Questions regarding the discontinuation of Hardin Scholarly Communication News may be directed to Linda Walton.

My sincerest appreciation for all the loyal readers out there.  Please visit our spring issue of Transitions, where you may set up an RSS feed for notifications of new content.

Karen Fischer, editor, HSCN and Transitions

November 2008 | Issue 3.08

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.

Table of Contents:

Congress’s copyright fight puts open access science in peril

Open Access: it’s “just good science”

Health Commons – changing the way basic science is translated to help human health

Scientific publishing might create a winner’s curse

Does online access change citation practices?

Publisher-Author Agreements and the NIH Public Access Policy

Read publisher policies on copyright, and more…

Author’s Rights, Tout de Suite

In Boost for NIH Policy, Major Autism Research Organization Mandates Public Access

Medical Wiki Backed by Prominent Colleges Will Go Live by Year’s End

Backlash against open access

In recent years, scientific publishing has changed profoundly as the Internet simplified access to the scientific journals that once required a trip to a university library. That ease of access has caused many to question why commercial publishers are able to dictate the terms by which publicly funded research is made available to the public that paid for it.

Open access proponents won a big victory when Congress voted to compel the National Institutes of Health to set a policy of hosting copies of the text of all publications produced by research it funds, a policy that has taken effect this year. Now, it appears that the publishing industry may be trying to get Congress to introduce legislation that will reverse its earlier decision under the guise of strengthening copyright protections.

Under existing law, the products of federally funded research belong to the scientists that perform it and institutions that host them. Academic journals have traditionally had researchers transfer the copyright of publications resulting from this research to the journals. The current NIH policy requires that authors they fund reserve the right to place the text and images of their publication in an NIH database hosted at PubMed Central (PMC).

To protect commercial publishers, papers submitted to PMC are not made accessible until a year after publication, and are not required to include the formatting and integration of images performed by the publisher. This one-year limit is longer than that required by other governments and private funding bodies such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Wellcome Trust. Many publishers have embraced this policy, and allow the fully formatted paper to be made available, sometimes after a shorter embargo.

Open Access meets resistance

Not all publishers have embraced it, however, and some have tried to exact exorbitant fees for allowing manuscripts to be transferred to PMC. Others have engaged in aggressive lobbying against open access efforts.

Read on…

Cameron Neylon, Where does Open Access stop and ‘just doing good science’ begin?, Science in the open, October 14, 2008.

I had been getting puzzled for a while as to why I was being characterised as an ‘Open Access’ advocate. …

This came to a head recently when I was being interviewed for a piece on Open Access. We kept coming round to the question of what it was that motivated me to be ’such a strong’ advocate of open access publication. I must have a very strong motivation to have such strong views surely? And I found myself thinking that I didn’t. I wasn’t that motivated about open access per se. It took some thinking and going back over where I had come from to realise that this was because of where I was coming from. …

The debate [about OA] has placed, or perhaps re-placed, right at the centre of the discussion of how we should do science, the importance of the quality of communication. It has re-stated the principle of placing the claims that you make, and the evidence that supports them, in the open for criticism by anyone with the expertise to judge, regardless of where they are based or who is funding them. And it has made crystal clear where the deficiencies in that communication process lie and exposed the creeping tendency of publication over the past few decades to become more an exercise in point scoring than communication. There remains much work to be done across a wide range of areas but the fact that we can now look at taking those challenges on is due in no small part to the work of those who have advocated Open Access from its difficult beginnings to today’s success. Open Access Day is a great achievment in its own right and it should be celebration of the the efforts of all those people who have contributed to making it possible as well as an opportunity to build for the future.

High quality communication, as I and others have said, and will continue to say, is Just Good Science. The success of Open Access has shown how one aspect of that communication process can be radically improved. The message to me is a simple one. Without open communication you simply can’t do the best science. Open Access to the published literature is simply one necessary condition of doing the best possible science.

Science Commons’ John Wilbanks lays out the argument for the Health Commons – how the existing drug discovery process is broken, and where to look for inspiration in how to fix it.  Take a look at this great video and find out more about Health Commons.

The Health Commons was founded by:

Science Commons
CommerceNet
Public Library of Science
CollabRx

Scientific publishing may be having some difficulty as a business model, but there are also plenty of questions regarding how well it functions from a scientific perspective. Scientifically, the function of publishing is to get accurate, reproducible information and its interpretations into the hands of the scientific community, and there has always been some debate about whether the peer review and impact factor-driven world of publishing is the optimal way to achieve it. A paper that was published in the open access journal PLoS Medicine has now examined scientific publishing using economic concepts and concluded that the way things are done now is inevitably problematic.

The paper makes what may be its most tenuous claim up front: scientific information can be treated as a commodity. It may be really difficult to put a monetary value on this commodity, but it’s clear that lots of groups—fellow scientists, policy makers, commercial entities—want access to high-quality scientific data. The publishers act as intermediaries in this process, determining what research will grace their pages and attracting “buyers” of the information in the form of subscribers.

The authors argue that this situation makes the publishers, as they try to attract the hottest research to their pages, in a position analogous to bidders at an auction, and the authors analogous to sellers. This is where the economic model comes in. Auction bidders are prone to suffering a “winner’s curse,” where the true value of an item is probably closer to an average of the bids, which means that the winner (the highest bidder) probably offered too much for it. Reality, in the authors’ view, is probably closest to the average of the relevant publications, meaning that any given publication, even one accepted by a prestigious journal, is probably off-base, either subtly or dramatically. By “winning” the right to publish it, the journal gets the winner’s curse. Read more…

To read the PLoS Medicine article, go to:

Citation: Young NS, Ioannidis JPA, Al-Ubaydli O (2008) Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science. PLoS Med 5(10): e201 doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050201

Excerpt:

Earlier this year, Davis reported on a study by sociologist James Evans suggesting that online access to scientific journals is leading to more recent citations and a narrowing of the diversity of those articles which are cited.

This study was not taken at face value, and three information scientists (Vincent Larivière, Yves Gingras, and Éric Archambault) all at the University of Quebec in Montreal have released a new analysis taking aim at the diversity claim.

Their manuscript, “The decline in the concentration of citations, 1900-2007,” deposited September 30th in the arXiv, uses a simpler methodology. They report the percentage of papers that received at least one citation, the percentage of papers needed to account for 20%, 50%, and 80% of total citations, and the Herfindahl-Hirschman index, a measure used to estimate market concentration.

. . . What makes this controversy interesting is that both studies make theoretical sense.  A narrowing of science conforms to attention economics and preferential attachment (why the cited get more citations and the rest get ignored); a broadening of science conforms to information foraging theory, the principle of least effort, and the increasing ease of retrieving relevant articles.  The results of both studies imply something different about the state of science, whether scientific information is being disseminated efficiently, and whether the literature is reflecting more diversity of opinion or more conformity.

Read the entire post at: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/10/13/citation-controversy/

Read more commentary on the topic at:

Great minds think (too much) alike. Economist; 7/19/2008, Vol. 387 Issue 8589, p89-89, 2/3p (available to UI affliates only)

Washington DC–The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released “PubMed Central Deposit and Author Rights: Agreements between 12 Publishers and the Authors Subject to the NIH Public Access Policy,” by Ben Grillot, MLS (Maryland 2002), second-year student at the George Washington University Law School, and legal intern for ARL.

To help authors make informed choices about their rights, Grillot compares how the agreements of 12 publishers permit authors to meet the requirements of the recently revised National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy and share their works while they are under embargo. The NIH Public Access Policy requires authors of NIH-funded research to deposit their works in PubMed Central and make them publicly available within 12 months of publication.

Grillot focuses his analysis on how the agreements differ in: the terms and procedures of deposit of the work, the length of any embargo period, and the rights of the author to use and share the work during the embargo period. Grillot presents summary tables that clearly show the similarities and differences across agreements. He also analyzes the implications of these agreements.

Grillot concludes that the significant variability in publisher agreements requires authors with NIH funding to closely examine publisher agreements and the rights granted and retained when deciding where to publish their research. His analysis of these 12 agreements will help authors determine what to look for in an agreement and what questions to ask before signing.

“PubMed Central Deposit and Author Rights” is available for free download from the ARL Web site at http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/grillot-pubmed.pdf

SHERPA has several resources for authors to use:

RoMEO: Use this site to find a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher’s copyright transfer agreement.  Additionally, you will find many sample publication agreements on this site.

Publishers allowing the deposition of their published version/PDF in Institutional Repositories. There is often a question about the use of the publishers own PDF version of research articles and whether these can be archived. It is often believed that all publishers prohibit the use of their own PDF: in fact the situation is very different. Use this site to find out what you can do with your article post-publication.

Publishers’ paid open access options often allow authors to immediately deposit their articles in open access repositories upon payment of a fee. The same publishers may also allow authors to deposit after an embargo period without payment of a fee. Use this site to find out if a publisher has an OA option, and the cost.

Additionally, University of Iowa authors can find a trove of information on author rights (why you should retain copyright for your creative output) on the Transforming Scholarly Communication web site at the University of Iowa Libraries.