American Scientist Open Access Forum

A recent post by Steven Harnad on the American Scientist Open Access Forum is a comprehensive critique of:

Institutional Repositories: Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University's Installation of DSpace. PM Davis & MJL Connolly. D-Lib Magazine 13(3/4) March/April 2007 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march07/davis/03davis.html

Nature: Agencies join forces to share data

From the March 22 issue of Nature.

Excerpt:
The US government is considering a massive plan to store almost all scientific data generated by federal agencies in publicly accessible digital repositories. The aim is for the kind of data access and sharing currently enjoyed by genome researchers via GenBank, or astronomers via the National Virtual Observatory, but for the whole of US science.

Scientists would then be able to access data from any federal agency and integrate it into their studies. For example, a researcher browsing an online journal article on the spread of a disease could not only pull up the underlying data, but mesh them with information from databases on agricultural land use, weather and genetic sequences.

How national OA policies will affect libraries

The presentations from the SPARC-ACRL forum at the ALA midwinter meeting, Public Access: Federal Research Access Policies and How They'll Change Your Library (Seattle, January 20, 2007), are now online. (Thanks to Adrian Ho.)
From a post in Open Access News, by Peter Suber.

Comments on the Brussels Declaration

A post today on DigitalKoans by Chs W. Bailey discussing the publishers response to scholars' interest in open access.

The recent "Brussels Declaration on STM Publishing" by major scholarly publishers, such as Elsevier and Wiley, can be boiled down to: the scholarly publishing system ain’t broke, so don’t try to fix it. It provides an interesting contrast to the 2004 "Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science" by not-for-profit publishers, which outlined a variety of strategies for making content freely available.

It might also be interesting to read about an ongoing study of new scholars' attitudes and concerns led by Cathy Trower of Harvard. She recently spoke at Auraria and here is some text from the promo.

Trower leads Harvard’s Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE). The COACHE survey of 4,500 tenure-track faculty at 51 colleges and universities has revealed that, overall, climate, culture, and collegiality are more important to the success and satisfaction of early career faculty than compensation, tenure clarity, workload, and policy effectiveness.

COACHE discovered that the some of the key climate variables for junior faculty include: interest senior faculty take in their work, fairness with which they are evaluated, opportunities to collaborate with senior faculty, how well they seem to fit in their departments, sufficient professional and personal interaction with colleagues, and a sense of community in the department.

Support for open access publishing, a suggestion from BioMed Central

Some ideas from BioMed Central. Auraria Library is a member of BioMed Central and thus supports Auraria faculty publishing.

BioMed Central, which publishes over 170 peer-reviewed journals in biology, medicine and chemistry, has been a pioneer of the open access publishing model for academic research. Under the open access model, published articles are made universally available online with the cost being covered not by subscriptions but by article processing charges, payable on publication. Open access publishing has proven very popular with authors, and has grown dramatically since BioMed Central's launch in 2000. In order for that growth to continue, however, it is vital that sufficient funds are available to cover the cost of open access publication in a sustainable way.

There has been much discussion within the academic community about how best to pay the costs of open access publication, given that library budgets are already stretched. The Wellcome Trust examined this issue, and concluded that open access publication costs are best seen as part of the cost of doing research. Research institutions and funders recognize that research involves not only direct costs, but also indirect costs (for necessary infrastructure such as buildings/ laboratories/ maintenance/ library services etc.). We feel that it is very important that open access publishing costs should be recognized as such an infrastructure cost and budgeted for appropriately.

We would like to encourage all research institutions around the world to define an open access publishing budget for their institution, just as they currently have a library budget. A central 'open access publishing fund' could receive contributions from each of the funding organization that supports research at the institution. For example the National Institutes of Health and California Institute for Regulative Medicine both have open access policies, which enable researchers to apply for publication costs funding. For further information on all the funding agencies who have policies, please visit our website.

Having such a central fund for authors at your institution would reduce the barriers for those authors wishing to publish in an open access journal, and would thus deliver a more level playing field for open access journals to compete with traditional journals, which already receive extensive institutional support through library subscriptions.

If you would like help or ideas on how to set up a central fund or would like to discuss this further, please contact us at: institutions@biomedcentral.com.

We shall also be holding an open access consultation at the forthcoming Medical Library Association conference, on Monday, May 21st, 2007 from 7.00 - 9.00am, where we shall be discussing the issues of payment for open access publications, please do let us know if you would like to attend the event.

OAIster reaches 10 million records

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - OAIster Reaches 10 Million Records.
http://www.oaister.org/
We live in an information-driven world-- one in which access to good information defines success. OAIster's growth to 10 million records takes us one step closer to that goal.
Developed at the University of Michigan's Library, OAIster is a collection of digital scholarly resources. OAIster is also a service that continually gathers these digital resources to remain complete and fresh.
As global digital repositories grow, so do OAIster's holdings.
Popular search engines don't have the holdings OAIster does. They crawl web pages and index the words on those pages. It's an outstanding technique for fast, broad information from public websites. But scholarly information, the kind researchers use to enrich their work, is generally hidden from these search engines.
OAIster retrieves these otherwise elusive resources by tapping directly into the collections of a variety of institutions using harvesting technology based on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. These can be images, academic papers, movies and audio files, technical reports, books, as well as preprints (unpublished works that have not yet been peer reviewed). By aggregating these resources, OAIster makes it possible to search across all of them and return the results of a thorough investigation of complete, up-to-date resources.
Ann Devenish, Publication Services Project Manager at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, notes that "Harvesting by OAIster is a primary 'selling point' when we talk to scientists and researchers about the visibility, accessibility, and impact of their contributions in an institutional repository. From their own experiences they know that a search using one of the popular search engines can bring back thousands (if not, millions) of results which will require careful and time-consuming screening, with no guarantee that they will ever get to the content they seek. A search of OAIster, across hundreds of open and scholarly archives and millions of records, brings back results with the key metadata elements that allow for quick identification of, and easy navigation to, the content they seek."
OAIster is good news for the digital archives that contribute material to open-access repositories. "[OAIster has demonstrated that]...OAI interoperability can scale. This is good news for the technology, since the proliferation is bound to continue and even accelerate," says Peter Suber, author of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. As open-access repositories proliferate, they will be supported by a single, well-managed, comprehensive, and useful tool.
Scholars will find that searching in OAIster can provide better results than searching in web search engines. Roy Tennant, User Services Architect at the California Digital Library, offers an example: "In OAIster I searched 'roma' and 'world war,' then sorted by weighted relevance. The first hit nailed my topic-- the persecution of the Roma in World War II. Trying 'roma world war' in Google fails miserably because Google apparently searches 'Rome' as well as 'Roma.' The ranking then makes anything about the Roma people drop significantly, and there is nothing in the first few screens of results that includes the word in the title, unlike the OAIster hit."
OAIster currently harvests 730 repositories from 49 countries on 6 continents. In three years, it has more than quadrupled in size and increased from 6.2 million to 10 million in the past year. OAIster is a project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service.
For more information about University of Michigan's OAIster Project, visit http://www.oaister.org/, or contact Kat Hagedorn at khage@umich.edu.

Plans for an OA portal of world science

The US Department of Energy (DOE) and the British Library have agreed to build an OA portal of world science. From yesterday's announcement:
...Called ‘Science.world,’ the planned resource would be available for use by scientists in all nations and by anyone interested in science. The approach will capitalise on existing technology to search vast collections of science information distributed across the globe, enabling much-needed access to smaller, less well-known sources of highly valuable science. Following the model of Science.gov, the U.S. interagency science portal that relies on content published by each participating agency, ‘Science.world’ will rely on scientific resources published by each participating nation. Other countries have been invited to participate in this international effort.
Recognising the impact of international research efforts, [Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, Under Secretary for Science for DOE] stated, “It is time to make the science offerings of all nations searchable in one global gateway. Our goal is to speed up the sharing of knowledge on a global scale. As a result, we believe that science itself will speed up.” ...
Objectives of the “Science.world” initiative are to:
Search dispersed, electronic collections in various science disciplines;
Provide direct, seamless and free searching of open-source collections and portals;
Build upon existing and already successful national models for searching;
Complement existing information collections and systems; and
Raise the visibility and usage of individual sources of quality science information....
Posted by Peter Suber at 1/26/2007 09:35:12 AM.

Demonstrate support for open access

Following from the report from the "EU Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe" (summary at http://www.ec-petition.eu/) a consortium of organisations (see below for list) working in the scholarly communication arena is sponsoring a petition to the European Commission to demonstrate support for Open Access and for the recommendations in the report.

Signatures may be added on behalf of individuals or institutions.

Please register your support for Open Access. To sign the petition, go to

http://www.ec-petition.eu/

This note is forwarded at the request of Dr Alma Swan who is working on behalf of the organisations listed below.

------------------------------------------------------------
The sponsoring organisations are JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK), SURF (Netherlands), SPARC Europe, DFG (Deutsches Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany), DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag-og Forskningsbibliotek, Denmark).

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.