Technology Blog

The World Law Bulletin (WLB) is published at taxpayer expense by the Library of Congress (LOC). But it’s only available to members of Congress and LOC staffers, not the general public. The November 4 issue of Secrecy News has a succinct recommendation: “This ought to change.”

Patrice McDermott, Deputy Director of Government Relations for the American Library Association, plans to send a letter to the Congressional Joint Committee on the LOC, calling for OA to the WLB. Excerpt:

We are writing to request that you encourage, if not direct, the Law Library of Congress to publish the World Law Bulletin on the World Wide Web for unrestricted public access. The World Law Bulletin, produced monthly by the Law Library of Congress, is a unique and uniquely valuable publication. It provides an unparalleled survey of legal developments abroad, along with focused analysis on topics of special interest. It is based entirely on open, published sources. Although it reflects the considerable expertise of its authors and contributors, the World Law Bulletin has no advisory content whatsoever. Therefore, to make it widely available to the public would not implicate congressional deliberations in any way. We are attorneys, librarians, scientists, academicians, and others who would like to be able to obtain, on a timely basis, no-fee access to the World Law Bulletin, which our tax dollars support. We respectfully urge you to help the interested public to gain access to this exceptional congressional resource.

If you would like to add your signature to her letter, send your name, title, and organization to pmcdermott@alawash.org before December 9.

source: Call for OA to a taxpayer-funded journal

source: ALPSP-SSP presentations

source: Report on the ALPSP-SSP seminar

source: More on the book-scanning projects

source: OA flu virus genome database

source: Book publishers should improve online access, not fight it

source: Unpublished Einstein paper deposited in arXiv

The Netherlands Journal of Medicine changed to Open Access with the July-August 2005 issue. In a special report accompanying the change, the editorial board notes:

This represents a turning point for the Journal as open access publishing provides instant and universal availability of published work to any potential reader, worldwide, completely free of subscriptions, passwords and charges. This assures the widest possible dissemination of scientific knowledge from the Journal without boundaries of limited circulation or local availability of a hardcopy. We believe that by opening up we are making research available to a much wider range of readers than our print and subscription model would have been able to achieve.

In addition, the shift in access methods and publication processes (online ahead of print) has made it possible to eliminate the 4-6 month lag between publication of a paper in the journal and its indexing in PubMed.

Netherlands Journal of Medicine - Fulltext v60+ (2002+); Print ISSN: 0300-2977 | Online ISSN: 0928-1487.

source: Established medical journal shifts to OA

source: Frankfurt symposium presentations

The US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) will remove some OA aeronautical data from the internet. (Thanks to Patrice McDermott.) From yesterday’s press release:

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) will go forward with its previously announced proposal to remove its Flight Information Publications (FLIP) and Digital Aeronautical Flight Information File (DAFIF) from public access. NGA is taking this action due to the increased numbers of international source providers claiming intellectual property rights of their data. Many of these sources forewarned NGA they intended to copyright their aeronautical data. NGA’s public release of data produced by others violated claimed copyright, forcing NGA to discontinue the release of this data to the general public. Government agencies and authorized government contractors are not affected by this action….As a result of input from the public comment period, NGA will phase in the removal of the affected NGA products from public access over a 22 month period….The first phase of the product withdrawal begins in January 2006 with the removal of worldwide DAFIF from public sale. The electronic distribution of DAFIF over the World Wide Web (www) and public sale of NGA FLIP outside US airspace will cease in October 2006. The remaining NGA FLIP will be removed from public access in October 2007.

(PS: While the NGA is a division of the Defense Department, this decision is not to protect national security. It’s to protect intellectual property.)

source: More on the NGA decision to pull OA information offline

EBSCO Publishing is now providing free online access to its Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA) database. (Thanks to Buddy Pennington.) From the announcement:

This world-class bibliographic database provides coverage on subjects such as librarianship, classification, cataloging, bibliometrics, online information retrieval, information management and more. Delivered via the EBSCOhost platform, LISTA indexes more than 600 periodicals plus books, research reports, and proceedings. With coverage dating back to the mid-1960s, it is the oldest continuously produced database covering the field of information science.

source: EBSCO opens access to its LISTA database

source: New features at the self-archiving wiki

Here are some of Stevan Harnad’s thoughts on HAL (November 29):

Apparently France — a country highly centralised since Napoleonic days, with its unique national research institutions, of which the CNRS is the biggest — is in a structural and functional position to do something, at a national level, at one stroke, that no other country is quite in the position to do. The idea is to create one national OA archive for all disciplines and all institutions and universities to deposit all their research into: HAL (Hyper Articles on Line). This unified national effort is meant to avoid the kinds of divisiveness that in the UK led to a self-archiving recommendation by a parliamentary committee, subsequently rejected by the government, subsequently taken up again by the 8 UK Research Councils (RCUK) and now opposed by the Royal Society (Britain’s academy of science). In France, there is now the hope that not only will the big national research institutes (CNRS, INSERM, INRA, INRIA) unite in this national enterprise, but so will the French Academy of Sciences, as well as all the French Universities. If it succeeds, it will be an enormous coup for France, and a terrific direction-setter for the rest of the world — though probably no country would be in a position to emulate it exactly, for lack of corresponding centralised national institutions….It will be interesting to see whether the centralisation proves to be an asset or liability. It is impossible to predict, because the case of France is so unique, but a UK study on central vs. institutional self-archiving came up with a different recommendation for the UK, suggesting that not only would distributed local institutional and university archives, plus harvesting (including central harvesting) be cheaper than a central archiving model in the era or OAI-interoperability, but, even more important, the local institutional incentives and culture are likely to be more conducive to archive-filling, because of shared interests and benefits between researchers and their institutions….But who knows? No one has a winning formula for reaching 100% OA as quickly and reliably as possible until a formula has been demonstrated to win. Perhaps France’s unique configuration makes a formula possible there that would not work elsewhere. Moreover, we live in a virtual world, and each institution’s and university’s sector of HAL could be customised and given the look of and put under the control of each local content-providing institution. The real question is whether France’s national OA mega-archive will be backed up with a self-archiving mandate, or it will rely only on volunteerism, for volunteerism has proved to be a poor deliverer of OA so far.

source: Stevan Harnad on HAL

Since September, five major French research organizations –CNRS, Inserm, Inria, Inra, and the CPU– have been working together on a single, national OA repository called HAL (Hyper Article on Line). Here’s a recent (though undated) interview with Laurent Romary, Director of Scientific Communication at CNRS, on where HAL stands. (Thanks to Stevan Harnad.) Excerpt:

[HAL] is due to the convergence of three major movements. The first is the concept of direct scientific communications, initiated by the physics community and incarnated by the American Arxiv archive system. Second is the “open access” movement encouraging direct access to scientific publications, embodied by the Berlin declaration signed jointly by fifty major universities and European research organizations. Third, those organizations and universities need a reliable, detailed panorama of scientific publications, essential for their scientific policy and for evaluation purposes. The convergence of these three movements led to the decision to create a single archive for the entire French scientific community offering powerful, practical tools and services for research scientists and guaranteeing long-term preservation of documents. An agreement will be signed to formalize this collaboration between the various organizations. This single archive will significantly improve the visibility, dissemination, and the international impact of French scientific research, as data will be indexed by major search engines such as Google. Furthermore, the chosen platform – HAL (Hyper Articles on Line) – communicates with other major international archives such as Arxiv and (shortly) Pubmed Central….

This tool, developed by the CCSD and inspired by the American Arxiv system, offers research scientists a range of extremely useful services that make it a truly interactive solution (see the sidebar). HAL will soon be coupled with Term-Sciences, a multilingual terminology portal developed by Inist. This tool will enable users to search for and view international scientific terms in several languages….Finally, networks will be set up of “referring” documentalists trained by Inist. Serving the entire scientific community and working closely with research scientists, the documentalists will be notified automatically whenever a document is submitted. They will be responsible for verifying and correcting the quality of the metadata provided with the documents, which is vital for proper document indexing and dissemination. I should add that HAL will also enable research organizations to set up watchdog systems to identify emerging trends in research.

Here’s a brief “sidebar” on HAL by Bruno de la Perrière, from the same page as the interview:

“Today HAL is technically far superior to Arxiv”, proudly explains Franck Laloë, CCSD Director and creator of HAL. HAL provides an extensive set of tools and services that are extremely beneficial to research scientists: [1] automatic document submission (for both publications or pre-prints) with a link to an international open archive that increases visibility and impact, [2] simplified submission process for research scientists: a single submission can cover all the researcher’s work, evaluation procedures, activity reports, and replies to requests for quotations. The system provides tools for selecting and exporting publication lists, [3] advanced search engine, classification and searches using multiple criteria (publication date, scientific field, collection, organization, or laboratory), [4] automatic online extraction of all works by author, laboratory, or organization, with possible links to the organization’s local Web site (by including HAL in a given metadata structure, it is possible to specify the author/laboratory/organization affiliation), [4] creation of “collections” via buffers for authentication of a laboratory’s publications, the articles in a journal, etc. [5] alert and watchdog system that can be customized with user-defined profiles, [6] finally, HAL is designed to facilitate the creation of configurable interfaces for organizations to create their own environments.

source: More on HAL

source: Another blog comment on the Royal Society statement

source: Can journals afford to lower prices and profits?

Philip Davis, Journal Cost-Effectiveness Tables and Graphs, a preprint, November 29, 2005. A visual presentation of the data collected by Ted Bergstrom and Preston McAfee for their web site on journal cost-effectiveness. From Davis’ rationale: “The following tables and graphs focus on making comparisons between profit and non-profit publishers. The six largest publishers (Blackwell, Elsevier, Sage, Springer-Kluwer, Taylor & Francis and Wiley) are highlighted for comparison. This report does not advocate a particular position, nor does it necessarily represent the position of the author’s employer or institution. Feedback or suggestions for further analysis may be conveyed to the author by email at: pmd8 [at] cornell.edu.”

source: Davis graphs of Bergstrom-McAfee journal data

The OA Crystallography Open Database has logged over 24,000 entries. From Armel Le Bail’s announcement today:

With the help of >30 volunteers declared after the Petition
for Open Data in Crystallography (>1300 signatures), the increase is now attaining 2-3,000 new entries per month. Congratulations COD !

PS - This is not enough, a full database should contain
close to 500,000 crystal structures, and the increase per
year is currently close to 40,000…

source: Another OA milestone

Four more journals in the BMC-series have (finally) been accepted for tracking by The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI).

BMC Developmental Biology, BMC Immunology, BMC Neurology, and BMC Structural Biology are now included in the Science Citation Index Expanded, available through the Web of Science, and are on track to receive an impact factor in 2008.

BMC Developmental Biology - Fulltext v1+ (2001+) BioMed Central | PubMed Central; ISSN: 1471-213X.

BMC Immunology - Fulltext v1+ (2000+) BioMed Central | PubMed Central; ISSN: 1471-2172.

BMC Neurology - Fulltext v1+ (2001+) BioMed Central | PubMed Central; ISSN 1471-2377.

BMC Structural Biology - Fulltext v1+ (2001+) BioMed Central | PubMed Central; ISSN: 1472-6807.

BioMed Central maintains an ongoing list of the abstracting and indexing services reviewing their various titles. I’ve added links for the PubMed Central mirrors of theses titles, but it should be noted that the preservation and distribution arrangements for the BioMed Central content is more extensive.

[Thanks to Dana L. Roth, Caltech]

Update. This is Peter updating George’s posting. I just heard from Matt Cockerill at BMC that BMC Plant Biology was also accepted by ISI. For all these journals, the ISI coverage starts in 2005, which means that the 2007 impact factors will be available in June 2008.

source: Four more BMC titles added to WoS

source: Aula talk: David Weinberger