Hardin Scholarly Communication News

Full year results from Oxford Open show wide variation in open access uptake across disciplines

Oxford Journals, a division of Oxford University Press, today released full year figures from its optional open access experiment, Oxford Open. In the first year of launch, almost 400 papers have been published under the optional open access model across 36 of the 49 participating titles.

The majority of uptake of optional open access has, as predicted, been in the life sciences, with approximately 10% of authors selecting the open access option across 16 participating journals in this area, compared with approximately 5% in medicine and public health, and 3% in the humanities and social sciences.

Three life sciences titles in the areas of molecular and computational biology have seen over 20% uptake. The highest of these was for Bioinformatics, which has published over 50 open access papers in 2006. 2007 online subscription prices have been adjusted for these journals to reflect this uptake.

Oxford Open, launched in July 2005, gives authors the option of paying for their research to be made freely available online immediately upon publication in the participating journals. Twenty-one titles adopted this model in July 2005, and further titles have joined in 2006, giving 49 journals participating at present.

Claire Bird, Senior Editor, Oxford Journals, commented, “we continue to see wide variation in uptake, and different levels of interest in ‘author-pays’ open access models between disciplines. The highest uptake has been in areas where more funding for open access is available, such as the life sciences, and we would expect this trend to continue in 2007.”

Managing Director, Martin Richardson also commented: “We launched Oxford Open to help foster a better understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of open access and subscription-based business models. These results show that while open access is beginning to be embraced in some subject areas, the level of uptake is generally quite low. These results continue to suggest that open access is likely to be only one of a range of models that will be necessary to support the requirements of different research communities.

“We remain committed to sharing the results of these experiments with the community in order to increase knowledge and understanding of open access, and to help direct us, and other publishers, towards viable business models for the future.”

Oxford Journals will continue to offer optional open access to the 49 participating journals for 2007, in addition to continuing its other experiments with open access with Nucleic Acids Research (NAR), Journal of Experimental Botany, and Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine (ECAM). It also expects further journals to join the initiative over the coming year.

Oxford Journals continues to offer two standard charges: 1500 GBP standard, and a discounted rate of 800 GBP for authors based in an institution with an online subscription to the journal. 80% of authors who chose open access in the first year of Oxford Open have paid a discounted open access charge, as members of a subscribing institution.

Oxford Open charges will remain the same for authors wishing to publish open access in 2007. Further reduced charges are also available to authors in developing countries: see the Oxford Open website, and participating journal homepages, for further information.

The online subscription prices of 3 journals (Bioinformatics, Carcinogenesis and Human Molecular Genetics) have been adjusted for 2007 to reflect how much original research material was made freely available in the first phase of the initiative in 2005-2006.

Oxford Journals News Release, Aug. 30, 2006

J Med Libr Assoc. 2006 July; 94(3): 253–262.
Copyright © 2006, Medical Library Association

Karen M. Albert, MLS, AHIP, Director of Library Services
Talbot Research Library, Fox Chase Cancer Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19111

ABSTRACT:
Purpose: The paper reviews and analyzes the evolution of the open access (OA) publishing movement and its impact on the traditional scholarly publishing model.

Procedures: A literature survey and analysis of definitions of OA, problems with the current publishing model, historical developments, funding agency responses, stakeholder viewpoints, and implications for scientific libraries and publishing are performed.

Findings: The Internet’s transformation of information access has fueled interest in reshaping what many see as a dysfunctional, high-cost system of scholarly publishing. For years, librarians alone advocated for change, until relatively recently when interest in OA and related initiatives spread to the scientific community, governmental groups, funding agencies, publishers, and the general public.

Conclusions: Most stakeholders acknowledge that change in the publishing landscape is inevitable, but heated debate continues over what form this transformation will take. The most frequently discussed remedies for the troubled current system are the “green” road (self-archiving articles published in non-OA journals) and the “gold” road (publishing in OA journals). Both movements will likely intensify, with a multiplicity of models and initiatives coexisting for some time.

To view the full article: http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1525322

NIH may have to insist on submission to online archive.

Nature 441, 915(22 June 2006) | doi:10.1038/441915a; Published online 21 June 2006
By Gene Russo

Abstract:
A question to holders of grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH): do you plan to submit publications resulting from NIH-funded research to PubMed Central? The answer is probably ‘no’. Fewer than 4% of NIH-funded researchers send their papers to the free-to-access archive, despite the agency having requested that they do so since May 2005.

That could be about to change. The archive is at the heart of plans, backed by a coalition of US politicians and advocacy groups, to make the fruits of publicly funded research freely available. On 13 June, a change was introduced to a House of Representatives spending bill such that NIH grantees would be required, not requested, to submit to PubMed within 12 months of publication. The proposal has upset some publishers and scientific societies, who are wary of citation confusion and a possible drop in income.

The move is in part a response to the limited impact of NIH’s current policy on open access. “It is not working in its current state,” says Norka Ruiz Bravo, NIH deputy director for extramural research and an advocate of full participation in open-access publishing by all grantees.

To view the full article: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7096/full/441915a.html
(access restricted to UI affiliates and other subscribers)

Science 15 September 2006: Vol. 313. no. 5793, p. 1572
DOI: 10.1126/science.313.5793.1572a

Letters:

Excerpt:

In their letter “Public access failure at PubMed” (7 July, p. 43), M. Stebbins et al. express a skeptical view of the NIH public access policy, basing their critique on several misconceptions that deserve comment.

1) Is the policy too costly? The current NIH appropriation is $27.9 billion. The $3 million anticipated yearly cost of the public access policy represents 0.011% of the appropriation. In fact, the expenditure on public access is dwarfed by the $30 million annually that NIH reports it provides its funded investigators for page charges and other costs of publishing in subscription journals (1).

2) Stebbins et al. claim that there is a lack of “a demonstrated desire by the general public for access to primary research papers.” Usage statistics for PubMed Central (PMC)–the NIH database that provides full-text research articles to the public for free and serves as the repository for articles submitted under the public access policy–suggest otherwise. There were more than 5 million users of PMC in April. That level of use suggests that not only are working scientists taking advantage of the resource, students and the lay public are as well. There is surely usage from junior colleges, research institutes, small companies, and many other organizations that do not have large budgets for biomedical research journal subscriptions.

3) The public access policy is criticized because there is “no dedicated system to guarantee that corrections” can be made after publication. Substantive author corrections or retractions are often made by the subsequent publication of errata or retraction notices. The National Library of Medicine has an established system that ensures that any published errata or retractions are noted in the PubMed citation and PMC full-text articles include a link (2).

6) Stebbins et al. claim that the proposed Federal Research Public Access Act (S.2695) requiring federal agencies to implement a public access policy has drawn criticism because it “unfairly places scientists between funding agencies and publishers.” Actually, organizations that have a financial stake in publishing are the main source of opposition to the policy and to S.2695. Scientists submit articles without compensation, they carry out peer review usually without compensation, and they often serve as editors for little or no compensation. Publishers make huge profits from this business model based on free labor. Because of the unsupported concern that the public access policy would adversely affect their business interests, they use their political and economic clout to lobby for restricted access, which is detrimental to the professional interests of the scientists that they claim to be serving.

Michael A. Rogawski*
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, MD 20892, USA
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: michael.rogawski@nih.gov

Peter Suber
Public Knowledge
1875 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 650
Washington, DC 20009, USA

Read the entire letter: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/313/5793/1572a (access restricted to UI affiliates and other subscribers)

BioMed Central has released its Summary of funding agency policies on open access. From the press release (Sept 15, 2006):
BioMed Central today released the results of its international survey of 75 biomedical funders on their policies regarding open access to the results of research. The survey confirms that there is strong support by funders for moves to increase access to the results of research, through open access publishing and open access archiving.
Summary of survey findings:
• 33 funders responded to the survey (or had already made their policies on open access publicly available)
• 31 funders have confirmed that they are willing to fund article processing charges for open access publication
• 16 funders are signatories of one of the major international declarations in support of open access
• 15 funders have an official policy in support of open access
• 11 of these official funder policies either encourage or require funding recipients to deposit all resulting research articles in an open access repository

To assist authors wishing to publish in open access journals, the results of BioMed Central’s survey have been compiled into a comparison table, bringing together detailed information on each funder’s policy.
Matthew Cockerill, BioMed Central’s Publisher, commented: “It is very encouraging to see a growing number of funders expressing official support for open access, and confirming that they will make funds available to allow authors to publish in open access journals. Many of the funders we contacted as part of the survey indicated that, while they did not yet have an official policy in support of open access, it was an issue that they were actively working on. We hope that publication of this comparison table of funder policies will encourage even more funders to define official policies on open access.”

Open Access News, 9/15/2006

Morrison, Heather and Waller, Andrew (2006) Open access for the medical librarian. Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association 27(3):pp. 69-73.

Abstract:
In this article open access is defined, and the resources and issues of greatest relevance to the medical librarian are discussed. The economics of open access publishing is examined from the point of view of the university library. Open access resources, both journals and articles in repositories, are already significant and growing rapidly. There are close to 2300 fully open-access peer review journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) (320 health sciences titles are included). DOAJ is adding titles at a rate of 1.5 per day. An OAIster search of resources in repositories includes more than 7.6 million items (a rough estimate of the number of articles in repositories, although not all items are full text), and this number will exceed one billion items before the end of 2007. Medical research funders, including the US National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, the UK Medical Research Council, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, either have implemented or are considering open access policies. This will drive greater growth in open access resources, particularly in the area of medicine. There are implications and leadership opportunities for librarians in the open access environment.

John Willinsky, Why Open Access to Research and Scholarship? Journal of Neuroscience, September 6, 2006.

Excerpt:
The Internet has changed how we conduct and share research, primarily by increasing the global reach of scholarly communication. With scholarly journals, this possibility of expanding the circulation of knowledge has led to an “open access” movement that is making an increasing number of published, peer-reviewed articles free to read on-line. Authors, editors, publishers, and librarians are exploring new ways of using the Internet to make more of their research available in this way. The Society for Neuroscience provides an excellent example. It has recently increased the level of open access to The Journal of Neuroscience by making back issues, once they are 6 months old, freely accessible to on-line readers. The current president of the Society for Neuroscience, Stephen Heineman, explained that the move to increase access made sense, not only in light of National Institutes of Health and patient advocacy group initiatives, but because “open access is also consistent with the mission of the Society to promote research and to educate the public” (Heineman, 2006), and to that end, the Society is a signatory to the Washington D.C. Principles for Free Access to Science….

The question that scholarly societies and publishers are asking is that even if no one disputes the public good represented by the greater circulation of this knowledge, how can a journal be expected to offer free access to its content and remain financially viable? More than that, why would a scholarly society put subscription revenues at risk to further increase free access to its content? …

To begin with the simplest of points, made across a growing number of studies, open access leads to a work being cited more often and more quickly (Hitchcock, 2006)…

The most important reason for pursuing open access comes down to first principles. With its proven ability to increase the circulation of research (meaning that more researchers are turning a critical and appreciative eye to this work), open access strengthens the scientific claims of articles and overall quality of the research literature. Open access to research literature may prove to be the most important scientific gain afforded by the Internet…

Yet, open access is also part of a larger set of worries for the executive directors of scholarly associations. Many of them are witnessing the slow attrition of journal subscriptions among institutions, as libraries face tough choices between the big publishers’ bundled titles and the smaller society titles. At the same time, individuals are seeing less value in subscribing to titles that the library delivers to their laptops. How, then, are societies to serve member-authors, whose primary interest is in increasing their readership (rather than seeing it dwindle) and realizing the full benefit of their contributions to the public good? …

[T]Internet is already leading, much as the printing press did centuries ago, to a greater circulation of this work. How much greater that circulation will be, and to whose benefit, are the questions that we should all be asking. The answer will depend, in part, on the leadership and vision of scholarly societies such as this one, as well as the actions of its members (when it comes to self- archiving their published work). At the very least, this is a time to experiment (the very thing we do so well, after all) with new ways and models of scholarly publishing….

Also see Gary Westbrook’s (editor-in-chief of the Journal of Neuroscience) editorial titled “An Open Question”:

Excerpt:
Certainly there are legitimate reasons why government-funded research should be available to those who paid for it, but the reality, at least for the Journal of Neuroscience is that 96% of the articles published since 1981 are already freely available to anyone with Internet access. Only the 600 papers published in the last 6 months are under access control, and those are freely available to each of the >35,000 members of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) as a benefit of membership, as well as at more than 1000 libraries across the world. A recent survey of the membership indicated strong support for the concept of open access, but an unwillingness to pay the ~$3000 cost of each article published in the Journal, perhaps not a surprise in this year of uncertain grant funding.

Open Access News, 9/08/2006

Scientific journal Nature has reportedly adopted an open peer-review system to review papers submitted for publication. Under the initiative, manuscripts will be uploaded to a pre-print server and made available online to members of the scientific community in a blog format.

Comments submitted are subject to review themselves prior to being published, and those commenting will be required to put their name and institution to their words. In addition to public review via the Peer Review Trial, manuscripts will continue to be sent to Nature’s experts for a closed review. Also, authors can choose not to have their work reviewed in this manner, as there are some disadvantages associated with having an open peer-review. Although access is intended primarily for the scientific community, anyone can access the pre-published material.

However, the journal will discard any comments found to be irrelevant, intemperate or inappropriate. According to Nature’s editors, both sets of comments — the traditional peer-review opinions as well as the online remarks – will be taken into consideration while deciding whether or not to publish a study.
Interested readers can also visit the Nature web debate on Peer Review, and are invited to comment on the articles published there.

Knowledgespeak, 9/18/06 (and Issues in Scholarly Communication: SC News for the UIUC Community, Sept 18, 2006)

From the CBCRA web site:

We have created a unique [open-access] repository of peer-reviewed literature on breast cancer research, research supported by CBCRA. We believe it is the first of its kind, initiated by us because we believe that the public should have free access to research results funded by public agencies….CBCRA is the primary granting agency for breast cancer research in Canada….To date, CBCRA has allocated $138 million to top-quality breast cancer research in Canada.

The CBCRA doesn’t mandate OA to its research, although it’s thinking about a mandate for the future. It simply tries to provide OA to all the CBCRA-funded research that it can. Instead of doing this by contract, at the time of funding, it does it by painstaking requests for permission sent to grantee-authors and their publishers after they have published research based on CBCRA funding. First it tracks down authors and asks them to sign a license. Then it contacts their publisher and asks for permission to post an OA copy of the article to the CBCRA repository. It doesn’t send its queries until at least 12 months after publication, when publishers are more likely to agree. When it gets no replies, it sends out its letters again.

Using this arduous method since February of this year, CBCRA has been able to provide OA to about 25% of its research. About 62% of authors and 70% of publishers have agreed to the OA proposition. It’s considering a mandate in part to enlarge its OA coverage to 100% and in part to reduce or eliminate the large administrative burden of permission-seeking.

Kudos to the CBCRA for the steps it has already taken and for considering a mandate for the future. Unlike the Wellcome Trust, which is private, and the Research Councils UK, which are public, the CBCRA is an alliance with members on each side of the line. Its motto is: “Canada’s unique collaboration of public, private and non-profit organizations.”

The Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance (CBCRA)
http://www.breast.cancer.ca/

The CBRCA’s OA repository, hosted by the University of Toronto
https://researchspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807.1/1
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_07_02_fosblogarchive.html#115231219745255122

SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #100/August 2, 2006

The September issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine has three articles/essays addressing open access:
• Stevan Harnad, Open access: the evidence and the verdict (Letters: http://proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/login?url=http://www.jrsm.org/cgi/content/full/99/9/435-a)
• Mark Walport and Robert Kiley, Open access, UK PubMed Central and the Wellcome Trust (Essays: http://proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/login?url=http://www.jrsm.org/cgi/content/full/99/9/438)
• Richard Smith, The highly profitable but unethical business of publishing medical research (Series: http://proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/login?url=http://www.jrsm.org/cgi/content/full/99/9/452)

(Currently articles are restricted to U of Iowa affiliates and other subscribers)