How the internet is transforming scholarly research and publication

Peter Suber

H. Frank Cervone, The Repository Adventure,

 Library Journal

, June 1, 2004. Excerpt: "The digital repository genesis has been short, beginning in late 2000 when the UK's University of Southampton released a software package called EPrints.

Institutional repositories from a library perspective

Becky Hogge, Patents for profit: dystopian visions of the new economy, Open Democracy, March 11, 2005. Primarily about software patents, but Hogge connects the topic to wider themes, including OA.  Excerpt:  'The success of Open Source underlines the fact that knowledge is a different sort of resource to labour or land.

Resisting software patents and promoting OA

Rufus Pollock, Pleiades: Lots of Ancient Geodata Released!

 Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog

, November 12, 2007.

First batch of open data from the Pleiades project

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 Python Papers has released a Statement on Open Access.  PP is an OA journal devoted to the Python programming language.  From the new statement:

 Comment

.  I appreciate this kind of explicitness (and have previously called for it).

An OA journal spells out its access policy

Gavin Baker

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

Bob Grant, Bush vetoes NIH budget increase,

 The Scientist

, November 14, 2007.  You know the basic facts.  But here's what's new:

 Comment

.  What's new and welcome here is that FASEB is working for the override in order to save the billion dollar budget increase for the NIH.

FASEB working for override of Bush veto

Manon Anne Ress, Require or Encourage? IGWG text on open access,

 KEI Policy Blog

, November 14, 2007.  Excerpt:

 Comment

.  Thanks to Manon and KEI for this alert.  I'd like to hear from any readers who might know which national delegations inserted the strong language in the first draft and which wanted to weaken it in the new draft.

WHO IGWG2 waters down draft OA mandate

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

1.8 million pages of federal case law to become freely available, a press release from Public.Resource.Org, November 14, 2007.  Excerpt:

 Comment

.  Another victory for the public and the public domain, thanks to Carl Malamud and Public.Resource.org.  Kudos to PRO, Fastcase, and all involved.

 Update

. Also see John Markoff's story in the November 14 New York Times.

OA to a hoard of US case law

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

Mark Leggott, American Chemical Society vs. Open Access to Research, Loomware, May 20. 2005. A blog posting. Excerpt:  'I've been wondering when this behemoth was going to role over and notice that the academic world was starting to freely share research information. ACS has long been the publisher of a very powerful and unique database of research in the area of chemistry and related disciplines.

More on the ACS v. PubChem

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

Paul Baker has blogged some notes on a recent talk by Gary VandenBos of the American Psychological Association.  Excerpt:

 Comments

. I can't tell from these notes how accurately VandenBos described the NIH policy or FRPAA before criticizing them.  Did he mention that the policies only apply to the final version of the author's peer-reviewed manuscript, and not to the copy-edited published edition?

APA criticism of the NIH policy and FRPAA

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

Seed says openness is a "game changer"

Royal decoration for founder of KB’s e-Depot, a press release from the Dutch Koninklijke Bibliotheek.  Excerpt:  Also see the RAND Europe report on e-Depot published last week (and blogged here just a minute ago).

Recognition for founder of Dutch e-Depot

ICPCNanoNet is a new OA repository for nanoscience research.

An OA repository for nanoscience

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

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

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

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

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

JISC has published an interview with Paul Miller, Director of the UK Common Information Environment. Excerpt:  'The Common Information Environment (CIE) are a group of public sector organisations who recognise that a lot of the content that we are placing online for our own audiences is also of relevance and interest to many others across a range of domains.

More on the Common Information Environment

Andrea Foster, Software Group Gets Online Textbooks to the Developing World,

 Chronicle of Higher Education

, November 16, 2007 (accessible only to subscribers).

More on the Global Text Project

Kaitlin Thaney has blogged some notes on one of the panels at the Harvard Medical School conference, Publishing in the New Millennium: A Forum on Publishing in the Biosciences (Cambridge, November 9, 2007).

Notes on the Harvard publishing forum

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

Sely Costa, The Open Access Movement in Brazil,

 EPT

, November 12, 2007.  (Thanks to Barbara Kirsop.)  Excerpt:

 Comment

.  This is a wonderfully useful and heartening report of very impressive progress.

OA in Brazil

Eric Lease Morgan's DOAJI Search (first blogged here May 5) was just named nice web site of the month by the June issue of Internet Resources Newsletter.  Congratulations Eric!

More on DOAJI Search

The Cryosphere is a new peer-reviewed, OA journal from the European Geosciences Union.  From the site:  PS:  This two-stage form of review, with the first closed and the second open, and the first prospective and the second retroactive, was pioneered by Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and made more popular by PLoS ONE.

New OA journal on ice

John Hawks, AAA journals ratchet up 108 percent for 2008,

 john hawks weblog

, November 7, 2007.  Excerpt:

 Comments

Just a note on the math in my headline:  The old prices for the two named subscriptions were 232 + 138 = 370.  The new prices for the same two subscriptions are 432 + 338 = 770.  The new total is 2.08 times the earlier total.

AnthroSource journal prices more than double after move to Wiley-Blackwell

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

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.

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

Market research on digitization projects

Videos from the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting (Baltimore, November 17-18, 2008) are now online: John Wilbanks keynote, Part 1 John Wilbanks keynote, part 2 Bob Witeck keynote David Shulenburger keynote Bonnie Klien: On Government Repositories Catherine Mitchell: On Services, Users &amp; Alliances Ernie Ingles: Why Repositories?

Videos from Digital Repositories meeting

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

Andrew Polaszek, A universal register for animal names, Nature, September 22, 2005.  (Thanks to Donat Agosti.)  Excerpt:  Also see the technical paper which the Nature comment above merely summarizes.

An OA register for animal names

Subbiah Arunachalam, Open access could close North-South technological gap, SciDev.Net, July 1, 2005. A letter to the editor.

OA archiving for developing countries

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

Daniel Greenstein, Not so quiet on a Western front,

 Nature

, May 28, 2004. Excerpt: "I believe that the business model of commercial publishing, which once served the academy's information needs, now threatens fundamentally to undermine and pervert the course of research and teaching.

Another contribution to the Nature OA debate

Jason Schwartz, Schools share class info across Internet, Daily Pennsylvanian, March 4, 2005. Excerpt:  'For the last four years, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been pioneering a system known as OpenCourseWare, which allows any Internet user to access materials -- including lecture notes, problem sets and quizzes -- from various university courses.

More on open courseware beyond MIT

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

Tim Jones, A Transparency Agenda for the New Administration, Electronic Frontier Foundation, November 12, 2008.

Another recommendation for OA to gov. data

Genome Medicine is a new peer-reviewed OA journal published by BioMed Central. See the November 12 announcement. The article-processing charge is £1350 (€1660, $2105), subject to discounts and waivers. Authors retain copyright and articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Abstracts for some articles to be published in the first issue are now available.

New OA journal of genomic medicine

JISC, Armistice Day anniversary marked by launch of Great War Archive, press release, November 11, 2008.

OA digital collections on WWI launch

The April issue of Learned Publishing is now available.

April issue of Learned Publishing

PLoS Clinical Trials is moving to PLoS ONE.  In the process, it will cut its publication fee in half, from $2,500 to $1,250.

 Update

. Also see the PLoS Hub for Clinical Trials, launched this month.

PLoS consolidates two journals

Many of the presentations from the conference, Commons-sense: Towards An African Digital Information Commons (Johannesburg, May 25-27, 2005), are now online.

Presentations on OA in Africa

Gabriele Beger, Was ist und was kann Open Access beim eLearning bewirken?  A Quicktime webcast of her keynote address at the 2007 meeting of the Gesellschaft für Medien in der Wissenschaft (Hamburg, September 11-12, 2007).  Beger is the Director of the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg and the President of the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Informationswissenschaft.

Gabriele Beger keynote on OA at GMW 2007

Grant Funding Opportunities, JISC Information Environment Team, November 10, 2008.

Upcoming funding opportunities from JISC

Umberto Guidoni (Rapporteur), Draft Report on the European Research Area: New Perspectives, European Parliament Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, October 22, 2007.  Excerpt:

 Comments

This draft motion is in response to the green paper, The European Research Area: New Perspectives, by EU Research Commissioner, Janez Potocnik, April 4, 2007.

Draft motion in support of OA for the European Parliament

Alexis Madrigal, Traditional Journal Publishers' Anti-Open-Access PR Plan Revealed,

 Wired Science

, September 21, 2007.

More on the leaked AAP/Dezenhall documents

T.J. Sondermann has launched a blog devoted to Google Scholar.

A blog of Google Scholar news

The Journal of Religion, Conflict, and Peace is a new peer-reviewed OA journal published by the Plowshares Project, "a peace studies collaborative of Earlham, Goshen, and Manchester Colleges."  For more detail, see Joseph Leichty's editorial in the inaugural issue, The Genesis of

 Journal of Religion, Conflict, and Peace

.

 Comment

.

New OA journal of religion, conflict, and peace

COMMUNIA, the European Thematic Network on the Digital Public Domain, is accepting applications for new network members. See the June 16 post to SPARC-OAForum for details.

COMMUNIA network seeks new members

Peter Brantley, Books Working with the Web,

 O'Reilly Radar

, November 5, 2007.

Linking to open ebooks v. controlling the user experience

The PLoS Medicine Editors, Why Bigger Is Not Yet Better: The Problems with Huge Datasets, PLoS Medicine, February 2005.

More on OA to data

Rufus Pollock, Give Us the Data Raw, and Give it to Us Now,

 Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog

, November 7, 2007.

Don't let a shiny interface make open data less useful

The Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) has published Escholarship:  A LITA Guide.

LITA guide to Escholarship

James Council, Warning! Rant Ahead: Academic Journals and the Publishers who Publish Them,

 An Academic in Libraryland

, October 25, 2007.  Council is the Dean of Libraries at North Dakota State University.

More on the journal pricing crisis

Dean Giustini interviews Robin Featherstone,

 UBC Academic Search - Google Scholar Blog

, September 17, 2007.  Featherstone is an Associate Librarian at the US National Library of Medicine currently working at Yale's Cushing/Whitney Medical Library.

"Librarians must be public advocates for open access"

Paul D. Thacker, Investigative reporting can produce a “higher obligation”,

 SEJournal

, Summer 2007.  Excerpt:

 Comments

We've long known that the American Chemical Society (ACS) pays very high salaries to its executives, at least for a non-profit scientific society.  For example, according to its 2005 tax returns, it paid Madeleine Jacobs $919,251 and Bob Massie $1,033,330.

This explains a lot

Chemists Without Borders has posted the second draft of its Open Chemistry Position Statement (and Suggested Actions).   PS:  The first draft was written in July and posted in September.

Second draft of Open Chemistry statement

Open knowledge, open future,

 The Journal Times

(from Racine, Wisconsin), November 5, 2007.  Excerpt:

 Comment

.  I'm glad to see another editorial in support of an OA mandate at the NIH.  Unfortunately, this one repeats the error made by the Washington Post on Thursday.  Correction:  The NIH policy would require deposit in an OA repository (PubMed Central), not submission to OA journals.

Editorial in support of an OA mandate at the NIH

SPARC Europe is calling for nominations for the third annual Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications.

Third annual SPARC Europe Award for Scholarly Communications

David R. Gerhan, Wanted: One Principal Search Engine for Digital Images,

 College &amp; Undergraduate Libraries

, 14, 2 (2007).  Full-text not yet available.

Free searching for images in the humanities literature

Shirl Kennedy, Resources of the Week: Free Stuff From Pricey Database Vendors,

 ResourceShelf

, November 5, 2007.

Islands of free in oceans of price

Bob Butler has launched BestThinking.  From today's announcement:

 Comments

I welcome new ways to combine OA with user comments or ratings.  But the phrase

 knowledge-based content

reminds me of

 cheese-like product

.  When the announcement refers to

 the challenges of other open access websites

, it seems to mean the challenges of Wikipedia.

Another site combines OA and user ratings

Munger Africana Library Notes (MALN) is a new OA collection within Caltech's Collection of Open Digital Archives (CODA).

73 monographs on Africa made OA by Caltech

The Lancet and the Global Forum for Health Research have announced the winners of the 2007 essay contest on

 Equitable access: research challenges for health in developing countries

.  From Friday's press release: Thirty-two of the submissions, including the five winning essays, are now online --all OA.  The paper most focused on OA is Anoop Dhamangaonkar, "Health research in developing countries:

Winners announced in essay contest on equitable access

The backfiles of the Revista de Derecho, Universidad de Concepción, to 1933, went OA in June 2008. Free registration is required.

OA to backfiles of Chilean law journal

CARL-SPARC toolkit encourages authors to maximize research through digital repositories, a press release from CARL and SPARC.

CARL and SPARC encourage Canadian authors to self-archive

Mendeley has announced plans to become interoperable with CiteULike (February 16) and $2 million in venture capital (February 25).  From the second announcement:   Here's more on the OA connection from Mendeley Founder and Director, Victor Henning, quoted with his permission:   PS:  Also see our past posts on Mendeley.

Mendeley finds funding

Dorothea Salo, Less cognitive load, faster deposit,

 Caveat Lector

, November 2, 2007.  Excerpt:

 Update

. See Dorothea's follow-up from November 5, summarizing ideas sent by her readers and lamenting the lack of an effective repository manager community to swap ideas and best practices.

Streamlining repository deposits

ELIG sets learning priorities in Europe for 2009, a press release on the annual meeting of the European Learning Industry Group (ELIG), November 7, 2008.  (Thanks to Subbiah Arunachalam.)

The priority of open education

SPARC, Open Access Week declared for 2009, press release, March 5, 2009.

OA Week 2009 announced

Iain Thomson, University calls for intellectual property rethink,

 Information World Review

, October 31, 2007.  Excerpt:

 Comment

.  This is incredibly refreshing and forward looking.  Is this something that only brand new, well-endowed universities could consider?  Or could any university do it, perhaps by rereading its mission statement?

Managing university IP to spur research, not revenue

Stevan Harnad, Institutions: Don't Just Cancel Journals; Mandate Self-Archiving,

 Open Access Archivangelism

, November 1, 2007.

Mandating OA for institutional performance review

The Polar Information Commons: A Framework for Long-term Stewardship of Polar Data and Information, press release, February 23, 2009.

 See also

our past posts on CODATA.

A commons for polar data

Jürgen Pfeifle, Open Content: Eine Frage des Geschäftsmodells,

 Do It.Online

, November 5, 2008.  An intro to several related openness movements, with a few paragraphs on OA research.  Read it in German or Google's English.

OA and other openness movements

The Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec's annual report for fiscal year 2007-08, released on July 30, 2008, contains a description of its digitization activities.

Digitization at the National Library of Quebec

Christian Zimmermann, RePEc in October 2008, The RePEc blog, November 5, 2008.

RePEc October update

Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, The New Science of Sharing,

 Business Week

, March 2, 2007.  (Thanks to Glyn Moody.)

More on data sharing in big science and big industry

Tim O'Reilly makes the argument for Open Publishing. A 4-minute video interview.

 See also

our past posts on O'Reilly.

O'Reilly on open publishing

Philip Davis, End of Free Access, The Scholarly Kitchen, February 26, 2009.

Medical journal backs away from OA

Fair Copyright in Research Works Act,

 The Exchange Online: The Newsletter of the Association of American University Presses

, November 4, 2008.  Excerpt:

 Comments

See my blog comments on the AAUP letter, my comments on a subsequent AAUP clarification, and my full-length critique of the Conyers bill (in SOAN for October 2008).

More from the AAUP on the Conyers bill

Fiona Murray, et al., Of Mice and Academics: Examining the Effect of Openness on Innovation, working paper, October 10, 2008.

Effects of openness on research

On February 10, SURF announced the Kick Off (in Dutch) of the Dutch Open Access Year.  (For some reason, Google Translate doesn't accept the page, but here's the link to the English translation in case the problem is merely temporary.)  Last November 28, the Vrije Universiteit van Amsterdam hosted a mini-symposium to anticipate OA Year.  The presentations are now online.

2009 is Open Access Year in the Netherlands

Dublin City University officially launched its institutional repository, DORAS (DCU Online Research Access Service).

An IR for Dublin City University

Texas A&amp;M University is considering an OA policy.  For details, see this report on its recent symposium, The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication In the Digital Age (College Station, Texas, February 11-13, 2009).  Excerpt:     PS:  Also see our past posts on the OA activity at Texas A&amp;M.

Texas A&amp;M considers an OA policy

Yesterday marked the official launch of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.  From the about page: From the Guest Commentary in the inaugural issue by Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization: Also see Daniel Sarna's announcement on the

 PLoS Blog

.

 Update

.

Launch of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases

Péter Jacsó, SCImago Country Rank Database, Péter's Digital Reference Shelf, February 2009. A review of the OA SCImago database of journal data.

 See also

our past posts on SCImago.

Review of SCImago database

Denmark's Electronic Research Library (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek, or DEFF) has adopted a Danish translation of the Knowledge Exchange's License to Publish.  The license previously existed in English, Dutch, and Spanish.  Here's how KE summarizes the main provisions of the license:

DEFF adopts the KE open license

Gary Hall,

 Culture Machine: call for contributions

, a post to the Cult-Stud list, March 1, 2007.  Thanks to Underscore for the alert and for reproducing the message (otherwise accessible only to list subscribers).

OA repository for cultural studies calls for contributions

Steve Hitchcock, Warning on repository legacy deposit burden,

 EPrints Insiders

, March 2, 2007.

Best practice for archive managers:  new articles first, past articles later

Jane Park, CC Licensing Your Dissertations, Creative Commons, February 17, 2009.

 Comment.

Peter notes that use of CC licenses for dissertations dates to at least 2006; see this example from Caltech. See also the comments on the CC blog post for other examples.

 Update.

See also danah boyd's comments.

CC licenses for dissertations

Herkko Hietanen, The Pursuit of Efficient Copyright Licensing — How Some Rights Reserved Attempts to Solve the Problems of All Rights Reserved, dissertation at Lappeenranta University of Technology, December 9, 2008.

Dissertation on efficiencies in copyright licensing

The Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) is a major OA project from the U.S. National Cancer Institute. The caBIG pilot was announced last July but the grid itself is now nearly ready for public use.

caBIG nearing completion

Last summer Tilburg University launched an Open Access Publishing Fund as a one-year experiment, set to expire at the end of August 2009.  The fund helps faculty pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals.  Delft University of Technology launched a fund in April 2008 and the Wageningen University and Research Center launched a fund in 2006.

Three more OA journal funds at Dutch universities

Rufus Pollock, Computing Copyright (or Public Domain) Status of Cultural Works, miscellaneous factZ, March 12, 2009.

Open Access News

Realistic futures in which universities would save money from journal conversions to OA

More on OA at U. Calgary

Updates on OpenWetWare

Author's perspective on an OA book

Comparing author-side fees at OA and TA journals

Comparing the results of four IR surveys

Case study in challenging a copyright transfer agreement

Presentations from Italian conference

On CLOCKSS trigger events

On OpenWetWare

More on calculating the size of the public domain