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Making medical information more accessible Adam Bosworth, Health care information matters, Google blog, November 30, 2006. Bosworth is the Vice President of Google. Excerpt:
PS: I've written to Google, suggesting ways that it could help provide open access to medical research.
I just mailed the December issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. This issue offers my predictions for 2007 and takes a close look at how the US mid-term election may affect OA. The Top Stories section takes a brief look at the CERN project to convert particle physics journals to OA, two major OA initiatives from India, two recommendations for OA mandates in Australia, the INSPIRE compromise in the EU, and the AAA decision to disband the AnthroSource Steering Committee for endorsing FRPAA. I'm continuing the Round-up experiment for another month, briefly recapitulating the OA developments from the past month not covered in the other stories.
Art museum drops reproduction fees for scholarly uses Martin Bailey, V&A to scrap academic reproduction fees, The Art Newspaper, December 1, 2006. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) Excerpt:
Paul Hutchings, Open Access now Openly Accepted, Kindle Research, December 1, 2006. Excerpt:
Guidelines to implement the Internet Manifesto support OA IFLA and UNESCO have published the IFLA/UNESCO Internet Manifesto Guidelines (dated September 2006 but apparently released this week). The new guidelines will help libraries implement IFLA's 2002 Internet Manifesto. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) Excerpt:
Barbara Brynko, The Spirit of Giving, Information Today, December 2006. Excerpt:
Progress on the World Digital Library UNESCO and US Library of Congress host meeting on World Digital Library project, a press release from UNESCO, December 1, 2006. Excerpt:
Open Courseware is a worldwide movement Jeffrey Thomas, Online Materials Broadening Global Access to Education, US Info (from the US Department of State), December 1, 2006. Excerpt:
Emergency medicine researchers favor OA R. M. Rodriguez and three co-authors, An evaluation of emergency medicine investigators� views on open access to medical literature, Emergency Medicine Journal, December 2006. Only this abstract is free online, at least so far.
Don Hawkins, Open Access From the Publisher's Viewpoint, InfoToday blog, November 30, 2006. Excerpt:
Leila Fernandez, Open Access Initiatives in India - an Evaluation, Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, 1,1 (2006). Excerpt: Abstract: Developing countries have embraced open access with a view to promoting visibility of research done in these regions. Open access initiatives described in this paper are based on interviews with information professionals responsible for creation and maintenance of online research repositories in India. Open access journals, e-print archives and e-theses repositories are covered with an emphasis on the sciences including the physical sciences, mathematics and the biomedical sciences. Existing repositories were identified from the Registry of Open Access Repositories....Key contacts were facilitated by well-known local open access advocates. Participants were contacted by e-mail and sites visited wherever possible. Many universities in India are at present lacking in infrastructure for establishing institutional repositories, so most of the institutions visited were research institutes and informatics centres. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to ascertain the background of participants, institutional culture, software selection, nature of funding, submission policies and future plans of these repositories. Also covered were promotion methods, user feedback and institutional support. Barriers to setting up institutional repositories are identified in this paper. Special features are described. Based on participant feedback a list of best practices is presented. The study has definite implications for the role of Canadian librarians in the promotion of Canadian research. OA library journal walks the walk Jennifer Richard, Welcome to Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, 1,1 (2006). The editorial in a new OA journal. Excerpt: Our philosophy guarantees rigorous peer review and high standards for both theoretical and practical articles which are made freely and immediately available to everyone. No embargoes! The founding members of the editorial board and the Partnership Board were adamant about open access; so much so that many were not willing to support the journal if it was not truly open access. If librarians can talk the talk we have to be prepared to walk the walk and that�s what we�ve done with this journal. Milestone for India's NIO repository India's National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) has reached the 500th full-text deposit in its institutional repository. For details see today's announcement. Two OA journals for two Chinese societies BioMed Central has recently launched peer-reviewed OA journals for two Chinese scientific societies.
House Dems try to save the EPA libraries Yesterday the Democratic leadership of the House Science Committee issued a press release on the closing of the EPA libraries. Excerpt:
Also see the press release from the American Library Association praising the Science Committee letter. Walt Crawford is soliciting feedback on how much he should continue to cover "Library Access to Scholarship" (mostly OA) in his newsletter, Cites & Insights. PS: In January 2004 Walt announced that he was scaling back his OA coverage in part because I did it so well. Fortunately he continued, even if he did scale back, and now he's raising the same question again, in part for the same reason. My feeling is the same as it was then. There are two reasons why my voice shouldn't exclude his: he's good at this (see some examples) and we don't always agree. Drop him a line and encourage him to keep it up. An anonymous academic librarian in Belgium has launched a new blog on ETDs (electronic theses and dissertations), focusing on "recent free access publications" about them. Welcome to another blog on OA. UCI joins the Open Courseware Consortium The University of California at Irvine has joined the Open Courseware Consortium. For details, see yesterday's announcement. New OA journal on the anthropology of religion Anpere: Anthropological Perspectives on Religion is a new peer-reviewed, open-access journal. It publishes in English, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian and apparently charges no author-side fees. (Thanks to antropologi.info.) Gavin Yamey and Calestous Juma, Improving Human Welfare: The Crucial Role of Open Access, Science Editor 29, 5 (2006) pp. 163-165. Self-archived November 30, 2006. Abstract: Developing countries are increasingly improving their capacity to use scientific and technical knowledge to solve local problems. They are investing in communication infrastructure and improving technology policies. For such measures to be effective, those countries also need greater access to the world�s pool of knowledge. India should mandate OA to publicly-funded research Subbiah Arunachalam, A Perspective on Open Access Publishing, Biobytes, December 2006. Excerpt:
PS: Unfortunately the URL Arun used in the article for the ATA doesn't work. I've replaced it with the correct URL. German journal publishes a special issue on OA The current issue of Wissenschaftsmanagement is devoted to open access. It contains 18 short articles, all but one in German. Annette Schavan, Germany's Federal Minister for Science, wrote the editorial. Most of the articles describe the OA activities of major German institutions like the Fraunhofer Society, the German Rectors' Conference, the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, and the Max Planck Society. The one English-language article in the issue is "Open Science for an Open Society" (p. 22) by Ulf Dahlsten, Directorate General for the Information Society and Media European Commission. (Thanks to Georg Botz.) Free market principles to improve access rather than block it John Sulston, Free market must serve, not restrain, research, Financial Times, November 30, 2006. Sulston won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2002 and works actively for open access and open data. Excerpt:
More on the Medical R&D Treaty Martin Enserink, WHO Panel Weighs Radical Ideas, Science Magazine, December 1, 2006 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:
PS: For background see the draft treaty and past posts on it. Disclosure: I signed the letter of submission and helped draft the treaty's OA provision (�13.1), which would mandate OA to publicly-funded research. Patenting scientific principles and natural phenomena Lori Andrews and three co-authors, When Patents Threaten Science, Science Magazine, December 1, 2006 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:
PS: For background, see my previous posts on Madey v. Duke. Today the open-access mandate at the UK's Particle Physics & Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) takes effect.
Major report on OAI interoperability Martha Brogan, Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library, Digital Library Federation, November 22, 2006. A major study (282 pp) of OAI interoperability from the DLF, one of the organizations, with CNI and NSF, that originally sponsored the development of the OAI-PMH. Excerpt:
See especially these sections: Access to health information in Bhutan Steven William Glover and four co-authors, A review of health and access to health information in Bhutan, Health Information & Libraries Journal, November 29, 2006. Not even an abstract is free online, at least so far. Oxford supports OAI-PMH harvesting of its journal metadata Oxford Journals offers faster and better access to metadata records with OAI-PMH functionality, a press release from Oxford Journals. Excerpt:
Comment. This is smart and all journals (OA and TA) should do it. (I've been recommending it since 2004.) Inderscience seems to have been the first non-OA publisher to test its potential as a more effective and less expensive alternative to traditional marketing. For details, see this Inderscience case study from 2003. Limited copyright exemption for the Internet Archive Nick Farrell, Internet Archive is free from DMCA, The Inquirer, November 30, 2006. Excerpt:
Permission granted and withheld Rufus Pollock, UK National Statistics: Are They Open or Not? Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog, November 30, 2006. Excerpt:
Comment. One of the chief benefits of making information OA is that users are spared the expense and delay of asking permission to make use of it. Some providers understand this and provide blanket permission for certain uses in advance. However, what they don't always realize is that this benefit is completely negated when the permission is vague or inconsistent. Then conscientious users will still have to ask permission, denting their productivity, sometimes denting their budget, and increasing the unrelenting pressure to become less conscientious. One of my favorite examples is a June 2004 policy by Johns Hopkins University Press (JHUP) allowing authors to self-archive JHUP journal articles in their institutional repository "provided the [repository] does not directly compete with either the Johns Hopkins University Press or Project Muse." Access models to govt data in Denmark and Australia The Free Our Data blog has two posts today on how Denmark and Australia charge for access to publicly-funded government data. Home for the Royal Society's hybrid OA journal program The Royal Society has created a home page for EXiS Open Choice, its hybrid OA journal program. Although the program was launched in June 2006, and had an FAQ from the beginning, it didn't have a home page until yesterday or today. Willinsky book now self-archived Although John Willinsky's book, The Access Principle (MIT Press 2005), already had an OA edition, Willinsky has deposited another OA copy in dLIST. The updated abstract:
The OA workshop at Online Educa Berlin Online Educa tackles lifelong learning and open access, a press release from JISC, November 30, 2006. Excerpt:
Traditional scholarly prestige and new forms of buzz Paul Kobulnicky, Scholarly Reputations: Who's Got Buzz? Educause Review, November/December 2006. Excerpt:
Be openly accessible or be obscure is a new blog on OA by Jim Till. Jim is a University Professor Emeritus of medicine at the University of Toronto, a member of the Executive Committee of UT's Project Open Source | Open Access, a member of the editorial boards of two OA journals, Chair of the CIHR Advisory Committee on Access to Outputs of Research --and a former contributor to Open Access News when it was a group blog. Welcome back to the blogosphere, Jim! PS: I thought I blogged this last week but now I can't find the post. If it's really out there and just slipped through my net (and Google's), I apologize for the repetition. Funding peer-reviewed journals Dick Kaser, Funding Open Access, Information Today blog, November 29, 2006. Excerpt:
Comments. Depending on how Anthony fleshed out this comment, I could agree or disagree. More specifically:
Athabasca University asks faculty to self-archive Canada's Athabasca University has adopted an OA policy. (Thanks to Virtual Canuck via OA Librarian.) The policy:
From Terry Anderson at Virtual Canuck:
From Heather Morrison at OA Librarian:
Chris Greer, The Digital Data Universe of the Future, a webcast of a 56 minute lecture at the Library of Congress, October 11, 2006. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) From the blurb:
The MRC's new FAQ on its OA policy The UK's Medical Research Council (MRC) has launched an FAQ on OA. There are some new points here even for those who have been following the evolution of the MRC's OA policy. For example, the MRC will use the Bethesda definition of OA (Question 1). It will also follow the Wellcome Trust in using a strict mandate: grantees who want to publish in journals that don't permit OA archiving on the MRC's terms, including the maximum six month embargo, must negotiate with the journal or publish elsewhere (Question 9), although they may petition MRC to make a rare exception (Question 15). Comment. Kudos to the MRC for using the Wellcome-type mandate that doesn't let publishers set the embargo period. As I've argued before, the legal basis of funder OA policies should be the enforceable funding contract (or a specially enacted government license), not the consent of a third party like the grantee's publisher. Spanish University signs Berlin Declaration
The University of Alicante in Spain has signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Acces to Knowledge.
Another field-specific blog on OA Open Access Anthropology is a new blog from the same people who brought you the wiki of the same name. Welcome to all involved! PS: This is a useful development. I believe it's only the third blog devoted to OA in a specific field. The first was in law (but is now dormant) and the second in LIS. Heather Morrison, Open Access in Physics and Chemistry, or, A Tale of Two Disciplines, a presentation at the McGill Library School, November 27, 2006. Excerpt:
Cross-national co-authorship data could help the transition to OA Salvatore Mele, David Dallman, Jens Vigen, and Joanne Yeomans, Quantitative Analysis of the Publishing Landscape in High-Energy Physics, a preprint, self-archived November 26, 2006.
More on the OA connection from the body of the paper:
Background on the Bangalore model national OA policy Barbara Kirsop, Creating a National Open Access Policy for Developing Countries, Open and Shut, November 29, 2006. Excerpt:
Who can read your past publications? Jonathan Eisen, Has your scientific research been wasted? The Tree of Life, November 27, 2006. Excerpt:
Two library groups support draft CIHR policy SPARC and CARL have issued a joint press release commending the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) for its draft OA policy. Excerpt:
More on the Bangalore model national OA policy Frederick Noronha, Scientists push open access for developing nations, SciDev.Net, November 29, 2006. Excerpt:
An interview with John Houghton on the economic impact of OA Kate Worlock, Exploring the Economic Impacts of Open Access: An interview with Professor John Houghton, EPS IMI, November 2006 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:
Dutch national library will preserve the country's OA repositories The National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) announced today that it will preserve the OA repositories in the country's Darenet network. The details are in Dutch, but Wouter Gerritsma has posted a short English-language summary on his blog:
Comment. It's important that these repositories will be preserved, important that the burden will be borne by a well-funded, well-respected library, and important that the repositories themselves will be freed to focus on removing access barriers to the nation's research output. Open access helps when disciplines overlap, Research Information, December 2006 /January 2007. Si�n Harris interviews with Mark Cassar, manager for journal development at the American Institute of Physics (AIP). Excerpt:
The CCLRC, its OA repository, and its home-grown repository software Catherine Jones, Collecting research output, Research Information, December 2006 /January 2007. Excerpt:
PS: Of the eight Research Councils UK, five require open access to the research they sponsor (BBSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, and PPARC) and two are still deliberating (AHRC and EPSRC). The CCLRC is the only one that has already decided merely to encourage it. Maureen Pennock has written a short review of Fedora, the open-source software for OAI-compliant repositories. OOPS translates the Johns Hopkins OpenCourseWare into Chinese Lucifer Chu's Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS) has struck again, translating the Johns Hopkins University OpenCourseWare site into Chinese. For details, see the JHU announcement (undated but apparently released yesterday or today):
Comment. I love the OOPS story and found a few more details in an article from the March 2005 Taipei Times. Chu made $27 million translating The Lord of the Rings into Chinese and now spends 16 unpaid hours per day making making open content available to Chinese readers. Free software to integrate text, data, mining tools, and OA abstracts with OA articles CiteXplore is free software from EMBL-EBI to integrate research articles and data files, and to connect both with text-mining tools. From yesterday's announcement:
Comment. Note that CiteXplore doesn't merely integrate text, data, and mining tools. It also integrates OA abstracts (even for non-OA articles) with full-text OA copies or versions that may exist in repositories around the web. It doesn't do this for every non-OA article with an OA version somewhere, but it's the first tool I've seen to make a systematic start. This is important because there are far more OA abstracts than OA full-text articles.
Kumble Subbaswamy, Provost of the University of Kentucky, has added his signature to the SPARC list of U.S. university presidents and provosts endorsing open access to publicly-funded research and the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (FRPAA). The tally is now up to 131.
Heather Morrison, Ray English, or: the Open Access Genie, OA Librarian, November 27, 2006. Excerpt:
PS: Ray deserves all this appreciation and more. Read the full post for laurels and details I had to omit from this excerpt. Lorenz, Open Access to Indigenous Research in Norway, Antropologi.info, November 28, 2006. Excerpt:
See the full post for the eight theses with links and abstracts. More on India's Universal Digital Library and Million Book Project N. Balakrishnan and three co-authors, Digital Library of India: A Testbed for Indian Language Research, TCDL Bulletin, 3,1 (2006). (Thanks to Frederick Noronha.) Abstract: This paper describes the goal of the Universal Digital Library Project (UDL) and presents the approach taken by � and the technological challenges associated with � the Million Books to the Web Project (MBP). The Digital Library of India (DLI) initiative, which is the Indian part of the UDL and MBP, is discussed. DLI fosters a large number of research activities in areas such as text summarization, information retrieval, machine translation and transliteration, optical character recognition, handwriting recognition, and natural language parsing and morphological analyses. This paper provides an overview of the activities of DLI in these areas and shows how DLI serves as a multilingual resource. OA book goes into second print edition According to IB Weblog, the first edition of Walther Umst�tter's festschrift is out of print and the publisher, Humboldt University Berlin (HUB), has ordered a second edition. Nothing unusual there, except that HUB itself has already provided OA to the full contents. (Thanks to netbib.) PS: I take this as further evidence that OA editions of full-text books needn't undermine sales of the priced/printed editions. Does copyright obstruct access to science? George Sandberger, Behindert das Urheberrecht den Zugang zu wissenschaftlichen Publikationen? Zeitschrift f�r Urheber- und Medienrecht, 50, 11 (2006) pp. 810-817. The article is not online even for subscribers. Thanks to Eric Steinhauer, who also provides a brief summary (in German). Oxford hybrid journals support deposit in independent repositories Oxford University Press Announces Agreements with NLM and SIMID SA, a press release from Oxford Journals, November 28, 2006. Excerpt:
Comments.
The new issue of Library Hi Tech is devoted to Academic information services: new paradigms, the presentations from the Bielefeld conference of nearly the same name (February 7-9, 2006). Here are the OA-related articles; only abstracts are free online, at least so far.
Impact of e-science on libraries Tony Hey and Jessie Hey, e-Science and its implications for the library community, Library Hi Tech, 24, 2 (2006) pp. 515 - 528. Only this abstract is free online, at least so far.
The case for putting new creative work into the public domain Peter Saint-Andre, Who's Afraid of the Public Domain? A preprint, version 1.0, November 26, 2006. Excerpt:
OA repository for Flemish marine research The Flanders Marine Institute (Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee, VLIZ) has launched the Open Marine Archive. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) From the site:
Society journals superior in price and quality to commercial journals, but should still consider OA Kimberly Douglas and Dana L. Roth, Looming Threats To Society Journals, Chemical and Engineering News, November 20, 2006. Excerpt:
Job listings at Nature are now free to post as well as free to read. For details, see the Nature press release. (Thanks to Timo Hannay.) Minho OA conference by webcast The Second Annual Open Access conference at Portugal's University of Minho is now in progress (November 27-28, 2006). If you're not in Minho, you can follow the events through a streaming webcast. Greetings to my friends who are speaking or participating! Official version of the Bangalore model OA policy for developing countries The National Open Access Policy for Developing Countries has now been posted at the web site of the conference that drafted and announced it (Workshop on electronic publishing and open access, Bangalore, November 2-3, 2006). We should regard this as the official version for citing and linking. PS: For background, see my post from November 22, 2006. Internet Archive wins education award The Internet Archive (IA) has won the Microsoft Education Award from the from the San Jose Tech Museum's Tech Award program (awarded by the museum, funded by Microsoft). From the acceptance speech by Rick Prelinger, the IA Board President:
HighWire Press has launched its 1,000th journal site. For details, see today's announcement. Another society journal converts to OA The European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) has started an OA trial period for its journal, the Bulletin of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science, starting with the current issue (October 2006). For background, see Vladimiro Sassone's Letter from the Bulletin Editor in the current issue (pp. 6-7):
Also see today's blog post by Luca Aceto, a member of the EATCS Council:
Update (October 2007). It's been a year since the trial period began, and all issues since then have been OA. It looks like the OA trial period was a success and the journal's OA policy is no longer an experiment. Bill Hooker, The Future of Science is Open, Part 2: Open Science, 3 Quarks Daily, November 27, 2006. Excerpt:
France has a nationwide archive, now needs a policy to fill it Stevan Harnad, Access Archiving in France, Open Access Archivangelism, November 25, 2006. Excerpt: Franck Lalo� (2006) Les archives ouvertes (AO) et la communication scientifique directe (CSD). Une pr�sentation � la r�union du CNRS sur les archives ouvertes (Paris, 16 novembre 2006). (blog Libre Acc�s INIST) |