Senate Committee in Favor of Access to Publicly Funded Research
U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee has agreed that researchers who have received funding from the National Institutes of Health should be required to deposit an electronic copy of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive. That would make the publicly funded research results freely available on the Internet. From the Alliance for Taxpayer Access’s report:
“Action by our Senators in supporting this change is especially welcomed by the patient community,” said Colleen Zak, Executive Director of the Autosomal Recessive Polycystic Kidney Disease and Congenital Hepatic Fibrosis (ARPKD/CHF) Alliance. “Delivering on the NIH public access policy will create anticipated opportunities for accelerating research and finding cures.”
Contest to Encourage Discussions of Information Sharing
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has issued a call for entries for the SPARC Discovery Awards. From the press release:
The contest, details for which are online at www.sparkyawards.org, encourages new voices to join the public discussion of information policy in the age of the Internet. Contestants are asked to submit videos of two minutes or less that imaginatively show the benefits of bringing down barriers to the free exchange of information. While designed for adoption as a college or high school class assignment, the SPARC Discovery Awards are open to anyone over the age of 13. Submissions will be accepted beginning in mid-July and must be received by December 2, 2007. Winners will be announced in January 2008.
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The contest takes as its inspiration a quote from George Bernard Shaw: “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
This contest offers faculty and students an opportunity to openly discuss issues related to information access and sharing.
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, Version 68
Version 68 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now online:
This selective bibliography presents over 3,040 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.
The 2006 annual edition of the bibliography is also available.
Subject-specific Repository
AgEcon Search: Research in Agricultural and Applied Economics is an online subject-specific repository that indexes and disseminates outcomes of agricultural economic research. Because of its success, the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has recognized it as a model for building an innovative and collaborative disciplinary archive. Here is a brief description of AgEcon Search (from the SPARC press release):
The project operates as what economists refer to as a distributed network. The leading partners - the University Libraries and Department of Applied Economics - contribute staff time, equipment, and funds for student support. Content contributors take on the work of preparing each paper, completing the submission form, and delivering the manuscripts to AgEcon Search - thus minimizing what needs to be done centrally. If a group chooses, they may pay (on a cost-recovery basis) to have their accumulated resources incorporated. To ensure the quality of the research in the collection, an organized scholarly community such as a society, association, university department, or organization must sponsor the work submitted, and each group has a peer review process in place for contributions.
Ten years since its launch, AgEcon Search has become an important tool for academe and industry. The collection contains over 24,000 papers from 140 institutions and professional associations, and over 1.25 million downloads have been recorded since 2001.
Toward Open Access Publishing
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has published Towards Open Access Publishing in High Energy Physics, which describes how the particle physics community disseminates pre-prints of research articles through large repositories:
This Working Party Report offers a new opportunity for the community to add open access peer-reviewed journals to its publishing outlets through a global conversion of the main corpus of journals to the open access model. The opportunity to improve cost-effective access to peer-reviewed research is there for authors, funding agencies and publishers who respond imaginatively to the proposal.
While the report focuses on the particle physics community, it will be of reference value to scholars in different disciplines who are interested in understanding and/or pursuing open access.
SPARC Innovators (June 2007)
Drs. Ted Bergstrom and Carl Bergstrom have been recognized as innovators by SPARC (Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition) for their contribution to the open access movement. From the press release:
Ted and Carl are best known for their collaborations on Ted’s journal pricing Web pages and, more recently, on the Eigenfactor.org Web site produced by Carl’s research lab. Ted’s journal pricing page, which offers data reporting price per article and price per citation for about 5,000 academic journals, has centralized pricing information so it can be explored and compared in ways that were previously impossible. The site has become a vital resource for researchers and librarians alike. Carl’s Eigenfactor.org site offers a completely new and innovative approach to assessing the value of journals; it provides researchers, librarians and others a new mechanism to evaluate based on a diverse array of criteria.
Click here for more information about these two innovators.
P.S.: Dr. Ted Bergstrom’s journal pricing page discusses issues generated by incessantly escalating journal prices. Dr. Carl Bergstrom’s Eigenfactor.org provides an alternative method to assess the value of scientific information.
Author and Publisher Rights
In the June issue of SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN), Dr. Peter Suber discusses the balance between author and publisher rights:
In order for authors to provide OA to their own work, they don’t need to retain full copyright, and in order for publishers to publish, they don’t need to acquire full copyright. This raises the hope that we might find a balance giving each side all it needs. But even with good will on both sides, this win-win compromise may be out of reach; each side might give and receive significant concessions and still not have all it needs.
There were two developments in May that could affect the balance between author and publisher rights. First, a group of universities adopted an "author addendum" to modify standard publisher copyright contracts and a pair of non-profits enhanced their own author addenda. Second, a group of publishers adopted a position statement on where the balance lies. Not surprisingly, the two groups strike the balance in different places.
Dr. Suber also directs the reader’s attention to certain acronyms that have appeared in the open access discussions.
