Welcome to the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #79
November 2, 2004Read this issue online
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/11-02-04.htm
Contents
If you're a U.S. citizen, then please don't forget to vote today. The newsletter can wait. Some things are even more important than open access.
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Brief update on NIH plan
If you recall, on July 14 the House Appropriations Committee report called on the NIH to develop a plan to provide open access to peer-reviewed journal articles arising from NIH-funded research. The whole House approved that recommendation on September 9. The Senate Appropriations Committee decided not to include a similar recommendation in its own appropriations bill. The differences between the two appropriations bills will be worked out by a conference committee. However, Congress adjourned on October 8, before the conference committee could meet, and will not reconvene until November 16. In the meantime, NIH funding for the new fiscal year, which began on October 1, was continued at 2004 levels by a Continuing Resolution that lasts until November 20.
The conference committee to reconcile the FY 2005 appropriations will meet after Congress reconvenes, we hope soon after. I'm predicting that it will leave the House recommendation intact. Even if it is silent on the matter, however, the NIH will be free to adopt its OA plan. Problems would only arise if the committee approved some language opposing the OA plan. The Open Access Working Group and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access are leading the advocacy effort to hold the House position.
The NIH released the draft of its open-access policy on September 3 for a period of public comment to end on November 16. If the conference committee gives the NIH a green light to continue, then the NIH will digest the public comments and issue a final version of its new policy. The House asked for the plan to be ready by December 1 and the NIH should be able to meet the deadline. The plan could take effect immediately or soon afterwards.
If higher-priority legislation and the aftermath of the presidential election preoccupy Congress after it reconvenes, then it may fund the government with continuing resolutions until well into the new year. That would delay the official resolution of the House and Senate appropriations bills. However, the NIH might start to implement its OA policy before such an official resolution. The reason is simply that the NIH is proposing to revise its in-house guidelines for awarding research grants. It already has the authority to do this and needn't wait for new legislation. If the official resolution of the appropriations bills or other legislation asks NIH to retract or modify its plan, then of course it would to reconsider its options.
If you haven't sent comments to the NIH on its draft plan, then please do so before November 16.
Reread the NIH draft plan, as published in the Federal Register
http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/06jun20041800/edocket.access.gpo.gov/2004/04-21097.htm
Submit comments by email
PublicAccess@nih.gov
Submit comments by web form
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/public_access/add.htm
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Journals: please post your access policies
Let's accept that open access is not going to disappear. One way or another, journals will continue to experiment with free and priced access to their content. We may disagree about which kinds of access are economically sustainable, and which are preferable, but I think we all agree that some forms of free online access are here to stay.
If so, then here's a simple idea whose time has come. Journals should post the details of their current access policies on their web sites. Today some do and some don't. Some are thorough and some are skimpy. Some are current and some are way out of date. Because policies differ from journal to journal, and sometimes from issue to issue of the same journal, potential readers, authors, and subscribers are more confused than they --we-- have to be. We shouldn't have to undertake a research project, make phone calls, send off emails, or conduct listserv colloquies (themselves confusing and inconclusive) just to learn these basic facts of life in the digital age.
Journals wouldn't have to disclose trade secrets or give away valuable information to their rivals. The "phenotype" of a journal's access policy is intrinsically public. Making the "genotype" explicit online will help constituents without giving away any competitive advantage.
Most journals do a very good job spelling out the details of their submission policies online. Self-interest requires it. The time has come to do the same with their access policies. If assisting potential readers, authors, and subscribers counts as self-interest, then self-interest requires this step as well. Here are some of the benefits:
* It will help authors decide where to submit their work. Attractive policies really will attract submissions.
* It will help authors of published articles understand what they may and may not do with the postprints. Increasingly, and for good reasons, authors want to know.
* It will help scholars, librarians, and others compile data on the prevalence of certain policies. We won't have to to conduct expensive and time-consuming surveys to get this information; we won't have to make decisions in the absence of this information; and we won't have to generalize from incomplete samples. Journals and publishers themselves will benefit from having this information, as will researchers, libraries, and funding agencies.
* It will help document the variety of OA and OA-like experiments under way. Journals considering a certain policy will be able to find other journals that have tried it or are currently using it. Journals could share information among themselves to establish what works, or what works where, and more rapidly prune the tree of possibilities and explore untried variations.
Nearly all these benefits would be even greater if journals would post their policy details to a central database, or post them on their own web sites with standardized terminology or tags. Detail-harvesting, searching, and comparison could then be automated. But for now this is too much to ask. At least journals should put their policies on their own sites in their own words and keep them up to date.
An objection: "But our access policy frequently changes, at least in small ways." Exactly. It may be a small headache to keep the online policy statement up to date. But it prevents many small headaches as authors, readers, libraries, and subscribers struggle to discover exactly what your policy is. It also prevents larger headaches when authors, readers, libraries, and subscribers give up and try elsewhere.
In fact, however, it shouldn't be difficult to keep the policy statement up to date. Most journals announce changes to their access policies in press releases or editorials. If so, it's not hard to save the key parts of the description to a permanent page on the journal web site. Then just update the time-stamp or version number on the page so that regular visitors know it has changed.
An objection: "But some parts of our access policy will not be popular." Perhaps, but is non-disclosure the best solution to this problem? If you disclose the policy, then you can explain and justify it or link to an editorial that does so. As long as you really hold the policy, it has to be better public relations to disclose and explain it than to enforce it without disclosing or explaining it.
Both OA and non-OA journals should publish their policy details. There are at least three reasons why OA journals shouldn't be exempt. First, OA journals differ among themselves on some access issues. If you don't believe it, take a close look at any handful of journals in the DOAJ. Second, the boundary between OA and non-OA journals is increasingly smudged by the rise of hybrid models. Finally, unfortunately, some journals move from OA to non-OA, not just the other way around.
Here are some of the details it would be helpful for journals to disclose:
* What kinds of content, if any, do you offer online free of charge? If you provide free online access to your back run, what is the embargo period or moving wall? If you offer authors an OA option for their own accepted articles, then what are the terms of the offer?
* Do you allow authors to deposit their postprints in OA repositories? If you allow postprint archiving with some restrictions, then what restrictions? For example, do you bar it at disciplinary archives and permit it only at the author's personal web site or institutional repository? Do you allow it for the version approved by peer review but not for the version refined by copy editing? Do you allow the author to disseminate the publisher's own PDF? Do you give blanket permission in advance or do you require case-by-case requests?
* Do you refuse to consider submissions that have circulated as preprints? Do you ask authors of accepted articles to remove preprints from OA repositories?
* What permissions do you give for the use of your content? For example, do you allow the author to distribute copies of the postprint to students and colleagues? Do you allow all teachers to distribute copies to students? Do you allow authors, without further permission, to use their work in presentations and subsequent publications? For your free online content, do you allow commercial reuse, derivative works, copying of individual articles, mirroring of larger collections, or LOCKSS-style preservation?
* What rights do you require that authors transfer to you? (It is understood that journals sometimes negotiate these terms; but what is your preference or your default contract?)
* Do libraries have the right of permanent access to subscribed issues (to your copies or their own) after their subscriptions lapse? If so, do libraries have the right to migrate the files to new formats or new media to keep them readable as technology changes?
This list will fluctuate over time. (For example, in a few years we might ask: Do you open your digital files for crawling by knowledge-integrating and question-answering AI?) But this is a start.
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Who should control access to research literature?
Many of the publishers objecting to the NIH plan already provide free online access to their contents after some delay. For some the delay is longer than six months but for others it is not. Some publishers allow postprint archiving without any delay at all, although perhaps they adopted this policy on the assumption that authors would not seize the opportunity in large numbers.
In short, their objection does not seem to be to OA as such. The objection is that the NIH plan will provide OA on the NIH's terms, not on the publishers' terms. The problem is control. Will the timetable and the conditions be set by publishers or by others, such as authors or funding agencies?
In the past, I've tended to focus on the access barriers that stand in the way of OA and the task of removing them one by one. But watching some publishers oppose the NIH OA plan (and other OA initiatives as well) when they are willing to remove some of these barriers on their own, I've shifted in my thinking a bit. The more fundamental question is who controls access, not what barriers stand in the way. Who should decide which access barriers to remove, when, and on what terms?
Publishers opposed to the NIH plan want to make these decisions themselves, not to cede control to anyone else, especially the government. Notice that we're not talking about decisions on what to study, what to publish, or how to conduct peer review. We're only talking about decisions on what access barriers to remove and on what timetable. The question is not how to conduct science, but how to control access to the results. Some publishers opposing the NIH policy like to blur this distinction, perhaps deliberately.
Sometimes the question is hard to separate from the question whether to "let the market work" (i.e. refrain from government intervention and leave control with publishers), which I've addressed elsewhere.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/nihfaq.htm#market
Publishers who object to this loss of control are defending the remarkable proposition that they should control access to research conducted by others, written up by others, and funded by taxpayers. More: they claim that they should control access to this literature even when it is given to them free of charge and even though the prices they demand for it have risen four times faster than inflation for nearly two decades.
If we let publishers control access to this knowledge, then the toll will continue to grow faster than inflation. Even if it didn't, or even if the prices were low and reasonable, the present system wouldn't scale, since the growth of published knowledge itself would quickly put the total price out of reach, creating access barriers based on the accident of user wealth. We want to remedy information overload, but we want to do it with smart tools that help us find the subset of information we need, not with crude policies that set off huge swaths of it, relevant and irrelevant alike, as too expensive.
Publishers cannot say that they deserve to control access because their role in the process is the most important. They facilitate peer review, which is critical, and add value in other, less critical ways. But nobody can argue that facilitating peer review is more important than conducting the research in the first place, or writing it up, or even funding it. The peer-review provider is now the access gatekeeper, but not because any rational principle requires it. When we start to replace this inherited system with a more rational one, the former gatekeepers protest, but I have yet seen them offer a principled objection. I've seen principled or evidence-based objections to the economics of OA journals and to the economic consequences of OA archiving; these are constructive, deserve responses, and are receiving responses. But publishers have not been as constructive or coherent on the fundamental proposition, represented by the NIH plan, that publishers should not be the ones to control when or on what terms the public will have access to publicly-funded research. Their objections to this proposition have been naked assertions of economic self-interest at the expense of the public interest.
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Citicorp report on Elsevier and open access
On October 8, Citigroup Smith Barney issued a 56 page report, _Reed Elsevier: Science Friction_, analyzing the STM journal industry and the market position of Reed Elsevier. The authors are Rogan Angelini-Hurll, Marc Sugarman, Roberto Odierna, and Tom Singlehurst, in consultation with Vighnesh Padiachy. The report is not online, so I can't link to it. But here is my summary of its main conclusions, or at least the main conclusions of interest to proponents of open access.
* During 2004, Reed Elsevier profits will grow more slowly than the STM publishing sector overall. Moreover, constrained library budgets and increased government scrutiny exert pricing pressure on the whole STM sector. Consequently Citicorp is downgrading its rating of Elsevier stock from Hold/Medium Risk to Sell/Medium Risk and lowering its price target from 500p to 450p.
* Growth in the Reed Elsevier science division will slow down in the short term and require new investment. However, the rise of OA institutional repositories will create new risks for that investment.
* Most libraries have finished switching over to electronic delivery, so Elsevier's premium for ejournals will no longer bring in much revenue. At the same time, more and more libraries want out of the big deal.
* Open access is rising in popularity and will not go away. OA archives and OA journals are increasing in number and usage, and governments are considering policies that would mandate OA to taxpayer-funded research.
* The market will move towards upfront-funded OA journals. However, several factors will slow the transition, which will therefore be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. For the short or medium term, but not the long term, the transition to upfront funding for journals will cost more than the present system. Governments may be reluctant to reduce research funding in order to pay for OA. To support their journals, society publishers might have to give up revenue now used for other purposes. OA journals will not have the benefit of funding from corporate users that conventional journals currently enjoy.
* The STM journal market is peculiar. Journals don't pay authors. Readers don't pay journals; because libraries pay on behalf of readers, readers know the quality but rarely the cost of what they read. Journals don't compete directly with one another and have a monopoly on the distribution of their own articles. Unlike other consumers, libraries spend up to the limit of their budgets.
* Publishers explain their price increases by citing increased costs, increased volume, increased usage, and increased investment in infrastructure for electronic publishing. However, when examined closely (details in the report), these explanations are misleading and unpersuasive. Citicorp believes that price increases are mainly due to a desire to maintain high profit margins.
* If the price per article is falling, it is due to greater volume, clever bookkeeping, and bundling, and does not result in lower costs for subscribers.
* Library budgets are maxed out. If publishers continue to raise prices, libraries will have to purchase smaller and smaller percentages of the published literature.
* Universities are starting to understand that rising journal prices and journal use of copyright are reducing access to research. At the same time universities are starting to see the benefits of open access as an alternative to the current system. (At this point, the report offers a table based on my list of University Actions Against High Journal Prices, <http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/lists.htm#actions>.) However, while universities protest high prices, and some endorse open access, most renew their Elsevier subscriptions.
* OA advocates are correct to argue that OA removes access barriers, increases the visibility and impact of authors and their work, increases a funding agency's return on investment, relieves library budgets, brings access to non-academics, and provides a business model that scales with research funding rather than with library funding.
* On the downside, the "author-pays" model may not be economically sustainable, may not transfer from biomedicine to other fields, may "penalize" high-output research institutions and countries (though this "penalty" may be "more than recouped" through OA efficiencies), and may not generate revenue needed for post-publication expenses such as long-term preservation and upgrading technology.
* Government intervention is justified by the use of public money to fund research, to fund researcher salaries, and to fund the purchase of journal subscriptions.
* Today the level of knowledge about open access among scientists is low, but this will change. Universities are starting to educate their faculty about OA and to recommend it (in part) as a solution to library budget problems. Large and conspicuous government-sponsored OA initiatives are imminent in the U.S. and U.K. Successful OA journals are rising in usage and repute.
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Major open-access developments in October 2004
This is a selection of open-access developments since the last issue of the newsletter, taken from the Open Access News blog, which I write with other contributors and update daily. I give both the item URL and blog posting URL so that you can read the original story as well as what I or another blog contributor had to say about it. For other developments, the blog archive is browseable and searchable.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
Here are the major stories from October:
* PLoS launches its second journal, PLoS Medicine.
* EPIC and Key Perspectives releases an important report supporting mandated OA archiving.
* SAGE Publications permits postprint archiving.
* Google launches Google print.
* Gone With the Wind triggers an important question about OA to public-domain works.
* Novartis funds OA research on diabetes.
* PLoS launches its second journal, PLoS Medicine.
The Public Library of Science launched PLoS Medicine, its second OA journal, on October 18. In addition to five research articles and their synopses, and eight feature sections (PLos Medicine Debate, Essays, Neglected Diseases, Perspectives, Health in Action, Policy Forums, Learning Forum, and Case Report), the inaugural issue contains two strong defenses of OA journals, one from the editors and one from the PLoS founders.
PLoS Medicine, inaugural issue
http://plosmedicine.org/
Virginia Barbour, James Butcher, Barbara Cohen, and Gavin Yamey, Prescription for a Healthy Journal: Take monthly, at no cost; reaches six billion, PLoS Medicine, October 19, 2004. The editorial in the inaugural issue.
http://www.plosmedicine.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0010022
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_17_fosblogarchive.html#a109812903091479080
Michael B. Eisen, Patrick O. Brown, Harold E. Varmus, PLoS Medicine --A Medical Journal for the Internet Age, PLoS Medicine, October 19, 2004. Message from the PLoS founders in the inaugural issue.
http://www.plosmedicine.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0010031
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_17_fosblogarchive.html#a109812950606041108
PLoS press release on the launch of the new journal, October 19, 2004.
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20041019005873&newsLang=en
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_17_fosblogarchive.html#a109821583133222255
PLoS press release on the launch and the Wellcome Trust gala to celebrate it. (Dated October 17, the press release was apparently misdated and prematurely released; the true date for both the launch and the Wellcome party was October 18.)
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20041017005020&newsLang=en
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_17_fosblogarchive.html#a109809835265388421
Also see Tom Roper's notes on the Wellcome Trust party.
http://tomroper.typepad.com/tr/2004/10/a_quick_account.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_17_fosblogarchive.html#a109863035675903477
Here are some of the news stories on the launch.
Lynn Eaton, Public Library of Science launches "author pays" model, BMJ, October 30, 2004.
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/329/7473/996?view=full
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_24_fosblogarchive.html#a109906317116688659
P.V Ramachandran, PLoS Medicine follows PLoS Biology, October 30, 2004.
http://www.pvramachandran.com/blog/2004/10/plos-medicine-follows-plos-biology.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_24_fosblogarchive.html#a109914670166340735
Scientists Publish Medical Journal Online At No Charge, iHealth Beat, October 28, 2004.
http://www.ihealthbeat.org/index.cfm?Action=dspItem&itemID=106821
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_24_fosblogarchive.html#a109906346176127510
Kata Kertesz, Medical research articles soon to be available free to the public, Associated Press, October 27, 2004. Printed in many papers; here's the link to the San Diego Union-Tribune.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/computing/20041027-1138-onlinemedicaljournal.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_24_fosblogarchive.html#a109890581124735661
Florian Rötzer, Medizinische Fachzeitschrift nach dem Open Access-Modell gestartet, Telepolis, October 25, 2004.
http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/on/18646/1.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_24_fosblogarchive.html#a109888472149706705
Richard Wray, Lancet faces free access competition, The Guardian, October 20, 2004.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1331136,00.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_17_fosblogarchive.html#a109824019330920110
Janice McCallum, The Lancet vs. PLoS Medicine Is No Open and Shut Case, Commentary (the Shore Communications blog), October 19, 2004.
http://shore.com/commentary/weblogs/2004_10_01_m_archive.html#109821995427741142
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_17_fosblogarchive.html#a109824313502854179
Saeed Shah, US Public Library of Science launches rival to 'The Lancet', The Independent, October 18, 2004.
http://news.independent.co.uk/media/story.jsp?story=573619
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_17_fosblogarchive.html#a109815050678023389
Tim Lougheed, New online medical journal challenges conventions, Canadian Medical Association Journal, October 12, 2004.
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/171/8/838?ct
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_10_fosblogarchive.html#a109761133790372681
Also see Jim Till's letter to the editor in response to Lougheed's article.
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/eletters/171/8/838#1517
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_10_fosblogarchive.html#a109764493096623433
* EPIC and Key Perspectives releases an important report supporting mandated OA archiving.
The study is important for at least two reasons, both of them anticipated by the report for the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. First, the new study calls for funder-mandated OA to funded research, of which government-mandated OA to taxpayer-funded research is only a special case. Second, it argues for distributed OA archiving (through institutional repositories) over centralized OA archiving (through an archive like PubMed Central). As public and private research funders around the world consider mandating OA to the publications that result from funded research, this report should guide policy.
Alma Swan, Paul Needham, Steve Probets, Adrienne Muir, Ann O'Brien, Charles Oppenheim, Rachel Hardy, and Fytton Rowland, Delivery, Management and Access Model for E-prints and Open Access Journals within Further and Higher Education, EPIC and Key Perspectives, undated but apparently released October 4, 2004.
http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/OpenAccessArchive/E-prints_delivery_model.pdf
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_03_fosblogarchive.html#a109694547437759090
The JISC press release on the report.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=central_archiving_news_051004
* SAGE Publications permits postprint archiving.
SAGE Publications now allows postprint archiving without case-by-case requests for permission. The new policy is limited to author home pages and institutional repositories, and does not extend to disciplinary repositories like arXiv. It does not allow deposit of the publisher's own PDF. Despite the limitations on the permission, this is a major step forward. Like other publishers that have taken this step, SAGE deserves our thanks. Now the burden is on SAGE authors to take advantage of the opportunity. Stevan Harnad's journal-level supplement to SHERPA's publisher-level policy database now shows that 92% of surveyed journals are green and 69% allow postprint archiving.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/1151.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_03_fosblogarchive.html#a109733989496721813
Also see Péter Jacsó's review of SAGE Journals Online since its move to HighWire Press.
http://www.galegroup.com/free_resources/reference/peter/oct.htm#sage
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_09_26_fosblogarchive.html#a109675262820394010
* Google launches Google print.
Google Print is an ambitious project to digitize print information and index it alongside born-digital information. Still in beta, Google Print offers free full-text searching of participating print books and other print sources. Publishers cooperate in exchange for the exposure, the links to publisher home pages, and the "buy this book" links to online book vendors. It also helps that Google will digitize the books at its own expense. If your Google search brings up a print book among the hits, you can browse a page or two of the book centered on the searchstring. You can also limit a search to the text of a given book. Google uses hackable CSS to disable printing and image-copying when browsing book pages; this won't stop determined infringers, but it seems to be secure enough to persuade publishers to join the program.
Much of the press focuses on the way Google Print will sell books and compete with Amazon's Search Inside the Book. Fair enough. But for us it's significant for the same reason Search Inside the Book is significant. This is free online searching without free online reading. It brings some of the benefits of OA --full-text indexing for content discovery-- without the rest. It's not OA, but for print literature, it's a big step forward.
Amazon's Search Inside the Book increases the sales of participating books. As evidence emerges that Google Print has the same effect, for the same reasons, more publishers will want to participate. Over time, this will breach the analog wall between online and offline texts. It will show publishers that, at least for some kinds of content, free-online access and priced-print access are compatible. It will get publishers wanting the kinds of free online access that increase net sales of priced print editions. It will get them to investigate which kinds these are. This can pave the way to fully OA books and reduce the opposition to OA archives and journals --evidence permitting.
Google Print
http://print.google.com/googleprint/about.html
The launch of Google Print received huge press. Here's a sampling of the major articles.
Scott Lorenz, New Google Print Program Offers Authors a Powerful Way to Market and Promote Their Books for Free, a press release, October 28, 2004.
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2004/10/emw172071.htm
L.N. Revathy, A twist to the tale, Business Line, October 25, 2004.
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/ew/2004/10/25/stories/2004102500170200.htm
John Markoff, Broadening battle in online search market, International Herald Tribune, October 19, 2004.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/10/18/business/google19.html
Danny Sullivan, Google Print Opens Wide to Publishers, ClickZ, October 13, 2004.
http://www.clickz.com/experts/search/opt/print.php/3419481
Danny Sullivan, Publisher Reactions To Google Print; What About Authors? Search Engine Watch, October 8, 2004.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/041008-494a
Dan Ackman, Google Print: The Next Big Thing, Forbes, October 7, 2004.
http://www.forbes.com/execpicks/2004/10/07/cx_da_1007topnews.html
Barbara Quint, Google Print Expands Access to Books with Digitization Offer to All Publishers, Information Today, October 7, 2004.
http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb041006-1.shtml
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_03_fosblogarchive.html#a109715408672675391
Tara Calishain, Google Print, Google Print, Argh Argh Argh, ResearchBuzz, October 6, 2004.
http://www.researchbuzz.org/archives/002056.shtml
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_03_fosblogarchive.html#a109715538775704779
Jeffrey Goldstein, Google Launches Amazon-Style Book Search Business, Reuters, October 6, 2004.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=internetNews&storyID=6427578
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_03_fosblogarchive.html#a109707193932218145
* Gone With the Wind triggers an important question about OA to public-domain works.
The Australian copyright on _Gone With The Wind_ has expired, but the U.S. copyright has not (thanks to Bono copyright extension). Project Gutenberg of Australia has concluded that the book is in the public domain under Australian law and is disseminating an open-access edition from its web site. The heirs of author Margaret Mitchell are demanding a halt to the dissemination and threatening to sue the US-based Project Gutenberg for copyright infringement.
One the one hand, it's true that users from the U.S. or any other country can download the book from the Australian site. On the other hand, if that were a reason for the Australian site to take down the book, then suddenly all countries in the world would have a term of copyright effectively equal to the longest term in force anywhere. Conversely, of course, if the Australian site were not required to take down the book, then all countries in the world would have a term of copyright effectively equal to the shortest in force anywhere. Since either resolution is likely to equalize copyright terms around the world, de facto if not de jure, this issue is much too important to depend on a lawyer's cease-and-desist letter to a cash-strapped non-profit. Project Gutenberg of Australia needs some serious legal and financial help.
David Rothman, _Gone With the Wind_ heirs threaten Project Gutenberg, Teleread, October 26, 2004.
http://www.teleread.org/blog/2004_10_24_archive.html#109882938565501362
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_24_fosblogarchive.html#a109888037665169229
In FOSN for 11/16/01, I looked at the possibility that IP-tracking software could solve this problem without all countries on Earth or in cyberspace having to harmonize their rules on free speech or copyright. If national rules could be harmonized in the right direction, then harmonization might be more attractive than IP-tracking software. But the risk of harmonizing in the wrong direction makes us take a closer look at IP-tracking software.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/11-16-01.htm
* Novartis funds OA research on diabetes.
Novartis has struck a deal with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to fund diabetes research and provide OA to the results. Novartis is a private, for-profit drug manufacturer. Why is it doing this? For clues, see these passages from Jeffrey Krasner's story in the Boston Globe: "For Novartis, which has one drug to treat diabetes and is working to expand its franchise in the fast-growing disease, the high-profile research effort is a way of forging close ties with some of its most important new academic neighbors and an attempt to try a new way of collaborating that could become a model for others in the biopharmaceutical industry. 'This is a very progressive step on the part of a private, for-profit biotechnology company,' said Sheldon Krimsky, a science policy specialist at Tufts University and a director of the Council for Responsible Genetics, a public interest advocacy group. 'It's a recognition that you can still use this research to make profitable products but the knowledge of the genes should be open and available to all users. It's very unusual.' Alan D. Cherrington, president of the American Diabetes Association, said he was unaware of any other industry-sponsored diabetes research effort in which results would be made public....'If you hide the data, you have to put up artificial barriers and your scientists have to be more cautious,' said Fishman, president of the Novartis Institutes. 'I view this as the kind of work that nobody benefits from keeping secret.' "
Imagine if private for-profit companies joined private foundations and public funding agencies in putting an OA condition on their research grants. Imagine if the argument for OA to privately funded research were as strong (for different reasons) as the argument for OA to publicly funded research.
Jeffrey Krasner, Novartis to share diabetes research, Boston Globe, October 28, 2004.
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2004/10/28/novartis_to_share_diabetes_research?pg=full
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_24_fosblogarchive.html#a109899597016087074
Press release from Novartis and the Broad Institute, October 27, 2004
http://www.nibr.novartis.com/Downloads/News/Broad_release.pdf
http://www.broad.mit.edu/media/2004/novartis_1027.html
Jonathan Knight, Novartis goes public with DNA data in bid to tackle diabetes, Nature, October 28, 2004.
http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v431/n7012/full/4311029b_fs.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_10_24_fosblogarchive.html#a109905762128791625
Novartis
http://www.novartis.com/
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
http://www.broad.mit.edu/
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Coming up later this month
Here are some important OA-related events coming up in November.
* November 16. The deadline for sending comments to the NIH on its open access plan. You may submit comments by email or web form. See the lead story above for the links.
* Notable conferences this month
Towards What Knowledge Society?
http://www.cibersociedad.net/congres2004/index_en.html
Cyberspace, November 2-4, 2004
INASP/PERI Review and Stakeholders Meeting (by invitation only); includes a November 5 Symposium on Investing in Scientific Knowledge
http://www.bellanet.org/calendar/index.cfm?op=ShowEvent&event_id=3670&calendar_id=4
Oxford, November 3-6, 2004
Gli atenei italiani per l'Open Access: verso l'accesso aperto alla letteratura di ricerca (Italian Universities for Open Access: Towards Open Access to Scholarly Literature)
http://www.aepic.it/conf/index.php?cf=1
Messina, November 4-5, 2004
The Information Society: New Horizons for Science (19th International CODATA Conference)
http://www.codata.org/04conf/index.html
Berlin, November 7-10, 2004
Open Access Publishing: does it really work in practice? (sponsored by ALPSP and SSP)
http://www.alpsp.org/events/s081104.htm
also: http://www.sspnet.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=3643
Washington, D.C., November 8, 2004
Archiving Web Resources: Issues for cultural heritage institutions
http://www.nla.gov.au/webarchiving/
Canberra, November 9-11, 2004
Access to health information in developing countries: Eastern Mediterranean Region
http://www.bellanet.org/calendar/index.cfm?op=ShowEvent&event_id=2984&calendar_id=4
Cairo, November 9-11, 2004
Internet Librarian 2004; includes an Open Access Forum (sessions C301 and C302)
http://www.infotoday.com/il2004/default.shtml
Monterey, November 15-17, 2004
IST 2004; includes a networking session on Open Access to Information in Sciences and Humanities
http://europa.eu.int/information_society/istevent/2004/index_en.htm
The Hague, November 15-17, 2004
Institutional Repositories: The Next Stage
http://db.arl.org/ir2004/reg/
Washington, D.C., November 18-19, 2004
Everything you always wanted to know about e-journals but were afraid to ask... (sponsored by UKSG)
http://www.uksg.org/events/191104.asp
Edinburgh, November 19, 2004
Copyright, Scholarship, and the Case for Open Access: Conference on the Intellectual Commons (sponsored by the University of Maine)
http://library.umaine.edu/COIC/default.htm
Orono, Maine, November 20, 2004
Libraries --Gateways to Information and Knowledge in the Digital Age
http://www.alic2004.org/
Bangkok, November 21-24, 2004
UKSG Seminar on the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Report, "Scientific Publications: Free For All?"
http://www.uksg.org/events/231104.asp
London, November 23, 2004
* Other OA-related conferences
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/conf.htm
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Housekeeping
* I've added 17 new conferences to the conference page since the last issue. In the next few days I'll delete the second asterisk marking them and the new entries will blend into the rest of the collection.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/conf.htm
* Are any of you experts on Blogger or RSS? Occasionally I have questions or problems that require an expert's judgment, and I'd like to be able to run them by one or more volunteers. Thanks.
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This is the SPARC Open Access Newsletter (ISSN 1546-7821), written by Peter Suber and published by SPARC. The views I express in this newsletter are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of SPARC.
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Peter Suber
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peter.suber@earlham.edu
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