Periodicals Price Survey 2008: Embracing Openness

An article in Library Journal, 4/15/2008 by Lee C. Van Orsdel & Kathleen Born reports:

Global initiatives and startling successes hint at the profound implications of open access on journal publishing.

Complete with 2004-2008 data and tracking the change this article discusses some of the effects and potential effects of the open access movement.

University College Dublin on the Institutional Repository project

UCD Today from the University College Dublin, includes publicity on the Institutional Repository project. See page 5.

NIH Requirements for Public Access to Journal Articles

The NIH open access requirement has been broadly advertised. Here is the NIH's FAQ on the topic and below is Springer's announcement of it. This is a description aimed at the authors/faculty and includes instructions for complying with the requirement.

Dear SpringerAlert Subscriber,

Do you receive research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)? If so, as from April 2008 you will be required to deposit the final manuscript of your journal articles in PubMed Central and ensure free availability (open access) within 12 months of publication.

You will be pleased to hear that Springer journals are fully geared up for that requirement. All you have to do is opt for open access publication of your article through Springer's Open Choice - you will be given that option as soon as your article has been accepted for publication after peer review - and we will handle the administrative process.

Springer will take care of the immediate deposit in PubMed Central and what's more, not of the manuscript, but of the final, published article. And it will also be available with open access right away, and not just after 12 months.

The cost of Open Choice is - as stated on the NIH web site - a permissible cost in your grant so please take care to budget for it.

Publishing with open access in Springer journals completely takes away any worries you might have about complying with the new NIH rules for grantees when it comes to publishing your research results. We look forward to the submission of your next paper.

Best regards,
Your Springer Open Choice Team

U.S. Govt. Plans to Close Internet site Consolidating Economic Indicator Reports

U.S. Govt. Plans to Close Internet site Consolidating Economic Indicator Reports

The website was awarded a best of web by Forbes magazine.
The web site can, for now, can still be located at: http://www.economicIndicators.gov/

If you wish to continue to receive this data, you will need to acquire a temporary subscription to STAT-USA.

This is the Disclaimer from the http://www.economicIndicators.gov web site

Due to budgetary constraints, the Economic Indicators service (http://www.economicindicators.gov) will be discontinued effective March 1, 2008.

Economic Indicators.gov is brought to you by the Economics and Statistics Administration at the U.S. Department of Commerce. Our mission is to provide timely access to the daily releases of key economic indicators from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Census Bureau.

You may link to the most recent release by clicking on the report name in the table below. You may also subscribe to our *free Subscription Service to have these files emailed or faxed directly to you as soon as they are released.

comments on Harvard's OA / IR policy

A post by Noah Gray in the Nature Neuroscience blog on the Harvard policy critiques the all encompassing and vague nature of the policy. A comment from Steven Harnard of the American Scientist Open Access Forum on Gray's post proposes some alternate wording to optimize the effectiveness of the declaration.

Harvard Faculty Unanimously Agree To Establish Open Access Repository

An article in the February 13, 2008 Library Journal announces that

Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) yesterday unanimously approved a motion that would compel faculty to deposit their research in an open access (OA) repository managed by the library to be made freely available to anyone via the Internet.

Univ College Dublin Library & Enovation Solutions team up

Emmet Ryan of ENN reports that the UCD Library and Enovation Solutions have completed the development of an open access digital repository to collect, preserve and disseminate the full-text research outputs of researchers at University College Dublin for launch later in 2008.

Open Access Forum from the UCDHSC Libraries & Colorado Health Informatics Collaboration

Open Access Forum

Examine key issues surrounding Open Access, including its impact on faculty scholarship and publishing.

Learn more about:

• Legislative issues and current debates surrounding access to federally funded research;
• How researchers can retain their intellectual property and authorship rights;
• Various publishing models for distributing science research and data;
• Issues surrounding access to scientific discovery among the globally poor.

Schedule:

Presentation by
Larry Peiperl, MD, Senior Editor, PLoS Medicine titled
Open Access: Three Kinds of Impact
(Impact Factor, Societal Impact, Clinical Impact)

Reactor Panel

• Robert Dellavalle, MD, PhD, MSPH - Associate Professor, Department of Dermatology, UCDHSC School of Medicine
• Lawrence Hunter, PhD - Associate Professor, Department of Pharmacology, UCDHSC School of Medicine
• Lisa Schilling, MD - Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, UCDHSC School of Medicine

Q&A Session follows

Join us on
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
11:30AM – 1:30 PM
RC1 West Auditorium
Anschutz Medical Campus

Registration is not required
Pizza and sodas provided (First come, first served)

Sponsors:
UCDHSC Libraries - Health Science Library and Auraria Library
Colorado Health Informatics Collaboration

Questions? Contact Kevin.Cullen@uchsc.edu or Catherine.Reiter@uchsc.edu

Open Access resources are available

Open-access literature is digital literature, both peer-reviewed and popular, that is available on the web, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Committing to open access requires dispensing with the financial, technical and legal barriers that are designed to limit access to scientific research articles to paying customers.

The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for
copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the
integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and
cited. - from the Pakistan National Digital Library

Here are some resources for educators and researchers made possible by open access principles.

National Science Digital Library
Library of Congress National Digital Library Program

More websites or directories listing open access journals
Auraria Library Open Access info
BioMed Central
Library Publishing Media
Directory of Open Access Journals
Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek Universitaet Regensburg
FFT: Free Full Text
PhysNet
Public Library of Science
PubMed Central

First Close Look at Colleges' Digital Pirates

The First Close Look at Colleges' Digital Pirates by BROCK READ, Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 September 2007 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i02/02a00102.htm (Aurarians use this link to find the password you'll need)

"Ms. Elzy and Mr. Arbogast wanted financial support from the industry, and they got it. The Digital Citizen Project, as Illinois State calls it, has benefited from considerable entertainment-industry financing, including an influx of several hundred thousand dollars that came shortly after the meeting. . Later, Illinois State secured promises that the information the university collects will not be used to prosecute students."

SPARC letter to members on the PRISM anti-open access effort

Press Release: SPARC letter to members on the PRISM anti-open access effort
Date: September 6, 2007
To: SPARC Members
From: Heather Joseph, SPARC Executive Director
Re: PRISM anti-open access effort
http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/07-0907prism.html

"I'm writing to bring to your attention the recent launch of an anti-open access lobbying effort. The initiative, called "PRISM - the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine" ( http://www.prismcoalition.org), was launched with development support from the Association of American Publishers and specifically targets efforts to expand public access to federally funded research results - including the National Institute of Health's Public Access Policy."

Publisher author agreements

Open access: An examination (as noted on the blog DigitalKoans) of the publisher author agreements statistics shows 72% permit some form of self-archiving.

According to today's SHERPA/RoMEO statistics, 36% of the 308 included publishers are green ("can archive pre-print and post-print"), 24% are blue ("can archive post-print (i.e. final draft post-refereeing)"), 11% are yellow ("can archive pre-print (i.e. pre-refereeing)"), and 28% are white ("archiving not formally supported").
...
Much progress has been made in the area of author agreements, but authors must still pay careful attention to the details of agreements, which vary considerably by publisher. The SHERPA/RoMEO—Publisher Copyright Policies & Self-Archiving database is a very useful and important tool and users should actively participate in refining this database; however, authors are well advised not to stop at the summary information presented there and to go to the agreement itself (if available). It would be very helpful if a set of standard author agreements that covered the major variations could be developed and put into use by the publishing industry.

Bill requiring open access for NIH-funded research moving through Congress

From the August issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter: This issue takes a close look at a bill moving through Congress that would require open access for NIH-funded research. The round-up section briefly notes 79 OA developments from July.
Posted by Peter Suber at 8/02/2007 10:17:00 AM. (from Open Access News)

Momentum for open access

Article by David Solomon from Inside Higher Ed, July 24, 2007

Last year, a proposal in Congress to require all federally supported research to be placed online, freely available, attracted considerable attention and debate — and ultimately stalled.

This year, a measure that is narrower — it would apply only to research supported by the National Institutes of Health — appears within reach of passage. The proposal is part of the appropriations bill for the Education Department and the NIH, and passed the House of Representative without debate last week. The Senate Appropriations Committee has already approved the measure, which has attracted bipartisan support.

Impact of BioOne journals

BioOne (www.bioone.org) announced the cumulative increase of journal impact in its BioOne.1, BioOne.2, and Open Access Collections, according to the Thomas Scientific Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) 2006 Journal Citation Report (JCR), published last week.

An innovative full-text aggregator of essential bioscience research journals published by independent not-for-profit societies and institutions, BioOne now boasts 86 ISI ranked titles—a robust 68% of its total collection of 126 journals. This includes five titles that have gained an Impact Factor in the 2006 JCR including:

· Castanea, published by the Southern Appalachian Botanical Society

· URSUS, published by the International Association for Bear Research and Management

· Rangeland Ecology and Management, published by the Society for Range Management

· Haseltonia, published by the Cactus and Succulent Society of America

· Journal of Insect Science, published by the University of Wisconsin

Several other BioOne publications saw marked increases in their Impact Factor from the 2005 to 2006 Journal Citation Reports. BioScience, the journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, became BioOne’s most highly ranked participating publication with an Impact Factor of 5.424, up from 4.708 in the 2005 index. BioScience now is ranked 6^th of 64 titles in biology.

BioOne also increased its title presence in a number of ISI subject categories, including Ornithology. The Auk, published by the American Ornithologists’ Union, ranks 2^nd of 19 titles in Ornithology, with an Impact Factor of 2.056 (up from 1.838 in the 2005 index.) The Condor, published by the Cooper Ornithological Society, ranks 3^rd in Ornithology, with an Impact Factor of 1.604 (up from 1.337 in the 2005 index.)

Mindful that the ISI Impact Factor is most useful when combined with other metrics for assessing journal quality, we applaud the BioOne participating titles that have made such impressive strides in the 2006 ISI Journal Citation Report.

Encouraging faculty to use an author addendum (allows for deposit in institutional repositories)

Yesterday the U of Illinois Provost, Linda Katehi, sent this email letter to U of Illinois faculty:
New opportunities created by electronic publishing and archiving are changing the business of scholarly publication. Because traditional publication agreements transfer copyrights to publishers and restrict electronic distribution by the author and their institution, publishers appear to have captured much of the benefit of these changes.
In November 2006, faculty governance leaders from CIC universities discussed these issues that affect scholarly communication and called for a concrete strategy that would help faculty retain more control over their published intellectual property. Subsequently, the CIC provosts issued a Statement on Publishing Agreements and an Addendum to Publication Agreements for CIC Authors. The Addendum is intended to be used by faculty entering into publication agreements with journal publishers or presses. It supports authors rights to use their own published work in teaching and research, to post a publication on a personal website, or to deposit it in a repository maintained by their institution or a professional association. IDEALS is the University of Illinois institutional repository.
Late this Spring [April 30, 2007], the U of I Senate endorsed the principles expressed in the CIC Provosts Statement and Addendum; encouraged faculty to consider using it as well as other publication agreement addenda that increase their rights in reproducing, distributing, and archiving their own work; and asked the CIC Provosts to provide leadership in negotiating with publishers to develop new publication agreements that provide CIC authors and institutions greater rights for use, distribution and archiving their published scholarly works.
It is our responsibility as scholars to ensure that our work is available as widely as possible to maximize its scholarly impact, accessibility, and educational use. I encourage you to use the Addendum and to deposit your research and scholarship in IDEALS, which provides reliable and persistent access to its holdings.
(Thanks to Katie Newman on the U of I Scholarly Communication blog.)
Comment. The U of I is right to encourage faculty to use the CIC author addendum. But in the June SOAN, I hoped that CIC institutions would go further:
...[I]t's not clear what form the encouragement will take. Will it be limited to the abstract encouragement of passing a resolution in the Faculty Senate? Or will there also be some case-by-case encouragement? ...In a standoff between a publisher and faculty member, what will universities do to support their faculty member?
Here's the bigger question: What else will these universities do to encourage OA archiving? If they take the step of adopting an author addendum, they should also adopt a policy to require OA archiving. If permission is not a problem (because publishers already give it or because an addendum worked), what will these institutions do to insure that faculty postprints are actually archived? ...
The permission problem is worth solving, but we have to remember that solving it is only a means to the end of OA. Universities adopting an author addendum are moving in the right direction, but they must keep moving. Permission for OA isn't yet OA itself....
What's important is not how often U of I faculty use the author addendum, but how often they self-archive. I hope Provost Katehi's office monitors the self-archiving rate and is ready to adopt an effective policy to move it toward 100%.
From Open Access News

HHMI becomes first major US funder to require open access
In a significant development for the open access movement, the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes (HHMI) this week became the first large research funder in the USA to require its investigators to make their published results openly accessible. The policy on Public Access to Publications, announced this week, requires HHMI Investigators to ensure that all biomedical articles on which they are a major author are made freely accessible within at most 6 months of publication, and are deposited in PubMed Central .
The policy also proposes a clear mechanism for enforcement, indicating that, in future, only articles published in compliance with the policy will be eligible for consideration when investigators' HHMI appointments are reviewed.
HHMI's President, Tom Cech, discussed the background to the Insitute's open access policy in the May issue of the HHMI Bulletin.
A notable aspect of HHMI's intitiative on open access is that the Insitute has agreed to pay some traditional publishers up to $1500 (on top of subscription revenue) in order to ensure that HHMI retains the right to post a copy of the author's manuscript version (not the final published version) on to PubMed Central after a 6 month embargo period. This emphasizes the importance attached to open access by HHMI, but also makes clear the value for money offered by BioMed Central's article processing charge (APC).
BioMed Central's typical APC, after institutional discount, is less than $1500 and this cost is instead of subscription revenue, not in addition to it. In return for this payment, BioMed Central makes the official final version of published articles freely available on PubMed Central immediately on publication, and also makes the articles freely available for reuse and redistribution.
Many HHMI Investigators have already published in BioMed Central's open access journals. We hope that the Institute's new policy on open access will encourage further HHMI researchers to give our journals a try.
For details of other funders policies on open access, see BioMed Central's funder policy page.

Losing access to research

Article by pHd student Danney Kingsley on a system built to increase access to government funded research in Australia that is going awry. Losing Access to Research, ScienceAlert, Australia and New Zealand, June 29, 2007.

Making your OA publications easier to find

PublicationsList is a new tool from Textensor that lets authors make an online linked list of their OA publications. From today's announcement:
PublicationsList.org launched to improve access to self-archived and open-access academic publications
Now there is nothing stopping every researcher having a professional and up-to-date list of their publications on the web.
[PublicationsList is] a new easy-to-use, on-line service designed to let researchers maintain a comprehensive public record of their research output with links to full text versions of papers.
With growing interest in open access journals and institutional repositories, an author's home page still remains the obvious starting point to access their work. But all too often personal web pages are out of date or do not link to full text versions of papers even when they are available.
Textensor's new service...is designed to make the process of maintaining a comprehensive publications list on the web as quick and straightforward as possible. For most researchers this is the single most important aspect of their web presence.
Authors who already have their publications organised in reference management systems can simply upload the file to have them all imported in one go. For biomedical researchers, the system will also accept identifiers from PubMed, the central repository of bioscience papers, then fetch all the required data automatically.
Links can be included to full text versions of each paper and, where the publishers allow it, PDF files can be uploaded directly. This means the service can be used for individual self-archiving although Textensor anticipates that most users will prefer to link out to the various journal websites or institutional repositories where their work is already archived. The system will also host abstracts, keywords, and the author's own notes about their publications. These can be particularly useful, for example to indicate where a more recent publication supersedes an earlier one, or to add links to related work.
The key feature of PublicationsList.org is that it focuses on the requirements of the individual and remains a fixed point as they move between institutions in the course of their career and publish in a range of journals. To this end, it also allows the user to include their contact details and bibliography, and their papers are listed at a straightforward and memorable URL such as "publicationslist.org/albert.einstein". Hosting publications on publicationslist.org is free for research students and there is a low cost subscription for academic staff....
From a post in Open Access News, by Peter Suber.

BBC to Put one Million Hours of its Past Online Corporation wants its entire archive to be available for free

James Robinson, media correspondent
Sunday April 15, 2007
The Observer Guardian Unlimited

Thousands of hours of broadcasting history are to be made available to the public online as part of a plan to open up the BBC's entire archive to licence-fee payers free of charge.

The radio and TV material, some of which has never been repeated, includes an interview with Martin Luther King filmed shortly before he was assassinated, and another with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in which the former Beatle talks candidly about the impact their relationship had on the band.

Other programmes include a 1956 episode of the nature series Zoo Quest in which a young David Attenborough captures the komodo dragon on film for the first time. The episode has never been repeated but could soon be available online as part of the ambitious project, headed by the BBC's director of future media and technology, Ashley Highfield.

The BBC wants to put nearly one million hours of material on the internet for viewers to watch, listen to and download and has already begun the long process of retrieving and transferring programmes. A trial involving 20,000 users will begin next month, and the service could be available nationally in a year's time. Highfield will announce details of the scheme in a speech this week.