Technology Blog

Paul Ginsparg, As we may read, Journal of Neuroscience, September 20, 2006. (I thought I blogged this earlier but just discovered that I hadn’t.)  Excerpt:

The e-print arXiv, initiated in August 1991, has effectively transformed the research communication infrastructure of multiple fields of physics and could play a prominent role in a unified set of global resources for physics, mathematics, and computer science. It has grown to contain >375,000 articles (as of July 2006), with >50,000 new submissions expected in calendar year 2006 and >40,000,000 full-text downloads per year. It is an international project, with dedicated mirror sites in 17 countries and collaborations with United States and foreign professional societies and other international organizations, and it has also provided a crucial lifeline for isolated researchers in developing countries…

The arXiv is entirely scientist driven: articles are deposited by researchers when they choose (either before, simultaneous with, or after peer review), and the articles are immediately available to researchers throughout the world. As a pure dissemination system, it operates at a factor of 100–1000 times lower in cost than a conventionally peer-reviewed system (Ginsparg, 2001). This is the real lesson of the move to electronic formats and distribution: not that everything should somehow be free, but that with many of the production tasks automatable or off-loadable to the authors, the editorial costs will then dominate the costs of an unreviewed distribution system by many orders of magnitude….

The methodology works within copyright law, as long as the depositor has the authority to deposit the materials and assign a nonexclusive license to distribute at the time of deposition, because such a license takes precedence over any subsequent copyright assignment….

From the outset, arXiv.org relied on a variety of heuristic screening mechanisms, including a filter on institutional affiliation of submitter, to ensure insofar as possible that submissions are at least “of refereeable quality.” …

A form of open access appears to be happening by a backdoor route: using standard search engines, more than one-third of the high-impact journal articles in a sample of biological/medical journals published in 2003 were found at nonjournal Web sites (Wren, 2005). To assess the extent of this phenomenon less systematically in the neuroscience community, I looked up the publications posted at [Brain Mapping Studies]….The result is striking: at least 75% of the publications listed were freely available either via direct links from the above Web page or via a straightforward Web search for the article title. If indeed this is representative, then the neuroscience community may already be farther along in the direction of open access than most realize….

 Because the current generation of undergraduates, and the next generation of researchers, already takes for granted that such materials should be readily accessible from anywhere, it is more than likely that this percentage will only increase over time and that the publishing community will need to adapt to the reality of some form of open access, regardless of the outcome of the government mandate debate.

There is more to open access, however, than just the free access assessed above. True open access permits any third party to aggregate and data mine the articles, themselves treated as computable objects, linkable and interoperable with associated databases. We are still just scratching the surface of what can be done with large and comprehensive full-text aggregations. A forward-looking example is provided by the PubMed Central database, operated in conjunction with GenBank and other biological databases at the United States National Library of Medicine….

The enormously powerful sorts of data mining and number crunching that are already taken for granted as applied to the open-access genomics databases can be applied to the full text of the entirety of the biology and life sciences literature and will have just as great a transformative effect on the research done with it….

source: Paul Ginsparg on arXiv, OA, and the future

Chris Philipp, Reclusive mathematician rejected honors for solving 100-year-old math problem, but he relied on Cornell’s arXiv to publish, Cornell Chronicle Online. Excerpt:

The solution to one of the most famous problems in mathematics was posted on Cornell’s arXiv over an eight-month period, beginning in November 2002. Today, arXiv remains its only home.

Most scientists and researchers who post research on arXiv — an open-access repository for e-print postings operated by Cornell University Library — also submit it for publication in traditional peer-reviewed journals. But famously reclusive Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman’s decision to post his proof of the 100-year-old Poincaré Conjecture solely in arXiv was decidedly unorthodox.

Yet Perelman’s action underscores the repository’s increasing importance in the fields of physics, math and computer science…

“What is unusual about this, and certainly for anything this significant, is that Perelman apparently has no intent of publishing in the classical way, but has chosen the arXiv as the sole method of communication,” said R. Keith Dennis, a math professor and adviser to the Mathematics Library….

With arXiv, Cornell Library provides fast, free and open access to scientific literature, serving the fields of physics, mathematics, nonlinear science, computer sciences and quantitative biology…

All four recipients of the Fields Medal, which is awarded every four years, are regular arXiv contributors, including Terrence Tao, who is also one of its moderators. There are over 20 million full-text downloads from the server per year, and it currently hosts more than 380,000 articles, with a submission rate of 4,000 per month.

“Everybody reads it,” said Paul Ginsparg, Cornell professor of physics and of computing and information science who developed the repository while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1991. “[Perelman] put it there precisely to reach a wide audience.” …

arXiv has transformed how material is shared, making science more democratic and allowing for the rapid dissemination of scientific findings….

PS:  For background, see my 8/22/06 post on Perelman and arXiv.

source: More on Perelman and arXiv

Martin Rundkvist, Greed and Buffoonery in Academic Publishing, Salto Sobrius, September 29, 2006. Excerpt:

I agreed to a really crappy business deal today….

For a long time, academic journals from commercial publishers have grown in number and become more and more expensive. Individual scholars can no longer afford subscribing to them at all, and most research libraries have to prioritise strictly when choosing which ones to take. There is a successful resistance movement against these tendencies, Open Access publishing on the net. But culture changes slowly, and commercial journals are still indispensable reading in many fields of inquiry.

Last spring, Cornelius Holtorf at the European Journal of Archaeology kindly offered me a review copy of Martin Carver’s massive publication on the excavations at Sutton Hoo in the 80s and 90s. I accepted gladly, I got the book [and wrote a review]….

You never get paid for writing in academic journals. Scholars and journals have a symbiotic relationship where one could not survive without the other. We feed the journals material, and they feed our CVs. A review copy of an expensive book is all the tangible remuneration you can hope for as a contributor. But in this case I had to pay to get my review published.

“Author pays” is a common funding model for Open Access journals….But the European Journal of Archaeology isn’t OA. It’s a commercial product put out by Sage Publications….

source: TA journals charging both authors and readers

Koïchiro Matsuura, Knowledge Sharing: Forever a Future Prospect? Zaman Online, September 30, 2006.  Matsuura is the Director-General of UNESCO.  Excerpt:

Is knowledge sharing a utopia, the international community’s new buzz word?  We do not think so….

An economy based on the sharing and spread of knowledge is an opportunity for the emerging countries and for the wellbeing of their populations….

Shared knowledge is…a powerful lever in the fight against poverty. It is also today the key to wealth production….

Since [knowledge] is a public good that ought to be accessible to all, none should find themselves excluded in a knowledge society….

In network societies, creativity and the possibilities of exchange or sharing are greatly increased. These societies create an environment particularly favourable to knowledge, innovation, training and research. The new forms of network sociability that are developing on the Internet are horizontal and not hierarchical, encouraging cooperation, as well illustrated by the models of the research “collaboratory” or “open source” computer software….

[T]hese new practices hold out the hope that we shall be able to arrive at a fair balance between the protection of intellectual property rights, necessary for innovation, and the promotion of knowledge belonging to the public domain.

The sharing of knowledge cannot however be confined to the creation of new knowledge, the promotion of knowledge belonging to the public domain or the narrowing of the cognitive divide. It implies not only universal access to knowledge, but also the active participation of everyone. It will therefore be the key to the democracies of the future, which should be based on a new type of public space….

The obstacles that stand in the way of knowledge sharing are admittedly numerous. Like the solutions we are putting forward, they are at the heart of the UNESCO World Report, Towards Knowledge Societies, directed by Jérôme Bindé and published a few months ago….Knowledge sharing will not forever be a future prospect: for it is not the problem but the solution. The sharing of knowledge does not divide knowledge: it causes it to grow and multiply.

source: UNESCO perspective on knowledge sharing

Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation asked me what what I thought of the term “author pays” –as applied to OA journals– and posted my reply to his blog. Excerpt:

One of my constant harangues is that the term “author pays” is false and misleading. Here’s an excerpt from my Open Access Overview:

A common misunderstanding is that all OA journals use an “author pays” business model. There are two mistakes here. The first is to assume that there is only one business model for OA journals, when there are many. The second is to assume that charging an upfront processing fee is an “author pays” model. In fact, fewer than half of today’s OA journals (47%) charge author-side fees. When OA journals do charge fees, the fees are usually paid by author-sponsors (employers or funders) or waived, not paid by authors out of pocket. This misunderstanding is harmful because it makes authors wonder whether they can afford to pay the fees….In fact there are many reasons why OA journals do not exclude the poor.

When OA journals do charge these fees, I call them “author-side” fees rather than “author fees”, since they must be paid by someone on the author’s side of the transaction, like a funder or employer, as opposed to someone at the reader’s side of the transaction, like a library.

But the main points are these: the majority of OA journals don’t charge any author-side fees, and for the minority that do, the fees are usually paid by sponsors or waived. Hence, authors rarely pay out of pocket. Long-term, as OA prevails, we can pay for OA journals with the savings from the cancellation, conversion, or demise of subscription-based (non-OA) journals. Then we can move from today’s situation, in which authors rarely pay out of pocket, to a situation in which they never do.

A related point is that a study last year [by the ALPSP] showed that more non-OA journals than OA journals charge author-side fees. So if there is an effect to exclude the poor, non-OA journals are guilty more often than OA journals. I say more about this in an article in the June 2006 issue of my newsletter.

source: Against the term “author pays”

Richard Squires, Editorial policy: The right to medical information, Canadian Medical Association Journal, September 12, 2006.  (Thanks to SPARC E-News.)  Excerpt:

In a recent editorial co-published by PLoS Medicine and the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Barbour and colleagues, employees of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), make the valid point that “print is no longer the most efficient way to disseminate information.” They also argue convincingly that publicly funded researchers have a moral obligation to make the results of their research freely available to everyone….

CMAJ has embraced the policy of open access to its contents on the Internet for nearly a decade and, although it still publishes a print version, its online version is considered the official journal of record. An open-access policy for online content has clear advantages: it makes information available to all who want it regardless of their ability to pay; if necessary, publication can be immediate rather than be delayed in the line-up for print publication; there are no limitations on length; and information is easily accessible. Nevertheless, it also challenges the traditional financial model of the funding of journals through advertising and subscription….

Surprisingly few of the major (if impact factor is a measure of importance) international peer-reviewed medical journals have followed CMAJ’s example. BMJ provides open access to its original research, but JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine and the Annals of Internal Medicine have bowed to indirect pressure and now provide open access only 6 months after print publication. The Lancet as yet provides no open access. Although most commercial publishers largely follow this traditional funding model, a few commercial publishers are tip-toeing into the open-access, publication-fee model.

Will print journals eventually disappear? Probably not, since we all like the leisure of leafing through our favourite medical journals. But it is clear that busy physicians looking for reliable information on a specific topic will more and more rely on the Internet. Journal publishers and editors will have to explore financial models to secure the viability of Internet and print journal formats, but we adamantly maintain that medical information arising from publicly funded research and from studies involving volunteer subjects in pharmaceutically supported clinical trials must be freely available. The whole purpose of medical research is to provide reliable and valuable health information to the profession and the public. To put that information up for ransom is not acceptable.

source: CMAJ endorses OA for publicly-funded research

CreateChange has just published an interview with Leslie Pack Kaelbling, founder of the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) and leader of the declaration of independence at Machine Learning.  (Thanks to SPARC E-News.)  Excerpt:

How have the Internet and digital technologies changed the way academics research and communicate in computer science?

…The thing that is dramatically different is how we figure out what other work is going on. CiteSeer is an online system that indexes computer science literature and finds the citations for online papers. You just type in a name and click. It’s amazing. That’s changed everybody’s life.

What barriers have you faced as you try to effectively communicate in light of this transformation?

When it was first possible to post papers on a Web site, journal publishers started to be worried and shake their fists. In the 1990s, some universities adopted policies to prohibit posting copyrighted papers on the Web, but authors typically ignored them. Scholars want people to read their stuff. We just want people to know about our work.

How did the Journal of Machine Learning Research get started and how has it benefited scholarship?

I was on the editorial board of a journal called Machine Learning, the main journal in the field. The price kept going up and we’d say, “This is ridiculous” – especially because libraries couldn’t afford it. Plus, the journal had an official policy about not putting stuff on the Web. We explained it was counter productive, to no avail. Finally, I got tired and said, “Forget it, let’s publish our own journal.” Two-thirds of the Machine Learning board resigned and started the new journal in 2000….

How has it been received?

By 2004 we had the second highest impact factored journal in all of computer science….

What is the benefit of more open sharing of research?

You know that quotation from Newton: “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Knowing what other people have done lets you build on it and not reinvent the wheel. It used to be that six people were working on the same thing at once and didn’t know it. That can still happen, but now as soon as one person writes it up in the literature you can know about it. It’s going to decrease duplication of effort, and free more people to work on things that are truly new and exciting. That’s the biggest impact.

source: Interview with Leslie Pack Kaelbling

source: OA databases in chemistry

Iryna Kuchma sends OA news from the Ukraine. Excerpt:

[A group of public and private organizations] created a working group on developing Open Access projects in Ukraine and implementing resolution of Ukrainian Parliament on Open Access.

The working group was created during a seminar Open Access: Information, Scientific Communication and Culture that took place on September 28 2006 at International Renaissance Foundation….

The seminar Open Access: Information, Scientific Communication and Culture was based on the presentation by Urs Schoepflin, Library Director, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, on International Open Access Initiatives, Open Access to Culture and Science, Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, and Open Access projects of Max Planck Society in Germany. Iryna Kuchma, International Renaissance Foundation, complemented with a presentation of latest Ukrainian and international Open Access developments, policies and practices.

At the end of 2005 Ukrainian Parliament (Verhovna Rada) passed resolution On Recommendations of Parliamentary hearing on Developing information society in Ukraine…where open access was called one of the priorities in developing information society in Ukraine….[I]t is recommended for the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine to create favourable conditions for developing open access repositories in archives, libraries, museums and other cultural institutions….[I]t is recommended for the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine to stir to activities on creating accessible national electronic information resources especially with scientific-technical and economical information; to develop model regulation on repository of electronic documents; and for the Ministry of education and science of Ukraine to speed up development of state program on ICT in education and science including the close on development of open access resources in science, technology and education with open access condition to state funded researches….

The organizations launching the new open access working group include the Parliamentary Committee on Science and Education, the State Fund for Fundamental Researches, the Scientific and Publishing Council of National Academy of Science of Ukraine, the Ministry of Science and Education of Ukraine, the National Library of Ukraine after V.Vernadsky, the State Department of Intellectual Property, the Kyiv public administration, the Association “Informatio-Consortium”, the Institute of social development, and the International Renaissance Foundation (Soros Foundation–Ukraine).

Comment. The Parliamentary resolution of December 2005 recommends an OA mandate for publicly-funded research.  It’s very good news that the working group now pushing for its implementation represents so many public agencies. 

source: Ukraine moves closer to an OA mandate

Take it!

Spread the word!

The Security Awareness Company wants to teach YOU about computer security!!!

Tell everyone you know!

Get in the know! Be aware!

source: Did We Get Your Attention?

Outsell has issued a press release on its new market report on the STM industry. Excerpt:

Outsell, Inc….today announced publication of its second annual MarketView report, Scientific, Technical & Medical Information: 2006 Market Size, Share, Forecast and Trend Report. In it, Outsell forecasts a compound annual growth rate for the segment of 7.2 percent through 2009, to reach $25.5 billion in revenue….

Key findings:

• The top 25 companies, particularly in the geophysical and energy segment, will be the engine behind STM growth in the next year. Double-digit growth is common where geophysical information and rich data are involved….
• The top 10 STM companies include Elsevier, Thomson Scientific and Healthcare, Wolters Kluwer Health, Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck Gmbh, Springer Science + Business Media, American Heart Association, Inc., WesternGeco, IHS, Inc., American Chemical Society (ACS), and John Wiley & Sons, Inc….

Companies that would like to purchase this report should go [here] or contact Outsell directly at 650-342-6060….

source: Double-digit growth predicted for STM publishers

European Archive Foundation launches free digital library, Associated Press, September 28, 2006. Excerpt:

The European Archive Foundation said Thursday it has launched its massive digital library of free music and film.

The nonprofit organization collaborates with national libraries and other organizations to make non-copyrighted, or free-use material available to the public….

On line now is an extensive database of live musical performances, classical music, early British film and a snapshot of the entire Italian Internet domain.

European Archive spokesman Julien Masanes said the European Archive has stored about 10 percent of the Internet Archive’s material, and the two institutions will eventually act as backups for each other’s records in case of disaster….

The European Archive will block information requests from Internet users whose IP addresses are registered in the United States, due to differing copyright laws, he said….

source: OA archive of music and film

Peter Moszynski, PLoS launches journal for neglected tropical diseases, BMJ, September 23, 2006.  Only the first 150 words are free online and they contain nothing not already blogged here.

source: More on PLoS NTD

Nikhil Swaminathan, Free, For All: How will the open access movement affect global science?  Seed Magazine, September 29, 2006. Excerpt:

When Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 this spring, many scientists had a warm fuzzy feeling: The bill would require any published paper drawing on research funded by a major US government agency to be put online within six months, enabling anyone with Internet access to obtain the latest scientific research.

But science publishers are not feeling the love. The bill is part of a global open access movement that is forcing the scientific community to re-address how it publishes research. In 2005, Research Councils UK recommended that all public funded studies be made available; this year, the European Commission advised EU countries to adopt an open-access policy. But, despite its noble aspirations, Cornyn-Lieberman could throw a monkey wrench into the works of scientific publishing. “Government agencies are going to become publishers competing against the [original] publishers,” said Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society (APS), which publishes 14 journals….

Cornyn-Lieberman joined an open access movement that has exploded in recent years, thanks largely to the NIH: In the late 90s, then-director Harold Varmus laid the groundwork for PubMed Central, an online archive of biology-related research. In 2000, the Nobel Prize-winner co-founded the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a non-profit that publishes the increasingly well-regarded open access journals PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine. That same year, APS decided to offer free access to articles older than a year “because we thought it was the right thing to do,” said Martin Frank. And titles like Nature, Science, PNAS, JAMA and The New England Journal of Medicine are granting free access to older articles and/or allowing authors, after a lag time, to link to articles from their personal web pages. In 2005, the NIH instituted its public access policy, which asks NIH-funded investigators to submit peer-reviewed manuscripts to PubMed Central within 12 months of journal publication….

[T]he UK’s Wellcome Trust last year began requiring its investigators to provide peer-reviewed articles within six months of publication, and an effort urging the Australian Research Council to adopt a similar system is also underway.

PNAS now allows authors to make articles available online for a fee of $1,000. About 19% of PNAS authors have elected to do so, and according to a recent study, these papers are over twice as likely to be cited…as articles in subscriber-model journals. A 2005 international survey of researchers found that 29% had published in open access journals, up 18% from 2004. “Authors appear to be being influenced by the accumulating evidence that open access leads to greater usage and citation of their articles,” said Mark Patterson, director of publishing for PLoS. In fact, in 2004’s “Journal Citation Report,” Thomson Scientific found the young PLoS Biology had a higher impact factor than the respected Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, the pricey Brain Research [$23,617 a year] and the venerable PNAS….

Comment. A good overview except that it doesn’t challenge Martin Frank’s groundless claim that FRPAA will make the US government into a publisher.  FRPAA only applies to articles already published by independent peer-reviewed journals.  The OA copies of the articles that the government will host will differ from the published originals, and be inferior to the originals, unless the publishers themselves consent to let the government host the published editions.  And of course the government copies will not be OA until six months after the originals were published.  Publishers who worry that OA archiving will undermine subscriptions rarely mention that a study commissioned by their own ALPSP (March 2006) found that high journal prices far surpassed OA archiving as a cause of journal cancellations.

source: FRPAA, OA momentum, publisher fears

The presentations from Open Education 2006 (Logan, Utah, September 27-29, 2006) are now online.  Unfortunately they’re bundled into a single, huge (3.4 MB) PDF.

source: Open Education presentations

Steve Hitchcock, ID/OA not DOA, Eprints Insiders, September 29, 2006. Excerpt:

A new term - ID/OA, where OA does not stand for open access but provides a path towards it - has begun to appear more frequently in list mails and comments to blogs. This might be an opportune moment to restate what it stands for and why it is necessary.

Immediate Deposit/Optional Access is a response to the emerging funder mandates on open access. These mandates typically respect publishers’ embargoes of six months or so before authors are required to provide open access to their own versions of published papers in an IR. Unfortunate, but true, and apparently a balance that funders believed they had to strike with publishers.

According to the chief protagonist for ID/OA, Stevan Harnad: ” Most journals now endorse immediate OA self-archiving by their authors. But for the minority of journals that do not, the deposit should be mandated to be immediate anyway, and any allowable delay or embargo should apply only to the access-setting (i.e., whether access to the deposited article is immediately set to Open Access or provisionally set to Closed Access, in which only the author can access the deposited text).” …

ID/OA authorises immediate deposit in the IR of bibliographic data and the full-text of the author version of a paper upon acceptance for publication. If an embargo applies before open access is allowed the depositor can set the embargo to expire automatically, after which the full paper becomes accessible to all from the IR.

In the meantime, a viewable record of the paper exists in the repository and displays the “Request eprint” button, which allows readers to request the full text directly from the author (allowed under the embargo even if open access is not).

In this way you have a hook to get authors to provide the data at the point in the cycle when it is most important to them, and you get immediate access if not open access. According to Harnad: “The case for immediate access is exactly the same as the case for Open Access itself.”
For a more complete description of how ID/OA fits into the general scheme of open access, see Stevan Harnad’s original blog.

Comment. This is what I’ve called the dual deposit/release strategy and I support it under any name.

source: Explaining immediate deposit / optional access

Alma Swan, Open Access: What is it and why should we have it?  A technical report from Key Perspectives, self-archived September 29, 2006.

Abstract:   Open Access (OA) means (1) greater visibility and accessibility, hence impact, from scholarly endeavour, (2) more rapid and more efficient progress, (3) better assessment, better monitoring and better management of science and (4) novel information can be created using new computational technologies. The JISC-commissioned Roadmap for UK OA repositories envisages a (I) Data Layer, consisting of the repositories themselves, underpinned by a layer of services at the Ingest Level where data are collected (technical or policy advice for repository managers, hosting services for repositories, or digitisation services for legacy literature). Above the data layer is the (II) Aggregator Layer, where content is harvested and metadata are enhanced, enriched and presented to be exploited by services operating in the top layer: (III) the Output Level. Top-layer services may include preservation services or publishing services such as peer review and adding value in the form of copyediting, formatting for print and online presentation and marking-up (e.g. into XML) to enable optimal exploitation by semantic computer technologies. Other services may harvest content and publish overlay journals, create specialised collections for particular scholarly communities in individual disciplines for teaching and learning or to be added to other types of material to provide high added-value services with revenue-earning potential.

source: Four benefits of OA

Paul Peters, The Economics of Open Access Publishing, a preprint to be presented at Online Information 2006 (London, November 28-30, 2006).  Peters is the Senior Publishing Developer at Hindawi Publishing. Excerpt:

While advocates of open access publishing have tended to focus on the benefits that it can offer authors and readers, there are equally important benefits that an open access publishing model can provide for small and mid-sized publishers. Within the existing subscription-based publishing industry there are a number of market forces that work against smaller publishers, and this is making it increasingly difficult for these smaller publishers to stay competitive. However, by adopting a business model based on publication charges, smaller publishers can overcome many of the difficulties that they currently face in the subscription market.

There are three main advantages that open access can provide for smaller publishers. One important advantage is that it makes the growth of both new and existing journals much easier. In addition, a shift to open access will promote more competition between publishers, which will enable many smaller publishers to gain a competitive edge over the largest and most well-established publishing houses. Finally, an open access publishing model will make a journal far more attractive to potential authors, since they can avoid many of the unnecessary limitations imposed by subscription-based models….

source: Advantages of OA for small publishers

Elsevier has adopted a policy for authors whose research is funded by the Wellcome Trust.  The key piece of background, of course, is that Wellcome mandates OA for Wellcome-funded research.  Excerpt from Elsevier’s new policy:

…Elsevier has made an agreement with the Wellcome Trust that will allow authors who publish in Elsevier journals to comply with [Wellcome’s] requirements. This new agreement is intended to support the needs of Elsevier authors, editors, and society publishing partners, and protect the quality and integrity of the peer review process.

Wellcome Trust funded authors publishing in Elsevier journals can comply with the Wellcome Trust policy by paying a subsidy fee to the journal to help offset the cost of peer review and other publishing costs. Wellcome Trust will reimburse authors who have paid the subsidy fee. The fee has initially been set at $3,000 per article for all Elsevier journals except those published by Cell Press, which have a $5,000 per article subsidy fee, and The Lancet, which will have a fee of £400 per page. The difference in fees for The Lancet and Cell Press reflects higher associated costs.

Upon final publication, Elsevier will send to PMC the Wellcome Trust Subsidised Manuscript (a version of the accepted manuscript that reflects all author-agreed changes that arise from the peer-review, copy-editing and proofing processes) and will authorize its public posting on PMC, and PMC mirror sites, immediately. The Wellcome Trust Subsidised Manuscript on PMC and PMC mirror sites will also link directly to the final published journal article, which will continue to reside only on Elsevier’s websites and which Elsevier will make freely available to both non-subscribers and subscribers.

There is no change to Elsevier’s author posting policy that allows authors to post revised personal versions of manuscripts (those that reflect changes made in the peer review) on their own web sites and the sites of their institutions, provided a link to the journal is included. Posting directly to PMC or other sites outside an author’s institution continue to be prohibited, as does any further republishing or redistribution of Elsevier copyright-protected content and Society copyright-protected content published by Elsevier. This new agreement enables Wellcome Trust-funded authors to comply with the Wellcome Trust Policy without having to violate their publishing agreements with Elsevier….

Comment.  I’ve criticized publishers who charge authors for the right to comply with their own funding contracts.  (”Authors shouldn’t have to pay their publisher in order to live up to a contract with their funder.”)  But the circumstances change when the funder is willing to pay the fee charged by the publisher. 

As long as funders like Wellcome are willing to do this, and as long as the publisher fees are reasonably tied to the actual costs of an efficient operation, then this can be a win-win-win.  Authors and funders get OA to their research; publishers get their expenses covered for providing it; and authors pay nothing out of pocket.  There’s a fourth party in the wings –subscribers– who will win too if the publisher reduces subscription prices in proportion to author uptake of its OA option.

There are still ways in which the deal can be improved.  Elsevier could make the OA edition the same as the published edition.  It could let participating authors retain copyright and use CC licenses (or equivalents) on the OA editions.  It could let participating authors deposit their articles in any OA repository, not just their own IR.  (For more background, see my June article on Elsevier’s hybrid journal program, where I pointed out that the Elsevier terms conflicted with the Wellcome Trust’s requirements.)

If we conceive the funder-grantee contract to be independent of the author-publisher contract, then it looks like publisher fees are meddling in contracts to which publishers are not a party.  But the Wellcome-Elsevier agreement suggests that these previously separate contracts are merging and that we will have to recognize a new kind of tripartite contract among authors, funders, and publishers.  If so, publishers who enter these agreements can’t complain when public policies to regulate access to publicly-funded research have the side-effect of regulating publishers, something they have been very touchy about in the past.

source: Elsevier and Wellcome come to an agreement

Australia’s Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) has published an important report by John Houghton, Colin Steele & Peter Sheehan:  Research Communication Costs In Australia: Emerging Opportunities And Benefits, September 2006 (also available in RTF). Excerpt:

[D]espite billions of dollars being spent by governments on R&D each year, relatively little policy attention has yet been paid to the dissemination of the results of that research through scientific and scholarly publishing.

A key question facing us today is, are there new opportunities and new models for scholarly communication that could enhance the dissemination of research findings and, thereby, maximise the economic and social returns to public investment in R&D? …

The study draws on international and local experience to provide a preliminary cost-benefit analysis of existing and emerging alternatives for scholarly communication for institutions in Australia, and for Australia as a whole….

Perhaps the most important potential benefit of open access is enhanced access to, and greater use of, research findings, which would, in turn, increase the efficiency of R&D as it builds upon previous research. There is also significant potential to expand the use and application of research findings to a much wider range of users, well beyond the core research institutions that have had access to the subscription-based literature.

Estimating the benefits of a one-off increase in accessibility and efficiency we find that:

• With public sector R&D expenditure at AUD 5,912 million in 2002-03 and a 25% rate of social return to R&D, a 5% increase in accessibility and efficiency would be worth AUD 150 million a year;
• With higher education R&D expenditure at AUD 3,430 million and a 25% rate of social return to R&D, a 5% increase in accessibility and efficiency would be worth AUD 88 million a year; and
• With ARC administered competitive grants funding at AUD 480 million and a 25% rate of social return to R&D, a 5% increase in accessibility and efficiency would be worth AUD 12 million a year.

Note that these are recurring annual gains from the effect on one year’s R&D. Assuming that the change is permanent they can be converted to growth rate effects….

Expressing these impacts as a benefit/cost ratio we find that, over 20 years, a full system of institutional repositories in Australia costing AUD 10 million a year and achieving a 100% self-archiving compliance would show:

• A benefit/cost ratio of 51 for the modelled impacts of open access to public sector research (i.e. the benefits are 51 times greater than the costs);
• A benefit/cost ratio of 30 for the modelled impacts of open access to higher education research; and
• A benefit/cost ratio of 4.1 for the modelled impacts of open access to ARC competitive grants funded research….

There are new opportunities and new models for scholarly communication that can enhance the communication and dissemination of research findings to all potential users and, thereby, increase the economic and social returns to public investment in R&D. Open access is, perhaps, the most important.

Seizing these opportunities and realising the benefits will depend upon appropriate reward systems and incentives to ensure:

• Widespread adoption of open access strategies by universities, research funding bodies and government agencies;
• ‘Hard or soft mandated’ deposit of research output at the national, funder and/or institutional levels;
• Fully integrated institutional repositories or relevant subject-based archives based upon open access standards; and
• Fully developed links between content ‘publishing’ and research management, reporting and evaluation.

Research evaluation is the primary point of leverage, influencing strongly the scholarly communication and dissemination choices of researchers and their institutions. A related secondary point of leverage is funding, and the conditions funding bodies put upon it….Inter alia, this means:

• Ensuring that the Research Quality Framework supports and/or encourages the development of new, more open scholarly communication mechanisms, rather than encouraging a retreat by researchers to conventional publication forms and media, and a reliance by evaluators upon traditional publication metrics;
• Encouraging funding agencies (e.g. ARC, NHMRC, etc.) to mandate that the results of their supported research be available in open access archives or repositories;
• Encouraging universities and research institutions to support the development of new, more open scholarly communication mechanisms, through, for example, the development of hard or soft open access mandates for their supported research; and
• Providing support for a structured advocacy program to raise awareness and inform all stakeholders about the potential benefits of more open scholarly communication alternatives, and provide leadership in such areas as copyright….

Comment.  This is a detailed, credible attack on a hard problem:  estimating the net economic benefits to a nation in promoting open access to its research output.  Every policy-maker should read it.  Friends of OA in every country should bring its analysis and conclusions to the attention of their legislators and public funding agencies.

source: A powerful case for the economic benefits of OA