June 26, 2009
Contact: Rebecca Smith, KU Libraries, (785) 864-1761.

LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas has become the nation’s first public university to adopt an “open access” policy that makes its faculty’s scholarly journal articles available for free online.

The move aligns KU with Harvard and Stanford universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which have similar policies in place.

Scholarly articles — the method by which a professor presents original research results — normally are published in peer-reviewed journals and available only through paid subscriptions.

Under the new faculty-initiated policy approved by Chancellor Robert Hemenway, digital copies of all articles produced by the university’s professors will be housed in KU ScholarWorks, an existing digital repository for scholarly work created by KU faculty and staff in 2005. KU ScholarWorks houses more than 4,400 articles submitted in digital formats that assure their long-term preservation.

Professors will be allowed to seek a waiver but otherwise will be asked to provide electronic forms of all articles to the repository. KU’s Faculty Senate overwhelmingly endorsed the policy at a meeting earlier this year, but additional policy details, including the waiver process, will be developed by a senate task force in the coming academic year, said Faculty Senate President Lisa Wolf-Wendel, professor of education leadership and policy studies. The task force will be led by Ada Emmett, associate librarian for scholarly communications.

“Academic publishing has become increasingly commercial and unavailable to other scholars, or to the general public, in recent years,” said A. Townsend Peterson, distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and curator at the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center at KU. “This new policy offers a voluntary means of opening doors to much of KU’s journal-based scholarship. This policy represents a first step towards a new means of scholarly communication, in which the entire global academic community has access to the totality of scholarship. We all can participate in the scholarly exchange that leads to new knowledge creation.”

Peterson said open access policies such as KU’s will bring greater visibility to the authors’ work and will showcase the breadth and depth of the faculty’s contributions to academic research and to the university’s mission.

“Granting the university the right to deposit a copy of scholarly journal articles in an open digital repository extends the reach of the scholarship, providing the widest possible audience and increasing its possible impact,” said Lorraine J. Haricombe, dean of libraries.

Read more about this on Peter Suber’s Open Access Blog.

The statement was signed by the directors of a group of small and medium-size presses, including Penn State University, Rockefeller University Press, the University of Michigan Press, and the University Press of New England. It was posted on Peter Suber’s Open Access News blog.

“The signatories think that it is important to publicly align ourselves with the stance taken by many university faculties and administrators on scholarly communication,” Mike Rossner, the Rockefeller press’s director, told The Chronicle by e-mail on Wednesday. His press makes its content publicly available six months after publication, he said, “and our revenues have increased every year since then.” That experience has led his press to conclude that “providing public access to scholarly-journal articles after a short delay is compatible with our subscription-based business model.”

from The Chronicle: Daily News Blog, 4 June 2009, by Jennifer Howard

Text from the Position Statement:

Position Statement From University Press Directors on Free Access to Scholarly Journal Articles:

1. The undersigned university press directors support the dissemination of scholarly research as broadly as possible.
2. We support the free access to scientific, technical, and medical journal articles no later than 12 months after publication.  We understand that the length of time before free release of journal articles will by necessity vary for other disciplines.
3. We support the principle that scholarly research fully funded by governmental entities is a public good and should be treated as such.  We support legislation that strengthens this principle and oppose legislation designed to weaken it.
4. We support the archiving and free release of the final, published version of scholarly journal articles to ensure accuracy and citation reliability.
5. We will work directly with academic libraries, governmental entities, scholarly societies, and faculty to determine appropriate strategies concerning dissemination options, including institutional repositories and national scholarly archives.

The statement is signed by the directors of the University Press of Florida, University of Akron Press, University Press of New England, Athabasca University Press, Wayne State University Press, University of Calgary Press, University of Michigan Press, Rockefeller University Press, Penn State University Press, and University of Massachusetts Press.

For immediate release
June 25, 2009

For more information, contact:
Jennifer McLennan
jennifer [at] arl [dot] org
(202) 296-2296 ext 121

Taxpayer Alliance applauds bill to broaden access to federal research results Federal Research Public Access Act introduced today

Washington, DC – Senators Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and John Cornyn (R-
TX) today introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), a bill to ensure free, timely, online access to the published results of research funded by eleven U.S. federal agencies. The proposed bill is welcomed by the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, a coalition of research institutions, consumers, patients, and others formed to support open public access to publicly funded research.

FRPAA would require those agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to research manuscripts stemming from such funding no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.  The bill gives individual agencies flexibility in choosing the location of the digital repository to house this content, as long as the repositories meet conditions for interoperability and public accessibility, and have provisions for long-term archiving.

“Ready access to published research will advance the frontiers of knowledge more rapidly, bringing the fruits of federal expenditure for research to citizens more quickly,” said David Shulenburger, Vice President for Academic Affairs at the Association of Public and Land- grant Universities. “FRPAA guarantees that access to all – scientists and citizens alike. This bill balances the public’s right to access what it has paid for, while preserving the time-tested institutions on which vetting and distribution of scholarly research has long relied.”

The bill covers unclassified research funded by agencies including:
Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Science Foundation.

Sir Richard Roberts, Nobel Laureate and Chief Scientific Officer for New England Biolabs, welcomed the bill, saying, “I support any measure that will help disseminate the findings of scientific research in an unimpeded fashion. This bill will provide an important new resource for scientists in all disciplines to use in innovative ways.
It acknowledges the new reality of how science is conducted, and provides critical support to help accelerate research, discovery and innovation.  This is good for science, and ultimately good for the public.”

“FRPAA will pay especially generous dividends to students by opening access to publically funded research – a significant portion of which has been unavailable to undergraduate and graduate students alike,”
noted Nick Shockey, Student Outreach Fellow for SPARC and recent graduate of Trinity University, San Antonio. “This legislation will help ensure that a student’s education is limited only by curiosity rather than by the access each campus is able to afford.”

“We welcome the introduction of this landmark legislation,” added Heather Joseph, spokesperson for the Alliance and Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).
This bill reflects the recognition that expanded access to research results will benefit all citizens.  Every member of the public has a stake in this research. Whether it is understanding climate change, developing renewable energy resources, or helping to halt a flu pandemic, these research results are of critical value to every American taxpayer. We look forward to working with the wide coalition of supporters of public access to see this legislation come to fruition.”

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access calls on organizations and individuals to write in support of the bill through the Web site at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org .

For more information about the Federal Research Public Access Act, visit http://www.taxpayeraccess.org.

###

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is a coalition of patient, academic, research, and publishing organizations that supports open public access to the results of federally funded research. The Alliance was formed in 2004 to urge that peer-reviewed articles stemming from taxpayer-funded research become fully accessible and available online at no extra cost to the American public. Details on the ATA may be found at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org.

————————————-
Jennifer McLennan
Director of Communications
SPARC
jennifer@arl.org
(202) 296-2296 x121
Fax: (202) 872-0884

Read another article about FRPAA from Library Journal: Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) Reintroduced in Senate

Excerpt:

It looks like there’s a new copyright battle brewing in Congress after U.S. Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Joe Lieberman, (I-CT) reintroduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), a bill that would require every federal department and agency with an annual extramural research budget of $100 million or more to make their research available to the public within six months of publication.

The bill sets up a direct showdown—or perhaps a stalemate—with Congressman John Conyers (D-MI), who in February of this year, introduced the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (HR 801) an opposing bill supported by publishers that would prohibit the federal government from requiring copyright transfer in connection with receiving federal funding.

Abstract: Previous investigations into the impact of open-access journals on subsequent citations confounded open and electronic access and failed to track availability over time. With new data, we separated these effects. We demonstrate that a journal receives a modest increase in citations when it comes online freely, but the jump is larger when it first comes online through commercial sources. This effect reverses for poor countries where free-access articles are much more likely to be cited. Together, findings suggest that free Internet access widens the circle of those who read and make use of scientists’ investigations.

Read the full article: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;323/5917/1025

Abstract:   Open Humanities Press (OHP) is the first open access publisher devoted to contemporary critical theory. OHP was created as a grassroots movement of academics, librarians, journal editors and technology specialists to address the growing inequality of readers’ access to critical materials necessary for our research. In this presentation, I offer case studies of journals edited by the founders of the new OA academic journal consortium, Open Humanities Press, as a starting point for a discussion of how professional open access publishing may be achieved without author-side fees (a ‘business model’ that for both practical and cultural reasons is inappropriate in the context of humanities publishing). While reputable open access publishing in the humanities confronts significant challenges, the problem of how to finance it – the problem that is frequently raised as the Gold path’s chief obstacle in the sciences – appears far and away the least pressing.

J. A. Evans and J. Reimer argue that a research article published online is only modestly (8%) more likely to be cited if it is freely available. This result would seem to cast doubt on one important argument in favor of free access—that it will increase the visibility of a paper to colleagues. However, the 8% statistic that Evans and Reimer highlight is misleading. The authors’ supporting online material (figure S1C) clearly shows that the impact of free access on citations is heavily dependent on the age of the article at the time free access was provided. In particular, when articles were made freely available within 2 years of publication, their citations increased by almost 20%.

Read on: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/325/5938/266-c

In another letter in response to the Evans and Reimer article, Philip Davis points out that the authors “ignore other sources of open-access articles, such as when authors pay to make their articles freely available in subscription-access journals (2) or use self-archiving.”   Read Davis’ letter at: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;325/5938/266-a

And, one last letter worth reading: Open Access: The Self-Selection Effect

Excerpt:

The debate over Open Access (OA) has typically been the domain of faculty and administrations, taking place near the pinnacle of academia’s ivory tower. But last week the American Medical Student Association and other student groups, brokered by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), weighed in from below with their own “Student Statement on the Right to Research.”

In the statement, students call upon faculty, researchers, and funding groups (including governments) to support Open Access principles in order to remove “barriers for scholarly and educational re-use” of research materials.

The other signatory groups on the the June 10 statement were the Student PIRGs, Students for Free Culture, Universities Allied for Essential Medicine, the California Institute of Technology Graduate Student Council, and the Trinity University Association of Student Representatives.

Nick Shockey, student outreach fellow for SPARC and former student senator at Trinity University in San Antonio, told LJAN: “Until now, there has not been much of a student voice on this issue that affects students so much, and we have a compelling case to make. Limited access to research makes us settle for what is available rather than what is best and puts those students at smaller institutions that cannot afford multi-million dollar journal budgets at a disadvantage.”

Read on…

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]

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 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.