Hardin Scholarly Communication News

Hardin Scholarly Communication News - 8/26/04

August 26th, 2004 by UI Libraries

Significant Open Access Developments at Home and Abroad

August 26th, 2004 by UI Libraries

The two lead stories the August issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter describe two of the most significant open-access developments in our history. In addition to the usual round-up of news from the past month, it takes a close look at the proposals in both the US and the UK to mandate open-access archiving for the results of taxpayer-funded research. The US proposal comes from the House Appropriations Committee and focuses on NIH-funded research. The UK proposal comes from the report of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee and would apply to all taxpayer-funded research.

Read all about it: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/08-02-04.htm

More on the same topic:

British Parliamentary Panel Endorses Open Access to Scientific Literature (Chronicle of Higher Education, July 20, 2004) http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2004/07/2004072002n.htm

NIH Research to be Open Access (The Scientist, July 29, 2004)
http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20040729/04/

Access All Areas: Scientific Publishing is Having to Change Rapidly to Respond Rapidly to Respond to Growing Pressure for Free Access to Published Research (The Economist, Aug. 5, 2004)
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3061258

BioMed Central Journal Making an Impact!

August 26th, 2004 by UI Libraries

Open access journals published by BioMed Central have received impact factors that compare well with equivalent subscription titles. The impact factors, which are calculated by ISI, look at articles published in the journals in the period 2001-2002. The high impact factors, all for journals that are just a few years old, prove that Open Access to research literature achieves impact fast and makes quality articles widely visible.

Arthritis Research & Therapy jumped from 3.44 to 5.03, propelling it to rank second in the rheumatology field in its fifth year of publication. Breast Cancer Research also increased its impact factor, moving from 2.81 to 2.93, placing it on even footing with its direct competitor, Breast Cancer Research & Treatment, which was established more than 20 years ago. Critical Care moved up to 6th in its field, and now has an impact factor of 1.9.

Four journals published by BioMed Central received their first impact factors this year. Respiratory Research (5.53) has taken second place in the respiratory field. Current Controlled Trials in Cardiovascular Medicine has an impact factor of 3.12. BMC Cell Biology (2.61) and BMC Health Services Research (0.67) also entered well.

BioMed Central saw its impact factors go up across the board. BMC Cancer now has an impact factor of 1.7, while BMC Infectious Diseases (1.25) and BMC Public Health (0.93) also saw increases in their impact factors from the 2002 Journal Citation Report.
[SPARC E-NEWS June-July 2004 http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=g37]

News Release: Former Editor of BMJ Joins the Public Library of Science

August 26th, 2004 by UI Libraries

Dr. Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and chief executive of the BMJ Publishing Group, has joined the Public Library of Science Board of Directors. Dr. Smith has long championed the causes of increased access to research articles, particularly in the developing world, improved ethical standards for researchers and authors, and most recently, open access publishing models. In May of 2004, Dr. Smith announced his resignation from the BMJ to become chief executive of the European arm of UnitedHealth Group, the largest healthcare company in the United States. In joining PLoS, Dr. Smith is calling for a complete overhaul of current biomedical publishing models.

In recent years, Dr. Smith, while running a for-profit commercial publishing business, has encouraged the development of new business models that would maintain publishing revenues while offering free access to full-text versions of original research. His commitment to open access publishing at the BMJ, and now at PLoS, reflect a growing movement towards making biomedical research a truly public resource.

In other news, PLoS has issued a response to the report from the Science and Technology Committee of the United Kingdom House of Commons, "Scientific Publications: Free For All?" available at < http://www.plos.org/about/openaccess.html >.

[SPARC E-NEWS June-July 2004 http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=g37]
[PLOS News Release on same topic: http://www.plos.org/news/announce_smith.html]

News Release: $5 Million Gift Supports Harvard’s Open Collection Program

August 26th, 2004 by UI Libraries
Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin have given $5 million to support the Harvard University Library’s Open Collections Program, which enables the University to make research materials from libraries across Harvard freely available over the Internet. Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers lauded Rausing, Ph.D. ‘93, and Baldwin, Ph.D. ‘86, for their commitment to Harvard’s libraries and to the expansion of knowledge on a global basis. "This gift represents a visionary and dramatic step in the University’s efforts to share its outstanding collections with scholars and students around the world," Summers said. "Intellectually curious people from every corner of the globe will have free access to such information for the benefit of their studies, their interests, and their work." Follow the link below to read more….
[Harvard University Gazette: http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/07.22/13-library.html]

Springer Announces an Open Choice “Option” Prompting Much Discussion About New Publishing Models

August 26th, 2004 by UI Libraries

Choice? Springer Ups the Ante on Open Access

In a headline-grabbing announcement, Springer, now the second-largest commercial STM publisher in the world, has announced that authors publishing in any of its journals can now choose to make their work freely, "permanently" available in return for an author charge. But is Springer’s new Open Choice program a boost for open access or simply a bold strategy to compete with both burgeoning open access journals and traditional commercial publishers? Under the program, which begins immediately, authors can choose between making their work available through the existing subscription models or pay a $3000 author charge, plus any other applicable fees such as page charges for print editions, to have their articles freely accessible to the public through Springerlink, Springer’s online platform. Each journal will feature a mix of paid and free content.

Springer CEO Derk Haank, former CEO of industry leader Elsevier, said the move was designed to "respond to the demands of the small group of researchers and certain publicly funded research communities" calling for wider access. "We want to offer our authors both options and let them choose," said Haank. "Ultimately, the customers will decide what they want." While it remains to be seen as to how well the new Open Choice program will perform, it has already succeeded in launching Springer into the headlines, and could at the very least help the upstart company get a leap on its competition. The number two player in the field, Springer was created by British investment firms Cinven and Candover, which merged Kluwer Academic Publishers and Bertelsmann Springer in 2002. The timing of the announcement is also worthy of note–just as the UK Parliament prepares to release its report on its recently concluded inquiry into STM publishing. Open access and pricing issues were heavily discussed during the inquiry.

BioMed Central: Springer’s Open Choice Is Not To Be Confused with Open Access

On the surface, Springer’s "author pays" model might be welcomed by open access advocates. But while the British newspaper the INDEPENDENT hailed Springer as the first commercial publisher to "partially" embrace open access, that’s not quite the case, says open access pioneer, Jan Velterop, CEO of BioMed Central. "It is indeed not open access," Velterop told the LJ Academic Newswire. "To be fair to Springer, they know it isn’t open access, and that’s why they call it Open Choice." True open access, Velterop says, implies by definition "that all use is fair use as long as the author and article are properly cited."

Springer’s program breaks from that definition is some key ways. First, a strict copyright policy remains in effect for Open Choice authors. While Springer will make those articles available to users for free, the company continues to require "standard consent-to-publish and transfer-of- copyright agreements" from authors, which it says is necessary to protect authors’ rights. It also forbids "copying, reproducing, distributing, or posting of the publisher’s version of the article on a third party server." Velterop also points out that Open Choice articles have made no commitment to be archived in an open access repository, such as PubMed Central. That, he notes, makes guaranteeing open access in perpetuity "virtually impossible."

Velterop says researchers may ultimately be deterred from Springer’s Open Choice program because of a more basic shortcoming: price. "What [authors] have to gain is not in any way in proportion to the cost of $3000," he contends. At $3000, plus any applicable other charges, such as page charges for print editions, Springer’s price is more than double the price of the Public Library of Science’s (PLoS) $1500 author fees, and $2475 more than BMC’s current $525 author charge. PLoS, however, is a new venture and its officials acknowledge they don’t yet know what true author costs will be. For its part, BMC also has yet to become a self-sustaining business, and has heard concerns over its recently revamped institutional membership pricing as well as criticism that its author fees may be unrealistically low. Still, it is questionable whether Springer’s Open Choice service will woo researchers predisposed to open access. It is also unclear whether the program will offer much relief for academic libraries.

By definition, free content in Springer’s Open Choice program would appear alongside traditional, subscription-based content. That means libraries will still have to subscribe to Springer journals, while the pioneering open access journals are available freely over the Internet. To compensate for this mix of free and paid content, Springer journal prices will be adjusted annually based on the number of Open Choice articles in each journal. Should the number of Open Choice articles increase, then subscription prices would decrease and vice versa. Such a scenario could add another wrinkle to library budget planning.

In Another Twist, Oxford Open Access Journal Gets Sponsorship, Raises Questions

We have the "author pays" version of open access. Now we can add to that the "somebody else pays" version. Oxford University Press has introduced a new open access journal that will be free of author charges for a decade–though perhaps not free of skepticism. Oxford describes EVIDENCE- BASED COMPLEMENTARY AND ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE (eCAM) as "an international, peer-reviewed journal that seeks to understand the sources and to encourage rigorous research in this new, yet ancient world of complementary and alternative medicine." The journal, which has recently published its first issue, will focus on traditional Asian healing systems. Rather than charging libraries or individuals subscription fees, and rather than charging author fees, the journal will be supported for a decade by the Ishikawa Natural Medicinal Products Research Center (INMPRC) in Japan. The journal’s managing editor is Professor Nobuo Yamaguchi–president of INMPRC. Asked if that did not present a conflict of interest, OUP spokeswoman Rachel Goode said that, as a policy, "any paper submitted by an author based at or funded by the INMPRC is not handled by Professor Yamaguchi." Instead, those papers will be handled by professor [Edwin] Cooper." Cooper is a founding editor-in-chief of eCAM and a professor of neurobiology at UCLA. An article in the journal describes Yamaguchi and Cooper as 25-year friends. See www.ecam.oupjournals.org.

Goode says Oxford is following the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors guidelines (www.icmje.org/index.html#ethic). Among the guidelines: "Editors should publish regular disclosure statements about potential conflicts of interests related to the commitments of journal staff." No such disclosure statement appeared in the first issue of eCAM. In announcing the journal, Martin Richardson, managing director of OUP Journals Division, said that research in alternative medicine was enjoying growing interest, but "adopting an author-pays OA funding model would be inappropriate in this market where many potential authors are working with limited research funding, or are based at less wealthy institutions." This is a third open access initiative from Oxford, which has certainly shown a willingness to experiment with its journals program.

NUCLEIC ACIDS RESEARCH recently began a mandatory author- pays model, while the JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BOTANY has an optional author-pays model.

[Library Journal Academic Newswire (TM), The Publishing Report, July 8, 2004]

Professional Society’s Take on Access to Scientific Literature

August 26th, 2004 by UI Libraries

Bettie Sue Masters and Judith S. Bond have entered the Nature debate on open access. The Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), the flagship journal of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), will celebrate its centennial in 2005. More recently, JBC has provided free, on-line, full text searchable access to every published article since its inception in 1905. The [ASBMB Journal of Lipid Research (JLR)] now also provides free, on-line access to every published article since its founding in 1959. Many other journals are now following suit but only a few have succeeded in achieving the goal of making their entire contents available in such a form. This activity was undertaken with the view of providing a vital service to the biological sciences community but it was not done without considerable thought and concern about its financial implications; the process cost in excess of $700,000. The financial stability of the ASBMB and its business model for publishing has allowed its non-profit organization to take on such expenses, to serve its readers, authors and science. Its expenses are paid by a combination of sources, primarily by page charges to authors and subscriptions to individuals and libraries. In a recent survey of over a 1,000 JBC authors, over 80% preferred this mode of covering expenses to other models, such as authors or institutions paying all the costs.
[Nature 7/8/04 Open Access News 7/11/04 http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/27.html]

Be sure to look at the entire debate on Open Access in Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/ ( Univ. of Iowa access and subscribers to Nature only)

Review of SPARC’s Work

August 26th, 2004 by UI Libraries

Bas Savenije. University Librarian at Utrecht University, presented a paper titled The SPARC Initiative: A Catalyst for Change at the "The Digital Library and e-Publishing for Science, Technology and Medicine" Conferenece, TICER, Geneva, June 15, 2004.

Abstract: SPARC was started in 1997 by a number of large research libraries in the US. Its main goal was to restore a competitive balance of the STM journals publishing market. Over the last two years SPARC has put a special emphasis on Open Access, including institutional repositories. This paper gives an overview of the activities of SPARC and its partners in these areas. The results are evaluated and compared with the measures defined in 1997. Finally, the paper describes the possibilities for libraries to contribute to the realization of SPARC’s goals.

Read his presentation at: http://www.library.uu.nl/staff/savenije/publicaties/ticer2004.htm

How Less Restrictive Copyrights Would Benefit Science

August 26th, 2004 by UI Libraries
The third installment of a series of editorials in PLoS Biology, titled Whose Copy? Whose Rights? discusses the middle ground in copyright where an author negotiates to keep certain rights instead of assigning full copyrights to the publisher. Read it at: http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0020228

PubMed Continues to Fill In Archives

August 26th, 2004 by UI Libraries

PubMed Central is continuing to fill in gaps in their online archives with a backfile digitization project <http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/about/scanning.html>. The backfiles for the three titles below have increased considerably!

Journal of Clinical Investigation
Fulltext v1-32 (1924-1953), v35 (1956), v38-71 (1959-June 1983), v72(4)-96 (October 1983-1995), v107+ (2001+) http://pubmedcentral.com/tocrender.fcgi?action=archive&journal=120
ISSN: 0021-9738

Infection & Immunity
Fulltext v1-26 (1970-1979), v31+ (1981+) 6 month moving wall
http://pubmedcentral.com/tocrender.fcgi?action=archive&journal=87
Print ISSN: 0019-9567 | Online ISSN: 1098-5522

Antimicrobial Agents & Chemotherapy
Fulltext v1+ (1972+) 6 month moving wall
http://pubmedcentral.gov/tocrender.fcgi?action=archive&journal=82Print ISSN: 0066-4804 | Online ISSN: 1098-6596

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