Transitions

May 2007
Issue 2.07

Welcome to the May 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:

U of Iowa Participates in Permanent Electronic Journal Archiving Service

Journal Pricing Reports Released: Shows Steep Increasing Costs for Social Science Journals and Merging Publishers

Nature: Agencies Join Forces to Share Data

Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Co-existence or Competition?

2006 BioOne Progress Report Now Available

Open Access and the Progress of Science

Eigenfactor Web Site Goes Live

University Presses Try to Straddle the Battle Lines in Open-Access Debate

Institutional Repositories: Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University’s Installation of DSpace

Study Shows that Scientists are Still Leary of Publishing in Open Access Journals

BioMed Central Brings Open Access Publishing to Physics and Math

In late 2006, The University of Iowa Libraries became a charter member of Portico (http://www.portico.org/). Portico offers a service which provides a permanent archive of electronic scholarly journals.

Background:
The scale and complexity of the infrastructure and operation necessary to preserve core electronic scholarly literature exceeds that which can be supported by any individual library or institutional budget. After extensive, iterative discussion in the library and publisher communities, the Portico electronic archiving service has been shaped in response to this need. Initial support for Portico is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Ithaka, The Library of Congress, and JSTOR.

Portico provides all libraries supporting the archive with campus-wide access to archived content when specific trigger events occur, and when titles are no longer available from the publisher or other source. Trigger events include:

* A publisher stops operations; or
* A publisher ceases to publish a title; or
* A publisher no longer offers back issues; or
* Upon catastrophic and sustained failure of a publisher’s delivery platform.

Portico also provides a reliable means to secure perpetual access, if participating publishers choose to designate Portico as a provider of post-cancellation access. In addition, select librarians at participating libraries are granted password-controlled access for verification and audit purposes only.

View current list of participating publishers (more join every month):
http://www.portico.org/about/part_publishers.html

View a list of committed journal titles:
http://www.portico.org/about/committed_titles_alpha.html

Two recent studies on periodical pricing trends have been released. They include information on trends in journal publishing, including pricing, mergers, and measurements of
Serial Wars (Library Journal’s Annual Periodical Pricing Survey)
by Lee C. Van Orsdel & Kathleen Born
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6431958.html
April 15, 2007

Excerpt:
In a year filled with drama and hyperbole, the serials marketplace churned toward a future whose shape is the subject of fierce debate. Forecasts from commercial publishers touting collapse and disaster seemed oddly out of sync with the profits they enjoyed—around 25 percent on average. Nevertheless, in a market where prices continued to rise and bundled content continued to sell, some of the very publishers whose fortunes are made in scientific, technical, and medical (STM) journals all but declared that the open access (OA) movement is apocalyptic in scope and will lead to the end of journals as we know them.

Open access is no longer a subtext in the annals of the journals industry. It stands alone as an alternative to the existing system of journal publication, which most say is unsustainable in its current form. It can mean different things to different proponents—a shared path to many ends. Libraries want relief from journal prices that are patently outrageous and defy cost-benefit justification. Authors want impact, and OA articles get cited much more often. Scientists want faster and easier access to others’ research, but a recent paper, “UK Scholarly Journals: 2006 Baseline Report,” found that half of all researchers in Britain have problems securing access to needed articles. Universities want a better return on their investment in intellectual capital, authors, peer reviewers, and editors. Taxpayers want to be able to read the research they sponsor.

Highlights on Cost History:
Biology
Avg. cost per title: $1676
% of change ‘03-’07: 39

Business & Economics
Avg. cost per title: $820
% of change ‘03-’07: 33

Chemistry
Avg. cost per title: $3429
% of change ‘03-’07: 30

Education
Avg. cost per title: $451
% of change ‘03-’07: 46

Language and Literature
Avg. cost per title: $179
% of change ‘03-’07: 39

Political Science
Avg. cost per title: $446
% of change ‘03-’07: 53

Trends in Scholarly Journal Prices 2000-2006
Sonya White and Claire Creaser, Loughbourgh: LISU, 2007 http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/lisu/pages/publications/oup2.html
[1.00 GPB = 2.00775 USD] (4/17/07)

From the Press Release:

The research updates the previous findings on pricing for biomedical journals, and has also been extended to analyze pricing for social science titles. Findings within the report show little variation to the original data published in 2004: there are continued trends in price variance across publishers, including median price increases ranging from 42% to 104% for biomedical titles, and 47% to 120% for social science titles. Median journal prices also continue to vary widely between publishers for both these disciplines, ranging from £198 to £859 in biomedical titles, and £119 to £513 in the Social Sciences.

Claire Creaser, Director of LISU and one of the report’s authors, commented “Serials pricing remains a key concern of librarians in all sectors. It is an area which is becoming more complex, with publishers seeking to adapt to the growing demands of authors and readers in relation to access and quality of research outputs. This report gives a valuable insight into a small part of the current debate, focusing on just two broad subjects and eleven major scholarly journal publishers. There remain many areas still to be investigated, and many factors which may affect journal pricing which are not covered here. LISU was pleased to be invited to carry out this work, and hopes to be able to take it further in the future.”
Highlights on Median Journal Prices by Publisher for Social Science Titles:

University of Chicago
median price: $238.92
% change ‘00-’06: 119.7

Blackwell
median price: $528.04
% change ‘00-’06: 107.1

Sage
median price: $720.78
% change ‘00-’06: 100.8

Taylor & Francis
median price: $602.33
% change ‘00-’06: 93.5

Springer
median price: $487.88
% change ‘00-’06: 65.5

Oxford
median price: $347.34
% change ‘00-’06: 65.1

Wiley
median price: $1029.98
% change ‘00-’06: 62.2

Highlights on Median Journal Prices by Publisher for Biomedical Titles:

Sage
median price: $746.79
% change ‘00-’06: 104.4

Blackwell
median price: $921.55
% change ‘00-’06: 90.9

Taylor & Francis
median price: $831.21
% change ‘00-’06: 90.0

Springer
median price: $929.59
% change ‘00-’06: 83.2

Nature
median price: $1391.37
% change ‘00-’06: 75.4

Cambridge Univ Press
median price: $397.53
% change ‘00-’06: 72.2

Elsevier
median price: $1724.66
% change ‘00-’06: 51.0

Wiley
median price: $1515.85
% change ‘00-’06: 51.0

From the March 22 issue of Nature. For the full text, see http://ealerts.nature.com/cgi-bin24/DM/y/hc530SpivX0HjB0BOpY0EA

Excerpt:

The US government is considering a massive plan to store almost all scientific data generated by federal agencies in publicly accessible digital repositories. The aim is for the kind of data access and sharing currently enjoyed by genome researchers via GenBank, or astronomers via the National Virtual Observatory, but for the whole of US science.

Scientists would then be able to access data from any federal agency and integrate it into their studies. For example, a researcher browsing an online journal article on the spread of a disease could not only pull up the underlying data, but mesh them with information from databases on agricultural land use, weather and genetic sequences.

Nature has learned that a draft strategic plan will be drawn up by next autumn by a new Interagency Working Group on Digital Data (IWGDD). It represents 22 agencies, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, the Departments of Energy, Agriculture, and Health and Human Services, and other government branches including the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The group’s first step is to set up a robust public infrastructure so all researchers have a permanent home for their data. One option is to create a national network of online data repositories, funded by the government and staffed by dedicated computing and archiving professionals. It would extend to all communities a model similar to the Arabidopsis Information Resource, in which 20 staff serve 13,000 registered users and 5,000 labs.

To help the scholarly community better understand and evaluate how open archiving might impact journal subscriptions, the Publishing Research Consortium has released the summary paper ‘Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Co-existence or Competition?’.

This paper is a condensed version of the earlier analysis released in November 2006. It looks at librarian purchasing preferences, and concludes that mandating self-archiving within six months or less of publication will undermine the subscription-based peer review journal. The summary paper, together with the original report, is freely available at http://www.publishingresearch.org.uk/.

At an average cost to subscribing institutions of $0.75 per full-text download, BioOne remains one of the highest quality, lowest cost options for electronic access to current content. A complete report detailing BioOne’s evolution last year is now available in the 2006 BioOne Progress Report at http://www.bioone.org/pdf/BioOne06ProgressRpt.pdf.

This publicly available report illustrates BioOne’s increasing relevance and value to the scholarly community as an alternative, not-for-profit online publisher. In addition to describing past and present activities and achievements, the report highlights BioOne’s continued commitment to evolve to better meet the needs of its stake-holders.

BioOne is now home to 125 publications from 91 publishers across three collections: BioOne.1, BioOne.2, and Open Access. Paid subscribers (which includes the University of Iowa) at the end of 2006 included nearly 1,000 global institutions and organizations, plus many hundreds more accessing through no or low cost developing world programs. BioOne registered over 5.9 million hits in 2006 to abstracts and full-texts, with at least 258,000 unique visitors to the site each month.

The power to transform research communication may be at each scientist’s fingertips
by Alma Swan

Excerpt:
There’s an old joke about asking the way to somewhere and being told it would be best not to start from where you are. It’s a good way to frame some thoughts about whether our present system of scholarly communication aids the progress of science or gets in the way.

If we could start now, equipped with the World Wide Web, computers in every laboratory or institution and a global view of the scientific research effort, would we come up with the system for communicating knowledge that we have today? The system we have, which originated as an exchange of letters and lectures among scattered peers, does some things well. But in its current form—a leviathan feeding on an interaction of market forces within and outside science—one can hardly argue that the system satisfies the needs of a modern scientific community. And new developments in the way science is done will make it even less fit for its original purpose in the years ahead.

No, we would think of a new way, one that would provide for rapid dissemination of results that any scientist could access, easily and without barriers of cost. We might debate how to implement quality control, how to ensure that originators of ideas or findings are given their proper due, how our new and better system should be paid for and how to deal with bandwidth constraints in some parts of the world. But no one would say, “Hey, why don’t we only let some researchers see this stuff and see how science gets on?” Yet that is precisely where we are today, in a system where gateways limit access to research results, and as a consequence only a small fraction of the world’s research libraries subscribe to some journals. The gentleman’s club survives, if only as metaphor.

Read the article: http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/55131

American Scientist Online, May-June 2007

The official version of the full Eigenfactor web site is now available online at http://www.eigenfactor.org/. Eigenfactor.org is a non-commercial academic research project sponsored by the Bergstrom lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington which aims to develop novel methods for evaluating the influence of scholarly periodicals and for mapping the structure of academic research. The Eigenfactor web site now covers all 7000+ journals in the 2004 Science and Social Science JCR, and also covers 110,000+ reference items cited by these journals but not listed in the JCR.

The web site also provides information on the value-per-dollar that journals provide. Users can click on any journal title, and see a popup with more information, including full information about price, publisher, and value provided, courtesy of Ted Bergstrom and Preston McAfee’s http://www.journalprices.com/.

By JENNIFER HOWARD

BRIDGING THE DIVIDE: This winter has been colder than usual in many parts of the country, but in the open-access wars it’s been a season of heated rhetoric. In January reports circulated in the journal Nature and in Scientific American that a division of the Association of American Publishers had hired a “pit bull” PR firm to help it respond to the threat posed by open access. Argue that “public access equals government censorship,” the flaks reportedly advised.

Then, in February, an editor over at the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit group that publishes open-access journals, issued a call to arms on the group’s blog: “For the sake of global scientific progress, human development, and poverty alleviation, it is surely time to end the slavery of traditional publishing.”

A noticeably milder tone prevails in the Association of American University Presses’ statement on open access, released last month. It neither embraces nor rejects the open-access revolution. Instead it calls for a broader, calmer approach, one that balances the virtues of the old and the new. And it asks that the discussion include the humanities and social sciences along with the scientific, technical, and medical fields that have been the primary focus of open-access campaigns, “lest an unfortunate new ‘digital divide’ should arise between fields and between different types of publishing.”

Read the entire article: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i28/28a02001.htm

Chronicle of Higher Education, Volume 53, Issue 28, Page A20, March 16, 2007

Related Article:

University Presses Take Their Stand on Open Access
The open access debate is one of the hottest topics in academic publishing, with advocates for access and publishers battling for political and public support. University presses have been feeling somewhat in the middle and sometimes ignored — and they responded Tuesday with a policy paper outlining their perspective.

In many respects, the document from the Association of American University Presses focuses on potential harm that could be done to their operations by the open access model, talking about the potential for it to hurt circulation revenues, and emphasizing that university presses are not exactly wealthy institutions. But the paper also talks about the many experiments university presses are undertaking with open access or alternative pricing models — and goes one further. While the open access debate has focused on scholarly journals, the presses suggest that models that work for journals may well also work for monographs.

read the article at:
http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/28/open

Inside Higher Ed, Feb. 28, 2007

Philip M. Davis
Cornell University
<pmd8@cornell.edu> (corresponding author)

Matthew J. L. Connolly
Cornell University
<mjc12@cornell.edu>

D-Lib Magazine March/April 2007 Volume 13 Number 3/4

Abstract

Problem: While there has been considerable attention dedicated to the development and implementation of institutional repositories, there has been little done to evaluate them, especially with regards to faculty participation.

Purpose: This article reports on a three-part evaluative study of institutional repositories. We describe the contents and participation in Cornell’s DSpace and compare these results with seven university DSpace installations. Through in-depth interviews with eleven faculty members in the sciences, social sciences and humanities, we explore their attitudes, motivations, and behaviors for non-participation in institutional repositories.

Results: Cornell’s DSpace is largely underpopulated and underused by its faculty. Many of its collections are empty, and most collections contain few items. Those collections that experience steady growth are collections in which the university has made an administrative investment, such are requiring deposits of theses and dissertations into DSpace. Cornell faculty have little knowledge of and little motivation to use DSpace. Many faculty use alternatives to institutional repositories, such as their personal Web pages and disciplinary repositories, which are perceived to have higher community salience than one’s affiliate institution. Faculty gave many reasons for not using repositories: redundancy with other modes of disseminating information, the learning curve, confusion with copyright, fear of plagiarism and having one’s work scooped, associating one’s work with inconsistent quality, and concerns about whether posting a manuscript constitutes “publishing”.

Conclusion: While some librarians perceive a crisis in scholarly communication as a crisis in access to the literature, Cornell faculty perceive this essentially as a non-issue. Each discipline has a normative culture, largely defined by their reward system and traditions. If the goal of institutional repositories is to capture and preserve the scholarship of one’s faculty, institutional repositories will need to address this cultural diversity.

Read the article at: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march07/davis/03davis.html

Related article:
Harnad: Mandates Would Empower Institutional Repositories

It was probably not much of a surprise to librarians to learn in a recent D-Lib article that Cornell’s DSpace institutional repository (IR) is not filling up very quickly or catching on with faculty; nor was it a surprise that self-archiving and open access champion Stevan Harnad quickly offered a point-by-point response to D-Lib authors Phil Davis and Matthew Connolly. However, the problem of filling IRs with content, Harnad maintains, has a surprisingly easy solution. “The finding is that faculty don’t self-archive spontaneously,” Harnad posited. “The remedy, which [Davis & Connolly] do not mention at all, is to mandate that they self-archive.”

Previous studies show that when mandated to do so, faculty will populate IRs, Harnad argues. “The Swan surveys had already reported that faculty say they will not self-archive on their own,” Harnad told the LJ Academic Newswire, “but 95 percent will self-archive if mandated, over 80 percent of them willingly.” Harnad also cited Arthur Sale’s April 2006 D-Lib article that found that, while “voluntary” policies resulted in repositories collecting less than 12 percent of the available theses, “mandatory policies were well accepted and cause deposit rates to rise towards 100 percent.” There are currently 12 university or departmental mandates adopted worldwide and 11 funder mandates, plus one multi-institutional mandate and six funder mandates proposed, Harnad noted, adding that “the remedy has been tried, a number of times, and it works each time.”

“It sounds simple enough,” responded Davis on Yale University’s Liblicense-L discussion list. “Make one’s faculty do what they don’t see as necessary themselves.” Davis says his and Connolly’s study aimed not to “demonstrate that IRs are a failure,” but by focusing on “non-use” aimed to find out why they are not growing more quickly. “If we are to work at an institution where our researchers have the freedom to choose how they disseminate and archive their work, then it is important to understand the beliefs and motivations behind their behaviors,” Davis continued. “These results may lead to building better services around repositories.”

Library Journal Academic Newswire, March 20, 2007