Barbara Malina (ed.), Open Access Opportunities and Challenges:  A Handbook, the German UNESCO Commission, July 2008.  A 144 pp. collection of articles on OA by 38 authors.  (Thanks to Napoleon Miradon.)

This is an English translation of Open Access: Chancen und Herausforderungen - ein Handbuch, which the German UNESCO Commission published on June 6, 2007.

PS:  The German edition includes a short section by me on OA in the US, an abridgement of my longer piece in Neil Jacobs (ed.), Open Access: Key strategic, technical and economic aspects, Chandos, 2006.  The English edition includes an abridgement and update (as of September 2007) of the same longer piece. 

Comment.  Also see Canessa and Zennaro's Science Dissemination using Open Access, which I blogged this morning.  That makes two books on OA in one day.  If you count Kylie Pappalardo's Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment:  A Guide for Authors, which I blogged on Tuesday, then that's three books on OA in three days.

The final projects from Heather Morrison's course on open access (University of British Columbia, Spring 2008)  are now online.  Heather says the projects include "subject guides to open access resources for the environment, chemistry, environmental and occupational health, HIV/AIDS, Media Studies, a tutorial on preservation issues, and a draft research projects on OA mandates."

Hybrides Publizieren: Gemeinschaftsprojekt von Verlag und Bibliothek der Bauhaus-Universität, a press release from Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, July 1, 2008.  (Thanks to Klaus Graf.)  Read the press release in German or Google's English.

At Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, the press and library are working together to publish a series of dual-edition (OA/TA) monographs, and just published their first title, Die Realität des Imaginären. 

E. Canessa and M. Zennaro (eds.), Science Dissemination using Open Access, a new book published under a CC-NC-ND license by the Science Dissemination Unit of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, July 2008.

The book knits together pieces from many sources into a single narrative.  (Disclosure:  some of the pieces are mine.)  It's available as a downloadable PDF (4.74 MB, 196 pp.) or an online edition in an ebook viewer with turning pages.

From today's announcement:

The book is a compendium of selected literature on Open Access, both on the technical and organizational levels, and was written in an effort to guide the scientific community on the requirements of Open Access, and the plethora of low-cost solutions available. The book also aims to encourage decision makers in academia and research centers to adopt institutional and regional Open Access Journals and Archives to make their own scientific results public and fully searchable on the Internet. Discussions on open publishing via Academic Webcasting are also included.

The book is an effort by ICTP-SDU (Italy) in collaboration with CERN (Switzerland) enabled by the support of INASP (UK).

E-LIS has passed the milestone of 8,000 deposited documents.  (Thanks to Andrew Waller.)

Videos of the presentations at New Communication Channels for Biology (San Diego, June 26-27, 2008) are now online.  (Thanks to Bora Zivkovic.)

Chris Rusbridge, Research Repository System persistent storage, Digital Curation Blog, July 2, 2008.  Excerpt:

This is the seventh and last of a series of posts aiming to expand on the idea of the negative click, positive value repository, which I'm now calling a Research Repository System. I've suggested it should contain these elements:

• web orientation
• researcher identity management
• authoring support
• object disclosure control
• data management support
• persistent storage
• full preservation archive, and
• spinoffs

At a very basic level, the RRS should provide a Persistent Storage service. Completely agnostic as to objects, Persistent Storage would provide a personal, or group-oriented (ie within the institution) or project-oriented (ie beyond the institution) storage service that is properly backed up. There’s no claim that Persistent Storage would last for ever, but it must last beyond the next power spike, virus infection or laptop loss! ...Conversely (and this isn’t easy), there must be reliable ways of taking parts of it with you when away from base, so synchronisation with laptops or remote computers is essential. It should support anything: data, documents, ancillary objects, databases, whatever you need. It’s possible that “cloud computing” eg Amazon S3, the Carmen Cloud or other GRID services might be appropriate....

Some spinoffs you should get from your RRS would include persistent elements for your personal, department, group or project web pages (even the pages themselves). It should provide support for your CV, eg elements of your bibliography, project history, etc. It will provide you and your group with persistent end-points to link to. And your institution will benefit, first from the fact that it is supporting its researchers in curating their data and supporting verifiability of publication, and also benefiting from the research disclosure aspects.

I guess that just about wraps it up. So who's going to build one?

PS:  For background, see Rusbridge's original post on negative click repositories and some of the buzz it generated.

Steven Schwartz, Open Access: what do you think?  Macquarie University Vice Chancellor's Office, July 3, 2008.  Schwartz is the Vice Chancellor of Macquarie University.  Excerpt:

I am thinking about bringing a paper to the Macquarie University Senate on Open Access, the subject of an earlier blog.

A draft of this paper appears below. I would like your feedback. Have I missed anything? Can the paper be improved?

For more information on Open Access, you might like to consult this guide.

DRAFT - Open Access at Macquarie

Scholarly research is one of Macquarie’s most important contributions to society. As academics, we all have an interest in disseminating our work to the widest possible audience....

It is time for Macquarie University to join the ranks of a growing number of universities worldwide as well as a growing number of funding councils (ARC, NIH, ERC) to mandate that our refereed research output be deposited (“self-archived”) in Macquarie University’s Institutional Repository.

At a minimum, the mandate will only require us to deposit our refereed, revised, final drafts in the Macquarie repository immediately after its acceptance for publication. The electronic copy will provide a record of our research and can be used for government audits, promotions, report generation, grant applications as well as other purposes. In other words, no other data collection will be necessary; no other tiresome forms will need to be completed.

Depositing an article in the repository is not the same as making it accessible to scholars around the world. Articles in the repository will not be automatically accessible to outsiders. The author will determine who has access. This is necessary because some journals have policies that prohibit open access (in some cases, only for an embargo period) and academics need to be flexible in what they make available. Thus, for articles published in journals that do not yet endorse Open Access, or who impose an embargo, access to the deposit can be set as Closed Access permanently or for the length of the embargo. Under Closed Access, only the author has access to the full text. The metadata (author, title, date, journal name, and so on) will still be visible to all users webwide.

In practice, journal policies may not prove to be a major problem. The great majority of scholarly journals do not object to making authors’ self-archived papers “Open Access” immediately. (For a database summarising the policies of most journals, see here). Note, however, that some journals only make the Open Access option available on authors’ request.

For those who wish to fulfill user needs during the Closed Access embargo period, the Macquarie repository will have an “Eprint Request” button. Anyone webwide can press the button to send an automatic Eprint request to the author. The author can click to send one individual Eprint to the requester. Researchers have used this practice for many years, originally with paper reprints. (To see how this works, see here.) ...

To make our scholarly work available to all scholars including those in developing countries and those without access to expensive library subscriptions, and to ensure that the University has a record of its scholarly output, Senate resolves to recommend that Council:

1. mandates that all refereed, revised, final draft manuscripts be deposited in the Macquarie repository after its acceptance for publication;

2. mandates that all journal article manuscripts be deposited in the repository but monographs will be self-archived at authors’ discretion;

3. requires that, where permissible, manuscripts be made Open Access, available to anyone on the web; and

4. permit, where necessary because of journal policy, or the author requests, manuscripts to be made Closed Access until dissemination is permitted.

Comments

• If adopted, this would be one of the strongest university policies anywhere.  I especially applaud its mandatory language, the dual deposit/release strategy or what Stevan Harnad calls immediate deposit / optional access, and the use of an email request button for manuscripts during the period after deposit and before OA release.  I also like the way it offers no opt-out for deposit, and allows slack only on the timing of the release. 
• My only suggestion is to clear up a slight inconsistency in the "release" half of the deposit/release policy.  Schwartz' description suggests that authors could choose (for a variety of reasons) to leave deposits closed forever even if the publisher's embargo was temporary.  But point #3 of draft resolution requires OA release "where permissible".  My preference would be to resolve this tension in favor of point #3. 
• Once this tension is resolved, however, I urge Schwartz to present it to the Macquarie University Senate --and the Senate to follow Harvard and Stanford by adopting it in a unanimous vote.

OA mandate forthcoming in Norway?  Co-Action Publishing, June 30, 2008.  An English summary of this June 2 document from the Norwegian government.  Excerpt:

This month the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research issued a request to the Norwegian Research Council and The Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions (UHR) for advice on Open Access to scientific articles.

In a Parliamentary Report nr. 20 (2004-2005) the government signaled that the Ministry would be investigating the possibility of making the results of publicly financed research more widely available. The current request for advice is a follow-up to the report and comes on the heels of a number of international events that have furthered Open Access, including a number of mandates from other national research councils and the Harvard University mandate.

The official request states that “The Ministry of Education and Research wishes to see the possibilities for stimulating an increased use of Open Access publishing of peer-reviewed scientific literature.” By Open Access, the Ministry refers to both gold and green publishing, but there appears to be a stronger emphasis on self-archiving as the request specifically states that the investigation should evaluate whether a mandate on self-archiving (green) of publicly financed research should be introduced, as well as an evaluation of the legal, technical, economic, administrative, and other consequences of such a mandate.

Comment.  There's a good chance that Norway will end up adopting an OA mandate.  The government is asking advice from the Norwegian Research Council, which created an OA working group last fall and is now working on an OA position paper.  The government is also asking advice from the Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions, which joined SCOAP3 in January 2008, and submitted a pro-OA comment (in English) to the EC in June 2006, calling on the EC to provide OA to publicly-funded research and revealing that it had already called on its own member institutions to adopt local OA policies.

Theological Librarianship is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from the American Theological Library Association.  The inaugural issue (June 2008) is now online.  (Thanks to David Cassens.)

Jeffrey Young, Textbook Piracy Grows Online, Prompting a Counterattack From Publishers, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 1, 2008.  Also see the CHE's blog post on the story, if only because it supports user comments.  From the article:

College students are increasingly downloading illegal copies of textbooks online, employing the same file-trading technologies used to download music and movies. Feeling threatened, book publishers are stepping up efforts to stop the online piracy....

Comments

• Nobody is calling this OA, and that's good.  I'm only blogging the story in order to distinguish lawful OA from unlawful file-swapping.  Yes, expensive textbooks are a serious problem.  I myself have often written about a growing textbook pricing crisis.  But the solution is to create and use OA textbooks (a growing movement, BTW), and share the work of the consenting, not to infringe the copyrights of TA textbooks and share the work of the unconsenting.  For more, see my October 2003 article, Not Napster for science.
• The anonymous host of Textbook Torrents, one of the web sites offering illicitly-scanned copyrighted textbooks for downloading, called his actions "civil disobedience".  Please.  I strongly support OA textbooks and I know something about civil disobedience, which is an act of political protest, not an act for personal gain.  On the contrary, it can involve serious personal hardship, such as police dogs, firehoses, and imprisonment.  Martin Luther King, Jr., taught his followers to "accept blows without retaliation".  Most disobedient activists willingly accept legal penalties, in part to publicize their protest and in part to make clear that they are not acting for personal gain.  The exceptions are protesters whose purpose is to challenge the constitutionality of the law they violated.  The host of Textbook Torrents "asked to remain anonymous for fear of legal action against him" (according to the Chronicle).  By all means point out the problem in stark terms, and offer the strongest ethical or political defense of your solution that you can.  Just don't call it civil disobedience.
• I hate to point out an other hand, but there is one.  For years publishers have abused language on their side by calling copyright infringement "piracy".  It's not piracy, which ranges from theft of physical property all the way to maiming, mayhem, and murder.  Perhaps the host of Textbook Torrents can strike a plea bargain with the lexicography police:  If publishers will stop calling copyright infringement "piracy", he or she will stop calling it "civil disobedience". 

Matthew Dublin, CARe Program's Balancing Act for Patient Privacy and Open Access, Genome Technology, July/August 2008.  Excerpt:

One project making headway on the slippery slope of patient privacy versus free data access is the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute's Candidate Gene Association Resource project, known as CARe. The goal of the program is to provide a hosted resource for investigators where nine separate national heart, lung, and blood cohorts are combined to provide meta-analysis of clinical data from more than 50,000 patients together with genome-type data. The project's leaders had the hair-pulling task of striking a balance between how openly accessible they could make the data without compromising the patients' identity.

"By definition, when someone has been genotyped or has received whole genome scans, they're identified," says Marcia Nizzari, director of the informatics development program in the medical and population genetics group at the Broad Institute. "So there's an issue of how do you handle security and yet at the same time make things open enough to really make it a resource to the research community that's valuable." ...

Declan Butler, PLoS stays afloat with bulk publishing, Nature News, July 2, 2008.  Excerpt:

Public Library of Science (PLoS), the poster child of the open-access publishing movement, is following an haute couture model of science publishing — relying on bulk, cheap publishing of lower quality papers to subsidize its handful of high-quality flagship journals.

Since its launch in 2002, PLoS has been kept afloat financially by some US$17.3 million in philanthropic grants. An analysis by Nature of the company's accounts shows that PLoS still relies heavily on charity funding, and falls far short of its stated goal of quickly breaking even through its business model of charging authors a fee to publish in its journals. In the past financial year, ending 30 September 2007, its $6.68-million spending outstripped its revenue of $2.86 million, according to the publicly available accounts.

But its financial future is looking brighter thanks to a cash cow in the form of PLoS One, an online database that PLoS launched in December 2006. PLoS One uses a system of 'light' peer-review to publish any article considered methodologically sound. In its first full year of operation in 2007, PLoS One published 1,230 articles, which would have generated an estimated $1.54 million in author fees, around half of PLoS's total income that year. By comparison, the 321 articles published in PLoS Biology in 2007 brought in less than half this amount....

From the outset, the company consciously decided to subsidize its top-tier titles by publishing second-tier community journals with high acceptance rates that would be cheaper to produce....

“If the original model was to be self-sustaining through author fees, it seems that PLoS is not even half-way there,” says Bernard Rous, deputy director of publications of the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest educational and scientific computing society. Nevertheless, Rous endorses PLoS's strategy of tapping multiple revenue sources and cross-subsidizing to allow open access to all its titles....

“It's fair to say that the community-run journals, including PLoS One, are contributing very well to our overall financial picture, says Peter Jerram, chief executive of PLoS, adding: “PLoS is on track to be self-sustaining within two years. In the interim some philanthropic support will be needed....

BioMed Central has an estimated annual revenue of around £10 million ($20 million). It is already “pleasantly profitable”, according to a science-publishing consultant who asked to remain anonymous. “BioMed Central knows well that much of the journal middle order is more profitable than the great brands because of the lower editorial costs and the cheaper marketing costs for bundles of journals. I suspect that PLoS One is a result of learning the same lesson,” adds ["a science-publishing consultant who asked to remain anonymous"].

BioMed Central is now up for sale, which will be a “fascinating first market test of what people will pay for an open-access company”.

Comment.  Declan Butler last used tax records to investigate PLoS' finances in June 2006.  See some of the comments (first set, second set) generated by his investigation.

Update.  The story has now triggered a large number of comments (scroll to the bottom of the page).  Also see blog comments by Mike Dunford, Jonathan Eisen, Alex Holcombe, Bill Hooker, GrrlScientist, and Greg Laden.

Gavin Yamey, Excluding the poor from accessing biomedical literature: A rights violation that impedes global health, Health and Human Rights, 10, 1 (2008).  Excerpt:

...The full text versions of most biomedical studies — an essential treasury of life-saving knowledge — are locked away behind access barriers. These access tolls bring enormous profits to the traditional corporate publishing industry, but at the same time make it impossible for many people worldwide to access the biomedical literature. The imposition of such tolls arguably violates the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that everyone has the right “to share in scientific advancement and its benefits” (Article 27, section 1).

In this article, I take a rights-based view of this current crisis of restricted access to the results of scientific and medical research. Such research is conducted in the interests of the public, and yet the results are largely kept out of the public domain by traditional corporate publishers who own them, subject them to extremely tight copyright restrictions, and sell them in a market worth about US$5 billion. The results of biomedical research have unfortunately been privatized, monopolized, and concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of multinational corporations.

This article considers how exclusion from accessing the biomedical research literature harms global public health. I argue that this literature should be considered a global public good and base my argument upon long-standing and recent international declarations that enshrine access to scientific and medical knowledge as a human right. I present an emerging alternative publishing model, called open access, and argue that this model is a more socially responsive and equitable approach to knowledge dissemination. I situate open access publishing within a broader movement that has emerged in the digital era to create a public “knowledge commons,” which can play a crucial role in supporting an informed citizenry in its efforts to promote human rights....

Comment.  This is the most careful rights-based argument for OA that I've seen, and the only one that ties the argument closely to relevant provisions of international treaties on human rights.

Yesterday the European Commission released this very brief announcement:

Following on the Council Conclusions and the Commission Communication on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation, the European Commission is developing an open access pilot in FP7. More information will be available soon.

Comment.  For OA-related excerpts from the Council Conclusions (November 2007) and the Commission Communication (February 2007), and my comments, see my two blog posts on the Conclusions (one, two) and my blog post and newsletter article on the Communication.  Both documents fall short of endorsing the near-consensus recommendations for an OA mandate the EC received from the EU research community.

In the Communication, the EC said that "Initiatives leading to wider access to and dissemination of scientific information are necessary, especially with regard to journal articles and research data produced on the basis of public funding" (p. 7), and that it would eventually "issue specific guidelines on the publication of articles in open repositories after an embargo period" (p. 8). I suspect that the coming OA pilot is not the same as the coming OA guidelines, but just an experiment to help shape the guidelines.

The presentations from the eIFL meeting of repository managers from Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine (Kyiv, June 18-21, 2008) are now online.  Thirteen are in Russian, two in English.

The presentations from the eIFL workshop on Open Access: New Models for Scholarly Communication in Moldova (Chisinau, Moldova, June 23-24, 2008) are now online.  Eight are in Russian, five in English, and one in Romanian.

The US Department of Energy has launched the DOE Data Explorer (DDE).  From the site:

Discover the data behind DOE's scientific publications!

Use the DOE Data Explorer (DDE) to find scientific research data - such as computer simulations, numeric data files, figures and plots, interactive maps, multimedia, and scientific images - generated in the course of DOE-sponsored research in various science disciplines. The DOE Data Explorer includes a database of citations prepared by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) based on the information found at data-hosting Web sites. It is intended to be particularly useful to students, the public, and to researchers who are new to a field or looking for experimental or observational data outside their normal field of expertise.

You may browse or search the database, then link to a data collection where it resides. You will often find specialized search interfaces and software toolkits developed by the data owners. These allow you to search deeper into the data files and help you understand, analyze, and use the data within the context of your own research interests.

The publicly available data collections support DOE research results that are well documented in journal articles, conference literature, and technical reports. Key DOE databases of R&D information are searchable through the Science Accelerator. The DOE Data Explorer will include enhanced search capabilities across specialized Web sites as it continues to grow.

Each dataset has two web pages, one a prose description with associated metadata and the other an interface for searching, browsing, and downloading.  For example, see the two pages (1, 2) for the DOE file of Evaluated Nuclear [Reaction] Data.

What would you create with public information?  A contest from the UK government.  (Thanks to Glyn Moody and Richard King.)  Excerpt:

Ever been frustrated that you can't find out something that ought to be easy to find? ...Do you think that better use of public information could improve health, education, justice or society at large? ...

The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated. The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the Government's behalf, and we have a £20,000 prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level. You can see the type of thing we are are looking for here. 

To show they are serious, the Government is making available gigabytes of new or previously invisible public information especially for people to use in this competition.  Rest assured, this competition does not include personal information about people.

We're confident that you'll have more and better ideas than we ever will....

Go on, Show Us A Better Way.

I just mailed the July issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.  This issue takes a close look at how access barriers create a "last-mile problem" for knowledge.  The round-up section briefly notes 128 OA developments from June.