How the internet is transforming scholarly research and publication

Peter Suber

The March/April issue of

 D-Lib Magazine

is now online.  Here are the OA-related articles: Philip M. Davis and Matthew J.L. Connolly, Institutional Repositories: Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University's Installation of DSpace.  Excerpt from abstract:  "Cornell's DSpace is largely underpopulated and underused by its faculty. Many of its collections are empty, and most collections contain few items.

March/April D-Lib

Gavin Baker

ITConversations has an audio interview with Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org, recorded March 18. And Law.com has a profile of Malamud's work on OA to case law, dated March 31.

Profiles of Carl Malamud, rogue archivist

oreprovider is a free and open source add-on service for Fedora to "disseminate digital objects stored in a Fedora repository as OAI-ORE Resource Maps". The project is written in Java and was developed by the National Library of Sweden.

OAI-ORE add-on for Fedora

Ingrid Robeyns and some other members of the American Political Science Association (APSA) were surprised to find their conference presentations for sale at AllAcademic.  Robeyns wrote to AllAcademic twice, and got no response, and then wrote to the APSA twice, and got no response.  Finally she turned to blogging:   It worked.  The next day, this comment appeared on her blog:   PS:

OA to conference presentations, restored

Germany's Informationsplattform Open Access has made it to the second round of consideration for renewal of its DFG funding.  If it is renewed, it will expand and update the information on its site, and offer all of it in English translation.  Read the announcement in the original German or in Google's English.

Germany's OA info center may be renewed, expanded

Tomorrow the UK Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) will come to the end of its regular funding.

Central funding for AHDS ends tomorrow

Eight non-profit organizations have launched a Petition for Public Access to Publicly Funded Research in the United States.  From the site:

 Please sign it as an individual, encourage your institution to sign it as an institution, and spread the word.  Your support will be critical in persuading Congress to adopt


 FRPAA


 .

Petition for OA to publicly-funded research in the US

The presentations from the AAAS symposium, Effects of Intellectual Property Protections on the Conduct of Scientific Research: Results of a Survey of U.S. AAAS Members (Washington, DC, January 16, 2007), are now online.

IP and the conduct of science

Oliver Obst has written an open letter to the American Academy of Pediatrics to protest the high price of its journal, Pediatrics.  Obst is the Head of the Central Medical Library at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, and past Vice President of the German Medical Library Association.

Open letter protesting high price of medical journal

Bibliotheca Alexandrina launched its Access to Knowledge project on March 30. From the announcement:

 Update.

See also this profile at iCommons.

Bibliotheca Alexandrina launches A2K project

Carnegie Mellon librarians recently digitized the backfile of the American Journal of Science for OA.

140 year back file of AJS now OA

Richard Poynder, The Open Access Interviews: Hélène Bosc,

 Open and Shut?

March 27, 2009.  This is another richly textured interview, unearthing details about the early history of OA, OA in France, OA in Europe, and the career of one of Europe's first and most influential OA activists.  It's difficult to excerpt, but here's a little to whet your appetite:

Richard Poynder interviews Hélène Bosc

The British Journal of Mormon Studies is a new OA, peer-reviewed journal in Mormon studies. Print editions are available print-on-demand from Lulu. The inaugural issue, dated Spring 2008, is available. The journal will be published twice annually.

New OA journal on Mormon studies

Stefanie E. Warlick and K. T.L. Vaughan, Factors influencing publication choice: why faculty choose open access, Biomedical Digital Libraries, March 9, 2007.  Abstract:

 Comment

.

Why faculty choose OA to publish in OA journals

Today Danny Hillis' Metaweb launched its first product, Freebase.  (Thanks to Glyn Moody.)  From site: Here are some details from John Markoff's article in yesterday's

 New York Times

: Also see Tiim O'Reilly's article at O'Reilly Radar:

 Comment

.

Launch of Freebase

Boing Boing (March 17) and Free Government Information (March 23) cover the question of a deal by the Government Accountability Office, an arm of the U.S. Congress, which Thomson West claims granted the company exclusive access to federal legislative histories compiled by GAO.

 Update

(4/14/08). The answer to the question is yes, the government did sell exclusive access to its legislative history to Thomson.

Did U.S. gov't sell out its legislative history?

Richard Monastersky, Hughes Institute's Deal With Elsevier Will Open Up Access to Its Researchers' Work,

 Chronicle of Higher Education

, March 9, 2007 (accessible only to subscribers).

More on the HHMI-Elsevier agreement

Heather Morrison,  York University Library - another Canadian leader in the open access movement,  The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics,  March 26, 2008.

York U.'s efforts for OA

B K Mishra, World class library likely in Patna, Times of India, March 25, 2008. Reports that the Chandragupta Institute of Management, Patna will establish an institutional repository as part of its library, apparently to open by the end of May.

CIMP to launch IR

Riaz K. Tayob, WHO: Slow progress in talks on IPRs and innovation, SUNS #6441, March 26, 2008.

World Health Org.: OA to promote medical research

Dorothea Salo, Voice and Labor,

 Caveat Lector

, March 26, 2008.

The labor of an IR

Mabel Chew, Elmer V. Villanuev, Martin B. Van Der Weyden, Life and times of the impact factor: retrospective analysis of trends for seven medical journals (1994-2005) and their Editors' views,

 Journal of the  Royal Society of Medicine

, 100 (2007) pp. 142-150.  (Thanks to Jacob Bettany.)  Excerpt: PS:

Does OA increase a journal's impact factor?

Sundar Raman interviewed Melissa Hagemann on the OA movement for radio station KRUU, February 22, 2007.  The hour-long podcast is available for downloading.  (Thanks to the P2P Foundation wiki.)

Interview with Melissa Hagemann on the OA movement

John Wilbanks, Creative works, copyrights, and publishing...,  john wilbanks' blog, March 26, 2008.

On the idea-expression divide in scientific literature

BioMed Central announced yesterday its new peer-reviewed OA journal, Molecular Cytogenetics. The journal will publish research on "all aspects of chromosome biology and the application of molecular cytogenetic techniques in all areas of biomedicine". Three papers are now online, all published March 26.

New OA journal on molecular cytogenetics

Imagine scanning the barcode of a printed book with your cell phone and then running a search, from the phone, of a digital copy of the same book.  You can now do that with a Google Android phone --at least for books already scanned by Google and showing their barcodes.  See the

 Google Book Search blog

for details.

 Comment

.  Very cool.

Search through a printed book with your Android phone

From a transcript of Lawrence Lessig's keynote at the Students for Free Culture Conference (Berkeley, October 11-12, 2008):

 Update.

Stevan Harnad hopes Lessig is talking about green OA.

Sit-ins for OA

The Open Access Directory (OAD) just opened a list of Volunteer opportunities.  This is a place where volunteers can look for jobs that will help the cause, and where everyone can list the jobs they'd like to see someone do.  At the moment, many of the jobs listed are about building the OAD itself.  But it's not at all limited to OAD-building.

OAD list of volunteer opportunities

Charles Bailey has made an interesting discovery:   Incredible.  It's bad enough to demand copyright after peer review, when publishers only need the right of first publication.  But this goes much further in tying the author's hands.  Charles comments:   Here's another angle on it:  if editors or referees suggest changes to the manuscript, the author is no longer free to reject them and try another journal.

Haworth demands copyright prior to peer review

Alison Henning, UK PubMed Central - enabling easier reporting on the outcomes of grants, UK PubMed Central Blog, March 23, 2009.

Linking grants with publications in UKPMC

Heather A. Piwowar and Wendy W. Chapman, Identifying Data Sharing in Biomedical Literature, submission to American Medical Informatics Association Symposium (November 8-12, 2008, Washington, DC). Abstract:

 Update

. Also see the version at Nature Precedings.

Identifying data sharing in biomedical research

Gloria Tavera, Open access meets undergrad research… please?, Open Students, March 24, 2008.

OA for undergrad students

Thomas Hess, Rolf T. Wigand, Florian Mann, and Benedikt von Walter, Open Access &amp; Science Publishing: Results of a Study on Researchers’ Acceptance and Use of Open Access Publishing, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, March 7, 2007.  From the executive summary:   Also see the short press release and the long one.

Another study of author attitudes toward OA

John Harnad, Clarifying Open Access: its implications for the research community,

 Physics World

, March 2007.  A letter to the editor.  I don't have a link to the online version and here excerpt the submitted version.  John Harnad is the Director of the Mathematical Physics Laboratory at the Centre de recherches mathématiques in Montréal.  He's also the brother of Stevan Harnad.

A critique of the CERN plan for gold OA

Karen Hunter, Scott Virkler, and Rafael Sidi, Disruptive technologies: taking STM publishing into the next era,

 Serials

, March 2007.  All three authors work for Elsevier.  Only this abstract is free online:  PS:  No, I don't know what this means either.  I'd love to have access to the full text and find out.

 Update

.  I just got my hands on a copy.

Elsevier: harness the openness of new technologies

If you remember, back in January four Norwegian university libraries rejected the whole package of 778 Blackwell journals because of "unacceptable conditions and price increases" (more details here and here).   Yesterday Blackwell announced that the problem has been resolved.

Update on Blackwell in Norway

Ben Vershbow has blogged some notes on the first day of presentations at Rice University's De Lange conference, Emerging Libraries: How Knowledge Will Be Accessed, Discovered, and Disseminated in the Age of Digital Information (Houston, March 5-7, 2007).

Notes on Rice's De Lange conference

The Open Knowledge Foundation, the Open Rights Group, and Free Culture UK have written a joint response to the UK Office of Communication's Public Service Publisher consultation.  Excerpt:   PS:   For background, see Saul Albert's report on an earlier stage of the discussion (blogged here January 30, 2007).  The consultation ended on March 23.

Response to the UK's Public Service Publisher consultation

Dorothea Salo has launched an IR-Managers web site, which includes a blog, forum, and mailing list.  From the site:   Nice touch:  the forum doesn't let spambots register but neither does it make you prove your humanity by reading an illegible string of letters and retyping it.  You'll only have to answer a question about open access.  The blog is now recruiting contributors.

Place for IR managers to talk shop

The April issue of

 Learned Publishing

is now online.  Here are the OA-related articles. Rick Anderson, Open access - clear benefits, hidden costs.  Full-text OA, no abstract.  Also see my comments. Donald W. King, The cost of journal publishing: a literature review and commentary.  Full-text OA.  Abstract:

April issue of Learned Publishing

The Bavarian State Library has joined the Google Library project.  From today's announcement by Google's Jens Redmer:  Also see the library's announcement, in German.

Bavarian State Library joins the Google Library project

The University of California Press has launched a new monograph series in literary studies called FlashPoints.  Each book in the series will have an OA edition and a priced/printed edition.  From the site:    PS:  This is not UCPress's first sally in dual-edition publishing.

OA/TA book series launched by U of California Press

Donat Agosti has written a report on the meeting, Open Access: Vom Prinzip zur Umsetzung (Bern, March 1, 2007), sponsored by the Schweizerische Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften (Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences).  Excerpt:

OA presentations at the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences

Jane Dudman, Wellcome Trust makes Open Access changes,

 Information World Review

, March 5, 2007.

The Wellcome Trust's OA digitization projects

The Value of Spatial Information, a report by ACIL Tasman prepared for Australia's Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information and ANZLIC, March 2008.  (Thanks to Baden Appleyard.)  From the executive summary:

 Comment

.  These are big numbers and it takes a minute to put them in perspective.

The high cost of the lack of open data

Ricky Erway and Jennifer Schaffner, Out of the Stacks and onto the Desktop: Rethinking Assumptions about Access and Digitization, a webinar from RLC/OCLC.  (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)

RLG webinar on access and digitization

Starting today, the university press (Universitätsverlag Ilmenau) of the Ilmenau Technical University (Technische Universität Ilmenau) will publish each of its books in dual editions, one OA and one priced/printed.  (Thanks to press director Eric Steinhauer via Klaus Graf.)  This is a mandate laid down in a new university regulation published today.

Ilmenau Technical U mandates OA editions of books from its university press

Stevan Harnad, Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise, a preprint self-archived March 26, 2007.

OA scientometrics

Yesterday 10 major science organizations issued a joint statement (in German) explaining the rudiments of OA and reaffirming that OA does not violate copyright or interfere with the freedom of publication.  Read it in German or Google's English. The joint statement is an answer to the objections and misunderstandings of the Heidelberg Appeal, a sign-on petition against Google Books and OA launched earlier this week.

10 major German science organizations defend OA

Lots of online chatter about the JISC annual conference, Opening Digital Doors (Edinburgh, March 24, 2009): Conference presentations Posts from the event blog and across the Web See especially notes on the open access session by Joe Wilson and Owen Stephens

Presentations and notes on JISC conference

The Open Access Directory (OAD) just opened a list of Early OA journals for community editing.  The list covers peer-reviewed OA journals launched in or before 1993.     Remember that OAD is a wiki. You can help the cause by adding or revising entries to the OAD lists.

Early OA journals

Laurie Taylor, Almost 1.5 million!, Digital Library Center Blog, March 23, 2008.

Digitization milestone from U. Florida

Creative Commons Expands Documentation Project, press release, March 23, 2008.

CC documentation project

Heather Morrison, Coming April 24: the IDRC Digital Library,

 Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics

, March 26, 2007.  Excerpt: PS:  The IDRC first announced plans to launch this repository in December 2005.

IDRC repository coming

How Digital Book Collections Will Change Academe, a 12 minute podcast interview with Brewster Kahle from the

 Chronicle of Higher Education

.

Brewster Kahle talks about the openness of the Open Content Alliance

The journal Museum Anthropology has been providing OA to some of its book reviews through the journal's associated blog.  On the same blog, editor Jason Baird Jackson reflects on the OA experiment:   The experiment has been such a success that the journal has launched an OA supplement, Museum Anthropology Review, also in blog format, just for reviews.

OA book reviews in anthropology

Fayaz Ahmed and Rafiq Rather, Open Access Digital Repositories: An Indian Scenario,

 KnowGenesis: International Journal for Technical Communication

, 2, 1 (2007).  The article is free to read but only for registered users, and registration requires the user to agree to email alerts for new issues.

OA repositories in India

Bobby Pickering, Free up access to archives for all,

 Information World Review blog

, March 26, 2007.

Where is the UK leadership on OA?

Napoleon Miradon, Letter to MPs, a post from the AmSci OA Forum, March 24, 2007.  In this draft letter to members of the European parliament, Miradon points out that the EU already mandates deposit or collection of EU-funded research and permits (but does not require) its OA dissemination.

An OA mandate for Europe in the draft FP7 grant agreement

Fair use has prevailed in James Joyce scholarship.

Fair use for Joyce scholars

The Center for Journal Ranking was launched in January 2007.

Another new, free journal quality measurement

Brian D. Crawford, "Chairman's Corner,"

 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Bulletin

, Spring 2007, pp. 1-2.  Crawford is the Chairman of the Executive Council of the Professional/Scholarly Publishing (PSP) of the Association of American Publishers (AAP).  This is a strongly-worded criticism of OA advocates and defense of the AAP.  I reproduce it in full so that I can answer it in full.

Brian Crawford speaks out

The recommendations from the Institutional Repositories Workshop sponsored by Knowledge Exchange (Utrecht, January 16-17, 2007) are now online.  (Thanks to Birgit Schmidt.)

KE recommendations for IRs

Here's something you don't see everyday:  a journal editorial accompanied by a press release and call for supporting signatures: Rick Anderson, Open access - clear benefits, hidden costs,

 Learned Publishing

, April 2007.

Costs and benefits of OA

The Prevail Archive is an OA collection of official documents related to the the shootings at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007. The archive is the result of a volunteer student effort to scan documents released under Virginia's Freedom of Information Act. (Thanks to the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

 See also

our past post on the April 16 Archive, another OA archive about the events.

Archive of documents about the Virginia Tech attack

Some blog notes on the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting (Baltimore, November 17-18, 2008): Dorothea Salo: Professional schizophrenia, John Wilbanks keynote, In which I happily eat crow Marcus Banks: Brief Notes, Innovation Fair

Blog notes on SPARC repositories meeting

The presentations from Linked Data on the Web (Madrid, April 20, 2009) are now online.

Presentations from linked data conference

Anders Rydholm and Olle Svensson, New format, Open Access, and online pre-publication,

 Acta Orthopaedica

, February 1, 2009.

"Our purpose is to spread knowledge, not wealth"

Bruce Byfield, Open access and open source intersect in Public Knowledge Project,

 IT Manager's Journal

, March 23, 2007.

Profile of John Willinsky and the Public Knowledge Project

U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific &amp; Technical Information, View, store, slice, dice research data to suit your science program needs, as OSTI continues expanding access, OSTI News, March 17, 2009.

Energy research data now offered in XML

The American Association of Law Libraries has released its Advocacy Toolkit for the 111th Congress (2009-2010). The Conyers bill, H.R. 801, is included in the Bills We’re Tracking section, under the heading "AALL opposes the following bills".

Advocacy resources from AALL

Alex Koohang and Keith Harman, The Academic Open Access E-Journal: Platform and Portal,

 Informing Science Journal

, 9 (2006).

The rise of OA journals

Matthew Elbeck and Jean Mandernach, Expanding the value of scholarly, open access e-journals,

 Library &amp; Information Science Research

, December 2008.

More on the quality of OA journals

Robert Kiley, Finding funder attributed papers in UKPMC, UK PubMed Central Blog, March 19, 2009.

Searching by funder in UKPMC

The first 2009 issue of ScieComm is now online.  (It's labeled vol. 1, no. 1, but should be vol. 5, no. 1.)

The latest on Nordic OA

Martin Boosen, Institutionelle Repositorien in Deutschland, Master's thesis at Cologne University of Applied Sciences, 2008.

Thesis on IRs in Germany

U.S. President Barack Obama's nominees to head the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco, were confirmed by the Senate on March 19. (Thanks to Science Progress.)  See our past posts on the OA connections for Holdren and Lubchenco.

Obama's science advisor, NOAA head confirmed

Today's

 Nepal News

has a report on the conference, Linking Geodata with Biodiversity Information in the Himalayas (Kathmandu, November 15-16, 2008).

OA to geo-coded biodiversity information in the Himalayas

The French government is providing OA to its UFO investigations.  Apparently it's the first government to do so.  From yesterday's AP story:

 Update

(8/27/07). Exopolitics Toronto is urging the Canadian government to follow suit.

OA for UFO docs

Until now, I haven't blogged any of the controversy surrounding Reed Elsevier's involvement in the worldwide arms trade.  Because it has no OA connection, I've regarded it as off-topic for this blog.  But now the editors of

 The Lancet

(an Elsevier journal) have created an OA connection.

Elsevier and the arms business

Open Access @ OISE is a discussion list for students, faculty, and staff at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.

OA discussion list at U. Toronto school of education

Nat Ives, Media Giants Want to Top Google Results,

 Advertising Age

, March 23, 2009.  (Thanks to Glyn Moody for the alert and his comments.)  Excerpt:

 Comments

Newspaper publishers seem to be leading this cause.  Academic publishers are not as riled, although Jorge Cauz, President of the Encyclopedia Britannica, voiced a similar complaint back in January.

TA publishers want to bend Google rank

Jennifer Howard, Humanities Journals Confront Identity Crisis,

 Chronicle of Higher Education

, March 27, 2009.  Excerpt: PS:  Note that the CELJ blog endorsed OA in the second principle it articulated for the future of scholarly journals.

Humanities journals have mixed feelings about digital

Jennifer Howard, Publishers Face Pressure From Libraries to Freeze Prices and Cut Deals,

 Chronicle of Higher Education

, March 27, 2009.  Excerpt: PS:  Also see the the ARL Statement to Scholarly Publishers on the Global Economic Crisis, released last month, and the ICOLC Statement on the Global Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Consortial Licenses, released in January.

Will TA publishers risk cancellations with standard price increases this year?

Cornelius Puschmann has posted a round-up of blog notes on the Berlin 6 Conference (Düsseldorf, November 11-13, 2008). See especially the posts by Kaitlin Thaney (which we posted previously), Cornelius Puschmann, Mark Liberman, and Robert Forkel.

More blog notes on Berlin 6 conference

Jeffrey Young, MIT Professors Approve Campuswide Policy to Publish Scholarly Articles Free Online,

 Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog

, March 23, 2009.

More on the MIT policy

Stuart Lewis reports that the SWORD 2 project has launched a test repository.  Excerpt:

 Update

(11/18/08).  The test repository is DSpace-based.

Test driving repository deposits with SWORD

Scientific Commons has added timeplots of deposit activity for the repositories it indexes. See, for example, the graphs for E-LIS or PubMed Central. See the blog post by Lars Kirchhoff for details.

 See also

the similar graphs provided by the Registry of Open Access Repositories.

Scientific Commons adds graphs of repository deposits

I've often written about the valuable, publicly-funded, non-classified but non-OA reports from the Congressional Research Service (CRS).  Now the Federation of American Scientists'

 Secrecy News

reports that CRS has imposed even tighter access restrictions on the reports.

Tighter restrictions on CRS reports

Sane Bhagyashree and Gole Bhakti, Mahitichi mukta upalabdhata, Sakaal, October 14, 2008; self-archived November 13, 2008. (In Marathi.) English abstract:

 See also

our past posts on Open Access Day.

Indian newspaper on OA Day

Attila Csordás, Nature Publishing Editor on the idea of a public scientific multimedia site,

 PIMM

, March 22, 2007.  Csordás conducted an email interview with Maxine Clarke on

 Nature

's data sharing policy.  Clarke is the Publishing Executive Editor at

 Nature

.

Nature on OA data for published articles

A webcast of the Free Our Data meeting (Manchester, March 15, 2007) is now online.

Video of the Free Our Data meeting

Helicos Launches Open Access Web Site With Microbial Genome Data, press release, November 14, 2008.

Genome sequencing company shares data sets

Tim O'Reilly, How Google Books is Changing Academic History,

 O'Reilly Radar

, March 22, 2007.

Beyond OA for reading to OA for processing

Charles Arthur and Michael Cross, A few victories, but the battle goes on,

 The Guardian

, March 22, 2007.

A year of the Free Our Data campaign

Open Source Cinema has released its first open-source documentary, RiP: A Remix Manifesto.   From the blurb:     Kaltura, whose open-source technology helps power Open Source Cinema, calls RiP "the first legally remixable documentary about copyright and remix culture...."  No surprise, viewers haven't wasted any time in remixing it.

A legally remixable, open-source documentary

M. Castillo, A New Open Access Option from the American Journal of Neuroradiology

 , American Journal of Neuroradiology,

November/December 2008

 .

An editorial.  Not even an abstract is free online, at least so far.

Another TA editorial on OA

Greer L. Hauptman, The Library and the Bazaar: Open Content and Libraries, essay for a class at San Jose State University, self-archived November 12, 2008.

Essay on open content and libraries

Jason Kincaid, Major Book Publishers Start Turning To Scribd, TechCrunch, March 17, 2009.

Open Access News

OA across the federal government, hold the mandate

Housekeeping

Open access roundup

Measuring the growth of gold OA

2009 at Project Gutenberg

Open access roundup

ROAR software upgraded

Study on IR users

Phase 3 of White House consultation closes

Open access roundup

RePEc in December, and year in review