Transitions

A Shot Heard ‘Round the Academic World: Harvard FAS Mandates Open Access

In a historic measure, the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) in February unanimously approved a motion that compels Harvard researchers to deposit their “scholarly articles” in an open access (OA) repository to be managed within the library and to be made freely available to anyone via the Internet. Faculty members, however, can opt-out of compliance by obtaining a waiver, a point some OA advocates say could potentially undermine the policy’s effectiveness. Nevertheless, the Harvard vote provided a resonant “shot heard ’round the world” for the open access movement.

“This is a large and very important step,” said Stuart Shieber, professor of computer science at Harvard, who put forth the motion. “It should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have more control over how our work is used and disseminated.” In a statement released following the vote, Shieber cited serials costs that have “risen to such astronomical levels,” forcing cancellations and “reducing the circulation of scholars’ works.”

Specifically, the Harvard motion resembles a publishing contract of sorts; it compels faculty to give Harvard non-exclusive, irrevocable permission to distribute their articles online, which Harvard intends to do, as well as permitting others to use the works as well, as long as those uses are non-profit. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is “a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.” Faculty members retain their copyrights in the articles, subject to the university’s license and are free to publish in other journals. The legislation does not apply to articles completed before adoption of the motion, and does not apply to Harvard’s professional schools.

Curiously, the policy also, “when preferable,” allows faculty to opt-out of compliance. All one has to do, is ask. “The policy specifies that a waiver of the license for an article will be granted by request of the faculty author,” Shieber told the LJ Academic Newswire. “This is in keeping with the principle that the policy should serve the faculty, and faculty members are in the best position to determine that in individual cases.”

Critics, however, including OA pioneer Stevan Harnad, questioned whether “potential author resistance to perceived or actual constraints on their choice of which journal to publish in,” could hamper the policy—in other words, if the most prestigious journal in a researchers’ field requires exclusivity, will that be enough to motivate a researcher to opt-out?

Valid questions, among many others, that will surely be examined in practice: the motion provides for an analysis of the legislation’s effectiveness, with a report to be delivered in three years. “There are of course many details of implementation still being worked on,” Shieber told the Newswire. “In general, these will be worked out under the principle of serving the faculty best in the distribution of their scholarly writings.”

Following suit, the Harvard Law School unanimously voted to mandate OA on May 7th.

From Harvard Law School Press Release:

In a move that will disseminate faculty research and scholarship as broadly as possible, the Harvard Law School faculty unanimously voted last week to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available online for free, making HLS the first law school to commit to a mandatory open access policy.

“The Harvard Law School faculty produces some of the most exciting, groundbreaking scholarship in the world,” said Dean Elena Kagan ‘86. “Our decision to embrace ‘open access’ means that people everywhere can benefit from the ideas generated here at the Law School.”

Under the new policy, HLS will make articles authored by faculty members available in an online repository, whose contents would be searchable and available to other services such as Google Scholar. Authors can also legally distribute the articles on their own websites, and educators here and elsewhere can freely provide the articles to students, so long as the materials are not used for profit.

“This exciting development is something in which the whole Harvard Law School community can take great pride,” said John Palfrey ‘01, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and newly appointed vice dean of library and information resources. “The acceptance of open access ensures that our faculty’s world-class scholarship is accessible today and into the future. I look forward to the work of implementing this commitment.”

The vote came after an open access proposal was made by a university-wide committee aimed at encouraging wider dissemination of scholarly work. Earlier this semester, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to adopt a policy similar to the Law School’s new initiative.

Similar initiatives are underway to promote free and open access to scholarly articles elsewhere, although no initiative extends as far as Harvard’s. Legislation before Congress would mandate that all federally funded research be available in open access.

Library Journal Academic Newswire, Feb. 14, 2008
Harvard Law School Press Release, May 7, 2008

Harold Varmus, Progress toward Public Access to Science, PLoS Biology, April 8, 2008. An editorial.

Varmus is the President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, co-founder of the Public Library of Science, former director of the NIH (1993-1999), and the 1989 Nobel laureate for physiology or medicine.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is about to cross an important threshold. Starting April 7th, the authors of research reports that describe work supported by the NIH will be required to deposit accepted manuscripts into PubMed Central (PMC), the NIH’s public digital library of full-text articles, with the understanding that the articles will be freely available for all to view no later than 12 months after publication.

This is a landmark event from several perspectives. Most obviously, it further accelerates the world-wide movement toward greater access to the scientific literature, markedly increasing the number of articles freely available to read online. By taking this step, the NIH will join other funding agencies—including the Wellcome Trust, the UK Research Councils, the European Research Council, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute—all of which have recently required their investigators to deposit publications in PMC or equivalent public libraries, such as UKPMC, within six months to a year. Since NIH-supported investigators publish about 80,000 papers each year, many of them in journals that currently do not contribute their articles to PMC, the library will soon grow at about twice its already impressive rate. With an enlarged PMC, the virtues of full-text searches and ready access will be more obvious, encouraging still greater participation by authors of work not funded by the agencies that mandate deposition. As we all know, scientists want their work to be found, read, and cited.

The new NIH policy is especially gratifying to those of us who founded the Public Library of Science eight years ago with the goal of promoting greater access to and better use of the scientific literature through libraries like PMC. Still, not all articles in PMC are accessible on the same terms or timelines, and the public libraries and the laudable new policies from funding agencies still fall short of the full potential envisioned for a digital world of science. For articles in traditional, subscription-based journals, there is normally a six- to 12-month interval between publication and posting for public access. For that reason, the libraries are inherently archival—they are useful for searching relatively recent papers, but not for browsing most of the world’s newly published work. Furthermore, not every important new article will have been supported by enlightened funding agencies and fall within the reach of their mandates; those may not appear in PMC at all. The libraries are also limited as archives—the new policy is not retroactive, and few of the journals that participate in PMC have contributed their older papers. This is a pity, given the potential for preserving our scientific legacy in a searchable, digital form, especially at a time when most academic libraries are placing their old paper volumes in distant warehouses. So, for various reasons, the public libraries will remain incomplete, even with respect to recent work, until all authors—and publishers—commit to ensuring access to their work. Finally, unless authors modify their copyright agreements with journals before publication—something they are urged to do—journals will continue to retain inappropriate control over the use of their articles, which is currently confined largely to reading online for most articles in PMC.

In contrast, open-access journals, like those published by PLoS or BioMed Central, make their articles immediately and freely available in PMC, eliminating any extra work by the authors and any delay before the articles are fully accessible. Furthermore, these journals permit far greater use of their articles, by allowing readers to explore and reuse the texts under the terms of a Creative Commons license. These degrees of freedom are possible because access and use do not diminish revenues: open-access publishers recover their costs upfront, frequently by charging a publication fee that is paid from research expenses, rather than with subscription charges to libraries and readers. Thus the distribution and reuse of open-access content can be without limit, just as scientists and the public would wish.

The issue of ownership of published scientific papers is a vexing one, and it could pose difficulties for another recent and exciting initiative that promises to enlarge access to scholarly work. Last month, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) voted unanimously to require that its members provide the university with a nonexclusive license to post all their accepted articles on an openly accessible, university-maintained Web site. Because the policy might prevent some faculty, especially scientists, from publishing in journals that will not allow early free access, the policy was written to include an “opt-out” provision. This is, of course, not ideal, but much better than a policy that asks faculty to “opt-in.” Moreover, the nuisance of writing to the Provost every time a desired journal refuses to conform to the Harvard policy may cause faculty members to rethink their choice of venue, thereby minimizing use of the “opt-out” option.

As savvy journals will soon recognize, if faculty members choose to publish in other journals to comply with the new Harvard policy, the consequences will be significant—to be respected, journals need respected authors. Nevertheless, in a news article about the new Harvard policy in Science, former Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder, the chief lobbyist for the Association of American Publishers, says that, in view of the policy, “publishers may not be quite as excited to take articles from Harvard”[1]. This seems very unlikely, especially if the Harvard FAS is joined by other Harvard faculties and those on other prestigious campuses, where similar policies are under consideration.

The ownership issues are also not new. A decade ago, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences proposed that the nation’s academic work could be made more widely available through posting on university web sites. In a subsequent Policy Forum in Science [2], the authors of the Academy report recognized that this could not happen without recommended reform of copyright practices. Unfortunately, little progress has been made, largely because, then as now, traditional publishers fear major losses of subscription revenues if their journals’ articles are made freely available at the time of publication. Such losses are, of course, not going to occur if only some Harvard professors post their work in the university repository; but signs now point to more widespread participation in the United States, and some European institutions have already adopted such practices.

Open-access publishing offers a way out of this dilemma in academia, just as it offers solutions to the shortcomings of public libraries like PMC. When costs of publication are recovered from publishing fees instead of from subscriptions, and when authors retain copyrights and grant licenses to publishers, both of which happen with open-access publishing, then articles can be placed immediately in open university repositories (or in public libraries) without threats to revenues or infringements of ownership. We at PLoS celebrate these principles, while also applauding the new policies at Harvard, the NIH, and elsewhere, as welcome signs of continued progress toward public access to research literature.

The Audacity of SCOAP3, Ivy Anderson, Director of Collections, California Digital Library

Introductory Note: SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) is a grand experiment. It is a new model for scholarly communication proposed by a community of scientists. Physicists interested in expanding access to their literature have designed a novel approach to garner support from individual libraries, library consortia, research institutions, and even nation states to turn a core set of journals in the high energy physics (HEP) discipline into open access publications. SCOAP3 aims to convert all HEP literature published in high-quality journals, existing and new. This operation will be facilitated by the fact that seven journals carry the large majority of the literature in the field. These journals are published by the American Physical Society (APS), SISSA-IOP, Elsevier, and Springer. Already leaders in making their science freely accessible through the e-print service arXiv, the scientists are now proposing to make a substantial portion of the published literature open access as well.

For a variety of reasons, legal scholarship is an excellent laboratory for experiments in changing the traditional structures and economics of scholarship. Both open access and informal forms of scholarship have been more readily adopted and more quickly influential in law than in other fields. The unusual structure of most legal scholarship is a partial explanation for these facts, but many of the experiences and observations made in the legal arena offer substantive lessons for scholarship in other fields.

Nowhere are these experiences and observations better synthesized than in a recent article by Richard Danner, Ruffy Research Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Information Services at Duke University Law School. In “Applying the Access Principle in Law: the Responsibilities of the Legal Scholar,” Danner does a superb job of explaining what is unusual about legal scholarship, what the experiences of changing the publication models have been and what needs and responsibilities for individual scholars remain.

One of Danner’s observations particularly struck me when I read this article, and that impression was confirmed by a conversation I had this week with several librarians. Contrary to the oft-repeated claim that open access will inevitably lead to loss of subscription income for publishers, Danner documents the experience of Duke Law School when it moved all of its journals to open access web accessibility. As Danner tells the story, the school had concluded that the expected loss of subscription income would be offset by the values gained from greater exposure to its 6 print journals. But in fact, there was almost no such decline in print subscriptions, even after 10 years of free access. Only one journal showed an overall decline (of about 2%) over that time period, while four showed significant increases in subscriptions. The sixth journal experienced a small increase. Clearly better access leads to subscriptions from readers who otherwise would not have known about the journals, especially the specialized ones, which exhibited the largest increases. This week a librarian I was speaking with confirmed that she had also experienced this unusual form of marketing, when faculty have asked her to subscribe to journals they have discovered through open Web accessibility.

Overall, Danner’s article is a masterful analysis of the structure of publishing in a particular field and how the “access principle,” a concept taken from John Willinsky’s book of the same name, could transform a field of scholarship. In spite of the oddities of legal scholarship, Danner is very successful at offering both an analysis and a call to action that deserve to be translated and applied in other fields.

Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communication @ Duke, May 5, 2008

by Catherine Rampell, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 24, 2008.

Excerpt:

The high prices of textbooks, which are approaching $1,000 per year for an average student, have those students and their professors crying for mercy. Yet publishers say their cheaper options—electronic versions of traditional texts—aren’t selling.

Enter Flat World Knowledge. Starting next year, the new digital-textbook publisher will offer online, peer-reviewed, interactive, user-editable textbooks, free of charge. The catch? It’s not clear whether they can make any money doing so.

“We are finding and signing authors who we believe are the best in their fields,” said Eric Frank, co-founder of Flat World, which began its first peer review of textbook content last week. “We want to show professors that they’re not deciding between price and quality.”

Flat World hopes to leverage the availability (and hoped-for popularity) of these free books to make money by selling materials that supplement the online texts, such as study guides or print-on-demand hard copies. They will also take a cut of sales of user-created study materials sold through the Flat World site.

… Mr. Frank and his co-founder Jeff Shelstad, like the leaders of Freeload Press, collectively spent decades in the traditional textbook industry, most recently at Pearson Prentice Hall, before starting Flat World. Mr. Frank said they were leveraging their connections to get “authors who have existing best-selling books with other houses.”

The first books, which are planned for a January release, will be business and economics textbooks. Then, Mr. Frank said, he hopes to publish texts for other disciplines. That is, if the company can recoup the major upfront costs of producing a top-notch textbook.

But skeptical observers, including those who work on digital texts, think all the digital hurdles may be hard to surmount.

“I can’t imagine anyone taking this seriously,” said Bob Stein, director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, a think tank based in New York. “My reaction would be that either they’re not spending much money to produce these books, so they’re not of value and they’re giving poor kids the short end of the stick once again. Or, they’re going to overprice these ancillary things.”

But, he added, “I don’t understand what’s going to make anybody buy those in the first place.”

NIH has put together a web site to explain compliance and provide instructions on submission guidelines. Submission takes about 10 minutes, but there are also many journals that do the submission to PubMed automatically.

The NIH Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH funded research. It requires scientists to submit journal articles that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/). The Policy requires that these articles be accessible to the public on PubMed Central to help advance science and improve human health.

For Submission process, policy details, and FAQ, visit: http://publicaccess.nih.gov/

Robin Peek, What’s Next Post Mandate? A preprint of her Focus on Publishing column to appear in the March issue of Information Today. The preprint will come down at the end of February and the postprint will go up three months after publication. Excerpt:

…NIH tells submitters that: “Before you sign a publication agreement or similar copyright transfer agreement, make sure that the agreement allows the article to be submitted to NIH in accordance with the Public Access Policy.’ However what the NIH does not explain how the mandate will work with publishers who are not already in compliance with the guidelines. The NIH notes that,” Institutions and investigators are responsible for ensuring that any publishing or copyright agreements concerning submitted articles fully comply with this Policy.

Peter Suber, author of the SPARC Open Access News, observes “the policy makes no exceptions for dissenting publishers, does not depend on publisher consent, and simply requires grantee compliance. This clearly implies that if a publisher does not accommodate the NIH policy, and grantees cannot obtain special permission to comply with it, then they must look for another publisher.” …

One thing to keep in mind is that not all publishers object to this law as a good number of biomedical research journals…[already] submit [their articles] to PMC. Despite the strongly worded press releases from the major lobbying groups such the Association of American Publishers and the STM Publishers vowing to keep up the fight opposing the law…fighting the Congress and the President really has become old and its time to move on to other things. For example, Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, noted in a January 11, 2008 issue of Science. ‘Journals will have to step up their policing by asking NIH to remove articles that have been mistakenly posted because they are still under embargo or are too old to fall under the policy.”

The later part is just plain strange –where is logic of vanquishing the items submitted voluntarily? I am sorry, when did this become as issue? …I wish that the enlightened publishers who are already successfully working with the voluntary policy try to positively influence the implementation plan and not participate with publishing lobbies who provide us with more silly side street distractions.

But with the law will come the necessity to charge up the education machine. As Heather Joseph, the Director of SPARC stated in an interview with LJ Newswire: “In terms of the immediate future, librarians are going to be extremely busy educating their administrators, faculty members, researchers, and students as to how to comply with the policy, and also on what it means to each constituency. Successful implementation of this policy must be a high priority for the coming year.” …

Open Access News, February 3, 2008

Thomas Hess and three co-authors, Open Access & Science Publishing: Results of a Study on Researchers’ Acceptance and Use of Open Access Publishing, in Management Reports of the Institute for Information Systems and New Media, LMU München, 2007.

Executive Summary: This Management Report summarizes the main descriptive results of a study on researcher’s acceptance of Open Access publishing. The study was conducted in 2006 by the Ludwig-Maximilans-University Munich, Germany, in cooperation with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. The main focus is centered on the question if and why scientists decide or do not decide to publish their work according to the Open Access principle without access barriers and free of cost to readers. With the responses from 688 publishing scientists it could be demonstrated that the general attitude toward the Open Access principle is extremely positive. However, many seem to be rather reluctant to publish their own research work in Open Access outlets. Advantages like increased speed, reach and potentially higher citation rates of Open Access publications are seen alongside insufficient impact factors, lacking long-term availability and the inferior ability to reach the specific target audience of scientists within one’s own discipline. Moreover the low level of use among close colleagues seems to be a barrier towards Open Access publishing.

After a highly-publicized split last October, Springer announced this week that it has won back a key subscriber, Germany’s prestigious Max Planck Institute (MPS), with an innovative two-year deal that features Springer’s open access (OA) option. The new agreement, signed last week, was billed as a “mix” of open access and subscription models under which Max Planck researchers will have access to all 1200 Springer journals in SpringerLink as well as having author charges waived for researchers choosing to publish in journals under Springer’ OA option, Open Choice. Financial details, however, were not disclosed.

Though billed as “a two-year experiment,” the new deal represents a significant reconnection for Springer, a leading STM publisher, and the well-funded Max Planck, one of the world’s most prestigious research institutions with more than 12,000 staff members, 9000 Ph.D. students, post-docs, guest scientists and researchers, and student assistants working in over 80 affiliated research institutes. The agreement, however, was billed as “a two-year experiment.” Over the duration of the deal, noted Peter Hendriks, Springer’s president of STM publishing, both sides will “evaluate the effects of open access on both authors and users.”

Springer spokesman Eric Merkel-Sobotta told the LJ Academic Newswire the deal was along the lines of two other recent “experimental” deals Springer has struck, one with UKB, a consortium of the Universities and the Royal Library of the Netherlands, and one with the Georg-August University of Göttingen, both of which also waive author fees for those institutional researchers choosing to submit to Springer journals using Open Choice. The standard Open Choice author fee is $3000.

Springer’s Jan Velterop, an OA pioneer during his years at BioMed Central wrote on his blog that the new deal “could quite conceivably yield an increase in article submissions to Springer journals by authors from Max Planck Institutes…in fact, such an increase is expected, over time.” On his blog, OA advocate Peter Suber noted that this kind of deal “helps create a new body of OA content articles by faculty at participating institutions for about the same price that institutions currently pay for subscriptions.” Velterop added that such deals could reconcile “the desire for universal and immediate open access to peer-reviewed scientific journal articles with the need to ensure the economic sustainability of peer-reviewed journals.”

In October, 2007, after negotiations had broken down, MPS VP Kurt Mehlhorn said Springer was intent on charging “approximately double the price” the organization regarded as “reasonable.” In a statement, MPS officials suggested the breakdown in negotiations with Springer was representative of “extreme price developments in the supply of information, as well as usage restrictions,” and suggested scientific organizations throughout the world should “rethink” their information policies.

Chalk it up to all’s fair in negotiation. Merkel-Sobotta said Springer has always been open to open access, so long as any such system recognizes the value added by journal publishers and said that despite the public perception of acrimony, the two sides continued to talk and that Springer was “very pleased” with the eventual, innovative deal—and also interested to see what the next two years will look like. “If researchers really want open access,” he noted, “we’ll see.”

Library Journal Academic Newswire, Feb 5, 2008

Max Planck Society will pay gold OA journal fees
from Open Access News by Peter Suber, January 30, 2008

The Max Planck Society has agreed to pay the publication fees for MPS authors when they publish in any of the 17 OA journals from Copernicus Publications. From the MPS press release, January 28, 2008:

…With 17 peer-reviewed journals and 10 access-reviewed discussion forums, Copernicus Publications is the largest open access publisher in the Geo- and Earth system sciences. After the signature of similar contracts in the disciplines Physics and Bio-Medicine, the MPS is now enlarging its open access support to several other disciplines in the natural sciences….

Most of the journals of Copernicus Publications use an innovative two-stage publication process. This offers free accessibility to reviewer reports as well as comments of the scientific community alongside a discussion paper with the aim to develop the revision towards a very high quality journal article. “This contract also sends a clear signal that innovative review concepts, facilitated through open access and online tools, have the potential to enhance the effectiveness and transparency of scientific quality assurance” said [Martin Rasmussen, managing director of Copernicus Publications]….