Restrictions on Access
Inside Higher Ed reports that the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) recently changed its policy to restrict access to the papers deposited into its online database. That resulted in a protest from the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology:
Wai K. Cheng, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and an SAE fellow who led the faculty charge against the restrictions, presented his concerns to SAE’s publications board last month. The organization prides itself on its efficient search engine and comprehensive database, he said in an interview, which made the change in policy all the more annoying.
“It is a step backwards,” Cheng said. “All of the sudden we’re back to archiving papers by printing them out. They want to put a lock on this thing and make it more difficult to operate.”
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Duranceau, the licensing consultant [at the MIT Libraries], said faculty at MIT are committed to keeping their papers open to as many eyes as possible.
“The core issue is the reaction of the authors here in discovering that when they had written papers and given SAE the right to the materials, [the group] betrayed their trust,” she said. “No one was under a naive assumption that everything should be free, but there was an understanding that things should be made as barrier-free as possible.”
Fair(y) Use Tale
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Dr. Eric Faden, an English professor at Bucknell University, has created a video to poke fun at copyright:
Copyright law, a constant thorn in the sides of scholars and researchers, is generating a lot of public discussion this week, thanks in part to a new 10-minute video that parodies the law. "A Fair(y) Use Tale" has been downloaded from YouTube about 145,000 times since it was posted online Friday. The video uses 400 cuts from 27 different Disney films to mock copyright law as overly protective of the interests of copyright owners — Disney among them.
The video can be viewed at the Stanford Law School site or on YouTube.
Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine
Science Commons and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) have created the Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine, a new tool for academic writers:
[T]he Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine, an online tool created by Science Commons to simplify the process of choosing and implementing an addendum to retain scholarly rights. By selecting from among four addenda offered, any author can fill in a form to generate and print a completed amendment that can be attached to a publisher’s copyright assignment agreement to retain critical rights to reuse and offer their works online.
Open Access Portal
Four German universities have collaboratively created Open-access.net:
Open-access.net, an online information platform on open access issues is going online now. The Universities of Bielefeld, Goettingen, Constance and the Free University of Berlin jointly operate the platform and have received funding from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). The platform intends to inform on the growing scientific and political significance of open access issues.
Currently, only the homepage is available in English. More content will be translated from German to English soon.
Calls for Public Access to Federally Funded Research Results
Two U.S. federal agencies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Energy (DOE), have issued reports that accentuate the significance of public access to the outcomes of federally funded research. The CDC Professional Judgment for Fiscal Year 2008 points out that one area of critical need is:
Open access to CDC’s research publications for other scientists and the public (rapid, free, and unrestricted online access) to CDC sponsored peer reviewed research and access to ‘data in progress’ among scientists, especially during emergencies like SARS
DOE’s Workshop Panel Report on Accelerating the Spread of Knowledge About Science and Technology states:
In this new digital century, strategies for marshaling, sharing, transferring, and understanding huge amounts of quality data are crucial to the advancement of science and technology. Thus, these strategies must constitute a fundamental element of DOE’s science mission. Effective use of information has a direct bearing on the Department’s ability to address pressing national challenges such as energy security and economic competitiveness. In a world economy where advances in research and development come from an expanding array of sources, it is paramount that U.S. scientists, engineers, researchers, students and the general public have comprehensive access to this growing body of knowledge.
Furthermore, because scientific discovery is a cumulative process, with new knowledge building upon earlier findings, it is imperative that unnecessary barriers to sharing the immediate results of research should be removed. In this regard, the Panel supports and encourages the principle that publicly funded unclassified research should be deposited in stable, freely accessible public archives and made freely available as soon as possible after acceptance for publication. This will clearly advance the return on research investment and foster the rapid diffusion of knowledge.
Research Impact of Open Access Journal Articles
There is an article (The research impact of open access journal articles) that may be of interest to those who wish to learn more about the impact of open access on citation:
This exploratory paper investigates the research impact of OA articles across the subject disciplines. The research impact of OA articles as measured by the number of citations varies from discipline to discipline. OA articles in Biology and Economics had the highest research impact. OA articles in hard, urban, and convergent fields such as Physics, Mathematics, and Chemical Engineering did not necessarily get cited most often.
Access to Knowledge
Another open access medical journal, Open Medicine, was recently launched. Its editorial highlights the significance of open access:
To attain their true worth, medical journals need to place the knowledge on their pages into as many capable hands as possible. In the past, this opportunity was limited mainly to those with a university library close by. Now, because of the Internet, one simply needs to be near a telephone line. The capacity of medical journals to disseminate knowledge has never been greater.
Unfortunately, physicians attempting to answer a clinical question are faced with two unappealing options: to navigate a sea of unedited pages of varying quality, or to pay for access to more carefully reviewed scholarly information. It seems an anathema to the spirit of medical research that, largely for economic reasons, the information it produces remains hidden from many potential users. Access is limited not only for health professionals in poorer countries, but also for health care providers in wealthy countries (most of whom do not have "free" access to information unless they work in universities), and for patients, who deserve the opportunity to become informed about research that affects their lives. The transformation of research findings and discussion of the results — the application of knowledge — is curtailed. Just as importantly, the debate over its merit is stifled before it can properly begin.
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Medical knowledge should be public and free from undeclared influence. When possible, it should be free for those who apply it. Since people’s lives depend on it, that knowledge must be filtered several times before it is ready to use. Studies need to be peer reviewed, to have their statistics analyzed, their content edited, then copy edited, then published quickly for as wide an audience as possible. The prospect of having a high-quality source of information that held true to these principles but was also free and globally accessible was impossible to imagine 20 years ago. Paper and postage are simply too expensive. The landscape is different today.7 An ideal medical journal — a truly open one — is not only within our sight, it is within our reach.
There is no doubt that open access is important for the dissemination and advancement of not only medical knowledge but also other kinds of scholarship.
Suber: Trends Favoring Open Access
In the May 2007 issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN), Dr. Peter Suber presents an analysis of the trends in scholarly communication:
This article began with a simple attempt to identify trends that were changing scholarly communication. I expected to find trends that were supporting the progress of OA and trends that were opposing it or slowing it down. The resulting welter of conflicting trends might not give comfort to proponents or opponents of OA, or to anyone trying to make predictions, but at least it would describe this period of dynamic flux. It might even explain why OA wasn’t moving faster or slower than it was.
But with few exceptions I only found trends that favored OA. Maybe I have a blind spot or ten. I’ll leave that for you to decide. I’m certainly conscious of many obstacles and objections to OA, and address them every day. The question is which of them represent trends that are gaining ground.
Also available is a round-up of the happenings in scholarly communication in the past month.
Subject Index to Literature on Electronic Sources of Information
Marian Dworaczek has released the latest edition of the Subject Index to Literature on Electronic Sources of Information:
The Subject Index to Literature on Electronic Sources of Information and the accompanying Electronic Sources of Information: A Bibliography deal with all aspects of electronic publishing and include print and non-print materials, periodical articles, monographs and individual chapters in collected works. This edition includes 2, 237 titles. Both the Index and the Bibliography are continuously updated.
