Hardin Scholarly Communication News

A Newsletter for the Health Sciences Campus at the University of Iowa
August 19, 2005
Issue 6.05

Table of Contents: 

Faculty Senates Speak out on Scholarly Communication

PubChem Funding in Place for 2006

U.S. Share of Scientific Publishing Declines

Academic Journals Open to Change

Kansas Supreme Court to Rule on Ownership of Faculty Work

Two New PLoS Journals Launched this Summer

Open Access Bibliography Offers Overview to Concepts

LISU Responds to Elsevier Complaint Over Pricing Study

BioMed Central Journals Receive High Impact Factors

PLoS Biology Receives Its First Impact Factor

Another High Impact Factor from SPARC Alternative, Neuro-Oncology

PNAS Free Online Back to 1915

Research Councils UK (RCUK) Open Access Policy Open for Comments

American Library Association Praised for Leadership with Reauthorization of US Patriot Act

EBSCO Acquires DynaMed

First Fruits of NIH Public Access Policy

NIH Public Access Policy Has Little Effect Thus Far

U.S. Senate Supports NIH Public Access Policy; Requests Report

Elsevier Acquires MC Strategies, Inc.

In recent months, a variety of resolutions relating to scholarly communication have emerged from faculty governance bodies on campuses across the U.S.  These statements address a variety of issues, from open access to copyright concerns; all express concern about the health of the scholarly communication system.  March was a banner month with statements coming from the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Irvine; the University of Kansas; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.  In April, Case Western Reserve University and the Columbia University Senate adopted statements.  In May, Cornell University endorsed a resolution on open access and scholarly communication.  Additional statements on scholarly communication are reportedly in-process and may be ratified in the fall.  ARL hosts a website where links to all of these faculty actions are available. 

See: http://www.arl.org/scomm/open_access/2005facultyresolutions.html.

Report on Selected Activities of the Association of Research Libraries, June 2005 

PubChem, the National Institutes of Health-funded database of chemical compounds, appears to be safe–for now. After a House of Representatives subcommittee in June declined to recommend pulling PubChem’s funding or otherwise limiting its mandate, the Senate followed suit last week. In comments appended July 13 to the Senate Appropriations Committee Report on FY 2006 Labor-HHS Appropriations Legislation, the bill that funds the NIH and related agencies, the committee noted that it was "aware of the development of PubChem" and added only that it expected NIH to "work with private sector chemical information providers, with a primary goal of maximizing progress in science while avoiding unnecessary duplication and competition with private sector databases." In sum, the NIH was slated for a total budget increase of about 3.5 percent.

The American Chemical Society (ACS) has lobbied lawmakers to limit the scope of PubChem, charging that the NIH had "created a mini-replica of the CAS [Chemical Abstracts Service] Registry." The situation hearkens back to the closing of the Department of Energy’s nascent PubScience database, an online database of scholarly articles which database publishers argued competed with their products. PubScience was shuttered in 2002. In both cases library groups joined with scientists to support the government’s access and archiving efforts. Despite Congress’s refusal to scale back PubChem, ACS officials hailed the language in the Senate committee report as a victory, leaving open the possibility of increased opposition to the NIH effort in the future. In a statement, ACS said it was "delighted" that both the House and Senate appropriations committees urged the NIH to "avoid unnecessary duplication and competition with private sector databases." The Senate’s action, the statement said, was "another significant step toward a resolution that will supplement and not supplant private scientific information services."

Library Journal Academic Newswire, July 19, 2005 

Over the last two decades, the United States has seen its share of world output of scientific papers steadily decrease, while the collective shares of nations in the European Union (EU) and the Asia Pacific region have increased, according to a recent study published in Science Watch, the bimonthly newsletter of Thomson Scientific, a business unit of The Thomson Corporation. The study was conducted using citation data from the more than 8,700 prestigious, high-impact journals archived in the National Science Indicators(R) database.

Does this mean that there is an impending shortage of scientists in the U.S.? Though the National Science Board in 2004 warned of an impending scientist shortage in the United States due to international competition and a post-9/11 culture, Thomson Scientific experts don’t feel the United States’ loss in share is necessarily reflective of such a trend. "It’s important to note that, while the percentage of share of these countries may have fluctuated, the numbers of papers published in all regions have increased," said Henry Small, chief scientist of Thomson Scientific. "This makes it particularly difficult to attribute this trend to any purported U.S. shortage of scientists.

Serial E-News, July 28, 2005

Excerpted from an article from Wired News:

Seven years ago, Michael Eisen, an assistant professor of genetics and development at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, proposed a program to link experimental data from his lab to relevant pieces of scientific literature.

At the time, it seemed a no-brainer. Most scientific journals had begun publishing online, and Eisen believed a system to connect raw data to existing research might produce a multiplier effect. Scientists have always built on the work of other scientists, and he knew that the internet could have a profound impact on the pace of scientific discovery. He and his postdoctoral adviser, Pat Brown, fully expected cooperation from Stanford Library, which hosts a large number of scientific journals. "Instead," Eisen recalled, "we were told that the articles we wanted belonged to the publishers and we should basically piss off."

It had never occurred to Eisen that publishers could own scientific literature. He was offended by the idea that scientists could be wronged by copyright. This went double for the public, whose tax dollars pay for much of the scientific research undertaken today.

"All of a sudden, I saw how ridiculous this system was in the internet age," he said, "and I’ve been working to change it ever since." 

Read the whole article at: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,67797,00.html

Wired News, June 9, 2005 

The Kansas Supreme Court will evaluate an appellate court decision giving public institutions in Kansas the right to claim ownership of any faculty work, including books, with no negotiation on terms required. The lower court treated faculty work as "work for hire" under federal copyright law, classifying scholarly work as within the scope of employment of a faculty member. The current policy, designed in 1998, allows faculty to keep their book rights and has a revenue-sharing model for technology copyrights. Should the higher court decide in favor of the board, the policy could be changed at will. The case pits the Kansas Board of Regents against the Kansas National Education Association.

Inside Higher Ed, Aug. 8, 2005 <http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/08/08/kansas>

PLoS Computational Biology (www.ploscompbiol.org), launched in June, is a peer-reviewed journal reporting major biological advances achieved through computation. The journal publishes research from one of the most rapidly growing and exciting areas of scientific inquiry. As a collaboration between a scholarly society and an open access publisher, the journal also provides further momentum to the shift towards unrestricted access and use of all scientific and medical literature.  

The editor in chief is Dr. Philip E. Bourne, a professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of California San Diego, co-director of the Protein Data Bank and senior advisor to the Life Sciences at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.  In the inaugural issue, founding editor Bourne and co-founding editors Steven E. Brenner and Michael B. Eisen explain the vision behind PLoS Computational Biology: "What motivates us to start a new journal at this time? Computation, driven in part by the influx of large amounts of data at all biological scales, has become a central feature of research and discovery in the life sciences…Open access—free availability and unrestricted use –to all articles published in the journal is central to the mission of PLoS Computational Biology, and distinguishes this new journal from most scientific journals which still needlessly restrict access to their contents. Open access revolutionizes the way we use research literature, and takes much inspiration from the field of computational biology itself.”

PLoS news release, June 23, 2005 <http://www.plos.org/news/announce_compbiol.html>

A second journal, PLoS Genetics was released in July. The journal is led by the Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Wayne N. Frankel, a Senior Staff Scientist at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. Frankel writes in an editorial in the inaugural issue:

"On behalf of our editorial team, it is my pleasure to welcome you to PLoS Genetics, a new open-access journal from the Public Library of Science (PLoS). Led by an internationally recognized editorial board with broad knowledge and expertise, PLoS Genetics is a journal that celebrates the research of the greater genetics and genomics community. As you see in this first issue, PLoS Genetics is unique –publishing outstanding articles that reflect the full breadth and interdisciplinary nature of this research, all free to read and to use in your own research and teaching….In 2004, when PLoS asked several of us in the genetics community about a need and desire for an open-access genetics/genomics journal, I replied with a resounding "yes!" And I was not alone –others had the same reaction that the time was right for a new genetics journal of high quality. Certainly the open-access element was key –following in the public-domain spirit of genetics and genomics data release, for example, by the Human Genome Project. And creating such a journal –building on the strong experience and reputation of PLoS Biology– seemed an opportunity not to miss."

PLoS news release, July 25, 2005 <http://www.plos.org/news/announce_genetics.html> 

PLoS Genetics, v. 1 issue 1, July 2005 <http://genetics.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pgen.0010021>

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals provides an overview of open access concepts, and it presents over 1,300 selected English-language books, conference papers (including some digital video presentations), debates, editorials, e-prints, journal and magazine articles, news articles, technical reports, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding the open access movement’s efforts to provide free access to and unfettered use of scholarly literature. Most sources have been published between 1999 and August 31, 2004; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 1999 are also included. Where possible, links are provided to sources that are freely available on the Internet (approximately 78 percent of the bibliography’s references have such links).

To view the overview of OA concepts, visit: http://www.escholarlypub.com/oab/keyoaconcepts.htm 

To view the whole book, visit: http://www.escholarlypub.com/oab/oab.htm 

The Library and Information Statistics Unit (LISU) at Loughborough University in the UK has responded to STM publisher Elsevier, which maintains that an LISU pricing study overstates Elsevier’s median price for biomedical journals (See: http://ic-server02.info-commons.uiowa.edu/scholar/archives/195/).
Although LISU officials acknowledged Elsevier’s finding that some "abstracting/indexing/current awareness" titles were included inadvertently in its sample, they stood by the study’s central findings. In a letter to LIBRARY JOURNAL, LISU director Eric Davies offered adjusted figures, recalculated by excluding the above mentioned titles, reducing slightly Elsevier’s 2004 median for biomedical titles. In addition, although LISU researchers dispute Elsevier’s claim to include a small number of journals the publisher considered to be biomedical titles in its sample, researchers nevertheless recalculated their figures to include those disputed titles, a result that reduced Elsevier’s median price for a biomedical title in 2004 to £656 ($1194) vs. £731 ($1336) originally reported in the study.

In their own analysis, Elsevier argued that a large number of their biomedical journals were excluded, contending that their median price per title is closer to £401 ($730), based on 790 titles analyzed–thus overstated by 81 percent in the LISU study. LISU, however, stood by their methodology, with the exceptions above, noting that the additional 200-plus titles Elsevier factored into their calculations were Harcourt titles in 2000 and were thus excluded. "The purpose of the work was to analyze price changes," wrote Eric Davies, director of LISU. "It was therefore important that titles which had changed publisher, ceased to exist or were new launches during the period of study should not be included. A majority of the titles specified in Elsevier’s criticism as being overlooked were published by Harcourt in 2000, and so not included on that basis." Elsevier bought Harcourt in late 2000 and officially finished the deal in 2001.

To view the LISU study, go to: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dils/lisu/pages/publications/oup.html

Library Journal Academic Newswire, The Publishing Report, June 9, 2005 

Journals published by BioMed Central (BMC), an open-access publisher, have received ISI impact factors that compare well with equivalent subscription titles. Five BMC titles are in the top five of their specialty and five journals published by BioMed Central received their first impact factors this year. BMC Bioinformatics, with an impact factor of 5.42, remains one of the top journals in its field. Launched in 2000, it is the second highest ranked bioinformatics journal, and has an impact factor comparable to that of Bioinformatics (5.74), the most established journal in the field, which has been publishing for more than two decades and is supported by a major society.

BMC Genomics enters the Journal Citation Report with an impact factor of 3.25. This puts it in the top third of the genetics titles, and the top twenty percent of biotechnology journals. BMC Molecular Biology has an impact factor of 3.12, and BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders an impact factor of 1.00, putting it in the top half of the orthopedics listing. BMC Genetics has an impact factor of 0.92.

Critical Care’s impact factor jumped from 1.9 to 3.21, and the journal is now third in the critical care medicine field having overcome the competitor title Intensive Care Medicine, the official journal of the major European society. Breast Cancer Research also increased its impact factor from 2.93 to 2.98 and remains the second highest ranking breast cancer journal. Arthritis Research & Therapy maintains its rank of second in the rheumatology field with an impact factor of 4.55.

A number of other journal published by BioMed Central also saw their impact factors and rankings improve. BMC Infectious Diseases jumped from 1.25 to 2.07. BMC Cell Biology, with an impact factor of 2.62, is now in the top half of the cell biology listing. The impact factor for BMC Health Services Research almost doubled, from 0.68 to 1.23. BMC Cancer went up from 1.70 to 2.29 and BMC Public Health now has an impact factor of 1.55. With an impact factor of 4.03, Respiratory Research is the fifth most cited journal in the highly competitive respirology field.

The impact factors, which are calculated by ISI, look at citations in 2004 of articles published in the journals in the period 2002-2003.

Visit: http://www.biomedcentral.com/browse/journals/

SPARC e-news, June-July 2005