Transitions

February 2007
Issue 1.07

Welcome to the February 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 6-8 issues per year of this newsletter.

This newsletter aims to reflect the interests of its readers so please forward comments, suggestions and entries to include to karen-fischer@uiowa.edu. Also, read the health sciences counterpart to Transitions: Hardin Scholarly Communication News.

Table of Contents

For Oxford University Press, Online Venture Breathes New Life into the Monograph
Publishers’ Group Reportedly Hires P.R. Firm to Counter Push for Free Access to Research Results
Google’s Moon Shot: The Quest for the Universal Library
University of California Libraries Announce Pursuit of Value-based Journal Prices
U. of Michigan Press, Library, Scholarly Publishing Office Launch Digital Studies Imprint, Web Site
Major Society Publisher Announces Support for Public Access to Scientific Literature
Wiley Completes Acquisition of Blackwell
Scholarpedia Launches
American Mathematical Society Journals to be Preserved in Portico
Open Access to Research Is in the Public Interest - PLoS Biology Editorial
A Lesson in Viral Video
Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us
SPARC at Ten: A Decade Later, Organization Still Aims to Be Part of The Solution
BioOne Announces Return of Systematic Botany
Invitation to Sign Petition for Open Access

Officials at Oxford University Press (OUP) say their Oxford Scholarship Online program (OSO), a digital database of the press’s monographs, will expand by September to include nearly all of its monograph titles. OUP vice president and publisher Niko Pfund said that the successful program, will add new “modules” in math, physics, biology, psychology, business/management, history, literature, classics, and linguistics, adding nine new disciplines in all to the original four “modules” (economics, politics, religion, and philosophy). “This will in effect double the number of new titles we’re putting into OSO to approximately 400-450 new books a year,” he told the LJ Academic Newswire.

Pfund said the bold effort to launch OSO has taken “thousands” of hours of effort between publishers and authors and “lots” of m taoney, though he declined to estimate theb. OSO launched in 2003 as a subscription database before switching to a “perpetual access” model in 2005. The press’ massive effort, Pfund says, is paying off, with usage up over 450 percent. Pfund said OUP may even add more of its mainstream books to OSO, titles not necessarily considered monographs. “One of the challenges of academic publishing is the different way in which scholars, librarians, and publishers define the term ‘monograph,’” he conceded. “But one of the animating principles behind OSO is to maximize exposure for our books. So, if we think that inclusion of a specific academic trade or trade title in OSO would make for a good fit in the site, we’d include it.”

Of course, inclusion in OSO depends on a host of other factors as well, including the wishes of authors, some of whom may fear that an online offering will diminish book sales. In an age when Google is roiling the marketplace with its scan plan, prompting lawsuits and forcing many presses and authors into sometimes uncomfortable choices, OSO represents a significant strategic commitment of resources by OUP. And so far, authors have enthusiastically embraced the venture. “I’d say 90-95 percent of authors are initially positive, with about 20-25 percent having substantive questions that involve a few rounds of conversation,” Pfund said. Only “a very few” authors have declined inclusion. “In fact,” he added, “it’s been inspirational to see how many are willing to put in extra work on drafting abstracts and keyword lists to ensure their work is not only included in OSO but well-represented.”

It’s difficult to judge whether OSO has had an effect on book sales, Pfund said, noting that overall monograph sales have not decreased since OSO launched and some titles may appear to have benefited from increased exposure. But focusing on book sales, he suggests, is simply too narrow a measure in today’s “fragmented,” increasingly digital world. “We’re not seeing the end of the book, we’re seeing the galloping diversification of how its message can be conveyed,” he explains, describing the press’ philosophy as “format agnosticism,” that is to deliver content in whatever format is desired. “If dissemination and influence is our primary currency, then having books available via OSO, or netlibrary, in print perpetuity via print-on-demand, or in Google Book Search and Amazon’s Search Inside the Book means that more people can access your work in more ways from more places than ever before. That does translate to dollars.”

Library Journal Academic Newswire, Feb. 1, 2007

Excerpt:
The Association of American Publishers has hired a public-relations firm with a hard-hitting reputation to counter the open-access publishing movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available to the public, the journal Nature reported on Wednesday.

The firm, Dezenhall Resources, designs aggressive public-relations campaigns to counter activist groups, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit organization that monitors the public-relations business.

The firm’s founder and head, Eric Dezenhall, apparently has suggested that traditional publishers should link their business model with peer review and “paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles,” the Nature article says.

Read the entire article: http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/01/2007012601n.htm

Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 26, 2007

See the original article in Nature,
Published online: 24 January 2007; Corrected online: 25 January 2007 | doi:10.1038/445347a

PR’s ‘pit bull’ takes on open access: Journal publishers lock horns with free-information movement.
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070122/full/445347a.html

A recent article in the New Yorker magazine by Jeffrey Toobin chronicles Google’s ambitious library-scanning endeavor.

Excerpt:
Every weekday, a truck pulls up to the Cecil H. Green Library, on the campus of Stanford University, and collects at least a thousand books, which are taken to an undisclosed location and scanned, page by page, into an enormous database being created by Google. The company is also retrieving books from libraries at several other leading universities, including Harvard and Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library. At the University of Michigan, Google’s original partner in Google Book Search, tens of thousands of books are processed each week on the company’s custom-made scanning equipment.

Google intends to scan every book ever published, and to make the full texts searchable, in the same way that Web sites can be searched on the company’s engine at google.com. At the books site, which is up and running in a beta (or testing) version, at books.google.com, you can enter a word or phrase—say, Ahab and whale—and the search returns a list of works in which the terms appear, in this case nearly eight hundred titles, including numerous editions of Herman Melville’s novel. Clicking on “Moby-Dick, or The Whale” calls up Chapter 28, in which Ahab is introduced. You can scroll through the chapter, search for other terms that appear in the book, and compare it with other editions. Google won’t say how many books are in its database, but the site’s value as a research tool is apparent; on it you can find a history of Urdu newspapers, an 1892 edition of Jane Austen’s letters, several guides to writing haiku, and a Harvard alumni directory from 1919.

No one really knows how many books there are. The most volumes listed in any catalogue is thirty-two million, the number in WorldCat, a database of titles from more than twenty-five thousand libraries around the world. Google aims to scan at least that many. “We think that we can do it all inside of ten years,” Marissa Mayer, a vice-president at Google who is in charge of the books project, said recently, at the company’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California. “It’s mind-boggling to me, how close it is. I think of Google Books as our moon shot.”

To read the article in it’s entirety: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070205fa_fact_toobin

Related news item:
Princeton U. Library Latest to Join Google Scan Plan

Google has signed another university library to participate in its library scan plan, this week announcing an agreement with the Princeton University Libraries to digitize roughly one million books. Under the agreement, Princeton will initially supply only public domain books over the “next six years,” which it says will be indexed and searchable on the web and freely available for download. (Private universities, because they have fewer protections, have been more wary than public ones in testing the limits of copyright laws.) Princeton University Librarian Karin Trainer said joining Google Book Search will “make it easier for Princeton students and faculty to do research” and would also allow Princeton to “share our collection with researchers worldwide.”

Trainer said Princeton librarians will work with Google over the next several months to choose the subject areas to be digitized and the timetable for the scanning. Library staff, faculty, and students also will be able to suggest titles for inclusion. Princeton is the twelfth institution to join the Google Books Library Project, joining Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the University of California, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas-Austin, the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the New York Public Library, the University Complutense of Madrid, and the National Library of Catalonia.

Library Journal Academic Newswire, Feb. 8, 2007

Press Release/Announcement

University of California Libraries Announce Pursuit of Value-based Journal Prices
January 18, 2007

The University of California libraries are pleased to announce the availability of a report describing their work on “value-based” prices of scholarly journals. Authored by a task force of the ten-campus library system’s Collection Development Committee, The Promise of Value-based Journal Prices and Negotiation: A UC Report and View Forward is a direct outcome of the UC libraries’ collective strategic priority to advance economically balanced and sustainable scholarly communication systems.

The report details UC’s rationale for value-based journal prices and modeling of prices for scholarly materials that are reasonable, transparent, and based upon the value of the material to the academic mission of the University of California. The report describes a value-based approach that borrows from analysis done by Professors Ted Bergstrom (UC Santa Barbara) and R. Preston McAfee (Caltech) on journal cost-effectiveness (www.journalprices.com). The UC approach also includes suggestions for annual price increases that are tied to production costs; credits for institutionally-based contributions to the journal, such as editorial labor; and credits for business transaction efficiencies from consortial purchases.

Through the report the libraries ask how an explicit method can be established, validated, and communicated for aligning the purchase or license costs of scholarly journals with the value they contribute to the academy and the costs to create and deliver them. In addition to describing the work done to date, the report provides examples of potential cost savings and declares UC’s intention to pursue value-based prices in their negotiations with journal publishers. In addition, the report invites the academic community to work collectively to refine and improve these and other value-based approaches.

The Promise of Value-based Journal Prices and Negotiation: A UC Report and View Forward is available at: http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/cdc/valuebasedprices.pdf.

For more information, contact:
John Ober
Director of Policy, Planning, and Outreach
Office of Scholarly Communication
California Digital Library
(510) 987-0174
John.Ober@ucop.edu

Julia Kochi
Director, Digital Library & Collections
Library & Center for Knowledge Management
University of California, San Francisco
(415) 502-7539
Julia.Kochi@library.ucsf.edu

With its latest venture, the University of Michigan Press is exploring the cutting edge, both in terms of the content it publishes and how it publishes. Under a new collaborative program between the press, the library, and the Scholarly Publishing Office, the UM Press’s new Digital Culture imprint will both sell books and offer the full-text of those books freely on its Digital Culture Books website. The imprint debuted with the fall 2006 publication of The Best of Technology Writing 2006, edited by journalist and Sunday New York Times business columnist Brendan Koerner, who with UM press editor Alison MacKeen selected 24 pieces from several hundred submissions. “We wanted a versatile mixture of the light-hearted and serious, profiles, features, and ‘big think’ pieces,” MacKeen said of the first volume. “We also wanted to embed some articles in there that would help to make people aware of undercovered issues such as digital copyright, municipal wireless, and so on,” A 2007 volume, to be edited by Newsweek’s Steven Levy, is currently accepting nominations.

As groundbreaking as some of the ideas, however, is the Press’s decision to practice what many of its authors now preach, using the Digital Culture imprint to develop an “open and participatory publishing model” that seeks to “build a community” around its content. “Our goal is to give each project a robust online and print presence and to use the effort not only to introduce scholars to a range of publishing choices but also to collect data about how consumption habits vary on the basis of genre, age, discipline,” MacKeen explained. “The data will help us to understand more about the economics of digital publishing, and will also, we think, offset any potential economic risks by developing the venture as a research opportunity.”

While press officials use the term “open access,” the venture is actually more “free access” than open at this stage. Open access typically does not require permission for reuse, only a proper attribution. UM director Phil Pochoda told the LJ Academic Newswire that, while no final decision has been made, the press’s “inclination is to ask authors to request the most restrictive Creative Commons license” for their projects. That license, he noted, requires attribution and would not permit commercial use, such as using it in a subsequent for-sale product, without permission. The Digital Culture Books web site currently reads that “permission must be received for any subsequent distribution.”

The initiative is an innovative publishing strategy for university presses, who have the increasingly complex mission of serving scholarly communication needs while staying financially viable. “It will be interesting to see how it will go in terms of book sales,” MacKeen concedes. “I can imagine either an increase or a decrease.” Pochoda stressed that there is “more than a business model at stake,” however, noting that the collaborative nature of the Digital Culture imprint represents the press’ chance “to support open access in principle and practice while still acknowledging the obligation to survive as a business operation.” Nevertheless, he has reason to believe the press will sell some books. The National Academy Press, for example, offers its book content online, Pochoda notes, and its data suggests a corresponding jump in sales.

Library Journal Academic Newswire, Jan. 11, 2007

Washington, DC (Feb. 6, 2007) - The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB), a non-profit scientific society of over 11,000 members and publisher of the high-impact monthly journal, Molecular Biology of the Cell, has announced its “Position on Public Access to Scientific Literature,” calling for free public access to federally funded research within six months of publication. ASCB has provided free access (after a two-month embargo) to research published in its journals since 2001 and has experienced no adverse impact on its finances.

The ASCB statement, which was announced in a January 31, 2007 press release, reads:

ASCB Position on Public Access to Scientific Literature

The ASCB believes strongly that barriers to scientific communication slow scientific progress. The more widely scientific results are disseminated, the more readily they can be understood, applied, and built upon. The sooner findings are shared, the faster they will lead to new scientific insights and breakthroughs. This conviction has motivated the ASCB to provide free access to all of the research articles in Molecular Biology of the Cell two months after publication, which it has done since 2001. The articles are available both on the journal’s website and in the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central.

The vast majority of the biomedical research conducted at American universities and colleges is funded by taxpayers. The ASCB believes that taxpayers are best served when all scientists, educators, physicians, and members of the public - including patients and their families - have access to publicly funded research results. So long as significant access barriers remain, taxpayers are not fully benefiting from the work that they fund. With the proliferation of networked technology, we have an unprecedented and cost-effective means to overcome such barriers. For the first time, it is possible and practical to offer free access to every potential user. It is incumbent upon us, as scientists and citizens, to take full advantage of this opportunity.

Some publishers argue that providing free access to their journal’s content will catastrophically erode their revenue base. The experience of many successful research journals demonstrates otherwise; these journals make their online content freely available after a short embargo period that protects subscription revenue. For example, as noted above, the content of Molecular Biology of the Cell is free to all after only two months, yet the journal remains not only financially sound, but profitable. The data clearly show that free access and profitability are not mutually exclusive.

Our goal should be to make research articles freely available as soon as feasible so that science and the public benefit from their expanded use and application. At the same time, it is important that nonprofit societies and other publishers generate sufficient revenues to sustain the costs of reviewing and publishing articles. We believe that a six-month embargo period represents a reasonable compromise between the financial requirements of supporting a journal and the need for access to current research.

For these reasons, the ASCB supports efforts to require that the results of federally funded biomedical research be made freely available to the public, no more than six months after they are published.
[statement ends]

The statement, which is available online at http://ascb.org/index.cfm?navid=10&id=1968&tcode=nws3, bolsters the case for a mandatory National Institutes of Health public access policy and for passage of The Federal Research Public Access Act, a measure that would require federal agencies that fund over $100 million in annual external research to make manuscripts of peer-reviewed journal articles stemming from that research publicly available via the Internet within six months of publication. The bill was introduced last year by Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) and Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and awaiting reintroduction in the 110th Congress (For further information about the legislation, see http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/frpaa/).

Media Advisory, Feb. 6, 2007
Alliance for Taxpayer Access | www.taxpayeraccess.org

John Wiley & Sons this week announced that it had cleared all financial and regulatory hurdles and finalized its acquisition of Blackwell Publishing for a hefty purchase price of £572 million ($1.1 billion). With the deal now done, Blackwell’s publishing program will now merge with Wiley’s global scientific, technical, and medical business, becoming the largest of Wiley’s three business divisions, which also include Professional/Trade and Higher Education publishing.

Combined, Wiley and Blackwell publish approximately 1250 scholarly peer-reviewed journals, and over one million total pages, as well as an extensive collection of books. William J. Pesce, Wiley’s president and CEO, announced that Eric A. Swanson, Wiley senior VP of STM, will lead the merged business, and Blackwell CEO Rene Olivieri will serve as its chief operating officer. Pesce said that the merger will allow the company to “benefit [from] more investment in online capabilities than either could as separate entities.”

Library Journal Academic Newswire, Feb. 8, 2007

Planned Merger of 2 Big Journal Publishers Worries Many Academic Librarians

The venerable publisher John Wiley & Sons will celebrate its bicentennial next year, and it has already given itself a present: In mid-November, the company made the surprise announcement that it would purchase Blackwell Publishing Ltd. for £572-million, or roughly $1.13-billion, an acquisition likely to have broad consequences for the world of academic journals and libraries.

Assuming that the deal is completed, Wiley’s scientific, technical, and medical division will henceforth be known as Wiley-Blackwell. That combined division will publish more than 1,200 scholarly journals, bringing the company within shouting distance of the giants Reed Elsevier (2,200 journals) and Springer (1,500). Taylor & Francis, which made unsuccessful overtures toward Blackwell in 2002, will drop to fourth place, with 1,050 journals.

Read the entire article: http://chronicle.com/daily/2006/12/2006120402n.htm
The Chronicle Daily News, 12/4/06

Scholarpedia feels and looks like Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Indeed, both are powered by the same program - MediaWiki. Both allow visitors to review and modify articles simply by clicking on the edit this article link.
However, Scholarpedia differs from Wikipedia in some very important ways:
• Each article is written by an expert (invited or elected by the public).
• Each article is anonymously peer reviewed to ensure accurate and reliable information.
• Each article has a curator - typically its author — who is responsible for its content.
• Any modification of the article needs to be approved by the curator before it appears in the final, approved version.

…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.)

If there is enough interest and support from the public, Scholarpedia will grow in the following directions:
• The neuroscience chapter of Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience will be a seed to start Encyclopedia of Cognitive Neuroscience, and then Encyclopedia of Neuroscience
• Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems will be a seed to start Encyclopedia of Applied Mathematics, and then Encyclopedia of Mathematics.
• Encyclopedia of Computational Intelligence will be a seed to start Encyclopedia of Computer Science.

Read more at Scholarpedia

American Mathematical Society journals to be preserved in Portico

[ed. note: University of Iowa Libraries has licensed Portico and is a participant]

Non-profit electronic archiving service provider Portico, US, has announced that all the electronic content from one of its publisher participants – the American Mathematical Society (AMS) – has now been preserved in the Portico archive. AMS has chosen Portico as the archive for the current e-content of 11 journals (including the entirety of its three e-only titles). With this inclusion, more than 375,000 articles have been preserved within Portico.

The archive has fully preserved all the bibliographic data, PDF page content and supplemental files of over 10,000 articles published between 1995 and the present. It will now preserve new content from each of these 11 journals as it is published. In addition, AMS has designated Portico as an official delivery platform for post-cancellation access claims. Also, it will make an annual financial contribution to support Portico’s ongoing operations.

AMS is focused on pure and applied mathematical research and scholarship. It publishes the Journal of the American Mathematical Society, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society and Mathematics of Computation among other titles. Since 1996, AMS has been archiving its four flagship print publications with JSTOR. By archiving its e-current content with Portico, it seeks to assure the future availability of the complete publication run of these four titles for future scholars, practitioners, researchers and students.

Click here to read the original press release.

KnowledgeSpeak, 26 Jan 2007, http://www.knowledgespeak.com/newsArchieveviewdtl.asp?pickUpID=3475&pickUpBatch=560#3475