Israel Scholar Communication Scrolls

More on the Open Access mandate for the NIH

2008-01-09T12:18:00.000+02:00

Robin Peek, NIH OA Mandate Passes, a preprint of a column to appear in the February issue of Information Today. According to IT's new access policy, "The preprint will be removed on January 31st and the postprint will be posted 3 months after publication." Excerpt and comment by Peter Suber, Open Access News Blog:

...And in one final dashing of the pen, it was done, the National Institute of Health had a mandate to make all of its funded research OA. A requirement that represents a historic first for a U.S. government agency and one of the largest single mandates world-wide....

I am enjoying this quiet blissful tranquility putting aside in my mind the knowledge that the publishing lobby is no doubt sharpening its lawyers and drafting their own counter defensive. But while it is cliché to use the phrase, there has indeed been a sea change....

At this point it is too early to know how different Federal agencies and even other funding agencies countries will respond differently to the passage of this mandate. As Steven Harnad observes, I think the NIH victory is itself part of a surge of activity in OA mandates. NIH's is a big one so it will help spur others. The big surge now, however, will be in institutional mandates all over the world. According to the Registry of Open Access Repositories, there are now “21 funder-mandates, 11 institutional-mandates, and 3 departmental-mandates, plus 5 proposed-funder-mandates, 1 proposed-institutional-mandate, and 2 proposed-multi-institutional-mandates (worldwide) a total of 35 mandates already adopted and 8 more proposed so far.”

“It will trigger more mandates, particularly among other federal agencies in the US. Some will wait to see how the mandate works out at the NIH, but some already want to adopt OA policies and are only waiting for a green light from Congress.” observes Peter Suber, author of the [SPARC] Open Access Newsletter, “For them, this bill is the green light.”

Personally I have no doubt that there will be a shift in the publishing lobby strategy to question the ability of PubMed Central to handle the task of handling a submission load that will eventually increase from roughly 4% to a 25-fold increase to 100% compliance and that publishers will raise the argument again that researchers don’t really care that much about OA....

[Suber notes:] “The NIH has been energetic and conscientious in making the voluntary policy work as well as it can. But researchers are overstretched and preoccupied.” adding, “They are willing to comply if mandated, as Alma Swan’s studies have shown, but otherwise they don't want to add another chore to their long to-do lists.”

“I think the NLM has its part of the game well covered - the National Center for BioTechnology Information (NLM) repeatedly demonstrated its ability to handle rapid scaling of such operations, as for example with Genbank,” observes Matt Cockerill, Publisher of BioMed Central, “ PubMed Central itself already contains more than 1 million articles, mostly deposited by publishers, so an NIH mandate with 100% compliance (roughly 65,000 articles annually) is unlikely to pose a technical or logistical challenge.”

However, the publishers are still prepared to fight against that mandate. How surprising. For example, in a press release issued on January 4th by the Association of American Publishers reaffirmed its displeasure. In a slightly different tactic than has been used before, Allan Adler, AAP’s Vice President for Legal and Government Affairs [argued], “Journals published in the U.S. have strong markets abroad; indeed, in some fields of research, most sales are to institutions and individuals outside the United States,” Adler said. “A government policy requiring these works to be made freely available for international distribution is inherently incompatible with the maintenance of global markets for these highly successful U.S. exports. Smaller and non-profit scientific societies and their scholarly missions will be particularly at risk as their journal subscribers around the world turn to NIH for free access to the same content for which they would otherwise pay.”

The new law requires deposit immediately upon acceptance and free online release within 12 months of publication, not immediately. Moreover, there are mandates occurring in many other countries as well as in the United States. But with the mandate now a matter of law there will be publishers who are going to dig into the last of their arsenals to complicate implementation of the mandate and later will seek to bitterly battle after the law takes effect. Personally I expect even wilder twists and turns to emerge as publishers fight back. “Beware the wounded beast, they still have sharp claws

The Case for University-Level Open Access Mandates

2008-01-07T12:14:00.000+02:00

Alma Swan and Les Carr, Institutions, their repositories and the Web, a preprint forthcoming from Serials Review (by Peter Suber OA News Blog).

Abstract: It will soon be rare for research-based institutions not to have a digital repository. The main reason for a repository is to maximise the visibility of the institution’s research outputs (provide Open Access), yet few contain a representative proportion of the research produced by their institutions. Repositories form one part of the institution’s web platform. An explicit, mandatory policy on the use of the repository for collecting outputs is needed in every institution so that the full research record is collected. Once full, a repository is a tool that enables senior management in research institutions to collate and assess research, to market their institution, to facilitate new forms of scholarship and to enable the tools that will produce new knowledge.

Dampening Opening Access Value Is a PR Action by Conventional Influential Publishers

2007-11-20T12:02:00.000+02:00

Peter Suber recently received an email from "Miss Phlogiston", another insider at the American Chemical Society. As with the original "ACS Insider" (see one, two), Peter knows nothing about the pseudonymous author. Excerpt from her message:

I am writing you this email in [alliance] with the original Insider at the American Chemical Society. The Chronicle of Higher Education confirmed last week that executive bonuses at the American Chemical Society are tied to the financial success of their publishing division. This money may be influencing opposition to Open Access publishing by ACS executives. The executive director pulls in almost $1 million annually.

To prevent Open Access:

ACS Editor Rudy Baum has written numerous opposing editorials in Chemical & Engineering News.
The Society has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for lobbyists.
ACS Publishing Executive, Brian Crawford, helped hire a suspect PR firm which created a covert organization called Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM).
Question: Is ACS being run in the interest of members or to fatten the wallets of its executives? Please reference the following time line with supporting sources.

[1] Sept 2004 - Rudy Baum writes an editorial in C&EN entitled "Socialized Science." Rudy argues, "Open access, in fact, equates with socialized science." Rudy does not mention that bonuses for ACS publishing executives are tied to publishing profits.

[2] June 2006 - Rudy Baum writes "Take A Stand," another C&EN editorial against "socialized science." He argues, "As a member of the ACS Publications Division executive team, I am very familiar with the tremendous effort, expense, and human resources that are poured into producing the finest chemistry journals and databases in the world." As support, Rudy cites the position of the scholarly division of the Assn. of American Publishers (AAP). Rudy does not disclose that the chairman of the AAP's scholarly division is Brian Crawford, a publishing executive at ACS.

[3] July 2006 - As Nature later reports, Several publishing executives with ACS, Wiley and Elsevier meet with PR operative, Eric Dezenhall, to discuss a plan to defeat open access. Dezenhall advises the executives to equate Open Access with a reduction in peer review quality.

[4] August 2006 - ACS publishing executive, Brian Crawford, writes a letter against Open Access to the Los Angeles Times. In the letter, he states, "Publishers will keep working to expand access to research while maintaining the integrity of peer review and copyright protection." Crawford identifies himself the "chair of the executive council of the professional and scholarly publishing division of the Assn. of American Publishers."

[5] January 2007 - Nature reports that several publishing companies (Elsevier, ACS, Wiley) have hired PR operative Eric Dezenhall to fight Open Access. In the past, Dezenhall represented several celebrities, as well as felons convicted in the Enron debacle.

[6] January 2007 - Scientific American reports that ACS has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire lobbying firms to defeat Open Access. ACS' own internal lobbyists are also working against Open Access, but the exact expense cannot be determined from published records.

[7] Summer 2007 - Former ACS journalist, Paul D. Thacker, writes in the SEJournal that Rudy Baum and other ACS executives sought to discredit his reporting after his editor received complaints from ACS President, Bill Carroll. Thacker claims that Carroll chairs the ACS Committee on Executive Compensation which reviews the bonuses of the publishing executives such as Rudy Baum. Rudy Baum does not address the issue of compensation, but Carroll states that his Committee does not review editorial bonuses.

[8] September 2007 - The Assn of American Publishers launches a new group called Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM) coalition, an anti-open-access group. The group claims that Open Access will hurt peer review.

[9] Early October 2007 - ACS sends out a press release stating that several anonymous emails about executive pay and bonuses are filled with "erroneous and misleading claims." The press release notes that compensation for ACS executives is approved by the Committee on Executive Compensation, however, executive compensation is not "related to the Society's position on open access." The press release continues, "Our Society's position is also represented by the Association of American Publishers, a non-profit organization whose membership encompasses the major commercial and non-profit scholarly publishers, including ourselves."

[10] October 22, 2007 - As reported in The Scientist, Rudy Baum declines to state if his compensation is tied to publishing profits. Of an anonymous email claiming the contrary, he says, "When anonymous material comes into the office I throw it out right away."

[11] October 24, 2007 - ACS rebuts the anonymous email in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle interviews ACS Executive Director, Madeleine Jacobs, who "did confirm that senior executives and some managers in the publishing division have a 'small portion' of their overall incentive compensation 'based on meeting certain financial targets.' She did not agree that such incentive pay, however small, represented a conflict of interest in the group's opposition to open-access legislation and called such argument 'spurious.'" ...

For References and Post FullText please see OA News Blog

Academic freedom includes sharing knowledge as a public good, US teachers say

2007-11-17T12:02:00.000+02:00

Academic Freedom in the 21st-Century College and University (.pdf), the Statement on Academic Freedom from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), September 2007. (Thanks to John Ober and Peter Suber) Excerpt:

...Academic integrity in research, however, requires discoveries to be shared and knowledge to be considered primarily as a public good instead of a private possession.

Academic freedom requires the free exchange of ideas and information, following prudent and responsible academic and institutional standards. However, the growing commercialization of research presents problems for free exchange. For example, confidentiality agreements with business sponsors of research serve the business’s interest in restricting information to stop competitors from appropriating ideas. However, such agreements may conflict with intellectual free exchange, not allowing others to learn enough to be able to test, replicate and/or refute the theories and the evidence supporting them. This retards the development of knowledge and the potential for new discoveries....

Of course, faculty, instructional staff and other professionals performing research at the institution can, and their institutions may, legitimately claim ownership of the products —such as publications and patents— of research conducted under the auspices of the institution. But the ideas and results of research should be freely shared...

How libraries handle Open Access resources: educating users is a must

2007-11-14T12:02:00.000+02:00

How libraries handle OA resources and educate users about OA

Anna K. Hood, SPEC Kit 300: Open Access Resources, Association of Research Libraries, September 2007. (Thanks to Charles Bailey and Peter Suber) The link points to the OA executive summary and conclusion. The full report is a 140 pp. book available for $40 from Amazon.

From the executive summary:

Faced with ever-increasing journal subscription costs and declining library collections budgets, libraries are expanding their collections by making open access (OA) research literature available through their catalogs, Web sites, open URL resolvers, and other resources....

The purpose of this survey was to gather information on whether and how ARL member libraries are selecting, providing access to, cataloging, hosting, tracking usage of, and promoting the use of open access research literature for their patrons by using established library resources such as the OPAC and link resolvers....

The survey was sent to the 123 ARL member libraries in March 2007. Seventy-one responses were received by the deadline, a return rate of 58%. All but one of the survey respondents provide access to OA resources. These 70 libraries represent 57% of the ARL membership.

From the conclusion:

Almost all of the ARL member libraries that responded to this survey provide access to open access literature, linking to externally hosted content and hosting OA content on their servers. Many of their institutions have made formal statements in support of open access efforts and the majority of these libraries provide financial support for external OA resources by paying author fees, etc. Some provide financial support for locally hosted content that is in addition to hosting and staff time....

In most libraries the selectors and the selection criteria are the same as for other materials, especially other electronic resources.

Cataloging methods and staff are also largely the same for OA resources as for other electronic resources....

In addition to providing links to a variety of externally hosted OA resources, the responding libraries also host a wide range of OA resources on their own servers. These resources include digital collections and archives, pre-publication material, lectures, primary source material, finding aids, theses and dissertations, grey literature, Web sites, and databases, as well as journals. As with print collections, the libraries provide storage, access, and maintenance for these local digital collections.

The most common place to list OA resources is the library’s primary finding aid, the OPAC. They also can be found along with other electronic resources on Web pages, in open URL resolvers, and in other third-party title lists or portals. Of course, locally hosted resources are often found directly by searching institutional repositories.

While most libraries promote OA recourses in the same ways as other resources, many of the responding libraries are actively educating faculty and students about open access and other issues in scholarly communication and make a point of introducing this relatively new type of resource through Web sites, newsletters, campus forums, flyers, and blogs...

Regardless of whether they choose to distinguish between open access and traditional, subscription-supported resources when selecting, processing, and promoting materials, ARL member libraries have embraced open access resources and integrated them into their existing workflows...

Washington Post Writes About Open Access

2007-11-10T12:02:00.000+02:00

Rick Weiss, Open Access to Research Funded by U.S. at Issue, Washington Post, November 1, 2007. Excerpt by OA News Blog:

A long-simmering debate over whether the results of government-funded research should be made freely available to the public could take a big step toward resolution as members of a House and Senate conference committee meet today to finalize the 2008 Department of Health and Human Services appropriations bill.

At issue is whether scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health should be required to publish the results of their research solely in journals that promise to make the articles available free within a year after publication.

The idea is that consumers should not have to buy expensive scientific journal subscriptions -- or pricey per-page charges for nonsubscribers -- to see the results of research they have already paid for with their taxes.

Until now, repeated efforts to legislate such a mandate have failed under pressure from the well-heeled journal publishing industry and some nonprofit scientific societies whose educational activities are supported by the profits from journals that they publish.

But proponents -- including patient advocates, who want easy access to the latest biomedical findings, and cash-strapped libraries looking for ways to temper escalating subscription costs -- have parlayed their consumer-friendly "public access" message into legislative language that has made it into the Senate and House versions of the new HHS bill.

That has set the stage for a last-minute lobbying showdown.

"There's been loads of debate and discussion, and at last it's going forward," said Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a Washington-based library group. She has been a persistent presence on Capitol Hill, making the case for open access....

Scientists assert that open access will speed innovation by making it easier for them to share and build on each other's findings.

"Congress recognizes that, in the Internet age, unimpeded access to publicly funded research results is essential for the advancement of science and public health," said NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni....

Opponents say that the economics of the open-access model are still experimental and tenuous, and that some open-access journals are dependent on philanthropic foundation money to balance their books. They also contend that the approach raises copyright issues.

"I think there are some very serious questions to examine as to whether this is an unwarranted government intrusion into the private-sector publishing industry," said Allan R. Adler, vice president for legal and government affairs at the Association of American Publishers, which has organized efforts to quash the movement...

With both Senate and House appropriation committee chairmen in favor, the language requiring the change would normally be virtually assured, despite a recent negative White House pronouncement. But Hill watchers said that -- given President Bush's threat to veto the bill for budgetary reasons and the likelihood of a continuing resolution, which would not have the new language -- it is too soon for the open-access movement to publish a victory paper.

Comments by Peter Suber:

One correction: The policy would require deposit in an OA repository (PubMed Central), not submission to OA journals. It's about green OA, not gold OA. This correction applies to Rick Weiss, for example in his second paragraph, and to Allan Adler and the AAP, whose objection to the economics of OA journals is not relevant to a policy that focuses exclusively on OA archiving.

If Adler is thinking that that the NIH policy will force subscription journals to convert to OA, then he should connect the dots, explain his theory in more detail, and respond to the counterevidence from physics. I detail this counterevidence in an article in the September 2007 issue of SOAN (see esp. section 5).

Weiss says that opponents also cite copyright problems with the policy, though he doesn't elaborate. But the NIH provision of the bill concludes with these words: "...Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law." What part of "consistent with copyright law" do these unnamed opponents not understand?

Adler also objects to "government intrusion into the private-sector publishing industry." Here's one way that I've responded to this objection in the past: "The complaint about 'government intrusion into the market' is disingenuous. Scientific research and publication are permeated by government spending and government policies... In the US, most scientific research is funded by taxpayers, most scientists work at public institutions and are paid by taxpayers, and most subscriptions to subscription-based journals are purchased by public institutions and paid for by taxpayers. If publishers really mean that government money and policymaking should keep out of this sector, then they should say so. But they know that they would go bankrupt under such a rule. What they really want is the present arrangement of government subsidies for the work they publish, government subsidies for their own subscription fees, and double-payments by taxpayers who want access."

One medical library's efforts to support Open Access

2007-11-07T12:02:00.000+02:00

Molly C. Barnett and Molly W. Keener, Expanding medical library support in response to the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy, Journal of the Medical Library Association, October 2007. This article was submitted to JMLA in April 2007, well before the recent House and Senate votes to mandate OA at the NIH. Excerpt by Open Access News Blog:

Responding to recent changes in the scholarly publishing process, Coy C. Carpenter Library is expanding its scholarly communications program to better support the research publication efforts of the faculty at Wake Forest University Health Sciences (WFUHS). Recent advances in open access publishing and archiving initiatives, adoption of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) “Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research” (Public Access Policy) in 2005, the rapidly increasing pool of published biomedical research, rising costs of subscription rates, and continued barriers to access have necessitated an internal redesign of the library's Faculty Publications (FP) database. Changes in the scholarly publishing environment have also spurred the creation of online resource lists specifically addressing common issues in scholarly communications, including copyright and intellectual property ownership, open access, and the importance of scholarly publishing.

These efforts, coupled with plans for educational sessions on open access and copyright retention for faculty, are intended to address common questions raised during the publishing process. In particular, the FP database will bridge faculty publication citations to individuals' personnel profiles in the university's human resources department's management software, PeopleSoft, and to the full text of faculty-authored journal articles, thus providing the institution with a more complete picture of WFUHS faculty research initiatives and outcomes. This paper illustrates key objectives in Carpenter Library's strategy for supporting scholarly communications through enhancing the knowledge management applications of the FP database and leveraging the database's functions to promote open access to research...

Helping Faculty to Realise that Toll-access n the Internet-based world is an archaism

2007-11-04T12:02:00.000+02:00

More on the value of removing permission barriers

Heather Morrison, The Usefulness of Open Access, or Yet Another Positive OA Cycle, Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, November 3, 2007. Excerpt by Peter Suber:

Many faculty members are currently encountering one of the sillier disadvantages of the toll-access approach in the internet-based world. That is, the decreasing usefulness of articles with the restrictions of licensing. An article that one might have put on reserve as a print copy, or handed out in class as print, without a second's thought, may well be forbidden, or much more complex to provide, in the online environment. Librarians, this is a teachable moment!

An article that is truly OA as per the Budapest definition, CAN be placed on e-reserve or distributed in coursepacks, either as a link, or as the full content of the article - with attribution, of course, but with no frustrating, time-wasting and often costly process of obtaining permissions, or dealing with the complexities of authentication or re-authentication to connect student with article...

[T]he more we promote resources like DOAJ, OAIster, Scientific Commons, etc., the more faculty will see for themselves this particular benefit of OA. This can only increase the tendency for faculty to want to seek out OA resources, and publish OA themselves - a positive cycle...

UK Prime Minister endorses public access to public info

2007-11-02T12:02:00.000+02:00

Michael Cross, PM embraces the notion of easier access to government data, The Guardian, November 1, 2007. Excerpt by Peter Suber, OA News Blog:

The case for allowing free access to data collected and held at taxpayers' expense has received endorsement from the top of the British government. In his speech on civil liberties last week, Gordon Brown, the prime minister, said: "Public information does not belong to government, it belongs to the public on whose behalf government is conducted."

Brown's speech acknowledged the power of the web to give access to information about public services. "The availability of real-time data about what is happening on the ground - whether about local policing or local health services - is vital in enabling people to make informed choices about how they use their local services and the standards they expect."

Brown is also considering opening new parts of the government's digital archives....

However, the prime minister did not mention how his enthusiasm for allowing citizens access to data squares with the policy of encouraging some publicly-owned bodies to charge for data sets, especially for re-use in web mashups and other products. But Locus, a trade association, welcomed the speech. "Next time we hope he will focus on re-use," it said.

We agree. Over the past 18 months, our Free Our Data campaign has argued that the government should stop attempting to trade in information, but instead make its unrefined data (except where it threatens privacy or national security) freely available to all comers.

Later this month, an independent review commissioned by the Treasury will report on the costs and benefits of the current "trading fund" model...

Science magazine advice to young scientists: Maximizing Productivity and Recognition, Part 1: Publication, Citation, and Impact

2007-10-30T12:02:00.000+02:00

Stephanie Pfirman and four co-authors, Maximizing Productivity and Recognition, Part 1: Publication, Citation, and Impact, Science, November 2, 2007. Excerpt by Peter Suber:

...In this series, we use our own experiences, combined with insights from the literature, to provide junior scientists with strategies for increasing research productivity, recognition, and impact. Here, we focus on publications and citations. In our next article, we offer tips for collaboration and networking...
To make your future work as accessible as possible, publish in journals that are indexed by ISI and in journals that allow full-text open access. The easier it is for others to find and use your work, the better. A recent study found that open-access articles were twice as likely to be cited in the first half-year after publication and almost three times as likely to be cited within about 16 months (Eysenbach, 2006)...

PS: For some elaboration, see Peter Suber version of the same advice.

Mandate for Public Access to National Institutes of Health Funded Research Urged to Become Law

2007-10-25T12:02:00.000+02:00

Full U.S. Senate Approves Bill Containing Support for Access To Taxpayer-Funded Research

U.S. Senate last night approved the FY2008 Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations Bill (S.1710), including a provision that directs the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to strengthen its Public Access Policy by requiring rather than requesting participation by researchers. The bill will now be reconciled with the House Appropriations Bill, which contains a similar provision, in another step toward support for public access to publicly funded research becoming United States law.

"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."

Under a mandatory policy, NIH-funded researchers will be required to deposit copies of eligible manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine's online database, PubMed Central. Articles will be made publicly available no later than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

The current NIH Public Access Policy, first implemented in 2005, is a voluntary measure and has resulted in a de deposit rate of less than 5% by individual investigators. The advance to a mandatory policy is the result of more than two years of monitoring and evaluation by the NIH, Congress, and the community.

"We thank our Senators for taking action on this important issue," said Pat Furlong, Founding President and CEO of Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy. "This level of access to NIH-funded research will impact the disease process in novel ways, improving the ability of scientists to advance therapies and enabling patients and their advocates to participate more effectively. The advance is timely, much-needed, and - we anticipate - an indication of increasingly enhanced access in future."

"American businesses will benefit tremendously from improved access to NIH research," said William Kovacs, U.S. Chamber of Commerce vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs. "The Chamber encourages the free and timely dissemination of scientific knowledge produced by the NIH as it will improve both the public and industry's ability to become better informed on developments that impact them - and on opportunities for innovation." The Chamber is the world's largest business federation, representing more than three million businesses of every size, sector, and region.

"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.

Joseph added, "On behalf of the taxpayers, patients, researchers, students, libraries, universities, and businesses that pressed this bill forward with their support over the past two years, the ATA thanks Congress for throwing its weight behind the success of taxpayer access to taxpayer-funded research."

Negotiators from the House and Senate are expected to meet to reconcile their respective bills this fall. The final, consolidated bill will have to pass the House and the Senate before being delivered to the President at the end of the year.

Source: The Alliance for Taxpayer Access Press Release (24 October 2007) Distrubted via and discussed at Liblicense maillist. Posted by Jennifer McLennan, Director of Communications SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition) http://www.arl.org/sparc (202) 296-2296 ext 121 jennifer@arl.org

Neuron Information for authors allows archiving of your previously published research

2007-09-01T12:02:00.000+03:00

Quoting Neuron information for authors:

As an author, you (or your employer or institution) may do the following:

• make copies (print or electronic) of the article for your own personal use, including for your own classroom teaching use;

• make copies and distribute such copies (including through e-mail) of the article to known research colleagues, for the personal use by such colleagues (but not for commercial purposes as described below);

• post a revised personal version of the final text (including illustrations and tables) of the article (to reflect changes made in the peer review and editing process) on your personal or your institutional website or server, with a link (through the relevant DOI) to the article as published, provided that such postings are not for commercial purposes as described below;

• present the article at a meeting or conference and to distribute copies of the article to the delegates attending such meeting;

• for your employer, if the article is a "work for hire," made within the scope of your employment, your employer may use all or part of the information in the article for other intra-company use (e.g., training);

• retain patent and trademark rights and rights to any process or procedure described in the article;

• include the article in full or in part in a thesis or dissertation (provided that this is not to be published commercially);

• use the article or any part thereof in a printed compilation of your works, such as collected writings or lecture notes (subsequent to publication of the article in the journal); and

• prepare other derivative works, to extend the article into book-length form, or to otherwise re-use portions or excerpts in other works, with full acknowledgment of its original publication in the journal.

All copies, print or electronic, or other use of the paper or article must include the appropriate bibliographic citation for the article’s publication in the journal. However you should not indicate in the citation that the version that you are reproducing or posting is the final published version as published in the journal. As an example, it may be appropriate to indicate “This paper has been submitted to [Journal] for consideration.”

Commercial purposes include: the posting by companies or their employees for use by customers (e.g., pharmaceutical companies and physician-prescribers); commercial exploitation such as associating advertising with such posting (including the linking to advertising by search engines); the charging of fees for document delivery or access; or the systematic distribution to others via e-mail lists or list servers (to parties other than known colleagues), whether for a fee or for free.

Source: Authors’ Rights. Neuron Information for authors. Last viewed 1 September 2007 [FullText]

Nature journals allow authors to archive their research

2007-08-25T12:02:00.000+03:00

NPG author licence policy applies to all journals published by the Nature Publishing Group (NPG), including the Nature journals.

NPG does not require authors of original (primary) research papers to assign copyright of their published contributions. Authors grant NPG an exclusive licence to publish, in return for which they can reuse their papers in their future printed work without first requiring permission from the publisher of the journal. For commissioned articles (for example, Reviews, News&Views), copyright is retained by NPG.

When a manuscript is accepted for publication in an NPG journal, authors are encouraged to submit the author's version of the accepted paper (the unedited manuscript) to their funding body's archive, for public release six months after publication. In addition, authors are encouraged to archive this version of the manuscript in their institution's repositories and on their personal websites, also six months after the original publication. Authors should cite the publication reference and DOI number on any deposited version, and provide a link from it to the URL of the published article on the journal's website (see publications A-Z index).

This policy has been developed by NPG's publishers to extend the reach of scientific communication, and to meet the needs of authors and the evolving policies of funding agencies that wish themselves to archive the research they fund. It is also designed to protect the integrity and authenticity of the scientific record, with the published version on nature.com clearly identified as the definitive version of the article.

NPG recognizes the balance of rights held by publishers, authors, their institutions and their funders (Zwolle principles, 2002), and has been a progressive and active participant in debates about access to the literature. In 2002, NPG was one of the first publishers to allow authors to post their contributions on their personal websites, by requesting an exclusive licence to publish, rather than requiring authors to transfer copyright.

NPG actively supports the self-archiving process, and continues to work with our authors, readers, subscribers and site-license holders to develop our policy. By recognizing the rights and needs of all relevant stakeholders, we hope to ensure that NPG enhances its position as the publisher of the world's highest-impact research.

Further details can be found at NPG's reprints and permissions website...

Source: NPG author licence policy (last viewed 15 August 2007) [FullText]

Research shows that scientists need Open Access and benefit from it!

2007-08-14T13:03:00.000+03:00

PLoS Biol. 2006 May;4(5):e157. Epub 2006 May 16
Citation advantage of open access articles.
Eysenbach G.
Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, University Health Network, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

PubMedID, Record, Free FullText link & Related Articles: 16867971

Open access (OA) to the research literature has the potential to accelerate recognition and dissemination of research findings, but its actual effects are controversial. This was a longitudinal bibliometric analysis of a cohort of OA and non-OA articles published between June 8, 2004, and December 20, 2004, in the same journal (PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). Article characteristics were extracted, and citation data were compared between the two groups at three different points in time: at "quasi-baseline" (December 2004, 0-6 mo after publication), in April 2005 (4-10 mo after publication), and in October 2005 (10-16 mo after publication). Potentially confounding variables, including number of authors, authors' lifetime publication count and impact, submission track, country of corresponding author, funding organization, and discipline, were adjusted for in logistic and linear multiple regression models. A total of 1,492 original research articles were analyzed: 212 (14.2% of all articles) were OA articles paid by the author, and 1,280 (85.8%) were non-OA articles. In April 2005 (mean 206 d after publication), 627 (49.0%) of the non-OA articles versus 78 (36.8%) of the OA articles were not cited (relative risk = 1.3 [95% Confidence Interval: 1.1-1.6]; p = 0.001). 6 mo later (mean 288 d after publication), non-OA articles were still more likely to be uncited (non-OA: 172 [13.6%], OA: 11 [5.2%]; relative risk = 2.6 [1.4-4.7]; p < 0.001). The average number of citations of OA articles was higher compared to non-OA articles (April 2005: 1.5 [SD = 2.5] versus 1.2 [SD = 2.0]; Z = 3.123; p = 0.002; October 2005: 6.4 [SD = 10.4] versus 4.5 [SD = 4.9]; Z = 4.058; p < 0.001). In a logistic regression model, controlling for potential confounders, OA articles compared to non-OA articles remained twice as likely to be cited (odds ratio = 2.1 [1.5-2.9]) in the first 4-10 mo after publication (April 2005), with the odds ratio increasing to 2.9 (1.5-5.5) 10-16 mo after publication (October 2005). Articles published as an immediate OA article on the journal site have higher impact than self-archived or otherwise openly accessible OA articles. We found strong evidence that, even in a journal that is widely available in research libraries, OA articles are more immediately recognized and cited by peers than non-OA articles published in the same journal. OA is likely to benefit science by accelerating dissemination and uptake of research findings.

Study Suggest Open Access Articles Are More Immediately Recognized and Cited, then Barrier Access Articles

2007-08-06T12:02:00.000+03:00

J Med Internet Res. 2006 May 15;8(2):e8
The open access advantage.
Eysenbach G.
Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, Toronto, Canada
PubMedID, Record & Related Articles: 16867971

A study published today in PLoS Biology provides robust evidence that open-access articles are more immediately recognized and cited than non-OA articles. This editorial provides some additional follow up data from the most recent analysis of the same cohort in April 2006, 17 to 21 months after publication. These data suggest that the citation gap between open access and non-open access papers continues to widen. I conclude with the observation that the "open access advantage" has at least three components: (1) a citation count advantage (as a metric for knowledge uptake within the scientific community), (2) an end user uptake advantage, and (3) a cross-discipline fertilization advantage. More research is needed, and JMIR is inviting research on all aspects of open access. As the advantages for publishing open access from a researchers' point of view become increasingly clear, questions around the sustainability of open access journals remain. This journal is a living example that "lean publishing" models can create successful open access journals. Open source tools which have been developed by the Public Knowledge Project at the University of British Columbia with contributions from the Epublishing & Open Access group at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation in Toronto are an alternative to hosting journals on commercial open access publisher sites.

Major proponents for OA Talk on How to Best Realize Permissions To Archive Postprints

2007-07-11T09:42:00.000+03:00

Stevan Harnad, Get the Institutional Repository Managers Out of the Decision Loop, Open Access Archivangelism, June 12, 2007.

Summary: Many Institutional Repositories (IRs) are not run by researchers but by "permissions professionals," accustomed to being mired in institutional author IP protection issues and institutional library 3rd-party usage rights rather than institutional author research give-aways. The solution is to adopt a sensible institutional (or departmental) deposit mandate and then to automatize the deposit procedure so as to take Repository Managers out of the decision loop, completely.

The optimal deposit mandate is to require Open Access deposit of the refereed final draft, immediately upon acceptance for publication, but there is a compromise for the faint-hearted, and that is the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate:

The only thing standing between us and 100% OA today is keystrokes. It is in order to get those keystrokes done, at long last, that we need OA mandates, and ID/OA is a viable interim compromise: It gets all N keystrokes done for 62% of current research, and N-1 of the keystrokes done for the remaining 38%. For that 38%, the "Fair Use Button" will take care of all immediate researcher usage needs for the time being. The robots will have their day once 100% deposit mandates prevail and the research community tastes what it is like to have 62% OA and 38% almost-OA world, at long last. For then those Nth keys will inevitably get stroked, setting everything to Open Access, as it should (and could) have been all along....

Comments by Peter Suber:

Funding agencies can bypass permission problems because they are upstream from publishers. Researchers sign their funding contracts before they sign their copyright transfer agreements with publishers. Hence, if funders are firm (the Wellcome Trust is the model here), they can mandate OA and publishers will have to choose between accommodating their policies and refusing to publish work by funded researchers. But institutional repositories are downstream from publishers and cannot bypass permission problems in the same way. I don't care much who runs an IR. But we shouldn't assume that a university-level OA mandate will make permission problems disappear. (I'm not saying that Stevan makes this assumption.)

Most journals already permit postprint archiving, so no permission-seeking is necessary. But in the minority of cases for which it is necessary, it's a great boon to have some permission-seekers on staff to assist authors.
When the relevant permission problem is an embargo, Stevan's remedy is exactly right. Authors should deposit their work immediately upon publication, but only flip the access switch from closed to open when the embargo expires. During the period of closed access, the repository can provide OA to the metadata and the author can email copies of the text to readers who request them.

Source: P Suber Open Access News of 13 June 2007

Good to know: U of Minnesota Library Teaches on Authors's rights

2007-07-08T09:42:00.000+03:00

The University of Minnesota Libraries have created a page of Q & A on Author's Rights. Six of the questions cover the CIC Author Addendum, which UMN adopted on May 3. Excerpt by Peter Suber:

12. What if the publisher says No to the U of MN Author's Addendum?
You still have a choice of action: you could negotiate fewer rights with the publisher, or sign the standard agreement without the addendum, or investigate publishing in another venue with policies you prefer. We are aware of no instance in which a publisher has refused to publish an article where the author initially sought to retain some non-exclusive rights to the article. For more negotiating tips, see Reserving Rights of Use in Works Submitted for Publication: Negotiating Publishing Agreements or Author Rights: Using the SPARC Author Addendum to secure your rights as the author of a journal article

13. Is the U of MN Author's Addendum a threat to the viability of non-profit scholarly society journals?
No, probably not. There is as yet no evidence that publishing revenues are declining or at risk, even with the rapidly growing number of open access policies and amount of publicly available scholarship. Further, the policy contains a key provision that protects journals and the peer review process: for those journals that do not already allow open access to articles within six months of publication, the policy assumes, and faculty may specifically request, a delay of up to six months after publication and before the university places any articles in a public repository. Immediate access continues to be through the published journal.
In some disciplines, freely accessible online archives have proven to be a supplement to journal readership, not a replacement for it. In physics, for example, where nearly 100% of new articles are freely available from birth in the arXiv open-access repository, subscription-based journals have continued to thrive. The American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics Publishing are unable to identify any subscriptions lost as a result of arXiv in more than a decade of its existence [see Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. Technical Report, JISC, HEFCE.].

14. Is there anywhere I can share my work where I would always retain all rights to reuse it?
The University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy provides long-term preservation and access services for the intellectual and creative output of the University's academic, research, and administrative communities. Authors retain copyright to their submissions and are free to reuse their works elsewhere. Contributing works to the Conservancy does not transfer intellectual property rights. For more information, see the UDC's Copyright Policy and Deposit Agreements page.

Bibliography on filling institutional repositories

2007-07-05T09:42:00.000+03:00

Adrian K. Ho and Joe Toth, Content Recruitment for Institutional Repositories (IR's), self-archived June 20, 2007.

Abstract: It is an annotated bibliography for a panel discussion at the 2007 American Library Association Annual Conference [Washington, D.C., June 21-27, 2007]. It focuses on relevant articles published from Jan. 2005 through May 2007.

Source: Open Access News Blog by P. Suber (21 June 2007) [FullText]

Open Access Journals Gain High Impact Factor by Thompson ISI: Good to Know for Contributors

2007-07-02T09:42:00.000+03:00

From Mark Patterson, PLoS Director of Publishing, on the PLoS blog (reported by Peter Suber at OANews Blog):

The 2006 impact factors have just been released by Thompson ISI. The first two PLoS journals continue to perform very well: 14.1 for PLoS Biology (14.7 in 2006); 13.8 for PLoS Medicine (8.4 in 2006). The PLoS community-run journals also received their first impact factors: 4.9 for PLoS Computational Biology; 7.7 for PLoS Genetics; and 6.0 for PLoS Pathogens. (Note that the latter impact factors are based on only around six months worth of publications in 2005, and are likely to increase next year.)

Although the impact factor is an over-used and abused measure of scientific quality, it is a journal metric that is important for the research community, and so until there are alternatives, PLoS has to pay attention to the impact factor...

University of Amsterdam established an OA publishing fund

2007-06-30T09:42:00.000+03:00

U of Amsterdam has an OA publishing fund

In January 2007, the University of Amsterdam launched an Open Access fund to help its faculty pay the publication fees at fee-based OA journals. From the fund page:

Since January 2007, the UvA has a dedicated fund of 150.000 EUR per year for the full financing of open access publishing. Researchers can utilise the OA fund in order to finance OA publication costs until the end of 2009. All applications will be honoured as long as the funds last. NB: these funds are solely earmarked for financing the costs of ‘open access’ publication and not for ‘ordinary’ publication costs.

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provides a complete overview of all ‘open access’ journals, incl. the so-called ‘hybrid’ journals by Elsevier, Springer, Blackwell, etcetera. for which the funds may also be used.

The UvA is a member of the Public Library of Science (PLOS) and BioMed Central, entitling us to a discount when publishing in these publisher’s journals....

Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer in the U of Amsterdam library tells me that the fund will be evaluated after three years and has received an average of two applications per week.

Comment. Kudos to Amsterdam. When the U of Nottingham announced its OA fund earlier this month, I wondered whether there were others. I thank Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer for letting me know about the Amsterdam fund and I repeat my call for others. We'll see many more of these as time goes on, but I want to identify the early leaders.

Source: Peter Suber OA News Blog (26 June 2007) [FullText]

Peter Suber Comments on Howard Hughes Medical Institute Mandate for Open Access by Its Grantees

2007-06-27T09:11:00.000+03:00

HHMI is finally mandating that its grantees provide OA to their published articles based on HHMI-funded research within six months of publication. We knew last October that it was planning to adopt a mandate, but now it's a reality. Moreover, HHMI is taking the same hard line that the Wellcome Trust has taken: if a grantee's intended publisher will not allow OA on the funder's terms, then the grantee must look for another publisher. This is all to the good. Funders should mandate OA to the research they fund, and they should take advantage of the fact that they are upstream from publishers. They should require grantee compliance, not depend on publisher permission.

But unfortunately, HHMI is continuing its practice of paying publishers for green OA. I criticized this practice in SOAN for April 2007 and I stand by that criticism. HHMI should not have struck a pay-for-green deal with Elsevier and should not be striking a similar deal with Wiley. HHMI hasn't announced how much it's paying Wiley, and it's possible that the Wiley fees are lower than the Elsevier fees. But it's possible that they're just as high: $1,000 - $1,500. We do know that its Wiley fees will not buy OA to the published edition, but only OA to the unedited version of the author's peer-reviewed manuscript. HHMI hasn't said whether its Wiley fees will buy unembargoed OA or OA with a CC license. The Wellcome Trust's fees to Elsevier buy three things of value --immediate OA, OA to the published edition, and OA with a CC license-- while HHMI's fees to Elsevier buy none of these things. If HHMI gets all three of these valuable things for its Wiley fees, then it's basically paying for gold OA and no one can object to fees that are high enough to cover the publisher's expenses. But paying for green OA, when the publisher's expenses are covered by subscription revenue, is wrong and unnecessary even if the fees are low. For details, see my April article.

Source: Peter Suber. HHMI mandates OA but pays publishers to allow it. Open Access News Blog (26 June 2007) [FullText and update]

Milestone for PubMed Central: one million-article mark reached

2007-06-22T09:42:00.000+03:00

As Peter Suber reports at his OA News Blog (22 June 2007), PMC now hosts more than 1,000,000 free online full-text research articles. From yesterday's press release:

PubMed Central (PMC), NLM's free digital archive of full-text journal articles, reached the one million-article mark the week of June 18. The millionth article reportedly came from the American Journal of Pathology. Now in its seventh year, PMC is enhanced each week with articles from over 350 important life sciences journals whose publishers have agreed to deposit current issues. All of the content submitted to PMC is converted to a normalized electronic format for long-term storage and display on the web.

Many of the participating publishers have also benefited from the PMC Back Issue Digitization Project, where NLM scans older issues from cover to cover, starting with volume 1, and creates PubMed citations for articles that are not in PubMed. Jointly sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK, the NLM scanning project has collected and collated over 5 million pages of material. As of June 2007, these scanned articles accounted for 675,000 of the million articles in PMC....

Nature Precedings is Live

2007-06-20T09:42:00.000+03:00

Timo Hannay, Nature Precedings is live, Nascent, June 18, 2007. Hannay is Nature's Director of Web Publishing. Excerpt:

"...One thing that we've already added since [the launch] is a 'bridge' from our journal manuscript submission system to Nature Precedings. This allows NPG authors to submit their manuscripts for immediate pre-publication in Nature Precedings while they are being considered by the relevant journal. It's heartening to see people already beginning to use this (though as I write the system is misbehaving — please hang on in there while we get it fixed)...

There have been some unfounded initial concerns that Nature will have some special rights to the content, or that we'll be charging for some aspect of the service. On the contrary, all the content is released under the Creative Commons Attribution License and the service is free to authors and readers. In fact we're working with some of our partners to mirror the content to ensure it's long-term free availability (whatever might happen to Nature Publishing Group)..."

Librarianship and Open Access

2007-06-18T09:42:00.000+03:00

Heather Morrison, Candice Dahl, and Jennifer Richard, Librarianship and the Open Access Journal : State of the Union, a slide presentation at the Canadian Library Association Conference 2007 (St. John's, May 23-26, 2007), thanks to Prof. Suber OA News blog.

Feasibility of Developing a Usage Factor for STM Journals

2007-06-16T09:42:00.000+03:00

More on the feasibility of a Usage Factor

The UKSG has released its final report on the feasibility of developing a Usage Factor for journals and journal articles. From the text (dated May 2007 but announced and released June 15, 2007):

...Based on [surveys and interviews] it appears that it would not only be feasible to develop a meaningful journal Usage Factor, but that there is broad support for its implementation. Detailed conclusions and recommendations are provided in Section 4 of this report. Principal among these are: 1. the COUNTER usage statistics are not yet seen as a solid enough foundation on which to build a new global measure such as Usage Factor, but confidence in them is growing and they are seen as the only viable basis for UF; 2. the majority of publishers are supportive of the UF concept, appear to be willing, in principle to participate in the calculation and publication of UFs, and are prepared to see their journals ranked according to UF; 3. there is a diversity of opinion on the way in which UF should be calculated... 4. the great majority of authors in all fields of academic research would welcome a new, usage-based measure of the value of journals; 5. UF, were it available, would be a highly ranked factor by librarians, not only in the evaluation of journals for potential purchase, but also in the evaluation of journals for retention or cancellation; 6. publishers are, on the whole, unwilling to provide their usage data to a third party for consolidation and for calculation of UF. The majority appear to be willing to calculate UFs for their own journals and to have this process audited. This is generally perceived as a natural extension of the work already being done for COUNTER. While it may have implications for systems, these are not seen as being problematic...; 7. there are several structural problems with online usage data that would have to be addressed for UFs to be credible. Notable among these is the perception that online usage data is much more easily manipulated than is citation data; 8. should UKSG wish to take this project further there is a strong likelihood that other agencies would be interested in contributing financial support

From elsewhere in the body of the report:

...6 of the 7 authors are interested in knowing how frequently their articles are accessed online. One author currently monitors the Web of Science to access how frequently his articles are being cited; he would find the usage equivalent of this very valuable. Other authors mentioned that they are also very interested in where and by whom whom their articles are being used. The majority of the authors were not familiar with COUNTER....

[In response to the question whether usage data should cover articles from the previous 2 years, the previous 5 years, or some other period, one interview subject suggested:] Go for 2 years. UF should be more immediate than IF. Given the trend towards free availability of research articles after a period, paid access is going to be increasingly regarded as being for a shorter period after publication. Librarians will want metrics to cover the period for which they are paying. Five years would be too long....

[In response to a question about benefits for participating publishers, one suggested:] By participating in this process, publishers will influence it, helping to develop useful measures in which they can have confidence. Currently journal publishers are under a lot of pressure to demonstrate the value they provide. The challenge from open access has further stimulated this...
[T]he number of sites on which the full text of a particular article will be available is likely to grow in the future, as a result of an increase in open access publishing and institutional repositories. This will increase the difficulty in obtaining a 100% global figure for journal usage. This need not be an insurmountable obstacle to the calculation of comparable UFs, but it is a potential problem...

Librarians indicated that, if UF were available, it would become the second most important factor ( after ‘feedback from library users’) in decisions in the purchase of new journals, while it would be the third most important factor ( after ‘feedback from library users’ and ‘usage’) in retention/cancellation decisions...

Source: P Suber News Blog [16 June 2007) [FullText]