Transitions

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]

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.

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.

Michael Mandiberg, How to Negotiate a Creative Commons License: Ten Steps, January 12, 2009. (Thanks to Creative Commons.)

… [T]he focus of this post is on how we were able to negotiate the Creative Commons license [for our book] from [publisher] New Riders, which is owned by Peachpit, which is owned by Pearson (a big big corporate big thing.) …

Publishers know things are going to change, but they don’t know what that change is going to be. Know that your publisher is willing to experiment. …

Use case studies to argue with facts. It also helps for them to see that other reputable publishers have licensed books Creative Commons. …

Gavin Baker, How to negotiate a Creative Commons license in a work contract, A Journal of Insignificant Inquiry, January 14, 2009.

… Even friendly organizations tend to use legal boilerplate in their contracts — which typically treats your intellectual production as a work for hire, assigning exclusive copyright to your client or employer. This should be problematic for anyone: not only do you lose the right to apply a CClicense to your work, you lose the right to use your work for any purpose without getting your (former) employer’s permission.

Without getting into a discussion about the work-for-hire doctrine, there’s an easy way around this. You can assign copyright to your employer, but you get a non-exclusive license, too. This is similar to the logic of the author addenda of the scholarly publishing world. They can do anything they want with the content you produced — but you can, too. …

[Thanks to Open Access News]

Phil Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen, Mar. 2, 2009

Excerpt:

…Now let’s look at the phrase, “open access.”  Open is about visibility, transparency, and freedom.  Its antithesis is “closed access” which is often used to describe subscription-access.  We are shut out, kept in the dark, barred from access.  Subscriptions are about denying freedom.

You will note that this implies something very different than the phrase “free access,”  which does not assume access as a right, but as a privilege.  In this frame, access is a gift that someone else paid for and something for which we should be grateful.  Free, as in “free beer.”

“Open access” has a long history as a frame, but it did not originate in the open access movement. Rather, it comes from the politics of democracy.  We need open access to government records and the dealings of our elected officials.  Without transparency, accountability is impossible.

…The more I think about open access, I’m coming to realize this debate is not about science or economics or business models.  Open access is about policy, and policy is rooted deeply in core values.  The language simply reflects those deeply held values.  Open access advocates will continue to accuse publishers (as a group) of being uncaring and working against the public good.  In turn, publishers will continue to accuse open access advocates of being irrational ideologues.

One thing is clear — this debate was never about science.

This paper will review the foundational concepts in media framing and apply them as a case study to the contentious debate over open access. The results of an analysis of editorials and letters published in major world newspapers illustrates that proponents of free access to the research literature have routinely framed their arguments in terms of transparency and accountability. In addition, proponents have been able to construct social action frames, a necessary component in creating social movements. Opponents, on the other hand, lack a central frame and have constructed complex and nuanced counterarguments about quality and sustainability of scientific publishing. While these counterarguments may be sound, they lack the simplicity and narrative structure of the proponents’ arguments.

Piero Cavaleri, et al., Publishing an E-journal on a shoe string: Is it a sustainaible project?, working paper, February 2009. (Thanks to Gavin Baker, Open Access News)

Abstract:

The aim of this article is to report on an experiment in publishing an open access journal and learn from it about the larger field of open access publishing. The experiment is the launch of theEuropean Journal of Comparative Economics (EJCE), an on-line refereed and open access journal, founded in 2004 by the European Association for Comparative Economic Studies and LIUC University in Italy. They embarked upon this project in part to respond to the rising concentration in the market for scientific publishing and the resulting use of market power to raise subscription prices and restrict access to scientific output. We had hoped that open access journals could provide some countervailing power and increase competition in the field. Our experience running a poorly endowed journal has shown that entry to the field may be easy, yet that making it a sustainable enterprise is not straightforward.

The Global Library of Women’s Medicine is a new OA resource launched on November 21, 2008. From the announcement:

… The Global Library of Women’s Medicine, was launched at a dinner held at The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in London last night. It is a unique web library incorporating a vast range of detailed clinical information across the whole field of women’s medicine. It consists of 442 main chapters and 53 supplementary chapters, supported by over 40,000 references, which will be kept permanently up-to-date. The chapters have been written by more than 650 specialists and will reflect some of the very best worldwide opinion. …

The Global Library of Women’s Medicine will support doctors and other health professionals in their care of women. As an open access resource it is hoped that in addition to providing an expert resource for the medical profession in the Western World, it may also be of real value to doctors and others in parts of the Developing World where access to current clinical information has always been challenging. …

[thanks to Open Access News]

Press Release from the American Anthropological Association:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (PDF)
October 13, 2008

AAA Awarded Planning Grant to Examine Future of Scholarly Journals

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is pleased to announce today that it has been awarded a $50,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to conduct preliminary research on the economic issues faced by scholarly society publishers in the humanities and social sciences as consequence of the demand for open access to their peer reviewed journals.

The grant, will provide support for an examination of the publishing programs of  nine social science and humanities societies and the development of an information base from which publishing model options might be derived to assure societies of the ability to sustain their publishing programs in an open access environment.

Work on the effort will begin immediately, with a final report expected to be released in the first quarter of 2009.

“This study is another step in AAA’s effort to better understand the conditions under which the future of our journal publishing program must operate, to learn from the experiences of other social science and humanities journal publishers and to carefully examine the issues, opportunities and problems presented by open access,” AAA Executive Director Bill Davis said in a statement released today.

AAA Director of Publishing Oona Schmid commented today, “Current open access models were developed within the Scientific, Technical, and Medical publishing communities. However, scholarly publishing in the social sciences and in the humanities differs in substantial ways. This study is our first step in understanding these differences, in order to locate a model that supports our discipline fully.”

AAA is joined in this effort by the Modern Language Association, the American Sociological Association, the American Historical Association, the American Economic Association, the National Communication Association, the American Statistical Association, the Political Science Association and the American Academy of Religion, under the auspices of the National Humanities Alliance Task Force on Open Access and Scholarly Communication.

excerpt:

When the National Institutes of Health (NIH) created its groundbreaking public access policy this year, advocates expressed the belief that it the policy would spread, and other major research organizations would follow. Today, Autism Speaks, the nation’s largest autism advocacy organization, became the first U.S.-based non-profit advocacy organization to develop a public access requirement.

As of December 3, all researchers accepting grants from the organization will be required to deposit any resulting peer-reviewed research papers in the PubMed Central online archive, and make them available to the public within 12 months of journal publication.

Positive reinforcement
The move constitutes significant—and very public—support of the NIH public access policy. In 2007, Autism Speaks committed an unprecedented $30 million in new research funding to autism research. It has also generated significant attention to its cause via outreach efforts and resources for families. And, the group clearly has friends in Congress. Last year, Congress approved full funding of the Combating Autism Act, providing $162 million for programs at the NIH, Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA).

by Andrew Albanese — Library Journal Academic Newswire, 11/13/2008