Technology Blog

Three of Germany’s national research institutions have signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge:

1. Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und —prüfung (BAM, or Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing)
2. Bundesanstalt für Geowissenschaften und Rohstoffe (BGR, or Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources)
3. Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB, or National Metrology Institute of Germany)

source: Three more German institutions sign the Berlin Declaration

Kenneth D. Crews and Gerard van Westrienen, Copyright, Publishing, and Scholarship, The “Zwolle Group” Initiative for the Advancement of Higher Education, D-Lib Magazine, January / February 2007.  Excerpt:

The relationship of copyright law to the creation and publication of scholarly works is a critical concern for the advancement of new knowledge. The owner of the copyrights in scholarly publications can often control access to the information in those publications, as well as control many uses of [them]….Readers and other researchers are often constrained in their ability to access and use those new works by the limitations and controls that can result from copyright protection. How faculty authors, working with their universities and publishers, make decisions about the management of the copyright can have profound consequences for the ability of researchers, students, libraries, and other users to obtain, read, disseminate, and learn from scholarly works and the information they embody….

In the 1990s many of the stakeholders in these developments began to witness immediate and complicated implications for research related to copyright law. These developments prompted SURF Foundation…to initiate an international copyright project. SURF Foundation was seeking a cooperative approach to these often contentious issues. The initiative became known as the “Zwolle Group,” and it has now completed five years of developing and sharing guidance for faculty authors, publishers, librarians, and other stakeholders who are seeking to improve their management of copyright issues. The cooperation of major stakeholders as equal partners makes the Zwolle initiative unique in the world.

This article marks…provides an examination of the issues and the projects of the Zwolle Group….

A most recent product pursuing implementation of the Zwolle Principles is a paper examining Open Access [Frederick Friend, December 2004]. The paper concludes that good rights management procedures are as important for open access content as they are for purchased content. The paper examines the issues and interests at stake in the management of copyrights, with a view toward facilitating open access, particularly the availability of scholarly works through institutional repositories. The purpose of the procedures is not to hinder the legitimate use of the open access content but to protect the legitimate interests of stakeholders. Licences and clear copyright and other rights statements are the key tools in the implementation of the Zwolle Principles in relation to open access content….

source: Overview of the Zwolle principles

I’m on the road with intermittent opportunities to blog.  I’ll start catching up on recent news tomorrow or the next day.

source: On the road

Elena Giglia, Open Access e ricerca in area biomedica : un’introduzione, Università degli studi di Torino, Servizio Informazioni Biomediche, 2007.  Self-archived, January 15, 2007.  In Italian but with this English-language abstract: 

Introductory bibliography to Open Access in the biomedical field, as made out for the congress Institutional archives for research: experiences and projects in Open Access, Rome 29 nov-1 dec 2006. It lists “Web resources” with a practical target and more theoretical “Contributions”. Online version [here].

source: Bibliography of OA in biomedicine

Stevan Harnad, EURAB’s Proposed OA Mandate: Strongest of the 20 Adopted and 5 Proposed So Far, Open Access Archivangelism, January 15, 2007.  Excerpt:

The ROARMAP Registry of University and Funder Self-Archiving Mandates keeps growing: 56 policies, 20 adopted mandates, and 5 proposed mandates so far, worldwide. But the latest mandate proposal from EURAB is the best of them all: So good that I don’t have a single recommendation for improving it! It has all the essential ingredients:

1. Deposit of peer-reviewed postprint is required
2. Deposit required immediately upon acceptance for publication (no exceptions, no delays)
3. Deposit in Institutional or Central Repository
4. Set access to deposit as Open Access as soon as possible, within 6 months at the latest.

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

That’s it. It’s not possible to design a better policy, or one that is surer to get the entire international research community to 100% OA more reliably, quickly or effectively….Please emulate it at your university, research institution or funding agency and we’ll reach the optimal and inevitable at long last….

source: More on the OA mandate proposal from EURAB

Arthur Sale, The Patchwork Mandate, D-Lib Magazine, January/February 2007. 

This article is written mainly for repository managers who are at a loss as to what policies they (or their universities or research institutions) ought to deploy in order to ensure that most, if not all, of the institution’s scholarly output is deposited in the institution’s repository. In essence, there are only two pure policies:  [1] requiring (mandating) researchers to deposit, and [2] relying on voluntary (spontaneous) participation, with or without encouragement.  This short article describes a third policy that provides a transitional path between the two….

I call it the patchwork mandate for reasons that will become obvious….What is the patchwork mandate? Simply this:

1. Knowing that you have been unable to convince the senior executives, you nevertheless personally commit to having a mandate across your institution.
2. You aim to pursue a strategy that will achieve an institutional mandate in the long term. (It is highly recommended that you register your intention to do this in ROARMAP so as to encourage other repository managers caught in the same dilemma.)
3. Since you haven’t been able to get an institutional mandate, you work instead towards getting departmental (school/faculty) mandates one by one. Each departmental mandate will rapidly trend towards 100%, and little activism is needed to maintain this level….

PS:  This is the published version of paper I blogged as a preprint on November 11, 2006.  See my earlier post for a supportive comment.

source: Mandating OA department by department

Find a spot where a building blocks out the Sun, but allows you a clear view of the sky just to the east, far enough to that side to stay visible up to a half hour past sunset. That stretched out cloud pointing off into the sky is Comet McNaught, said to be the brightest comet to pass our skies in over 40 years.

Comet McNaught hasn’t disappointed. As it veered into Mercury’s orbit, the comet ejected fiery debris, putting on a spectacular show visible in the daytime, with the naked eye. Astronomers assign a numerical value to celestial objects to denote their brightness; the lower the number, the brighter the object. Comet McNaught has reached minus 5, compared to minus 4 for the planet Venus
[ The Brilliant Comet McNaught - Astronomy ]

Unfortunately for those of us in the northern hemisphere, McNaught’s round of the Sun shoots it out to our southern side, which is just as well considering the cloudy cold-snap up here in the woodlands. If you’d like to sneak a peek before it skips out to Argentina, Space.com has viewing maps and links to the archival and current SOHO images

source: The Brilliant Comet McNaught

The January 2007 issue of Nucleic Acids Research is devoted to databases, mostly OA databases.  (Thanks to bbgm.)  From Alex Batemen’s editorial introduction to the issue:

The 2007 Database Issue of Nucleic Acids Research is the fourteenth in a series dedicated to databases in the field of molecular biology. These databases are essential resources for experimental and computational biologists alike and this compilation provides descriptions and updates of the most important of these databases, and serves to introduce newly compiled resources that provide specialist information in the biological area. The current issue is the largest yet and presents 68 new databases and updates of 106 existing databases. The 2007 Database Issue is not included in the print subscription to NAR. Instead, the Database Issue is freely available online to all under NAR’s open access model. However, print copies are available for separate purchase by institutions and individuals….

Having now edited the database issue for 4 years and carefully inspected over a thousand different biological databases. I feel I am well placed to give advice to prospective authors. There are many important aspects to any web accessible database that might be published in [a future edition of] this issue….

• Do attribute the original sources of derived data.
• Do make sure that you are not breaching any license terms by redistributing data….
• Do make data available for bulk download as flat files or relational database tables with associated documentation.
• Web services and DAS are becoming popular ways to make databases programmatically available. Making these available can stop your website being ground to a halt by users trying to screen scrape all your data.
• Do allow users to provide feedback on your data and submit new data….

source: Advice for OA database maintainers

JournalJunkie provides free online podcasts of the abstracts of articles in a growing number of medical journals.  You can listen to them online or download them to your MP3 player.  You can also “subscribe” for automatic downloads.  When the journals provide their own podcasts (as Lancet, BMJ, NEJM, and JAMA do, for example), JournalJunkie simply adds links and the layer of subscription management.  For journals that don’t already provide podcasts, JournalJunkie makes its own.  All the voices on its podcasts are human –and it has a standing call for more human readers.

source: Free online podcast abstracts

Authoratory is a tool for data-mining information about authors with articles cited on PubMed Central.  From the site:

The content of Authoratory is produced by analyzing large amounts of data from PubMed….

Authoratory data-mining techniques make it possible to discover new information about the authors - the information that is not apparent by reviewing one or two of their articles. For each selected author Authoratory gives the following:

• the author status: primary or non-primary (primary author publishes articles independently, while non-primary always publishes articles with another author or a group of authors)
• the list of most frequent coauthors (navigate the social network between the authors using their join publications)
• professional interests (as indicated by the MeSH keywords and by the statistical analysis of abstracts and publication titles)
• the author’s affiliated institution and contact information
• the change of all these parameters across time

Authoratory keyword search is unique as well. It uses keyword frequencies to rank authors against each other. The more papers the particular author publishes for a specific keyword, the higher his rank is in the keyword listings. With Authoratory keyword search it ’s possible to quickly find all authors with the expertise in a specific narrow topic….

source: Data-mining PubMed for author information

Wealth Strategies Journal is a new OA journal published by Joshua Tree Enterprises.  Its inaugural issue (November / December 2006) is now online.  (Thanks to PA Elder.)

source: New OA journal on estate planning

OA Librarian has announced two peer-reviewed OA journals published by Simon Fraser University:

1. Child Health and Education/ Santé et Éducation de l’Enfance (the link doesn’t work for me at the moment but assume the problem is temporary)
2. International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership (launched in 2006, now in its third issue)

source: Two OA journals from Simon Fraser University

The Indian government has launched OA “knowledge portals” on water and energy, the first two in a series.  From yesterday’s press release:

A national drive to ensure access to knowledge and learning can transform India’s potential for development, lift young Indians to new levels of understanding and competence, and make India one of the leading knowledge societies in the world. This is the central affirmation of the National Knowledge Commission in its 2006 Report to the Nation, released here today. The Report was presented to the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, by Commission Chairman Mr Sam Pitroda. The special function was also marked by the Prime Minister’s inauguration of two national knowledge portals, opening public access to knowledge and ideas on the issues of Water and Energy.

Appointed by the Prime Minister in October 2005 with a three-year mandate, the Commission is assigned to prepare a blueprint for radical improvement of knowledge access, knowledge creation and application, by and for the Indian people….The Commission has already submitted wide-ranging recommendations for action to the Prime Minister. The Report today made these recommendations public….

The inauguration of the two national web portals on Water and Energy marks the Commission’s bid to enhance public access to information and knowledge on these two critical development issues. To ensure that the recommended knowledge flow and outreach is available to everyone, similar access is envisaged through the media of print, audio-visual communication, library and information institutions and services, and live interaction processes, in all languages. The promotion of web portals on internet is just one of the Commission’s initiatives to open up knowledge sources and resources for public use. The portals are designed to be interactive, and will offer the user public web space to share information and ideas and to create knowledge resources. The Commission has sought the partnership of expert organisations to lead and ‘champion’ the development of the portals. The Water portal has been developed by the public charitable Arghyam Trust, and the Energy portal by TERI. Public use portals and other communication outreach are also likely on the issues of environment, health, citizen’s rights and employment….

source: India launches OA knowledge portals on water and energy

Stevan Harnad, Cliff Lynch on Open Access, Open Access Archivangelism, January 12, 2007.  Excerpt:

Summary:  Comments on Cliff Lynch’s “Improving Access to Research Results: Six Points“:

“Open Access Is Inevitable: How Best to Get There?”

Universities and research funders can and do mandate OA (Green) self-archiving. Cliff seems to be fixated on waiting instead for a transition to OA (Gold) Publishing (and a rather vague definition of OA as “reduced barriers”). He recognizes that Gold’s asking price is too high, but not that the transition is also far too uncertain, has already wasted far too much time, and is out of the hands of the research community, whereas Green OA mandates are fast, sure, virtually cost-free, and entirely within the hands of researchers, their universities and their funders. Cliff thinks Green OA is “less optimal” for no reason other than that he thinks it will lead to “fragmentation”: Of course it won’t: the unifying glue for distributed journal articles is their metadata tags, including their journal’s name, not the glue binding any journal’s contents.

“Universities Have a Key Stake in the Future of the Scholarly Literature and Thus Should Support Faculty in Negotiations with Publishers.”

Advice and support from universities (and funders) on retaining rights is welcome, but rights retention is not a necessary precondition for self-archiving, nor for mandating self-archiving; so if it poses any obstacle to agreement on immediate adoption of a self-archiving mandate (e.g., because researchers are concerned that rights retention might constrain their choice of journals or might put too big a negotiating burden on them), it should be dropped….

“We Need to Talk Directly about the Support of Scholarly Societies.”

It is not at all clear why we need to do that! What we need is OA. Green Self-Archiving mandates provide 100% OA. Publisher permission — whether Scholarly Society or commercial — is not required for funders and universities to mandate immediate deposit. It is not a conversion to Gold OA publishing that is being mandated. (Funders and universities can only impose mandates on their fundees and employees, not on publishers.) In any case, the funding of Scholarly Societies’ “good works” should not be subsidized at the cost of researchers’ lost usage and impact. (Cliff does not disagree, but the reason he wants to talk is because he is thinking only of Gold.)

“We Need to Think about What We Can Afford in Scholarly Publishing.”

Cliff is right to be sceptical about Gold OA’s current asking price but this is only an issue for those who for some reason want to promote immediate conversion to Gold OA, right now. For those who merely seek 100% OA now, the current price of Gold is irrelevant….

“Scholarly Publishing Is a Means to an End: Just because the existing scholarly publishing system has served the academy fairly well in the past does not mean that it has an intrinsic right to continue to exist in perpetuity.”

The research community needs OA (to all peer-reviewed journal articles), now; publishing reform is a different agenda….

source: Harnad on Lynch on OA

Stuart Weibel has blogged some notes on Michael Keller’s January 8 talk at OCLC, Mass Digitization in Google Book Search: Effects on Scholarship.  (Thanks to The Stoa Consortium.)  Excerpt:

Mike Keller delivered a presentation at OCLC today entitled Mass Digitization in Google Book Search: Effects on Scholarship. Mike is director of Stanford University Libraries, and wears an academic publisher’s hat as well, being responsible for High Wire Press and Stanford University Press. He commands a panoramic view of the digital scholarly landscape, and has the intellect and experience to convert view to vision. This vision is both breathtaking and, in some respects, disturbing….

Several salient observations from his remarks:

• Digitization of the card catalog resulted in a 50 % increase in book usage
• Google indexing is the #1 driver of article usage in High Wire – by a large margin (10 to 1 beyond the next highest, if I understood him correctly)….

It is difficult to resist Keller’s assertion that Google Book Search (GBS) is likely to revolutionize access to books more than any single factor in the library world – if not directly, then indirectly. It would be hard to be a librarian and not find chagrin in this realization.  Keller rightly urges us to focus on the larger picture and the many benefits….

Keller suggested that the most important thing about GBS is that it has occasioned a great debate about the importance of copyright in the intellectual life of the nation (and the world)….Perhaps for the first time, there are heavy hitters on both sides of the argument, which may result in a reinterpretation of fair use that makes more sense (to libraries and readers) in the digital age.  One may hope.

Keller pointed out the importance of healthy competition among various digitization projects: the Million Book Project, GBS, the Open Content Alliance, the Microsoft/British Library and Microsoft/Cornell efforts. Could we have imagined anything like this rush to mine the library shelves of the world even a few years ago? Could we (the library community) have marshalled either the vision or the resources to accomplish the task on our own?  It is unlikely.

On the dark side, he raised the image of libraries as herds of cows in these deals. Participants are kept in the dark, enjoined from sharing the details of their deals with other participants, let alone with their public constituencies….

What is evident is that benefits for the G-Libraries are substantial. The libraries involved receive a windfall of the digitized contents of their collections (though, Keller also points out that much is likely to have to be recaptured at higher resolution in the future)….

source: Michael Keller on Google book-scanning

U. of Michigan Press, Library, Scholarly Publishing Office Launch Digital Studies Imprint, Web Site, Library Journal Academic Newswire, January 11, 2007.  Excerpt:

With its latest venture, the University of Michigan Press is exploring the cutting edge, both in terms of the content it publishes and how it publishes. Under a new collaborative program between the press, the library, and the Scholarly Publishing Office, the UM Press’s new Digital Culture imprint will both sell books and offer the full-text of those books freely on its Digital Culture Books website….

As groundbreaking as some of the ideas, however, is the Press’s decision to practice what many of its authors now preach, using the Digital Culture imprint to develop an “open and participatory publishing model” that seeks to “build a community” around its content. “Our goal is to give each project a robust online and print presence and to use the effort not only to introduce scholars to a range of publishing choices but also to collect data about how consumption habits vary on the basis of genre, age, discipline,” MacKeen explained. “The data will help us to understand more about the economics of digital publishing, and will also, we think, offset any potential economic risks by developing the venture as a research opportunity.” …

Pochoda stressed that there is “more than a business model at stake,” however, noting that the collaborative nature of the Digital Culture imprint represents the press’ chance “to support open access in principle and practice while still acknowledging the obligation to survive as a business operation.” Nevertheless, he has reason to believe the press will sell some books. The National Academy Press, for example, offers its book content online, Pochoda notes, and its data suggests a corresponding jump in sales.

source: New line of OA books from U of Michigan Press

Government looks at data shake-up, BBC News, January 12, 2007.  Excerpt:

The way the government makes its vast amounts of data available to the public could be about to change.  It has decided to make access to a database of UK laws completely free for the public to access and re-use….

It is a victory for campaigners who think public sector information should be free for the public to use….

The focus of this issue has revolved around The Statute Law Database, a huge undertaking designed to catalogue all existing legislation in the UK.

It has been ten years in the making and has eaten up public funds along the way. Because of this, the government was keen initially to make some money back on it.

The decision to make it completely free is a landmark one, said Jim Wretham, head of Information Policy at the Office of Public Sector Information.

“It is a tremendously important resource. It marks a sea-change in the general thinking about the way government information becomes available,” he said….

“In the case of Ordnance Survey the government is dependent on the income it generates to cover the cost of making the maps,” said Mr Wretham.  But, he admits, the way government information is used in the public domain is due for a shake-up.  “The Office of Fair Trading recently published a report on the commercial use of public information and certain aspects of our licensing activities were questioned,” he said.  “The time is ripe for improvement,” he added.

The government has until the end of March to respond to the findings of the Office of Fair Trading….

It could mean that fees are removed completely and would be a huge victory for campaigners and websites keen to exploit the vast resources of government databases….

PS:  For background on OA to the Statute Law Database, see my blog post from December 21, 2006.  For background on the Office of Fair Trading report supporting the case for OA to public information, see my post from December 8, 2006.

source: OA to UK law may trigger OA to other public info

The International Journal of Communication is a new peer-reviewed OA journal published by the USC Annenberg Center for Communication.  (Thanks to Adrian Ho.)  The inaugural issue is now online.  From its open access policy:

Open Access enables authors to obtain the maximum possible exposure for their work. Freely available papers are read more, cited more, and have more impact than ones available only to paid subscribers. As an experiment, enter a research topic into a search engine like Google and see how many links you obtain to papers published in traditional journals. You will find that most references are to working papers, not to published papers, because working papers are freely available.

The advent of the web has made free dissemination of research feasible and financially viable. Because existing specialty journals obtain revenues from selling subscriptions, primarily to libraries, access to the research they publish is limited. The attractive revenue stream that such subscriptions provide makes it unlikely that these journals will convert to Open Access. Thus a need exists for new refereed Open Access journals to replace existing journals. We believe that the establishment of a major Open Access journal in communication study will lead others to establish Open Access journals for many sub-fields and specialities in communication, reclaiming full control for the profession of its research output. We hope that this will lead the profession to a new norm in which all research is freely available.

source: New OA journal of communication

Richard Poynder, Open Radio, Open and Shut, January 11, 2007.  Excerpt:

At the end of last year I received an email from a US community radio station called KRUU-FM, which is based in Fairfield, Iowa. While surfing the Web Sundar Raman, the host of a show called Open Views, had come across the interviews I have been doing with leaders of the various free and open movements, and he wanted to talk to me about them on air.

Sympathetic to the notion of community radio, and intrigued by the raison d’être of Open Views — to explore the open source and free culture movements around the world “stretching beyond the limits of software” — I agreed to do the interview, which was broadcast in December (and can be heard here). 

It was only after the interview was over, however, that I realised that KRUU is more than just a community radio station: it is also a grassroots initiative with a deep commitment to the principles advocated by the various free and open movements. Or as station manager James Moore more extensively described it during the inaugural Open Views programme, KRUU is “grassroots, community, public, non-profit, open radio.” …

source: What is open radio?

Andrea Marchitelli, Open access weblog, Biblioteche oggi, 24, 10 (2006) pp. 54-55.  In Italian but with this English-language abstract:

In this review the author examines three weblogs about open access, to demonstrate that is possible to be so different talking about the same things.

The three blogs reviewed are DigitalKoans by Charles Bailey, Open Access Archivangelism by Stevan Harnad, and Open Access News by yours truly.

source: Review of three blogs on OA