the research Caroline Sutton and I have been doing on society publishers with OA journals.  In late 2007 we found 425 societies publishing 450 full OA journals, and 21 societies publishing 73 hybrid OA journals.  (We've found more since publishing those preliminary results, and will soon update our online list.)  It's true that most of the journals (356) were in the STM fields, but we found 51 in the social sciences, 32 in the humanities, and five in the arts.

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The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) picked Open Access Day for its official launch.  From today's announcement:

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.

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.

Comments

• This is a coming-of-age event for gold OA.  It's important for sharing best practices, for public education, for advocacy, for setting ethical standards, and for pulling together a highly diverse coalition of large and small, for-profit and non-profit, pre-BBB and post-BBB publishers.  Congratulations to all the founding members.
• See the new organization's mission and purpose, board, bylaws, and history.  Also see our past posts on the OASPA.

Update. Also see the blog post by Gunther Eysenbach, one of the OASPA co-founders.

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The Open Access Directory (OAD) just opened a list of Audio about OA for community editing and enlargement.

Like the lists of Video about OA, Educational materials about OA, and the official list of Events celebrating Open Access Day, this one is timed to support Open Access Day (October 14, 2008) and capture the many new resources now under development for it.

The first version of the list is short, just enough to justify a launch.  If you know of audio recordings about OA (not just recordings which happen to be OA), please take a moment to add them.  OAD contributors must register, but registration is free and easy.

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Microsoft Research has released Beta 1 of its Research-Output Repository Platform.  (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)  From the site:

MSR�s Research Output Repository Platform (codename �Famulus�) aims to provide the necessary building blocks, tools, and services for developers who are tasked with creating and maintaining an organization�s repository ecosystem. Furthermore, it provides an easy-to-install and maintain experience for those who want to quickly set up a research output repository for their project, team, or organization. The platform is based on Microsoft�s technologies (SQL Server 2008 and .NET Framework version 3.5 SP1) hence taking advantage of their robustness, their quality support infrastructure, and the plethora of developer-focused documentation. New applications on top of the platform can be developed using any .NET language and the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 environment. The platform focuses on the management of research assets�such as people, papers, lectures, workflows, data, and tags � as well as the semantic relationships between them. Support for various services such as full-text search, OAI-PMH, RSS and Atom Syndication, BibTeX import and export, SWORD, AtomPub, and OAI-ORE are included as part of the distribution.

Microsoft is releasing the source code under the Microsoft Research License Agreement, which allows essentially all uses except commercial use and has a share-alike clause.

PS:  For background, see our past posts on the Microsoft repository platform.

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The University of Glasgow has adopted an OA mandate.  The proposal to the University Senate is dated June 5, 2008, and was apparently approved in time to take effect at the start of the current (08-09) academic year.  The policy was announced late last week.  From the policy proposal:

...A key element in the University�s plans to maximise the impact of peer-reviewed research publications is the need to make such publications as widely available as possible. It is the University�s policy to develop and implement a comprehensive publications database recording bibliographic information and providing access to, where possible, the full text, for all peer-reviewed, published research outputs produced by university staff. As research assessment moves towards bibliometric based metrics, this will support internal bibliometric analysis.

At present, the University strongly encourages authors to deposit copies of their peer-reviewed published work into the University�s Institutional Repository, Enlighten, and while this has had some effect on increasing the number of full text papers made available it is only a fraction of the University�s potential research output....

In order to achieve these objectives Senate is asked to approve a policy requiring staff to deposit:

• electronic copies of peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings
• bibliographic details of all research outputs, and to encourage staff to provide the full text of other research outputs where appropriate....

Staff are asked to deposit a copy of peer-reviewed, published journal articles and conference proceedings into Enlighten, where copyright allows, as soon as possible after publication. Other research outputs such as book chapters and books can also be deposited if desired by authors. Where a publisher has placed an embargo on making an item openly available, the item will not be made publicly visible until the embargo period has expired....

Staff will only be asked to provide copies of publications where publisher agreements permit deposit in online repositories. Repository staff will check publishers� copyright agreements to ensure that deposit is permitted. Under no circumstances will staff be required to make publications available in contravention of UK copyright law....

Repository staff can check funders� Open Access policies and where staff are already required by their funders to deposit in a subject based repository such as UK PubMed Central, repository staff will ensure that links are made from Enlighten to the relevant repository. There will therefore be no requirement for staff to deposit in more than one repository.

Staff, or their representatives, can easily deposit items themselves via Enlighten or can email items directly to repository staff who will deposit them....

Comments

• I applaud the mandatory language and the university's determination to improve upon its previous, non-mandatory policy.  I like the way the university will integrate the OA repository and bibliometrics and the way it sees a well-populated OA repository as serving institutional interests directly, not just indirectly by serving faculty interests.  I like the way Glasgow staff will help faculty deposit their articles and check to see whether copies already exist in funder repositories.  (But when copies do already exist at funder repositories, wouldn't it make more sense for Glasgow to harvest its own copies rather than merely link to copies elsewhere?)
• Glasgow leaves a loophole or opt-out for resisting publishers (deposit is only required "where publisher agreements permit deposit").  That will defeat much of the purpose of upgrading the policy from discretionary to mandatory.  The Wellcome Trust and NIH policies, for example, close this loophole completely, and the Harvard policy shifts the opt-out from the publisher to the author.  (In all those cases, authors must retain the key right to authorize OA and publisher permission is never needed.)  If Glasgow receives fewer deposits than it wants, I hope it will follow one of those strategies and close the loophole.

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The participants in the Open Access and Research Conference 2008 (Brisbane, September 24-25, 2008) have issued the Brisbane Declaration.  Here it is in full:

Following the conference on Open Access and Research held in September in Australia, and hosted by Queensland University of Technology, the following statement was developed and has the endorsement of over sixty participants.

Brisbane Declaration

Preamble

The participants recognise Open Access as a strategic enabling activity, on which research and inquiry will rely at international, national, university, group and individual levels.

Strategies

Therefore the participants resolve the following as a summary of the basic strategies that Australia must adopt:

1. Every citizen should have free open access to publicly funded research, data and knowledge.
2. Every Australian university should have access to a digital repository to store its research outputs for this purpose.
3. As a minimum, this repository should contain all materials reported in the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC).
4. The deposit of materials should take place as soon as possible, and in the case of published research articles should be of the author�s final draft at the time of acceptance so as to maximize open access to the material.

Brisbane, September, 2008

Comments

• This is not the first call for OA to publicly-funded research.  But I particularly like the way it links that call to (1) OA repositories at universities, (2) national research monitoring programs, like the HERDC, and (3) the value of early deposits.  Kudos to all involved.
• See our past posts on the Brisbane conference.

Update (10/9/08).  Also see Stevan Harnad's comments:

The Brisbane Declaration on Open Access at last puts some real practical policy content and substance into the Budapest/Bethesda/Berlin series, along the lines of the UK Select Committee Recommendation and Berlin 3....If this is implemented planet-wide, we have universal Open Access within a year.

And see the comments of Arthur Sale, one of the declaration drafters, quoted by Harnad:

...May I tease out a few strands of the Brisbane Declaration for readers of the list, as a person who was at the OAR Conference in Brisbane.

1. The Declaration was adopted on the voices at the Conference, revised in line with comments, and then participants were asked to put their names to it post-conference. It represents an overwhelming consensus of the active members of the repository community in Australia.

2. The Conference wanted a succinct statement that could be used to explain to senior university administrators, ministers, and the public as to what Australia should do about making its research accessible. It is not a policy, as it does not mention any of the exceptions and legalisms that are inevitably needed in a formal policy.

3. The Conference wanted to support the two Australian Ministers with responsibility for Innovation, Science and Health in their moves to make open access mandatory for all Australian-funded research.

4. Note in passing that the Declaration is not restricted to peer-reviewed articles, but looks forward to sharing of research data and knowledge (in the humanities and arts).

5. At the same time, it was widely recognized that publishers' pdfs ("Versions of Record") were not the preferred version of an article to hold in a repository, primarily because a pdf is a print-based concept which loses a lot of convenience and information for harvesting, but also in recognition of the formatting work of journal editors (which should never change the essence of an article). The Declaration explicitly make it clear that it is the final draft ("Accepted Manuscript") which is preferred. The "Version of Record" remains the citable object.

6. The Declaration also endorses author self-archiving of the final draft at the time of acceptance, implying the ID/OA policy (Immediate Deposit, OA when possible).
While the Brisbane Declaration is aimed squarely at Australian research, I believe that it offers a model for other countries. It does not talk in pieties, but in terms of action. It is capable of implementation in one year throughout Australia. Point 1 is written so as to include citizens from anywhere in the world, in the hope of reciprocity. The only important thing missing is a timescale, and that's because we believe Australia stands at a cusp.

What are the chances of a matching declaration in other countries?

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AAA Creates "Open Access" to Anthropological Research, a press release from the American Anthropological Association, October 6, 2008.  Excerpt:

In a groundbreaking move aimed at facilitating greater access for the global social science and anthropological communities to 86 years of classic, historic research articles, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association announced today that it will provide, free of charge, unrestricted content previously published in two [of] its flagship publications � American Anthropologist and Anthropology News.

The initiative, among the first of its kind in the humanities- and social science-based publishing environment and made in coordination with publishing partner Wiley-Blackwell, will provide access to these materials for the purposes of personal, educational and other non-commercial uses after a thirty-five year period.

Starting in 2009, content published from 1888 to 1973, will be available through AnthroSource, the premier online resource serving the research, teaching, and professional needs of anthropologists. Previously, this information was only available via AAA association membership, subscription or on a so-called �pay per view� basis.

�This historic move, initiated by the needs and desires of our worldwide constituency, is our association�s pointed answer to the call for open access to our publications. This program, I believe, is an important first step in answering the call to un-gating anthropological knowledge,� AAA Executive Director Bill Davis said in a statement issued today.

The initiative, which will be re-evaluated by internal AAA committees in the next year (the Committee on Scientific Publication as advised by the Committee for the Future of Electronic Publishing), may be expanded in the future....

Update (10/7/08).  Here are a few comments from the blogosphere and press.

From Alex Golub on Open Access Anthropology:

Amazingly, I agree with Bill Davis that this is an �important first step in answering the call for un-gating anthropological knowledge� � although I�d put the emphasis on �first step�....

Is this a big deal? It is hard to say. First, opening Anthropology News is trivial � it should have been done a long time ago, and everyone has agreed about this since the days when I served on the AnthroSource Steering Committee. The AAA should not be congratulated on taking four years to implement a change that could have taken a week.

Secondly, a 35 year window gives the world access to _most_ of American Anthropologist, including some of the most important work in our discipline. At first glance, this is not just good news, it is utterly superb news and the AAA should be commended for doing the right thing. But there are still lots of important questions to be answered: what license will this material be released under? In what form will it be made available? Can it be included in other repositories or only downloaded from the AAA website? ...[T]here is still plenty of time for this good news to turn sour....

There is one other thing to note: This decision clearly represents the success of the OA community�s decision to hold the AAA accountable, in public, for its actions. I honestly do not think this decision would have been made if the OA community had not called out the AAA and demanded to know what the hell it thought it was doing....

From Chris Kelty on Savage Minds:

Breaking News! Stop the Presses!!! OMGWTF!!!! ... [T]his is great, really, despite my snarkiness. The AAA has realized that opening up 35 year old scholarship is not a threat to their publishing revenue, and it may well improve public understanding of anthropology. This is a huge step forward....

However...It sucks that this is being called �open access�....[W]hat is happening here is a dissolution of the term open access and a pretty shameless use of this opportunity to issue a press release that might repair some of the damage the association has suffered on this issue. Fair enough, they are trying. Try harder, I say.

From Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Ed:

The anthropology association has been divided for years over open access....Many rank-and-file anthropologists embrace the idea, seeing it as a way to most effectively communicate without imposing huge financial burdens on their libraries. But the association relies on revenue from subscriptions to its journals and has resisted repeated pushes from its own members to move in the direction of open access.

These tensions are not unique to anthropology, but the discipline has seen more than its share of flare-ups over the the issue, with pro-access scholars horrified that their association lobbied against open access legislation in Congress and that the scholarly society replaced a university press as its publishing agent with a for-profit publisher....

Several members of [the AAA Committee on Scientific Publication and Committee for the Future of Electronic Publishing], asking that their names not be revealed, said that some members of those panels had wanted the association to open up more recent scholarship, but that association leaders were cautious about going any further.

In an interview, Oona Schmid, director of publishing for the association, said, �We know we have members who really care about open access,� and that the shift amounted to �a really substantial offer.�

Asked about the 35-year time delay, Schmid cited research showing that the half life of articles in anthropology journals (meaning the time in which half of the scholarly citations they receive are made) is 12-15 years, and that the association wanted a time period that would keep journals for subscribers only while they were being cited....

Patricia Kay Galloway, an associate professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, has previously served on anthropology association committees on digital publishing but left because of disputes over her support for open access. She said that the idea that open access involves a 35-year delay is �just crap.�

She said that �it�s nice to get� the older material, but noted that the field of anthropology has changed radically in the last 35 years on such issues as how indigenous people should be studied and the need to avoid �elitist bias.� She said �the most exciting work� is not going to be available in this program. �And that�s why people are not going to be impressed.�

The primary reason the association won�t go open access, she said, is to preserve revenue. And that�s not an appropriate reason, even if it means that the association might end up with a smaller operation....

Comments

• The anthropology bloggers speak my mind, especially Chris Kelty:  "Fair enough, they are trying. Try harder, I say."  Thirty-five years is the longest embargo or moving wall I've ever seen a publisher boast about.  It's more than 10 times longer than the runner up.
• Jaschik is right that "anthropology association has been divided for years over open access."  For the blow by blow, see our many past posts on the AAA and OA.

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Scientific American has the scoop:  Open access publisher BioMed Central sold to Springer, October 7, 2008.  Excerpt:

Open access pioneer BioMed Central has been acquired by Springer, ScientificAmerican.com has learned.

BioMed Central publisher Matthew Cockerill announced the news in an email today to editors of BMC's journals.

Those in the open access movement had watched BioMed Central with keen interest. Founded in 2000, it was the first for-profit open access publisher and advocates feared that when the company was sold, its approach might change. But Cockerill assured editors that a BMC board of trustees "will continue to safeguard BioMed Central's open access policy in the future." Springer "has been notable...for its willingness to experiment with open access publishing," Cockerill said in a release circulated with the email to editors....

PS:  I'll post more details when I have them.

Update (10/7/08).  Also see the joint Springer/BMC press release.  Excerpt:

...BMC is the largest open access provider in the world with over 180 peer-reviewed journals.

BioMed Central�s flagship journals include Journal of Biology, BMC Biology, BMC Medicine, Malaria Journal, BMC Bioinformatics andGenome Biology.  BioMed Central has revenues of approximately EUR 15 million per year.  The company is based in London, with a second office in Liverpool, and has approximately 150 employees.

Derk Haank, CEO of Springer Science+Business Media said:  �This acquisition reinforces the fact that we see open access publishing as a sustainable part of STM publishing, and not an ideological crusade.  We have gained considerable positive experience since starting Springer Open Choice in 2004, and BioMed Central�s activities are complementary to what we are doing.  Additionally, this acquisition strengthens Springer�s position in the life sciences and biomedicine, and will allow us to offer societies a greater range of publishing options.�

Matthew Cockerill, Publisher of BioMed Central said:  �...BioMed Central has demonstrated that the open access business model can work, and we look forward to continued rapid growth as part of Springer...."

Comments

• There's lot of fascinating room for conjecture here.  But one speculation we can rule out is that Springer will convert BMC's OA journals to TA.  First, it's clear from Derk Haank's statement that Springer wants BMC because it's OA, not despite it.  Second and more important, BMC has an Open Access Charter precisely to prevent an acquisition or take-over from reversing the company's commitment to OA:

  BioMed Central has established an independent Board of Trustees. If and when a change of ownership should be considered, the Board of Trustees will be asked to judge and advise whether sufficient guarantees to continue a policy of unconditional open access for research articles are being offered and agreed by any prospective new owner. BioMed Central will not enter into a change of ownership agreement unless the Board of Trustees accepts these guarantees.

• Nor do I take this as a sign of BMC's failing health.  On the contrary.   If BMC were failing, Springer would not want to buy it.  BMC would not qualify either as a good investment or as a rival worth sidelining.  The purchase is a sign of Springer's confidence that BMC will continue its long, steady climb from the red to the black.
• As the world's largest OA publisher, BMC was already in a unique position to benefit from economies of scale.  Joining Springer will enable it to realize even greater economies of scale --unless the efficiency of BMC's comparatively lean and mean corporate structure, optimized for OA publishing, is cut by Springer's legacy overhead.  But either way, get used to saying it:  Springer is now the world's largest OA publisher.
• If Derk Haank says that OA publishing is a "sustainable part of STM publishing", then it's harder for anyone to say that it isn't.  That includes the publishing lobby, which for years has played on fears of unsustainability in its campaign to derail or dilute national commitments to OA for publicly-funded research.
• Questions:  Will BMC's publication fees go up, down, or stay the same?  Will other giants look for OA acquisitions?  Will Springer use its corporate muscle to lobby for green and gold OA?
• A prediction to remember:  Five years ago, the financial analysts at BNP Paribas studied the world of journal publishing and concluded that there was a 50% chance that in ten years the major commercial firms would dominate OA publishing as they then dominated TA publishing, but with lower profit margins.

Update (10/7/08).  Also see Andrew Albanese's story in Library Journal.  Excerpt:

...Financial terms were not disclosed. On the balance sheet, adding BioMed Central would seem to be a very minor deal for Springer; BioMed Central publishes some 193 open access journals with revenues of roughly $24.5 million, while Springer publishes over 1700 journals in addition to 5500 new books annually, with revenues nearly $1.25 billion. It is a significant event in the history of open access publishing, however, as a leading commercial publisher has now expressed confidence in a business model once deemed, at best, experimental, and often called untenable....

Industry watchers have long expected that BMC founder Vitek Tracz was building up to a sale, much as he did when he sold BioMedNet to Elsevier in 1996. While at Elsevier, meanwhile, Haank was rather agnostic about the future of OA, supporting �green� self-archiving policies. When he joined Springer, Haank hired BMC�s first CEO, Jan Velterop, in 2005, and Velterop oversaw the company�s initial foray into open access publishing, Open Choice, before leaving for KnewCo in March 2008.

As an upstart business, BMC has had its growing pains. The company, founded in 2000, had yet to turn a profit, instead choosing to bet on a longer-term strategy of growing its publishing program and OA. Although BMC individual author charges more than doubled in recent years, it kept its author processing charges (APCs) below the rates of its competitors, a strategy that helped yield significant growth in submission rates and articles published, if not short-term profits....

The question now, is will BMC have more of an effect on the way commercial giant Springer publishes, or vice versa....

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The NIH has released its Analysis of Comments and Implementation of the NIH Public Access Policy, 2008.  The document doesn't include a month and date, but it was apparently released in the last day or two.  Excerpt:

...The current Public Access Policy is the culmination of years of effort and community interaction. Prior to passage of Section 218 [of the Consolidated
Appropriations Act of 2008], NIH undertook extraordinary public outreach concerning the issue of public access to the published results of NIH-funded research. These outreach efforts included a review of over six thousand public comments and the establishment of an independent advisory group to review NIH�s implementation of a voluntary Public Access Policy. Additionally, as part of the process to implement Section 218 in a transparent and participatory manner, NIH formally sought public input through an open meeting and a Request for Information (RFI) seeking public comment. This open meeting occurred on March 20, 2008 and was designed to ensure that a discussion of stakeholder issues could occur. The feedback from the open meeting helped define questions for an RFI, which was published on the NIH web site on March 28, 2008 and in the Federal Register on March 31, 2008. The RFI was designed to seek input on the NIH Public Access Policy, as it was revised to incorporate Section 218, and the responses to frequently asked questions (FAQs) concerning it. The RFI was open for sixty days following publication in the Federal Register, from March 28 to May 31, 2008.

OVERVIEW OF FEEDBACK ...

In response to the open meeting and RFI, NIH received 613 unduplicated comments from a broad cross-section of the public....

Most comments offered broad support for the policy as written. Many comments requested a reduction in the delay period before papers can be made publicly available on PubMed Central. In some cases, commenters expressed concern about the Policy, others asked for clarification, and still others suggested alternatives to NIH�s implementation....

NIH also received comments describing implementation efforts by numerous awardee institutions and publishers....

NIH RESPONSE

NIH carefully considered the views expressed by publishers, patient advocates, scientists, university administrators and others in the comments submitted. Throughout the course of its analysis, NIH undertook various efforts to respond to concerns as it identified them....In May, July, and September of 2008 NIH updated the Public Access website to clarify the applicability, goals and anticipated impact of the policy, the available methods to submit papers, and planned methods to document compliance. In June 2008, NIH updated the NIH Manuscript Submission System (NIHMS)....In August, the National Library of Medicine issued a new web tool to help the scientific community obtain PubMed Central Identifiers in bulk. In September 2008, NIH issued a Guide Notice (NOT-OD-08-119) reminding awardees about the compliance process and providing details concerning NIH�s monitoring plan for Fiscal Year 2008.

These efforts appear to be working. NIH estimates approximately 80,000 papers arise from NIH funds each year, and this total serves as the as the target for the Public Access Policy. During the voluntary policy, from May 2005 to December 2007, NIH was able to collect a total of 19% of targeted papers, from all sources (see Page 27 current status, in conclusion section for more details). Under the first five months of the Section 218 requirement (April to August 2008), this rate jumped to an estimated 56% of papers per month....

However, work still remains, as over 40% applicable papers per month remain un-submitted....

The body of the report summarizes the individual comments, including objections to the policy (without attribution), along with the NIH's responses.  For example:

...Many comments touched on potential financial impacts of this Policy on publishers. Some claimed that the Policy would be harmful. A subset of these commenters further argued that if Journals are adversely impacted by the Policy, it would harm peer review as a whole. No data demonstrating harm to journals or peer review was submitted.

Some commenters claimed the Policy would not be harmful to publishers. A few publishers described their experience making papers publicly available at 12 months or less, both on or off PubMed Central, without adverse financial impact....

PS:  For background, see our blog post on the NIH's March 2008 meeting and call for comments, our post on the subsequent RFI, a 2 hour 40 minute video of the March meeting, the full-text comments received by the NIH (with attribution), and various slide presentations from the NIH on the comments, including a preliminary version of the new document.

Update.  The document is still undated, but the NIH had added a date to the link on the comments page, September 30, 2008.

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I just mailed the October issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.  This issue takes a close look at the bill to overturn the NIH public access policy, the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (H.R. 6845), and the publishing lobby's arguments in support of it.  The round-up section briefly notes 149 OA developments from September.

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The National Cancer Institute of Canada (NCIC) has adopted an OA mandate.  (Thanks to Jim Till.)  Excerpt:

Effective July 2009, all researchers supported in whole or in part through the NCIC are required to make their published results of NCIC supported work publicly available. Researchers are encouraged to make their work publicly available as soon as possible, but must do so no later than six months after the final publication date.

Archives such as PubMed Central, researchers� host institution websites, and/or open access journals are all acceptable ways to make research findings publicly available....

NCIC believes strongly, however, that unrestricted public access to research findings is a crucial part of upholding the values and responsibilities of the NCIC as a granting agency and of the NCIC�s funders, the Canadian Cancer Society and The Terry Fox Foundation, both of whom are supported in turn by donations from the public. Major funding bodies around the world have progressively adopted open access as a means of increasing the public availability and transparency of the research they fund. Open access allows for broader dissemination of knowledge and ultimately promotes research advancement, crucial to the NCIC�s mission to reduce the incidence, morbidity and mortality of cancer.

As part of this policy, the NCIC will provide support for any charges levied by publishers that are required to comply with this open access process. Such charges may be included as legitimate research expenses (fully justified as with all other expenses) in the budget of a research grant submission....

Also see the NCIC's Open Access FAQs.  Excerpt:

8. Will I need to make my previously published, NCIC-supported papers available?

This policy comes into effect in July 2009, for all new grants and awards commencing July 1, 2009. However, the NCIC encourages all continuing grantees to find ways to make their research findings publicly accessible. Any NCIC supported publications over 12-months-old have likely been made fully accessible by publishers.

9. What if a journal is compliant with open access, but does not allow the paper to be made freely available until 12 months after publication?

Researchers are able to submit their work to a journal that does not support public availability within six months of the publication date. The NCIC does not wish to compromise the ability of researchers to publish in high-impact journals. However, researchers must inform the NCIC of this limitation and the paper must be made freely available as soon as possible. Please email research@cancer.ca when this issue arises for monitoring purposes. Like other agencies, the NCIC is applying pressure to non-compliant journals to allow for public availability within six months.

Comments

• I applaud the mandatory language, the six month cap on embargoes (with some exceptions), and the flexibility to use different OA repositories or even OA journals to satisfy the policy. 
• The policy doesn't distinguish the timing of deposit from the timing of OA release, though it should.  I hope that the NCIC require immediate deposit even if it allows delayed release.  For details, see what I call the dual/deposit strategy or what Stevan Harnad calls immediate deposit / optional access.
• The policy leaves a loophole for resisting publishers.  When a given publisher does not allow OA on the funder's terms, the NCIC does not require grantees to look for another publisher, as the Wellcome Trust and NIH (and a handful of others) do.  But it does want to use its policy to apply "pressure to non-compliant journals to allow for public availability within six months."  I'm not sure it can work both ways.  Publishers will not feel the intended pressure if they have an easy opt-out.  If experience confirms this suspicion, I hope NCIC will adopt the WT-NIH model and close the loophole.
• The NCIC should say more about the scope of its willingness to pay fees to make OA possible.  If it's willing to pay for gold OA, I applaud that.  If it's willing to pay publishers to permit or provide green OA, then I don't, and I hope the NCIC will reconsider.
• Both the policy and FAQ pages are dated August 1, 2008. 

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Fred Campbell, ACS open access agreement, Chemistry World, September 2008.  Excerpt:

The American Chemical Society (ACS) is expected shortly to finalise an agreement under which, for a fee, it will deposit published articles into open access repositories, such as PubMed Central, and allow their content to be text-mined, hyperlinked, copied and redistributed, for non-commercial research and education purposes.

The altered model would have direct consequences for researchers funded by the UK funding bodies, the Medical Research Council (MRC) and Wellcome Trust, who require that all manuscripts be deposited into open access repositories but are currently advising authors to avoid publishing with the ACS....

Researchers funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) were recently granted a policy change, whereby the ACS would deposit the article on the author's behalf under the AuthorChoice [hybrid OA journal] system; this will now be extended to non-NIH authors.

Also in the current system, the licence that accompanies the articles restricts any further hyperlinking or text-mining of the deposited manuscript; the new licence will lift those limitations. An improved agreement would likely end the UK funding bodies' recommended boycott.

Comments 

• This is a not a step forward, but merely glissade from one bad policy to another.  NIH-funded researchers who publish in ACS journals must pay ACS in order to comply with their prior, independent funding contracts.  Now ACS will offer the same "benefit" to researchers funded by the MRC and Wellcome Trust. 
• For background see my article from April 2007, Paying for green open access.
• The NIH, MRC, and Wellcome Trust use a strong form of OA mandate.  Instead of letting authors opt out when they want to publish with a recalcitrant publisher, like the ACS, they require authors to look for another publisher.  That's the sense in which these funding agencies have been "boycotting" or "advising authors to avoid publishing with the ACS", although it's more fair to say that the ACS has been boycotting authors funded by those agencies.  Under its new policy, the ACS will no longer exclude them, but merely charge them.  I like the evidence that even the large, wealthy, and very recalcitrant ACS can't continue its boycott of researchers funded by these important agencies.  But researchers shouldn't have to pay any publisher to comply with their own funding contracts, and shouldn't have to pay for gold OA if they only want green OA.  Researchers funded by NIH, MRC, or the WT should save their money and continue to steer clear of ACS journals.

Update and correction (9/27/08).  The ACS currently offers NIH-funded authors three options, one of which requires no fee and no ACS membership.  The problem it is trying to fix with its forthcoming revision is to make the fee-based AuthorChoice option compatible with the requirements of the Wellcome Trust and MRC.  Those funders will pay fees on behalf of authors, but only for publishers who go beyond gratis to libre OA.  If the ACS does start to offer libre OA for its AuthorChoice fees, that would be a step forward, especially if it continues to offer a no-fee option for NIH-funded authors.

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If you remember, in June 2008 a group of important German research institutions and funding agencies launched the Allianz der deutschen Wissenschaftsorganisationen (Alliance of German Science Organizations), which committed itself to support green and gold OA, among other goals.

The Alliance's founding document from June 11, 2008, is now available in English.  (Thanks to Neil Beagrie.)  Excerpt:

Equipping scientists and scholars with the information infrastructure best suited to meeting their research needs is the guiding principle of this priority initiative. In the digital age, this entails digital access to publications, primary research data, and virtual research and communication environments, available to the user without costs or other barriers. It also requires a sustainable, integrated digital research environment that can provide all German researchers the broadest possible access to published knowledge and the relevant primary research data....

The Alliance of German Science Organisations therefore agree to coordinate the activities of the individual partner organisations and to expand on the ideal of the innovative information environment by means of a Joint Priority Initiative from 2008 to 2012 with the following goals:

• to guarantee the broadest possible access to digital publications, digital data and other source materials
• to utilise digital media to create the ideal conditions for the distribution and reception of publications related to German research....

The Priority Areas in Detail ...

Priority Area 2:  Open Access

The term Open Access describes the goal of making knowledge globally accessible and usable in digital form without financial, technical or legal barriers....

The activities of the Alliance�s existing Open Access working group � perhaps including further members � will be stepped up, so that the open access to texts, primary data and other digital objects can be promoted and implemented by means of science policy and other concrete steps.

A primary goal of this Priority Area is to expand the scope and network of institutional and disciplinary digital repositories. To achieve this, incentives will be developed in the context of the alliance�s activities: First � with reference to the research institutions � to undertake the standardisation, networking and quality assurance of publication servers; and second � with reference to the individual scientists and scholars � to make (secondary) publications available via the so-called �green road� of Open Access.

The second essential goal is to further develop the so-called �golden road� of Open Access (an article is freely accessible as soon as it is published in a journal) through coordinated action. This will require the development of new business and funding models as well as new forms of cooperative financing. Pilot projects will be used to track the way in which subscription fees and publication costs can be correlated and/or rearranged. Models will be developed and tested in discipline-specific settings with the goal of financing publication costs as the final step of the research process. Suitable budgetary measures must be developed to ensure that research budgets are not strained as a result....

PS:  The founding members of the Alliance are the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD, German Academic Exchange Service), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), the Fraunhofer Society, the Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft Deutscher Forschungszentren (Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers), the Hochschulrektorenkonferenz (HRK, German Rectors Conference), the Leibniz Society, the Max Planck Society, and the Wissenschaftsrat (WR, German Council of Science and Humanities).

Apparently the Alliance still doesn't have a web site.  But if I'm wrong, I'd love to be corrected.

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Elias A. Zerhouni to End Tenure as Director of the National Institutes of Health, a press release from the NIH, September 24, 2008.  Excerpt:

Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., the director of the National Institutes of Health, today announced his plans to step down at the end of October 2008 to pursue writing projects and explore other professional opportunities.

Dr. Zerhouni, a physician scientist and world-renowned leader in radiology research, has served as NIH director since May 2002. He led the agency through a challenging period that required innovative solutions to transform basic and clinical research into tangible benefits for patients and their families. One of the hallmarks of his tenure is the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, launched in 2003, after extensive consultations with the scientific community....

Key Accomplishments of Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D. ...

[PS:  I'm including only two of the 22 sections.]

Molecular Libraries
The NIH Roadmap identified one key "new pathway": the need for molecular libraries. The Molecular Libraries initiative resulted in development of a nationwide consortium of 10 small molecule screening centers; including NIH; a database, PubChem; and new tools and technologies to better serve investigative needs. PubChem provides free access to discoveries about the chemical structures and biological activities of small molecules....The Molecular Small Molecule Repository currently contains over 300,000 small molecules....

Public Access to NIH-funded Published Research
In February 2005, Dr. Zerhouni announced an unprecedented policy designed to expand and accelerate public access to published articles resulting from NIH-funded research. The policy was the first of its kind and called on scientists to release manuscripts from research supported by NIH as soon as possible, and within 12 months of publication. Publications are made available in a web-based archive managed by the National Library of Medicine. At a time when demand for such information is on a steady rise, the online archive increases the public's access to health-related publications....

Comments

• This is big.  Elias Zerhouni has headed the NIH through both its voluntary and mandatory OA policies.  He once approved the voluntary policy, but changed his mind and testified before Congress three times on the need for an OA mandate.  He's heard all the publisher arguments and answers them forcefully.  He's a strong friend OA and will be missed.
• He'll leave next month, well before the fate of the Conyers bill is settled.  But Congress has heard from him on the issue --his most recent testimony was at the September 11 hearing on the bill-- and he may be available in the future to testify as a private citizen with deep knowledge of the issue and long institutional memory. 
• Whether his retirement is a setback for OA will depend on who succeeds him.  President Bush will choose his successor unless the financial crisis, the war, and the election postpone the appointment long enough to hand it off to Bush's own successor.  Bush had minor objections to the NIH OA mandate, but they were not strong enough to prevent him from signing it into law.  In any case, the other issues facing this very large agency will dwarf the access policy in the selection of the next Director, and Zerhouni himself was a Bush appointee.  Moreover, it seems to me that scientists with the knowledge and policy background to run the NIH tend to support public access to publicly-funded research.  One of Zerhouni's predecessors as NIH Director was Harold Varmus (1993-1999). 
• Elias Zerhouni in July 2004:  "The public needs to have access to what they've paid for....The status quo just can't stand."
• Elias Zerhouni in February 2005:  "Scientists have a right to see the results of their work disseminated as quickly and broadly as possible, and NIH is committed to helping our scientists exercise this right. We urge publishers to work closely with authors in implementing this policy."
• Elias Zerhouni in March 2007:  "We need to make [public access] a condition of federal fund granting."
• More later, as this unfolds.

Update (9/25/08).  Here's some background, especially to the "why now?" question.

From Jeffrey Young at The Hill:

...Zerhouni...told the president of his plans �several weeks� ago....

As a presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed official, Zerhouni would have had to resign when the next president takes office. He explained that he wanted to depart before then so Bush�s successor has to act quickly to replace him.

�I felt it would be in the best interests of the NIH for me to leave before the election,� Zerhouni said. With a vacancy in the directorship, he explained, when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) or Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) wins the presidential election in November, he would be more inclined to name a replacement, he said.

�I would want people to focus on NIH as early and as soon as possible after the election,� Zerhouni said, rather than assume the agency is in good hands already. Zerhouni said he has no interest in remaining in office under the next administration.

Zerhouni stated that �there�s no precipitating event� that led to his decision to vacate his position and rejected characterizing his departure as a resignation. �It�s just basically stepping down at the right time,� he said. �I�ve always said I would end my tenure at this time." ...

The NIH�s efforts to increase public access to government-funded research...met with resistance from medical journal publishers and some researchers. As with his ethics reforms, Zerhouni said these steps were necessary to restore public trust in the agency....

From Jocelyn Kaiser at Science Magazine:

...Zerhouni told reporters today that his departure follows "the natural cycle of tenures for this position," which are historically held for about 6 years. He wanted to step down before the November presidential election so that the next Administration can "focus on NIH as early and as soon as possible," he said. Although he has been considered for the presidency of JHU, he does not have a job lined up and said he wanted to "take some time out." President George W. Bush has not yet named an acting NIH director, but Zerhouni said he expects it will be NIH's current deputy director, Raynard Kington....

Update (9/27/08).  Also see the statement from Genetic Alliance.  Excerpt:

...Earlier this month, Dr. Zerhouni rallied for more open health systems; defending the public's right to view the results of taxpayer-funded research as provided by the NIH Public Access Policy during a legislative hearing on H.R. 6845, the 'Fair Copyright in Research Works Act.' The NIH policy is essential to translating biomedical research into clinical results. Individuals, families and healthcare providers now have open access to publicly funded research, and this achievement will be a hallmark of Dr. Zerhouni's tenure....

Update (10/9/08). Also see Andrew Albanese's story in Library Journal.

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The latest list from the Open Access Directory (OAD) is devoted to Educational materials about OA.  Dorothea Salo has seeded the list, and it's now open for community editing. 

It's launching this week in order to support Open Access Day (October 14, 2008), and to capture the many teaching and learning materials currently under development for it.

The list is looking especially for materials that other users can mine for ideas, and use with attribution, when preparing their own talks, slide shows, brochures, posters, videos, podcasts, and workshops.  (OAD merely links to these materials; it doesn't host its own copies.)

OAD is a wiki and appreciates your help in keeping its lists comprehensive, accurate, and up to date.

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The University of Toronto is scheduled to cut its funding for Bioline International at the end of this month.  For details, see two comments recently posted to Richard Poynder's interview with Leslie Chan, a professor at Toronto and Associate Director of Bioline.  From the comment by Marla Miller:

...[An earlier comment by Peter Mitchell is correct to say] that funding promised to Bioline was revoked. Since I am the �silent partner� in Bioline, the librarian who made the 5 year funding commitment to the project, beginning with May of 2007, I would like to offer some clarification, in part to make sure that it is understood that I am not the person who withdrew the promised funding....

[T]he Chief Librarian of U of T...gave her consent to our 5 year funding plan [2007-2011].  However, when the new budget year came around in May of 2007, to my complete surprise, the Dean of Leslie Chan�s campus stated that he was rescinding the approval of funding previously granted by the Chief Librarian....

I am of the opinion that Dean acted improperly and that the University should fulfil the commitment that was made. With representation from my Faculty Association, I am now pressing for a review of the Dean�s decision....

Comment.  Bioline is an OA pioneer and success story, directly helping researchers in developing countries and reflecting well on the U of Toronto.  See our 33 past posts on it.  Just yesterday Michael Geist highlighted it in his column in the Toronto Star: 

...[T]he University of Toronto provided the lead support for BioLine International, which was founded in 1993 to bring scientific journals, largely from developing countries, to the Internet. Today, BioLine hosts 70 [OA] journals from 15 countries. Last year, more than 3.5 million full-text articles were freely downloaded from the site....

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Mike Rossner, Executive Director of the Rockefeller University Press, has released his letter to the American Association of University Presses (AAUP), protesting its support for the Conyers bill.  He sent the letter today.  Excerpt:

I am writing to take issue with your letter of September 10th, supporting the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, which seeks to overturn the mandate on public access to NIH funded research.  I would be grateful if you could let your member presses know on what basis you claim to speak on their behalf.  We deserve an accounting of how many member presses are indeed affected by the NIH mandate (that is, how many publish research articles resulting from NIH funded research), how many of those presses were consulted, and how many of them supported your ef forts to overturn the mandate.  Without this information you are replaying the PRISM fiasco of the AAP - a lobbying effort that no-one would admit to supporting.

The Rockefeller University Press, as a member organization of the AAUP, strongly opposes your efforts to overturn the NIH mandate. In your letter you claim that "Copyright is the legal foundation that permits recovery of [our] costs and investment in publishing new work.  Weakening copyright protection through federal mandates that publications resulting from government-funded research be made freely available undermines that foundation and threatens the very system that makes such work of high value in the first place."  However, you do not provide any data to back up this statement.  We at the Rockefeller University Press have the data to show that this is not true.  We have released our content to the public 6 months after publication since January, 2001, but our revenues have grown every year since then.  In May of this year, we took the additional step of allowing authors to retain copyright and distribution rights to the articles published in our journals.  Third parties can use all of our content under a modified Creative Commons License. I do not anticipate that these new policies will affect our revenues.

I fully understand the value added by publishers.  However, our authors create the works we publish and should thus have rights over their distribution.  The public pays for NIH-funded work and should thus have access to the results.  The problem here is not the government trying to usurp publishers' rights, but the fact that publishers have for so long usurped these rights from authors and the public.

Comments 

• Kudos to Mike Rossner for speaking out (again).  His letter makes two important points:  (1) that some university presses support the NIH's OA mandate, as is, and (2) that the AAUP did not consult its members before claiming to speak for them in trying to overturn the NIH mandate. 
• We need to hear from other university presses who don't believe the AAUP is representing them on this issue.  Faculty and librarians:  talk to the press on your campus.
• Also see my comments on the AAUP letter. 

Update (9/24/08).  Also see Peter Givler's response to Mike Rossner's letter.  Givler is the Executive Director of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP).  Excerpt:

Thank you for your letter, which I am forwarding to the Board.

For the record, though, allow me to point out that you're accusing me of doing something the letter very carefully and deliberately did not do, namely, attack the NIH mandate itself.  If the bill is passed its most likely immediate effect will be to roll the NIH's public access policy back from mandatory to voluntary, but the bill itself addresses a much larger issue:  whether any federal agency should have the authority to claim a copyright in what the bill defines as "extrinsic works" solely by virtue of funding the underlying research.  That is a policy question with very broad and serious implications for all of scholarly publishing; it isn't limited to journals publishers in the health sciences, as important as they may be. My letter to Chairman Conyers and the other sponsors of the bill expresses the belief that the bill addresses that policy question appropriately.

I have three quick comments on Givler's response to Rossner:

• Rossner said that AAUP opposed the NIH mandate, which is true.  The Conyers bill would overturn the mandate and the AAUP supports the Conyers bill in hopes that it will overturn the mandate.
• Givler didn't address one of Rossner's important questions:  "I would be grateful if you could let your member presses know on what basis you claim to speak on their behalf."
• Finally, on Givler's main point ("whether any federal agency should have the authority to claim a copyright in what the bill defines as 'extrinsic works' solely by virtue of funding the underlying research"):  (1) The NIH isn't claiming a copyright, merely a non-exclusive license; (2) the license is granted by the copyright holder, the author, in consideration for a large publicly-funded research grant; publishers are not a party to that contract; (3) publishers who don't want to publish articles under these circumstances don't have to.  They know when submissions are from NIH-funded authors.  The policy takes nothing from publishers, but merely changes the terms of a business proposition ("will you publish this article?").  Publishers may want a sweeter deal, but they don't have a right to a sweeter deal.  By contrast, authors have the right to transfer all, some, or none of their rights to publishers, and taxpayers have a right to access the results of non-classified publicly-funded research.

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American citizens who support the NIH policy and oppose the Conyers bill: 

Please don't forget to notify your Representative and Senators by end of business on Wednesday, September 24, the day after tomorrow.  Congress adjourns on Friday and members have to hear from you before they leave town.  Even if the Conyers bill doesn't move, the language may be attached to another bill that is moving. 

For details and a draft letter you can adapt, see the ATA's call to action I blogged last Thursday.

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Action Items: NCRR will:

• Work to implement policies that encourage or require investigators to share data collected with NIH support and to describe their data-sharing plans in detail in their applications. ...

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Germany's Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft adopted an OA mandate in July 2008.  (Thanks to the Informationsplattform Open Access.) 

Unfortunately, both the German and English versions of the policy are locked PDFs which block cutting/pasting (why?) and I don't have time to rekey the important passages. 

But here are a few highlights:

• The policy follows the Berlin Declaration definition of OA.
• FG "makes every effort" to provide OA to the full-text articles by its employees.
• When FG employees publish in TA journals, copies "shall" be deposited in the FG repository, Fraunhofer ePrints.  If the publisher insists, FG will respect an embargo of up to one year.
• When FG employees publish articles, they are "expressly required to demand" the "right to further use of their own works."
• FG "wholeheartedly supports" publishing in peer-reviewed OA journals.
• FG managers are "urged to take a proactive stance" to help FG researchers make use of green and gold OA.
• FG "is committed to providing the necessary financial, organization and non-material support" to implement its policy.
• FG is "committed to lobbying for official recognition" of OA "on a national and European scale" and "for the drafting of appropriate legislation."

Comments

• In its basics, the FG policy resembles the NIH policy:  researchers must reserve the right to authorize OA, deposit in the repository is required, and embargoes may be up to one year.  But the NIH policy requires deposit immediately upon acceptance and the FG policy is silent on the timing of deposits.  I hope FG will follow the growing practice of depositing immediately upon acceptance, switching access from closed to open when the embargo runs, and making metadata OA from the start.
• I can't tell from FG's strong support for OA journals, and its commitment to provide the financial means to implement its policy, whether it will pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals.  If it can afford to so so, I hope it will. 
• The month before FG adopted this policy, it joined the Allianz der deutschen Wissenschaftsorganisationen (June 11, 2008), a new alliance of German research organizations committed to OA.  See my blog post about it.  Does this mean that other alliance members without OA policies are now adopting them?
• Kudos to all involved at FG.  But please unlock the PDF.  (What were you thinking?)

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It's not over yet.  The Alliance for Taxpayer Action is calling on US citizens to keep the pressure on Congress to support the NIH policy and defeat the Conyers bill.  From today's call to action:

...Please contact your Representative and Senators no later than September 24, 2008 to express your support for public access to taxpayer-funded research and ask that he or she OPPOSE HR6845. Especially important are members of the House Judiciary Committee and Senate Judiciary Committee. (Draft text and contact details are included below).

HR6845 is designed to do the following:

1.    Amend current copyright law (Title 17).

2.    Prohibit all U.S. federal agencies from conditioning funding agreements to require that works resulting from federal support be made publicly available if those works meet either of two conditions:

a.    They are funded in part by sources other than a U.S. agency, or

b.    The results from "meaningful added value" to the work from an entity that is not party to the agreement.

3.    Prohibit U.S. federal agencies being able to obtain a license to publicly distribute, perform, or display such work by -- for example -- putting it on the Internet.

4.    Makes broad policy by stifling public access to a wide range of federally funded works, and effectively overturns the crucially important current NIH Public Access Policy.

5.    Because it is so broadly framed, the proposed bill would require an overhaul of well-established procurement rules in effect for all federal agencies, and could disrupt day-to-day procurement practices across the federal government, including in critical areas such as research to support national defense and homeland security.

6.    In particular, the bill would repeal the longstanding "federal purpose" doctrine, under which all federal agencies that fund the creation of a copyrighted work must reserve a "royalty-free, nonexclusive right to reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the work" for any federal purpose. This will severely limit the ability of U.S. federal agencies to use works that they have funded to support and fulfill agency missions and to communicate with and educate the public.

7.    The bill is a blunt instrument that uses extremely broad language to override existing procurement law, and as such has serious implications for the entire U.S. federal government far beyond articles resulting from research funding.

8.    Because of the NIH Public Access Policy, millions of Americans now have access to vital health care information from the NIH�s PubMed Central database. Under the current policy, nearly 4,000 new crucial biomedical articles were deposited in the last month alone. This proposed bill would prohibit the deposit of these articles, and as a result, researchers, physicians, health care professionals, families and individuals will find it much harder to get access to this critical health-related information.

Constituents across the country are asked to contact Congress and let them know you support public access to federally funded research and OPPOSE HR6845. Again, the proposed resolution would effectively reverse the NIH Public Access Policy, as well as make it impossible for other federal agencies to put similar policies into place.

Thank you for your support and continued persistence in supporting this policy. You know the difference constituent voices can make on Capitol Hill.

As always, please let me know what actions you�re able to take, by email to jennifer [at] arl [dot] org.

[PS:  Here omitting the sample text to mail to your Senator or Representative, and a list of the relevant committee members and their phone numbers.]

Comment.  Although we have heard reports that the bill has been shelved for this year, the language could move forward without the bill.  For example, even if the sponsors plan no further action on the bill in this session, they could insert the language into another piece of legislation moving toward a vote.  We must keep the pressure on between and now and the scheduled adjournment, on September 26, to discourage any last-minute movement.

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Thirty-three US Nobel laureates in science have written an open letter to Congress defending the NIH policy against the Conyers bill (September 9, 2008).  Excerpt:

As scientists and Nobel Laureates we are writing today to support the NIH Public Access Policy that was instituted earlier this year as a Congressional mandate. This is one of the most important public access initiatives ever undertaken. Finally, scientists, physicians, health care workers, libraries, students, researchers and thousands of academic institutions and companies will have access to the published work of scientists who have been supported by NIH.

For scientists working at the cutting edge of knowledge, it is essential that they have unhindered access to the world's scientific literature. Increasingly, scientists and researchers at all but the most well-financed universities are finding it difficult to pay the escalating costs of subscriptions to the journals that provide their life blood. A major result of the NIH public access initiative is that increasing amounts of scientific knowledge are being made freely available to those who need to use it and through the internet the dissemination of that knowledge is now facile.

The clientele for this knowledge are not just an esoteric group of university scientists and researchers who are pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge....

The scientific literature is our communal heritage. It has been assembled by the painstaking work of hundreds of thousands of research scientists and the results are essential to the pursuit of science. The research breakthroughs that can lead to new treatments for disease, to better diagnostics or to innovative industrial applications depend completely on access not just to specialized literature, but rather to the complete published literature. A small finding in one field combined with a second finding in some completely unrelated field often triggers that "Eureka" moment that leads to a groundbreaking scientific advance. Public access makes this possible.

The current move by the publishers is wrong. The NIH came through with an enlightened policy that serves the best interest of science, the scientists who practice it, the students who read about it and the taxpayers who pay for it. The legislators who mandated this policy should be applauded and any attempts to weaken or reverse this policy should be halted....

[PS:  Omitting the 33 signatures.]

Comment.  This is the third time that US Nobel laureates in science have written to Congress in support of the NIH policy.  Also see the first letter (25 signatures, August 26, 2004) and the second letter (26 signatures, July 8, 2007).

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After Hearing, Sweeping Anti-NIH Bill To Be Shelved �for Now, Library Journal Academic Newswire, September 16, 2008.

Within hours of last week�s hearing on the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, a sweeping, publisher-supported bill that would ban public access measures similar to the National Institutes of Health�s (NIH), lawmakers all but ruled out action on the bill in 2008. With Congress set to adjourn on September 26, Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), who chairs the subcommittee on the Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property, which sponsored last week�s hearing, said the bill would be held until at least next year.

In comments after the hearing, however, John Conyers (D-MI), lashed out at the House Appropriations Committee, which passed the public access mandate as part of an omnibus spending bill in 2007. Conyers told CongressDaily that he was frustrated by the Appropriations� Committee�s refusal to engage repeated questions from the House Judiciary Committee, which Conyers chairs, about the copyright and intellectual property implications associated with the NIH mandate. Conyers fumed that appropriators acted �summarily, unilaterally and probably incorrectly� in enacting the mandate, and suggested the mandate was at the center of a Congressional turf war....

Notably, however, when asked for a comment on the bill just hours before its introduction last week, a Conyers� staffer told the LJ Academic Newswire the legislation was likely coming out of Berman�s office, suggesting Conyers� post-hearing remarks may represent more bluster than any deep commitment to seeing through the bill he introduced last week. Not only did the bill not come out of Berman�s office, Berman declined to publicly support the bill, saying he needed to �learn more about the issues.�

The bill itself, meanwhile, a broadly-written measure, was criticized by copyright experts. �The bill is an odd duck because it would do far more than simply end public access to NIH-funded research,� noted Villanova law professor Michael Carroll on his blog. Carroll said that if passed, the sweeping bill could �impliedly amend� other provisions by which taxpayers procure services�and suggested there was a good reason why Appropriations didn�t consult Conyers before passing the mandate: because �assertions that the policy somehow diminishes copyrights lacks any basis in law.�

The bill�s supporters in the publishing community, meanwhile, all praised the measure....The rhetoric was far more charged, however, in a release from publisher-supported advocacy group the Copyright Alliance. �The mere fact that a scientist accepts as part of her funding a federal grant should not enable the federal government to commandeer the resulting research paper and treat it as a public domain work,� noted executive director Patrick Ross. �Authors and publishers don�t need the feds playing Rumpelstiltskin by returning after a year to take their children away.�

Open Access blogger Peter Suber, who has commented extensively on the NIH efforts blasted that rhetoric as flatly false, inaccurate, and dishonest. �First, the NIH policy regulates grantees, not publishers,� he observed. �Second, the policy�doesn�t archive the published versions of the articles, let alone deprive publishers of them or nullify any of the rights in them that authors may have transferred to publishers. When NIH grantees transfer rights to publishers, publishers may hold and exercise those rights in full.�

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The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) has released a Statement on Alternative Publishing Models & Open Access.  It was approved by the CRKN Board of Directors on September 9, 2008, and will be presented to the Annual General Meeting on September 23, 2008, for discussion and ratification.  (Thanks to Leslie Chan.)  Excerpt:

Principles

CRKN affirms that broad and enduring access to the materials and outputs of scholarly research is an integral component of Canada�s research infrastructure, and vital to the progress of science, civil society and global well?being.

CRKN is committed to securing the broadest access to the world�s knowledge for the benefit of its member universities and the communities they serve � researchers, students, staff and the public.

CRKN is committed to working within a framework that includes new models of scholarly publishing as well as content licensing, viewing these as complementary strategies that both contribute to the overarching goals of lowering barriers and maximizing access to the materials and outputs of research....

Actions

1. Focus on Canadian research outputs and Canadian content

1.1.  CRKN will open formal channels of discussion with Canadian publishers, content providers and research funders to explore how CRKN may be an active partner in helping transition to an open access environment.

Deliverables: development of a business plan in 2009 for pilot project(s)

1.2. CRKN will take an active role in maximizing access to Canadian research outputs and implementing granting council policies, by redoubling our efforts with publishers to ensure author rights to archive their peer-reviewed manuscripts in institutional or open access repositories.

Deliverable: formal provisions within CRKN procurement contracts, on timeline of license renewals.

2. Focus on roles as a national focal point for international open access initiatives

2.1.  CRKN will act as a national focal point for international open access initiatives, where CRKN is uniquely positioned to play a coordination and/or financial management role on behalf of its members.

Deliverable: Participation in international initiative, 2009-2010.

3. Focus on advancing open access provisions within content licensing program

3.1. CRKN will promulgate model license and contractual agreements that provide for the broadest base of users and most expansive usage for the member community.

3.2. CRKN will negotiate aggressively for reduced licensing fees for content resources that have open choice (i.e. author pay) provisions.

3.3. CRKN will work with the researcher and publisher communities to explore tool development and support usage rights for text mining.

Deliverable: development of pilot project, 2009-2010

Comments

• Kudos to the CRKN board.  This plan would significantly advance OA in Canada, and I hope the members approve it next week.  I especially like the CRKN's willingness to talk to all institutional stakeholders (universities, funders, publishers) and its goal to boost the number of green journals. 
• CRKN is in a very good position to get member institutions to launch IRs and adopt effective policies to fill them.  This goal isn't mentioned in the plan, but I hope the CRKN will take it up.  Boosting the number of green journals only increases permission for OA.  To increase OA itself, authors and their institutions must take advantage of the opportunity.
• CRKN has a $50+ million annual budget, focuses on the humanities and social sciences, and represents 72 universities across Canada.

Update.  Here's some related information from Heather Morrison, by email.  (Thanks, Heather.) 

Most CRKN members are also members of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL).  CARL has had an institutional repository program and metadata harvester for years; most libraries either have, or are in the process of developing, repositories.  It is not clear whether smaller members of CRKN would have their own repositories, or whether collaboration makes more sense. More likely the latter; sharing of  infrastructure is quite common.

CRKN does not focus just on the social sciences and humanities,  rather this was the last major initiative.  The initial round of content acquisition was focused very much on the sciences.

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Michael Carroll, Attacking Public Access Through the Copyright Act, Carrollogos, September 12, 2008.  Carroll is a Visiting Professor of Law at the American University, Washington College of Law, and a member of the Board of Creative Commons.  Excerpt:

On September 9th, Mr. Conyers introduced H.R. 6845, "The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act", into the House of Representatives. There is nothing fair about this bill at all, and it should be opposed by anyone who cares about public access to publicly funded research....

The bill is an odd duck because it would do far more than simply end public access to NIH-funded research. It would also impliedly amend public procurement law and impliedly repeal portions of the longstanding "rights in data" contracting provisions of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, the DFARS, and portions of the intangible property provisions of OMB Circular A-110.

Traditionally, the Copyright Act has not been used for this purpose. Certain journal publishers have asserted to NIH and to the Committee that the NIH policy is in some vague way inconsistent with the Copyright Act and U.S. international copyright obligations. This assertion lacks any basis in law, and a group of 47 professors at American law schools who teach or write about copyright law sent a letter to the committee making this point....

[PS:  Omitting an annotated summary of the bill.]

Comment.  This is very helpful.  But it raises some new questions.  Did the Judiciary Committee intend to amend public procurement law or any other federal law unrelated to public access for publicly-funded research?  Who will gain and who will lose by the amendment to procurement law, and do the losers know about this bill?

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Andrew Noyes, House Judiciary chairman slams Appropriations panel over jurisdiction, Government Executive, September 12, 2008.  Excerpt:

...On Thursday, Conyers slammed the powerful House Appropriations Committee for not consulting with his panel before pushing through the rule as part of a 2008 funding package.

"We have tried to communicate repeatedly with the leader of that committee ... and what did we get? Nothing," Conyers said at a hearing of the Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property Subcommittee.

He said he viewed the silence as a blow-off by Appropriations Chairman David Obey and said he was frustrated that appropriators ran roughshod over the "sacred jurisdiction" of his committee to act "summarily, unilaterally and probably incorrectly." ...

Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property Subcommittee Chairman Howard Berman, D-Calif., said he saw merits to both sides but did not publicly endorse Conyers' bill...

He and...ranking member Howard Coble, R-N.C., said they needed more time to learn about the issue before taking a position. Berman told CongressDaily after the hearing that further action on the bill would probably be held over until the 111th Congress....

Comments

• There are many backstage forces at work here.  One is publisher lobbying.  But another is turf jealousies among the powerful House committees.
• Why did the House Appropriations Committee, which shepherded the OA mandate bill through to a vote, not run the language by the House Judiciary Committee?  I can only guess.  Perhaps because the Judiciary Committee only needed to be involved if the bill raised copyright issues, and it didn't raise copyright issues.
• Who says the NIH bill didn't raise copyright issues?  One person who says so is William Patry, former Copyright Counsel to the House Judiciary Committee and now Senior Copyright Counsel at Google.  See my July 2008 blog post on his remarks.
• Who knows how strong the Judiciary Committee would have found the publishing lobby's arguments on their own, without the secret sauce of turf rivalries?

Update.  Not only has Berman not endorsed the Conyers bill, but he publicly  opposes it.  See Andrea Gawrylewski in TheScientist (September 12, 2008):

...The new legislation would "turn back the clock" by prohibiting the NIH from mandating public access as a condition of researchers receiving funding, according to an introductory statement [at the hearing] by chairman of the subcommittee considering the issue, Howard Berman, Democratic representative from California....

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The American Association of University Presses has released its September 10 letter to the Congressional sponsors of the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act.  Excerpt:

...This very important bill will ensure that future actions by the federal government will not diminish the copyright protection currently accorded to scholarly works whose research may be federally funded, in full or in part, but whose publication, in any medium, requires that significant value be added, and paid for, from other sources.

AAUP has 116 members in 42 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico....On average, 90% of their operating revenue comes from their publishing operations, the vast majority of it from sales of the books and journals they publish, and only 10% as a subsidy from their parent institutions....

Copyright is the legal foundation that permits recovery of those costs and investment in publishing new work. Weakening copyright protection through federal mandates that publications resulting from government-funded research be made freely available undermines that foundation and threatens the very system that makes such work of high value in the first place....

The members of AAUP strongly support open access to scholarly literature by whatever means, so long as those means include a funding or business model that will maintain the investment required to keep older work available and continue to publish new work. However, trying to expand access by diminishing copyright protection in works arising from federally-funded research is going entirely in the wrong direction, and will badly erode the capacity of AAUP members to publish such work in their books and journals....

Comments

• The AAUP is more candid on the primacy of revenue than other publishers who have endorsed the bill.  But it still asserts too strong a connection between the revenue problem and a supposed copyright problem:
• Before the NIH policy, NIH-funded authors typically transferred full copyright to publishers.  Under the new mandatory version of the policy, NIH-funded authors must retain the non-exclusive right to authorize the NIH to disseminate their peer-reviewed manuscripts.  They may, and still typically do, transfer all other rights to publishers.  As a result, publishers are receiving something slightly less than the full bundle of rights they formerly received.  But that's not "reduced copyright protection" for publishers.  Publishers still have full protection to exercise the rights they acquire from authors.  They're just upset that they're acquiring fewer rights from authors.  The reduction may be a problem for them and it may (or may not) affect their revenues.  But it doesn't follow that it's a legal injury which Congress ought to remedy, rather than, say, a financial risk that publishers must accept as part of life in a changing world.  Nor does it follow that the publishers' preferred remedy isn't itself a kind of "reduced copyright protection" --for authors, who are the first copyright holders here and who should be protected in their freedom to bargain away one of their rights in exchange for a large research grant.  There's no reason why the Judiciary Committee should care more to protect publishers from financial risk than to protect authors in disposing their copyrights as they see fit. 
• I'm very aware that the NIH policy is mandatory.  But we shouldn't misunderstand what that means.  The NIH is putting an OA condition on a voluntary contract.  It isn't requiring OA unconditionally, and couldn't possibly do so.  The relevant author freedom here isn't the freedom to deposit in PMC, which existed under the previous (non-mandatory) version of the policy, but the freedom to accept a research grant which requires deposit in PMC.  The guardians of "copyright protection" should want to protect the freedom of all rightsholders (authors, publishers, or other) to exercise the rights they hold when they hold them.  The publishers are calling on Congress to tilt an unbalanced copyright system further toward themselves.
• Is your institution a member of the AAUP?  If so, does your institution want to overturn the NIH policy?  Does your institution realize that the AAUP is speaking for it in its letter to the Judiciary Committee?  If you don't want the AAUP to speak for your institution this way, make your complaint known to the AAUP, to the leadership of the House Judiciary Committee (John Conyers, Chairman, D-MI, and Lamar Smith, Ranking Member, R-TX), and to the public.

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Jocelyn Kaiser, Congressional Committee Moves to Block NIH Public Access Policy, Science Magazine, September 11, 2008.  Excerpt:

...NIH says compliance [with the new, mandatory version of the policy] has risen [from less than 10%] to 56%, or about 3300 papers submitted each month, since the rule took effect in April. (The agency could potentially suspend the grant of an investigator who ignores the policy but is so far relying on less punitive measures, such as reminders). Meanwhile, some commercial and society publishers, such as the American Physiological Society (APS), have complained that the policy infringes on their copyrights and will put them out of business by cutting into their subscription base....

Representative John Conyers (D�MI)...questioned the need for the policy when the public can already obtain the papers through a subscription or at a library. Moreover, most journals make their content free after 12 months.

NIH Director Elias Zerhouni defended the policy. He argued that PubMed Central is enhancing the papers by linking to molecular databases and other papers. "The real value is the connectivity," Zerhouni said. He also claimed that "there is no evidence that this has been harmful" to publishers. In response, APS Executive Director Martin Frank, whose society publishes 14 journals, disagrees, telling Science that some journal editors believe the new policy is leading to "fewer eyeballs coming to their sites." ...

There is no companion bill in the Senate, and Congress is not expected to act on the [Conyers bill] before it adjourns later this month. Jonathan Band, a Washington, D.C., attorney who represents the American Library Association, which favors open access, says the bill's sweeping provisions are a fatal flaw. "It goes far beyond the NIH policy. It limits a lot of what the federal government can do," he says....

Comments

• "Representative John Conyers (D�MI)...questioned the need for the policy when the public can already obtain the papers through a subscription or at a library."  Rep. Conyers doesn't understand the problem.  Public libraries seldom subscribe to peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly journals, and university libraries have to cancel titles by the hundreds every year because prices are increasing significantly faster than library budgets.  This is a "let them eat cake" response.
• "[M]ost journals make their content free after 12 months."  It's odd that publishers would this as an argument against the NIH policy.  If it's true, then publishers have to stop arguing that OA to NIH-funded research would kill their revenues, kill their journals, and kill peer review.  If it's not true, or if the NIH policy goes significantly further than publishers would voluntarily go on their own, then they have drop the "wasteful duplication" argument.  They can't have it both ways.
• As soon Congress first called for the NIH policy in 2004, we started hearing opposition from publishers who already, voluntarily provided gratis OA to their articles on the same 12 month timetable allowed by the proposed policy.  They weren't the majority or even close (and still may not be today).  But I wrote an article about them and made this point:

  [T]heir objection does not seem to be to OA as such.  The objection is that the NIH plan will provide OA on the NIH's terms, not on the publishers' terms.  The problem is control....Who should decide which access barriers to remove, when, and on what terms? ...Publishers who object to this loss of control are defending the remarkable proposition that they should control access to research conducted by others, written up by others, and funded by taxpayers.  More:  they claim that they should control access to this literature even when it is given to them free of charge and even though the prices they demand for it have risen four times faster than inflation for nearly two decades....When we start to replace this inherited system with a more rational one, the former gatekeepers protest, but I have yet seen them offer a principled objection....Their objections...have been naked assertions of economic self-interest at the expense of the public interest.

• In response to Elias Zerhouni's claim that "there is no evidence that [the NIH policy] has been harmful" to publishers, "Martin Frank...[told] Science that some journal editors believe the new policy is leading to 'fewer eyeballs coming to their sites.'" ...That's the harm?  It's well-known and not surprising that OA archiving can reduce downloads from publisher web sites.  But there's no evidence that these reduced downloads are reflected in reduced subscriptions. If there were, then publishers would cite the reduced subscriptions instead of the reduced downloads, to strengthen their case that the policy causes harm.  Moreover, the downloaded manuscripts contain citations and links to the published editions (the NIH sees to it), helping to spread the journal's brand, increase its audience, and increase the citations to its papers.  But even if the downloads didn't cite and link to the published originals, should our representatives in Congress deny the public interest in public access to publicly-funded research in order to steer more eyeballs to publisher web sites?  (For more on the reduced downloads phenomenon, see Section 8 of this article from September 2007.)

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The American Chemical Society also supports the Conyers bill to overturn the NIH policy.  No surprise there.  Susan R. Morrissey has details in the September 11 issue of Chemical & Engineering News:

"The legislation comes in response to concerns that publishers have �whether real or perceived� about the federal government taking the works that exist in our journals after we have expended considerable labor, effort, and costs associated with evaluating and filtering research articles," says Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, which publishes 14 research journals....

"We believe that it is in the public interest to foster this beneficial publishing activity," ACS President Bruce. E. Bursten says in a letter to the bill's sponsors. He adds that this bill will help sustain the publishing enterprise.

The bill creates the category of "extrinsic work," which is work resulting from multiple-source funding. Work that falls into this new category would be protected by copyright laws and would not fall under federal policy, including NIH's open-access policy, which mandates that final, peer-reviewed manuscripts must be made freely accessible. This new category would apply to research funded by any combination of federal and private sources. It would also apply to articles published in journals, regardless of who funds the research, because the articles are the result of a peer-review and publication process funded by a nongovernment source....

Comments

• "Work that falls into this new category would be protected by copyright laws..."  Note to the ACS:  research articles by NIH-funded researchers are already protected by copyright law (unless they are written by NIH employees), and Congress has already insisted that they be protected by copyright law.  As I pointed out in an article in August 2007:

  [N]ote that the language [in the appropriations bill adopted by Congress in December 2007] contains a curious proviso: "That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law." ...[W]e have to distinguish two questions: whether the [NIH policy] does in fact violate copyright and whether this proviso gives publishers any leverage they didn't already have. The second question shows why the proviso is so curious. It goes without saying that an agency shouldn't violate copyright law, just as it shouldn't violate laws against speeding, spitting, or cutting hair without a license. The proviso is what lawyers call surplusage; it spells out an obligation that would apply even if not spelled out.

• But Congress spelled it out anyway, which should help everyone stay focused.  If federal law already requires the NIH to conform to copyright law, and Congress reaffirmed that principle just last year, then why are the publishers back in Congress asking for more?  Because they want more than compliance with copyright law.  They want the cushy old arrangement in which publicly-funded research was turned over to private corporations (for-profit or non-profit) for dissemination at any prices that the market would bear. 
• Publishers are in a hard spot.  The NIH policy already conforms to copyright law, but they have to use copyright as the pretext to get the attention of the Judiciary Committee (which has jurisdiction over copyright, not science or science funding).  This creates pressure to disguise revenue arguments as copyright arguments.  Will this fool anyone?  Will supporters of the content industry in Congress vote with the publishing lobby even if they see that it doesn't really have a copyright complaint?
• Even the focus on revenue, however, makes two dubious assumptions beyond the dubious copyright assumption:  that the NIH policy really will diminish publisher revenues and that this will undermine peer review.  I address both assumptions at length in an article from September 2007.

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Jennifer Howard, Congressional Hearing Over Public Access Filled With High Drama, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 12, 2008 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:

A life-and-death battle is going on over public access to federally financed research �life for taxpayers and many scientists, and death for publishers. Or so each side claims....

Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the NIH, led off with a passionate case for PubMed [Central] as "a vital component of 21st-century science." He presented a timeline of breakthroughs related to the Human Genome Project to demonstrate what he called "a true explosion in scientific discovery," one accelerated by researchers' access to unprecedented amounts of data.

The NIH's public-access policy, Dr. Zerhouni argued, helps speed up the pace of discovery by making knowledge widely available. "We fully believe it is consistent with copyright law," he said. He also pointed out that the NIH policy allows for an embargo twice as long as the standard period in Canada, Australia, and parts of Europe.

Heather D. Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, or Sparc, expressed "serious reservations" about the legislation. Ms. Joseph's group speaks for many research libraries, which have been stalwart supporters of public access. Undoing the NIH policy, she said, would limit taxpayers' access to "crucial, health-related information that can make a life-or-death difference in the lives of the American public." ...

Yet Ralph Oman, a copyright lawyer who lectures in intellectual-property law at George Washington University Law School, made the case to the committee that "a mandatory federal policy requiring these works to be made available for worldwide distribution is in inherent conflict with copyright" and would threaten publishers' continued existence....

Both the Association of American Publishers and the Association of American University Presses issued strong statements of support for the bill.

So did Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, which publishes scientific journals. He repeated the publishers' mantra that they make "a significant value-added contribution" to the research they publish, even if the NIH pays for it. "Articles should not be taken from those of us responsible for their creation," he told the subcommittee.

One group was not well represented in yesterday's wrangling: the scientists who actually do the research being fought over, as a subcommittee member, Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, noted. Most of these researchers sign their copyrights over to their publishers as a condition of being published. One glimmer of how some of them feel came in an open letter to Congress submitted by 33 Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, physiology, and medicine.

"The current move by the publishers is wrong," the laureates wrote. "The NIH came through with an enlightened policy that serves the best interest of science, the scientists who practice it, the students who read about it, and the taxpayers who pay for it." ...

Comments

• I've already commented at length, twice (Sept 5 and Sept 11), on publisher claims for the new bill and I won't repeat those comments here.  But here's a comment on Martin Frank's assertion that "Articles should not be taken from those of us responsible for their creation."  (I don't have a transcript or the full context, just this quotation from the CHE story.)
• The claim is breathtakingly one-sided.  Of course publishers have a role in the creation of published research articles.  But who else has a role?  How about the researchers who did the research and wrote the articles?  How about the public funding agency which paid for the research and the taxpayers who stand behind the funding agency? 
• There are two things wrong with Frank's claim.  First, it assumes that publishers are the only parties responsible for the creation of research articles.  Second, it assumes that the NIH policy "takes" those articles from publishers.  On the second of these, see my comments yesterday on the increasingly common but false publisher claim that the NIH policy forces them to "surrender" their articles.  But here's a bit more on the first assumption.
• I acknowledge that publishers add value.  For example, here:  "Speaking for myself, I've never denied that journals add value. To me the question is not whether a journal adds value but how to pay for the most essential kinds of added value without creating access barriers for readers."  But do publishers acknowledge that authors and funders add value?  If not, let them say that in public.  But if so, then they must accept the need for compromise among value-adders and drop the self-serving demand that all their interests be served first and that all other stakeholders, including taxpayers, should make do with what is left.
• Here's how I put the argument in an article from August 2007:

  Publishers like to say that they add value by facilitating peer review by expert volunteers. This is accurate but one-sided. What they leave out is that the funding agency adds value as well, and that the cost of a research project is often thousands of times greater than the cost of publication. If adding value gives one a claim to control access to the result, then at least two stakeholder organizations have that claim, and one of them has a much weightier claim than the publisher. But if publishers and taxpayers both make a contribution to the value of peer-reviewed articles arising from publicly-funded research, then the right question is not which side to favor, without compromise, but which compromise to favor. So far I haven't heard a better solution than a period of exclusivity for the publisher followed by free online access for the public. This compromise-by-time is buttressed by a second compromise-by-version: publishers retain control over the published edition for the life of copyright while the public receives OA to the peer-reviewed but unedited author manuscript. Publishers who want to block OA mandates per se, rather than just negotiate the embargo period, are saying that there should be no compromise, that the public should get nothing for its investment, and that publishers should control access to research conducted by others, written up by others, and funded by taxpayers.

• Elias Zerhouni was completely right to say in the hearing that "the NIH policy allows for an embargo twice as long as the standard period in Canada, Australia, and parts of Europe."  The NIH policy is already a compromise and one that gives publishers more than any other OA mandate from a medical research funder.  Apart from the NIH, here's a complete list of the medical research funding agencies worldwide with OA mandates, public and private.  Every single one uses an embargo of six months, instead of the NIH's 12:  the Arthritis Research Campaign (UK), British Heart Foundation, Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, European Research Council, Cancer Research UK, Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Executive Health Department, Department of Health (UK), Fund to Promote Scientific Research (Austria), Genome Canada, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Joint Information Systems Committee (UK), and the Wellcome Trust (UK).
• Why do all these medical funders choose six month embargoes instead of 12?  Nobody has combed through their policy documents and juxtaposed their statements of rationale.  But I suspect the answer is this:  (1) Any delay in public access to publicly-funded research is a compromise with the public interest, (2) delays are more harmful in medicine than in any other field, and (3) medical funding agencies are dedicated to the public interest in advancing research, health, and healthcare.  But if that's true, then why do they allow any embargo at all rather than require immediate OA?  Roughly for the reasons publishers have been citing.  Publisher interests are already built into these policies, and have already been weighed and valued. 

Update.  Here's an OA version of the article.

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The American Psychological Association has finalized its self-archiving policy after a two-month re-examination.

If you remember, on July 15, 2008, the APA announced a policy to charge NIH-funded authors $2,500 to deposit their articles in PubMed Central, and to prohibit authors from depositing manuscripts on their own in PMC or any other repository.  Even after paying the fee, the APA would not deposit the published version of the article, would not allow OA release for 12 months, would not not allow authors to deposit in any other OA repository, and would not allow authors to retain copyright.  After immediate and widespread protest, the APA announced an interim policy on July 19, rescinding the fee, reaffirming the APA's long-standing green policy, and promising to re-examine the policy before making it final. 

The key paragraph of the final policy is identical to the corresponding paragraph of the interim policy of July 19:

Authors of manuscripts to be published in APA journals may post a copy of the final peer-reviewed manuscript, as a word processing, PDF, or other type file, on their personal Web site or on their employer's server after the manuscript is accepted for publication. The following conditions would prevail: The posted article must carry an APA copyright notice and include a link to the APA journal home page, and the posted article must include the following statement: "This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.� APA does not provide electronic copies of the APA published version for this purpose, and authors are not permitted to scan in the APA published version.

Comment.  The new policy is very conservative, but much better than the July 15 original.  I'm happy to repeat my response to the July 19 interim policy:  "I applaud the APA for reaffirming its green policy for all APA authors, including NIH-funded authors, and I applaud it for dropping the deposit fee."

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... Australian governments should adopt international standards of open publishing as far as possible. Material released for public information by Australian governments should be released under a creative commons licence. ...

Update (PS).  See these specific recommendations from the report (thanks to Glen Newton):

• Recommendation 7.7: Australia should establish a National Information Strategy to optimise the flow of information in the Australian economy. The fundamental aim of a National Information Strategy should be to: ...maximise the flow of government generated information, research, and content for the benefit of users (including private sector resellers of information).
• Recommendation 7.8: Australian governments should adopt international standards of open publishing as far as possible. Material released for public information by Australian governments should be released under a creative commons licence.
• Recommendation 7.9: Funding models and institutional mandates should recognise the research and innovation role and contributions of cultural agencies and institutions responsible for information repositories, physical collections or creative content and fund them accordingly.
• Recommendation 7.10: A specific strategy for ensuring the scientific knowledge produced in Australia is placed in machine searchable repositories be developed and implemented using public funding agencies and universities as drivers.
• Recommendation 7.11: Action should be taken to establish an agreed framework for the designation, funding models, and access frameworks for key collections in recognition of the national and international significance of many State and Territory collections (similar to the frameworks and accords developed around Australia's Major Performing Arts Companies).
• Recommendation 7.14: To the maximum extent practicable, information, research and content funded by Australian governments � including national collections � should be made freely available over the internet as part of the global public commons. This should be done whilst the Australian Government encourages other countries to reciprocate by making their own contributions to the global digital pubic commons....

And some of these reflections:

Governments and public agencies are centrally involved in the provision of research, information and content across a very broad range of activities.  For some years now, both commercial and policy focus has turned towards the economic and social benefits flowing from open access to these resources, and by contrast, the potential costs and 'value damming' that can be involved in 'business as usual' models where content is more tightly held....

Open access requirements are increasingly being introduced by research funding organisations and research institutions worldwide.  To date progress in Australia has been patchy and lacking the comprehensiveness and boldness of leading countries such as the UK....

Also see the transcript of a speech given by Kim Carr on September 9.  Excerpt:

The last big idea in the report I want to touch on is open access.

It is embodied in a series of recommendations aimed at unlocking public information and content, including the results of publicly funded research.

The review panel recommends making this material available under a creative commons licence through:

• machine searchable repositories, especially for scientific papers and data
• cultural agencies, collections and institutions, which would be funded to reflect their role in innovation
• and the internet, where it would be freely available to the world....

Australia takes justifiable pride in the fact that it produces 3 per cent of the world�s research papers with just 0.3 per cent of the world�s population, but that still means 97 per cent of research papers are produced elsewhere.

We are and will remain a net importer of knowledge, so it is in our interest to promote the freest possible flow of information domestically and globally.

The arguments for stepping out first on open access are the same as the arguments for stepping out first on emissions trading � the more willing we are to show leadership on this, we more chance we have of persuading other countries to reciprocate.

And if we want the rest of the world to act, we have to do our bit at home....

Also see coverage and comment by Michael Geist, Michael Jubb, and Kate McDonald.

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The DC Principles Coalition (DCPC) and the Professional/Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) released their joint letter to the House sponsors of the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (FCRWA), September 10, 2008.  This came out before today's hearing on the bill.  One of the letter's co-authors, Martin Frank, was a witness at the hearing.  Excerpt:

...A recent congressional mandate at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) forces publishers to surrender their copyrighted scientific journal articles for free public access twelve months after publication and sets a dangerous precedent. This mandate in effect reduces copyright protection for this important class of works to only one year. The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act rightly prevents the government from imposing mandates that diminish copyright protection for private-sector, value-added research articles....

Also see the Statement on the FCRWA from Patrick Ross, Executive Director of the Copyright Alliance, September 10, 2008.  Excerpt:

...A recent congressional mandate at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) forces publishers to surrender their copyrighted scientific journal articles for free public access 12 months after publication....

�The mere fact that a scientist accepts as part of her funding a federal grant should not enable the federal government to commandeer the resulting research paper and treat it as a public domain work....[T]aking the scientist�s copyrighted interpretation of the data is not fair to other funders, and it is certainly not fair to the publisher. A publisher improves the work through a rigorous peer review process and develops it for publication. Authors and publishers don�t need the feds playing Rumpelstiltskin by returning after a year to take their children away.

�That publisher has earned the right as a copyright owner to pursue a return on his investment, a pursuit made more difficult when its copyright term is essentially reduced to one year....�

Comments

• Both documents use the inaccurate and dishonest word "surrender" to describe what the NIH policy makes publishers do to their publications.  First, the NIH policy regulates grantees, not publishers.  Second, the policy merely archives copies of authors' peer-reviewed manuscripts in PubMed Central.  It doesn't archive the published versions of the articles, let alone deprive publishers of them or nullify any of the rights in them that authors may have transferred to publishers.  When NIH grantees transfer rights to publishers, publishers may hold and exercise those rights in full.
• Note that the use of the word "surrender" in this context was pioneered by the first press release (August 23, 2007) from PRISM, the anti-OA lobbying organization widely ridiculed last year for claiming (among other things) that "public access equals government censorship".  Whether or not PRISM is back as an organization, its dishonest advocacy is back.
• The Copyright Alliance reaches new heights of rhetorical excess with the word "commandeer".  (It would be at least as accurate to say that the traditional publishing model commandeers publicly-funded research, and holds it for ransom.)
• Both documents say that the NIH policy essentially reduces the term of copyright to one year.  Not true.  The free online PMC edition (released within the first year after publication) is not the copy-edited, formatted, paginated published edition.  Publishers retain full control of the published edition, and may refuse permission for free online access until the copyright expires 70 years after the author's death.
• The Copyright Alliance document says that after the 12 month embargo runs, the US government treats deposited manuscripts as "public domain work[s]".  Is this deeply uninformed or deliberately deceptive?  Do you expect better from an organization specializing in copyright?
• Even putting that flat falsehood to one side, both documents leave the impression that the NIH policy infringes publisher copyrights.  But it doesn't.  NIH grantees retain the non-exclusive right to allow PMC to disseminate their peer-reviewed manuscripts; they may transfer all other rights to a publisher.  So when PMC does disseminate those manuscripts, it has the permission of the copyright holders.  As I put it in a February 2008 article on the policy, "publishers cannot complain that this infringes a right they possess, only that it would infringe a right they wished they possessed."  As the debate unfolds, remember this:  There is no copyright infringement here.  There may be reduced publisher revenues, and there may not.  But there is no infringement.
• The DCPC/AAP/PSP letter is signed by 43 publishers.  I'd like to know whether all 43 actually approve of this harmful bill or whether they are just members of either the DC Principles Coalition and/or the AAP/PSP.  At least 34 signatories are society publishers.  Did they consult their membership before opposing the NIH policy?  (BTW, compare these 34 with the 425 societies publishing 450 full OA journals.)
• Researchers:  Has your professional society signed on to the DCPC/AAP/PSP letter?  If so, let your society know internally and online that it's not speaking for its members, that it's putting its interests as a publisher ahead of its interests as a scholarly society, and that it's acting more like a commercial firm than a non-profit organization dedicated to research.  At the same time, send copies of your message to the leadership of the House Judiciary Committee (John Conyers, Chairman, D-MI, and Lamar Smith, Ranking Member, R-TX).  Organize other members of your society to deliver the same message --to the society itself, to the Judiciary Committee, and publicly online-- and elect leadership that will speak for interests of researchers.
• The last time PRISM overplayed its hand, nine important academic publishers disavowed it or took public steps to distance themselves from it.  It's time for publisher-members of DCPC or AAP/PSP who think their organizations' rhetoric goes too far to step forward.  Please don't just make a public statement; send your statement to the leadership of the House Judiciary Committee.

Update.  Also see the AAP/PSP press release on the new bill, and the DCPC press release on Martin Frank's testimony, both September 11, 2008.

Update (9/19/08).  The American Institute of Physics also supports the Conyers bill.  See the summary of its position, its arguments, and its September 11 letter to the Judiciary Committee.

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• Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni, Director, National Institutes of Health
• Dr. Martin Frank, Executive Director, American Physiological Society
• Hon. Ralph Oman, Lecturer, The George Washington University Law School
• Heather Joseph, Executive Director, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

... The only reason this has even made it to public comment (I think) is a bunch of representatives feeling slighted because a bill passed Congress without going through their committee (the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and IP�the measure was part of an Appropriations bill, so it went through that committee). The grumbling at the opening of the session about how important their committee is, prestige of the Appropriations committee be damned, rah rah rah, I think bears this out. So the representatives have been receptive to the patently ridiculous argument that the NIH mandate *changed* copyright law and, thus, should have fallen under their purview. ...

Bottom line: it�s a contract. It�s not a copyright law! The only way the NIH OA mandate conflicts with copyright law is if you change copyright law, which is what the publishers are trying to do now. After all, if it really conflicted, why haven�t the publishers just sued the NIH (as they have also rattled sabres about)?

Maybe because they�d lose. ...

• Now that we have the text of the bill, we see that it would prevent any federal agency from taking a license in a work resulting from its funding, or from adopting any policy that would "restrain or limit the acquisition or exercise of [copyright] rights".
• This is strictly my personal opinion, but this bill doesn't seem likely to become law, at least this session. With hotly-contested elections less than two months away, and a new Congress and administration to take office in January, there's not enough time for the bill to move; there's not even a Senate companion bill. I'd call this a stalling tactic. Advocates of public access, who could be working to adopt policies at other funding agencies, instead have to divert their energy to fend off this ludicrously-named bill. The agencies themselves may hesitate to move forward with new policies until the legislation is resolved. And this could change the narrative about the NIH policy: instead of talking about how well it's worked, the media and policymakers will be talking about the opposition to the policy. It's a setback, and a cynical tactic, but the odds of this bill actually becoming law are slim.
• See also our past post about the bill.

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Andrew Albanese, NIH Public Access Policy To Face Copyright Challenge in Congress? Library Journal, September 5, 2008.  Excerpt:

In less than a week, on Thursday, September 11, the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property of the House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on what sources tell LJ is a legislative attempt to redress publishers' concerns that public access policies �namely the recently enacted policy at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)� conflict with copyright and intellectual property laws. No text has yet been released for the legislation, tentatively titled the �Fair Copyright in Research Works Act.� Nor has the hearing appeared on the subcommittee's schedule.

The legislative hearing comes after publishers succeeded in adding a key phrase to the NIH public access mandate just before the bill�s passage in December, 2007 �that the NIH policy be implemented �in a manner consistent with copyright law.� As LJ reported then, that simple phrase appeared to position publishers for a possible legal or legislative challenge to the policy.

In recent months, the possibility of a legal or legislative challenge began to seem almost certain: in comments to the NIH on implementation this spring, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) included a legal memo from law firm Proskauer Rose backing publisher claims that the NIH policy conflicts with copyright law, and in June, NIH director Elias Zerhouni denied publishers� request that the policy go through a federal rulemaking process.

Shortly after passage of the NIH public access policy, AAP�s VP for legal and government affairs Allan Adler reiterated publishers� position that the measure was �unprecedented� and �inconsistent� with intellectual property laws, and vowed publishers would continue opposition. �[The policy] undermines publishers� ability to exercise their copyrights in the published articles�threatens the intellectual freedom of authors, including their choice to seek publication in journals that may refuse to accept proposed articles that would be subject to the new mandate,� he said. AAP officials, contacted today, were unavailable for comment.

Anticipating such a challenge, officials at SPARC and the Association of Research Libraries, however, have strongly denied that the NIH public access policy conflicts with copyright, last year preparing a memo of their own. �Contrary to the STM publishers� assertions, this policy does not create a statutory exception or limitation to an investigator�s copyright,� the memo states. �Rather, it merely requires the NIH to condition its grant of funding to the investigator on his agreement to provide PMC [PubMed Central] with a copy of his article for the purpose of making the article publicly available via PMC.� ...

Comments

• Here it comes.  Albanese is right that publishers have been giving signs that they'd do this, and he's right that friends of OA have been preparing.  He cites the SPARC memo from last year, but you should also see the latest version of that memo, from this year.
• Read Allan Adler's words carefully:  "[The policy] undermines publishers' ability to exercise their copyrights in the published articles�threatens the intellectual freedom of authors, including their choice to seek publication in journals that may refuse to accept proposed articles that would be subject to the new mandate."  The most important thing to notice is that he doesn't even allege that the policy infringes copyrights.  There's a good reason for that:  the policy doesn't infringe copyrights.  NIH grantees retain the right to authorize public access through PubMed Central, even if they transfer all other rights to a publisher.  Hence, public access through PubMed Central is authorized by the copyright holders.  As I put it when describing the NIH policy in February, "publishers cannot complain that this infringes a right they possess, only that it would infringe a right they wished they possessed." 
• The other allegations are easily dealt with.   For example, does the NIH policy really limit author freedom to publish in journals that refuse to publish NIH-funded authors?  Or should we lay that one at the feet of publishers?
• The publisher complaint boils down to this:  "OK, the policy doesn't violate the letter of copyright law, but it violates the spirit, which is that our ability to profit from research we didn't conduct, write up, or fund should not be put at risk just so that publicly-funded research can be made more useful, by reaching everyone who can make use of it, or just so that taxpayers don't have to pay twice for access.  OK, it's true that authors are the initial copyright holders in their work, and they are free to transfer all, some, or none of their rights to publishers.  But the spirit of copyright law is that they should transfer all of their rights to publishers.  We've grown to depend on it.  OK, it's true that we don't really know that the NIH policy will reduce our revenues, and there may be good reasons to think it won't, but at least the policy creates a risk.  The government should protect us from risks created by new new and better ways of doing things.  It violates the spirit of copyright law for a government agency like the NIH to put the taxpayers' interests ahead of our private interests as an industry." 
• I'm just about to leave the country for a week, during which I'll have limited opportunities for blogging and email.  But I'll try to stay on top of this story.  Gavin and I will blog the developments as they unfold, and I'll have a lot more to say in the October issue of SOAN.

Update.  Alert to US Citizens:  If your representative is a member of the House Judiciary Committee, please contact him/her before the end of business on Tuesday, September 9, and express your support for the NIH policy.  There are committee members from AL, AZ, CA, FL, GA, IA, IL, IN, MA, MI, MN, NC, NY, OH, TN, TX, UT, WI, and VA.  Some members know nothing about the policy but what the publishing lobby has told them.  Explain why the policy matters to you and make it personal.  Send copies of your message to the committee leadership (John Conyers, Chairman, D-MI, and Lamar Smith, Ranking Member, R-TX).  If your representative is not a member of the committee, then you can send a message to the committee leadership alone.  For the contact info on any member, see Congress Merge.  If you can address copyright issues, do.  This committee has jurisdiction over copyright issues, and copyright is the hook publishers used to get the committee's attention.  It's tiring to mobilize all over again, but it's necessary.  Please write and spread the word.  Keep a copy of your message.  You may need it again.

Update.  Also see:  Is NIH Public Access Mandate In Danger? Library Journal Academic Newswire, September 9, 2008.

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Ireland is launching a national OA platform or portal which will harvest the contents of the country's new network of institutional repositories.  See the announcement by Dublin City University (undated but this week):

A Window to Irish Research: the Creation of a National Research Website...

Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation, Dr Jimmy Devins opened a Research Information Systems Conference at the Science Gallery in Trinity College Dublin yesterday. The conference is an integral part of the Irish Universities Association (IUA) project to develop a national research website. The goal of IUA's National Research Platform Project is to provide a web based platform where all publicly funded research projects and information can be found....

Commenting on the value of the project Minister Devins said: "Effective implementation of the Strategy for Science Technology & Innovation (SSTI) will require enhanced visibility and accessibility of the national research effort. We need more effective identification and classification of the research being conducted in the Irish higher education sector and research establishments and more effective dissemination of the results of that research to potential users, in Ireland and globally"....

The National Research Platform feasibility study will run for one year and is funded equally by the HEA Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) and the higher education sector....

Data from expertiseireland.com will provide the cornerstone for the new National Research Platform. Under the banner of the expertiseireland.com website considerable progress has been made in mining the research information systems of the higher education institutions and creating, in a single web-based location, more than 5700 profiles of knowledge experts and access to the opportunities available for licensing from this sector. Other administrations are now considering similar approaches, including the Australian government.

The expertiseireland.com portal also represents an important national resource of data capable of feeding into initiatives such as benchmarking exercises, or bibliometric analysis. The value of expertiseireland.com has been affirmed by an international peer review process which resulted in the IUA securing funding from SIF for a project to provide open access to research papers of university researchers which would use expertiseireland.com as a national access point. For the first time, Irish research will be freely available worldwide. This access will ensure Irish research has a greater impact by significantly increasing the visibility of Irish research and the concomitant increased citations and awareness....

While these efforts are underway, information on much of the national research effort remains largely inaccessible and inconsistent; either being subsumed into the strata of individual university websites, or spread across disparate and uncoordinated sites devoted to individual research projects. The National Research Platform will provide a window to Irish Research by gathering the information from these projects and presenting it in a user friendly format.

Comments 

• If I understand it, the new OA research portal will harvest its contents from university repositories and other distributed sources, rather than require direct deposits in the central database.  If so, it's the first national OA research portal anywhere to take that promising approach.
• Ireland's Higher Education Authority (HEA) adopted an OA mandate just last month, and funded at least the feasibility study behind the new portal.  The Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET) adopted an OA mandate in May 2008.  Both the HEA and IRCSET mandates allow grantees to meet the OA requirement by depositing their work in their own, local institutional repositories, and both plan to make use of the network of IRs at every Irish university now under construction by the Irish Universities Association. 
• This looks like the result of a careful three-step plan:  (1) launch IRs at every Irish university, (2) require OA to new articles resulting from publicly-funded research, understanding that most of them will land first in the author's IR, and (3) launch a national platform to harvest the contents of the IRs and use it to promote the visibility of national research, preserve it, organize it, and crunch it for benchmarking, bibliometric analysis, and quality assessment.  The system is a little more complicated than requiring deposit in special repositories hosted by the funding agencies (such as PMC and UKPMC).  But it's within reach for small countries with relatively few funding agencies and universities.  And it has the benefits of (1) helping universities to disseminate and analyze their own research output, (2) adding local incentives to funder mandates to increase and reward author participation, (3) adding robustness to digital preservation, and (4) ensuring that the system will scale with the growth of published research, regardless of what happens to the national platform.  To me, the greatest benefit is (5) nurturing local cultures of self-archiving at every university, which will carry over to non-funded research and magnify the impact of the funder OA policies.

Update.  Also see the comments of Garret McMahon, not only on the news but also on the presentations at the meeting where the news was announced.

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I just mailed the September issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.  This issue takes a close look at the ways in which journal quality and journal prestige overlap, the ways in which they diverge, and how their complex relationship affects the prospects for OA.

The round-up section briefly notes 96 OA developments from August.

Update.  Here's a story without a strong enough OA connection to blog on its own.  But because it connects well with my article in the September SOAN, I'll note it here.  The British Academy is criticizing the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH) for its attempt to rate journals by their prestige.  That's right:  prestige, not quality or impact.  Journal editors in the history of science, technology, and medicine (HSTM) are circulating an editorial against the practice and asking ERIH to remove them from the index.  The copy of the editorial I received by email, forwarded from the EJournals mailing list, was signed by the editors of 45 journals.  (I can't link to it because the online version is in a closed archive.)  I've seen several OA copies of the editorial, but none has all 45 signatures, for example, 1, 2, 3, 4.  I support the journals' criticism of ERIH.  The prestige rankings will have the effect of cementing a journal's current level of prestige, nourishing the benign circle for high-prestige journals and the vicious circle for low-prestige journals.

Update. For ERIH's response to the criticism, see Michael Whorton's letter to the editor in the Times Higher Education Supplement for November 27, 2008. Whorton is a member of the ERIH steering committee.

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The UK Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) has launched UKDA-store, an OA repository for data in the social sciences.  (Thanks to DataShare.)  From the July 24 announcement:

The ESRC Research Methods Festival at Oxford was the venue, on 30 June 2008, for the launch of UKDA-store, a new self-archiving system for the storage and sharing of primary research data outputs in the social and behavioural sciences.

Research data and output sharing is an important part of publicly-funded research, and research funders are increasingly implementing formal data sharing polices, in line with high-level recommendations and policies made by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and others. The ESRC was one of the first UK funding bodies to initiate a data sharing policy and fund an archive to house research data generated as a result of its funding....

UKDA-store is complementary to the formal preservation and dissemination system for data that are offered by the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) via the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Data Policy. While the UKDA-store system can hold all kinds of digital objects from numeric and textual datasets to technical and research reports, it can also link virtually to outputs held in other repositories. UKDA-store will enable a greater number of research data outputs to be shared by investigators, in cases where ESDS may not have the resources to acquire and store these data, or where the data simply do not fit the ESDS collections development policy.

UKDA-store, developed with funding support from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), uses a state of the art open source repository system based on FEDORA to allow contributors to manage their own data and research outputs. The benefit to users searching for a range of research outputs is that the system allows linking between research funding information, research outputs, publications and archived data sources.

Phase I is geared to ESRC researchers, who have submitted data resources at the end of their awards, where data are deemed to be more suited to a self-archiving repository system than formalised acquisition and preservation with ESDS....

Also see the UKDA-store FAQ and user guide.

Comments 

• At the moment, UKDA-store is limited to work by ESRC-funded researchers.  Although the ESRC adopted an OA mandate for literature and data in June 2006, I can't tell whether deposit in UKDA-store is mandatory for ESRC-funded researchers.
• It appears that the "store" in UKDA-store refers to the JISC-funded StORe (Source-to-Output Repositories) project.  But this is a guess.

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Macquarie University has adopted an OA policy.  From today's announcement:

Research conducted by Macquarie University experts will soon be freely available to anyone with access to the internet, following a unanimous decision by the Macquarie University Council last night.

Council voted to endorse University Senate recommendations that research articles be deposited in the online Macquarie University repository ResearchOnline after their acceptance for publication.

"This historic decision will make Macquarie's scholarly work much more available to researchers, including those in developing countries and those without access to expensive journal subscriptions," said Vice-Chancellor, Professor Steven Schwartz.
"It is an example of using modern communication technology to achieve one of the oldest and most central academic aims - the free dissemination of knowledge."

The Macquarie decision follows similar initiatives by overseas universities such as Harvard and Stanford, and funding bodies such as the US National Institutes of Health, National Research Council of Canada and European Research Council....

[Said Schwartz:]  "Although academics do much of the work associated with these journals for free, the journals can still be prohibitively expensive. Some cost $20,000 for a one-year subscription."

Manuscripts of Macquarie research that are accepted for publication will now be immediately available to anyone on the web. In a few cases, access to some articles may be temporarily embargoed because of a journal's policy. However, Professor Schwartz said that embargoes are the exception rather than the rule.

"The great majority of scholarly journals do not object to making authors' self-archived papers 'Open Access' immediately," he said....

Comments

• For background, see Schwartz' July 3 blog post outlining a draft OA policy, and my comments on it.  (You have to love a Vice Chancellor who initiates an OA policy, who has a blog, and who blogs a draft OA policy for public comment.)  Schwartz hasn't yet blogged about the vote at the University Council.
• Macquarie hasn't yet released the policy text.  So I can't tell how near or far it is from the draft Schwartz blogged last month.  In particular, I can't tell whether it encourages or requires OA.  But all the policies cited in the announcement --at Harvard, Stanford, the NIH, ERC, and Canadian NRC-- are mandates, which suggests that the Macquarie policy is also a mandate. 
• The July draft policy was exemplary:  it included mandatory language, the dual deposit/release strategy (or what Stevan Harnad calls immediate deposit / optional access), and an email request button for sharing manuscripts during the period after deposit and before OA release.  It also provided no opt-out for faculty deposits, and only allowed slack on the embargo period before OA release. 
• I'll post the policy language when I have it.  Meantime, kudos to VCk Schwartz and the Macquarie University Senate and University Council.

Update (8/29/08).  There's a short article on the Macquarie policy in today's issue of The Australian.  It's notable mainly for describing the policy as a mandate.  "Macquarie University has joined the small club of Australian institutions that require academics to make their research papers freely available over the Internet."

Update (8/29/08).  It's a mandate.  Thanks to Steven Schwartz, here is the language adopted by the University Senate and Council:

Senate resolves to recommend that Council:

• mandates that all refereed, revised, final draft research manuscripts be deposited in the Macquarie University Repository after their acceptance for publication,  except for books or chapters in books which may be self-archived at the author's discretion;
• requires that these manuscripts be made Open Access, available to anyone on the web, except where this is restricted by publisher policy.

Schwartz adds that "there is no opt out. Deposit is mandatory and access can only be restricted during embargo periods and not beyond."

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Ireland's Higher Education Authority (HEA) has adopted an OA mandate.  (Thanks to Niamh Brennan.)  From its August 19, 2008, announcement:

...Where a research publication arises in whole or in part from HEA funded research (i.e. where one or other of the researchers concerned receives HEA funds in support of their endeavours), the following policy will be adhered to with effect from 30th June 2008....

Conditions to which HEA funded award recipients should adhere:

1.  All researchers must lodge their publications resulting in whole or in part from HEA-funded research in an open access repository as soon as is practical after publication, and to be made openly accessible within 6 calendar months at the latest, subject to copyright agreement.

2.  The repository should ideally be a local institutional repository to which the appropriate rights must be granted to replicate to other repositories.

3.   Authors should deposit post-prints (or publisher's version if permitted) plus metadata of articles accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals and international conference proceedings.

4.   Deposit should be made upon acceptance by the journal/conference. Repositories should release the metadata immediately, with access restrictions to full text article to be applied as required. Open access should be available as soon as is practicable but not later than six months after publication.

5.  Suitable repositories should make provision for long-term preservation of, and free public access to, published research findings.

6.  Books and book chapters are not covered by such repositories but the following condition applies in such cases.  When a book goes out of print or four years following publication, whichever is sooner, and the publisher does not foresee a further print run or availability online for the work within a six-month period, then authors should make the work available online in an open and accessible way.

7.   ...Data in general [as opposed to metadata] should as far
as is feasible be made openly accessible, in keeping with best practice for reproducibility of scientific results.

8.   Software, together with methods and algorithms, are not directly covered by Open Access repositories.  However in keeping with best practice of scientific reproducibility key scientific results should be made available openly.

9.  HEA may augment or amend the above requirements wherever necessary to ensure best practice in Open Access....

Comments

• The HEA policy is nearly identical to the OA mandate adopted by the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET) in May 2008.  In my blog comment on the IRCSET policy, I said: 

  This may be the best funder mandate anywhere....I particularly applaud the mandatory language, the firm six month deadline with no loopholes for resisting publishers, the equal standing of central and distributed repositories, [the application to data and software], and the full implementation of the dual deposit/release strategy (or what Stevan Harnad calls immediate deposit / optional access)....

• However, there is one difference which significantly weakens the HEA policy.  While IRCSET requires OA within six months of publication, without qualification, HEA requires OA within six months "subject to copyright agreement."  This is precisely the loophole for resisting publishers that I praised IRCSET for omitting.  The HEA policy defers to any publisher policy which prohibits OA archiving or requires a longer embargo period.  It gives publishers a simple opt-out.

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The European Commission has launched an experimental OA mandate for 20% of its 2007-2013 research budget.  From the EC press release (August 20, 2008):

Fast and reliable access to research results, especially via the Internet, can drive innovation, advance scientific discovery and support the development of a strong knowledge-based economy. The European Commission wants to ensure that the results of the research it funds under the EU's 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7) with more than � 50 billion from 2007 - 2013 are disseminated as widely and effectively as possible to guarantee maximum exploitation and impact in the world of researchers and beyond. The Commission today launched a pilot project that will give unrestricted online access to EU-funded research results, primarily research articles published in peer reviewed journals, after an embargo period of between 6 and 12 months. The pilot will cover around 20% of the FP7 programme budget in areas such as health, energy, environment, social sciences and information and communication technologies.

"Easy and free access to the latest knowledge in strategic areas is crucial for EU research competitiveness. This open access pilot is an important step towards achieving the 'fifth freedom', the free movement of knowledge amongst Member States, researchers, industry and the public at large," said EU Commissioner for Science and Research Janez Poto?nik. "Beyond, it is a fair return to the public of research that is funded by EU money."

"...Our new pilot will harness that potential, making it easier for researchers, businesses and policy makers to address global challenges like climate change by providing them with access to the latest research," said Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media. "I welcome especially the fact that scientific publishers have started to move gradually towards new dissemination models and are collaborating with researchers on open access. They have given valuable input to the Commission on these areas, which has been used in the preparation of the pilot project. This will allow a mutually beneficial coexistence that maximises the effects of open access on publicly funded research while leaving room for privately financed business models in publishing."

The Commission's open access pilot, to run until the end of FP7 [in 2013], aims to ensure that the results from EU-funded research are progressively made available to all. Grant recipients will be required to deposit peer reviewed research articles or final manuscripts resulting from their FP7 projects in an online repository. They will have to make their best effort to ensure open access to these articles within either six or twelve months after publication, depending on the research area. This embargo period will allow scientific publishers to get a return on their investment....

Also see the pilot project FAQ.  Excerpt:

Why are embargo periods running from 6 to 12 months instead of a single embargo period?

Scientific publishers draw attention to the fact that when considering open access policies, funding bodies should be aware that "one size does not fit all". The length of time during which research results are novel and useful varies according to discipline....

As this is a pilot initiative, the different embargo periods allow the Commission to experiment and assess the impact of such embargo periods....

The new OA clause in grant agreement makes clear that the embargo period

will be 6 months in the thematic areas "Health", "Energy", "Environment (including Climate Change)", and "Information & communication technologies"...and the activity "Research infrastructures"..., and 12 months in the thematic area "Socio-economic Sciences and the Humanities" and the activity "Science in Society".

Also see the full text EC decision (August 20, 2008) and its Annex 1.

Comments

• Key points:  (1) the project is limited to 20% (�10+ billion) of the FP7 research budget (�50+ billion), but is part of a plan to insure that publicly-funded research is "progressively made available to all"; (2) the pilot runs until the end of FP7 in 2013; (3) the EC acknowledges publisher input and wants the plan to preserve private-sector publishers; (4) the plan uses variable embargo periods (6-12 months) to reflect the fact that articles in different fields have longer or shorter periods of market value; (5) for the research to which the new policy applies, this is an OA mandate; deposit in an OA repository is required.
• As far as I can tell, the policy doesn't yet specify the repositories in which grantees must deposit copies of their work or the timing of the deposits (as opposed to the timing of the eventual OA release).
• In justifying the project, the EC uses four welcome and familiar arguments: (1) that OA makes research faster and more efficient; (2) that OA to publicly-funded research is a part of a "fair return to the public"; (3) that OA multiplies the funder's return on investment; and (4) that OA to European research will boost the European economy and improve its competitiveness.
• The EC will release more details on September 1 at the pilot project home page (now largely empty).
• While the EC acknowledges publisher input, it doesn't acknowledge the input from researchers and research organizations in support of OA, although it largely incorporates their recommendations.  For the major OA recommendations leading up to this pilot project, see the EC-sponsored study in 2006, the December 2006 statement from the Scientific Council of the European Research Council (ERC), the January 2007 report from the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB), and a petition signed by more than 26,000 European researchers and more than 1,300 European research institutions.
• For background, see my article on the EC's February 2007 plan or Communication for OA in Europe.  Also see the EC's cryptically brief announcement from July 2008 that this OA pilot project was coming, and the EC Research Commission's previous signals that it wanted to make "movement of knowledge" a fifth freedom alongside the movement of goods, services, capital, and labor guaranteed by the EU Treaty.
• This isn't the first EU-wide OA mandate.  The European Research Council adopted its OA mandate in December 2007.

Update.  I was wrong in my second bullet point above.  The EC has expressed a preference for institutional repositories.  From the FAQ:

How will the open access pilot be implemented?

New grant agreements in the areas covered by the pilot will contain a clause requiring grant recipients to deposit peer reviewed research articles or final manuscripts resulting from their FP7 projects into their institutional or if unavailable a subject-based repository....

Update.  As part of a separate but related policy, the EC will pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals.  (Thanks to Matthew Cockerill.)  From the FAQ:

Are there similar projects on open access initiated by the Commission? ...

- the Commission has taken the initiative to use FP7 grant agreements to encourage grantees to take advantage of reimbursement for the full cost of open access publishing so that their research articles can be made available in open access mode as soon as they are published....

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Queensland University of Technology has created an experimental $10,000 fund to pay the publication fees at PLoS journals during 2008.

Comment.  I applaud this step.  When other universities launch funds to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals, I applaud them too, but I wonder why they haven't already taken steps to provide green OA for their entire output of peer-reviewed research articles.  Fortunately, that question is unnecessary here.  QUT has had a green OA mandate in place since January 1, 2004.  It was the first university anywhere to adopt one, and now it's the first university to launch an OA journal fund to supplement an existing green OA mandate.

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The US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has launched the Health Care Innovations Exchange.  (Thanks to Ted Eytan.)  From the about page:

Launched in the spring of 2008...[t]he Innovations Exchange is being designed to address a major challenge in health care delivery: the slow diffusion of innovative strategies and activities across health care providers. Every day, health care practitioners develop new, effective ways to provide better care, but that information does not move easily beyond institutional walls or across health care silos (e.g., from hospitals to nursing homes, or from private physician practices to community health clinics). As a result, great ideas are limited in their implementation�and providers are constantly reinventing the wheel because they are unaware that tested solutions already exist.

AHRQ's solution is to provide health care practitioners with:

• A standardized way to document innovations,
• A centrally located and searchable [OA] repository that all health care decision makers can use to quickly identify ideas and tools that meet their needs, and
• A way to network with like-minded innovation adopters.

Users of the Health Care Innovations Exchange are expected to be a diverse group �physicians, nurses, administrators, allied health professionals, and others� with the common thread being their commitment to improving the delivery of health care.

From the page on submissions, Share Your Innovations:

...Why Participate in the Health Care Innovations Exchange?

Contribute to the Greater Good.  The Innovations Exchange provides an avenue for you to bring about positive changes in patient care far beyond the walls of your own institution. By sharing your innovation, you will be helping to build a rich resource that will complement and enhance the usefulness of the traditional professional literature on health care services....

From the page of criteria, How Innovations Are Selected:

...You must be willing to make enough information freely available to enable a user of the Health Care Innovations Exchange to understand the elements of the innovation and make a decision about adopting it. This requirement does not exclude innovations that incorporate commercial products or other materials for which there may be a fee or licensing requirements. It is not necessary for all information about the innovation to be publicly available, but the Editorial Teams will need access to information with sufficient detail to produce a comprehensive description....

The Innovations Exchange will aim to include innovations that are or were funded by the Agency [but will not limit itself to AHRQ-funded research]....

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I just mailed the August issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.  This issue takes a close look at two species of free online access and proposes some vocabulary to help us talk about them unambiguously.  The round-up section briefly notes 115 OA developments from July. 

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SPARC posted some new details (July 16, 2008) on the OA mandate at the Stanford School of Education.  Excerpt:

...[John] Willinsky, who joined the faculty at Stanford in September, was prepared for a heated debate, but instead encountered enthusiasm to move ahead. After a one-hour discussion, the motion was approved unanimously at the retreat attended by most of the 50-member faculty.

�It really does signal a change in people�s understanding, awareness, and sensitivity to the issue because it was such an easy sell,� says Willinsky, a long-time advocate of open access....

Once the Stanford University School of Education faculty approved the policy, it was then sent to the university�s general counsel for review. Willinsky consulted closely with the Harvard Law School to craft the policy, author�s addendum and assemble a packet of supporting documents for the university.  The general counsel gave the go ahead for the policy in late June. The repository is now in place and Willinsky is helping work out the details to implement the open access policy.

The move by the School of Education has triggered interest elsewhere on campus. The School of Humanities and Science has expressed an interest in pursuing an open access policy and Willinsky hopes there will be others at Stanford.

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The Humanities and Social Sciences branch of France's Agence Nationale de la recherche (ANR) has adopted an OA mandate, requiring its grantees to deposit their peer-reviewed manuscripts in HAL-SHS, the humanities and social sciences section of HAL.  (Thanks to Stevan Harnad.)

Read the French original (in ROARMAP) or Google's English.

In November 2007, ANR adopted a policy to encourage OA archiving, and the new policy strengthens it by requiring project managers to insure that it is done.

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Microsoft Research Unveils Free Software Tools to Help Scholars and Researchers Share Knowledge, a press release from Microsoft, July 28, 2008.  Excerpt:

At the ninth annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit today...Tony Hey, corporate vice president of Microsoft�s External Research Division,...announced a set of free software tools aimed at allowing researchers to seamlessly publish, preserve and share data throughout the entire scholarly communication life cycle....

In the area of scholarly communication, Hey said, �Collecting and analyzing data, authoring, publishing, and preserving information are all essential components of the everyday work of researchers � with collaboration and search and discovery at the heart of the entire process. We�re supporting that scholarly communication life cycle with free software tools....�

Microsoft researchers partnered with academia throughout the development of these tools to obtain input on the application of technology to the needs of the academic community, while Microsoft product groups submitted feedback on how the company�s technology could optimally address the entire research process. The collective efforts resulted in the first wave of many tools designed to support academics across the scholarly communication life cycle.

The following tools are freely available now:

• Add-ins. The Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 enables metadata to be captured at the authoring stage to preserve document structure and semantic information throughout the publishing process, which is essential for enabling search, discovery and analysis in subsequent stages of the life cycle. The Creative Commons Add-in for Office 2007 allows authors to embed Creative Commons licenses directly into an Office document (Word, Excel or PowerPoint) by linking to the Creative Commons site via a Web service.
• The Microsoft e-Journal Service [alpha version]. This offering provides a hosted, full-service solution that facilitates easy self-publishing of online-only journals to facilitate the availability of conference proceedings and small and medium-sized journals.
• Research Output Repository Platform [slides, forum, about]. This platform helps capture and leverage semantic relationships among academic objects � such as papers, lectures, presentations and video � to greatly facilitate access to these items in exciting new ways.
• The Research Information Centre [forthcoming]. In close partnership with the British Library, this collaborative workspace will be hosted via Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and will allow researchers to collaborate throughout the entire research project workflow, from seeking research funding to searching and collecting information, as well as managing data, papers and other research objects throughout the research process....

Comments

• This is for real.  Don't mistake the Microsoft research division, which doesn't sell anything, for the Microsoft product divisions.  Tony Hey believes in open access and open data, and is putting Microsoft resources behind them.  For background, see Richard Poynder's interview with Tony Hey (December 2006), and my previous post on the Microsoft repository platform (March 2008). 
• The new tools are free of charge.  The announcement doesn't say they will ever be open source, but Microsoft encourages open-source tools in the open chemistry projects it funds.  So it's possible.
• The authoring add-in should help publishers (including OA publishers) reduce costs, at least if they want to provide XML, and it should help them decide to use XML.  The repository platform and e-journal service are even more direct contributions to OA.  I don't know much about the e-journal service, apart from a swarm of great ideas raised at a Microsoft brainstorming meeting in November 2005.  And I don't know much about the repository platform except that it will be interoperable, play well with Microsoft tools like SQL Server Express, use semantic processing to create arbitrary relationships between resources, and serve as a back end compatible with DSpace and EPrints front ends.  I look forward to user reviews.

Update.  Also see Peter Monaghan's story in the Chronicle of Higher Education, July 31, 2008.  Excerpt:

For example, the Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007...allows users to create documents in the widely used format developed by the National Library of Medicine's free digital archive of peer-reviewed biomedical and life-sciences journal literature, PubMed Central. But users will also be able to shape the software to suit other formats because the code for the tool is openly accessible and freely adaptable.

The products, initially aimed at scientists, also seek to make it easier for authors and editors to electronically embed into papers details about the research process and its results, such as bibliographies and key phrases. The goal, Microsoft officials said, is to help readers who conduct searches in electronic databases find relevant articles more easily.

The new tools will enable a more dynamic way of discovering and exploring links within enormous and hard-to-search bodies of research, the officials said.

"We've never before addressed what we could put around Office, Excel, SharePoint, and our other programs to make them more useful for science," said Tony Hey, corporate vice president of Microsoft's external-research division. "For example, Word was not tailored for scientific papers. But we decided to see, Can we make it more useful in that way?" ...

Such developments [OA mandates at funders and universities] have increasingly raised concerns about copyrights and fair reuse of archived materials. So to help authors, publishers, and databases embed information about copyrights and licenses in Microsoft Office documents, the company released another free product, called the Creative Commons Add-in for Office 2007.

Mr. Hey says he believes that Microsoft's business goals and academe's needs are in harmony when it comes to research and publishing. Scholarly institutions will happily pay fees, he said, to have companies like his provide products that relieve universities and their faculty members of tasks like managing large databases. After all, he said, scholars are more interested in doing actual research. Mr. Hey, who directed Britain's national e-Science Programme from 2001 to 2005, said that during recent decades he had seen "generations of research scientists sacrificed to being the computer-science techie for their group."

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NRC Publications Archive: Extending the reach and increasing the impact of NRC research, a press release from Canada's National Research Council (NRC), July 23, 2008.  Excerpt:

The National Research Council's Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI) is pleased to announce an initiative to create an NRC Publications Archive (NPArC). This searchable, web-based archive will provide access to NRC's record of science and demonstrate the many ways NRC researchers translate science and technology into value for Canada.

NPArC will increase the access to NRC-authored publications, guarantee long-term access to NRC's research output, and serve as a valuable resource for NRC researchers, collaborators and the public.

As part of this initiative, NRC has established a policy making it mandatory, starting in January 2009, for NRC institutes to deposit copies of all peer-reviewed, NRC-authored publications and technical reports in NPArC.

Wherever possible, NPArC will provide access to the full text of these publications. NRC's Licence to Publish (Crown Copyright) will be updated to declare its intent to deposit the full-text of NRC-authored publications in NPArC. However, the nature, timing and extent of access to individual publications depends on a variety of factors, including agreements with publishers, or in the case of technical reports the sensitivity or confidentiality of content.

More information about the NRC Publications Archive will be forthcoming closer to the launch date in December 2008.

Comments 

• For background, see my July 16 post on Richard Akerman's preview of the NRC OA mandate.
• On the one hand, the NRC has adopted a policy "making it mandatory...for NRC institutes to deposit copies of all peer-reviewed, NRC-authored publications and technical reports in NPArC."  On the other, it appears that the policy has a loophole for resisting publishers:  "the nature, timing and extent of access to individual publications depends on a variety of factors, including agreements with publishers...." 
• I urge the NRC to keep the loophole closed.  There's no need to let publishers opt out by demanding onerous terms incompatible with the NRC's plan for green OA to "all peer-reviewed, NRC-authored publications".  For examples of how to do it, see the OA policies of the Wellcome Trust, NIH, MRC, and others, which simply require, as part of the funding contract, that grantees deposit relevant works in the relevant OA repository.  If grantees find that a given publisher will not permit OA archiving on the terms spelled out in the prior contract, then they must look for another publisher. 

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Open access to large-scale drug discovery data, an announcement from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), July 23, 2008.  Excerpt:

The Wellcome Trust has awarded �4.7 million (�5.8 million) [$9.3 million] to EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) to support the transfer of a large collection of information on the properties and activities of drugs and a large set of drug-like small molecules from the publicly listed company Galapagos NV to the public domain. It will be incorporated into the EMBL-EBI's collection of open-access data resources for biomedical research and will be maintained by a newly established team of scientists at the EMBL-EBI. These data lie at the heart of translating information from the human genome into successful new drugs in the clinic....

As part of the Wellcome Trust grant announced today, the EBI will obtain the rights to the databases from BioFocus DPI [the service division of Galapagos]. The award will make it possible to provide free access to this information for all researchers. "The scientific community worldwide will greatly benefit from unrestricted access to these data. It will aid their efforts in predictive drug discovery," says Galapagos CEO Onno van de Stolpe. "Galapagos has successfully accelerated its research programmes with these, and BioFocus DPI used the data to deliver on its contracts with customers. After this transfer, which we hope will contribute to the advancement of drug discovery research by improving access to the data that we have collected, we will continue to use these resources."

The transfer will empower academia to participate in the first stages of drug discovery for all therapeutic areas, including major diseases of the developing world....

[S]ays EMBL-EBI Director Janet Thornton: "With this transfer, we aim to facilitate faster and better drug discovery...."

Comments

• Note that Galapagos is not saying that these data have outlived their usefulness.  On the contrary, it will continue to make use of them itself.  The theory here is that open data will accelerate drug discovery, even for the company which formerly held them to itself.  When Novartis did the same thing in 2007, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams described it this way:  "[B]y placing its data in the public domain, Novartis hopes to leverage the talents and insights of a global research community to dramatically scale and speed up its early-stage R&D activities....By sharing basic scientific data and collaborating across institutional boundaries, companies like Novartis and Intel are challenging a deeply held belief that early stage R&D activities are best pursued within the confines of secretive laboratories. As a result, both were able to cut costs, accelerate innovation, create more wealth for shareholders, and ultimately help society reap the benefits of scientific research more quickly...."  Some now call this practice precompetitive sharing. 
• Also note that the Wellcome Trust grant goes to EMBL, to host and manage these data, not to Galapagos, to relinquish them.
• Kudos to Galapagos and Wellcome Trust not only for opening these data, but for choosing the public domain rather than a license.  This fits with Science Commons' latest thinking on barrier-free research and collaboration in the Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data.

Update.  Also see the comment from John Wilbanks of Science Commons:

...This makes the scientific data that Galapagos has gathered an extraordinary gift � not just to science, but to open science....Returning the data to the public domain removes the legal barriers that prevent us from making full use of the latest technologies for data integration and analysis. The Galapagos data can now be used in ways no one can anticipate � the very definition of innovation....

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A consortium of major medical schools has announced the World�s Largest Collaborative [OA] Online Encyclopedia of Medicine And Health, July 23, 2008.  Excerpt:

The Medpedia Project today announced the formation of the world�s largest collaborative online encyclopedia of medicine called Medpedia. Physicians, medical schools, hospitals, health organizations and public health professionals are now volunteering to collaboratively build the most comprehensive medical clearinghouse in the world for information about health, medicine and the body. This free public site will officially launch at the end of 2008, and a preview site becomes available today....

Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health, the University of Michigan Medical School and dozens of health organizations around the world are contributing to The Medpedia Project in various ways. Many organizations will contribute seed content free of copyright restrictions. Harvard Medical School will publish content to uneditable areas that members of their faculty have created as part of a medical school wide effort. Others organizations, such as University of Michigan Medical School will encourage members of their faculty to edit Medpedia as individuals.

Other health and medical organizations that are supporting Medpedia include the American College of Physicians (ACP), the Oxford Health Alliance (OxHA.org), the Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies, (FOCIS), and the European Federation of Neurological Associations (EFNA). These groups are contributing content and promoting participation in Medpedia to their members. Medpedia is also receiving content and cooperation from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and many other government research groups who are eager to have that public domain information distributed to both the general public and to healthcare professionals.

�Medpedia has the potential to become a vital tool for scientists, researchers and educators, as well as for the general public across the globe, providing easy access to the latest and best information on medicine,� said Dr. Anthony L. Komaroff, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Health Publications Division of Harvard Medical School. �Sharing what we know, we can help each other and help ourselves.� ...

Over the next few years, the growing community of Editors on Medpedia will create and interlink Web pages for the more than 30,000 known diseases and conditions, the more than 10,000 drugs being prescribed each year, the thousands of medical procedures being performed and the millions of medical facilities around the world. These pages will provide insight into the latest health and medical discoveries along with photographs, video, sound, and images. The site has been designed so that everything on a subject will be simple to access. The main topic pages will be written in language the general public can easily understand, and each topic page will have with it a "Technical� page for professionals to discuss the same topic in more clinical and scientific language....

Medpedia runs on open source Mediawiki software, and like Wikipedia, content on the Medpedia site will be available for reuse under GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)....In the future, in order to cover operating costs, non-invasive, text-based advertising will be shown on the Medpedia website through third-party ad networks such as Google�s Ad Sense....Medpedia.com Inc. is funded and managed by Ooga Labs a technology greenhouse in San Francisco developing several for-profit, mission-oriented companies to address worldwide needs in health, education, and activism.

While the contents of Medpedia will be OA, editing privileges will be limited to those with an M.D. or biomedical Ph.D. who apply to become an editor.  For more details, see the FAQ.

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The Open Access Directory (OAD) is very pleased to announce the Bibliography of open access.

The bibliography is based on Charles Bailey's definitive Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals (ARL, 2005).  We are very grateful to Charles and the ARL for their willingness to move the bibliography to OAD for community updating and revision.  Here's how Charles described the launch on his blog this morning:

...With my permission and the agreement of ARL, most of the Open Access Bibliography has been converted to the MediaWiki format to form the basis of the Bibliography of Open Access. The new bibliography will be authored by registered Open Access Directory users, who can add or edit references. It is under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

The initial version of new bibliography has live links; however, they were last updated in August 2004, when the text of the Open Access Bibliography was frozen for print publication preparation. These links can now be updated by registered users.

The Open Access Bibliography, which contains textual sections not found in the Bibliography of Open Access, remains freely available in HTML and PDF formats at Digital Scholarship and as a printed book....

The OAD bibliography couldn't have a better foundation for future development.  It includes all the citations in Charles' original work and omits only his Preface, Acknowledgements, and introductory essay, Key Open Access Concepts.

Remember that OAD is a wiki.  We appreciate your help in keeping its lists comprehensive, accurate, and up to date.

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Inquiry into Improving Access to Victorian Public Sector Information and Data, a discussion paper from the Economic Development and
Infrastructure Committee of the Victorian Parliament, July 2008.  (Thanks to Tom Worthington.)  Excerpt:

...Question 2: How can improved access to and re-use of PSI [public sector information] drive economic growth, employment opportunities and new commercial ventures? ...

Question 4: If the Victorian public sector is to provide increased access to information, what kind of information would provide the greatest opportunities to improve or develop: ...b) social, medical and scientific research? ...

2.1.1... Emerging evidence suggests that in some cases improved access to and re-use of PSI can increase net returns on investment by government, particularly when access to publicly funded research is improved [citing the important study from Houghton et al, 2006] ....

2.1.1.1... Enhanced access to research may potentially increase the efficiency of R&D investment within scholarly and research communities by reducing duplication of research, and by increasing primary data and information available to researchers. In particular, improved access to R&D research could reduce the number of scientific studies that repeat �failed� research hypotheses. The DEST report also suggested that wider access to PSI would encourage open scientific inquiry and collective learning; allow closer interrogation of research findings and conclusions; and provide researchers with increased opportunities to identify and explore issues not considered in original research briefs, through a re-examination of primary research data....

2.1.1.2... Another argument for enhanced access to PSI is that it would increase and broaden opportunities for commercial exploitation of research data. Improved access to government research data and information could also potentially benefit the private sector by allowing it to draw on government knowledge and experiences to improve the quality of services, and thereby increase the productivity of the private sector in the economy.

2.1.1.3... The general community can potentially benefit through the development of informed citizens and informed consumers, who by having greater access to research publications and government information would better equip themselves to make efficient use of public and private sector services. An informed community could also, potentially, contribute more actively to the development of effective, efficient, and productive public policy....

Comment.  The committee is soliciting public comments on the paper, which are due by August 22, 2008.  (See the submission details here and on p. ix of the report.)  After digesting the comments, the committee will report back to Parliament by June 30, 2009.  I urge Australians, and especially Victorians, to submit comments to the committee in support of OA for publicly-funded research.

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The American Psychological Association has posted a new interim policy on NIH-funded authors and self-archiving. 

If you remember, last week the APA posted a policy (1) charging a $2,500 fee to deposit author manuscripts in PubMed Central, and (2) revoking the APA's long-standing green policy, or permission to self-archive, at least for NIH-funded authors.

The new interim policy drops the deposit fee and reaffirms the green policy, even for NIH-funded authors.  Excerpt:

A previous APA Web site posting of these author instructions that included reference to a publication fee for manuscripts based on research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since October 1, 2007, is currently being re-examined and is not being implemented at this time.  APA will continue to deposit NIH-funded manuscripts on behalf of authors in the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central (PMC) in compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy, as noted below.

Authors of manuscripts to be published in APA journals may post a copy of the final peer-reviewed manuscript, as a word processing, PDF, or other type file, on their personal Web site or on their employer's server after the manuscript is accepted for publication. The following conditions would prevail: The posted article must carry an APA copyright notice and include a link to the APA journal home page, and the posted article must include the following statement: "This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.� APA does not provide electronic copies of the APA published version for this purpose, and authors are not permitted to scan in the APA published version....

Comments

• I applaud the APA for reaffirming its green policy for all APA authors, including NIH-funded authors, and I applaud it for dropping the deposit fee.
• I call the new policy "interim" because the policy page says that the deposit fee "is currently being re-examined and is not being implemented at this time."  I urge the APA to make the interim policy permanent.
• The new interim statement resolves a conflict between the APA's 2002 policy, allowing self-archiving, and the (now-deleted) 2008 policy restricting it.  But there is one more conflict I hope the APA will resolve shortly.  The APA publication rights form does not expressly allow self-archiving and, read narrowly, may prohibit it.  (Thanks to Stuart Shieber for pointing this out.)  It allows authors to "reproduce" their paper for "personal use or for company use" and to "make limited distribution of all or portions of the...paper prior to publication."  But that is all.  This language was in force even before last week's policy restricting the APA green policy.  By contrast, both the 2002 policy and the new interim policy are more explicit and more helpful in their permission for self-archiving.  The 2002 policy allows authors to "post a copy of the final manuscript...on their Web site or their employer's server after it is accepted for publication" and the new interim policy allows authors to "post a copy of the final peer-reviewed manuscript...on their personal Web site or on their employer's server after the manuscript is accepted for publication."  I hope the APA will soon make its publication rights form as clear and unambiguous as these two policy statements.
• For my comments on the retracted policy (charging a deposit fee and revoking the permission to self-archive for NIH-funded authors), see my blog posts for July 15 and July 16.

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Richard Akerman, Mandatory IR deposit as of 2009 for National Research Council Canada, Science Library Pad, July 15, 2008. 

From an internal email (with permission)

[The NRC Senior Executive Committee] SEC has established a policy making it mandatory, starting in January 2009, for NRC institutes to deposit copies of all peer-reviewed publications (articles, proceedings, books, book chapters) and technical reports in [the forthcoming NRC Institutional Repository, to be called] NPArC. The SEC has also approved an update to NRC Form 22 Licence to Publish (Crown Copyright) that will explicitly state NRC�s intention to deposit these publications in NPArC.

As this blog is by no means an official source of information about my organisation [NRC], if you have any questions I ask that you go through regular NRC or CISTI communications channels [NRC Newsroom and NRC Mediaroom].

Comment.  Thanks to the Richard for posting the news and kudos to all involved at the NRC.  Neither the NRC Newsroom nor NRC Mediaroom has any details yet, but I'll post more as I learn more.

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The American Psychological Association may have the worst publisher policy to date for NIH-funded authors.  Excerpt:

In compliance with [the NIH OA policy], APA will deposit the final peer-reviewed manuscript of NIH-funded research to PMC upon acceptance for publication. The deposit fee of $2,500 per manuscript for 2008 will be billed to the author's university per NIH policy....

Even after collecting the fee, the APA will not deposit the published version of the article, will not allow OA release for 12 months, will not allow authors to deposit in PMC themselves (and bypass the fee), will not allow authors to deposit in any other OA repository, and will not allow authors to retain copyright.

Comments

• I don't oppose publication fees at OA journals.  But publication fees at OA journals buy gold OA, which always includes immediate OA and OA to the published edition of the article.  In most cases it also allows the author to retain key rights, including the right to deposit the work in an OA repository independent of the publisher.  But the APA is not charging for gold OA.  It's charging for green OA:  deposit in an OA repository (PMC) and nothing more.  In fact, the APA is frank enough to call its demand a "deposit fee" rather than a "publication fee".  No author or author-sponsor should ever have to pay a fee to deposit an article in an OA repository. 
• The NIH policy does not prevent publishers from charging fees.  Indeed, it doesn't prevent publishers from doing anything.  It regulates grantees, not publishers.  But it certainly doesn't require publishers to charge fees.  The APA is simply being dishonest when it says that it will bill its fee to universities "per NIH policy". 
• The foulness of this policy wouldn't matter if NIH-funded authors simply steered clear of APA journals.  That's my recommendation.  A green OA fee is not a good use of grant funds, university funds, or author funds.
• The APA isn't the first publisher to charge for green OA, especially for authors under green OA mandates from their funders.  Both Wiley and the ACS did it under the previous (voluntary) version of the NIH policy, and the OAD is documenting publishers who try the same tactic under the new (mandatory) version of the policy.
• See my past posts on the APA's opposition to the NIH policy.

Update (7/16/08).  This morning the APA policy page deleted the language summarized above and replaced it with these paragraphs:

A new document deposit policy of the American Psychological Association (APA) requiring a publication fee to deposit manuscripts in PubMed Central based on research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is currently being re-examined and will not be implemented at this time. This policy had recently been announced on APA�s Web site. APA will soon be releasing more detailed information about the complex issues involved in the implementation of the new NIH Public Access Policy.

APA will continue to deposit NIH-funded manuscripts on behalf of authors in compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy.

Update (7/16/08).  Also see Kevin Smith's comment, Making Elsevier Look Good:

...Since there is virtually no cost associated with the mechanics of deposit itself, and the NIH policy allows an embargo on public availability of articles of up to one year in order to protect the traditional subscription market, it is hard to see what this policy is intended to accomplish other than to force an additional income stream out of the faculty authors who already provide the APA with free content. And there is heavy irony in the APA�s assertion that they can do this �as the copyright holder.� ...

Two simple and specific messages need to be delivered over and over to our faculty authors if this dysfunctional and abusive system is to change.

First, they need to be reminded that they do have choices about where they publish their work; there is no logic in remaining loyal to a particular journal when the publisher of that title has clearly decide to place profit and self-interest above the well-being of the academy, the discipline, or its scholarly authors.

Second, regardless of where they publish their research, scholars should resist transferring copyright to journal publishers. APA can only tell scholarly authors what that can and cannot do with their work after they have received a transfer of copyright; up to that point they must negotiate, not dictate....

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The Open Access Directory (OAD) just opened a list of OA journal business models for community editing. 

The goal of this list is to catalog the basic themes in financing OA journals, and all the extant variations on those themes.  From the scope notes:

This is a list of business models and revenue sources for OA journals.  Some revenue sources are supplementary and not sufficient. We aim to include all the revenue sources actually used by OA journals, even if they are small parts of larger business models.

The list has reached a critical mass but still needs a lot of work.  Remember that OAD is a wiki, and you can help keep its lists comprehensive, accurate, and up to date.

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The Open Access Directory (OAD) is pleased to announce that its list of Publisher policies on NIH-funded authors is now open for community editing and enlargement.

The list starts with 204 links to publisher policies and 26 annotations.  We've very grateful to Arta Dobbs (University of Connecticut Health Center), Molly Keener (Wake Forest University Health Sciences), and P. Scott Lapinski (Harvard Medical School) for their hard work in developing this foundation on which the public can now build.

OAD is a wiki  and we encourage all users to help keep it comprehensive, accurate, and up to date.  We especially encourage publishers with a policy on NIH-funded authors to make sure that their policy is included on the new list. 

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The Open Access Directory (OAD) list of Data repositories is now open for community editing.

OAD is a wiki, and you can help the cause by adding or revising entries to its lists.

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Barbara Malina (ed.), Open Access Opportunities and Challenges:  A Handbook, the German UNESCO Commission, July 2008.  A 144 pp. collection of articles on OA by 38 authors.  (Thanks to Napoleon Miradon.)

This is an English translation of Open Access: Chancen und Herausforderungen - ein Handbuch, which the German UNESCO Commission published on June 6, 2007.

PS:  The German edition includes a short section by me on OA in the US, an abridgement of my longer piece in Neil Jacobs (ed.), Open Access: Key strategic, technical and economic aspects, Chandos, 2006.  The English edition includes an abridgement and update (as of September 2007) of the same longer piece. 

Comment.  Also see Canessa and Zennaro's Science Dissemination using Open Access, which I blogged this morning.  That makes two books on OA in one day.  If you count Kylie Pappalardo's Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment:  A Guide for Authors, which I blogged on Tuesday, then that's three books on OA in three days.

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E. Canessa and M. Zennaro (eds.), Science Dissemination using Open Access, a new book published under a CC-NC-ND license by the Science Dissemination Unit of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, July 2008.

The book knits together pieces from many sources into a single narrative.  (Disclosure:  some of the pieces are mine.)  It's available as a downloadable PDF (4.74 MB, 196 pp.) or an online edition in an ebook viewer with turning pages.

From today's announcement:

The book is a compendium of selected literature on Open Access, both on the technical and organizational levels, and was written in an effort to guide the scientific community on the requirements of Open Access, and the plethora of low-cost solutions available. The book also aims to encourage decision makers in academia and research centers to adopt institutional and regional Open Access Journals and Archives to make their own scientific results public and fully searchable on the Internet. Discussions on open publishing via Academic Webcasting are also included.

The book is an effort by ICTP-SDU (Italy) in collaboration with CERN (Switzerland) enabled by the support of INASP (UK).

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Steven Schwartz, Open Access: what do you think?  Macquarie University Vice Chancellor's Office, July 3, 2008.  Schwartz is the Vice Chancellor of Macquarie University.  Excerpt:

I am thinking about bringing a paper to the Macquarie University Senate on Open Access, the subject of an earlier blog.

A draft of this paper appears below. I would like your feedback. Have I missed anything? Can the paper be improved?

For more information on Open Access, you might like to consult this guide.

DRAFT - Open Access at Macquarie

Scholarly research is one of Macquarie�s most important contributions to society. As academics, we all have an interest in disseminating our work to the widest possible audience....

It is time for Macquarie University to join the ranks of a growing number of universities worldwide as well as a growing number of funding councils (ARC, NIH, ERC) to mandate that our refereed research output be deposited (�self-archived�) in Macquarie University�s Institutional Repository.

At a minimum, the mandate will only require us to deposit our refereed, revised, final drafts in the Macquarie repository immediately after its acceptance for publication. The electronic copy will provide a record of our research and can be used for government audits, promotions, report generation, grant applications as well as other purposes. In other words, no other data collection will be necessary; no other tiresome forms will need to be completed.

Depositing an article in the repository is not the same as making it accessible to scholars around the world. Articles in the repository will not be automatically accessible to outsiders. The author will determine who has access. This is necessary because some journals have policies that prohibit open access (in some cases, only for an embargo period) and academics need to be flexible in what they make available. Thus, for articles published in journals that do not yet endorse Open Access, or who impose an embargo, access to the deposit can be set as Closed Access permanently or for the length of the embargo. Under Closed Access, only the author has access to the full text. The metadata (author, title, date, journal name, and so on) will still be visible to all users webwide.

In practice, journal policies may not prove to be a major problem. The great majority of scholarly journals do not object to making authors� self-archived papers �Open Access� immediately. (For a database summarising the policies of most journals, see here). Note, however, that some journals only make the Open Access option available on authors� request.

For those who wish to fulfill user needs during the Closed Access embargo period, the Macquarie repository will have an �Eprint Request� button. Anyone webwide can press the button to send an automatic Eprint request to the author. The author can click to send one individual Eprint to the requester. Researchers have used this practice for many years, originally with paper reprints. (To see how this works, see here.) ...

To make our scholarly work available to all scholars including those in developing countries and those without access to expensive library subscriptions, and to ensure that the University has a record of its scholarly output, Senate resolves to recommend that Council:

1. mandates that all refereed, revised, final draft manuscripts be deposited in the Macquarie repository after its acceptance for publication;

2. mandates that all journal article manuscripts be deposited in the repository but monographs will be self-archived at authors� discretion;

3. requires that, where permissible, manuscripts be made Open Access, available to anyone on the web; and

4. permit, where necessary because of journal policy, or the author requests, manuscripts to be made Closed Access until dissemination is permitted.

Comments

• If adopted, this would be one of the strongest university policies anywhere.  I especially applaud its mandatory language, the dual deposit/release strategy or what Stevan Harnad calls immediate deposit / optional access, and the use of an email request button for manuscripts during the period after deposit and before OA release.  I also like the way it offers no opt-out for deposit, and allows slack only on the timing of the release. 
• My only suggestion is to clear up a slight inconsistency in the "release" half of the deposit/release policy.  Schwartz' description suggests that authors could choose (for a variety of reasons) to leave deposits closed forever even if the publisher's embargo was temporary.  But point #3 of draft resolution requires OA release "where permissible".  My preference would be to resolve this tension in favor of point #3. 
• Once this tension is resolved, however, I urge Schwartz to present it to the Macquarie University Senate --and the Senate to follow Harvard and Stanford by adopting it in a unanimous vote.

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OA mandate forthcoming in Norway?  Co-Action Publishing, June 30, 2008.  An English summary of this June 2 document from the Norwegian government.  Excerpt:

This month the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research issued a request to the Norwegian Research Council and The Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions (UHR) for advice on Open Access to scientific articles.

In a Parliamentary Report nr. 20 (2004-2005) the government signaled that the Ministry would be investigating the possibility of making the results of publicly financed research more widely available. The current request for advice is a follow-up to the report and comes on the heels of a number of international events that have furthered Open Access, including a number of mandates from other national research councils and the Harvard University mandate.

The official request states that �The Ministry of Education and Research wishes to see the possibilities for stimulating an increased use of Open Access publishing of peer-reviewed scientific literature.� By Open Access, the Ministry refers to both gold and green publishing, but there appears to be a stronger emphasis on self-archiving as the request specifically states that the investigation should evaluate whether a mandate on self-archiving (green) of publicly financed research should be introduced, as well as an evaluation of the legal, technical, economic, administrative, and other consequences of such a mandate.

Comment.  There's a good chance that Norway will end up adopting an OA mandate.  The government is asking advice from the Norwegian Research Council, which created an OA working group last fall and is now working on an OA position paper.  The government is also asking advice from the Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions, which joined SCOAP3 in January 2008, and submitted a pro-OA comment (in English) to the EC in June 2006, calling on the EC to provide OA to publicly-funded research and revealing that it had already called on its own member institutions to adopt local OA policies.

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Yesterday the European Commission released this very brief announcement:

Following on the Council Conclusions and the Commission Communication on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation, the European Commission is developing an open access pilot in FP7. More information will be available soon.

Comment.  For OA-related excerpts from the Council Conclusions (November 2007) and the Commission Communication (February 2007), and my comments, see my two blog posts on the Conclusions (one, two) and my blog post and newsletter article on the Communication.  Both documents fall short of endorsing the near-consensus recommendations for an OA mandate the EC received from the EU research community.

In the Communication, the EC said that "Initiatives leading to wider access to and dissemination of scientific information are necessary, especially with regard to journal articles and research data produced on the basis of public funding" (p. 7), and that it would eventually "issue specific guidelines on the publication of articles in open repositories after an embargo period" (p. 8). I suspect that the coming OA pilot is not the same as the coming OA guidelines, but just an experiment to help shape the guidelines.

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I just mailed the July issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.  This issue takes a close look at how access barriers create a "last-mile problem" for knowledge.  The round-up section briefly notes 128 OA developments from June.

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