Transitions

March 2009
Issue 1.09

Welcome to the Spring issue of Transitions.

The purpose of this irregular electronic newsletter is to bring to readers’ attention some of the many new projects and developments affecting 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 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:

Google Books Settlement - updates

Publish in Wikipedia or Perish

Long-term Open Access Journal Ends Free Access

Study Suggests Library Dollars Spent Corrolate with Grant Income

Misunderestimating Open Science

Institutional Repositories: Thinking Beyond the Box

MacArthur Foundation Adopts a Research Access Policy

Negotiating a Creative Commons License

Framing the Open Access Debate

How the Media Frames “Open Access”

Publishing an E-journal on a Shoestring: Sustaining a low-buget OA journal

University Presses Find Strategies to Survive Economic Crisis

New Open Access Search Tool for Economics

An Open Access Resource for Women’s Health

Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab

Lisa Spiro, Director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University’s Fondren Library, overviews digital humanities developments in 2008 in two postings:

• Digital Humanities in 2008, Part I
• Digital Humanities in 2008, II: Scholarly Communication & Open Access

Part 1 discusses the emergence of Digital Humanities, and Part 2 looks broadly at the scholarly communication landscape, discussing open access to educational materials, new publication models, the Google Books settlement, and cultural obstacles to digital publication.

Excerpt from Part 2:

… This year saw some positive developments in open access and scholarly communications, such as the implementation of the NIH mandate, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts & Science’s decision to go open access (followed by Harvard Law), and the launch of the Open Humanities Press. But there were also some worrisome developments (the Conyers Bill’s attempt to rescind the NIH mandate, EndNote’s lawsuit against Zotero) and some confusing ones (the Google Books settlement). In the second part of my summary on the year in digital humanities, I’ll look broadly at the scholarly communication landscape, discussing open access to educational materials, new publication models, the Google Books settlement, and cultural obstacles to digital publication. …

 

The Association of American Universities (AAU) and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC) have released their February 19 letter to the House Judiciary Committee, supporting the NIH policy and opposing the Conyers bill. 

The major university associations in the US have joined the major library associations in supporting the NIH policy.

Exerpt from the Feb. 13th letter endorsed by major library associations:

Scientific research is advanced by broad dissemination of knowledge, and the subsequent building upon the work of others. To this end, the NIH Public Access Policy ensures that the results of our nation’s $29 billion annual investment in research reach the broadest possible audience. The Policy requires that, in exchange for receiving federal research dollars, grantees deposit the final electronic manuscript of their peer-reviewed research results into PubMed Central, NIH’s digital archive, to be made publicly available within 12 months – and was specifically implemented in full compliance with current U.S. copyright law.

The NIH Policy achieves several notable goals: First, it ensures broad public access to the results of NIH’s funded research, allowing scientists and researchers to collaborate and engage in cutting-edge research. Such access allows for greater sharing of information, speeding discovery, medical advances, and innovations.

Second, the NIH Policy ensures that the U.S. government has a permanent archive of these critical, publicly funded biomedical research results, ensuring that results can be built upon by not only this generation, but also future generations, of researchers.

Finally, the Policy creates a welcome degree of accountability and transparency, which enable us to better manage our collective investments in the NIH research portfolio and ensure the maximum possible benefits to the public in return.

To read about what people are writing in the blogosphere about the Conyers Bill, visit Open Access News at:

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/02/more-comments-on-conyers-bill-6.html

[Some text for this blog entry was excerpted from Peter Suber, Open Access News]

News updates on Google Books:

The American Library Association (ALA) Office for Information Technology Policy has launched Google Books Settlement.  It contains the settlement documents and a blog to track new developments and commentary. Included on the site is a 2 Page Super Simple Summary.

Librarian Opposes Google’s Library Fees, All Things Considered, NPR, February 21, 2009
Google wants to give you access to its huge database of scanned, out-of-print books, but the company is going to charge for it. Robert Darnton, head librarian at Harvard University, says the deal violates a basic American principle — that knowledge should be free and accessible to all. 

Rick Johnson, Free (or Fee) to All?, Library Journal, December 23, 2008.
In 2004, when five libraries inked the first book-scanning agreements with Google, it seemed like the company was offering a public service. Google’s plan to digitize the great libraries of the world conjured images of a vast, freely accessible Internet public library, bringing together corporate capital and vast library collections, with the potential to carry knowledge off the shelf virtually into every home and workplace. In the course of Google’s effort to bring library collections to the web, however, something quite different than an Internet public library has emerged.

Francine Fialkoff, Google Deal or Rip-Off? Librarians need to protect the public interest, Library Journal, December 15, 2008. 
An editorial.  Excerpt: One public access terminal per public library building. Institutional database subscriptions for academic and public libraries that secure once freely available material in a contractual lockbox, which librarians already know too well from costly e-journal and e-reference database deals. No remote access for public libraries without approval from the publisher/author Book Rights Registry, set up to administer the program. And no copying or pasting from that institutional database, though you can print pages for a fee.  Of course, you can always purchase the book, too.  Those are just a few of the choice tidbits from the 200-page settlement in the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Authors Guild three-year-old suit against Google, drawn from Jonathan Band’s “Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries and the Google Library Project Settlement.”  Band’s report was commissioned by the American Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries….

Declan Butler, Publish in Wikipedia or Perish, Nature News, Dec. 18, 2008

Journal to require authors to post in the free online encyclopaedia.

Excerpt:

Wikipedia, meet RNA. Anyone submitting to a section of the journalRNA Biology will, in the future, be required to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. The journal will then peer review the page before publishing it in Wikipedia.

The initiative is a collaboration between the journal and the RNA family database (Rfam) consortium led by the UK Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton. “The novelty is that for the first time it creates a link between Wikipedia and traditional journal publishing, with its peer-review element,” says Alex Bateman, who co-heads the Rfam database. The aim, Bateman says, is to boost the quality of the scientific content on Wikipedia while using the entries to update the Sanger database.

…The goal is to encourage more scientists who work on RNA to get involved in creating and updating public data on RNA families, while being rewarded by the traditional method of a citable publication, says Sean Eddy, a computational biologist at the Janelia Farm Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia, and a co-author of the nematode article.

The Journal of Clinical Investigation began providing free access to all online content in 1996.  In spite of dwindling revenue from print subscribers, the journal continued to justify free access to its content.

JCI has an impact factor of 16.9, and is the most highly-cited journal within its category of Medicine, Research and Experimental, according to ISI’s 2007 Journal Citation Reports.  Its editors reject 9 out of every 10 manuscript submissions.

The journal receives several sources of income from its authors.  JCI charges for submission ($70 US), pages charges ($0.22 per word), plus additional fees for each figure ($100), table ($50),  supplemental data ($300) and color ($1000).  Apparently, these author charges are not sufficient to cover publication costs for a high-quality journal.

The journal receives several sources of income from its authors.  JCI charges for submission ($70 US), pages charges ($0.22 per word), plus additional fees for each figure ($100), table ($50),  supplemental data ($300) and color ($1000).  Apparently, these author charges are not sufficient to cover publication costs for a high-quality journal.

Starting with the January 2009 issue, The Journal of Clinical Investigation began restricting some content. Research articles, corrigenda, and erratum remain freely available. Access to other content, such as book reviews and commentary, is restricted to subscribers (the University of Iowa is a subscriber).

Read more about it at “End of Free Access.”

[excepts from DigitalKoans and the Scholarly Kitchen]

Norman Oder, Study at UIUC Suggests $4.38 in Grant Income for Each Library Dollar, Library Journal, 1/22/2009

While return on investment (ROI) studies have become common in the public library arena, a pioneering ROI case study involving the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC) suggests that each dollar invested in the library in 2006 returns $4.38 in grant income. The study, while limited in scope and arguably in need of refinement, has spurred research at several other universities worldwide.

The study, University investment in the library: What’s the return?, was sponsored by Elsevier, whose staffers in 2006 had begun to notice that university administrators were increasingly asking about research performance measurement, cost justification, and return on investment. At a North American Library Advisory Board (NALAB) meeting, Elsevier proposed the idea of doing a case study and Paula Kaufman, UIUC’s University Librarian, volunteered, according to Elsevier VP Chrysanne Lowe.

The study was led by Judy Luther, President, Informed Strategies, with input from project advisor Carol Tenopir, professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (and an LJ columnist) and Elsevier’s Lowe and Kira Cooper. It was inspired by an article by Roger Strouse, VP and Lead Analyst with Outsell Inc., who described how corporate and government libraries save users time and help generate income with library resources.

James Boyle, Misunderestimating Open Science, Financial Times, Feb. 24, 2009

Excerpt:

It is hard for politicians to do anything that would shock me but I have to say that John Conyers, a US Congressman, has done it. In the process, he has taught us a lot about how far we have to go, all over the world, before we get our science policy right. Since science and technology are major engines of growth, that is a point of pressing interest for governments everywhere.

Rep. Conyers has introduced a bill, misleadingly called the ”Fair Copyright in Research Works Act,” that would eviscerate public access to taxpayer funded research. The bill is so badly drafted that it would also wreak havoc on federal information policy more generally. It is supported by the commercial science publishers, but opposed by a remarkable set of groups — ranging from the American Research Libraries, to 33 Nobel Prize Winners, to a coalition of patients’ rights organizations. (One of its many negative effects would be effectively to forbid the the US National Institutes of Health from allowing the taxpayers who have paid for medical research actually to read the results for free, hurting not only the progress of science, but informed medical decisions by patients and their families.)

As a copyright professor, I have to say the bill is a nightmare. For reasons I won’t bore you with, its limitations on Federal agencies are completely unworkable. And as a scholar who writes about innovation, I have to say that it flies in the face of decades of research which shows the extraordinary multiplier effect of free access to information on the speed of scientific development. But speaking as a human being, I just have to wonder what could be going through a politician’s head at a moment like this.

Library Journal has published “Institutional Repositories: Thinking Beyond the Box” by Andrew Richard Albanese.

Excerpts:

In February 2008, the faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University made history, unanimously passing a revolutionary open access mandate that, for the first time, would require faculty to give the university copies of their research, along with a nonexclusive license to distribute them electronically. In the press, Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton proudly spoke of reshaping “the landscape of learning” and fixing a damaged, overly expensive system of scholarly communication. And the very fulcrum of Harvard’s vision is a library-administered institutional repository (IR).

If Harvard’s vision portended a major role for IRs in the future, the reality today is that IRs remain largely empty, ineffective, and hobbled by everything from questions over their mission to lagging technology to the lack of meaningful institutional engagement. If they are to succeed as Harvard envisions, the next generation of IRs will require something of a reinvention—and a significantly higher level of institutional commitment.

. . . 

IRs have failed to catch on for a multitude of reasons, Salo explains, not the least of which is that the first generation was hopelessly passive about their collection activities. Essentially, IRs were created as large, digital “cardboard boxes,” without any specific mission, which faculty, unrealistically, were expected simply to fill. “When that didn’t happen, when it turned out faculty wouldn’t just voluntarily deposit things, most IRs didn’t know what to do next,” Salo says.

If librarians have learned anything from the failure of IRs thus far, it is that “build it and they will come” is not a viable collection strategy, nor any way to foster the digital library of the future. The next wave of IRs, she stresses, must be reimagined around specific services that have value to faculty and can be marketed to them—and supported by an administrative mandate.

“Revisiting IRs, the question librarians will need to ask is what digital objects are important for us to collect,” Salo explains, “and then how do we go about going out and getting them.” Already, she notes, that has begun—and the trend augurs well for the future. “Some IRs opened in the last year to 18 months are avoiding their predecessors’ mistakes,” Salo says, “and in that I see the stirrings of hope.”

. . . .

Moving the next generation of IRs toward Harvard’s vision of a “digital commonwealth” will not be easy. In his SPARC closing keynote address, David Shulenberger, VP of academic affairs at the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, spoke of the dysfunction in the academy and the institutional barriers to change—from organized resistance to open access policies by publishers and scholarly societies to a lawsuit filed by two university presses against a library over e-reserves.

“We can’t afford to have those who benefit from the university environment working in ways so detrimental to it,” Shulenberger stressed. The “most effective” way forward, he suggested, are digital repositories—and he urged universities to “emulate Harvard.”

Library advocacy will play a key role in the future of IRs—but, as Salo notes, the heavy lifting is indeed an institutional burden. “The Harvard mandate is not something that can be accomplished in the library,” she notes. “That was carried out by faculty. But once you have your fire-breathing faculty, that’s where the library has to step up and say we can be the solution for this.”

The MacArthur Foundation adopted a research access policy, which took effect on September 18, 2008.  (Thanks to Open Access News). Excerpt:

…The Foundation’s policy is to ensure that the Grant Work Product furthers charitable purposes and benefits the public. To that end, the Foundation seeks prompt and broad dissemination of the Grant Work Product at minimal cost or, when justified, at a reasonable cost.

The Foundation encourages openness in research and freedom of access to underlying data by persons with a serious interest in the research. Grantees are also encouraged to explore opportunities to use existing and emerging internet distribution models and, when appropriate, open access journals, Creative Commons license or similar mechanisms that result in broad access for the interested field and public.

The Foundation recognizes there may be circumstances where limited or delayed dissemination of Grant Work Product or limited access to data may be appropriate to protect legitimate interests of the grantee, other funders, principal investigators or participants in research studies. Such circumstances will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Intellectual property rights (including copyright and patent rights) should not be used to limit or deny access to the Grant Work Product, to result in exclusive use of such Grant Work Product, or to create revenue that is not used for charitable purposes. While copyright to the Grant Work Product will ordinarily remain with the grantee, the Foundation will require that it be granted a no-cost assignable license to use or publish the Grant Work Product. The Foundation will exercise the license only if the grantee does not or cannot provide for broad and prompt dissemination consistent with this Policy. The Foundation may forego a license if the Foundation is reasonably satisfied that other appropriate arrangements will be implemented that will assure prompt public dissemination of the Grant Work Product.

View MacArthur’s entry in the SHERPA Juliet site, which outlines their publication policies regarding archiving.