January 2007 | Issue 1.07

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 Hardin News.

Table of Contents:

Author Addenda (for Retention of Copyright): An Examination of Five Alternatives
Survey on Academic Publishing
Scholarpedia Launches
Open Access Could Lead to Cancelled Subscriptions
Summary of Biomedical Funders’ Policies on Open Access
The Promise of Value-based Journal Prices and Negotiation
Publishers Criticize Professors for Copyright Violations
What is Open Data?
Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office
Genetic Database That Matches Drugs to Illnesses May Speed New Therapies
Nature Ends Open Peer Review Experiment
Google’s Offer to Digitize Journal Back Runs for OA
UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) Now Live
Shaping the Future of Scientific Scholarly Communication: PLoS One

Excerpt from Author Addenda: An Examination of Five Alternatives, D-Lib Magazine, November 2006, vol. 12, no. 11

The Problem:
When an author publishes a book or a paper, many publishers ask the author to transfer all copyrights in the work to the publisher. But that is not always to the author’s advantage.

When authors assign to publishers all of the rights that comprise the bundle of rights known as copyright, they lose control over their scholarly output. Assignment of copyright ownership may limit the ability of authors to incorporate elements into future articles and books. Authors may not be able to use their own work in their teaching, or to authorize others at the institution or elsewhere to use materials.

Unless addressed in the transfer agreement, the publisher may forbid an author to do the following:
• Post the work to the author’s own web site, an institutional repository, or a subject-based repository.
• Copy the work for distribution to students.
• Use the work as the basis for future articles or other works.
• Give permission for the work to be used in a course at the author’s institution.
• Grant permission to faculty and students at other universities to use the material.
For all of the above reasons, many organizations and institutions have encouraged authors to better manage their copyrights.

One Solution: the Author’s Addenda:
Until recently, the primary method that authors could use to retain some rights in their writings was to rewrite the contract with the publishers themselves. Thanks to the development of standardized author addenda, the task has become much simpler. An author’s addendum is a standardized legal instrument that modifies the publisher’s agreement and allows the author to keep key rights.

…Currently, Scholarpedia hosts Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience, Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems and Encyclopedia of Computational Intelligence. Although all three will eventually be published in a printed form, they will also remain freely available and modifiable online. (Producing a hard copy of each encyclopedia is important for archiving; besides, many academicians have a preconception that the prestige of an online article is not as high as that of a printed one.)

Read more at Scholarpedia

A study of 400 librarians has found that the length of the embargo period before material becomes open access, and whether peer-reviewed versions of articiles are available, are key determininants in a librarian’s deision to maintain or cancel journal subscriptions,

The study was conducted by the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC). The founding partners of PRC are The Publishers Association (PA) of the UK, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM). Corresponding partners include The Association of American University Presses and the Professional / Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers.
In sounding a potential alarm, the PRC site goes on to say:

This study raises questions about previous claims that librarians will continue to subscribe to journals, even when some or all of the content is freely available on institutional archives.

Read the full study.

PRC News Release, Nov. 9, 2006

BioMed Central Autumn Librarian News Update, Oct. 13, 2006

Abstract

In pursuit of their scholarly communication agenda, the University of California ten-campus libraries have posited and tested the case that a journal’s institutional price can and should be related to its value to the academic enterprise. We developed and tested a set of metrics that comprise “value-based pricing” of scholarly journals. The metrics are the measurable impact of the journal, the transparent measures of production costs, the institutionally-based contributions to the journal, such as editorial labor, and the transaction efficiencies from consortial purchases. Initial modeling and use of the approaches are promising, leading the libraries to employ and further develop the approaches and share their work to date with the larger community.

Exceprts:

Our model of value-based pricing assumes that prices could and should be set, or negotiated, not solely through an arbitrary producer-set price point (in which little is known to the library about publisher assumptions and expectations for generating revenue above operational costs), but rather, in relation to four key elements:

* measures of scholarly value and impact;
* transparent and explicit indexes for changes in production costs;
* value-adding contributions from the purchasing/leasing institution (e.g. for original content, editorial labor, editorial overhead such as office space);
* transaction efficiencies (e.g. through business negotiations with a library consortium; through near-zero marginal costs for an additional user). [p. 3]

… Our modeling of value-based prices used Bergstrom-McAfee’s work to progressively “discount” list prices for journals with high RCI scores, i.e. to calculate a discount from the institutional list price when their combined costs per-citation and per-article were significantly higher than the median non-profit journal in the same discipline. Higher Relative Cost Index scores, indicating a journal further from the median price/article and price/citation of non-profit journals in the same discipline, were more heavily discounted…In two test cases of commercial publishers with large title lists, this yielded list price discounts in the range of 40% and 50% for the entire list of journals for which RCI data was available. If successfully employed in a purchase or license negotiation, these base prices would very likely yield larger and more defensible discounts than ad hoc “better than list price” negotiations. [p. 5]

… In UC’s experience, while annual price caps that are negotiated over the life of a multi-year contract add predictability, they are often arbitrarily proposed and negotiated with anecdotal evidence to find a compromise between what the publisher wants and what is reasonable or affordable to the library. To remove this arbitrary aspect, we wanted to tie annual price increases to actual increases in publisher production costs. UC has limited experience in negotiating price increases tied to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), under the rationale that CPI is an actual measure of inflation. However, we speculated that the Producer Price Index (PPI), specifically the PPI’s “Commodity Finished Goods Less Food and Energy” (which removes the two most volatile components), is a more appropriate metric for changes in production costs. We calculated a 3-year (2003-2005) average for PPI of 1.36% which compared quite favorably to extant price caps. [p. 6]

… Our report…brings several “big questions” to the foreground and further emphasizes the importance of community engagement in the debate. For example, is it possible for for-profit publishing to maintain an acceptable margin of profit in a “value-based” pricing system? How can we meaningfully assess value as publishers begin to move away from (historically print-based) institutional list price pricing models, a model we can all agree is untenable? Can we effectively shape those new pricing models? How do we factor in usage data? What other potential measures of value are there? How do we quantify the academy’s contribution to the publishing/scholarly communication process? Can and should value-based pricing be developed for the article as opposed to the journal? [p. 9]

Read the full report: http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/cdc/valuebasedprices.pdf

The AAP hopes that other institutions will implement programs similar to the one Cornell has adopted.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 20 November 2006
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/292898_copyright20.html
Edupage, EDUCAUSE Listserve, Nov 27, 2006

Download the Creative Commons Microsoft Office add-in from the Microsoft website. For a short URL to this resource, use this tinyURL:
http://tinyurl.com/y9y634

Installation of the Creative Commons Microsoft Office add-in will add an option to your File menu whereby you can easily add the CC logo and usage statement to your document.

Issues in Scholarly Communication: SC News for the UIUC Community, Dec. 13, 2006