Hardin Scholarly Communication News

With almost every passing day, public access to yet another government information resource is extinguished.  Like an exotic species or a nearly forgotten language that suddenly becomes extinct, its disappearance excites little attention or protest. But the cumulative effect of many such losses is bound to be significant.  The latest official resource to vanish from the public domain is the U.S. Air Force "orbital element" database.  These orbital elements, which characterize the orbits of satellites in Earth’s orbit, have been freely available to the public through NASA for nearly twenty years.  Now they won’t be.  http://www.agi.com/resources/tle/

Secrecy News 2/22/05 

The American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society, is broadening access to research articles published in its 33 scholarly journals. The Society is introducing two new experimental policies that define how readers can view free digital versions of ACS articles beginning one year after publication.

First, in response to public access guidelines recently released by the NIH, the ACS will post, for public accessibility 12 months after publication, the peer-reviewed version of authors’ manuscripts on the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central during 2005. The NIH policy encourages authors whose work it funds to submit their peer-reviewed manuscripts to PubMed Central, the agency’s free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. Commenting on this new service, ACS Publications Senior Vice President Brian Crawford said, "We understand that NIH-funded authors will wish to comply voluntarily with the NIH’s policy request. By introducing this service, the ACS will take on the administrative burden of compliance and at the same time will ensure the integrity of the scientific literature by depositing the appropriate author version of the manuscript after peer-review."

Second, as a value-added service to ACS authors and a method of further opening access to its content, the full-text version of all research articles published in ACS journals will be made available at no charge via an author-directed Web link 12 months after final publication. Allowing unrestricted access to articles 12 months after publication is an expansion of the Society’s current practice of permitting 50 downloads of authors’ articles free of charge during the first year of publication. This initiative will go into effect during 2005.

"We are very pleased to expand access in this way to research published in ACS journals," said Crawford. "It is fundamental to the ACS mission to support and promote the research enterprise and to foster communication among its scientists. Providing unrestricted access via author-directed links 12 months after publication - in addition to the 50 free e-prints currently allowed during the first year of publication reinforces that mission."

Robert Bovenschulte, president of the ACS Publications Division, said, "These experimental policies balance the important goal of expanding dissemination of research with the need to preserve the integrity of the scientific record as well as the viability of our journals program."

ACS Press Release: March 7, 2005

On February 3, 2005, the National Institutes of Health issued its “Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research,” available at http://www.nih.gov/about/publicaccess/index.htm. While recognizing the policy as a major step forward, the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), of which SPARC is a leader, said the NIH policy falls short of its expectations. The ATA has urged Congress to monitor the success of the policy and for NIH to adjust it if necessary to ensure full participation and timely access.

In a public a letter to Department of Heath and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Michael Leavitt (http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/docs/ATA_to_HHS.pdf) ATA outlined key concerns with the NIH policy:

• It is entirely voluntary. Although NIH research is funded with taxpayer dollars, the agency is leaving the decision up to each author whether to make their research results available.

• It does not assure timely public availability of research in PubMed Central. Authors can specify an embargo period of up to a year.

• It unnecessarily puts grant recipients in the position of trying to meet the contradictory expectations of their funding agency, which urges but doesn’t require deposit and timely public release, and their publishers, whose agreements with authors may not permit PubMed Central deposit.

To increase public education and action on this issue, SPARC has created information for use in campus education and advocacy campaigns to encourage PubMed Central deposit. Practical resources for NIH-funded researchers are available at http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/author.html. Information for librarians is at http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/librarian.html. General information on the policy is available at http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/index.html.

SPARC e-news, February-March 2005

The Association of American Publishers, a chief opponent the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) initial draft policy to make the research it funds freely available within six months, has replied to the NIH’s watered-down final policy. The message: work with us. "Publishers agree with the NIH that science and society-at-large are best served by the widest possible dissemination of published health and medical research," the AAP said. "However, if the NIH’s new public access initiative is to add real value for researchers and patients, it must complement rather than compete with or duplicate the significant advancements and substantial investments that publishers have already made."

Last month, the NIH released a final policy that requested, rather than required, grantees to deposit their papers in PubMed Central with 12 months (see LJ Academic Newswire 2/8/05). The policy succeeded in uniting the two sides of the issue in their dissatisfaction. Proponents of the draft policy feared that 12 months would become the de- facto embargo, and wondered what the final policy would really achieve. Publishers questioned whether the NIH’s request was tantamount to a demand, given that the NIH is a major funder of research. However, just as proponents of the draft proposal have cautiously embraced the new policy- -essentially saying that it is better than no policy– publishers also now seem to be cautiously reaching out to NIH. "We were encouraged that the NIH responded to some concerns of publishers and the research community by incorporating both voluntary choice and flexibility," the AAP said. "As the NIH goes forward with its plan, it must be careful to distinguish a professional and scholarly publishing environment that consistently delivers excellence, integrity, and innovation from one in which "free" access is subsidized through regulation."

Library Journal Academic Newswire (TM), The Publishing Report, March 3, 2005

Rick Johnson, the founding Executive Director of SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), has announced his decision to resign. Heather Joseph has been named to succeed him.  Joseph is the founding President and Chief Operating Officer of BioOne, an innovative aggregation of high-impact bioscience research journals. The change in SPARC leadership is effective July 1, 2005.

"Rick’s leadership of SPARC was crucial in making libraries an important force in the process of transforming scholarly communication," said ARL Executive Director Duane Webster. "The news that Rick is leaving is tempered, however by having someone of Heather Joseph’s caliber and experience assume this critical role.  ARL, SPARC, and BioOne already have close working relationships that will ensure continuity and a seamless transition in leadership."

Joseph held a number of senior positions with publishing organizations in both the non-profit and commercial sectors before signing on to help launch BioOne in 2000.  BioOne is a groundbreaking collaboration among scientific societies, libraries, academe and the commercial sector that works to transform the scholarly communication process by providing expanded access to scientific research results.  SPARC was instrumental in the establishment of BioOne, raising crucial development funds from SPARC member libraries and supplying business-planning expertise to help ensure the venture’s sustainability.  "I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute to an organization deeply committed to expanding access to information," said Joseph. "I look forward to the challenge of building on the strong foundation that Rick has built, and working to advance SPARC’s important and ambitious agenda."

http://www.arl.org/sparc/announce/042105.html
SPARC News Release, April 21, 2005

The DOAJ has added the its 1500th title to its web-based listing of open access journals. In response to user requests, it has also added a Date Added field to the downloadable file to supplement to the 30 day rolling window of new titles highlighted at http://www.doaj.org/new.

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) offers a Web-based Scholarly Communications toolkit as a resource designed to support advocacy efforts that work toward changing the scholarly communication system and to provide information on scholarly communication issues for librarians, faculty, academic administrators and other campus stakeholders.  A primary goal of the toolkit is to summarize key issues and content in order to give readers quick, basic information on scholarly communication topics. http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlissues/scholarlycomm/scholarlycommunicationtoolkit/toolkit.htm

The first large-scale comparison of open-access journals with traditional journals reflects a publishing industry in flux.  A new survey indicates that open-access journals — those that make their contents free to all readers upon publication — have widely varying business models. In addition, more than half of all of the journals in the survey, whether open-access or subscription-based, reported that they were likely to change their business model in the next three years.

Some of the findings were not surprising: Compared with traditional journals, open-access journals were by and large newer; they printed fewer features like editorials and news articles; and more of them finished the previous fiscal year in the red. Open-access journals also received fewer submissions and were less selective in choosing among submissions.

But other results were unanticipated. Contrary to expectations, author fees were charged by a larger fraction of traditional journals than open-access journals. More than 80 percent of the traditional journals published by members of the medical-colleges association and hosted by HighWire Press charged fees, such as page charges or color charges. Although the open-access movement is often associated with the author-pays business model used by high-profile publishers like the Public Library of Science, less than half of the open-access journals surveyed charged fees to authors.

Other sources of financial support for open-access journals included advertising, corporate sponsorships, government grants, and the use of volunteers. "Most people think of open access as being synonymous with author pays," said Ms. Kaufman. "The open-access journals don’t rely as much on author fees as one might think." 

Read the complete article at: http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i29/29a01802.htm

Chronicle of Higher Education, March 25, 2005

The Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR), which is currently in the planning stage, will support the rapidly emerging movement promoting open access to research information. DOAR, development of which is being supported in part by SPARC Europe, will categorize and list the wide variety of open access research archives that have sprung up around the world. DOAR will provide a comprehensive and authoritative list of institutional and subject-based repositories, as well as archives set up by funding agencies like the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust. Upon completion, users of the service will be able to analyze repositories by location, type, the material they hold and other measures.

The project is a joint collaboration between the University of Nottingham (UK) and the University of Lund (Sweden). In addition to SPARC Europe, DOAR funders include the Open Society Institute (OSI), the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and the Consortium of Research Libraries in the British Isles (CURL). More information on the project is available on the project website, http://www.opendoar.org.

SPARC e-news, February-March 2005

An Article in Washington Post titled “NIH Grant Recipients Are ‘Asked’ to Post Data: New Policy on ‘Public Access’ Draws Criticism” Appeared on February 4, 2005.

Researchers who receive grant money from the National Institutes of Health will be "asked" to submit their results to a public Web site within a year after they are published in a scientific journal, under a new and controversial NIH policy announced yesterday. The highly anticipated "public access" policy — which aims to make it easier for Americans to see the results of research they paid for with their tax dollars — represents a compromise between competing forces that had lobbied the agency intensely during the past year. Read the article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62156-2005Feb3.html