Open Access for Rapid, Interdisciplinary Communications
The American Institute of Physics (AIP) has announced the launch of a new open access journal, Biomicrofluidics. Its press release points out clearly why open access is the preferred channel to facilitate rapid and wide communications among researchers in a fast-growing interdisciplinary field:
"With the number of biomicrofluidics researchers growing exponentially, and the fast-paced development of biomicrofluidic devices, there is a strong need within the community for a widely read, rapid-publication journal such as Biomicrofluidics," said Hsueh-Chia Chang, Editor of Biomicrofluidics. "As an inherently interdisciplinary field, open access to the journal will allow researchers to build on each others work, thereby spurring significant research activity and leading to major breakthroughs in applications such as diagnostic technologies."
"With budgetary constraints hampering the efforts of many libraries to acquire all the research their patrons need, new connections are needed between those publishing research and those needing to utilize it," stated Marc H. Brodsky, AIP Executive Director and CEO. "In order to fulfill AIP’s mandate, which involves the diffusion of knowledge for the benefit of human welfare, we are pursuing new avenues to enhance the free flow of information. Open access publication is one such avenue."
While a publication fee will be charged to the authors who publish in Biomicrofluidics, it is much more affordable than that charged by some Elsevier journals. I think the difference lies mainly in the fact that this new open access journal is published to encourage and support scholarly communication, not for profit-making.
Open Computation and Scholarly Communication
This article, written by Clifford Lynch and to be published as a book chapter, discusses how the conventional scholarly publishing model is incompatible with the digital scholarly communication practices. It argues that there have to be changes in the legal and technical aspects. It concludes that:
The opportunities [of open computation] are truly stunning. They point towards entirely new ways to think about the scholarly literature (and the underlying evidence that supports scholarship) as an active, computationally enabled representation of knowledge that lives, grows and interacts with its contributors rather than as a passive archive or record. They suggest ways in which information technology can accelerate the rate of scientific discovery and the growth of scholarship. It would be a disgrace if we allowed the inertia of historic scholarly publishing practices and the intellectual property arrangements that underlie these patterns to foreclose such opportunities. Open access offers an important simplification and reduction of the barriers if its development is shaped in a way that is responsive to these opportunities, although it is certainly not a panacea in its current form.
The article is also available in the pdf format.
Conference Papers on Open Access and Institutional Repositories
Gary Price’s ResourceShelf notes that some papers on open access to be presented at the 2006 World Library and Information Congress are already available online. They include:
- Open Access Scholarly Databases–A Bird’s Eye View of the Landscape
- Open Access–Philosophy, Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study
- Directories of Institutional Repositories: Research Results & Recommendations
Possible Amendment to Copyright Law
A bill was introduced in U.S. Congress on Tuesday to address the section of copyright law that deals with orphan works (works that are still under copyright protection but their owners cannot be located). If passed, the bill would pave the way for easier reuse of orphans works on condition that users had already made a good faith effort to locate the works’ owners without success. In the long run, the amendment would facilitate scholarly communication and provide more materials for faculty to prepare new educational materials.
Authors pay for free access to their articles?
Originally posted by Sara Ranger:
According to a representative from Elsevier, some of their journals are now offering authors a new option. An author would pay the publisher $3000 to allow non-subscribers to have free access to his or her article (already accepted for publication) through ScienceDirect.
Not mentioned is how long the article will be available–is it in perpetuity?
Also, this seems like a lot of money for one article. If it were a lifetime offer, or an offer to a university for any articles coming from that university, it might be a reasonable offer. I’m curious to see how many authors take Elsevier up on this.
Citation Advantage of Open Access
In this article published in PLoS Biology, Dr. Gunther Eysenbach reports the findings of his study of the citation advantage of open access articles:
[E]ven in a journal that is widely available in research libraries, OA articles are more immediately recognized and cited by peers than non-OA articles published in the same journal. OA is likely to benefit science by accelerating dissemination and uptake of research findings.
In an editorial from Journal of Medical Internet Research, Eysenbach identifies the three components of the open access advantage:
(1) a citation count advantage (as a metric for knowledge uptake within the scientific community), (2) an end user uptake advantage, and (3) a cross-discipline fertilization advantage. … As the advantages for publishing open access from a researchers’ point of view become increasingly clear, questions around the sustainability of open access journals remain. This journal is a living example that "lean publishing" models can create successful open access journals.
Scholarly Communication Workshop
The University of California at Los Angeles Library will host a Scholarly Communication workshop on Saturday, July 15th. It will "focus on sharing success stories and lessons learned by UC libraries on how to institutionalize a scholarly communications program." The registration is now open. The registration fee is $15, and the registration deadline is June 30th.
Research Findings and Public Interest
The Royal Society in Britain has published a report about communicating research findings to the public for the sake of public interest. The report recommends:
Lay summaries, carefully prepared by collaboration between researchers and professional journals, could serve an important function when communicating to the public. Researchers should be encouraged to acquire the skills needed for such communication.
The report also provides a checklist to help researchers take public interest into account when they are considering whether they should communicate their findings to the public.
Peter Suber has commented on this report on his Open Access News blog.
Report of Scholarship and Libraries in Transition Symposium
The National Commission on Libraries and Information Science has released the report, Mass Digitization: Implications for Information Policy, which summarizes the discussions at the "Scholarship and Libraries in Transition" Symposium held at the University of Michigan in March. The report covers nine major issues that have information policy implications:
- Copyright: How should important aspects of copyright—fair use, orphan works, opt-in vs. opt-out models—be handled in digitization projects?
- Quality: When is the quality of OCR good enough? What about quality of content and authentication?
- Libraries: What are the roles and priorities for libraries in the digital age?
- Ownership and preservation: Who will assume long-term ownership of books and journals and other media? Who will take responsibility for long-term preservation of books and journals and other media, and preserving the public record?
- Standardization and interoperability: How can the silos of digital initiatives communicate with each other?
- Publishers: What are the roles of publishers and booksellers in the digital age?
- Business models: What business models are needed in the era of mass digitization? How will the open access movement affect the economics of digitization?
- Information literacy: What should be done about information illiteracy?
- Assessment: What types of assessment are being used? How will we know if digitization and electronic access are meeting people’s needs?
The Webcast of the Symposium is also available.
Opinions on Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006
The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has issued their opposition to the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (FRPAA). In sum, AAP argues that "unwarranted measure would have severe consequences for publishers, scientific societies, researchers, and U.S. taxpayers." In response, Michael Carroll analyzes AAP’s arguments and proffers his opinions.
It is hard to tell whether FRPAA will eventually become legislation. But at least it has raised academics’ awareness of open access and encouraged open discussions of scholarly communication issues.
