Open Access News

This paper reviews how Open Access policies (OA) and Institutional Repositories (IR) might be portrayed as agents of change within the realm of scholarly publishing. Using commentary on academic publishing as background, commentary that sees OA and IR as optimal and inevitable, and beneficially disruptive of the existing system, two theoretical approaches are presented as ways of providing a more detailed and explicit analysis of OA/IR dynamics. Both theories to varying degrees derive their inspiration from an exploration of the nature of change. The first �disruptive technology/disruptive innovation� approach (Christensen) specifies change in market theory terms, a re-structuring "driven" by innovation within, and possibly disruptive of, existing market arrangements. The second approach views change as a process of "reassembling" and reconfiguring of relationships between elements of a network (Actor-Network Theory). The application of both approaches to OA/IR is explored, including reference to a case study on a university institutional repository implementation. While "disruption" and similar terms might be in common and casual use, the basic idea gains greater clarity in these theories, and in doing so promotes greater awareness of the assumptions being made, and the aspirations being pursued.

In November 2008, Maxi Kindling und Sandra Lechelt of Libreas conducted a 28:32 minute podcast interview with Eric Steinhauer (in German) on OA in higher education.  There is also a transcript, which you can read in German or Google's English.  Steinhauer is a lawyer and Vice Director of the Library at the University of Magdeburg.  (Thanks to Klaus Graf.)

The German federal government's 2008 media and communications report (Medien- und Kommunikationsbericht der Bundesregierung 2008) was published last month, December 17, 2008.  (Thanks to KoopTech.)  It's a PDF, so I can't link to a  machine translation. 

At pp. 76-77, the government says it will re-evaluate a 2006 proposal for a secondary exploitation right for authors (Zweitverwertungsrecht f�r Urheber) of scientific research articles based on publicly-funded research.  The proposal is based on an excellent idea of Gerd Hansen's which I wrote about in SOAN for June 2006: 

The Upper House of Germany's Parliament (Bundesrat) is considering a bill to permit author self-archiving of journal articles six months after publication regardless of the terms in a copyright transfer agreement the author might have signed....

The government rejected the idea in 2006 and German law does not currently incorporate it.  The government is not promising to support it this time, but its willingness to re-evaluate it has to count as good news.

(Thanks to Sebastian Krujatz for help in understanding the government's position.)

Joe Gollner, The Emergence of Intelligent Content:  The evolution of open content technologies and their significance, January 6, 2009.  Apparently a preprint.  (Thanks to Alles over Content Management.)  Excerpt:

Abstract:   This paper traces the history of open content technologies in an effort to understand the nature and significance of intelligent content. What is illustrated is that a common thread runs through SGML, HTML, XML, Web 2.0, the Semantic Web, DITA, and OOXML and that the evolution of open content technologies has enabled the emergence of intelligent content and with it a new form of organizational agility.

This whitepaper has been prepared as a corollary to the presentation �Content Fusion: There�s a Piece of Data Lodged in my Document� at Intelligent Content 2009, Palm Springs CA, January 29-30, 2009.

From the Introduction:

After decades of evolution, content technologies have arrived at a critical threshold. All of the pieces are now in place and it has become possible to genuinely talk about �intelligent content� � by which we mean content that expresses its full meaning in a way that is openly accessible both to applications and to people. This is important because with intelligent content comes an entirely new class of solutions the emergence of which could not come at a better time. To fully appreciate the potential of intelligent content, we should first understand the evolution of open content technologies that has led to its emergence. This is the focus of this paper.

The Burney Collection of 17th and 18th newspapers was digitized in a public-private partnership, but the results are TA rather than OA.  (Thanks to Glyn Moody.)  From a JISC press release (January 13):

The largest single online collection of English news media from the 17th and 18th centuries, the Burney Collection, is now available free of charge for the first time to Higher and Further Education institutions and Research Councils across the UK....

Digitised through a partnership between the National Science Foundation and the British Library, then developed and hosted online by Gale/Cengage Learning, the digital version of the Burney Collection has been purchased in perpetuity by JISC Collections on behalf of the UK academic and research community at a national level....

Comment.  Publicly-funded digitization projects have a lot to learn from publicly-funded research projects.  The same principle that requires OA for publicly-funded research requires OA for publicly-funded digitization, especially when the works being digitized are in the public domain.  The principle applies when "all or part" of the funding is from taxpayers.  When this principle would scare off private funders, and the public funding isn't enough to complete the project, then we can offer the private funder a temporary revenue stream from a toll booth on public property, in exchange for its investment, by analogy with the embargo periods on publicly-funded research.  But like an embargo, this is a compromise with the public interest and must expire.  If it doesn't expire, then for some fraction of the cost of digitization, private companies could essentially buy exclusive rights to works in the public domain.  The damage is notable even when the originals are available in non-digital form.  But the damage is severe when the originals, as here, are rare and fragile and could never be viewed by most users in non-digital form.

Mamiko Matsubayashi and six co-authors, Status of open access in the biomedical field in 2005, Journal of the Medical Library Association, January 2009.

Objectives:  This study was designed to document the state of open access (OA) in the biomedical field in 2005.

Methods:  PubMed was used to collect bibliographic data on target articles published in 2005. PubMed, Google Scholar, Google, and OAIster were then used to establish the availability of free full text online for these publications. Articles were analyzed by type of OA, country, type of article, impact factor, publisher, and publishing model to provide insight into the current state of OA.

Results:  Twenty-seven percent of all the articles were accessible as OA articles. More than 70% of the OA articles were provided through journal websites. Mid-rank commercial publishers often provided OA articles in OA journals, while society publishers tended to provide OA articles in the context of a traditional subscription model. The rate of OA articles available from the websites of individual authors or in institutional repositories was quite low.

Discussion/Conclusions:  In 2005, OA in the biomedical field was achieved under an umbrella of existing scholarly communication systems. Typically, OA articles were published as part of subscription journals published by scholarly societies. OA journals published by BioMed Central contributed to a small portion of all OA articles.

Here's an unexpected finding not evident from the abstract: 

Fewer OA articles in our sample were published in full OA journals (37.2%) than in traditional subscription journals (62.8%) [a category including hybrid OA journals]....

PS:  Also note that in first third of 2005, no form of the NIH policy had yet taken effect, and in the second two thirds only the low-compliance voluntary form was in effect. 

Harvard's page on its Open-Access Policies has added links to a waiver request form and a quick-submit service for the repository.  Both require a Harvard ID for login.

Spain's Ministry of Science and Innovation (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovaci�n) has expressed interest in joining the CERN SCOAP3 project.

Audra Mahlong and Siyabonga Africa, IP Bill locks down innovation, IT Web, January 15, 2009.  Excerpt:

President Kgalema Motlanthe has signed the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) from Publicly Funded Research and Development Bill into action.

The legislation forms part of science and technology minister Mosibudi Mangena's initiatives to increase innovation in the public sphere. The minister hopes to do this by ensuring publicly-funded researchers get a return on their research through marketable patents and collectable royalties....

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) says it supports the objectives of the IPR Act and, at the same time, it points out the complexities of promoting effective technology transfer....

�The impact of this law is that there is now a barrier to innovations which will save lives,� says Andrew Rens, intellectual property fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation. He notes that by moving away from the open sharing of inventions and information, more people stand to lose out than gain from the system.

Rens notes the Bill works on false premise that patenting leads to profit, and cases in other countries working on a similar system of IP rights have shown this. �SA also has no patent examination system where previous patents are checked against each other. There is no assessment which is done to see whether the idea has any merit or not,� explains Rens.

The Bill will have wide-ranging consequences for the South African research community, he notes, saying the country could see a decline in research co-operation from international consortia with universities, a decline in philanthropic funding and a move away from open access.

�This is not a solution. Do we want to see research which benefits the ordinary South African, or do we want to contribute to jobless growth? The solutions are in open access and increased access to venture capital funding for companies,� states Rens.

Comment.  Tech transfer laws like this one do allow the patenting of otherwise patentable discoveries made by publicly-funded research, and to that extent they enclose more of the commons.  We can debate their wisdom.  But even if they expand enclosure and create a corrupting influence on universities, it's not clear that they impede OA to research itself.  The Bayh-Dole Act in the US did not, for example, block the NIH policy, even though the law was 24 years old and well-entrenched by the time the NIH policy was first proposed.  Looking at the other end of the stick, however, OA can advance the goals of tech transfer by making it easier for businesses to monitor new discoveries that might be ripe for investment and commercialization.  That's why the European Commission tech-transfer report of April 2008 recommended OA for publicly-funded research.

OCLC Members Council and the OCLC Board of Trustees will jointly convene a Review Board of Shared Data Creation and Stewardship to represent the membership and inform OCLC on the principles and best practices for sharing library data. The group will discuss the Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records with the OCLC membership and library community.

The purpose of this Review Board is to engage the membership and solicit feedback and questions before the new policy is implemented. In order to allow sufficient time for feedback and discussion, implementation of the Policy will be delayed until the third quarter of the 2009 calendar year. ...

Jennifer Younger, Edward H. Arnold Director of Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame, and an OCLC Members Council delegate, will chair the Review Board. Members Council delegates and other leaders in the library community will be represented on the Review Board. ...

The Review Board on Principles of Shared Data Creation and Stewardship will:

• Consult with librarians and member representatives as appropriate.
• Review reports, letters and comments including blog and listserv messages from the global library community regarding the revised Policy.
• Recommend principles of shared data creation and changes in the Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records that will preserve the community around WorldCat infrastructure and services, and strengthen libraries. ...

The Review Board will also take into consideration other sources of review, like the recently formed ARL Study Group. The Review Board will provide findings to the President of Members Council, the Chair of the Board of Trustees, and the OCLC President and CEO.

The Review Board on Principles of Shared Data Creation and Stewardship is scheduled to meet in late January to develop a work plan. ... [A] preliminary report will be made to Members Council during its February meeting.

Delegates will discuss the report at the May Members Council meeting, and a final report is scheduled to be submitted to the OCLC Board of Trustees following the May meeting.

Implementation of the Policy had been set for February 2009, but the Policy will be under further review by the Board of Trustees and Members Council into the third quarter of 2009.

• Josh Hadro, ARL/ASERL Task Force to Investigate OCLC Policy Change, Library Journal, December 15, 2008.
• Andrew Albanese, ARL: OCLC Review a Chance To Be Heard on Policy Change, Library Journal, December 18, 2008.

... [T]he focus of this post is on how we were able to negotiate the Creative Commons license [for our book] from [publisher] New Riders, which is owned by Peachpit, which is owned by Pearson (a big big corporate big thing.) ...

Publishers know things are going to change, but they don�t know what that change is going to be. Know that your publisher is willing to experiment. ...

Use case studies to argue with facts. It also helps for them to see that other reputable publishers have licensed books Creative Commons. ...

... Even friendly organizations tend to use legal boilerplate in their contracts � which typically treats your intellectual production as a work for hire, assigning exclusive copyright to your client or employer. This should be problematic for anyone: not only do you lose the right to apply a CC license to your work, you lose the right to use your work for any purpose without getting your (former) employer�s permission.

Without getting into a discussion about the work-for-hire doctrine, there�s an easy way around this. You can assign copyright to your employer, but you get a non-exclusive license, too. This is similar to the logic of the author addenda of the scholarly publishing world. They can do anything they want with the content you produced � but you can, too. ...

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has released an updated version of its popular Scholarly Communication Toolkit in a new format and with updated content. The toolkit continues to provide context and background by summarizing key issues to offer quick, basic information on scholarly communication topics. It also links to examples of specific tools, including handouts, presentations and videos for libraries to adapt and use on their own campuses. ...

David Bollier's new book, Viral Spiral, now has a Web site and an OA, CC-licensed edition. See especially chapter 11, "Science as a Commons".

See also our previous post on the book, or past posts on Bollier.

The Stuttgarter Beitr�ge f�r Naturkunde Serie B converted to OA and changed its name to Palaeodiversity in late 2008.  (Thanks to Bill Parker.)  The backfile to 1999 is OA and older issues will soon be OA as well.

Hindawi is pleased to announce the addition of the ePUB digital format as one of the available formats on its online platform for all of its journal and book publications. ePUB is a modern, industry standard format developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum, of which Hindawi is a member, as an XML format for reflowable digital books and publications. ePUB is widely supported on computer systems as well as on digital reading devices such as the Sony digital book reader. A number of sample articles that have been released can be found at [here]. ...

Hindawi currently publishes all of its journal articles in PDF and HTML with full MathML support. ... All articles published since the beginning of 2008 shall be reprocessed in order to generate ePUB files. Going forward, all articles and books will be released in ePUB in addition to the other current formats.

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.

Labels: Hot

Ton Zijlstra, Open Government Data, Exciting New Project, Interdependent Thoughts, January 13, 2009.  Excerpt:

Last June I wrote about open data, after attending a session by Keith Andrews at PolitCamp Graz. I continued the discussion on that topic with others, which now has turned into a new and exciting project.

Wouldn't it be great if we, as citizens, could have access to already public data and information in a way that we can choose? ...It is...the rationale behind the British government project Show Us a Better Way, where ideas are collected around putting government data to good use....

It would be great wouldn't it? That's why the Ministry for Interior Affairs here in the Netherlands asked me and James Burke (Lifesized) to work on some appealing examples of reusing government data and opening up that data for the wider public (with APIs and some simple tools) in the coming months. At the same time we will create a map of possible government datasources to open up, and the people involved with maintaining those data sources, as well as collect ideas, examples, wishes, and needs from citizens around open government data....

Gavin Baker is live-blogging (1, 2, 3) the TACD's Patents, Copyrights and Knowledge Governance conference (Washington DC, January 12-13, 2009).

Update (1/13/09).  Gavin has posted a TOC of his 9 blog posts on the conference.

Stevan Harnad, STM Publisher Briefing on Institution Repository Deposit Mandates, Open Access Archivangelism, January 13, 2009.  The square brackets in this excerpt are Stevan's, not mine.

[Two members of STM have kindly, at my request, allowed me to see a copy of the STM Briefing on IRs and Deposit Mandates. I focused the commentary below on quoted excerpts, but before posting it I asked STM CEO Michael Mabe for permission to include the quotes. As I do not yet have an answer, I am posting the commentary with paraphrases of the passages I had hoped to quote. If I receive permission from Michael, I will repost this with the verbatim quotes. As it stands, it is self-contained and self-explanatory.]

The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) has circulated a fairly anodyne briefing to its member publishers. Although it contains a few familiar items of misinformation that need to be corrected (yet again), there is nothing alarming or subversive in it, along the lines of the PRISM/pitbull misadventure of 2007.

Below are some quote/comments along with the (gentle) corrections of the persistent bits of misinformation: My responses are unavoidably -- almost ritually -- repetitive, because the errors and misinformation themselves are so repetitive....

[Exclusive copyright transfer is essential so alternative versions do not prevent publishers from making ends meet. Publishers add value in return.]

(a) In their IRs, authors deposit supplementary versions of their own peer-reviewed publications in order to maximize their uptake, usage, applications, and impact, by maximizing access to them.

(b) So far, all evidence is that this self-archiving has not undermined the traditional toll-based (subscription/license) funding model for peer-reviewed journal publishing: rather, they co-exist peacefully.

(c) But if and when IR deposit should ever make subscriptions unsustainable for covering the remaining essential costs of peer-reviewed journal publishing, there is an obvious alternative: conversion to the Gold OA publishing funding model.

(d) What is definitely not an acceptable alternative for the research community, however, is to refrain from maximizing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress (by mandating IR deposit) merely in order to insure publishers' current funding model against any possibility that universal IR deposit might eventually lead to a change in funding model.

(e) Unlike trade authors, researchers transfer to the publishers of their peer-reviewed research all the rights to sell the published text, without asking for any royalties or fees in return. They have always, however, exercised the right to distribute free copies of their own articles to all would-be users who requested them, for research purposes. In the web era, OA IRs have become the natural way for researchers to continue that practice, in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress....

[Talking points in responding to the media: subscription publishing does require exclusive copyright transfer; perhaps OA publishing doesn't.]

This mixes up issues: The only relevant issue here for IRs and IR deposit policies is whether or not the publisher has formally endorsed providing open access to the peer-reviewed postprint immediately upon acceptance for publication. (This is called a "Green" publisher policy on OA self-archiving. It has nothing to do with author-pays/Gold OA publishing models. And authors paying for the "right" to deposit would be absurd and out of the question.) ...

[Should we endorse deposits that are open webwide only for a fee?]

Paying to deposit in researchers' own IRs would be absurd, and roundly rejected as such by the research community....

[Inform the media that publishers have made journal articles more accessible today than ever before.]

True (though thanks also to the advent of the Web). But this literature is not yet accessible to all those would-be users webwide whose institutions cannot afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published -- and no institution can afford to subscribe to all or most peer-reviewed journals....

(The publishing industry has to remind itself that the reason peer-reviewed research is conducted, peer-reviewed and published is not in order to fund the publishing industry, but in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.) ...

[Researchers should stay free "to choose how and where to publish."]

By all means. And they should continue to exercise their freedom to supplement access to their published research by depositing their postprints in their IRs for all would-be users webwide who cannot afford access to the publisher's proprietary version....

Comment.  I support all of Stevan's responses.  I also support his request to Michael Mabe to allow us to post quotations from the STM members-only briefing.  If Mabe agrees, then I'll blog the briefing (again) and include some excerpts from the text. 

... [University OA] mandates are, however, of little use if those works cannot be found by others. Search indexes like Google (Scholar) or OAIster are often not capable of sorting efficiently for the purposes of a researcher. It is therefore important that works from institutional repositories be also indexed in field specific indexes, like RePEc for economics.

RePEc does not house files, it only indexes them. Thus, the goal is not to push PDFs to RePEc, but rather to push the appropriate metadata about those PDFs. Software used in institutional repositories typically generates metadata, unfortunately not in the format required by RePEc (which predates any other format). Thus, metadata needs to be converted. We make available a variety of scripts, typically written in perl that are easily customizable to local needs, in particular for DSpace and EPrints. Other converters are always welcome to be added to the list.

The Swiss University of Fribourg has signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge. (Thanks to Anja Lengenfelder.)

Caroline Bayley, Buy none, get one free, BBC News, January 8, 2009.  (Thanks to Matt Cockerill.)  Excerpt:

Is the business model of the future one where the customer no longer pays? Already products in the digital marketplace are being given away free, yet companies are still making profits.

One firm believer in this increasingly common business model is Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine....

BBC Radio 4's In Business spoke to Chris Anderson ahead of the publication of his book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price....

Mr Anderson refers to Moore's Law, which states that computer power doubles every 18 months. The economic reciprocal of that, he says, is "the cost of a net unit of computer power falls by 50% every 18 months, which means that everything gets cheaper by 50% or more every year and a half...Imagine a factory of the 19th Century where the labour got cheaper, where the steel got cheaper, where coal got cheaper, the real estate got cheaper, every aspect....That's why there's such an imperative to make things digital, because you go from an economy where things get more expensive, such as oil and food - the economy of atoms - to an economy where everything gets cheaper, which is the economy of bits"....

"At the moment, people are still suspicious of 'free' and are right to be so. They often pay further down the line or pay with their time or reputation....People are right to think that somewhere, somebody is going to have to pay." ...

This new model still uses cross-subsidies - the idea that someone is paying - but in this case, Mr Anderson says, it's not you.

In the digital world, a very few paying customers can subsidise everybody else.

"The new form of cross-subsidy is one where a tiny minority of people who really appreciate the product, really get value from it, can subsidise everybody else, because the underlying cost of doing things online, in digital, is so low that you can give away 90% of it for free." ...

Chris Anderson refers to the spray of perfume given away free in the department store to encourage customers to buy a whole bottle.  One per cent of the product is given away free in order to sell 99%. In the digital world, however, the opposite applies, "you give away 99% to sell 1%," he says....

"[With computer games] the people you're charging are happy about it and the people you're not charging are the majority. So everybody's happy and the company makes money because the marginal cost of supplying that game to the free users is close to zero."

Comments

• Anderson is generalizing the business model used by OA journals, whether or not they charge publication fees.  Here's how I generalized it in an April 2002 article:

  There are many successful and sustainable examples in our economy in which some pay for all, and those who pay are moved by generosity, self-interest, or some combination. Either way, they willingly pay to make a product or service free for everyone rather than pay only for their own private access or consumption. This funding model, which works so well in industries with much higher expenses [such as broadcast television and radio], will work even better in an economic sector with the nearly unique property that producers donate their labor and intellectual property, and are moved by the desire to make a contribution to knowledge rather than a desire for personal profit.

• Unfortunately the link to the podcast interview with Chris Anderson and James Boyle is broken at the moment.  But keep trying in case the problem is only temporary.  If the BBC eventually posts the interview to a different URL, you should be able to find it here.
• Also see the reflections of Peter Day, who conducted the Anderson/Boyle interview, and our past posts on Anderson and Boyle.

Update.  Here's a working link to the podcast interview.  (Thanks to Matt Cockerill.)

Tove Faber Frandsen, The integration of open access journals in the scholarly communication system: Three science fields, Information Processing & Management, January 2009.

Abstract:   The greatest number of open access journals (OAJs) is found in the sciences and their influence is growing. However, there are only a few studies on the acceptance and thereby integration of these OAJs in the scholarly communication system. Even fewer studies provide insight into the differences across disciplines. This study is an analysis of the citing behaviour in journals within three science fields: biology, mathematics, and pharmacy and pharmacology. It is a statistical analysis of OAJs as well as non-OAJs including both the citing and cited side of the journal to journal citations. The multivariate linear regression reveals many similarities in citing behaviour across fields and media. But it also points to great differences in the integration of OAJs. The integration of OAJs in the scholarly communication system varies considerably across fields. The implications for bibliometric research are discussed.

Only this abstract is free online at the journal site, but also see the self-archived preprint.

Tove Faber Frandsen, Attracted to open access journals: a bibliometric author analysis in the field of biology, Journal of Documentation, January 2009.  (The DOI-based URL doesn't work for me at the  moment.) 

Purpose � Scholars from developing countries have limited access to research publications due to expensive subscription costs. However, the open access movement is challenging the constraint to access. Consequently, researchers in developing countries are often mentioned as major recipients of the benefits when advocating open access (OA). One of the implications of that argument is that authors from developing countries are more likely to perceive open access positively than authors from developed countries. The present study aims to investigate the use of open access by researchers from developing countries and is thus a supplement to the existing author surveys and interviews.

Design/methodology/approach � Bibliometric analyses of both publishing behaviour and citing behaviour in relation to OA publishing provides evidence of the impact of open access on developing countries.

Findings � The results of the multivariate linear regression show that open access journals are not characterised by a different composition of authors from the traditional toll access journals. Furthermore, the results show that authors from developing countries do not cite open access more than authors from developed countries.

Originality/value � The paper argues that authors from developing countries are not attracted to open access more than authors from developed countries.

Only this abstract is free online from the journal site, but also see the self-archived preprint.

Update (1/14/09).  See Phil Davis' comments on Frandsen's article and the comments of Stevan Harnad and Leslie Chan on Davis' comments.

From Davis:

...The fact that authors in developing nations cite as many subscription-based articles as their counterparts in developed nations questions the notion of a crisis of access to scientific information....

From Chan:

1. From our perspective, OA is as much about the flow of knowledge from the South to the North as much as the traditional concern with access to literature from the North. So the question to ask is whether with OA, authors from the North are starting to cite authors from the South. This is a study we are planning....
2. The more critical issue regarding OA and developing country scientists is that most of those who publish in "international" journals cannot access their own publications. This is where open repositories are crucial, to provide access to research from the South that is otherwise inaccessible.
3. The Frandsen study focuses on biology journals and I am not sure what percentage of them are available to DC researchers through HINARI/AGORA. This would explain why researchers in this area would not need to rely on OA materials as much. But HINARI etc. are not OA programs....
4. Norris et. al's (2008) "Open access citation rates and developing countries" focuses instead on Mathematics, a field not covered by HINARI and they conclude that "the majority of citations were given by Americans to Americans, but the admittedly small number of citations from authors in developing countries do seem to show a higher proportion of citations given to OA articles than is the case for citations from developed countries...."
5. ...Davis's eagerness to pronounce that there is "No Benefit for Poor Scientists" based on one study is highly premature.
   If there should be a study showing that people in developing countries prefer imported bottled water over local drinking water, should efforts to ensure clean water supplies locally be questioned?

Update (1/15/09).  Also see Tove Faber Frandsen's comment on Davis' post.  Excerpt:

...I would like to stress that this article do not try to assess the benefits of OA for developing countries. The conclusion of the study is not that open access is of no benefit to developing countries. From the conclusion:

�[B]ased on this study author behaviour in terms of OA publishing and citing cannot be distinguished on the basis of the author(s) being located in developed or developing country. However, OA journals can be characterised by attracting a certain group of authors as the results show that although authors from developing and developed countries do not differ in terms of citing OA journals, publications by both authors from developed and developing countries differ from the two former groups.�

I would not recommend drawing the conclusion that OA is no benefit for developing countries on the basis of the present study. The analyses are based on publication and citation counts, and we should be careful not to confuse citation rates with usage....

Finally, I would like to say that I look forward to continuing these discussions in the primary literature where we also need to document the differences of opinion.

In his first year of office, George Bush issued an executive order allowing former presidents to block the public release of their papers.  See our past posts on that order and the opposition it generated.

The first act passed by the House of Representatives in the first post-Bush session of Congress is the repeal of Bush's executive order.  (Thanks to FGI.)  If the Senate can pass its own version, Obama has promised the sign the bill.

PS:  It's real.  Change is coming.

The students in Basic Biotechnology at Michigan State University publish their papers in an OA course journal. In fact, Open Journal Systems is used for the entire course site, including syllabus, links to readings, etc. The course received a university award for its use of OJS. (Thanks to the Public Knowledge Project.)

See also our past posts on OA class journals at San Jose State University and the University of British Columbia.

... [Open Journal Systems] generally very usable, although there are a few areas, mostly related to current awareness, where some simple tweaks to the defaults would make things easier.

• Make subscribing easier and more obvious. When you visit an OJS using a standard theme, there�s no big button that says �subscribe� or a similar term. Instead, there are two options that lead down that path: �Register� and �For Readers�.

  The �For Readers� page, by default, directs readers to register to receive the table of contents of new issues via email. The �Register� page, by default, requires you to create a username and password, fill out a captcha, and give your full name in addition to your email address. ... That�s a lot of effort just to get an email when new issues are released. ...

  A journal should make a prominent pitch for visitors to subscribe before they navigate away from the page and forget about the journal. More subscribers leads to more readers, which leads to more authors and referees and commentary. ...

• RSS feeds by default. OJS includes a plugin to produce RSS feeds, but it doesn�t appear to be on by default; many OJS journals don�t offer RSS feeds. See above comments about the importance of turning visitors into subscribers.
• OpenID support. With 2,000 OJS journals floating around, it seems a bit silly to have to create an account at each one, doesn�t it? OpenID would give users a single login not only across other OJS journals, but any site supporting OpenID. Good news, though: OpenID support is in the OJS roadmap. ...

Study of the situation of the providers of information in order to evaluate the performance of the investments effected in initiatives [using] OAI-PMH. [S]tatistical information is presented on distribution of contents and the situation and growth of the projects from 2006, year in which we begin to compile the information, and compare[d] with reports of other places.

• Josh Hadro, Newsmaker Interview: Brad Wheeler on the HathiTrust, Library Journal, January 9, 2009. Mostly on the technology and organization behind HathiTrust.
• John Wilkin, HathiTrust and the Google Deal, Library Journal, December 23, 2008. On the relationship between Google Books and HathiTrust. (Thanks to Fabrizio Tinti.)

... This is a list of the top 5 major things any government of any developed nation should be doing in relation to the Internet ...

2. Free your data, especially maps and other geographic information, plus the non-personal data that drives the police, health and social services, for starters. Introduce a �presumption of innovation� � if someone has asked for something costly to free up, give them what they want: it�s probably a sign that they understand the value of your data when you don�t. ...

... Most publishers of medical journals have stuck to a 400-year-old model of fee-based publication. Such fees are downright prohibitive to much of the world. Why is this tolerated by medicine and the general public? ...

Doctoral thesis highly commended, News from DIS (the Department of Information Science at Loughborough University), January 9, 2009.  (Thanks to Stevan Harnad.)  Excerpt:

The Emerald Group Publishing Limited have informed the Department that Dr. Michael Norris has been named as a Highly Commended Award winner of the 2008 Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Award in the Information Science category for his doctoral thesis �The citation advantage of open access articles�.   These prestigious awards have now been running for four years and attract submissions of an exceptionally high quality from across the globe in all subject areas.

Michael was awarded his Ph.D. in the autumn of 2008 and is continuing to work on a research project in DIS.  Charles Oppenheim, Head of Department commented: �This recognition of Dr. Norris� research is richly deserved. His outstanding research explored the topical and contentious issue of whether Open Access journal articles receive more citations than toll access journals, and if so, why. His work demonstrated that the reasons for the increase of citations are complex and cannot be explained away in a simplistic fashion, as some have tried to do.�

PS:  Congratulations, Michael!  Also see the published article based on the dissertation:  Michael Norris, Charles Oppenheim, and Fytton Rowland, The citation advantage of open-access articles, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, July 9, 2008.  Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, neither the article nor the dissertation is yet OA. 

Update (1/13/09).  Two articles based on this dissertation have now been self-archived:

• Michael Norris, Charles Oppenheim, and Fytton Rowland, Finding open access articles using Google, Google Scholar, OAIster and OpenDOAR, Online Information Review, 32 (6), pp. 709-715.
• Michael Norris, Charles Oppenheim, and Fytton Rowland, The citation advantage of open-access articles, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, July 9, 2008. 

STM has written a members-only briefing document on university OA mandates.  Unless you're a member, it's all secret except for this blurb:

On 9 January 2009, STM issued a briefing for STM member Heads of House and Senior Executives on the issues that surround the increasing tendency of institutions to mandate the use of their repositories. This note provides an overview of the current scene and poses some closely connected publishing policy considerations.

E-LIS is an international open archive for the Library and Information Science fields, established in 2003. With over 8,600 documents as of November is an international open archive for the Library and Information Science fields, established in 2003. With over 8,600 documents as of November 2008, E-LIS is the world�s largest archive for LIS. Over half the documents in E-LIS are peer-reviewed. With support for 22 languages and a volunteer editorial team from over 40 countries, E-LIS is an outstanding example of global cooperation, which is reflected in one of the strengths of LIS. Over half the documents in E-LIS are peer-reviewed. With support for 22 languages and a volunteer editorial team from over 40 countries, E-LIS is an outstanding example of global cooperation, which is reflected in one of the strengths of E-LIS, the diversity of its content.

This presentation defines Open Access and gives an overview of the academic (teaching faculty) perspective on open access publishing and self-archiving and what it all means in the real-world university (library) environment. Some strategies are mentioned that could help the self-archiving movement.

• 57% of respondents knew the concept of OA
• The most popular sources of information about OA, in order:
  1. Browsing the Web
  2. Colleague
  3. Article
  4. Other means
  5. Library
• 31% were familiar with the concept of self-archiving
• 12% reported previously self-archiving, but only 2% in an open archive (the others on a personal or lab site)
• 86% did not know if their university had an IR
• 51% believe that self-archiving in an open archive won't increase the impact of an article
• 83% would self-archive if their employer or funder required it

• 5. A. Jacquesson and J.-Ph. Schmitt, Les grands �diteurs face au mouvement open access
• 8. L. Endrizzi, Wikip�dia : un nouveau mod�le �ditorial ?

In 2004, when five libraries inked the first book-scanning agreements with Google, it seemed like the company was offering a public service. Google�s plan to digitize the great libraries of the world conjured images of a vast, freely accessible Internet public library ...

While public libraries� doors are open and their collections �free to all,� as the Boston Public Library inscription famously proclaims, the Google Book Search settlement is a stark reminder that businesses are sustained by very different motivations than libraries. Control over library collections, once guided by the values of learning and research, is now a commercial matter. Goodbye free, hello fee.

It�s now clear that books will be a lucrative business for Google, bringing revenue not just from advertising but also from sales and licensing of out-of-print books. The proposed deal not only solidifies Google�s dominant position in Internet search, it gives the franchise a virtual monopoly on the long-tailed out-of-print book market. ...

According to the terms of the settlement, public libraries in the United States would be eligible for a license providing free online viewing but only at a single terminal and only for on-site library users. So much for the promise of the digital age. This sounds more like the age of the CD-ROM.

For access at additional terminals, libraries would have to pay a subscription fee. If users want to print, a per-page fee will be assessed. ...

At least works that are in the public domain, such as those published before 1923 or U.S. government documents, will be free of restrictions in digital form, right? Not exactly. You see, Google insists on being the gatekeeper, requiring users to gain online access to these works via its proprietary search engine. ...

[I]t is not fair to place restrictions on public domain works. After all, they belong to the public. These collections are only available to Google because of the public funding afforded to the nonprofit institutions that developed them. ...

As we consider where to go from here, I urge libraries to insist that Google withdraw all restrictions on uses of scanned public domain works. ... Just as timber companies don�t get a free pass to use federal lands, protections for the public domain should be part of commercial arrangements to exploit the public�s library collections. ...

In the short term, one bright spot is that libraries that open their collections to Google are entitled to copies of scanned works. Even with contractual restrictions, these scans can help fuel innovative ventures, like the HathiTrust, to build a digital library that embraces and carries forward core library values. Over the long haul, the proposed Google settlement and promising ventures like the HathiTrust remind us that libraries must support the development of a real Internet public library. This will require new funding strategies, coordinated library action, and public-oriented principles to guide us.

Welcome to the new Journal of Biomedical Science (JBS), which is published by BioMed Central in partnership with the National Science Council, Taiwan (NSC). This volume marks the transition of the journal from a subscription journal to an �open access� journal. ...

With the development of the internet, the way to conduct and share scientific research has been changing dramatically. Though still challenged by commercial journal publishers, open access publishing has become a growing trend for the possibility of expanding the circulation of scientific work and maximizing the research. Accumulating evidence has shown that open access articles are cited more quickly and more frequently than non-open access article published in the same journal. That probably explains the increasing interest from traditional journals in adopting open access as their new way of publishing.

Sponsored by the NSC, JBS aims to serve as an international forum for encouraging interdisciplinary discussions and contributing to the advancement of biomedical science, rather than as a periodical for commercial gain. ... We are well aware that access to an article, by itself, is not sufficient for citation. But access to it, by any path, is still a necessary pre-condition for citation. More and more journals are now turning to the open access publishing model. Therefore, to accelerate the dissemination of research information and provide maximum access to scholarly communication, the journal�s Editors and the NSC have decided to adopt the open access model ...

Previous articles published before 2009 are also freely available online (in final PDF version) to readers in the journal�s local repository. ...

Undeniably, open access also raises the issue of increasing financial burdens on authors because the publication cost is traditionally borne by the authors. Thanks to support from the NSC, authors will not be required to pay any article processing charges ...

Vittorio Klostermann, Die gro�e Allianz gegen das Buch, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 8, 2009 (accessible only to subscribers).  Klostermann, who founded the German publishing house, Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, objects to the new Allianz der deutschen Wissenschaftsorganisationen (Alliance of German Science Organizations) and its plans for OA in Germany.  His objections assume that the Allianz wants to abolish copyright, that a green OA mandate would undermine publisher revenues, that it would undermine author revenues (apparently thinking of books, not journal articles), and that it would undermine quality.

Thanks to Klaus Graf for the alert and for his comments, which you can read in German or Google's English.

PS:  Also see our past posts on the Allianz and its commitment to OA.  As far as I can tell, the Allianz still doesn't have a web site.

The January issue of Physics World contains two letters to the editor under the title, Debating open access and arXiv.  Neither letter is OA, at least so far, and PW doesn't even link to them from the TOC.  But thanks to John Glen for blogging citations and summaries (1, 2):

• Fairlie D. Debating open access and arXiv. Physics World 2009;22(1):20
  Letter suggesting that the enormous numbers of papers posted on arXiv indicates that too many papers are being published and that there is at present little motive for authors to publish their material in peer reviewed journals; arXiv should be regarded as more like a daily newspaper, not a place for final publication.
• Prentice, J. Debating open access and arXiv. Physics World 2009;22(1):20
  Letter pointing out that transferring the cost of publishing to the author may make whether to publish a management decision rather than a scientific one.