Technology Blog

The National Library of Catalonia (Biblioteca de Catalunya) and four other Catalonian libraries have joined the Google Library project.  From Google’s announcement:

The mission of the Library of Catalonia is to collect, preserve, and spread Catalonian bibliographic production and that related to the Catalonian linguistic area, to look after its conservation, and to spread its bibliographic heritage while maintaining the status of a universal center for research and consultation.

This translation of the National Library of Catalonia’s mission statement makes it clear why the National Library of Barcelona, Catalonia’s largest library, and four affiliate Catalonian libraries have decided to join the Google Book Search Library Project. By digitizing these libraries’ out-of-copyright books, millions of people around the world will be able to trace Catalonian history and culture through centuries of text….

PS:  Google is expanding its coverage of libraries outside the English-speaking world, begun in September 2006 when Complutense University of Madrid joined the project.  And the National Library of Catalonia is expanding its commitment to free online content, begun in April 2006 when it signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access.

source: Five Catalonian libraries join the Google Library project

Peter Brantley, Print on Demand and Digitization, Peter Brantley’s Thoughts and Speculations, January 11, 2007.  Excerpt:

…One of reasons for the interest in print on demand among libraries is the possibility that they may soon have access to significant digital repositories.  The most prominent example, and one near and dear to my present heart at the University of California, is the potential digital largesse of works being made available via the Google Book Search Library partners program.  In the program, libraries get back a digital copy of their works scanned by Google.  Obviously, for works that are in copyright, there is a very limited number of things that libraries can do with these copies.  For public domain works, however, almost anything is fair game, including printing off your own copies.

One of the challenges of the Google Book Search program for libraries is that the quality of the images delivered to libraries is uneven, and certainly not archival.  Without belaboring the details, it is fair to say that Google’s effort is focussed on the indexing of the texts to power discovery, and a marred display image is an acceptable compromise to make in order to reach the magnitudes of digitization necessary to make the operation - an industrial one in scale - sustainable.   But  not-pretty images pose a problem for print on demand….

For these repositories to be acceptable, [John Mark Ockerbloom] points that what we should do is to establish a clearing house or registry of these digitized works….

[I]f a faculty member requested a print of a book, a librarian could verify whether it met minimal standards and could give it a rough grade, certifying it to a certain level.  They wouldn’t try to correct or itemize the errors, but rather merely note this was a readable work, or readable but for the preface.  In such a fashion, particularly if universities could ever figure out how to work together to make a centralized repository of public domain works, one could know simply by looking up the work whether it was printable or not….

source: All the digitized books fit to print

Rich Cave and Barbara Cohen, The Public Library of Science: Open-Access Publishing and Advocacy, a slide presentation at Net Tuesday San Francisco, January 9, 2006.  The podcast will soon be available here.  (Thanks to NetSquared.)

source: PLoS at Net Tuesday San Francisco

Barbara Kirsop, Leslie Chan, Subbiah Arunachalam, Open access essential to improve information exchange, SciDev.Net, January 11, 2007.  A letter to the editor.  Excerpt:

We fully support Donat Agosti’s contention that open access is the only way for publicly-funded research to be shared not only between the North and South, but also between developing countries (see ‘Free access to research should not be limited’).

It is also our view that UN-supported projects like the Online Access to Research in the Environment, Health Internetwork Access to Research Initiative and Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture initiatives only provide ’sticking plaster’ solutions to information deprivation….

We do not understand why influential UN organisations such as the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the UN Environment Programme — whose remits are to support international health, agriculture and environmental programmes — are not encouraging the open access movement. By concentrating on the above projects and working with commercial publishers, they hamper research into issues such as climate change, HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and avian flu.

Meeting these challenges requires strategies to increase information exchange. Why, then, are these agencies solely supporting programmes that have limited global beneficiaries? For example, countries like India with low gross domestic products are barred from collaboration. These agencies should also be working to promote open access to all publicly funded research information….

UNESCO is the only UN agency that seems to have understood the importance of open access having endorsed its use in the draft programme and budget for 2006-2007. We urge other UN agencies and key funding bodies around the world to follow suit.

source: The UN should support OA

Stevan Harnad, The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition, a Technical Report for the Department of Electronics and Computer Science, Southampton University, self-archived January 10, 2007.

Abstract:   What the research community needs, urgently, is free online access (Open Access, OA) to its own peer-reviewed research output. Researchers can provide that in two ways: by publishing their articles in OA journals (Gold OA) or by continuing to publish in non-OA journals and self-archiving their final peer-reviewed drafts in their own OA Institutional Repositories (Green OA). OA self-archiving, once it is mandated by research institutions and funders, can reliably generate 100% Green OA. Gold OA requires journals to convert to OA publishing (which is not in the hands of the research community) and it also requires the funds to cover the Gold OA publication costs. With 100% Green OA, the research community’s access and impact problems are already solved. If and when 100% Green OA should cause significant cancellation pressure (no one knows whether or when that will happen, because OA Green grows anarchically, article by article, not journal by journal) then the cancellation pressure will cause cost-cutting, downsizing and eventually a leveraged transition to OA (Gold) publishing on the part of journals. As subscription revenues shrink, institutional windfall savings from cancellations grow. If and when journal subscriptions become unsustainable, per-article publishing costs will be low enough, and institutional savings will be high enough to cover them, because publishing will have downsized to just peer-review service provision alone, offloading text-generation onto authors and access-provision and archiving onto the global network of OA Institutional Repositories. Green OA will have leveraged a transition to Gold OA. 

source: The path from here to there

Christine Gorman, Name That Life Saver! Time Magazine, January 8, 2007.  Excerpt:

Forget Myspace. You should see what the Web 2.0 revolution is doing to medical journals. There’s a contest to name the most important medical advance since 1840 over at the venerable British Medical Journal. (Results to be posted on Jan. 18) …

But first prize still has to go to the Public Library of Science journals…, which jumped on the open-access research bandwagon early, and has been shaking up the paid-subscription journals ever since. No special licenses are required for doctors in poor countries to read high-quality PloS articles in full. As long as readers have internet access, the articles are free.

PloS.org’s latest offering: PloS One, where research articles from a wide variety of disciplines undergo minimal pre-publication review. The heavy lifting comes from what the editors call “community peer review,” which is done completely transparently through reader annotations on the web….

PS:  Is this first prize as a life saver or first prize as an example of Web 2.0?  Both? 

Note to Gorman:  While there were OA journals before PLoS, it’s more true to say that PLoS helped create the bandwagon than jumped on it.

source: First prize to PLoS

The December 2006 issue of Access is now online.  This issue has articles on OARE, OpenDOAR, Google Scholar, the Asean Library, the British Academy report on copyright barriers to social science and humanities research, and the Publishing Research Consortium study on journal cancellations. 

source: December issue of Access

David L. Schriger, Sripha Ouk, and Douglas G. Altman, The Use of the World Wide Web by Medical Journals in 2003 and 2005: An Observational Study, Pediatrics, January 2007.  (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)  Abstract:

Objectives. The 2- to 6-page print journal article has been the standard for 200 years, yet this format severely limits the amount of detailed information that can be conveyed. The World Wide Web provides a low-cost option for posting extended text and supplementary information. It also can enhance the experience of journal editors, reviewers, readers, and authors through added functionality (eg, online submission and peer review, postpublication critique, and e-mail notification of table of contents.) Our aim was to characterize ways that journals were using the World Wide Web in 2005 and note changes since 2003.

Methods. We analyzed the Web sites of 138 high-impact print journals in 3 ways. First, we compared the print and Web versions of March 2003 and 2005 issues of 28 journals (20 of which were randomly selected from the 138) to determine how often articles were published Web only and how often print articles were augmented by Web-only supplements. Second, we examined what functions were offered by each journal Web site. Third, for journals that offered Web pages for reader commentary about each article, we analyzed the number of comments and characterized these comments.

Results. Fifty-six articles (7%) in 5 journals were Web only. Thirteen of the 28 journals had no supplementary online content. By 2005, several journals were including Web-only supplements in >20% of their papers. Supplementary methods, tables, and figures predominated. The use of supplementary material increased by 5% from 2% to 7% in the 20-journal random sample from 2003 to 2005. Web sites had similar functionality with an emphasis on linking each article to related material and e-mailing readers about activity related to each article. There was little evidence of journals using the Web to provide readers an interactive experience with the data or with each other. Seventeen of the 138 journals offered rapid-response pages. Only 18% of eligible articles had any comments after 5 months.

Conclusions. Journal Web sites offer similar functionality. The use of online-only articles and online-only supplements is increasing.

From the body of the paper:

The Web-only model of journal publication eliminates printing costs, and this savings has made open access journals (the authors pay for the peer review services, and the article is available free to all with Web access) financially possible.  The growth of Web-only journals from Biomed Central (now >140 journals) and Public Library of Science (6 journals) is clear evidence that the WWW is changing scientific publication….

It could be argued that the only thing keeping print versions of full-length articles extant is the pharmaceutical industry’s willingness to purchase print advertisements and the journals’ need to put something between these ads….

In 2005, 57% of journals posted articles to their Web site before their appearance in print, and 12% of journals offered readers a forum for responding to each article. We were surprised that more readers did not take advantage of the postpublication review feature; 82% of such pages had no entries. Is this because readers do not read the articles, do not have anything to say, or are not interested in participating in such a forum? In the face of such low participation rates, how do we explain that the British Medical Journal averaged 6 postings per article on the 80% of articles that had postings? Perhaps it is because all of the British Medical Journal content was free to all at the time of this study or that the British Medical Journal has had a stronger Web presence for a longer period of time than many other journals and has cultivated a group of users who are comfortable using the WWW in this way….

source: How medical journals are using the web

The US National Science Digital Library (NSDL) has issued a general call to participate in NSDL.  Excerpt:

NSDL encourages contributions of educational resources from NSF grant awardees, library users, community members, resource developers, content providers, educators, learners of all ages, and other collection builders. Contributions can range from individual lesson plans or websites to collections of thousands of items, to technology-based tools and services that aid educational applications of digital resources. This enlarges and strengthens the library and encourages reuse and sharing of materials….

NSDL provides access to web-based educational resources, data sets, pedagogic materials or assessments, research materials, images, graphics, photos, simulations, games, activities, curriculums, visualizations, lesson plans, collections, reports, journal articles, etc….

source: Participate in the NSDL

JISC is soliciting proposals to create a survey of “different forms of research output” used by researchers.  From the invitation to tender:

1. This Invitation To Tender invites proposals to undertake, on behalf of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), a survey on the use by researchers and teachers of different forms of scholarly output.

2. Funding of £15,000 is available for this work (including VAT and related travel and subsistence).

3. The deadline for proposals is 13:00 hours on Wednesday 7th February 2007….

5. A key performance indicator in JISC’s Strategy and Operational Plan is to develop an overview of the barriers to effective scholarly communication and the emerging behaviours and different activities being funded worldwide to improve the position….

8. The use of different forms of scholarly output opens issues of means of access and of rights of access for researchers and for teachers. The use of images is governed by a different IPR regime to that for the use of research articles. An individual book chapter may be more difficult for students to trace and access than a journal article. Data sets related to research articles may require the user to have access to substantial computing facilities….

source: JISC will fund a survey of different forms of research output

The European Research Advisory Board (EURAB) recommends an OA mandate for EU-funded research.  Here’s today’s press release in its entirety:

The European Commission should consider mandating all researchers funded under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) to publish the results of their research in an open access repository within six months of initial publication, according to the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB).

While some concerns over open access are justified, such as the quality of the peer review process, preserving long term access, and the viability of smaller circulation publications, the overwhelming benefits far outweigh these concerns, states a new report by EURAB.

The open access debate has been triggered by the rapid and radical change in science communication brought about by the rise of the internet. There is also a desire to disseminate more widely the results of publicly funded research in order to raise awareness of the benefits of investing in science, and at the same time to bring down the costs of research for public authorities. Public funding bodies are currently paying three times for research, according to EURAB. First they pay for the research itself, then for peer review, and finally for a library subscription to the journal in which the resulting paper is published. Additional author-side fees levied by traditional toll-access journals may be considered a fourth cost.

The Commission has three roles to play in drafting and implementing a policy on open access, says EURAB: as a funding body, a policy body, and a supporting body.

As a funding body, the Commission seek to increase the visibility of, and improve access to, research funded by the Commission without compromising the freedom of scientists to publish where they feel is most appropriate.

A key recommendation is that the Commission considers instructing those receiving FP7 funding to lodge any publications resulting from their research in an open access repository as soon as possible after publication. The paper should be made openly accessible within six months.

EURAB says that the repository could be a local institution or dedicated to a specific subject. Deposit should be made once a journal or conference has accepted it for publication, and the repository should release the metadata immediately, with access restrictions to the full text article to be applied as required. Open access should then be implemented as soon as practicable after the author-requested embargo, or within six months, whichever comes first.

EURAB suggests that the Commission begins the roll out of such a complex policy issue with research funded by the European Research Council (ERC), which came into being with the launch of FP7.

As a supporting body, the Commission should place emphasis on streamlining the process of deposit for researchers, and on standards for supporting interoperability. In this context, the Commission should introduce a specific supporting action in every FP7 thematic priority to facilitate the use of deposit in open access repositories, states the EURAB report.

The Commission’s role as a policy body should be to encourage all Member States to promote open access publication policies for all of their publicly funded research.

A communication on scientific publishing is expected shortly from the European Commission.

To read the EURAB paper in full [December 2006], please click here.

Comments.

1. This is excellent news for many reasons.  First, the policy would apply across Europe, not just within a single country or institution.  Second, it encourages member states to adopt their own OA policies to buttress this EU-wide policy.  Third, EURAB is an independent agency created by the EU to make recommendations on research-policy questions of exactly this kind.  This report should carry weight. 
2. Fourth, the policy it recommends is superb.  It’s a mandate, not mere encouragement.  It gives authors a choice of repositories for deposit.  It caps the permissible embargo at six months.  It recommends deposit of the published version, if possible, and the final version of the peer-reviewed manuscript otherwise.  It uses what I call the dual deposit/release strategy or what Stevan Harnad calls the immediate deposit / optional access strategy (except that here, flipping the switch on the deposited article from closed to open is delayed but mandatory, not optional).  There’s no hint of compromise based on misunderstandings about copyright.
3. The only part of the EURAB recommendation not summarized in the press release is this:  “FP7 should include an action to invite proposals for an enhanced ranking of journals which includes not only traditional indicators of impact but also open access policies.”
4. Just one caveat:  The authors write that “some concerns over open access are justified, such as the quality of the peer review process….”  However the full report does not elaborate or justify this claim.  For a rebuttal, see my article, Open access and quality (October 2006). 

source: EURAB recommends an EU-wide OA mandate

The Portuguese Conference of University Rectors has signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge.

PS: Also see its November 2006 statement on Open access to scientific publications.

source: Portuguese university rectors sign Berlin Declaration

Cory Doctorow, The Foundations of Open Access, Free Culture @ NYU, January 9, 2007.  Excerpt:

So, this weekend is the Open Access summit and I wanted to share some thoughts on how to help bring this on a widespread basis.

Closely tied to open access is encouraging funding organizations to include language in their grant proposals which promotes open access, for code and content. This is in the foundation’s best interest - call it “philanthropic ROI”.

On the educational institution’s side of the fence, funding pressure could really tip the scale in favor of opening their work….Funding pressure changes everything….

Already, the Hewlett Foundation is moving in this direction, but if/when others follow it could be very decisive force in the campaign for Open Access.

The Hewlett Foundation’s Education Division provides grants in the area of Open Educational Resources, and all grant applications have to describe their approaches to
intellectual property in the terms below (these are copied directly from the grant application).

There’s more at Open Educational Resources.

…If you are developing content or producing articles, reports, white papers, or other written materials, please identify which of the Creative Commons licenses you will use to license the content….

If you are developing software, please identify which of the Open Source Initiative-approved licenses you will use to license the software….

If your work involves the creation of data sets, please see [the Science Commons FAQ on database licensing] and be prepared to discuss the open license plans with program staff.”

So, one way to put pressure on folks is to convince more funding agencies to begin stipulating for Open Access….

source: "Funding pressure changes everything."

The Machine-Assisted Reference Section (MARS) of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) of American Library Association (ALA) has assembled a list of the best free online reference sites of the past 10 years. 

There’s no point singling out the OA winners –they’re all OA.  But you’ll notice some familiar sites, like the DOAJ (a winner in 2005), and some unfamiliar ones, like the Big Cartoon Database (a winner in 2006). 

MARS picks winners every year and this web site is a compilation of all the winners for the past 10 years.  That explains why some are out of date.  For example, it includes my Guide to Philosophy on the Internet, because it was a winner in 2002, even though I officially (publicly, emphatically) stopped updating it in February 2003.  For just the newest winners, see the list for 2006.

source: Best free online reference sites of the past 10 years

David S. Stern, Vice President for Academic and Student Affairs of Hamline University, has added his signature to the SPARC list of U.S. university presidents and provosts endorsing open access to publicly-funded research and the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (FRPAA). The tally is now up to 132.

source: Another academic VP for FRPAA

eIFL.net has released its Handbook on Copyright and Related Issues for Libraries under a CC license.  One section is on Open Access to Scholarly Communications.

source: eIFL on copyright and OA

E-teaching.org has published the transcript of a live chat interview with Wolfgang Coy (in German) on new publishing with open access and open content.  Coy is a professor computer science at Humboldt University Berlin.  The interview questions came from a large number of logged-in users.  Read the German original or Google’s English.

source: Q&A about OA in Germany

James Till, Tags Indicate That Open Access Is Flourishing, Philica, January 8, 2007.  Excerpt:

On the basis of qualitative evidence, awareness of the open access (OA) movement increased substantially in 2006….Could a simple quantitative indicator be used to measure growth of interest in OA?

Social bookmarking services, such as Connotea (Lund, 2006), can be used to tag noteworthy articles. There were 104 entries in Connotea tagged “open access” in 2005. This number increased dramatically in 2006, to 738 (a 7-fold increase).

However, social bookmarking itself increased markedly during the past two years.

For example, entries tagged “internet” in Connotea increased from 299 in 2005 to 907 in 2006 (a 3-fold increase) and entries tagged “neuroscience” increased from 177 in 2005 to 491 in 2006 (also a 2.8-fold increase)….Because awareness of topics such as these were not expected to have increased significantly between 2005 and 2006, it was assumed that these 3-fold increases were a result of the increasing popularity of tagging via Connotea, and not of increased interest in the topics themselves.

A chi-square test of association…, in which the observed numbers of entries for “open access” in 2006 and 2005 (738 and 104) were compared with those obtained for “internet” (907 and 299) in a 2×2 contingency table, indicated that the difference in the 2006/2005 ratios for these two tags was highly significant at the P < 0.0001 level.

These results provide preliminary quantitative evidence that interest in OA is indeed burgeoning, and that frequencies of Connotea tags may provide a useful indicator for tracking these changes.

source: Measuring OA progress through tags

Open Access Research is a new peer-reviewed OA journal sponsored by the Georgia State University Library.  It’s the first peer-reviewed journal devoted to OA itself.  (Disclosure:  I’m on the editorial board.)  From the call for papers:

Open Access Research (OAR), is a peer- reviewed, open-access journal that will enable greater interaction and facilitate a deeper conversation about open access, including topics such as:

• open access journals
• institutional support for open access
• open access publishing services and software
• open access repositories (both institutional and subject-based)
• electronic theses and dissertations
• the impact of open access on scholarly research and communications.

If you are engaged in research relating to open access, or if you have an article in mind, please contact us. OAR’s first issue will be in August, 2007 and will subsequently be published three times a year….

Editors-in-Chief: John Russell (University of Oregon), Dorothea Salo (George Mason University), William Walsh (Georgia State University), Elizabeth Winter (Georgia Institute of Technology)….

source: First OA journal on OA

UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) launched today.  From the JISC press release:

From today scientists will be able to access a vast collection of biomedical research and to submit their own published results for inclusion in a new online resource. Based on a model currently used by the US National Institute of Health, UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) will provide free access to a permanent online archive of peer-reviewed research papers in the medical and life sciences.

A nine-strong group of UK research funders, including JISC and led by the Wellcome Trust, awarded the contract to develop UKPMC to a partnership between the British Library, The University of Manchester and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) last July….

Members of this group now require that articles describing the results of research they support are made available in UKPMC with the aim of maximising its impact. The UKPMC service will ensure that articles resulting from research paid for by any member of the funding consortium will be freely available, fully searchable and extensively linked to other online resources.

Initially UKPMC mirrors the American PubMed Central database (hosted by the NCBI at NIH). From today, UK scientists will also be able to submit their research outputs for inclusion in UKPMC. Through 2007, and beyond, the partners will develop innovative tools for UKPMC to further support biomedical research. In this way, UKPMC will grow into a unique online resource representing the UK’s biomedical research output.

Comments.  

1. Note that the announcement says that the members of the funders group “now require” OA to the research they fund.  This is bigger news than the launch of UKPMC itself.  For links to the policies, see the UKPMC’s Open Access Policies page.  Three of the eight mandates listed there are well-known:  The Wellcome Trust policy, the Medical Research Council policy, and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council policy. 
2. Of the others, two are apparently new:  the  Arthritis Research Campaign policy, the Chief Scientist Office policy.  Three are under development:  those of the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, and the Department of Health.  JISC is the only member of the funders group not (yet) represented on the OA policies page.
3. For my timeline, I’d appreciate it if any readers could help me discover the dates of adoption for the OA mandates at the Arthritis Research Campaign and the Chief Scientist Office.  (I do know that the ARC policy took effect on January 1, 2007.)
4. The ARC mandate is strong and detailed.  Grantees must deposit a copy of their final, peer reviewed manuscript in UKPMC no later than six months after publication.  If a grantee publishes in a fee-based OA journal, ARC will pay the fee.  If a grantee publishes in a TA journal that doesn’t give permission for OA deposit on ARC’s terms, ARC offers some negotiating suggestions.  But if the journal still doesn’t budge, ARC takes the Wellcome Trust approach:  “then the author should not proceed with the submission to that journal and should reconsider where to publish.”
5. The CSO mandate fits into one sentence (Section 13.7):  “A copy of the final, peer-reviewed version of all papers arising from the funded research and accepted for publication must be deposited in a publicly accessible repository (UK PubMed Central when this is established) and be made freely available within 6 months.”

source: UKPMC and a handful of OA mandates