Archive for September, 2006

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American Physical Society Expands Open Access Offerings

The American Physical Society (APS) is pleased to announce that it will soon expand its Open Access (OA) offerings to articles published in Physical Review A-E, Physical Review Letters, and Reviews of Modern Physics. This OA initiative is called FREE TO READ and, when released in early September 2006, can be appliedto any article or group of articles published in the Journals of the American Physical Society back to 1893. Anyone (authors, readers, institutions, funding agencies, etc.) may, by paying a one-time fee, make articles published in our journals available on our sites to all readers at no cost and without a subscription. Readers will have access to PDF and postscript versions of the FREE TO READ articles through the APS online journals.

For years APS has been a leader in OA with its early and continued support of arXiv.org and with its exemplary copyright agreement form. The agreement allows authors to make available their APS publications on their own or their institutions website. APS introduced its first OA journal, Physical Review Special Topics – Accelerators and Beams, in 1998. Based on a sponsorship model, this journal has steadily grown over the past 8 years and is now supported by an international group of accelerator laboratories. APS introduced a second OA journal in 2005 called Physical Review Special Topics – Physics Education Research. This freely available journal is financed by publication charges to the authors or the authors institutions. The introduction of FREE TO READ extends OA to the articles for all of APS’ journals.

The FREE TO READ fees will initially be $975 for articles in Physical Review A-E and $1300 for Letters in PRL. Articles in RMP, due to their large size and the limited number published annually, will be considered on a case-by-case basis. The higher price associated with PRL is due to its higher cost per published Letter (because of its stringent acceptance rate).

The fees will initially augment revenues for the APS, since they will not be replacing subscriptions, but have been set well below the current amount per article needed to recover costs in the absence of subscriptions. The fees will therefore be adjusted as necessary to maintain APS’s ability to sustain this initiative. Additional revenues from FREE TO READ will primarily be used to lower the current subscription rates of the smallest (lowest
tier) institutions.

The FREE TO READ initiative represents a path by which APS could gradually transition to full Open Access. If the community (especially institutions and funding agencies) shows continued support for this initiative, a sustainable level may be reached in which the APS can recover its costs, offset its risks, and eliminate subscriptions for some or all of its journals.

The APS is determined to extend every effort to make this model successful. Martin Blume, the Editor-in-Chief, states that “APS is a financially stable organization willing to take risks to support the community,” and it is with the community in mind that APS is offering FREE TO READ.

For additional information, please go to the FREE TO READ FAQ at http://publish.aps.org/FREETOREAD_FAQ.html

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Three big publishers offer Open Access Options

BMJ Journals Announces the Launch of Unlocked – a New Open Access Initiative

BMJ Journals, a division of the BMJ Group, today announced the launch of a new open access service, which, if supported by authors, will make some of the important medical research being published today freely available to anyone in the world with an internet connection.

Unlocked is a new service that gives authors the option to make their articles freely available online for a fee. Unlocked is available to any author publishing an article in a BMJ Journals specialty journal. This includes some of the world’s pre-eminent medical titles including: Gut, Heart, Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, Archives of Disease in Childhood, Thorax and Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.

Read more….
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/3244.html

Cambridge Open Option

From August 14th 2006 authors submitting articles to selected Cambridge Journals will be able to make their articles freely available to everyone, immediately on publication. Building on the success of Breast Cancer Online, the first Cambridge Open Access project, and Neuron Glia Biology, which provides Open Access after 6-12 months, Cambridge Open Option introduces a new Open Access model to a further 15 journals from the Cambridge list.

Gavin Swanson, STM Editor-in-Chief at Cambridge Journals said: “I’ve been involved in the Open Access world for some time and the launch of Cambridge Open Option is the result of a great deal of painstaking research into best practice. I’m confident that we have a robust model that will benefit both authors and researchers equally. We’re hoping that this will become a major part of our journals publishing in the future and that it will help us give greater access to the results of scientific research reported in our journals.”

Read more…
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/3253.html

Wiley Announces New Funded Access Service

Hoboken, N.J., August 7, 2006 – Global publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc., today announced a new funded access service forauthors of journal articles. Through this new program, authors will have the option of paying a fee to ensure that their article is available to non-subscribers upon publication via Wiley InterScience , Wiley’s online publishing platform, as well as the author’s funding agency’s preferred archive if applicable.

“Wiley developed the funded access program as a response to journal authors whose funding might have certain requirements,” said Mike Davis, Vice President, Global Life and Medical Sciences. “For those authors who want to publish in a Wiley journal, and whose funding agency requires deposit in an archive, this new program supports these requirements.”

As an initial offering, funded access will be available for 45 biomedical journals. Only authors of primary research articles qualify for this new service, and only those authors whose articles have been accepted for publication will be offered the funded access option at the point when the article is accepted, to ensure that the funded access option has no influence on the peer review and acceptance process. Wiley will deposit the final PDF of the article into the funder’s archive; this is the final, authoritative version of the article, after peer review, editing, any final corrections, online and print formatting, and publication. The fee for ensuring articles are made available through the funded access program is $3,000 per article.

Read more….
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/3247.html

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Announcing the Launch of Chemistry Central: A new home for open access chemistry research

Press Release: 22 August 2006

Chemistry Central, launched today at www.chemistrycentral.com, is a new open access website for chemists. It brings together peer-reviewed research in chemistry from a range of open access journals. All the original research articles on Chemistry Central are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication.

Chemistry Central has been developed by the same team who created BioMed Central, the leading biomedical open access publisher.

Bryan Vickery, Deputy Publisher at BioMed Central and a chemist by training, says “We have seen increasing interest from chemists in the open access publishing model and, having launched two chemistry-specific titles in the last 18 months, the time seemed right for BioMed Central to create an open access publishing website to meet the needs of chemists.”

Chemistry Central features open access articles from Geochemical Transactions, the online journal of the American Chemical Society’s Division of Geochemistry, and from the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry, which is published by the Beilstein Institut in association with BioMed Central. Chemistry Central also features chemistry-related articles publshed in BioMed Central’s biological and medical journals, including BMC Pharmacology, BMC Biochemistry and BMC Chemical Biology.

Journals featured on Chemistry Central incorporate special features to make them suitable for chemistry-related content. For example, authors can submit their figures as ChemDraw or ISISDraw files, and see an instant thumbnail preview showing how the web version of the figure will appear. Articles published in the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry also incorporate a graphical abstract on the table of contents and search results pages, providing a quick visual summary the research reported in the article.

As well as viewing the latest research highlights and content from featured journals, users of Chemistry Central can discuss articles, submit manuscripts, sign up for email alerts and find out more about starting a new open access chemistry journal or transferring an existing title to the Chemistry Central open access model.

Today’s launch of Chemistry Central is just a preview of what is to come. Further open access chemistry journals will be launched in the near future, including Chemistry Central Journal, which will cover all areas of chemistry, broken down into discipline-specific sections. Chemists who wish to support open access to published research by playing an editorial role on this major new journal should contact editorial@chemistrycentral.com.

Chemistry Central is part of the Open Access Central
family of sites, announced today by Science Navigation Group (press release available at http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/pr-releases?pr=20060822b).

Press contacts:
Grace Baynes for Chemistry Central
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7631 9988
Email: press@chemistrycentral.com

More on OA Central and Chemistry Central
Kim Thomas, BioMed Central opens access to Chemistry articles , Information World Review, August 22, 2006.

Excerpt:

Open access publisher BioMed Central has launched Chemistry Central, a site that the London based company hopes will see chemistry become as prolific in the open access arena as physics.

Access to Chemistry Central, and its sister site BioMed Central is available through a newly-launched portal, Open Access Central, which will provide a single point of access to all the publisher’s open access journals. A new site, PhysMath Central, is also planned for physics and mathematics.

“There are plenty of opportunities for physicists to publish their findings using the open access model,” said BioMed publisher Matthew Cockerill, but chemistry had lagged behind. He hopes the launch of Chemistry Central will change that: “We want open access to spread to as wide an audience as possible.”

Chemistry Central will make it possible for researchers both to publish articles in existing journals and to set up their own journals….

Cockerill said that the future of scientific publishing lay in open access: “Publishers need to adapt to the reality of what the web means for publishing scientific findings. In 2000 BioMed Central was a very new model. It had a slow start but we’ve had increasing enthusiasm as scientists started to see the benefits. We’ve seen a doubling every 18 months of the number of articles submitted to our journals.”

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Digital University/Library Presses: Internet-First University Press

Established in January 2004, Cornell University’s Internet-First University Press is described as follows:

These materials are being published as part of a new approach to scholarly publishing. The manuscripts and videos are freely available from this Internet-First University Press repository within DSpace at Cornell University.

These online materials are available on an open access basis, without fees or restrictions on personal use. All mass reproduction, even for educational or not-for-profit use, requires permission and license.

There are Internet-First University Press DSpace collections for books and articles, multimedia and videos, and undergraduate scholarly publications. There is a print-on-demand option for books and articles.

There are DSpace sub-communities for journals and symposia, workshops, and conferences. One e-journal is published by Internet-First University Press, the CIGR E-Journal (most current volume dated 2005). A print journal, Engineering Quarterly, has been digitized and made available.

There appears to be no further information about the Internet-First University Press at its DSpace site; however, the “Internet-First Publishing Project at Cornell Offers New and Old Books Free Online or to Be Printed on Demand” press release provides further background information.

ARL Institutional Repositories SPEC Kit, Aug. 23, 2006

Cornell’s Internet-First University Press web site:
http://dspace.library.cornell.edu/handle/1813/62

Information gathered from:
DigitalKoans, http://www.escholarlypub.com/digitalkoans/2006/08/23/digital-universitylibrary-presses-part-5-internet-first-university-press/

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Turning Public Data into National Security Secrets

Kudos to William Burr, who has documented an attempt to censor US history by suppressing information previously and officially public. See his new report, How Many and Where Were the Nukes? What the U.S. Government No Longer Wants You to Know about Nuclear Weapons During the Cold War , The National Security Archive, August 18, 2006. (Thanks to Free Government Information.)

Excerpt:
The Pentagon and the Energy Department have now stamped as national security secrets the long-public numbers of U.S. nuclear missiles during the Cold War, including data from the public reports of the Secretaries of Defense in 1967 and 1971, according to government documents posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive.

Pentagon and Energy officials have now blacked out from previously public charts the numbers of Minuteman missiles (1,000), Titan II missiles (54), and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (656) in the historic U.S. Cold War arsenal, even though four Secretaries of Defense (McNamara, Laird, Richardson, Schlesinger) reported strategic force levels publicly in the 1960s and 1970s….

Open Access News, Aug. 21, 2006

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Scholarly Communication: Academic Values and Sustainable Models

C. Judson King and five co-authors, Scholarly Communication: Academic Values and Sustainable Models, Center for Studies in Higher Education, July 27, 2006.

Abstract: This study reports on five interdisciplinary case studies that explore academic value systems as they influence publishing behavior and attitudes of University of California, Berkeley faculty. The case studies are based on direct interviews with relevant stakeholders –faculty, advancement reviewers, librarians, and editors– in five fields: chemical engineering, anthropology, law and economics, English-language literature, and biostatistics. The results of the study strongly confirm the vital role of peer review in faculty attitudes and actual publishing behavior. There is much more experimentation, however, with regard to means of in-progress communication, where single means of publication and communication are not fixed so deeply in values and tradition as they are for final, archival publication. We conclude that approaches that try to “move” faculty and deeply embedded value systems directly toward new forms of archival, “final” publication are destined largely to failure in the short-term. From our perspective, a more promising route is to (1) examine the needs of scholarly researchers for both final and in-progress communications, and (2) determine how those needs are likely to influence future scenarios in a range of disciplinary areas.

From the body of the paper:

These scholars had minimal, if any, understanding of open access models, although they were somewhat familiar with the “open” concept. We found that scholars are generally receptive to the ideal of making knowledge available for the “public good.”…

Faculty did have a good understanding that the high cost of journals is problematic and faculty in chemical engineering, in particular, viewed open access models as a possible alternative to commercial presses. Some faculty refuse to publish in particular journals because of their high cost and pricing mechanisms. Senior faculty appeared to be more comfortable with the idea of sharing material at the early stages of work (e.g., preprint servers), as did faculty in chemical engineering, biostatistics, and law and economics in general. Archaeologists already use some open access websites to share field observations….

The largest concern among scholars was the perception that open access models had little or no means of quality control, such as peer review. Some faculty in biostatistics, interestingly, equated the high cost of print journals with quality and believed that online open access models are “cheaper” and therefore might be prone to lower standards. Others expressed fear that scholarly work placed in open access models could be “stolen,” although faculty with a better understanding of the online publication process saw licensing bodies, such as Creative Commons, as a potential solution.

Scholars were generally not aware of author-pays models. Once explained, faculty responses were universally negative. Paying to publish one’s work was perceived as self-promotion and fundamentally in conflict with the peer review process. English-language literature faculty, in particular, equated the author-pays models to vanity presses, while those in the sciences equated it with advertising and therefore believed that any such publication would compromise academic integrity….

Results from the project suggest that examinations of how new media should and will affect scholarly communication and publication must recognize that, for the foreseeable future, the values surrounding final archival publication are deep and relatively inflexible in research universities. On the other hand, what scholars value and want will eventually become accepted practice. This is a much more realistic way of looking at issues than is devising models and modes of communication because of their cost efficiencies or other non-research criteria and then trying to draw scholars to them.

Comments (by Peter Suber, Open Access News, Aug. 17, 2006)

1. This report shows just how much educating we still have to do. I support the general conclusion that it’s more promising to devise systems of scholarly communication that match existing academic values than to pitch new systems, no matter how cool, that require changing or abandoning those values. But OA satisfies this criterion far better than the existing TA system. The problem is that most scholars still know very little about OA. And I must say that the authors of this study apparently did more to confuse than enlighten their interview subjects before interviewing them.
2. The interview subjects didn’t realize –in sufficient numbers– that OA journals perform peer review and can be as rigorous as TA journals. They didn’t realize that OA journals can use the same review standards, procedures, and even the same people (editors and referees) as TA journals. Nor did they realize that OA repositories can contain articles peer-reviewed at the most prestigious TA journals. (About 70% of peer-reviewed TA journals already permit author-initiated OA archiving.)
3. The interview subjects didn’t realize that OA is compatible with copyright and does not require putting works into the public domain. On the contrary, most OA initiatives want to use copyright (in the words of the BOAI) to “give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”
4. Not surprisingly, the interview subjects knew little or nothing about how OA journals pay their bills. The interviewers apparently introduced the false and harmful term “author pays” before asking interviewees what they thought about it. Indeed, these interviews demonstrate what kind of harm that term can cause. Both interviewers and interviewees need to understand (a) that most OA journals charge no author-side fees at all, (b) that at the minority of OA journals where fees exist, funders or employers typically pay on behalf of authors, or the journal waives the fee because of economic hardship, and hence (c) that these fees are rarely paid by authors out of pocket. They also need to understand that, where fees exist, they only apply to papers already accepted by peer review and that no journal using independent peer review deserves to be called a vanity press.
5. It’s still true, as I’ve been saying for too many years now, that the largest obstacles to OA are ignorance and misunderstanding.

Open Access News, Aug. 17, 2006