Innovations in Scholarly Communication
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, hosted a workshop on innovations in scholarly communication on April 18-20, 2007 in Geneva, Switzerland. The slides and videos of the presentations are now available online. The topics covered include open access and digital repositories.
Quality of Peer Review
The European Science Foundation has published a report, Peer Review: Its Present and Future States, that examines the shortcomings of the peer review system and discusses possible actions to address them. From the press release:
A central theme of the report is that the current peer review system might not adequately assess the most pioneering research proposals, as they may be viewed as too risky. John O’Reilly, former Chief Executive of the U.K.’s engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), now Vice Chancellor of Cranfield University, said traditional peer review might be too risk averse. He suggested the need to encourage pioneering research that is high risk in the proposal, but high impact if successful.
The 36-page report is available online.
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, Version 67
Version 67 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (SEPB) is now online:
This selective bibliography presents over 2,960 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.
Users can search SEPB using Boolean operators. Interim updates to SEPB will be posted on the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog.
Copyright and Intellectual Property Law
The Center for Intellectual Property at the University of Maryland University Center has made available the podcast of an interview with Mr. Fred von Lohmann, Senior Intellectual Property Attorney at the Electronic Freedom Foundation. During the interview, Mr. von Lohmann discusses copyright issues, "creative destruction," and the role of higher education in the copyright dialogue.
Progress of Science
In her article (Open access and the progress of science) published in American Scientist, Dr. Alma Swan discusses the inadequacy of the current scholarly publishing system:
If we could start now, equipped with the World Wide Web, computers in every laboratory or institution and a global view of the scientific research effort, would we come up with the system for communicating knowledge that we have today? The system we have, which originated as an exchange of letters and lectures among scattered peers, does some things well. But in its current form—a leviathan feeding on an interaction of market forces within and outside science—one can hardly argue that the system satisfies the needs of a modern scientific community. And new developments in the way science is done will make it even less fit for its original purpose in the years ahead.
She also highlights how open access can contribute to the advancement of science:
How does science measure the worth of a published piece of work? The standard metric today is the citation: Highly cited articles (and journals) have measurable impact. As open-access publishing experiments are moving forward, they are beginning to rack up numbers. By definition an open-access article has greater visibility, and it’s becoming evident that scientists do take the opportunity to read and use what they would otherwise not have seen. The bar chart on the next page shows that across a range of scholarly disciplines, opening access to articles increases their citation rate. Behind the numbers are the new collaborations that result when scientists who don’t know of one another’s work discover synergies that can be exploited. Science needs open access to facilitate that process.
Open access can advance science in another way, by accelerating the speed at which science moves. In most fields, open access is still a rarity rather than the norm, but in some fields of physics (high-energy, condensed matter and astrophysics) it has been commonplace for more than a decade. The arXiv, an open-access archive now maintained at Cornell University, contains copies of almost every article published in these disciplines, deposited by the authors for all to use. Tim Brody of Southampton University has measured the time between when articles are deposited in arXiv and when citations to those articles begin to appear. Over the years, this interval has been shrinking as the arXiv has come into near-universal use as a repository and as physicists have taken advantage of the fact that early posting of preprints allows them immediate access to others’ results. In other words, a system built on open access is shortening the research cycle in these disciplines, accelerating progress and increasing efficiency in physics.
Cultivating Creative Commons
Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons is a publication that "brings together papers from some of the most prominent thinkers of our time on the internet, law and the importance of open content licensing in the digital age." It can be downloaded from the Queensland University of Technology e-Prints Archive under the Australian Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Open up Scholarly Communication
Create Change has published a new interview about changes in scholarly communication. Dr. David R. Morrison, a professor of mathematics and physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, talks about arXiv, journal publishing, and access to scientific literature. Here is an excerpt of the interview:
What should be the role of funding agencies in scholarly communication change?
My view is that when the federal government is investing large money in scientific innovation, the scientific community as a whole has a right and duty to make the information available to as broad of an audience as possible.
So, the current model of taking the results of that research and giving it for free to a publisher who will then lock it up and only allow access after paying a fee is incompatible with that free communication of ideas. I really applaud the [US National Institutes of Health’s] PubMed Central initiative and I understand why Nature and Science are so upset about it, but it’s the right thing to be doing.
On the other hand, there are costs associated with publication. And the funding agencies have not been willing to provide money to pay for these things. It’s understandable that funding agencies want to focus their funding on the science, but finding a way to facilitate this kind of open communication is really important.
What are the benefits of more open sharing of research?
The nature of the scientific enterprise is founded on free and open communication of results. It’s true that there are places where people engage in science, like industrial labs or people carrying out classified research, where perhaps wide communication is not appropriate. But outside of those contexts, it’s fundamental to the enterprise that people be able to freely communicate what they have done.
In the old version of the system, where the only way to communicate your work was to put ink to paper and all major research libraries were subscribing to all the major research journals, the way to be open about communicating was to go through the journal system. Today, it’s not clear at all that is the way to be open about communication in research. To reach a broad audience of other scientists may require new techniques of communication that people may not have adopted as strongly as they ought to.
Copyright Renewal Database
Copyright Determinator, an online database developed by the Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources, is a tool for people who wish to search copyright renewal records for books published in the United States between 1923 and 1963. From its introduction:
This database makes searchable the copyright renewal records received by the US Copyright Office between 1950 and 1993 for books published in the US between 1923 and 1963. Note that the database includes ONLY US Class A (book) renewals.
The period from 1923-1963 is of special interest for US copyrights, as works published after January 1, 1964 had their copyrights automatically renewed by the 1976 Copyright Act, and works published before 1923 have generally fallen into the public domain. Between those dates, a renewal registration was required to prevent the expiration of copyright, however determining whether a work’s registration has been renewed is a challenge. Renewals received by the Copyright Office after 1977 are searchable in an online database, but renewals received between 1950 and 1977 were announced and distributed only in a semi-annual print publication. The Copyright Office does not have a machine-searchable source for this renewal information, and the only public access is through the card catalog in their DC offices.
In order to make these renewal records more accessible, Stanford has created this searchable database. …
The database site also lists online resources for learning about copyright and fair use.
Paying for Open Access Archiving
In the April 2007 issue of SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN), Dr. Peter Suber discusses the issue of charging for open access archiving:
Two announcements in March showed that some publishers want to charge for OA archiving and at least one foundation is willing to pay for it. Neither amounts to a trend, but both could slow the progress of green OA, either by the direct imposition of new and needless costs or by confusing policy-makers about the economics of green OA.
First the American Chemical Society (ACS) re-announced its hybrid journal program, AuthorChoice, and reminded us that authors who wish to self-archive must pay the AuthorChoice fee. Then Elsevier and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) agreed that when an HHMI-funded author publishes in an Elsevier journal, HHMI will pay Elsevier a fee to deposit the peer-reviewed postprint in PubMed Central six months after publication. Here’s a closer look at each policy.
Additionally, there is a round-up of what happened in March in the scholarly communication landscape.
