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Publishers should monetize web traffic rather than sell subscriptions Timo Hannay, Foo and beyond, Nascent, June 29, 2007. Hannay is the Director of Web Publishing at the Nature Publishing Group. Excerpt: Update. The title I picked for this post overstates's Timo's position. Thanks to Timo for his clarification and apologies for creating a false impression. As he writes on his blog: I'm a tiny bit concerned that [Suber's] title overstates my position. Subscriptions of various kinds are going to be with us for a long time to come. But in the context of social software (which is what I was writing about in one of the passages he quotes), it often doesn't make sense to charge users directly. That's why I think publishers need to get much, much better at monetising traffic � we're almost all useless at this right now. Citizendium is planning major changes in governance and scope. Founder Larry Sanger outlines them in a long letter to the CZ discussion list and excerpts some highlights on the CZ blog. Thierry Chanier, Commentary: Open Access To Research And The Individual Responsibility Of Researchers, Language Learning & Technology, June 2007. A general intro to OA. From the conclusion:
PS: Well-done. I'd only correct one small point in the final paragraph. Works deposited in an OA repository do not automatically, or even usually, receive a CC license or equivalent as part of the process. That requires a separate step by the author or someone acting on the author's behalf. A Charles Bailey retrospective Charles W. Bailey, Jr., A Look Back at Eighteen Years as an Internet Digital Publisher, DigitalKoans, June 29, 2007. Excerpt:
PS: Charles is not only a pioneer in electronic publishing but in OA publishing. The best way to get a sense of his extensive contributions is to see the chronology of his publishing activities, and the bibliography about those publications, which I've had to omit from this excerpt. I only hope this is just a retrospective exhibit for an ongoing career. InfoBlawg lists 11 OA publications from Chile. Read the Spanish original or Google's English. Access to knowledge as a public good Danah Boyd, Knowledge Access as a Public Good, Britannica Blog, June 27, 2007.
Comment. So far, so good. My only criticism is that Boyd focuses on Wikipedia and seems unaware of the wider world of open access to peer-reviewed research. CNRS Ethics Committee recommends broadest possible dissemination of research The Ethics Committee (Comit� d'�thique or COMETS) of France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) has issued an opinion on diffusing the results of research. (Thanks to the INIST Libre Acc�s blog.) The opinion makes eight recommendations, among them that CNRS should [1] support accessible publication systems in order to ensure the broadest possible dissemination of knowledge, [2] educate researchers about different methods of research communication, [3] ensure the open dissemination of data, and [5] think about ways to correct the abuses of the dominant system of monopoly publishing. Read the French original or Google's English. Australian RQF will discourage rather than encourage OA Danny Kingsley, Losing access to research, ScienceAlert, June 29, 2007. Excerpt:
University-industry agreement on "Free Participant Use Principles" Academia, IT Industry Leaders Create New Principles for Sharing Collaborative Research, a press release from IBM, June 27, 2007. Excerpt:
UK govt reorganizes departments responsible for research and education One of Gordon Brown's first acts as the new UK Prime Minister was to reorganize the government departments responsible for research and education. This doesn't affect OA policy yet, but it's bound to before long. First, Stephane Goldstein summarizes the changes:
Universities UK generally supports the changes:
OA education initiative for developing countries The People's Open Access Education Initiative is a new OA project to improve healthcare and health education in developing countries. From the site:
From the Development Gateway Foundation:
CLA adopts OA for most of its own publications CLA Moves Open Access, CLA digest, June 29, 2007. (Thanks to Heather Morrison.) Excerpt:
For background, see the full report of the Task Force on Open Access. PS: Kudos to the CLA for this large, welcome step, and kudos to the OA Task Force, convened by Heather Morrison, for its leadership. More on emerging OA policies in Africa Eve Gray, African Academies of Science promote access to digital knowledge resources, Gray Area, June 28, 2007. Excerpt:
Project to enhance IRs for handling OA datasets DataShare project to demystify data, an announcement from EDINA, June 28, 2007. Excerpt:
From EDINA's site on DataShare itself:
Lund launches an author's guide to scholarly journals Lund University has launched Journal Info, an online tool to help scholars evaluate journals where they might submit their work. The project has support from the National Library of Sweden. (Thanks to Co-Action.) This is another very useful service from the university that brought us the Directory of Open Access Journals and (with the U of Nottingham) OpenDOAR. Journal Info is not limited to OA journals. But when you look up a non-OA journal, it tells you that it's not OA and suggests some OA journals as alternatives. For an example, see the entry for Advances in Cancer Research from Elsevier. The entry also tells you the publisher, ISSN, the self-archiving policy, subscription price per article, subscription price per citation, for- or non-profit status, and how the journal rates on some quality and impact metrics. For rapid scanning, it gives a green tick mark for each parameter (e.g. access, price, impact) on which the journal falls into the top of half of the journals covered, and a red x when it falls into the bottom half. Today the service covers 18,000 journals and is still growing. For more information, see the FAQ, which is in English. There is a long press release in Swedish (June 28) and a short one in English (June 29). OA champion named to Google Health Advisory Council Google has established a Google Health Advisory Council. From the announcement:
Comment. Open access to medical research and information ought to be a central concern of the new advisory council. It's too early to say whether OA will make it to the council's agenda, but one reason to think it will is that Sharon Terry is a member. Terry is the President and CEO of the Genetic Alliance and an energetic champion of OA. See her case for OA in C&RL News for July/August 2005, based on her personal struggle to learn more the genetic disease afflicting her children. Excerpt:
Project Gutenberg Canada to launch on Sunday Project Gutenberg Canada --already online-- will officially launch this Sunday, Canada Day. ResourceShelf quotes an email from Gutenberg founder Michael Hart:
Kirk Biglione, DRM for Books: Will Publishers Learn Anything from the Music Industry�s Mistakes? MediaLoper, June 25, 2007. (Thanks to DigitalKoans.) Excerpt:
July issue of Cites & Insights The July issue of Walt Crawford's Cites & Insights is now online. This issue contains a lengthy rebuttal to Mark Helprin's NYTimes op-ed arguing for perpetual copyrights and a lengthy new installment in his excellent series on Library Access to Scholarship. In the latter, Walt takes on some recent examples of publisher extremism, including Brian Crawford's attack on OA ("[Brian] Crawford says, �The hypocrisy is breathtaking.� I [Walt Crawford] agree, but would suggest he�s looking in the mirror when he says that") and the ALPSP/AAP/STM position paper on balancing author and publisher rights ("about as unbalanced a statement of �balance� as I�ve seen"). Among his other topics: the difficulty of ascertaining the costs of publishing a peer-reviewed journal article, the HHMI deal to pay Elsevier for green OA, and Rick Anderson's guest editorial on OA in Learned Publishing.
Lisbet Rugtvedt, Free and open learning and research in Norway, a presentation at the Technology for Participation conference (Kristiansand, Norway, June 27, 2007). Rugtvedt is Norway's State Secretary for the Ministry of Education and Research. (Thanks to Co-Action.)
Comment. Informed, intelligent, and inspiring. Imagine having a cabinet secretary or minister in your country who could give this talk. Calestous Juma, Open access to existing technical knowledge, [Nairobi] Business Daily, June 28, 2007. Juma is a Professor of the Practice of International Development at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Excerpt:
Participating libraries talk about the Google Library project The "Google Five" Describe Progress, Challenges, Library Journal Academic Newswire, June 28, 2007. Excerpt:
SPARC panel on the state of three OA publishers At ALA, SPARC Forum Details Economic Stability of Open Access, Library Journal Academic Newswire, June 28, 2007. Excerpt:
Nature OA supplement on glycochem and glycobio Nature has created another OA supplement, this time on Glycochemistry & Glycobiology. (Thanks to Graham Steel.) Senate committee approves OA mandate for NIH Congressional Panel Favors Access To Publicly Funded Research, a press release from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), June 28, 2007. Excerpt:
PS: Don't confuse this with last week's news that the OA mandate had been approved by the Senate appropriations subcommittee responsible for the NIH (the Senate Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies). Today's news is that the full Senate Appropriations Committee has approved it. This brings us one step closer to an OA mandate at the NIH. But we're still several steps short of the goal and still need approval by the full Senate, approval of a similar bill by the House, reconciliation in a conference committee (if the two bills differ), and the signature of the President. UK govt position on access to public information The UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has issued The Government Response to the Office of Fair Trading Study on removing access barriers to public sector information (June 2007). Excerpt:
For those of us interested in OA to publicly-funded research, here's the key OFT recommendation and the government's reply:
Comment. The last paragraph is inconsistent. The RCUK position statement endorses open access (indeed, mandatory open access). The government cannot support that policy and call for cost-recovery access fees at the same time. Matthew Cockerill, publisher of BioMed Central, has commented on the new OA mandate from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI):
Open access to research infrastructure The June issue of First Monday is now online. None of the papers is on OA to research articles or data, but these six are on open access to research infrastructure:
The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) has released its Guide to Open Data Licensing. From today's announcement:
Is Google planning to become a publisher? Leigh Watson Healy, Google as Publisher: Is Google Poised for a New Push into the Information Industry? Outsell, May 2007. The report is not OA and not even close (it costs $1,295). But the thesis is interesting. From the press release:
Sweden aims to increase OA share of national research output Sweden's OpenAccess.se has announced a new project to improve the infrastructure for the nation's research output and at the same time to increase the OA portion of that output. The project is called Unified access to and reporting of Swedish scientific publications. (Thanks to Co-Action.) Excerpt:
Public funds for scientific articles in German Wikipedia Torsten Kleinz and Craig Morris, German Wikipedia receives state funding, Heise Online, June 26, 2007. (Thanks to Glyn Moody.) Excerpt:
Cool tool parses journal RSS feeds for user interests Matthew Cockerill, Track the latest open access research relating to your favorite taxon, BioMed Central blog, June 26, 2007. Excerpt:
Comment. This is very cool and could be adapted to the important subtopics of any discipline. I like the way it supports both OA and TA journals, since both can support RSS feeds, and I like the way it's inherently optimized for OA literature, since it provides direct links to free full text. Do libraries catalog OA journals? On June 18, Susanna Powers of Tulane University posted this query to the ERIL (Electronic Resources in Libraries) list:
Yesterday she summarized the responses:
Javier Villafuerte-G�lvez, Walter H. Curioso, and Oscar Gayoso, Biomedical Journals and Global Poverty: Is HINARI a Step Backwards? PLoS Medicine, June 26, 2007. A letter to the editor. Excerpt:
ERIC provides OA to digitized microfiche docs The US Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) has reported the first results of its (OA) Microfiche Digitization Project. From its June 24 announcement:
New OA journal of sociology of literature COnTEXTES: Revue de sociologie de la litt�rature is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from Revues.org and the Department of Languages and Romance Literature at the University of Liege. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) Manual for Swiss universities planning OA repositories Beatrice B�rgi, Open Access an Schweizer Hochschulen, Churer Schriften zur Informationswissenschaft, June 2007. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) Because the file is a PDF, I can't link to a machine translation. HHMI mandates OA but pays publishers to allow it HHMI Announces New Policy for Publication of Research Articles, a press release from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), June 26, 2007. Excerpt:
To supplement this press release see
Comments.
Update. I just received this clarification from Avice Meehan, HHMI's Vice President for Communications and Public Affairs:
More on Elsevier's OA Topic Pages Paula J. Hane, Scirus Partners With FAST and Elsevier Publishing to Create Topic Pages, Information Today NewsBreaks, June 26, 2007. Excerpt:
U of Amsterdam has an OA publishing fund In January 2007, the University of Amsterdam launched an Open Access fund to help its faculty pay the publication fees at fee-based OA journals. From the fund page:
Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer in the U of Amsterdam library tells me that the fund will be evaluated after three years and has received an average of two applications per week. Comment. Kudos to Amsterdam. When the U of Nottingham announced its OA fund earlier this month, I wondered whether there were others. I thank Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer for letting me know about the Amsterdam fund and I repeat my call for others. We'll see many more of these as time goes on, but I want to identify the early leaders. Frank Gibson, a scientist participating in the CARMEN open-data neuroscience project, has written a lengthy blog post defining and supporting open science. New blog for OA to public data in Canada DataLibre is a new "group blog, inspired by civicaccess.ca, which believes all levels of Canadian governments should make civic information and data accessible at no cost in open formats to their citizens." (Thanks to Montreal Tech Watch.)
Free online topic pages coming from Elsevier Elsevier and FAST will offer free online "topic pages" on scientific topics. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) From today's announcement:
Update. The Topics Pages site is now online, along with nine test pages. See e.g. the test pages on Evolutionary Economics and Serine Proteases. The Open Knowledge Foundation has launched its Open Textbook Project. From today's announcement:
New OA journal seeks papers, editors The Journal of Medical Sciences Research (JMSR) is a forthcoming OA journal now calling for papers and recruiting members of its editorial board. Antiquity is a non-OA journal with an OA supplement. Martin Rundkvist reports that the supplement is looking for content:
In just a minute I'll be on the road for two days with no opportunities for blogging or email. I'll start catching up late Monday or early Tuesday. OA portal and federated search of world science The US Department of Energy has announced the launch of WorldWideScience.org. From Friday's press release:
PS: When this project was first announced in January 2007, it was called Science.world. A publisher's take on copyright and OA Kevin Taylor, Copyright and research: an academic publisher�s perspective, SCRIPT-ed, June 2007. Taylor is the Intellectual Property Director at Cambridge University Press. Excerpt:
Comments.
Copyright skews digital access to cultural heritage Emily Hudson and Andrew T. Kenyon, Without Walls: Copyright Law and Digital Collections in Australian Cultural Institutions, SCRIPT-ed, June 2007. Excerpt:
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