NEW POLICY FOR PUBLIC ACCESS TO OUTPUTS OF CANADIAN RESEARCH

WASHINGTON, DC and OTTAWA, NOVEMBER 28, 2006 - SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and CARL (the Canadian Association of Research Libraries)--together representing over 200 academic and research libraries across North America--commend the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) for the strength and timeliness of its Draft Policy on Access to Research Outputs.

The CIHR's Draft Policy on Access to Research Outputs is the result of consultations, and a survey of the health research community, focusing on topics related to access. The process was conducted through the CIHR Web site beginning in April 2006.

CARL is the leadership organization for the Canadian research library community. CARL's members represent Canada's 27 major academic research libraries , Library and Archives Canada, the Library of Parliament and the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI).

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and SPARC Europe are an international alliance of more than 300 academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system. SPARC's advocacy, educational, and publisher partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of research.

Cost Benefits Analysis of OA: a study

Australia's Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) has published an important report by John Houghton, Colin Steele & Peter Sheehan: Research Communication Costs In Australia: Emerging Opportunities And Benefits, September 2006 (also available in RTF).

Some findings:
benefit / cost ratios ranging from 4 to over 51 for Australia's proposed open access via mandated self-archiving policy. That is, from various perspectives, the benefits of this approach exceed the cost by at least 4 times to over 51 times ($51 dollars of benefits for every dollar of cost).

Expressing these impacts as a benefit/cost ratio we find that, over 20 years, a full system of institutional repositories in Australia costing AUD 10 million a year and achieving a 100% self-archiving compliance would show:

* A benefit/cost ratio of 51 for the modelled impacts of open access to public sector research (i.e. the benefits are 51 times greater than the costs);
* A benefit/cost ratio of 30 for the modelled impacts of open access to higher education research; and
* A benefit/cost ratio of 4.1 for the modelled impacts of open access to ARC competitive grants funded research....

From: Peter Suber's Open Access News - more details

Taylor & Francis offers open access option to authors

Taylor & Francis is the latest publishing company to start offering its authors an open access (OA) option. iOpenAccess, as the new service is dubbed, certainly has a name that will attract the iPod generation, but at present remains a pilot.
iOpenAccess is across 175 Taylor & Francis journals in its chemistry, mathematics and physics portfolios, as well as a behavioural science journal from the Psychological Press. Medical and bioscience journals from the Informa Healthcare brand are also included in the scheme.
<-more from IRW->

Empirical study of university-level OA mandates

Arthur Sale, The acquisition of open access research articles, a preprint, self-archived August 23, 2006.

Abstract: The behavior of researchers when self-archiving in an institutional repository has not been previously analyzed. This paper uses available information for three repositories analyzing when researchers (as authors) deposit their research articles. The three repositories have variants of a mandatory deposit policy.
It is shown that it takes several years for a mandatory policy to be institutionalized and routinized, but that once it has been the deposit of articles takes place in a remarkably short time after publication, or in some cases even before. Authors overwhelmingly deposit well before six months after publication date. The OA mantra of 'deposit now, set open access when feasible' is shown to be not only reasonable, but fitting what researchers actually do.

From the body of the paper:
Conclusions:
Repository managers should invest in promotion and follow-up for 2-3 years after a mandatory policy is promulgated, after which the behavior becomes routinized.
No especial activities need to be undertaken to convince researchers to deposit research articles soon after publication – this seems to happen naturally under mandatory policies.
Six month embargos by publishers are likely to be unpopular with researchers, since in the absence of constraints they deposit earlier than this.
The recommendation widely adopted by the open access movement and summarized as ‘deposit immediately, and make open access as soon as legally possible’ is shown to be excellent advice for any university or funding agency considering adopting a mandatory policy.

Comment. This is an important set of results. Sale's research shows that OA mandates work without coercion and supports the case for university-level mandates, the case for the dual deposit/release strategy, and the case against self-archiving embargoes.

From Open Access News, August 23, 2006
Posted by Peter Suber at 8/23/2006 08:52:00 AM.

Institutional repositories do not always mean open access

Many institutions and authors develop repositories and not all are completely open access. Most, if not all of the actively growing repositories use software that allows the author complete control over who sees her/his work. The flexibility allows authors the choice of making their works, as a body or as individual arcticles, available or not and allows them to retain complete control. Also citation counting capability is becoming standard for these comprehensive software packages.

The effects of this control are discussed in a recent article in Citebase.

How many IRs are there in the US?

An article in the D-Lib Magazine (http://dlib.org/dlib/september05/lynch/09lynch.html) gives a snapshot answer to this as of early 2005.
At that time the number was small with as many being planned as existed at that time.

Also from the conclusions:

"Research libraries have taken on a leadership role in both policy formulation (including the framing of the necessary campus-wide conversations) and operational deployment roles for institutional repositories at our research universities. (We did not explore funding questions, which will be crucial going forward.) Clearly, while an institutional repository is recognized as an institutional service, library leadership is generally unquestioned; what varies from university to university is the extent of active collaboration by other campus units. Institutional repositories represent a critically important new policy and operational role for research libraries, and one that renews their connection with the core academic processes of the university."

More on the OA news from Oxford and PLoS

John Timmer, The state of public access publishing, Ars Technica, June 26, 2006. Excerpt:
A few stories came out regarding public access scientific articles over the past week that provide a decent summary of where things stand. The first comes out of the Oxford Journals, a large collection that includes some scientific journals and is managed by the Oxford University Press....In keeping with the spirit of things, they've made the presentations and reports from the conference freely available. Various journals were subjected to analyses based on the access and citation rates before and after open access, and the results were generally mixed. One presentation, however, stood out from the rest for some interesting and definitive conclusions. As a result of opening up Nucleic Acids Research (NAR), search robots visits to the site rapidly peaked. By a year later, access to the site following a link from search engines had passed the PubMed database as the primary means of reaching an NAR article. In less than two years, journal access was up about 145 percent. In the words of the analysis, open access has, "opened the gates to the Google generation."
We've already mentioned how the sophisticated evaluations performed by commercial search engines can often provide better results than some dedicated academic search sites and how at least one commercial publisher is interested in making subscription based content accessible to search engines. Presumably, clear cut results such as these will hasten such efforts in the future. There were a few other interesting tidbits in the report. For example, it seems that most of the additional views appear to be of older articles, suggesting that search engines are more adept at pointing users to content they might otherwise overlook. A lot of the new readers appear to be from central Europe, where funding for paid access to journals can be expected to be limited.
Meanwhile, one of the commercial publishing houses (Nature) takes a look at one of their open access rivals, the Public Library of Science....The article notes that, based on impact factor, the top PLoS journals are doing very well for newcomers in the publishing field. But the financing hasn't followed; income is increasing, but it's still lagging far behind spending, resulting in a net deficit of US$1 million last year. So far, PLoS has made up the difference via grants from foundations, but the fees charged for publishing a paper there are set to rise to make up some of the difference. Currently at $1500, those fees could rise to nearly $2500. For context, many other publishers charge fees, some of which vary by the number of color images in an article. It’s entirely possible to rack up even higher charges for publishing in a commercial journal. Still, it’s a far cry from the hopes that accompanied the formation of PLoS. It seems like the open access movement is still experiencing some growing pains.
From: Open Access News, June 27, 2006

E-prints "request a copy" button

In April 2006 GNU Eprints (free IR software) added a request button for copies of the eprints seen in the IR. The functionality of the button allows authors to gage the level of interest in their creations. Many hope the level of interest shown will encourage authors to open the access.

"Where a record of a stored eprint tells the user that an open access copy is not available, a form box appears inviting the user to paste in their email address and send a request to the author for a copy of the paper. This request is emailed automatically to the author, offering three choices in return: to email the requested eprint, to reject the request, or to make the eprint open access in the repository." - from the press release

Wellcome digitizes a million pages for OA

Kim Thomas, Wellcome Trust digitisation hits million page mark, Information World Review, June 16, 2006. Excerpt:
The Wellcome Trust has completed the first million pages of its project to digitise nearly 200 years’ worth of medical journals. The project, which started in 2004, is creating a digital archive that will offer free access to medical journals via PubMed Central, the online medical service from the US National Institutes of Health. The earliest archived journal dates from 1809, but the archive will also encompass current and future journals.
“It’s a living archive,” said Robert Kiley, head of systems strategy at medical research funding charity Wellcome Trust. He added that participating publishers have agreed to make all future content freely available online within 12 months of publication. “Once we’ve digitised a journal, if the publisher wants a copy itself for its own website, it can do that,” he said.
As well as digitising the content, the project, funded jointly by the Wellcome Trust and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), is creating a PDF file for every article in the archive. All the text is also being put through an optical character recognition process, making it possible to carry out free-text searches.
Kiley said that the project had been “subject to heavy and sustained use”. The Biochemical Journal has had more than one million articles downloaded in an eight month period, he said. The next journal to be digitised will be the British Medical Journal, a source of several ground breaking studies.

From Open Access News at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

warning about two-tiered internet

* Web inventor warns of 'dark' net *

The inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, has warned of the dangers of introducing a two-tier internet.
See article in BBC News:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/-/2/hi/technology/5009250.stm

OpenDOAR

From the DOAR site:

"The OpenDOAR service is being developed to support the rapidly emerging movement towards Open Access to research information. This will categorise and list the wide variety of Open Access research archives that have grown up around the world."

"The project is a joint collaboration between the University of Nottingham in the UK and the Lund University in Sweden. Both institutions are active in supporting Open Access development. Lund operates the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which is known throughout the world."

http://opendoar.org

Using Fedora for institutional repositories

This article is a summary and review of a series of articles written by Peter Murray at Ohiolink and posted to the Disruptive Library Technology Jester blog over the past couple of months .../2006/05/02/the-jesters-case-for-fedora

Fedora is used at OhioLink's Digital Resource Commons.

Interviews on Open Access in Research Information Magazine

Research Information has just published a series of interviews by editor Sian Harris on Open Access: http://www.researchinformation.info/rijunjul06openaccess.html

* 'Open access is much wider than just readers not paying' - Martin Richardson, Oxford Journals

* 'Academics have access anyway' - Michael Mabe, formerly of Elsevier

* 'Text mining of subject archives will enable new facts to be discovered' - Robert Terry, The Wellcome Trust

* 'Self-archiving should be mandatory' - Steven Harnad, U Quebec/Montreal & U Southampton (corrections by author in red at: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/shcorrex.html)

* 'The environmental community will embrace open-access' - Tim Smith, Institute of Physics Publishing

* 'Many areas of research are funded by taxpayers but they do not see the results' - Matthew Cockerill, BioMed Central

* 'The first priority should be awareness-raising' - Alma Swan, Key Perspectives

* 'Our community is used to immediate release of preprints' - Jens Vigen, CERN

* 'Get research authors to change their behaviour' - Leslie Carr, University of Southampton

- post adapted from list input by S. Harnad

Open data

SPARC-ACRL FORUM TO EXPLORE OPEN DATA

Washington, DC and Chicago, IL - May 11, 2006 - The upcoming SPARC-ACRL forum on emerging issues in scholarly communication, to be held during the American Library Association's annual meeting in New Orleans, will explore questions related to the field of Open Data. The forum will feature experts who are familiar with the issues associated with Open Data and known for their analysis of the evolving scholarly communication scene.

During the past several years, Open Data has become a field of urgent interest to researchers, scholars, and librarians. With the amount of scientific data doubling every year, issues surrounding the access, use, and curation of data sets are increasing in importance. The data-rich, researcher-driven environment that is evolving poses new challenges and provides new opportunities in the sharing, review, and publication of research results. Ensuring open access to the data behind the literature will play a key role in seeing that the scholarly communication system evolves in a way that supports the needs of scholars and the academic enterprise as a whole.

As Open Data moves to the forefront of scholarly communication, librarians, administrators, and researchers will be responsible for considering new access policies for data and data curation issues. This SPARC-ACRL forum will introduce Open Data as an emerging focus, explore the challenges of managing the data deluge, and aid participants in crafting their own digital data preservation and curation policies.

Speakers will include:

* Christopher Greer, Cyberinfrastructure Advisor, Office of the Assistant Director for Biological Sciences, National Science Foundation
* Robert Hanisch, Project Manager, Space Telescope Science Institute
* Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information

The SPARC-ACRL forum will be held on Saturday, June 24th from 4:00 - 5:30PM in the Morial Convention Center, Room 356 - 357. Reservations are not required.

The forum is followed by the ACRL Scholarly Communication Discussion Group, an opportunity to exchange views with speakers from the forum and take the discussion to a deeper level. The Discussion Group convenes on Sunday, June 25th, from 4:00 - 5:30PM in Evangeline Suite of the Royal Sonesta Hotel.

For more information, visit the SPARC Web site at http://www.arl.org/sparc/ and the SPARC Open Data email discussion list at http://www.arl.org/sparc/opendata/.

SPARC
SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and SPARC Europe are an international alliance of more than 300 academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system. SPARC's advocacy, educational, and publisher partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of research. SPARC is located on the Web at http://www.arl.org/sparc; SPARC Europe is at http://www.sparceurope.org.

ACRL
ACRL is a division of the American Library Association (ALA), representing more than 13,000 academic and research librarians and interested individuals. ACRL is the only individual membership organization in North America that develops programs, products and services to meet the unique needs of academic and research librarians.
Its initiatives enable the higher education community to understand the role that academic libraries play in the teaching, learning and research environments.

Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006

The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 by Robin Peek, InfoToday, May 8, 2006 http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb060508-2.shtml

"One of the greatest events in the history of Open Access may have just happened. On May 2, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, introduced the bipartisan Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (FRPAA) (S.2695). The legislation is co-sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn. If passed, the policy would require that agencies with research budgets of more than $100 million enact policy to ensure that articles generated through research funded by that agency are made available online within 6 months of publication.

Aurarians can track this bill thru Legislative Histories, Bills & Laws (Lexis Nexis). Click on Bill Tracking and then do a search on S 2695 limited to the current session 109 (2005-2006).

Related story

Scholarly journals resist offering online versions By Sara Ivry, The New York Times, May 8, 2006 http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6069510.html

"Scholarly publishing has never been a big business. But it could take a financial hit if a proposed federal law is enacted, opening taxpayer-financed research to the public, according to some critics in academic institutions."

Meta universities and open access

Dr. Charles M. Vest discusses how the Internet, educational technology, and the open access movement will contribute to the globalization of higher education and the possible emergence of a global meta-university in Open content and the emerging global meta-university, May/June of EDUCAUSE Review. He writes:

My view is that in the open-access movement, we are seeing the early emergence of a meta-university—a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced. The Internet and the Web will provide the communication infrastructure, and the open-access movement and its derivatives will provide much of the knowledge and information infrastructure.

Big changes that can have unintended consequences.

Google Scholar at Auraria Library

Auraria Library is back in the list of library links from Google Scholar so you may again choose it as a resource. On campus, the linking to full text resources via Auraria Full Text Resources in Google Scholar works just fine without going through the Library proxy, since campus computers are in the valid ip address ranges for Auraria Library electronic resources.

You may also choose Google Scholar from the Library's list of databases, login with your student id and nine-digit password, and you will automatically be searching Google Scholar with Auraria Library and Open WorldCat chosen as your defaults. Each record that you have access to has a link to Auraria Library Resources.

The link to this resource is available from on and off campus because you log in. The direct link to it, which you can bookmark/make a favorite, is
http://0-scholar.google.com.skyline.cudenver.edu/advanced_scholar_search.

FYI: As with all the online databases we buy or send you to, the number of resources Google Scholar can show you is large, very large, but is not the universe of scholarly resources available to you. As a matter of economics, each individual publishers' entire set of resources is not opened to Google to search. Many, but not a majority, of academic authors are turning to referreed open access journals as a place to publish their work (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html, http://www.doaj.org/) which are often available to anyone via the internet and thus to Google (and other search engines http://www.freefulltext.com/, http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/). So Google Scholar is well populated and extremely useful to serious researchers.

gathering storm

Three Gathering Storms that could cause collateral damage to OA and academia in general, is an article by Peter Suber in the March 2006 Open Access Newsletter, at:

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/03-02-06.htm#collateral

Rationale for institutional repositories

Here is an article by Steven Harnad discussing the need for self-archiving by scholars, and consequentially institutional repositories. The data is presented that supports the university wide development of ir's.

http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12078/

When the internet isn't free

How is this going to affect higher ed?

When the Net Goes From Free to Fee
The fear is that big broadband providers will split the Net into first class and steerage.
By Steven Levy Newsweek Feb. 27, 2006 issue
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11433420/site/newsweek

Report on orphan works to Senate Judiciary Committee

FYI: The U.S. Copyright Office submitted its "Report on Orphan Works" to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, January 31, 2006:

http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/

Social Science Statistics repository

Another oa-discipline based repository established in 1962(!) at Univ of Mich.

Membership is needed to get at ALL the datasets. Member list at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/membership/ors.html.

Libraries cannot be members, only institutions. Info at http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/ICPSR-FAQ/0051.xml and this about the complete online access to datasets (http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/ICPSR-FAQ/0104.xml).

It's in the adi, under criminal justice and criminology, statistics and sociology.

ICPSR (University of Michigan Institute for Social Research) The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) maintains and provides access to an archive of social science data for research and instruction, and offers training in quantitative methods to facilitate effective data use. Some datasets are available to the public.