The Cleveland Clinic is writing a gigantic OA medical textbook. With more than 150 chapters on 13 disease areas (e.g. cardiology, neurology, women’s health), it’s pushing the boundary between a textbook and an encyclopedia.
Visit: http://www.clevelandclinicmeded.com/diseasemanagement/medicineindex.htm
Open Access News 1/18/06
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_01_15_fosblogarchive.html
Excerpt from article:
In a position statement on the ‘open access’ debate, the Royal Society welcomes advances in technology “where the aim is to improve the exchange of knowledge between researchers and with wider society”. But it calls for funders to undertake a proper study before making researchers deposit papers about their work in open access journals, archives and repositories.
The statement concludes: “Careful forethought, informed by proper investigation of the costs and benefits, is required before introducing new models that amount to the biggest change in the way that knowledge is exchanged since the invention of the peer-reviewed scientific journal 340 years ago. Otherwise the exchange of knowledge could be severely disrupted, and researchers and wider society will suffer the resulting consequences.”
Serials-enews, 24 Feb, 2006
http://www.openrfi.com/NASIG/si_pd.cfm?ac=9068&pid=22&zid=2205&issueno=107
A group of libraries and publishers are cooperating on a pilot project to ensure access to online journals. Libraries at five universities, as well as the New York Public Library, will work with nine publishers on an archive that will consist of copies of journal articles from participating publishers stored on 10 servers at the universities.
Those archived copies will be unavailable to the public, but the system will monitor the Web sites of the journals that published those articles. When the system detects that the publisher’s online version of an article is unavailable for an extended period of time, the system’s governing board will decide whether to make the archived copy available. The goal is to ensure long-term access to journal articles, even when publishers go out of business or computer systems suffer severe outages or losses of data. The effort is important because libraries and publishers are frequently at odds over how and when to provide online access to copyrighted material. Those involved hope the effort will help the groups work together toward a common goal.
Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 January 2006 (available to UI affiliates and subscribers only) http://chronicle.com/daily/2006/01/2006012502t.htm
Officials at Health Canada, the federal agency that oversees Canadian medical and health issues, are voicing concern over a plan to slash the agency’s library. According to Canadian Broadcasting Company reports, the agency’s science library budget has been targeted for a whopping 50 per cent cut and library staff members in six libraries in or around the capital of Ottawa would be cut from 26 to 10 over three years. The move is part of a five-year plan to slash as much as $269 million from the Health Canada budget. Michèle Demers, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service, blasted the plan to CBC reporters. “The gutting of the science libraries at Health Canada is an over-simplistic decision that was imposed on that particular branch of Health Canada,” she said. “I think Health Canada needs to understand the impacts of this decision and reconsider.” Health Canada is said to be in the process of creating an electronic library to offer access to research, but government officials say there is still no time line for when that system will be available.
Library Journal Academic Newswire, Jan 12, 2006
MedPix is a new OA database of medical images. Press release:
MedPix is a free online Medical Image Database
(http://rad.usuhs.mil/medpix/medpix_home.html), provided by the Departments of Radiology and Biomedical Informatics, Uniformed Services University, Bethesda, MD. All public content is peer-reviewed by an Editorial Panel. All contributed content may be copyrighted by the original author/contributor. MedPix provides the indexing, storage service, and bandwidth as a public education service. Individuals as well as institutions may participate. Our primary target audience includes resident and practicing physicians, medical students, nurses and graduate nursing students and other post-graduate trainees. The material is organized by disease category, disease location (organ system), and by patient profiles. The database can be searched through multiple internal text search engines. In addition, search formulations can be sent directly to PubMed, or to other outside search engines with just ONE CLICK. Registered users may browse the image database through a “slide sorter” module. Contributed content may be copyrighted by the original author/contributor and is used with their permission.
Open Access News 1/21/06 http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_01_15_fosblogarchive.html
The NLM Board of Regents (BOR) (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/od/bor/) met on February 7-8 to discuss the November 2005 recommendations from the the Public Access Working Group for strengthening the NIH public-access policy (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/). The BOR sent a letter to NIH Director Elias Zerhouni on February 8, summarizing its own recommendations. The letter is not yet online. Excerpt:
The report of the November 15 Working Group meeting reveals that the current rate of participation in the voluntary Policy is very low (less than 4%). Since there is evidence that the submission system is relatively easy to use and that the majority of NIH-funded researchers appear to know about the policy, technical difficulties or lack of awareness do not appear to be primary reasons for non-compliance.
Based on this information and the opinions expressed by the Working Group members, the Board has concluded that the NIH Policy cannot achieve its stated goals unless deposit of manuscripts in PubMed Central becomes mandatory. We favor public release of NIH-funded articles in PubMed Central no later than 6 months after publication, although some flexibility may be needed for journals published less frequently than bimonthly. We were pleased that most of the publishers on the Working Group indicated an interest in depositing the final published version of articles in PubMed Central on behalf of NIH-funded authors. The Board agrees that this would be highly desirable. The Board encourages NIH and NLM to develop a careful plan for transitioning to a mandatory policy. It will be important to provide clear guidance and a reasonable timetable, to minimize burden on NIH-funded researchers and grantee institutions, and also to continue to work with publishers to make it easy for them to submit articles on behalf of their NIH-supported authors. The next Working Group’s next meeting is scheduled for April 10. I [BOR chair, Thomas Detre] would be happy to engage the Group in assisting with transition planning, if that would be helpful.
Open Access News 2/16/06
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_02_12_fosblogarchive.html
Excerpt from Part I of the Report:
BioOne was launched in 2001 and has become the leading not-for-profit aggregator and online disseminator of peer-reviewed research in organismal and integrative biology, ecology and environmental science. Our progress continued in 2005 with excellent results, including strong growth and wider diversity in subscribers, users, publishers and content. We will commemorate the milestone of providing five years of online service in spring 2006 and will continuously strive to increase our relevance and value to
stakeholders.
In virtually every respect, BioOne has exceeded the initial goals of the organization. Beginning with a collection of 37 titles at launch in April 2001, publications have more than doubled, to 82 in 2005, and the number of full text pages in the database has nearly quadrupled since our inaugural year. Subscribers at the end of 2005 exceed 800 institutions and organizations. Researcher’s online usage has also grown significantly and remains exceptionally strong. Royalties to publishers have grown substantially, in both total and average per title, becoming an important source of income for these non-profit organizations.
Our success in providing an economical and effective online research resource reflects the collaborative efforts and vision of a community of librarians, scholars, publishers and others, including our many partners. All have a commitment to our mission of ensuring comprehensive and affordable access to peer-reviewed bioscience research under sustainable publishing and subscription programs. The cornerstone of BioOne’s strategy has always been to evolve our underlying business model to keep pace with changes in scholarly publishing. This includes, in particular, the trend in libraries away from retaining print copies of journals where reliable electronic access exists. In response, we continue to fine-tune BioOne’s operating model from one designed originally to provide incremental revenue to journal publishers, to one that provides progressively more substantial revenue to help offset declines in institutional print subscription sales. Simultaneously, we have stepped up our efforts to offer publishers
meaningful programs to improve internal publishing efficiencies and tap into alternative income sources. Without such initiatives, the continued viability and independence of notfor- profit journal programs may erode, to the detriment of scholarship and science.
Read BioOne’s progress report online at:
http://www.bioone.org/pdf/BioOne05ProgressRpt.pdf
Rick Weiss, “Government Health Researchers Pressed to Share Data at No Charge,” Washington Post, March 10, 2006. Excerpt:
Political momentum is growing for a change in federal policy that would require government-funded health researchers to make the results of their work freely available on the Internet. Advocates say taxpayers should not have to pay hundreds of dollars for subscriptions to scientific journals to see the results of research they already have paid for. Many journals charge $35 or more just to see one article — a cost that can snowball as patients seek the latest information about their illnesses. Publishers have successfully fought the “public access” movement for years, saying the approach threatens their subscription base and would undercut their roles as peer reviewers and archivists of scientific knowledge. But the battle lines shifted last month when a National Institutes of Health report revealed that a compromise policy enacted last spring — in which NIH-funded scientists were encouraged but not required to post their findings on the Internet — has been a flop. Less than 4 percent filled out the online form to make their results available for public viewing.
Now a key federal advisory committee has recommended that scientists who receive NIH grants be required to post their results within six months of publication. And the Senate is considering legislation that would mandate such disclosures for an even broader array of federally funded scientists….”We think it is too early to jump into a mandatory system,” said James Pringle of the Publishing Research Consortium, a loose-knit group created to fight the public-access movement. It is not just profit-hungry publishers who object to mandatory public access, opponents emphasize. Some nonprofit scientific and professional societies fear that without the income they receive from their research journals they will no longer be able to finance their educational and training programs. “We make money off our journals, but it all goes back to enhance publishing and to enhance the needs of our scientific community,” said Martin Frank, executive director of the Bethesda-based American Physiological Society, which publishes 14 journals. The society runs an award-winning mentoring program for minority scientists and educational programs for elementary schools and high schools….
A National Library of Medicine working group concluded last November that scientists are well aware of the voluntary program — the NIH has sent multiple e-mails to grant recipients, published a pamphlet and posted details on the Web — and that the online submission system works well. The best way to boost compliance, a majority of the group concluded, is to make it mandatory. In February, the library’s Board of Regents made a formal recommendation to Zerhouni that grant recipients be required to post their papers within six months after publication — with some “flexibility” for infrequently published journals that might be hurt by free access to their contents within six months. Ruiz Bravo said the agency is considering the recommendation, but the publishing consortium is fighting back with data of its own. The group recently commissioned a survey of 1,128 scientists. It concluded that although 85 percent of scientists “have heard of” NIH’s public access effort, only 18 percent know “a lot” or “quite a lot” about it. That suggests NIH could still do more to promote the voluntary policy, Pringle said….
Public-access advocates say opponents are simply stalling. “It has to be mandatory,” said Rich Roberts, chief scientific officer of New England BioLabs in Ipswich, Mass. — one of many who think that most scientists will not get around to posting their work unless they are told they must. Some in Congress appear to agree. After years of asking NIH to encourage public access, Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) upped the ante in December by introducing the American Center for Cures Act. It would require recipients of grants — not only from the NIH but also from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality — to post their final manuscripts within six months after publication, or risk losing funding. That is an option that makes publishers cringe. But it could get worse. A spokesman for Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) said last week that the senator has been mulling over broader language that would compel public disclosure of research findings from an even greater number of federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. With that option looming, the National Library of Medicine’s recommendation — which applies only to NIH-funded research — could start to look good to publishers.
Washington Post, March 10, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/09/AR2006030901960.html
SPARC has launched a Web page (https://db.arl.org/oap) on which librarians, faculty and administrators can share the concept and execution of open access programs held at their universities. On this page, SPARC members and other can submit information about the open access programs on their campus and browse information about other institutions’ efforts. The site also contains information on institutional repositories and scholarly communication programs in general. Much of the information on the site was originally gathered by Rebecca Kemp, Electronic Resources/Serials Librarian at UNC Wilmington. Contributions are encouraged.
SPARC e-news, December 2005 – January 2006
http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/enews/dec05.html
In 2004, open access became an important subject for the British Parliament, as the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, after four public hearings, voiced its support for exploration into open access, particularly institutional repositories. Then the official British government’s response almost entirely dismissed the committee’s work. More than a year later, in a public debate held last week, that report, Scientific Publications: Free For All?, returned briefly to Parliament’s spotlight again. The general consensus: that the government’s dismissal of the report and in fact its understanding of the report was wrong. MP Phil Willis, the new chair of the Science and Technology Committee, said he was “staggered by the level on interest and the intensity of feeling on the subject.” Issues touched on included the impact of digitization, the open access movement, the cost of library subscriptions, and the hefty profits of major commercial scientific publishers. At least one MP rose to the defense of publishers MP Edward Vaizey, within whose constituency resides Reed Elsevier, Blackwell, MacMillan, and Oxford University Press. “I do not accept that the problem lies with publishers,” Vaizey said, “and I do not accept there is an access crisis.” Vaizey said he was wary of the government intervening to “ensure a new model gains ground.”
While feelings may differ among MP, it seemed there was consensus that the government look again at the 2004 report. “It is fair to say the government’s response was curious,” Willis noted, adding that the government seemed to “argue against and reject the ‘author pays’ model as if it was what the committee proposed when it palpably was not.” Willis also slammed the government for doing nothing to support the establishment of institutional repositories. MP Brian Iddon bolstered Willis’s critique. “The government’s response was wrong,” he said flatly. “We were not recommending the ‘author pays’ model in our conclusions. All we were doing was to suggest the government should pay some attention to it.” The debate also featured some of the tart, quick-witted give-and-take famous in British Parliament and on display in the 2004 hearings. When Iddon shared a story of once publishing articles in the Journal of the Chemical Society, MP Ian Gibson, who chaired the initial STM hearings, interrupted. “For the record, I published in Nature,” Gibson interjected. “How does that rate in the citation index?” Iddon, amused, explained to the audience that “my honorable friend is trying to get one up on me, because Nature is one of the highest-impact journals.”
Transcript of debate:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmhansrd/cm051215/halltext/51215h01.htm#51215h01_spnew45
Library Journal Academic Newswire, Dec 22, 2006
