Hardin Scholarly Communication News

A Newsletter for the Health Sciences Campus at the University of Iowa

January 9, 2006
Issue 1.06

Hardin Scholarly Communication News brings together a variety of topics that affect the current system of scholarly communication, with emphasis on new developments, open access and alternative publishing models in the health sciences. This newsletter aims to reflect the interests of its readers so please forward comments, suggestions and entries to include to karen-fischer@uiowa.edu. Subscribers will also receive our newsletter News@Hardin.

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Table of Contents:

Univ of Iowa Faculty Senate Passes Resolution on Scholarly Publishing

NeuroCommons

The Shift Away From Print

The Impact of Electronic Publishing

Economists’ Open Letter to University Presidents Urges An End to Free Ride for Expensive Journals

Data on JMLA’s Open Access Experiment

Univ of California Proposes an OA Policy for Comment

Clinical Trial Registration Report Card - NEJM Editorial

OECD Reports on Scientific Publishing and Open Access

Oxford Open Announces Q1 Results

Open Access to Science in the Developing World

SPARC Applauds Publisher’s NIH Plan to Offer Links, But Long-Term Conerns Remain

The Alternative: Journal Publishers Propose NIH Journal Linking Plan

More BMC Titles to be Tracked for Impact Factors

Libraries praise CURES Act

New Open Access E-Journals

The UI Faculty Senate on Tuesday unanimously approved a resolution that would help reduce scholarly journal costs for university libraries.

The resolution encourages faculty members to publish in lower-cost journals and asks the university to privilege them in the tenure and promotion process.

“We’re the people who keep these journals alive,” both by submitting research and purchasing them, said Faculty Senate President Richard Leblond.

The clinical professor of internal medicine said high journal costs are an issue facing universities around the country, and though he feels the resolution has “no teeth” - making its actual effect uncertain - it could help faculty become more aware of their role in the process.

Senate Vice President Sheldon Kurtz, a UI law professor, said that because faculty members are required to publish their research to gain tenure, universities are actually paying for the research twice.

“For us, the tension is that universities as a whole are being asked to buy back the research,” he said.

In other business, Leblond announced the formation of a task force to examine ways to improve communications among the faculty, staff, and student senates.

The committee would create an “office of shared governance” to find ways to help the three groups meet more frequently, such as moving their offices to a common location.

Doing so, Leblond said, would help the groups’ leadership discuss common issues, such as salaries and tuition. The current system is inefficient, he said.

“We have to figure out ways we can come to the best balance,” he said. “These things shouldn’t be decided at the legislative level. We ought to sit down and talk to one another.”

Leblond said he hopes to start the process in the next few months.

The text of the Resolution:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~facsen/Agenda/Senate05-06/11-29-05/2-LibrariesResolution.htm

[by Sam Edsill, The Daily Iowan, Nov 30, 2005]

The NeuroCommons is a proving ground for the ideas behind Science Commons: open legal contracts, open access literature, advanced use of open-standards semantic web technology and the construction of a community involving all the stakeholders in scientific funding, research and publishing.

The NeuroCommons project will:
1. Use freely available literature and databases to make scientific knowledge, descriptions of biological materials and data sets easier to use and find. A graph will connect neurological information and publish it in semantic web standard formats.
2. Provide an infrastructure for community-driven additions and annotations.
3. Lower the legal and technical barriers to finding and sharing knowledge and tools in the neurosciences.

The backbone of the NeuroCommons is the scientific canon or set of facts published in neurological research. Presently, the vast majority of these facts are trapped in document formats that are readable only by individuals - PDF, Word, HTML - and in many cases, usage is constrained by copyright. Users wishing to develop new methods to manage the literature can face a multitude of license schemes from publishers, digital rights management preventing text mining and other library management protocols. Although the methods for generating data are transformed by miniaturization and automation, the methods for interpreting those data remain stolidly traditional: individuals reading the peer-reviewed literature. The barriers to changing the system are both legal and technical.

A new kind of scientific publishing known as “open access” uses standard copyright licenses from Science Commons’ parent organization to explicitly allow users to share, repost and run software across scientific articles. This has created a growing body of literature that is legally re-usable without the involvement of lawyers or clearance with institutions such as universities. The NeuroCommons will be built upon this body of literature as well as the many public databases created in the US, the UK, the EU, Japan and other countries.

The success of the NeuroCommons will depend on the creation and evolution of a true open community like that in the free and open source software world. NeuroCommons is supported in conjunction with Teranode, a private software company with a semantic web focus as well as funders investing in researching complex neurological disorders, principal investigators in neuroscience, bio-materials repositories and others.

http://sciencecommons.org/data/neurocommons [4 Jan 2005]

For most scholarly journals, the transition away from the print format and to an exclusive reliance on the electronic version seems all but inevitable, driven by user preferences for electronic journals and concerns about collecting the same information in two formats. But this shift away from print, in the absence of strategic planning by a higher proportion of libraries and publishers, may endanger the viability of certain journals and even the journal literature more broadly — while not even reducing costs in the ways that have long been assumed. Read on at: http://insidehighered.com/views/2005/12/08/schonfeld

[Inside Higher Education 12/8/05]

“It has always been a characteristic of our planet that, besides eating and sleeping and squabbling and reproducing, we are also producing knowledge,” writes Stevan Harnad, a scientist at Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada), who has been a vocal advocate in changing how we go about publishing all that knowledge. Electron-borne information is clearly transforming academic publishing; not just affecting how journals and books are assembled and distributed, but stirring up the culture that surrounds the creating and sharing of new knowledge.

Some of these new manifestations look like hot-rodded versions of things we knew in the past (online journals, eBooks); while others (like research repositories, wikis, RSS feeds) are novel variants that may ultimately live or die, but meanwhile are teaching us lessons about how our research community really works.

Along those lines, a publishing milestone occurred this year. In a world where the top scientific journals can cost subscribers over $10,000 per year, an online science journal with a subscription price of $0 won a 13.9 impact-factor rating from the prestigious Thomson Scientific (formerly Thomson ISI) citation-counting service (Institute for Scientific Information), which acts as the Nielsen ratings of science publishing. That rating placed PLoS (Public Library of Science) Biology among the top journals in its category, although it was only two years old.

Read on at: http://www.campus-technology.com/article.asp?id=17723

[Campus Technology, Jan 4, 2005]

Two California economists have penned “An Open Letter to All University Presidents and Provosts,” suggesting a new way to deal with rising journal costs: charging back “expensive journals” for things like editing and peer review, essential services that most faculty have historically provided journals either for free or for a nominal fee. “It is time to recognize a simple fact,” write U. of California Santa Barbara’s Ted Bergstrom and California Institute of Technology’s Preston McAfee in an open letter. “The symbiotic relationship between academics and for-profit publishers has broken down. The large for-profit publishers are gouging the academic community for as much as the market will bear.” Bergstrom and McAfee suggest the formation of a “list of expensive journals,” for which a university would ultimately set its own policy on recovering overhead expenses. Based on rough estimates of manpower, space, and other materials, the authors suggested that a charge of “at least $12,000 per year” would be an appropriate charge for an “expensive” journal. Journals that remain below such a threshold, however, would not be charged. Making that list of “expensive journals,” could be a challenge, however, as bundled deals for electronic access, consortial buying, and access terms unique to each school would complicate such a task.

Still, the authors posit that overhead charges for expensive journals would re-capture a portion of the “monopoly profits” for those universities that actually produce the journal’s content. Those journals that keep prices below the “expensive” threshold, on the other hand, would continue to merit the subsidy of free peer review and editorial service. “We see no reason,” the authors state matter-of-factly, “for universities to subsidize editorial inputs to journals that are priced to extract maximum revenue from the academic community.” Underlying the author’s proposal is the suggestion that the days when many academic journals provided a service in return for a healthy profit have long-ended, with large for-profit publishing conglomerates now charging “monopoly” profits of “about five times higher per page and 15 times higher per citation” than non-profit journals. In the past, they note, individual faculty members have been encouraged to personally boycott expensive journals. However, most faculty have been understandably reluctant to rebuff powerful journals that are helpful to their academic careers. A university-wide policy, the authors point out, would shield faculty from making that difficult decision. More importantly, they write, a policy on dealing with journal expenses should be a matter of university policy because the “entire university community is harmed by the draining of library budgets.” To view the open letter, visit:
<http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~mcafee/Journal/OpenLetter.pdf>.

Also, try out the authors’ Journal Cost-Effectiveness Calculator. Enter a journal by title or ISSN and get back its its price per article, its price per citation, and rank (on these prices) relative to other journals in the fields of your choice. Green indicates good value, yellow for medium value, and red for bad value.

[Library Journal Academic Newswire (TM), November 8, 2005]

T. Scott Plutchak, The impact of open access, Journal of the Medical Library Association, October 2005.

Excerpt:

Between June of 2004 and May of 2005, the number of unique users accessing the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA) and its predecessor, the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association (BMLA), on the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central (PMC) system averaged just over 20,000 per month. When I first saw these numbers on the PMC administration site, I was astonished. The members of the Medical Library Association (MLA) itself (who we might presume are the main audience of the JMLA) number only about 4,500, and the print run of the journal is generally in the neighborhood of 5,000 copies. It seemed likely to me that the number of unique readers in any given month would be just some fraction of that core audience….

I wondered if PMC has some kind of formula that they use to translate the number of IP addresses into number of readers, so I emailed Ed Sequeira, the project coordinator, at PMC. Further astonishment! He pointed out that it was likely that my supposition about DHCP was balanced by the aggregation of users behind corporate firewalls and then told me that, from surveys that they have done, there are half again as many actual users per IP address. Thirty thousand unique readers?…I can think of few things more likely to gladden the heart of an editor than this kind of evidence of the reach and impact of the journal on which he lavishes so much time and attention. I have no doubt that we would not be seeing these sorts of numbers if the JMLA were not freely available on the Web. From the standpoint of readership and reach, MLA’s experiment with open access would appear to be a resounding success. But much of the discussion of open access during the past few years has focused on the risks. What of those?…So I looked at the revenue and membership figures for the last ten years. I wanted to examine the trend lines and see if anything appeared to change significantly around 2001/02, when the JMLA went up on PMC….

Subscriptions had been falling for a decade, but the drop from 2002 to 2003 was far more dramatic than the previous declines. The number of subscriptions declined again in 2004, although not as dramatically, but revenue went up slightly, thanks to a modest rate increase. Whether this indicates a trend or not is still too early to say….Perhaps more worrisome from the standpoint of the long-term health of the association is the impact of an open access journal on the members’ willingness to remain members. Here, the results are more encouraging. Total membership has declined during the entire period, but the biggest drop occurred in 2000/01, just before the PMC debut….To probe the views of members further, I worked up a quick online survey….I asked what degree of impact the JMLA’s free availability had had on their decision not to renew their membership. Seventeen respondents fit in that category. Fourteen indicated little to no impact, two were neutral, and one indicated that it had had a major impact. When I asked the current members if the JMLA’s free availability would make them more or less likely to renew their membership, 61% indicated that it would have no bearing; but, for 30%, it would make them somewhat to much more likely to renew. On the downside, 5% felt that it would make them much less likely to renew….

Other questions in my survey indicated that the free availability would make people much more likely to read articles from the older issues and would make potential authors more likely to submit manuscripts. These, of course, are the things that an editor loves to hear….Despite what I said near the beginning of this editorial, it is too early to label the experiment an unqualified success. But has the attempt been worth it so far? I look again at the PMC statistics. Twenty to thirty thousand unique users? Has it been worth it? Oh, yes!
Read the whole article at: http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1250314

Five white papers and a draft policy were released for comment by the University of California Academic Council on December 14. All six documents are relevant to Open Access, in different degrees:

1. Evaluation of Publications in Academic Personnel Processes
2. The Case of Journal Publishing
3. The Case of Scholarly Book Publishing
4. Scholarly Societies and Scholarly Communication
5. The Case of Scholars’ Management of Their Copyright
6. [The draft policy] Proposal for UC Faculty – Scholarly Work Copyright Rights Policy

An excerpt from the Overview of the Reports:

During University of California negotiations with publishers of scholarly works in 2004, it became clear to UC faculty that the current models of scholarly communication had become unsustainable. UC Librarians and budget officers had seen this crisis approaching for some years. But long as library budgets could be managed and access to the most critical work could be maintained, faculty members were largely insulated from the growing crisis. When it became clear, in the face of falling university budgets and rising costs of publications, that the UC community’s access to new knowledge would progressively be limited, and that the access by others to UC-produced scholarship would similarly be limited, the Academic Council (effectively the Executive Committee of the UC Academic Senate) established a Special Committee on Scholarly Communication (SCSC) to consider what role the faculty should take in addressing these important issues. The accompanying five short papers and appendices are the result of SCSC’s work. The papers define and explain the faculty’s view of changes that could improve dissemination of scholarly work to enhance the discovery and communication of new knowledge, and best serve the public interest.

To view the reports, go to:
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/committees/scsc/reports.html

Editorial in NEJM by Jeffrey M. Drazen, M.D., and Alastair J.J. Wood, M.D.:

One measure of medical progress is new treatments. The discovery of a novel therapy takes time and money, but more important, it requires the mutual effort of groups that, while they share the common goal of improved treatment, often have fundamentally competing interests. These interests intersect at the clinical trial. Patients who are looking for more effective and safer treatment agree to take part in a clinical trial in the hope that they will benefit from such treatment or that others with similar conditions will benefit later. The company developing the new therapy shares the hope that the trial will be successful, because it wants to market the tested therapy exclusively and profitably for as long as possible before its competitors can launch a similar therapy into the marketplace. These goals, though overlapping, are inevitably in conflict and will generate tension. Such tension has been thrown into sharp relief over the past 15 months by the push for clinical trial registration.

The academic establishment and patients have argued that when patients, motivated by altruism, participate (or even consider participating) in a clinical trial, they are entitled to understand fully all the options available to them in the various trials that are currently recruiting subjects. In addition, their participation in a clinical trial should result in generalizable knowledge that will be available to future patients and investigators to improve patient care. This can happen only when appropriate details of the clinical trial are made available to the public in a timely fashion. The Internet and public registries have made this possible.

[New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 353:2809-2811, December 29, 2005 - available to UI affliates and subscribers of NEJM]

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released in September 2005 a study of digital content and the state of scientific publishing. The report compiles a broad range of source data on the publishing industry and the development of digital content. Business models, including open access models, receive considerable attention. Striving to present a neutral stance, the report lists benefits and concerns about both open access journals and open access archiving. While promoting enhanced access to publicly funded research, the report stops short of recommending open access or public access imperatives. The very substantial data and analyses presented make this report stand out.
See: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/42/12/35393145.pdf.

[August–September 2005 E-News for ARL Directors, October 14, 2005]