Bibliography of Open Access
The Open Access Directory (OAD) now offers a Bibliography of Open Access:
- This bibliography is the work of OAD contributors. It’s based on Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, 2005.
- The original bibliography is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 license. The OAD version (like the rest of OAD) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. The OAD version does not include the prefatory texts, which are still online. See the original Preface, Acknowledgements, and introductory essay, Key Open Access Concepts.
- …
Impact of Electronic Publishing on Scholarship
An article in Science (Electronic publication and the narrowing of science and scholarship by Dr. James A. Evans) brings up some unintended consequences of making scholarly information available electronically. Here is the abstract:
Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled. But because they are used differently than print-scientists and scholars tend to search electronically and follow hyperlinks rather than browse or peruse-electronically available journals may portend an ironic change for science. Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005), I show that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles. The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship. Searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon.
European Commission’s Green Paper on Copyright
The European Commission has made available a green paper, Copyright in the Knowledge Economy. From the press release:
In its review of the Single Market[1] the Commission highlighted the need to promote free movement of knowledge and innovation as the “Fifth freedom” in the single market. The Green Paper will now focus on how research, science and educational materials are disseminated to the public and whether knowledge is circulating freely in the internal market. The consultation document will also look at the issue of whether the current copyright framework is sufficiently robust to protect knowledge products and whether authors and publishers are sufficiently encouraged to create and disseminate electronic versions of these products.
…
… In particular, the Green Paper is an attempt to structure the copyright debate as it relates to scientific publishing, the digital preservation of Europe’s cultural heritage, orphan works, consumer access to protected works and the special needs for the disabled to participate in the information society. The Green Paper points to future challenges in the fields of scientific and scholarly publishing, search engines and special derogations for libraries, researchers and disabled people.
The Green paper focuses not only on the dissemination of knowledge for research, science and education but also on the current legal framework in the area of copyright and the possibilities it can currently offer to a variety of users (social institutions, museums, search engines, disabled people, teaching establishments).
Access to Clinical Trial Results
The wave of providing open access to scholarly information and research data is going strong. According to an editorial in PLoS Medicine (Next stop, don’t block the doors), clinical trials results from the U.S. will become publicly available starting in Sept. 2008:
… As of September 27, 2008, the US Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act of 2007 (FDAAA) will require that clinical trials results be made publicly available on the Internet through an expanded “registry and results data bank” [8].
Under FDAAA, enrollment and outcomes data from trials of drugs, biologics, and devices (excluding phase I trials) must appear in an open repository associated with the trial’s registration, generally within a year of the trial’s completion, whether or not these results have been published. The new law is innovative in bridging the gap between a clinical trial’s registration at inception (now an established requirement for publication) and the public archiving of its final peer-reviewed report.
For each trial falling within its scope, the law requires the posting of a table of “demographic and baseline characteristics” of the study participants, as well as a “table of values for each of the primary and secondary outcome measures for each arm of the clinical trial, including the results of scientifically appropriate tests of the statistical significance.” Safety outcomes must be posted as of 2009, and further information may be required in future years. These are not just recommendations; the law imposes fines of up to US$10,000 per day for noncompliance.
The editorial discusses the implications of the Act.
Determining Copyright Status
An article in the July/August issue of D-Lib Magazine (Copyright renewal, copyright restoration, and the difficulty of determining copyright status by Peter B. Hirtle ) discusses steps for determining a work’s copyright status. Here is the abstract:
It has long been assumed that most of the works published from 1923 to 1964 in the US are currently in the public domain. Both non-profit and commercial digital libraries have dreamed of making this material available. Most programs have recognized as well that the restoration of US copyright in foreign works in 1996 has made it impossible for them to offer to the public the full text of most foreign works. What has been overlooked up to now is the difficulty that copyright restoration has created for anyone trying to determine if a work published in the United States is still protected by copyright. This paper discusses the impact that copyright restoration of foreign works has had on US copyright status investigations, and offers some new steps that users must follow in order to investigate the copyright status in the US of any work. It argues that copyright restoration has made it almost impossible to determine with certainty whether a book published in the United States after 1922 and before 1964 is in the public domain. Digital libraries that wish to offer books from this period do so at some risk.
Meanwhile, the American Library Association Office for Information Technology Policy has developed a slider that helps people determine whether a work is in the public domain.
P.S.: Organizations from Australia, the Netherlands, the U.K., and the U.S. have made available a report, International Study on the Impact of Copyright Law on Digital Preservation. From the front matter:
This study focuses on the copyright and related laws of Australia, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States and the impact of those laws on digital preservation of copyrighted works. It also addresses proposals for legislative reform and efforts to develop non-legislative solutions to the challenges that copyright law presents for digital preservation.
Open Access Journal Business Models
The Open Access Directory now offers a page on open access journal business models. It describes 11 models with examples:
- Added-value products
- Advertising
- Endowments
- Hybrid OA journals
- Institutional subsidies
- Membership dues
- Non-OA publications
- Publication fees
- Reprints
- Submission fees
- Volunteer effort
Journals Urged for Disclosing Financial Conflicts of Interest
The Center for Science in the Public Interest has issued a call for journals to develop a policy on disclosing financial conflicts of interest. From the press release:
The Center for Science in the Public Interest today urged editors of journals of science and medicine to adopt a common standard for disclosing financial conflicts of interest among their authors, editors, and peer reviewers. The nonprofit watchdog group, whose Integrity in Science Project monitors corporate influence on science, developed a model disclosure policy with Barnett S. Kramer, Thomas F. Babor, and Wendy Cowles Husser, respectively of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, the journal Addiction, and the Journal of the American College of Surgeons; and bioethicists Arthur Caplan and Jonathan Moreno, both of University of Pennsylvania.
Scientists� undisclosed financial ties to drug or medical device companies have been a major embarrassment for medical journals in recent years. …
Discussions of National Institutes of Health’s Public Access Policy
Social Science Research Network (SSRN) carries the preprint of an article about the new National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Public Access Policy (The impact of government-mandated public access to biomedical research by Kristopher A. Nelson), Open Access News reports. Here is the abstract:
On December 26, 2007, President Bush signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008. The bill, which became Public Law 110-161, contained a new requirement that manuscripts developed through funding by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) be made available to the public, free of charge, within one year after publication. This new mandatory requirement struck a compromise position between the existing pay-to-access model of private journal publishers and the potential free-for-all of the public domain. But did it go far enough? Should Congress have adopted a more aggressive policy of opening access to research? Alternatively, did Congress go too far, and as a result have we crippled scientific publishing?
From the conclusion:
… the move towards greater public access to research is a move in the right direction. The benefits of long-term archiving and free access by those who might not otherwise be able to afford it outweigh the negatives of increased support-staff workload and potentially reduced markets for traditional publishers. Certainly the law could have done more, but in many ways it is up to scientists and researchers themselves to push for greater moves in the direction of open access, if that is what will benefit science and discovery in the long term. Government can only mandate so much; beyond that, it is up to us to go the rest of the way.
P.S.: SPARC (Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition) has made available an analysis (NIH Public Access Policy Does Not Affect U.S. Copyright Law) of the NIH Public Access Policy. From the summary:
Although it is clear that the NIH Public Access Policy is simply a routine change in the contract between the NIH and funding recipients, the American Association of Publishers (AAP) submitted an opinion letter to NIH suggesting that this change raised copyright issues including U.S. obligations under international copyright agreements.[1] This AAP Opinion Letter is fundamentally flawed and mischaracterizes the relevant facts and law.
Contrary to the AAP assertions, the NIH Public Access Policy does not affect U.S. copyright law in any way. NIH has added a condition to pre-existing licensing terms in its grant agreements that affirms it can legally provide public access to publicly funded research. This change in the terms of NIH grant agreements is fully consistent with copyright law. Copyright is an author’s right. Researchers are the authors of the articles they write with NIH support. In exchange for substantial federal funding, these researchers voluntarily agree to grant the federal government a license to provide public access to the results of publicly funded research. NIH receives a non-exclusive license from federally funded researchers, who retain their copyrights and are free to enter into traditional publication agreements with biomedical journals or assign these anywhere they so choose, subject to the license to NIH.
Cyberinfrastructure and Higher Education
The July/August 2008 issue of EDUCAUSE Review focuses on the roles of cyberinfrastructure in higher education. The articles published include:
- Cyberinfrastructure: In tune for the future: Cyberinfrastructure permits a new kind of scholarly inquiry and education, empowering communities to innovate and to revolutionize what they do, how they do it, and who participates.
- Making research and education cyberinfrastructure real: Providing an evolving foundation for 21st-century research and education, cyberinfrastructure is both a focus for invention and an accelerator of innovation, linked through a trajectory that begins with design and evolves to broad-based use.
- Things to do while waiting for the future to happen: Building cyberinfrastructure for the Liberal Arts: What is the current thinking about cyberinfrastructure for the liberal arts, what models for transinstitutional collaboration and institution building are emerging, and what steps can campuses take to move this agenda forward?
- Cyberinfrastructure: Changing a cottage industry: Drawn from a recent ECAR research study, this article addresses the importance of five CI technologies to various academic areas in research and in teaching and learning at present and how survey respondents think the importance of these technologies might change in the near future.
- Trail-blazing the cyberinfrastructure road: The co-chairs of the EDUCAUSE Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CCI) Working Group provide background on the group and its activities in the area of higher education cyberinfrastructure.
Directory of Data Repositories
The Open Access Directory now offers a page about data repositories. The entries are arranged in alphabetical order of discipline.
