Sustainability of Open Access Publishing
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has made available the presentations and audio recordings of a program at the American Library Association Annual Conference, Course check: A conversation with three open access publishers about the challenges of sustainability. The presenters represented Public Library of Science, BioMed Central, and Hindawi Publishing.
Editorial on Public Access
Los Angeles Times has published an editorial (Accessing NIH research) that discusses free public access to research funded by the National Institutes of Health:
Taxpayers pony up $28 billion annually for the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest source of funding for medical research. The payoff, in addition to the occasional spectacular breakthrough, is more than 60,000 published studies each year.
The first beneficiaries of that knowledge aren’t doctors or patients. They are the publishers of the journals that review, print and sell the results to subscribers. Your tax dollars may have financed the clinical trial of a new treatment regime for the rare disease you’ve contracted, but you’ll probably still have to pay to see the results.
Thanks to Dr. Peter Suber for reporting this article on Open Access News.
Open Access and Developing World
BioMed Central, an open access publisher, has created a Web site that addresses the relationship between open access and the development world:
This site aims to provide resources about open access and internet technologies in the developing world. Emphasising the benefits to the developing world of increased internet technologies and open access to research, we hope to encourage projects and intiatives, and to showcase research published in open access journals that are of relevance to emerging countries.
Of interest is the Resources section, which lists relevant organizations, initiatives, reports, and articles.
Interview of Science Commons Director
Popular Science has published an interview of John Wilbanks, executive director of Science Commons. The interviewer points out the need for effective information sharing:
As scientific goals grow more multifaceted, the challenges for research and development lie not only in the experiments themselves, but also in the transfer of information among peers.
John Wilbanks responds by discussing how open access can alleviate the problems of the current scholarly publishing system:
The problems science is pursuing today—issues like global warming and genomic mapping—demand a distributed approach across disciplines. But currently, journal articles, data, research, materials and so on are stopped by contracts and copyrights at such a rate that it’s become nearly impossible to pull them together.
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Open access isn’t just about getting a scientist access to a file. It’s the best thing for science because it allows all the smart people in the world to start hacking on the scientific literature and applying tools like text mining, collaborative filtering and more. Right now, all that content is basically dark to most of the smart people on Earth.
Public Access to Publicly Funded Research Findings Approved by House of Representatives
The U.S. House of Representatives showed its support for public access to findings generated by research funded by the National Institutes of Health. From the Alliance for Taxpayer Access’s press release:
In what advocates hailed as a major advance for scientific communication, the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday [July 19, 2007] approved a measure directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide free public online access to agency-funded research findings within 12 months of their publication in a peer-reviewed journal. With broad bipartisan support, the House passed the provision as part of the FY2008 Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations Bill.
“The House has affirmed the principle that broad sharing of publicly funded research findings on the Internet is an essential component of our nation’s investment in science,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), and a leader of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA). “This action paves the way for all scientists and citizens to access, use, and benefit from the results of publicly funded biomedical research.”
Click here for a detailed report by Dr. Peter Suber.
Nobel Prize Winners Support Public Access
The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has made available online an open letter to the U.S. Congress that was signed by 26 Nobel Prize winners:
As scientists and Nobel laureates, we are writing to express our strong support for the House Appropriations Committee’s recent directive to the NIH to enact a mandatory policy that allows public access to published reports of work supported by the agency. We believe that the time is now for Congress to enact this enlightened policy to ensure that the results of research conducted by NIH can be more readily accessed, shared and built upon – to maximize the return on our collective investment in science and to further the public good.
Clarification about Open Access
In a recent blog post, the Editorial Team of Open Medicine clarifies the definition of open access:
[The definition of open access publication drafted by the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing] stipulates that the copyright holder grants to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute works derived from the original work, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship.
The Editorial Team also discusses how it uses a Creative Commons license to ensure derivative works of the published articles will be available in an open access manner. It asserts that "[i]t is through this creative and unlimited use of published material, with due attribution, that we believe scientific discourse can flourish."
American Research Funder Requires Public Access to Published Results
The Howard Hughes Medical Institutes (HHMI), an American research funder, have established a policy that requires funded researchers to make their published results publicly available by depositing them in PubMed Central. From the press release:
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute today announced that it will require its scientists to publish their original research articles in scientific journals that allow the articles and supplementary materials to be made freely accessible in a public repository within six months of publication.
“We have sought to balance the goal of public access with the important principle of scholarly freedom in the formulation of this policy and believe that it represents a positive step for us and for the broader scientific community,” said Thomas R. Cech, HHMI’s president.
This is a significant step in support of public access to funded research in the U.S.
International Agreement on Orphan Works
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions and the International Publishers’ Association have issued a joint statement regarding their agreement on five key principles of access to orphan works. From the press release:
The position paper is a contribution to the international debate on so-called “orphan works”: “Orphan Works” are works in copyright whose owner cannot be identified and located by someone who wishes to make use of the work in a manner that requires the rights owner’s permission. In a joint statement the international umbrella organisations of librarians and book and journal publishers have set out principles aimed at facilitating the use of orphan works.
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The statement sets out five principles to be followed by users of orphaned works:
- A reasonably diligent search should be undertaken to find the copyright owner.
- The user of an orphan work must provide a clear and adequate attribution to the copyright owner.
- If the copyright owner reappears, the owner should be reasonably remunerated or appropriate restitution should be made.
- If injunctive relief is available against the use of a previously orphaned work, the injunctive relief should take into account the creative efforts and investment made in good faith by the user of the work.
- The use of orphan works in [sic] non-exclusive.
Opportunities for Open Access
In the July issue of SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN), Dr. Peter Suber discusses the opportunities that emerge as a result of new technology and open access:
There’s the fact that the internet emerged just as journal subscription prices were reaching unbearable levels. There’s the fact that the internet widens distribution and reduces costs at the same time. There’s the fact that digital computers connected to a global network let us make perfect copies of arbitrary files and distribute them to a worldwide audience at virtually no cost. There’s the fact that unrestricted access to digital files supports forms of discovery and processing impossible for paper texts and DRM-clamped digital files. There’s the fact that for 350 years, scholars have willingly (even eagerly) publishing journal articles without payment, a custom that frees them to consent to OA without losing revenue. There’s the fact that OA is already lawful and doesn’t require copyright reform, even if it would benefit from reforms of the right kind. There’s the fact that OA is within the reach of authors acting alone and needn’t wait for publishers, legislation, or markets. There’s the fact that, for researchers acting on their own, the goal of OA is even easier to accomplish than the goal of affordable journals.
There is also a round-up of what happened in the landscape of scholarly communication in June 2007.
