Transitions

January 2010
Issue 1.10

Welcome to the winter issue of Transitions.

The purpose of this irregular electronic newsletter is to bring to readers’ attention some of the many new projects and developments informnig the current system of scholarly communication, with emphasis on new products and programs, the open access movement, and other alternative publishing models. Scholarly communication refers to the full range of formal and informal means by which scholars and researchers communicate, from email discussion lists to peer-reviewed publication. In general, authors are seeking to document and share new discoveries with their colleagues, while readers–researchers, students, librarians and others–want access to all the literature relevant to their work.

While the system of scholarly communication exists for the benefit of the world’s research and educational community and the public at large, it faces a multitude of challenges and is undergoing rapid change brought on by technology. To help interested members of the UI community keep up on these challenges and changes we plan to put out 4 issues per year of this newsletter.  Please visit our web site, Transforming Scholarly Communication, to find out more about this topic.

This newsletter is designed to reflect the interests of its readers so please forward comments, suggestions and entries to include to karen-fischer@uiowa.edu.

Read these articles in our January newsletter:

Public Access to Federally Funded Research – Public input
University Press survival… through open access
Compact for Open Access Publication Equity (COPE)
PLoS One to be indexed by Web of Science
Optical Society of America – a pioneer in scholarly publishing innovation
Nobel Prize-winning scientists urge Congress to act
Open Access Encyclopedias
Who will pay for Arxiv?
Studies on Access – a review
Medical Schools Quizzed on Ghostwriting
Scholarly and Research Communication, a new OA journal
Wellcome Trust calls for greater transparency

The Obama administration has launched a study of the open access model of publishing in which materials are made available free online.  The Office of Science and Technology Policy is in the process of collecting comments in a online public forum concerning public access to federally funded research.  While the comment period was supposed to end January 7th, it has been extended to January 21st.

OSTP has many blog entries describing the process.  Scroll down to the bottom to view comments.

Excerpt from the introductory posting explains the Administration’s intentions:

 The Administration is seeking public input on access to publicly-funded research results, such as those that appear in academic and scholarly journal articles. Currently, the National Institutes of Health require that research funded by its grants be made available to the public online at no charge within 12 months of publication. The Administration is seeking views as to whether this policy should be extended to other science agencies and, if so, how it should be implemented.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President and the White House Open Government Initiative is launching a “Public Access Policy Forum” to invite public participation in thinking through what the Federal government’s policy should be with regard to public access to published federally-funded research results.

from Inside HigherEd, November 4, 2009

excerpts:

…the survival of the Utah State University Press has been in doubt, with fears that deep cuts being made to public higher education in Utah would end up killing off the publishing outlet.

…the press will survive — in part by embracing a new model of organization (becoming part of the university library) and a new business model (embracing open access, in which most publications would be available online and free).

While both of those changes are significant, key aspects of the press’s identity and mission will not change. It will continue to be a peer-reviewed scholarly publisher, and plans to continue its highly regarded work in fields such as composition studies, folklore, poetry, environmental studies, and the history and culture of the West.

This is going to be a way for us to extend our reach and build momentum,” said Michael Spooner, director of the press.

This is not the first university press to make such a move.  University of Michigan Press was restructured as an academic unit in the libraries in March 2009. Read more about MPublishing at: http://www.press.umich.edu/digital/mpublishing/

In September 2009 five American universities signed the Compact for Open-Access Publication Equity, pledging to support OA journals by paying author-side fees on behalf of their researchers.  Participants include Harvard, Cornell, Berkeley, Dartmouth and MIT.  Since then three more institutions have signed the compact.  The compact states that “Therefore, each of the undersigned universities commits to the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds. We encourage other universities and research funding agencies to join us in this commitment, to provide a sufficient and sustainable funding basis for open-access publication of the scholarly literature.”

FAQ on COPE: http://www.oacompact.org/faq/

From PLoS’s website (1/5/10)

Today we learned that by the end of this week PLoS ONE (in keeping with all other PLoS journals) will be indexed by the Web of Science – this is an important literature discovery tool that many people use and so we are pleased to be indexed. PLoS ONE is also indexed by a host of other services such as PubMed, MEDLINE, PubMed Central, Scopus, Google Scholar, the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), EMBASE, AGRICOLA, PsycINFO, Zoological Records, FSTA (Food Science and Technology Abstracts), GeoRef, and RefAware.

Initially, coverage in the Web of Science will include new PLoS ONE articles plus those published in 2008 and 2009, and will be expanded to the articles published in 2006 (when PLoS ONE was launched) and 2007 in the coming weeks. Inclusion in the Web of Science also means that in June 2010 PLoS ONE will receive journal-level citation data from Thomson Reuters including a 2- and 5-year Impact Factor and Eigenfactor metrics.

As we have previously indicated, PLoS believes that research articles are best assessed on their own merits, rather than on the basis of the journal (and its impact factor) where the work happens to be published. While we are happy that PLoS ONE articles will become more discoverable as a result of their inclusion in the Web of Science, we will continue to push forward with our Article-Level Metrics program.

Naturally, we understand that inclusion in the Web of Science is significant for many academics whose research output is still measured by traditional means. We hope that this news encourages even more scientists to publish their work in PLoS journals, to benefit from the article-level metrics that are provided for every PLoS article (for example, this PLoS ONE article), and to ensure that all interested users have open access to their research.

SPARC
For Immediate Release
January 14, 2010

For more information, contact:
Jennifer McLennan
jennifer [at] arl [dot] org
(202) 296-2296 ext 121

With the launch of Optics Express in 1997, the Optical Society of America (OSA) created an open-access journal that has stood the test of time to become a both a scientific and financial success. The journal, now entering its second decade of publication, is consistently ranked among the top titles in its field. And, it has proved to be such a successful financial venture that the Society is this year rolling out three more publications that follow the same open-access business model.

For being a shining example of community-driven creativity and innovation in scholarly communications, the Optical Society of America has been named the first SPARC Innovator of 2010.  SPARC recognizes the team at OSA that brought Optics Express into existence and nurtured its growth and sustainability.

The OA journal, Optics Express, publishes original, peer-reviewed articles in all fields of optical science and technology twice a month – within an average of 47 days after article acceptance. The quick turnaround, along with creative ways to highlight content – such as electronic cover images for every issue and Focus issues – have made Optics Express a sought-after publishing destination for authors and a top journal in the field. OSA is introducing three new journals under the Optics Express brand and publishing model over the next year:
Biomedical Optic Express, Optical Material Express and Energy Express.

Inside HigherEd
December 14, 2009

Excerpts:

Can an information source that is free also be reliable? Or does the price of content always reflect its value? In higher education, this debate usually takes place in the context of academic publishing, where open access journals have emerged to challenge their pricey print predecessors. This mirrors a wider trend in media, where lean, Web-based, free-content outlets have begun supplanting newspapers, magazines, and other publications that depend on subscription revenue.

The same narrative is playing out in the world of scholarly reference works. Encyclopedia Britannica, the genre’s sturdiest brand, has been marginalized in the Internet age by Wikipedia and Google — tools it dismisses as untrustworthy. Quality, Britannica says, comes at a price: $69.95 per year for Web access, to be exact ($1,349 if you want the bound volumes). Professors, tending to agree, have debated whether and how their students should be allowed to use Wikipedia while lamenting the lazy research habits Google has enabled.

Meanwhile, a number of academic institutions are quietly trying to do what Britannica and others say can’t be done: build online encyclopedias that are rigorous, scholarly, and free to access.

Read on….

Excerpt:

The e-print arXiv (pronounced “archive”) is a central repository of research articles in physics, mathematics, computer science, and quantitative biology. Since its inception in 1991 by theoretical physicist Paul Ginsparg, it has had a huge impact on the way science is done by providing free access to “pre-prints” of research papers. This meant that scientists from anywhere in the world with any background could access the latest research even if their university libraries didn’t have a copy of the particular journal in which it was published. This is a big deal since the cost of many of these journals created a gap between those institutions which could afford to pay for many journals and those which could not. In many ways arXiv “brought science into the 21st century” by allowing scientists to draw upon the collective scientific community more efficiently. Many credit it for pioneering the open access movement in scientific publishing.

But with increasing costs and the state of university budgets, the Cornell University Library (which operates the arXiv) is looking to find more cost-effective ways to support the arXiv and the much-needed overhauls in the software architecture (”arXiteXture”?). [Earlier this year Cornell closed its Physical Sciences library to help trim operational costs.]  Currently the Cornell library pays the $400,000/year operating cost to make the arXiv available free-of-charge to the rest of the world.

Read the entire blog post at US/LHC’s website: http://blogs.uslhc.us/?p=3468

Philip M. Davis has written a “review of the empirical literature on access to scholarly information. This review focuses on surveys of authors, article download and citation analysis.”  The pre-print is available in Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.3953v1

Excerpts:

In reviewing the literature, there is surprising consistency in the conclusions of these studies: access to the published literature is improving, and those who generate knowledge view access issues as largely unimportant. We should emphasize the phrase “those who generate knowledge,” since there has been very little work on the dissemination of scientific information to those who use – but do not contribute to – the literature (i.e. teachers, medical practitioners, industrial researchers, and the lay public).

Moreover, most studies have focused on access to the formal, published literature and assume that access is provided either directly from the publisher or through a library intermediary. We should not ignore the many informal ways academics share documents among informal networks of peers. Lastly, we should understand that most of the surveys and interviews cited below were conducted prior to the recent economic downturn, which have resulted in significant material reductions in major academic libraries.

from the Conclusion:

In conclusion, the literature on the access indicates that access to the scientific literature is improving, and that compared to other research-related concerns, access is a low-priority concern. There is a dearth of research on whether free access to the scientific literature is making a difference in non-research contexts, such as in teaching, medical practice, industry and government policy making. Moreover, more work needs to be done on the dissemination of scientific papers through non-formal models such as peer-to-peer sharing networks.

Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican who is a leading critic of conflicts of interest in biomedical research, is focusing on the issue of journal ghostwriting. The New York Times reported that he has written to 10 medical schools, asking about whether they have policies that deal with issues raised by pharmaceutical companies ghostwriting articles that appear under the names of university researchers.

NYT excerpt:

Mr. Grassley, of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, sent the letters as part of his continuing investigation of so-called medical ghostwriting. The term refers to publication of medical journal articles in which an outside writer — sometimes paid by a drug or medical devices company whose product is being studied — has done extensive work on the article without being named on the publication. Instead, one or more academic researchers may receive author credit.

Mr. Grassley said ghostwriting had hurt patients and raised costs for taxpayers because it used prestigious academic names to promote medical products and treatments that might be expensive or less effective than viable alternatives.