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The presentations from the AAAS symposium, Effects of Intellectual Property Protections on the Conduct of Scientific Research: Results of a Survey of U.S. AAAS Members (Washington, DC, January 16, 2007), are now online. OA to conference presentations, restored Ingrid Robeyns and some other members of the American Political Science Association (APSA) were surprised to find their conference presentations for sale at AllAcademic. Robeyns wrote to AllAcademic twice, and got no response, and then wrote to the APSA twice, and got no response. Finally she turned to blogging:
It worked. The next day, this comment appeared on her blog:
PS: I don't like the APSA's claim of copyright over conference presentations, but I do like its commitment to OA for them. And I like the role of blogging in solving this problem. Open letter protesting high price of medical journal Oliver Obst has written an open letter to the American Academy of Pediatrics to protest the high price of its journal, Pediatrics. Obst is the Head of the Central Medical Library at the Westf�lische Wilhelms-Universit�t M�nster, and past Vice President of the German Medical Library Association. From his blog summary (March 8, 2007):
From the letter itself:
Andrew Waller, Open Access Course, OA Librarian, March 9, 2007. Excerpt:
Why faculty choose OA to publish in OA journals Stefanie E. Warlick and K. T.L. Vaughan, Factors influencing publication choice: why faculty choose open access, Biomedical Digital Libraries, March 9, 2007. Abstract:
Comment. Here's how I put it in Open Access and Quality (October 2006):
7 Things You Should Know About Open Journals, Educause Learning Initiative, February 2007.
Comment. The article itself uses "open journals" in its title, but the splash page and abstract use the phrase "open journaling", which unfortunately suggests diary-writing more than scholarly publishing. Look past it. My only quibble with the article is that it suggests that all OA journals use open review. Some do, some don't. A journal's access policy is independent of its method of peer review. BTW, the March installment in this series is 7 Things You Should Know About Creative Commons. Today Danny Hillis' Metaweb launched its first product, Freebase. (Thanks to Glyn Moody.) From site:
Here are some details from John Markoff's article in yesterday's New York Times:
Also see Tiim O'Reilly's article at O'Reilly Radar:
Comment. This could be extremely useful --to make search more intelligent, to create semantically-enhanced mirrors of existing repositories, to host uncopyrightable facts in interconnectable forms, to make OA data manipulable and queryable (not just accessible), and to enhance eprints by linking them to that kind of live data, to name just a few. I'll be watching for specifically scientific and scholarly uses of Freebase. If you notice any, please drop me a line. Georgie Donovan and Karen Estlund, New librarians and scholarly communication: Get involved, C&RL News, March 2007. Excerpt:
More on the HHMI-Elsevier agreement Richard Monastersky, Hughes Institute's Deal With Elsevier Will Open Up Access to Its Researchers' Work, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 9, 2007 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:
More on the HHMI-Elsevier deal Rick Weiss, Health Findings From Institute To Be Free Online, Washington Post, March 9, 2007.
Comments.
Does OA increase a journal's impact factor? Mabel Chew, Elmer V. Villanuev, Martin B. Van Der Weyden, Life and times of the impact factor: retrospective analysis of trends for seven medical journals (1994-2005) and their Editors' views, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 100 (2007) pp. 142-150. (Thanks to Jacob Bettany.) Excerpt:
PS: As far as I know, only two of these journals (BMJ and CMAJ) have enough OA experience to make the claim in the second paragraph. If so, that's one out of two reporting that OA increased IF, not one out of seven. More on the HHMI-Elsevier deal For my comments on the HHMI-Elsevier deal, see my blog post from yesterday. I wouldn't normally write a blog post merely to point to another of my own posts. But after writing my first-draft blog comments yesterday, I realized that I was simply wrong about a key part of the agreement. I deleted the comments, confirmed my new understanding, and wrote some new ones. Unfortunately, the faulty comments were online during mid-day for European time zones. Mark Chillingworth cited them on the IWRblog and perhaps others did as well. (Fortunately, Mark's summary didn't repeat my error.) Others may have read the first version without realizing that there's now a new version. In my revised comments, note especially #10: my apology for the confusion this caused.
Google facilitates data sharing Darren Waters, Google helps terabyte data swaps, BBC News, March 7, 2007. Excerpt:
Interview with Melissa Hagemann on the OA movement Sundar Raman interviewed Melissa Hagemann on the OA movement for radio station KRUU, February 22, 2007. The hour-long podcast is available for downloading. (Thanks to the P2P Foundation wiki.) From the blurb:
Haworth demands copyright prior to peer review Charles Bailey has made an interesting discovery:
Incredible. It's bad enough to demand copyright after peer review, when publishers only need the right of first publication. But this goes much further in tying the author's hands. Charles comments:
Here's another angle on it: if editors or referees suggest changes to the manuscript, the author is no longer free to reject them and try another journal. Author beware! Update. See comments by Heather Morrison and Bill Walsh. Walsh's comment shows that the policy is not quite as bad as it looks. HHMI and Elsevier strike a deal HHMI and Elsevier Announce Public Access Agreement, a press release from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, March 8, 2007. Excerpt:
Comments. I'm still digesting this. But here are some thoughts.
Another study of author attitudes toward OA Thomas Hess, Rolf T. Wigand, Florian Mann, and Benedikt von Walter, Open Access & Science Publishing: Results of a Study on Researchers� Acceptance and Use of Open Access Publishing, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit�t Munich, March 7, 2007. From the executive summary:
Also see the short press release and the long one. From the short one:
Comments.
Elsevier: harness the openness of new technologies Karen Hunter, Scott Virkler, and Rafael Sidi, Disruptive technologies: taking STM publishing into the next era, Serials, March 2007. All three authors work for Elsevier. Only this abstract is free online:
PS: No, I don't know what this means either. I'd love to have access to the full text and find out. Update. I just got my hands on a copy. The article doesn't mention OA, even as a challenge. But it does say the following:
A critique of the CERN plan for gold OA John Harnad, Clarifying Open Access: its implications for the research community, Physics World, March 2007. A letter to the editor. I don't have a link to the online version and here excerpt the submitted version. John Harnad is the Director of the Mathematical Physics Laboratory at the Centre de recherches math�matiques in Montr�al. He's also the brother of Stevan Harnad. Excerpt:
Comments.
Update. John Harnad has now self-archived the full-text of his letter. Update. Stevan Harnad has written a point by point response, sometimes agreeing with his brother, sometimes with me. Notes on Rice's De Lange conference Ben Vershbow has blogged some notes on the first day of presentations at Rice University's De Lange conference, Emerging Libraries: How Knowledge Will Be Accessed, Discovered, and Disseminated in the Age of Digital Information (Houston, March 5-7, 2007). Place for IR managers to talk shop Dorothea Salo has launched an IR-Managers web site, which includes a blog, forum, and mailing list. From the site:
Nice touch: the forum doesn't let spambots register but neither does it make you prove your humanity by reading an illegible string of letters and retyping it. You'll only have to answer a question about open access. The blog is now recruiting contributors. Stevan Harnad, Trojan Horse from American Chemical Society: Caveat Emptor, Open Access Archivangelism, March 6, 2007. Excerpt:
ACS re-announces its hybrid journal program The American Chemical Society has re-announced its hybrid journal program AuthorChoice. Yesterday's press release is essentially the same as the original press release from August 14, 2006. If ACS has changed any of its terms or policies, it didn't point out the changes and I haven't noticed any. To review, first see my nine questions for hybrid journal programs. Of the nine, the ACS gives a good and welcome answer to just one: it will let authors deposit articles in repositories independent of the ACS. It gives unwelcome answers to three more: it does not let participating authors retain copyright; it does not promise to reduce its subscription prices in proportion to author uptake (hence using the double charge business model); and it will apparently charge its AuthorChoice fee even to authors who want to self-archive. It leaves us uncertain on the remainder: Will it let participating authors use OA-friendly licenses? Will it waive fees in cases of economic hardship? Will it force authors to pay the fee if they want to comply with a prior funding contract mandating deposit in an OA repository? Will it lay page charges on top of the new AuthorChoice fee? I can't remember whether the ACS permitted no-fee, no-embargo self-archiving before it adopted the AuthorChoice program (and SHERPA has already been updated to reflect AuthorChoice). If ACS was green, then the new policy steps backwards by charging for what used to be free. If it was not green, then the new policy combines a forward and backward step: allowing self-archiving but only for a fee. It's not unusual for publishers to retreat on their self-archiving policies when they adopt hybrid journal programs. But the most common form of retreat is to add an embargo to their permission for postprint archiving, not to add a fee. Wiley's hybrid program (FundedAccess) is one that adds a fee, even for (perhaps especially for) authors under OA mandate from their funder. It's bad enough to charge for self-archiving and retreat from green OA in order to advance a low-uptake form of gold OA. It's worse to charge for self-archiving, as if it cost the publisher money, when all the publishing costs are already covered by subscriptions. Note that as the ACS policy is currently worded, it only charges the fee for self-archiving the published edition of an article. Unless the ACS revises the policy, I would assume that authors who want to self-archive the final version of their peer-reviewed manuscript, rather than the published edition, needn't pay anything. Update. Jane Smith of SHERPA tells me that ACS was a RoMEO white publisher before adopting AuthorChoice. It allowed authors to self-archive only the title, abstract, figures, and tables from an article, not the full-text of the peer-reviewed manuscript. (Thanks, Jane!) OA/TA book series launched by U of California Press The University of California Press has launched a new monograph series in literary studies called FlashPoints. Each book in the series will have an OA edition and a priced/printed edition. From the site:
PS: This is not UCPress's first sally in dual-edition publishing. Each volume in its GAIA (Global, Area, and International Archive) series is published in OA and TA editions, and about 400 (or 20%) of UC's eScholarship Editions are OA. BTW, this is exactly the kind of OA monograph publishing the AAUP encouraged university presses to explore in the Statement on Open Access it released last week.
Bavarian State Library joins the Google Library project The Bavarian State Library has joined the Google Library project. From today's announcement by Google's Jens Redmer:
Also see the library's announcement, in German. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) OA presentations at the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences Donat Agosti has written a report on the meeting, Open Access: Vom Prinzip zur Umsetzung (Bern, March 1, 2007), sponsored by the Schweizerische Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften (Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences). Excerpt:
The Wellcome Trust's OA digitization projects Jane Dudman, Wellcome Trust makes Open Access changes, Information World Review, March 5, 2007. Excerpt:
Soft and hard TPM barriers to ejournals Kristin R. Eschenfelder, Every Library�s Nightmare? Digital Rights Management and Licensed Scholarly Digital Resources, a preprint self-archived March 5, 2007. Abstract: This study explored what technological protection measures (TPM) publishers/vendors of licensed scholarly resources employ by assessing the use restrictions experienced in a sample of resources from history/art history, engineering and health sciences. The analysis develops a framework of use restrictions that distinguishes between soft TPM - which discourage use - and hard TPM - which strictly limit or forbid uses. Within soft TPM, the framework identifies six use discouraging TPM: extent of use, obfuscation, omission, amalgamation, frustration and threat. The study concludes that these soft TPM are common in licensed scholarly resources. Further, while hard TPM are less common, they are not unknown. Presentations from Rice's De Lange conference Rice University is releasing live webcasts of the presentations from its De Lange conference, Emerging Libraries: How Knowledge Will Be Accessed, Discovered, and Disseminated in the Age of Digital Information (Houston, March 5-7, 2007), as they occur. The webcasts will also be archived for later viewing. ResourceShelf has created a link-list of the talks. On today's program, watch for James Boyle on Science Wars: The Next Generation, Paul Ginsparg on Read as We May, Harold Varmus on Open Access Publishing in the Biomedical Sciences, and Brewster Kahle on Universal Access to Human Knowledge. Update. At least some of these talks are also being presented in Second Life. ERC will pay fees at fee-based OA journals From Matt Cockerill on the BMC blog:
PS: For details, see the ERC grant application guidelines at pp. 12, 35. The ERC is one of the first public funding agencies (after the NIH) willing to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals. Update (3/31/07). The March 30 version of the guidelines is now online. The policy is unchanged and still appears on pp. 12 and 35. Data sharing and data hoarding in high-stakes medical research RPM, Intellectual Property and Open Access to Biomedical Data, Evolgen, March 5, 2007. Excerpt:
Wiley-Blackwell launches an OA journal of clinical drug trials Wiley-Blackwell is launching a new peer-reviewed OA journal, Archives of Drug Information (apparently no web site yet). From yesterday's announcement:
PS: Note that ADI will be a full OA journal, not a hybrid under Wiley's Funded Access or Blackwell's Online Open. I believe it's the first full OA journal for either company. The press release doesn't say whether ADI will charge author-side publication fees. Berkeley will study faculty willingness to adopt new models of scholarly communication The University of California at Berkeley has received a Mellon grant to study the changing nature of scholarly communication, including open access. From the March 2 announcement:
Freie Netze, Freies Wissen, an OA book (Free Nets, Free Knowledge) by 17 authors, February 28, 2007. Read it in the original German or in Google's English. See especially Chapter 8: Digitale Freiheit f�r Forschung und ForscherInnen (Digital Freedom for Research and Researchers). Richard Baraniuk, Open Access Education - Building Communities and Sharing Knowledge, a public lecture at Rice University, March 5, 2007. A webcast will be available shortly. Baraniuk is a Professor of Engineering Rice University and the founder of Connexions. More on costs to universities for gold OA Bruno Bauer, Kommerzielle Open Access Publishing - Gesch�ftsmodelle auf dem Pr�fstand : �konomische Zwischenbilanz der "Gold Road to Open Access" an drei �sterreichischen Universit�ten, GMS Medizin - Bibliothek - Information 6, 3 (2006). Self-archived March 2, 2007. In German but with this English-language abstract:
Comment. My German isn't strong enough to read this article with the care it deserves, so I apologize in advance if this comment is off-target. Bauer appears to conclude that some universities will pay more in author-side fees for OA journals than they pay now for subscriptions. His abstract suggests it and he refers to two articles asserting that conclusion (Phil Davis et al. and William Walters). However, he doesn't refer to my article exposing the false assumptions in these earlier calculations. I can't tell whether Bauer himself relies on the same false assumptions --in particular, that all OA journals charge publication fees and that universities would pay all of them. Building ejournals with Drupal Charles W. Bailey, Jr., E-Journal: A Drupal-Based E-Journal Publishing System, DigitalKoans, March 5, 2007.
Two models for subsidizing publication fees at fee-based OA journals Jim Till, Scenarios about paying for OA, Be openly accessible or be obscure, March 2, 2007. Excerpt:
Update. See Stevan Harnad's comment. Strategic advice for achieving OA Nicholas Bramble, Preparing Academic Scholarship for an Open Access World, Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, Fall 2006.
Bramble hasn't merely self-archived his article. As an experiment, he has also made a wiki out of it. The complete backfile of the journal, Folklore and Folk Music Archivist, is now OA, thanks to the hard work of Indiana University's Archives of Traditional Music. (Thanks to Open Access Anthropology for the alert.) Brussels Declaration defends current inefficiencies John Blossom, E.U. Initiatives to Force Open Access Raise Protests from Publishers, Content Blogger, March 2, 2007. Excerpt:
Comments.
More on data sharing in big science and big industry Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, The New Science of Sharing, Business Week, March 2, 2007. (Thanks to Glyn Moody.) Excerpt:
India's publicly-funded open courseware Yesterday I drew attention to Utah's publicly-funded open courseware. Today I learned that India also has a publicly-funded OCW project in the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL). NPTEL is jointly sponsored by the seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). It started offering free online courses in June 2006 and by June 2007 expects to have 4,600 hour-long streaming video lectures for 110 courses. (Thanks to K. Mangala Sunder.) Unlike other OCW projects, NPTEL offers teacher-student interaction through course-specific workshops and threaded discussion lists. 10 success stories in open education How the Open Source Movement Has Changed Education: 10 Success Stories, Online Education Database, March 1, 2007. Excerpt:
Eric Kansa, DDIG Related Events in Austin, Digging Digitally, March 2, 2007. Excerpt:
How effective is the U of Zurich OA mandate? Klaus Graf, Open Access: Wie umsetzen? Archivalia, March 4, 2007. Signs that the OA mandate at the University of Zurich is not yet widely followed. Read it in the original German or in Google's English. Gold OA publishers and green OA mandates Stevan Harnad, On "Open Access" Publishers Who Oppose Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates, Open Access Archivangelism, March 3, 2007.
For more on gold OA publishers and green OA mandates, and more in response to Jan Velterop, see Stevan's second post from March 3, Ceterum Censeo.... Excerpt:
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