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

Peter Brantley, Making a Brouhaha in the Blogosphere,

 O'Reilly Radar

, September 30, 2007.  Excerpt:

 Comments

Kudos to the team that took this direct action.  This is a very satisfying result.  Sometimes the gap between the public domain and open access can only be bridged with a big digitization project and a ready host, and both can be difficult to arrange.

"This product isn't theirs to sell"

Charles Bailey has added four Google Custom search engines to Open Access Update, the RSS feed and web site woven of many individual OA-related feeds.  One of the new search engines covers the Mailing Lists in the collection, one covers the Serials, one covers the Weblogs, and one covers the Wikis.

More Google Custom search engines in service to OA

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

M. Carl Drott, Open Access,

 Annual Review of Information Science and Technology

, September 28, 2007.  Not even an abstract is free online, at least so far.

Another TA article on OA

The May/June issue of Research Information is devoted to open-access publishing.

New issue of Research Information on OA journals

Mark Chillingworth, Elsevier seeks to build bridges, Information World Review, June 10, 2005. Excerpt:  'The new director of library relations at Elsevier, Tony McSean, has admitted that it needs to improve relationships with information professionals, and is calling for a new era of co-operation.

Elsevier wants to improve relations with libraries

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

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

Don Hawkins blogged the Special Libraries Association conference session on open access for the InfoToday SLA blog.  Peter Suber was among the speakers.   Update: More notes on SLA's conference blog.

SLA session on OA

Gavin Baker

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

Jonathan Gray, After the Workshop on Open Scientific Resources, Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog, November 12, 2008. Blog notes on the Workshop on Finding and Re-using Open Scientific Resources (London, November 8, 2008). See also the wiki notes, especially "Planned Actions".

Notes on the Workshop on Open Scientific Resources

People, Place and Policy Online is a new peer-reviewed OA journal  from Sheffield Hallam University.  The inaugural issue is now online.

New OA journal on social policy

Gretchen Feltes, A Guide to the U. S. Federal Legal System:  Web-based Public Accessible Sources, NYU Law School, April 2005. An extensive update to a 2003 article. Excerpt:  'This guide was originally prepared to be added with similar guides for legal research of many foreign jurisdictions. The intended audience was global in scope and one without access to the printed sources and fee-based databases in American federal law.

Guide to OA sources of US law

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

Edward M. Corrado, An Open Source, Open Access Journal Database Appliance: A Proposal, a slide presentation at the IFLA meeting, Managing technologies and library automated systems in developing countries (Dakar, August 16, 2007).

An OA journal database for developing countries

Nature has created another OA supplement, this time on Ageing.

Nature OA supplement on ageing

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

Cristina Jimenez, British Library books go digital,

 BBC News

, September 28, 2007.  Excerpt:

 Comment

.  I can't tell whether access to these digital editions will be free of charge for everyone or only free of charge to higher education institutions in the UK.  Some Microsoft digitization projects are part of the Open Content Alliance, which is fully committed to OA, and some are not.

BL and Microsoft digitize 19th century books

The term open access and the acronym OA have arrived.  They have meanings outside the world of scholarly communication, but they have arrived.  Acronyma is a new search engine for acronyms.  Search for "OA" and it returns 15 names and phrases with those initials.  Rank them by importance and Open Access comes out on top --ahead of Order of the Arrow, Olympic Airways, and operator algebras.

"OA" has arrived

Jim Henderson, Google Scholar: A source for clinicians? Canadian Medical Association Journal, June 7, 2005. Excerpt:  'The ideal tool for finding clinical information would be a fast engine that provides the best hits from scholarly journal literature and clinical resources such as guidelines, perhaps emphasizing sites favoured by physicians in the way that Google emphasizes popular websites for general audiences.

Google Scholar for clinicians

Dorothea Salo, Voice and Labor,

 Caveat Lector

, March 26, 2008.

The labor of an IR

Mia Garlick, “Returning Author’s Rights: Termination of Transfer” Beta Tool Launched,

 Creative Commons blog

, December 21, 2006.  Excerpt:

 Comment

. I've never heard of a researcher using this provision to reclaim rights to a published journal article.  If any one knows a past case, please drop me a line.

Undoing bad copyright transfer agreements

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

Spotlight on HSRC Press,

 SA BookNews Online

, December 15, 2006.

Profile of South Africa's only OA publisher and its marketing manager

Fred Merceur, Fonctionnements et usages d’une Archive Institutionnelle, report, October 2008. An Ifremer report on the first 3 years of Archimer, its IR. (Thanks to INIST.)

 See also

our past posts on Archimer.

Report on 3 years of Archimer

Dominique Babini, Web access to social science journals in Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean – the case of CLACSO's network, a slide presentation at the First International Public Knowledge Project (PKP) Scholarly Publishing Conference, Simon Fraser University, July 11-13, 2007. Some highlights:

OA progress in Latin America

Seed Magazine, as part of its Revolutionary Minds series, has named a group of Game Changers.

Seed says openness is a "game changer"

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

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

The University of California Academic Council has written an open letter to the ACS (June 7, 2005).  Excerpt:  'In discussion with colleagues at the University of California and elsewhere we have come to understand that PubChem represents a vital next step for NIH in leveraging its investment in the human genome project by providing data on small molecules....By ensuring that publicly financed knowledge is broadly accessible on the Internet in

University of California criticizes ACS, supports PubChem

Childhoods Today is a new peer-reviewed OA journal published by the Centre for the Study of Childhood and Youth at the University of Sheffield.  The inaugural issue was published in July.

New OA journal on childhood studies

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

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

The Robert Woods Johnson Foundation has awarded a grant to the NIH's National Library of Medicine (NLM) to administer training programs at four universities in sharing information to advance public health.

Information sharing for public health

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 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

This morning the Directory of Open Access Journals logged its 1600th open-access, peer-reviewed journal.

Milestone for the DOAJ

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 new OA Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry (first blogged here March 13, 2005) is now ready to accept submissions.

Open for business

Abstracts of the presentations from the Workshop of the Information Management Working Group (IMWG) of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI) (The Hague, September 26-28) are now online.

Presentations on OA and development

SEP Reaches Significant Fund Raising Goal! NEH Matching Funds Secured, an update from SPARC, September 25, 2007.

Fund-raiding milestone for Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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

Emma Marris, Chemistry society goes head to head with NIH in fight over public database, Nature, June 9, 2005 (accessible only to subscribers).  Excerpt:  'Many chemists might not know it, but the organization that represents them in the United States is fighting to limit their free access to chemical information.

More on the ACS v. PubChem

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

OA scientometrics

CERN is looking to fill a fellowship on its SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) project.  (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)

Job with CERN study of OA

On Monday there was a panel discussion on open notebook science at Nature Island, Second Life.

Open science in Second Life

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

Digitization milestone from U. Florida

On June 15, EDUCause will host a webcast, Google's Library Digitization Project: Reports from Michigan and Oxford, featuring John Wilkin from Michigan and Reginald Carr from Oxford. Registration required.

Webcast on Google Library project

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

Dr. T.B. Rajashekar, a leader of the OA movement in India, died in a car accident on June 3.  Here's a short obituary by Vikas Kamat:   Update.  Also see the longer obituary by Subbiah Arunachalam and N. Balakrishnan.

T.B. Rajashekar

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

Ken Peach, Join the open-access revolution, CERN Courier, June-August, 2005. Excerpt:  'There is a quiet revolution under way in academic publishing that will change how we publish and access scientific knowledge. "Open access", made possible by new electronic tools, will give enormous benefits to all readers by providing free access to research results.

Call for OA in particle physics

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

Peter Binfield, Interview with PLoS ONE academic editor, Public Library of Science blog, November 6, 2008. An interview with Ivan Baxter, PLoS ONE Section Editor for plant biology.

Interview with a PLoS ONE Academic Editor

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

Nick Sheppard, Repository Day, Repository News, November 11, 2008. Blog notes on workshops introducing the IR for Leeds Metropolitan University.

Introducing the IR at Leeds Met. U.

Deep Web Technologies has launched the beta version of ScienceResearch.com, 'a free, publicly available web portal allowing access to numerous scientific journals and public science databases.'  From yesterday's press release:  '[A] single query will search thousands of high quality journals and databases, effectively millions of documents, in real-time.

Launch of an OA portal and search engine for science

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

The Office of Technology Assessment Archive, launched in June 2008 by the Federation of American Scientists, contains all the formally issued reports of the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, as well as many background papers and contractor papers. The reports cover various scientific and technical policy issues considered by the U.S. Congress from 1972 to 1995.

Archive of documents by and about the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment

Primary Research Group, The International Survey of Library &amp; Museum Digitization Projects, report, August 2008.

Market research on digitization projects

The Nigerian Library Association has honored Ezra Shiloba Gbaje for launching an institutional repository for Ahmadu Bello University.  From today's announcement by eIFL:  PS:  Congratulations, Ezra!

Nigerian librarian honored for OA work

The Open University has officially launched its institutional repository, Open Research Online.

An IR for the Open University

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

Carl Phillips, Introducing article-processing charges and inviting "detailed methods sections" articles, Epidemiologic perspectives &amp; innovations, June 7, 2005. An editorial. Excerpt:  'Epidemiologic Perspectives &amp;

Charging processing fees, soliciting long articles on method

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

Jennifer Crow, Open Access and Scholarly Communication, apparently a pre-print, deposited November 12, 2008.

Overview of OA and schol. comm.

Claudia S. has blogged some notes (in Romanian) on the Open Access Pre-Conference to the Globalization and Management of Information Resources conference (Sofia, November 11, 2008).  Read her notes in the original or in Google's English.

Notes on the Bulgarian OA conference

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

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

Michael Brunger on OA in atomic physics, a 5 minute YouTube video.

Video interview on OA in atomic physics

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

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

Video of the Free Our Data meeting

Kevin Donovan, Publishers Seek to Limit Universities’ Fair Use, Students for Free Culture blog, November 11, 2008. Discusses the publisher lawsuit against Georgia State and describes OA as among the possible responses.

More on OA as a response to the Georgia State lawsuit

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

 O'Reilly Radar

, March 22, 2007.

Beyond OA for reading to OA for processing

Carl Lagoze, et al., A Web-Based Resource Model for eScience: Object Reuse &amp; Exchange, preprint of a paper for the 2008 Microsoft eScience Workshop (Indianapolis, December 7-9, 2008), deposited on November 4, 2008.

More on OAI-ORE

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

Anthropology Now is a new magazine for lay readers.   (Thanks to anthropologi.info.)  From the editorial in the inaugural issue:

 Comment

.  I'm guessing that this is OA, but I wish I could be sure.  At the moment, all the articles are at least gratis OA.  (I couldn't find any licensing information.)  The excerpt from the editorial suggests a commitment to OA.

New anthropology magazine appears to be OA

RPM, Intellectual Property and Open Access to Biomedical Data,

 Evolgen

, March 5, 2007.

Data sharing and data hoarding in high-stakes medical research

The contents of Freebase and Freebase's Wikipedia extract are now available as public data sets on Amazon Web Services.

 See also

our past post on AWS public data sets.

Freebase and Wikipedia on Amazon Web Services

Kaitlin Thaney has posted several notes on the Berlin 6 Conference (Düsseldorf, November 11-13, 2008). Posts so far: Open Access and Franz Kafka Tony Hey (MSR) on e-science and OA New Modes of Scholarly Communication: Blogs, Wikis and Web 2.0 A word from the European Commission - Berlin 6

 Update.

More: OA and Open Standards - Berlin 6 OA and the Role of Societies - Berlin 6 Philippe Aigrain on OA - Berlin 6 Cost and Benefits

Blog notes on Berlin 6 conference

Kasia Kurek, Peter A.Th.M. Geurts, and Hans E. Roosendaal, The split between availability and selection Business models for scientific information, and the scientific process?

 Information Services and Use

, 26, 4 (2006). PS:  OA is a kind of access, not a kind of business model.  There are many business models compatible with OA.

Should OA repositories protect authors' moral rights?

Summary Minutes of the 2nd meeting of the High Level Expert Group on Digital Libraries 17 October 2006, European Commission.  While the meeting took place in October 2006, the summary minutes were only released on March 19, 2007.

Minutes of EC expert group discussing OA

This afternoon, the MIT faculty unanimously adopted a university-wide OA mandate.  Here's the resolution the faculty approved (thanks to Hal Abelson, MIT professor of computer science and engineering, who chaired the committee to formulate it):

 Comments

This is big.  Another of the world's great research universities has an OA mandate.

MIT adopts a university-wide OA mandate

The Library of Congress describes its new "Digitizing American Imprints" Program in a 21-minute webcast from January 14, 2009.  (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)  From the blurb:   PS:  The new pilot project is the the LOC's first mass-digitization effort for books, and aims to digitize 100,000 public-domain books for OA.  The occasion for the webcast was the digitization of the 25,000th book.

An OA book-scanning program from the Library of Congress

Nisha Doshi, Open Access Archaeology and PLoS, Public Library of Science, March 17, 2009.

OA archaeology and PLoS

The presentations from Berlin 5 Open Access: From Practice to Impact: Consequences of Knowledge Dissemination (Padua, September 19-21, 2007) are now online.  There are abstracts and in most cases full-texts as well.  In the case of the important closing keynote by Mariano Gago, Portugal's Minister of Science Technology and Higher Education, there should be both full-text and video, but at the moment both are unreadable.

Presentations from Berlin 5

Niha S. Jain, HKS Allows Article Access,

 Harvard Crimson

, March 18, 2009.  Excerpt: Also see John Lauerman, Harvard Government School to Offer Access to Faculty Papers,

 Bloomberg News

, March 17, 2009.

More on the new Harvard OA mandate

Fornvännen, the Swedish journal of archaeology published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, has converted to a novel form of delayed OA.  From the annnouncement by Martin Rundkvist, its managing editor: From the English version of the

 Fornvännen

"about" page:

 Comment

.

Open Access News

More on French digitization plans

Linguistics society debates data sharing

U.S. libraries call for public access

How to pass a campus OA policy

Open access roundup

Data management in Canada: new toolkit

Wikipedia in 2009

OA for Africa

Netherlands plans to digitize everything

Last chance to comment on White House consultation

OA across the federal government, hold the mandate