Why Publishers Want Authors to Transfer Full Copyright
In response to a position paper issued by the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers, Dr. Peter Suber discusses why publishers want authors to transfer full copyright. See the comments in this post on his Open Access News blog.
Papers from Public Knowledge Project Conference
The October 2007 issue of First Monday features selected papers presented at the International Public Knowledge Project Scholarly Publishing Conference held in Vancouver, Canada in July 2007. The papers include:
- Opening up scholarly information at the University of Illinois at Chicago
- Open access to open publish: National Library of Australia
- Using a Tetradic Network Technique and a Transaction Cost Economic Analysis to illustrate an economic model for an open access medical journal
- Transitioning to open access (OA)
U.S. Senate Approved Mandate for Public Access to NIH-Funded Research
The U.S. Senate has passed the FY2008 Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations Bill (S.1710), which includes a provision that requires researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to deposit eligible manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central database for the sake of public access to research outcomes. From the press release of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA):
“Last night’s Senate action is a milestone victory for public access to taxpayer-funded research,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a founding member of the ATA). “This policy sets the stage for researchers, patients, and the general public to benefit in new and important ways from our collective investment in the critical biomedical research conducted by the NIH.”
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“We welcome the NIH policy being made mandatory and thank Congress for backing this important step,” said Gary Ward, Treasurer of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). “Free and timely public access to scientific literature is necessary to ensure that new discoveries are made as quickly as feasible. It’s the right thing to do, given that taxpayers fund this research.” The ASCB represents 11,000 members and publishes the highly ranked peer-reviewed journal, Molecular Biology of the Cell.
P.S.: There is a follow-up report from Library Journal Academic Newswire.
Interview of Peter Suber
There is an interview of Dr. Peter Suber on the blog, Open and Shut:
A senior researcher at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), Open Access Project Director for the public interest advocacy group Public Knowledge, and Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, Suber is also an advisor to a number of other OA-related organisations - including the Wikimedia Foundation, the Open Knowledge Foundation, and the Australian Open Access to Knowledge Law Project (OAK).
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At the heart of Suber’s ability to unite the movement is a commitment to what he calls "the big tent" — a tent from which no faction of the open access movement is excluded, and in which all shades of opinion are welcomed. His blog covers points of view he does not personally accept, but he gives them space to make their case before offering his own constructive, critical comments.
Redefining Scholarly Publishing
The Journal of Electronic Publishing has published an article (Redefining scholarly publishing as a service industry) that discusses how the "author pays" open access business model will transform scholarly publishing:
The landscape of the scholarly publishing market has been largely defined by subscription-based publishing models that have existed since the earliest days of scholarly journal publishing. If there is a widespread shift from these subscription-based models to an open-access model based on publication charges, the fundamental nature of the scholarly publishing industry will transform from that of a content-providing industry to a service-providing industry. The benefits that this transformation will bring to the research community are in many ways as important as the benefits that an open access model will have in terms of increasing online access to scholarly literature.
When Is Open Access Not Open Access?
An editorial (When is open access not open access?) in PLoS Biology points out that there has been confusion about what open access entails, especially regarding the unrestricted use of content. The article provides examples and argues:
Does the distinction between free and open access really matter if anyone can read the article for free? Isn’t open access just about making the literature available? Well, yes and no. Free access is certainly important, but it’s only the starting point. At least of equal importance is the potential for innovation. We don’t know yet what innovation means with regards to the full text of an article—who could have predicted the impact GenBank would have or the uses that sequences are now being put to? As one colleague put it, free access is like giving a child a Lego car and telling her that she can look at it, perhaps touch it, but certainly not take it apart and make an airplane from it. The full potential of the work cannot be realized [6].
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… Open access is a term that should only be used when the license permits both free access and unrestricted derivative use (and gives appropriate attribution). Authors and funders need to be much more aware of the small print before inadvertently signing away their rights and those of their readers and, even worse, paying good money for the privilege.
New World of Research Communication
A seminar, Open Access: The New World of Research Communication, was held at the University of Ottawa in Canada on Oct. 10, 2007. The Webcast and presentations are now available online.
Infrastructure for Cyberscholarship
The Future of Scholarly Communication: Building the Infrastructure for Cyberscholarship is a report based on a workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Joint Information Systems Committee in Britain. The report states that:
- The widespread availability of digital content creates opportunities for new forms of research and scholarship that are qualitatively different from traditional ways of using academic publications and research data. We call this "cyberscholarship".
- The widespread availability of content in digital formats provides an infrastructure for novel forms of research. To support cyberscholarship, such content must be captured, managed, and preserved in ways that are significantly different from conventional methods.
UC Berkeley Channel on YouTube
The University of California, Berkeley has launched a channel on YouTube to Webcast its course lectures and special events. From the press release:
UC Berkeley is the first university to make videos of full courses available through YouTube. Visitors to the site at youtube.com/ucberkeley can view more than 300 hours of videotaped courses and events. Topics range from bioengineering, to peace and conflict studies, to "Physics for Future Presidents," the title of a popular campus course. Building on its initial offerings, UC Berkeley will continue to expand the catalog of videos available on YouTube.
This is an example of how Web 2.0 technology can be used to facilitate scholarly communication, teaching, and learning. Another example is the creation of SciVee.
More Negative Responses to PRISM
The PRISM campaign, which was recently launched by The Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division (AAP PSP), continues to evoke negative responses. An online article (Scientists, publishers and authors rage against PRISM) from Information World Review reports:
Well-known scientist and OA supporter Peter Murray-Rust from Cambridge [University] added to the chorus of derision for PRISM. "This initiative is an undisguised coalition to discredit OA publishing and its launch has generated universal dismay and anger in many quarters," he said. "This campaign is clearly focused on the preservation of the status quo in scholarly publishing (along with the attendant revenues), and not on ensuring that scientific research results are distributed and used as widely as possible," wrote Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition.
In addition, the Library Journal notes in its newswire story (PRISM spurs another AAP PSP Executive Council resignation):
Its [PRISM’s] launch, however, has been met with outrage by many members of AAP, as well as OA advocates. A number of publishers have since sought to distance themselves from PRISM, including: Cambridge University Press, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Columbia University Press, MIT Press, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, Pennsylvania State University Press, Rockefeller University Press, University of Chicago Press. Meanwhile, as OA advocate Peter Suber noted on his blog, no publishers are openly identified as members of the PRISM coalition.
