Open Access News

David Gallagher, On eBay, Some Profit by Selling What’s Free, New York Times, December 28, 2007.  Excerpt:

While scouring eBay for interesting Christmas presents a while back, I found and bought a DVD of a film made in 1954 about my home town of Doylestown, Pa. After it arrived I went searching for more information about it — and found the entire film, available as a free download from the nonprofit Internet Archive.

It turned out that the eBay seller had simply downloaded the movie file, burned it onto a DVD and stuck it in the mail. And he was doing the same with a wide range of other public-domain material: military truck manuals from World War II, PowerPoint presentations on health matters from government doctors, vaudeville shorts from the late 1800’s.

The seller’s name is Jeffrey....In an interview, Jeffrey said that he spends 20 to 30 hours a week working on his eBay business....He wouldn’t say how much money he makes, but indicated that it was worth the time he was putting into it.

Jeffrey’s auction listings do say the material is in the public domain, and he acknowledges that it is all out there on the Web for those who know where to find it. But he said some of his customers were people who might not know how to turn a downloaded file into something they could watch on a TV or play on a CD player. Some have dial-up Internet connections that would choke on a 600-megabyte compilation of technical manuals. Others don’t have the time or expertise to search for specific information....

Brewster Kahle, the digital librarian of the Internet Archive and a co-founder of the organization, said his group had no problem with people selling material from its online collection in this way....

Also see the reader comments at the end of the story, especially this one from Rick Prelinger, founder of the Prelinger Archives:

The Doylestown film is from our archives, which we support by selling stock footage. Though I’d prefer that people put out higher-quality DVDs than they generally do, and fervently wish they’d be open about where their source material came from (most of the cheap DVD vendors get hazy when describing sources), the public domain is the public domain. If you have a legally acquired copy of a public domain work, you can do with it what you please; this freedom makes possible quotation, anthologies, mashups and cultural innovation.

By the way, paying for public domain works isn’t so unusual — don’t we still pay for editions of Dickens, Mark Twain and Flaubert?

GovernmentDocs is an OA database of documents released under the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).  (Thanks to Free Government Information.)  From the site:

GovernmentDocs.org was created to advance the values of open and accountable government. This site gives the public an unprecedented level of access to government documents by allowing users to browse, search, and review hundreds of thousands of pages acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other public disclosure, or “sunshine,” laws.

With the GovernmentDocs.org system, citizen reviewers can engage in the government accountability process like never before. Registered users can review and comment on documents, adding their insights and expertise to the work of the national nonprofit organizations which are partnering on this project.

For more detail, see the November press release.

Comment.  GovernmentDocs is well-implemented.  I expected to see scanned images of the original docs, but I didn't expect to see my search terms highlighted in the images or to see a first-draft OCR of the scan on the same page.  What I like best, though, is the very idea:  sharing these docs with everyone, multiplying the benefits that flow from the trouble of requesting them in the first place.

PublicRecordsWire is an "an open system for cataloging, sharing and discovering new public records databases."  Users can search, tag, and rate the databases, browse by tags, category, and popularity, and add new databases.  (Thanks to Abbie Mulvihill.)

The presentations from the Harvard conference, Publishing in the New Millennium (Cambridge, November 9, 2007), are now online.  All of them are OA-relates.  (Thanks to Graham Steele.)

John Baez has collected links to a good number of free online textbooks in mathematics and physics.  (Thanks to Entertaining Research.)

The University of Edinburgh's OA journal, SCRIPT-ed ("A Journal of Law, Technology & Society") has started using CC-BY-NC-ND licenses.

The CAC Review from the Caribbean Amerindian Centrelink has converted from an OA newsletter to an OA blog.

The Annals of Improbable Research has converted to OA.  (Thanks to Wired News.)  From the announcement:

Welcome to the grand Improbable Research experiment. We are putting the entire magazine online for free.

Beginning with the current issue — vol. 13, no. 6, November/December 2007, the special Ig Nobel issue — the Annals of Improbable Research will be available online in three forms. Several years of back issues are also online (though not in quite as many forms).

Fear not. The magazine will also continue to be available in the best of all possible forms: traditional on-the-toilet-readable paper-and-ink....

Comment.  At the risk of being a wet blanket, let me point out AIR has to be serious about its business model even if it's not serious about anything else.  It's making new issues available in four forms:  priced print, priced hi-res PDF, free low-res PDF, and free HTML.  I don't know whether this system will pay the bills, and AIR probably doesn't either.  But I'm fascinated by it.  It lets AIR provide free online access to 100% of its new articles without embargoes, abridgments, or publication fees.  Is there any reason why "serious" journals shouldn't experiment with the same model?

Lucia Antonelli, Il repository istituzionale SSPAL.doc, a presentation delivered at Verso la circolazione dei saperi pubblici (Rome, December 11, 2007).  In Italian but with this English-language abstract:

SSPAL.doc, the institutional repository by italian Scuola Superiore della Pubblica Amministrazione Locale, allows the consultation of learning objects used by students in the courses organized by national, regional and inter-regional schools. It contains also proceedings of conference and workshop organized by SSPAL and researches and studies materials.

Joshua Gay, Don't let DRM get between you and a good book, Defective by Design, December 20, 2007.  (Thanks to LIS News.)  Excerpt:

...Amazon Kindle (Swindle), Sony Reader (Sh-reader), and others are all competing to control how, what, and when we can read with their competing Digital Restrictions Management technologies. Let's let them know that we won't buy their ebook readers until they get rid of the DRM! ...

We want to send a message about DRM on ebooks and ebook readers that everyone will understand with just four simple points:

• Amazon, Sony, and others want to change the way you read: They want to put locks on your books. Their "ebook readers" use Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technology to control how, what, and when you can read.

• When you purchase a DRM ebook, it is locked to a single device. When the device breaks or becomes outdated, you can no longer read your ebook. You buy a lock, but you don't own the key! If you try to pick the DRM-lock on an ebook so you can read your book on another device, you break US Federal Law (The Digital Millenium Copyright Act).

• DRM ebooks are bad for authors and publishers. The owners of DRM technology get to decide which books, newspapers, and magazines can be put into their DRM formats. The DRM technology owners can deny whomever and whatever they wish from using their format. DRM allows for digital censorship.

• Every few years you will have to buy a new copy of your favorite books, and a new ebook reader to go along with it. Any ability to lend your ebook to family or friends is severely limited at the whim of the DRM owner. For the future of reading: Don't buy ebook readers that use DRM technology—our books will end up locked shut.

Join us in action in teaching the world about DRM on ebooks....

Here are a few more notes from the celebrations around the web.  (Thanks to Bora Zivkovic for several of these.)

From Georgia Harper at the Texas Digital Library:

Those of us who are proponents of open access (OA) are celebrating the passage of the bill that makes the NIH mandate the law of the land....[I]t’s time to start thinking about how to take advantage of this opportunity to offer services to our library patrons who have NIH-funded research to post. Here at the UT Libraries, we’ve been working on a little initiative to enable our School of Nursing faculty to get their research papers posted, in anticipation of the mandate. So far we have an outline of a training module...and the School of Nursing is willing to work with us to test out this module and institute a service for the faculty. We want it to be as easy for the faculty as possible....Here’s our training module, as it exists in its rough form....

From Brandon Keim at Wired News:

...[The OA mandate is] bad news for the science publishing industry, who've used some dubious tactics to preserve the right of journal publishers to charge exorbitant fees for access to federally-funded findings.

But for cash-strapped scientists, academics and other interested citizens -- and for anyone who believes, as a matter of principle, that knowledge bought by the public belongs to the public -- it's good news indeed....

From Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb:

...This should open up a whole world of new opportunities for online research....Researchers, academics and others have loudly criticized the soaring prices of academic journals - which make access to publicly funded research cost-prohibitive to all but the largest institutions and double-charges institutions that paid for researcher salaries already.

From Barbara Kirsop at the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development:

...The NIH now joins 6 of the 7 UK Research Councils, the Wellcome Trust and many other prestigious providers of research funding in acknowledging the immense value of open access to research publications and scientific progress....

From Mark Patterson at the PLoS blog:

...One of the most effective ways to comply with this new requirement is for researchers to publish their work in fully open access journals such as those of PLoS. As part of the service we provide to authors, we deposit every article in PubMed Central so that it can be a part of this evolving and important online archive. And this happens as soon as the article is published – so that anyone with an interest in the work can immediately read it and build on it....

From Fernando Pereira at Earning My Turns:

A very important value of this opening will be to allow full indexing and analysis of the past literature. Sometimes we have the illusion that the latest publication is the one that matters, but in many cases, discovery is bumpy and long-drawn, so the ability to find and synthesize the whole history of a topic is very important in assessing the current state of knowledge. The potential of automated biomedical literature mining has just become that much greater.

From Rich at The New Freedom:

...I find it incredibly frustrating when I want to read an article, but can only read the abstract because I don’t have access to the publishing journal. While this law doesn’t mean that I’ll be able to read all of the journals I want to, it does mean I’ll be able to read a significantly larger portion of them. It makes sense, of course, that we the tax payers funding the research should be able to benefit from it. I’m sure companies like ACS Publications are unhappy about this, but I think that’s great, because those companies are really an affront to science.

We should be thankful to the Alliance for Taxpayer Access for their hard working in campaigning for this law. Their work isn’t finished yet, but this is a massive step in the right direction. Their cause is logical and noble....

From Kevin Smith at Scholarly Communications @ Duke:

...How can we [librarians] help faculty researchers understand the new mandate?  What publishers can we recommend, and can we help faculty review their publication contracts to be sure compliance (or even earlier public access to the article) is allowed?  Some publishers, like Elsevier, already promise to deposit copies of articles they publish for researchers.  Publishing with such a publisher is an easy way to comply with the mandate, but it will almost certainly result in the full 1 year delay before open access.  For many researchers, there will still be significant advantage in accomplishing open access much sooner than this.  So the task of assisting faculty with understanding their alternatives, negotiating their publication contracts and navigating the mechanics of open access deposit are even more urgent services that academic libraries can and should provide.

From Blake Stacey at Science After Sunclipse:

...This is what happens when those slinky, no good Reds are "both elusive and in possession of a better message".

Also see the shorter comments by Richard Akerman, BTurtle, Jason Buberel, Martin Fenner, Barbara Fister, Robert Gehring, Greg Laden, Mark Leggott, Heather Morrison, Lorena O'English, Open Helix, Neel Smith, Andrew Staroscik, and David Weinberger.

John Markoff, Documents of Library in Boston to Go on Web, New York Times, December 27, 2007.  Excerpt:

The historical record of the United States government will soon be more accessible.

A digital library partnership, including two nonprofit organizations and the Boston Public Library, is preparing to begin making digital copies of the library’s paper-based government documents collection, which will then be made available on the Internet.

The project, which will take two years and require the hand scanning of millions of pages of government hearings and related publications, will cost an estimated $6 million, according to the project’s sponsors.

Boston Public Library librarians said they planned to begin by digitizing the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings from the 1950s, which is regularly sought after by its patrons.

The project is being undertaken by Public.Resource.Org, a nonprofit group seeking to open public access to government records, and the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based digital library.

The project is the brainchild of founders of the two organizations, Carl Malamud and Brewster Kahle, and it is initially being financed by a $250,000 grant from a foundation established by Mr. Kahle and his wife, Mary Austin, and a matching grant from the Omidyar Network, a support organization created by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay.

Mr. Malamud said his goal is to digitize the entire United States government documents collection, which has been estimated to include up to 100 million pages of publications ranging from the Congressional Record to the Federal Register....

Public.Resource.Org’s online collection [from other projects] includes 21 million copyright records, 5 million G.P.O. pages as well as information from the Securities and Exchange Commission, Patent Office and other federal agencies.

Also see the Public.Resource.Org press release.

Update. Also see W. David Gardner's story in Information Week.

Egypt 'to copyright antiquities', BBC News, December 25, 2007.  Excerpt:

Egypt's MPs are expected to pass a law requiring royalties be paid whenever copies are made of museum pieces or ancient monuments such as the pyramids.

Zahi Hawass, who chairs Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, told the BBC the law would apply in all countries.

The money was needed to maintain thousands of pharaonic sites, he said....

"Commercial use" of ancient monuments like the pyramids or the sphinx would also be controlled, he said.  "Even if it is for private use, they must have permission from the Egyptian government," he added.

But he said the law would not stop local and international artists reproducing monuments as long as they were not exact replicas....

Thanks to Eric Kansa for the alert and for this comment:

...Egypt’s move to claim copyright over 4000-year old monuments obviously has nothing to do with motivating new creativity or invention, since the creators of these antiquities are long dead. (Note: neither does Walt Disney’s continually demand to exclusively own Mickey Mouse…) In our legal system, such works would belong to the public domain, and would be available to all for any purpose....

I wonder how the Egyptian state will try to enforce this far-reaching copyright claim. The Egyptomania genie is long out of the bottle (at least since the New Kingdom!). There are some 17,000 images tagged as “Giza” just in Flickr. Attempting to extract licensing rents on such uses will be monumental task, on par with building the pyramids in the first place....

How this law will impact research and education about Ancient Egypt is another issue of great concern. Making it harder to use images in journals and textbooks is no way to encourage understanding of the past....

Comment.  I see the need for funds to protect Egyptian antiquities.  But there's a category mistake in seeking those funds through the retroactive extension of copyright to objects that have already entered the public domain.  I've called that piracy against the public domain, and I have to use that description here as well.  The problem in Egypt is not that copying harms the original creators, or that those creators need an artificial monopoly, but that the cost of preserving those antiquities is not adequately borne by those who benefit from them.  That kind of cost-spreading is normally done through taxes, and the real problem here is that Egypt cannot tax non-Egyptians.  (I'm conceding that all of us benefit from the existence of Egyptian antiquities, a point that some might not concede.)  The problem is hard and Egypt cannot solve it alone.  But I'd rather see nations use local taxes to create a worldwide fund for objects of worldwide interest than to see nations use copyright law as a general vehicle for fund-raising.  The policy principle at stake here is that the public domain should grow every year and never shrink.  This means that I'd rather pay such a new antiquities tax than to be subject to the extended copyright law, even though I'd personally never copy Egyptian monuments or have to pay royalties. 

The new issue of Information Services and Use (vol. 27, no. 4, 2007) is now online.  The issue is devoted to presentations from last year's Academic Publishing in Europe conference (Berlin, January 23-24, 2007).  The articles are TA, and in most cases, not even abstracts are free online, at least so far.  Here are the OA-related articles:

• Isabella Meinecke, University presses and open access.  Abstract:   The situation of academic publishing is changing. Rises in prices, decreasing libraries' budgets, increasing academic output, and new possibilities of publishing in the digital age correspond to the need of new strategies in publishing. In Germany, recently founded university presses are considered as one response to the challenge. Associated with academic libraries, they support open access publishing and offer print on demand. The workshop was about to explore the role of university presses and open access in present and future academic publishing.
• Horst Forster, The i2010 digital libraries initiative: Europe's cultural and scientific information at the click of a mouse.  No abstract.
• Sabine Brünger-Weilandt, E-Science – Advancing new ways of scientific communication.  No abstract.
• Mayur Amin, Article repositories and journal subscription – future scenarios.  No abstract.
• Peter Johan Lor, Libraries in times of open access.  No abstract.
• Matthew Cockerill, Pricing, business models and open access: Status quo vs. Apocalypse.  No abstract.

Update.  The full-texts of all the articles in this issue are free online in a single large PDF.  (Thanks to Gavin Baker.)

Here are some notes from the celebration around the web:

From John Gordon at Gordon's Notes:

...I'd also like to thank the biomedical publishing industry. This could never have happened without the transformation of a cottage industry into short-sighted publicly traded corporations dedicated to maximizing near term revenue. Publishers pushed journal subscription and archive access prices to stratospheric levels, knowing their subscribers had no real options. It was a great short term strategy....

From Stevan Harnad at Open Access Archivangelism:

Worldwide, that now makes 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 -- a total of 35 mandates already adopted and 8 more proposed so far. See ROARMAP....

From Glyn Moody at Open...:

...[E]ven though the choice of 12 rather than six months is slightly pusillanimous, it's still a huge win for open access in the US. It will also have a knock-on effect around the world, as open access to publicly-funded research starts to become the norm....

From Peter Murray-Rust on A Scientist and the Web:

...[N]ow all fulltext derived from NIH work will be available on PubMed. Other funders will follow suit (if they are not ahead). So our journal-eating-robot OSCAR will have huge amounts of text to mine.

The good news is that we believe that this text-mining will, in itself, uncover new science. How much we don’t know, but we hope it’s significant. And if so, that will be a further argument for freeing the fulltext of every science publication.

Also see the shorter comments by Charles Bailey, Jonathan Eisen, Klaus Graf, Leslie Johnston, Paula Kaufman, Oliver Obst, Dorothea Salo, and the discussion thread about it on Slashdot.

Public Access Mandate Made Law, a press release from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, December 26, 2007.  Excerpt:

President Bush has signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency.

The provision directs the NIH to change its existing Public Access Policy, implemented as a voluntary measure in 2005, so that participation is required for agency-funded investigators. Researchers will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.

"Facilitated access to new knowledge is key to the rapid advancement of science," said Harold Varmus, president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Nobel Prize Winner. "The tremendous benefits of broad, unfettered access to information are already clear from the Human Genome Project, which has made its DNA sequences immediately and freely available to all via the Internet. Providing widespread access, even with a one-year delay, to the full text of research articles supported by funds from all institutes at the NIH will increase those benefits dramatically."

"Public access to publicly funded research contributes directly to the mission of higher education,” said David Shulenburger, Vice President for Academic Affairs at NASULGC (the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges). “Improved access will enable universities to maximize their own investment in research, and widen the potential for discovery as the results are more readily available for others to build upon.”

“Years of unrelenting commitment and dedication by patient groups and our allies in the research community have at last borne fruit,” said Sharon Terry, President and CEO of Genetic Alliance. “We’re proud of Congress for their unrelenting commitment to ensuring the success of public access to NIH-funded research. As patients, patient advocates, and families, we look forward to having expanded access to the research we need.”

“Congress has just unlocked the taxpayers’ $29 billion investment in NIH,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a founding member of the ATA). “This policy will directly improve the sharing of scientific findings, the pace of medical advances, and the rate of return on benefits to the taxpayer."
Joseph added, “On behalf of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, I’d like to thank everyone who worked so hard over the past several years to bring about implementation of this much-needed policy.”

This morning President Bush signed the omnibus spending bill requiring the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to mandate OA for NIH-funded research.  

Here's the language that just became law:

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

For the major steps along the way, and my evaluation of the bill, see my three newsletter articles from August, November, and December.

Here's a fast recap:  In July 2007 (for the second time) the House of Representatives adopted an appropriations bill requiring an OA mandate at the NIH.  In October 2007 (for the first time) the Senate adopted the same language.  In November, President Bush vetoed the bill for reasons unrelated to the NIH provision, and the House failed to muster enough votes to override the veto.  Congress responded by combining many of the vetoed appropriations into one omnibus bill, cutting spending down to levels that the President could accept, and retaining the NIH provision without modification. 

Thanks to all supporters of open access in Congress and the Executive branch, including the NIH itself.  Thanks to SPARC and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access for their energetic and effective work with policy-makers.  Thanks to Heather Joseph for her masterful and untiring leadership of both organizations.  Thanks to all of you who wrote to your Representatives and Senators to support public access for publicly-funded research.  Thanks, Santa! 

More later, you can bet.

Evolution: Education and Outreach is a new peer-reviewed journal from Springer.  (Thanks to John Timmer.) 

Each of its articles is free online, and it doesn't seem to use the Springer Open Choice hybrid model.  I'd call it Springer's first full OA journal except that it requires individual request and permission for all "reuse" (no qualifications).   By contrast, Springer's hybrid OA articles use CC licenses.

Clearly something is wrong:  the same "reuse" page incorrectly says that access requires payment ("To purchase or view a PDF of this article, please...select 'add to shopping cart' "), and of course copyright law permits some reuse without permission.

The editorial in the inaugural issue says nothing about the journal's access policy.

Antony Williams, A Growing Collaboration with Publishers - Nature Initiates Deposition of Spectral Data Onto ChemSpider, ChemSpider blog, December 21, 2007.  Excerpt:

...I am happy to announce that we have the first deposition of analytical data onto ChemSpider from a publisher. Bronwen Decker of the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) has facilitated the deposition of data onto the system. A paper entitled "Use of Raman spectroscopy as a tool for in situ monitoring of microwave-promoted reactions" has had two accompanying NMR spectra submitted online (and hooked back to the original article using the DOI number)....

Archivopedia: The online archives encyclopedia, LibSite, December 24, 2007.  Excerpt:

Archivopedia.com...focuses on the management and research of primary source materials....

The wiki encyclopedia is open for anyone to edit and contains information relevant to archivists, librarians, public historians, and museum professionals [such as news headlines, job ads, grant notices, teaching modules, and a terminology guide]....

In addition to the wiki, the site offers a search engine specially customized to find primary source materials around the world by keyword. This feature takes advantage of open source / open access initiatives and is designed to promote repository collections containing original materials by enabling researchers the opportunity to find and link to collections and specific items held at various repositories that might interest them in a single search. Try a sample search like “George Washington” in the [Google co-op] search engine....[PS: but beware of the distracting graphics.]

Michael Geist, The year in Canadian tech law, A to Z, Toronto Star, December 24, 2007.  Excerpt:

...O is for the Open access rules adopted by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, one of Canada's leading research granting institutions. The new rules require researchers to ensure that their work is openly available to the public within six months of publication....

Akobundu Dike Ugah and Michael Okpara, Obstacles to Information Access and Use in Developing Countries, Library Philosophy and Practice 2007.  Excerpt:

Experts have identified various obstacles to information access and use. Uhegbu...identifies five: economic, social, environmental, occupational, and infrastructure. Etim...lists seven, including physical infrastructure, technical, and managerial capabilities, among others, though her work focused mainly on scientific and technological information. This paper will discuss obstacles in the following areas: lack of awareness; inaccessibility; information explosion; bibliographic obstacles: environment; poor infrastructure; declining budgets and rising costs; costs for users; staff attitude toward users; and crime.

Since 2001 the New England Journal of Medicine has provided free online access to its research articles after a six month embargo.  But it required users to register.  On December 19, it dropped the registration requirement.

In 2008, the Pediatric Cardiology Society of India will launch a peer-reviewed OA journal, the Annals of Pediatric Cardiology (no web site yet), published by Medknow.

The Flanders Marine Institute (Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee, or VLIZ) has adopted a policy to deposit the Institute's research output in its OA repository, the Open Marine Archive (Open Marien Archief, or OMA).

Christine Kosmopoulos and Denise Pumain, Citation, Citation, Citation : Bibliometrics, the web and the Social Sciences and Humanities, Cyberego: European Journal of Geography, December 17, 2007.

Abstract:   The use of digital resources and the affirmation of research assessment exercises throw a new light on the issue of bibliometrics. The paper reviews the main data bases and indicators in use. It demonstrates that these instruments give a biased information about the scientific output of research in Social Sciences and Humanities. Emerging publishing and editing strategies on the web are analysed. The paper supports open access solutions and sharing resources policies for the social science's literature.

From the body of the paper:

It remains true that in the field of bibliometrics, as also for evaluation in general, trusting in a single indicator, however sophisticated, is an objective totally unsuited to what we know of the complexity of social systems, and that it would be advisable to set up not only batteries of indicators, but also multifarious methods for analyzing them and for preparing all decisions. Placing research in [an open access] network on a global scale thanks to electronic support and communication should cause the emergence of new forms of scientific evaluation, better harmonized, and of which the tools of bibliometry are only one aspect.

Rachel Creppy, Archives ouvertes, archives institutionnelles et protocole français, Bulletin des Bibliothèques de France, October 2007. (Thanks to the INIST Libre Accès blog.)  An update on OA archiving in France.  Because it's a PDF, I can't link to a machine translation.

Update. Thanks to Marlène Delhaye for letting me know about an HTML edition of the article, which allows me to link to Google's English. (Unfortunately, however, Google's machine translator doesn't work on this article; I'm leaving the link in place in case the problem is only temporary.) Marlène also points to this English-language blurb from the table of contents:

After presenting the European context of the Open Archives Initiative, the article looks at the current state of the French project in terms of signatories, approach, objectives, strategic axes, current works on communication issues, metadata structure, interoperability and ongoing archiving, the involvement of university institutions, and issues to be resolved.

The Danish Library Agency is joining CERN's SCOAP3 project (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics).  From the December 20 announcement:

The Danish Library Agency is pleased to announce, that it has signed an Expression of interest to join SCOAP3.

The Danish Library Agency hosts the secretariat of Denmark's Electronic Research Library (DEFF)....

DEFF has been closely monitoring the development of Open Access from its birth and is active in advocating for Open Access solutions and doing pilot projects. The invitation to join SCOAP3 to the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation was discussed by the ministries in DEFF’s Coordination Committee and on Tuesday 18 December they approved the signing of the Expression of interest.

DEFF considers a more widely access to scientific information as an important pillar for the Danish Government’s strategy ‘Denmark in the Global Economy’.

Stevan Harnad, Harvesting the Fruits of EU Research, Opening Scientific Communication, December 24, 2007.  In French and English.  Excerpt:

Europe invests many million of euros of European tax-payers’ money in funding research. The purpose is to generate maximal returns for the European tax-payer from the uptake, usage and application of those research findings, in the form of further research progress as well as R&D industrial applications.

This is called “research impact.” ...

In order to be used and applied, research has to be accessible. Research is published in peer-reviewed journals, but journal subscriptions do not maximize research access, because not all researchers’ institutions can afford subscription access to all research journals. Hence research impact is needlessly lost. How much research impact is being lost?

Studies across all fields of research have now demonstrated that if subscription access is supplemented with free online access (Open Access, OA) — by researchers self-archiving their final drafts in their own Institutional Repositories (IRs) — research impact is doubled. That means twice as much research impact for the same level of research funding....

Mandating OA self-archiving for funded research is a natural extension of mandating that the research should be published at all (”publish or perish”). It is also the optimal way to monitor and showcase research output, for institutions and funders, to maintain a record of research assets, and to credit and reward research impact, by harvesting research impact metrics (citations, downloads, etc.) as part of a system of continuous research productivity monitoring and assessment.

And, most important, mandating OA self-archiving will also maximise European research impact, thereby maximising the return on European tax-payers’ investment in research.

1. I'm slowing down for the holidays, and will catch up later with whatever I missed while making merry. But if President Bush signs the spending bill Congress passed on Wednesday requiring an OA mandate for the NIH, then I'll blog it the same day. 

2. Sometime last week Open Access News passed the milestone of 12,600 posts.

Happy holidays!

The same spending bill directing the NIH to mandate OA for NIH-funded research also directs the Environmental Protection Agency to re-open its libraries after a two-year frenzy of agency-led destruction.  For details, see the press release from the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

The Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF) is a new, non-profit organization devoted to OA for software protocols.  It recently persuaded Microsoft to open up the Windows server protocols in order support full interoperability with Samba, the FOSS suite of networking tools for Unix and Linux machines.  For details, see Serdar Yegulalp's article in Information Week.

Stevan Harnad, From Father Christmas to all the little boys and girls wishing for Open Access, Open Access Archivangelism, December 23, 2007.  Excerpt:

On Sun, 23 Dec 2007, [anonymous] wrote:

Dear Father Christmas,
   My wish goes towards allowing any researcher free access to current scientific information -- and when I say free, I mean without any constraint of fees, subscription, copyright. And what would be better than having open archives/repositories? ...
   How to get out of this dilemma? Recently, in France and Germany, lawmakers wrote a new law, punishing anybody intending to infringe copyright with enormous fines...
   My fellow European scientists are afraid and no longer dare to express their ideas....

REPLY FROM FATHER XMAS, NORTH POLE:

Dear little boys and girls everywhere who yearn for Open Access:

Yes, there is a way that you can have the Open Access you say you so fervently desire. But Father Christmas cannot give it to you, any more than Father Christmas can give you big muscles, if that is what you yearn for. All Father Christmas can do is tell you how you yourselves can build the big muscles you desire (by exercising daily with increasing weights). And for Open Access it is exactly the same: It depends entirely on you, dear children, each and every one of you.

Nor can you build big muscles from one day to the other. If you try to lift too heavy a weight, too early, you only cause yourself muscle strain. So don't insist on too much overnight. Start with one simple fact that is easy to assimilate: There is nothing whatsoever -- nothing physical, nothing legal -- that prevents you from depositing your own final, peer-reviewed drafts (postprints) of every single one of your own current research journal articles in an OAI-compliant Institutional Repository, right now: Nothing. Not copyright law. Not technology. Not cost. Not expertise. No point in writing to Father Christmas to wish for that, because it is already entirely in your own hands:

Your institution has no Institutional Repository yet? Then, for the time being, deposit your postprints in a central repository, like CogPrints or Depot or Arxiv or HAL or PubMed Central. But do the deposit now.

The journal in which it is published does not yet endorse immediate OA self-archiving? Then, for the time being, set access to the deposit as Closed Access rather than Open Access for as long as the journal embargoes access. But do the deposit now.

That's all. If all the little boys and girls did that before Christmas this year, on Christmas day all the current research worldwide would be visible worldwide, 62% of it already Open Access (because 62% of journals already endorse immediate OA self-archiving).

For the remaining 38% deposited in Closed Access, the metadata (author, title, journalname, date etc.) would be immediately visible worldwide, so any user who wanted to access the full-text could immediately email the author to request an eprint by email....

[I]nstead of just writing to St. Nick, I suggest writing to the Principal, Rector, Vice-Chancellor or Provost of your school...asking that the school itself should make this digital muscle-building part of its standard athletic curriculum for all its pupils -- making the keystrokes mandatory for all of you -- then that mandate will ensure OA self-archiving its proper place in your hierarchy of priorities. The rewards will be felt in your year-end marks...because self-archiving builds the citations as surely as it builds muscles....

Your faithful old
Kris Kringle

Sandy Swanson, University of Michigan’s digital repository now available through PubMed, MHSLA blog, December 21, 2007.  (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)  Excerpt:

From MLA Focus:

Deep Blue and PubMed LinkOut: A Higher Profile for University of Michigan Research

Researchers who find articles by University of Michigan (UM) authors in PubMed can now directly-and for free-link to the full text using Deep Blue, UM’s digital repository, via PubMed’s LinkOut feature. Deep Blue is an online archive that preserves and provides access to UM intellectual and creative work. It is the first institutional repository to provide such links.

To see all the items in Deep Blue that are in PubMed, enter “loprovdeepblue [sb]” in the PubMed search box. At this posting, there are over 8,800 articles.

I don’t find a way to add the Deep Blue collection in the LinkOut submission utility, and I don’t see a “free full text” button on the abstracts. However, Deep Blue’s link icon can be added to a library’s shared MyNCBI account; use Configure > PubMed > LinkOut > Miscellaneous > MLibrary (Deep Blue) (DeepBlue).

Update.  See Stevan Harnad's comment, Deposit institutionally, harvest centrally, Open Access Archivangelism, December 23, 2007.  Excerpt:

...Congratulations to the University of Michigan and PubMed for adding this excellent and timely feature (to both PubMed and Michigan's Institutional Repository [IR], Deep Blue)! But why stop there?

The implications are obvious: Central Repositories [CRs] (like PubMed Central and Arxiv and CogPrints) should not be deposited in directly, because that merely complicates and competes with a systematic worldwide policy of depositing all institutional research output in each institution's own, OAI-compliant IR. Institutions are the primary research providers. They have the greatest stake in ensuring that all their own research output is maximally visible, accessible, and usable, thereby maximizing the institution's research impact. Institutions are also the best placed to showcase, monitor and reward the self-archiving of their own research output.

All institutions should mandate that all their research article output must be deposited in their own IR. Research funders (like NIH) should also mandate that all the research article output from the research they fund must be deposited in the fundee's own institution's IR.
Then CRs like PubMed Central as well as indexers like PubMed (or Thompson ISI or Scopus or Google Scholar) can either link to or harvest from the network of interoperable, OAI-compliant IRs....

And remember that the Web era means distributed content provision and central harvesting, Google-style. It is not, as in paper days, that all the content needs to go in one central physical space.

Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O’Brien, A., Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005) Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned Publishing 18 (1). pp. 25-40.

Abstract: A study carried out for the UK Joint Information Systems Committee examined models for the provision of access to material in institutional and subject-based archives and in open access journals....A "harvesting" model is recommended....

The Fedora Commons has released the Fedora 3.0 Beta 1 for testing.  For details, see Thursday's announcement.

Richard F. Heller and six co-authors, Capacity-building for public health, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, December 2007.  Excerpt:

...The free and open-source software (FOSS) movement provides inspiration for an affordable and credible solution [to the problem of inadequate medical training in low and middle income countries]....

In the education field, there are now parallel developments of Open Educational Resources (OERs) with an ever-expanding range of high-quality online resources that are freely available through the Internet. There is major international interest and commitment in the use of OERs, as demonstrated by the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning’s Open Educational Resources Community....

Web 2.0 refers to the evolution of Internet use from the one-way transfer of information (Web 1.0) to collaboration and participation among users. In the context of education, students are not just recipients of education but are involved in collaboration in learning activities, expressed as eLearning 2.0 or Education 2.0. Education 3.0 is considered to be the extension to this, where open-access materials are created and adapted by various collaborating groups and individuals including the students....

Building on these needs and inspirations, we have proposed an educational initiative based on the open education resources available on the Internet. If we can develop an educational context around the open resources that are freely available, this might provide a low-cost solution to capacity-building in developing countries. This added context would include:  a gateway or repository for accessing materials that are linked to identified competence development and can be modified to reflect local settings; the teaching or facilitation of learning through online-focused discussions; a system for accrediting learned competences.  We have termed this the People’s Open Access Education Initiative (Peoples-uni)....

PS:  Thanks to Gavin Yamey for the alert and for background on how PLoS is supporting the POAE.

Science Magazine is providing free online access to its series of articles on Breakthroughs of the Year 2007.

Paola Galimberti and Marialaura Vignocchi, Time for a change: the Italian CRUI-Open Access Working Group’s action for a national e-theses provision service, in Proceedings ETD 2007 - Added Value to e-theses, Uppsala 2007.  Self-archived December 22, 2007.

Abstract:   The paper intends to present the status of e-theses collections in Italy, focusing on the major drivers for change that can contribute to create the basis of a national e-theses provision service able to collaborate with other international services. Finally, it illustrates the e-theses project of Bologna University as a case study of a viable integrated system offering added-value services.

Update.  Also see the CRUI guidelines themselves (in Italian) and this short summary in English.

MIT linguistics professor Kai von Fintel has made an 11 minute podcast on the founding the new OA journal, Semantics and Pragmatics.  From MIT's blurb:

The fourth episode in a new series of podcasts on various aspects of scholarly publishing & copyright is now available.

In this episode, we hear from Professor Kai von Fintel, Professor of Linguistics at MIT, whose research areas are in semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, and the intersections among them.

Professor von Fintel discusses the launch of a new open access journal, Semantics and Pragmatics, with co-editor David Beaver of the University of Texas at Austin. The podcast was recorded at a critical moment in the journal’s history, a few weeks after its website was launched and opened for submissions, and a few months before the first papers are expected to appear there, in early 2008....

PS:  For background, see my blog posts on Fintel's work in launching S&P.

Stevan Harnad, After the NIH Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate, Open Access Archivangelism, December 21, 2007.  Excerpt:

This is from your greedy, never-satisfied Archivangelist:

Now that the NIH Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate looks as if it will shortly be signed into Law:

1. There is no need to wait to implement the NIH mandate
2. There is no need to ape it: It can easily be optimised
3. There is no need to reserve Green OA self-archiving for NIH-funded biomedical research
4. All universities should mandate that all their research articles in all their disciplines are self-archived
5. There is no need to self-archive all those articles in PubMed Central: They should be self-archived in each university's own Institutional Repository
6. There is no need to allow deposit to be embargoed for 12 months: Deposit should be mandated immediately upon acceptance for publication
7. Embargoed articles can be set as Closed Access during any embargo
8. Meanwhile the Institutional Repository will allow users webwide to email the author a semi-automatic request for an eprint for individual use immediately for any deposit that is not yet OA.

This will provide either immediate OA (62%) or almost-immediate, almost-OA (38%) for all research articles in all disciplines, worldwide. It will also ensure the natural and well-deserved death of research access embargoes soon thereafter.

Summary of how to optimize the Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate:
I. Universities mandate deposit in their own Institutional Repositories.
II. Deposit is mandated immediately upon acceptance for publication.
III. The permissible embargo is on the date the deposit is set as OA, not on the day the deposit is made.

"Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?"

Comment.  I agree with all of Stevan's points.  On the other side, I'm sure he agrees that when the NIH mandate finally becomes law, it will be a  major victory.  There's no contradiction in celebrating the victory while remembering that there's still more to do.  If there were, nobody could celebrate anything.

The Citizendium encyclopedia project picks a Creative Commons license, a press release from Citizendium, December 21, 2007.  Excerpt:

In a much-awaited move, the non-profit Citizendium encyclopedia project announced that it has adopted the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-by-sa) as the license for its own original collaborative content. The license permits anyone to copy and redevelop the thousands of articles that the Citizendium has created within its successful first year.

The license allows the Citizendium to join the large informal club of free resources associated especially with Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation. Wikipedia uses the FSF’s GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), which is expected to be made fully compatible with CC-by-sa in coming months. Therefore, Wikipedia and the Citizendium will be able to exchange content easily....

To explain the choice of license to present and future contributors, [Citizendium founder and editor in chief Larry Sanger] released a 22,000-word essay: “An explanation of the Citizendium license.” The project underwent a very lengthy deliberation process in multiple groups and venues, beginning last spring....

The project rejected a license (CC-by-nc-sa) that would forbid commercial reuse, an issue on which “Citizens” were evenly divided....

PS:  If you remember, Larry Sanger kicked off the discussion back in September by calling for "well-reasoned position statements, from anyone...about what licensing scheme" Citizendium should use.

Bioinformatics has named the six champions of open access and open source on the short list for its 2008 Ben Franklin Award.  From Kevin Davies' article in Bio-IT World:

1. Philip E. Bourne (co-director, Protein Data Bank, University of California San Diego) –- Bourne is the founding editor-in-chief of PLoS Computational Biology, an open access journal published by the Public Library of Science. As co-director of the Protein Data Bank, he is responsible for continued free access to structural biology data and software distributed through the San Diego Supercomputer Center. He continues to develop widely used software tools including SciVee, a free scientific video delivery site in which video can be integrated with the open access literature to create a new learning experience.
2. James L. Edwards (Encyclopedia of Life, Smithsonian Institution) -- Edwards has been an advocate for the development and sharing of biodiversity data since the early 1980s. As program director of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Biological Research Resources Program, he advocated data standards for museum collections and for aggressive programs of database construction. As deputy assistant director for biological sciences at NSF, he helped develop blueprints for the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). His latest project is the construction of an open-access Encyclopedia of Life. 
3. Robert Gentleman (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center) -- Gentleman is one of the minds behind the R Project, a powerful and increasingly popular suite of statistical tools. He co-founded and developed BioConductor, an open-source/open-development software project for the genomic data analysis. Gentleman espouses strong ethical views on the meaning of publishing data, with an emphasis on sharing data-transformation methods as well as the underlying data.
4. Michael Hucka (California Institute of Technology) -- Hucka is the head of the Systems Biology Markup Language team (sbml.org) and the coordinator of the development of SBML. SBML is one of the first XML language widely used in biosciences. Hucka has also pushed for more openness, whether in the language development, distribution or software support. Hucka is also the lead developer of the open-source Systems Biology Workbench.
5. Francis Ouellette (Ontario Institute for Cancer Research) – Ouellette has been a tireless promoter of open-source access (read his top 10 things you can do to support open access). He was an early supporter of the PLoS community and has been a proponent of open access for work derived from public funding, e.g., Genome Canada.
6. Steven Salzberg (University of Maryland, College Park) – Formerly with The Institute of Genomic Research, Salzberg has promoted open access and data sharing in several areas, producing several popular open-source bioinformatics tools (MUMmer, Glimmer, TransTerm, Jigsaw, etc.). Salzberg helped start the Influenza Genome Sequencing project and has lobbied for the data’s immediate release, publicly calling on other influenza researchers to follow his lead.

Bioinformatics will name the winner at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, on April 29, 2008.