Welcome to the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #81
January 2, 2005Read this issue online
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-05.htm
Contents
Open access in 2004
2004 was the biggest year yet for open access. We saw important new OA policies from universities, publishers, foundations, and governments. At the same time, the volume of OA literature grew significantly, as did support for OA among researchers, policy-makers, and the public. Here's a review of the year.
* If 2003 was the year when research funders decided to pay the processing fees charged by OA journals, then 2004 was the year when funders started to mandate --or consider mandating-- OA archiving for the results of the research they fund. In July, the US House of Representatives called on the NIH to mandate OA archiving, but in September NIH softened the requirement to a request. Also in July, the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee recommended that all UK government funding agencies mandate OA archiving, but in November the government refused to adopt the policy. However, the UK funding agencies themselves (RCUK) are now considering whether to do so on their own. In the wake of the US and UK recommendations, scholars, newspapers, and government agencies called on other governments to mandate OA archiving for taxpayer-funded research. Such calls have so far appeared in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Holland, India, Japan, Norway, Scotland, and Switzerland. In October, a major study published by EPIC and Key Perspectives recommended mandated OA archiving by both public and private funding agencies. In November, the Wellcome Trust announced its decision to mandate OA archiving for all Wellcome-funded research.
* Universities have also started to mandate OA archiving for their research output. Queensland University of Technology adopted a general archiving expectation in late 2003, to take effect on the first day of 2004. The University of Minho adopted an explicit mandate last month, to take effect on the first day of 2005. At least one university (so far not wishing to be identified) is considering a policy to mandate OA archiving for all research reports and publications arising from grants administered by the university.
* The high profile of the US and UK recommendations made 2004 the year in which the "taxpayer argument" for OA became the single most effective argument for OA for a growing number of taxpayers and public-interest organizations. This is a textbook case of coalition-building. Just as researchers and librarians desire OA for different reasons, but can agree to work together to pursue it, in 2004 we saw groups that benefit from research, but without themselves conducing or curating research, start to use the taxpayer argument to demand OA to publicly-funded research. Now the patient-advocacy and taxpayer groups are an active, effective, and permanent part of the OA coalition.
* 2004 was the year that a significant number of subscription-based journals started turning green. Many that had required case-by-case requests to permit postprint archiving changed course and gave blanket permission, in advance, for all their authors. Elsevier, Springer, and SAGE are among the major publishers to take this turn in 2004. It was also the year in which many society and non-profit publishers who refuse to refuse to go green or gold endorsed several other kinds of free online access through the DC Principles. The "new normal" is wider access than before, through author self-archiving, delayed free access from publishers, or hybrid OA models. This isn't the last stop for the train, but it's already a success.
* In 2004, OA moved steadily from the periphery to the mainstream. It's still the case that only a minority of journals are OA and only a minority of new articles are OA, whether through journals or archives. But a significant majority of journals now permits OA postprint archiving. 2004 was the year in which a significant number of OA journals got ISI impact factors (which were very good, thank you). More and more funding agencies, public and private, encourage some form of OA, even if too many still limit grants to researchers who have published in the same-old set of conventional journals. More and more universities have launched OA repositories, even if very few have adopted policies to encourage or require faculty to fill them. Most researchers (in one survey) would accept an OA archiving mandate from their funding agency or employer, even if most senior faculty (in another survey) knew little or nothing about OA. Our forward strides took us further than ever in 2004, but we are still dogged by the shadow of error and confusion. Misconceptions about OA journals and OA archiving are still widespread, even among stakeholders who ought to know better. It's still true --as I've been saying for at least three years-- that the largest obstacles to OA are ignorance and misunderstanding. But we're no longer the uninvited guest at the party. OA is now a topic in any serious discussion of the large issues facing research impact, libraries, publishing, or scholarly communication.
* 2004 was the year in which we reached the kind of critical mass of OA content to attract profit-making companies. Google and Yahoo began crawling OA content, including OAI-compliant repositories, for self-interested reasons --to increase their own usefulness, hence their traffic, hence their ad revenue. Google went a lot further than this with Google Scholar and Google Print. ProQuest/Bepress and BioMed Central began selling services to universities wanting to outsource the job of launching and maintaining institutional repositories. Microtome offered the safety of print archiving for OA content. These trends should continue as the body of OA literature grows. There are unlimited opportunities for businesses to enhance the free primary literature and sell the enhancements.
(There is an interesting pattern here, beyond the obvious one of an emerging market for priced products to enhance the experience of something free, like kayaks and snowshoes, sunglassses and TiVo. The history of scholarly communication in the last half-century or so shows an alternation between scholarly control and outsourcing. The pricing crisis followed the first large wave of outsourcing. Since then scholars have resolved to retake possession of scholarly communication in order to reduce prices and offer open access. Now we're see a new generation of oursourcing options emerge, this time fully compatible with OA.)
* 2004 is the first year in which all three of the major public definitions of OA (Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin, or the BBB definitions) were behind us. There were many important new OA declarations in 2004, but nearly all of them cited one or more of the BBB definitions instead of crafting new ones. This had the effect of solidifying the authority of the BBB definitions and classifying the new statements more as enlistments than new starts or commencements. We are past the stage of self-definition and well into the stage of exuberant growth.
* 2004 was the year in which non-OA providers looked for ways to support free full-text searching even if they weren't ready to support free full-text reading, copying, or printing. We saw this in a range of initiatives from CrossRef Search to Google Print. (Elsevier's Scirus was an early pioneer in this category; Amazon Search-Inside-the-Book was launched in late 2003.) Conventional or non-OA publishers are experimenting with free online content as a way to increase sales. They also show that there is money to be made in standing between readers and publishers, say, with sophisticated search tools, and therefore that there are motivated entrepreneurs asking publishers to open their files, and in some cases paying them to do so. Finally, they show the continuing evolution of business models that generate revenue while giving users some kinds of content free of charge. As publishers start to accept that some kinds of free online access can increase net sales of priced editions, they will start to investigate which kinds these are. Evidence permitting, this could pave the way to fully OA books and reduce the opposition to OA archives and journals.
* 2004 was the year in which the U.S. Treasury Department applied trade embargoes to editing. U.S. journals could publish articles by citizens of Iran or Cuba, but editing the articles (for example, correcting a misspelled word) added value, "traded with the enemy", and violated the embargo. In December the Department largely reversed itself, but not until it faced lawsuits from publisher groups (AAP/PSP, AAUP), author groups (PEN), and the 2003 Nobel laureate for peace. Opposing the embargo was a patch of common ground between OA proponents and non-OA publishers. (I have more details on the December news in the Top Stories section, below.)
* 2004 was a breakthrough year for OA to data. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) issued the Declaration on Access to Research Data From Public Funding. Groups representing patients and doctors called for OA to clinical drug trial data, and drug companies began to comply. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) announced that ICMJE member journals would not publish research articles based on unregistered drug trials. Five U.S. Senators introduced the Fair Access to Clinical Trials Act to solidify and extend these gains. A group of biologists called for OA to microarray data as a condition of publishing articles based on those data. A panel of the National Research Council looked closely at the dangers of genomic data on pathogens, and concluded that the benefits of OA outweighed the risk of misuse by terrorists. The World Conservation Congress launched the Conservation Commons to provide OA to conservation data. The U.S. government decided to provide OA to weather and GPS data.
* If 2003 was the year in which many publishers shifted from belligerence to skepticism, and called for data, then 2004 was the year in which the data started to flow. There were important studies of OA journals, OA archives, OA impact, author attitudes, and publisher policies --for example, from ALPSP, EPIC and Key Perspectives, ISI, JISC, the Kaufman-Wills Group, the Open Society Institute, the Southampton Group, and the Wellcome Trust. This is gratifying and will only continue. OA topics don't have nearly the literature as, say, drug prices or the digital music industry, but we've already reached the point at which only specialists have mastered the literature on the microeconomics of OA.
* However, 2004 was also the year in which some publishers chose instead to jack up the belligerence. While on one front, civility and empiricism were in the ascendant, on another front publisher nastiness and misrepresentation reached new heights. Was it desperation as the NIH public-access policy moved closer and closer to adoption? Was it an attempt to "mobilize the base" of society members who didn't know enough to see through the misrepresentations? Was it a concession that they could not attack OA itself but only a straw-man version of OA? If the mantle of "religious ideology" ever fit the OA movement, then it was thrown down long before 2004. But this year it was picked up by the handful of publishers who withdrew from debate and inquiry in order to fulminate. (The most venomous and inaccurate pieces tended to be journal editorials and newspaper op-eds without the benefit of peer review.)
* Finally, the volume of OA-related news continued its rapid growth, making it more and more difficult to gather and digest. More than a year ago I had to stop tracking neighboring topics like copyright reform and academic freedom in order to focus narrowly on OA. In the middle of this year I had to stop recapitulating all the OA news of the month in the newsletter and cover only the month's top five stories. I'm already feeling pressure, even in the blog, to cover only the primary OA-related news and omit the secondary. I have to keep reminding myself that this is a sign of progress.
* Postscript. For comparison, see my review of OA developments in 2003.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-04.htm#2003
Before your memory of the past year fades, have a look at my timeline. Let me know if I've omitted anything significant from the section on 2004.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm
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Predictions for 2005
Last year, I made 14 predictions for 2004. How did I do? I'd say that each came true at least in part --but you be the judge, since I won't take time to review them here.
Predictions for 2004
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/02-02-04.htm#predictions
Here are my predictions for 2005:
* The NIH public-access policy will inspire similar policies in other funding agencies --in the US federal government, in US state governments, in other national governments, and in private funding agencies around the world. There won't be a domino effect, because different countries and disciplines really do face different circumstances. But the NIH policy will help change the default, or the burden of proof, and it will do a lot to spread the OA meme to researchers and policy-makers who haven't been paying much attention to date. As the policy spreads, we'll see some funding agencies go further than the NIH in promoting the public interest, or make fewer concessions to publishers, for example (1) requiring rather than merely requesting deposit in an OA repository, (2) allowing deposit in any repository that meets certain conditions, rather than requiring deposit in a central repository, (3) shortening the delay between journal publication and mandated OA, (4) lifting usage restrictions to permit more than "fair use" or "fair dealing", and (5) extending the policy beyond literature to data.
* Even before the NIH policy has produced much new free online literature, we'll see at least one journal claim that the policy is causing it to lose subscribers. The claim will trigger a difficult disagreement about how much of the loss is due to the NIH policy and how much is due to the antecedent rate of attrition, rising prices, and other causes of cancellation. It will also trigger a second, deeper disagreement about how far the loss, even if attributable to the NIH policy, justifies revising the policy.
* As more OA journals are launched, we'll start to see OA journals in the same research niche compete for submissions. When that happens, some will lower their processing fees, in order to undercut the competition and attract submissions. Others, especially those with higher prestige or impact, will raise their processing fees because they will find that they can do so without deterring submissions. Taking a few steps back, what this really means is that processing fees will not be closely tied to publishing costs but will float according to usage, prestige, impact, and what the market will bear. OA proponents will disagree about whether this is regrettable, because it raises fees above necessity, or desirable, because it creates a significant form of competition for submissions to replace a dysfunctional competition for subscriptions.
* Subscription-based journals will continue to experiment with OA, in familiar and unfamiliar ways. We'll see many more full and partial conversions to OA, many more hybrids and variants of OA, and much more creativity in coming up with business models that pay the bills without charging for access. Some journals will try to meet the demand they perceive from authors and readers. Some will be persuaded of the viability of new models by the data emerging from earlier experiments. Some will see OA as an alternative to exclusion from the big deal. Some will be playing catch-up with other journals that offer some form of OA. Some, of course, will have more than one of these motivations.
* One result of the many new OA and hybrid-OA journals will be that the converting journals will stop objecting that OA business models compromise peer review. Like existing OA journals, either they will see firsthand that the objection is untrue or they will take steps to insure that it is untrue. Journals resisting pressure to convert will continue to press the objection in order to show that they are being wronged. But they will be answered by a growing number of formerly non-OA journals and publishers, not just by traditional defenders of OA.
* OA will continue to expand in well-funded fields. But new attention and effort will focus on OA in less-well-funded fields, extending the OA campaign from low-hanging fruit to higher-hanging fruit. Scholars in these fields (not just the humanities and social sciences, but some STM disciplines like field biology) will take inspiration from the fields where OA is established and growing, but will be frustrated that the policy arguments and business models do not always transfer easily. In these fields, OA archiving will make gains faster than OA journals, but even OA archiving will be impeded by society publishers who have greater weight in many of these fields than they have in the well-funded STM fields.
* OA literature is a spectacular inducement for coders to create useful tools, e.g. for full-text searching, indexing, mining, summarizing, querying, linking, alerting, and other forms of processing and analysis. Conversely, useful tools optimized for OA literature create powerful incentives for authors and publishers to provide OA to their work. In the early days of OA, shortages on each side created a vicious circle that stymied progress (the small quantity of OA literature provided little incentive to develop new tools, and the dearth of powerful tools provided little incentive to make work OA). But we're rapidly approaching a critical mass of OA that will trigger a cascade of useful tools, and a critical mass of useful tools that will trigger a cascade of OA. The vicious circle is becoming virtuous.
* Similarly, in the early days of OA, there was a vicious circle that aborted many OA journals: journals need prestige to attract excellent submissions, and need excellent submissions to generate prestige. But we're rapidly approaching the time when this vicious circle too will be broken. With every passing month, the general momentum for OA, the growing volume of OA content, and the conversion of already-prestigious journals to OA, is making it easier for OA journals to recruit eminent scholars to their editorial boards and to attract first-rate articles.
* OA to new journal articles will vastly outpace OA to new books. But OA to sufficiently old books (books in the public domain) will start to surpass OA to sufficiently old journals (journals past the publisher's moving wall). Despite that, we'll see new progress toward OA to new books (because it triggers a net increase in sales) and OA to past journals (because it will serve the field and spread the brand without depriving publishers of significant revenue).
* Journals that try to limit postprint archiving to personal home pages or institutional repositories will find that this restriction is arbitrary and unenforceable. When copies find their way elsewhere, journals will find that to be harmless, or no more harmful than what they expressly permit. Because the restriction is arbitrary and violations are harmless, some journals will lift it. Because it is unenforceable, other journals will see no harm in leaving it in place. The strategy question for journals will shift from whether wider archiving permission will undercut subscriptions to whether arbitrary archiving restrictions will deter submissions.
* Very few journals, if any, will rescind their permission for postprint archiving, even if they decide that the policy harms their subscription base. One reason is that rescission will hand a competitive advantage to other journals that continue to offer this benefit to authors. Another is that postprint archiving will not threaten subscriptions until authors start to take advantage of it in large numbers. But when authors do start to take advantage of it in large numbers, then journals will not risk alienating them.
* Large commercial publishers will continue to diversify through mergers and acquisitions in order to reduce their exposure to the OA challenge, or to survive a loss of profits in their journal divisions. But only publishers large enough to afford to diversify will diversify. This will help the commercial giants, not the society publishers. However, it will not directly boost their fortunes in the journal business; on the contrary, it will function as insurance against the risk that their fortunes in the journal business may decline.
* OA proponents will have to cope with success. Or to be more precise, we'll have to cope with partial success. That means preventing universities from using OA as an excuse to cut library budgets. It means dealing with the fact that open-access content will co-exist with toll-access content, reducing the efficiencies of some OA models and enticing smart and energetic people on both sides to continue borderline skirmishes. It means clarifying the large and growing family of kindred forms of enhanced access. It means extending the OA campaign --beyond OA in prosperous disciplines and countries to OA in less prosperous disciplines and countries, and beyond publicly-funded research to privately-funded and unfunded research.
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Google's gigantic library project
Just as we were digesting the impact of Google Scholar (announced November 18) we had to start digesting Google's new and much larger project to digitize at least 15 million print books for free full-text searching and, in some cases, free full-text reading (announced December 14).
Five major research libraries have agreed to loan Google books for the gigantic project: Harvard, Stanford, University of Michigan, Oxford, and the New York Public Library (NYPL). Google says that no more libraries are on its list at the moment, but it's always willing to hear from libraries with special collections that Google might crawl.
Some of the scanned books will be under copyright and some will not. When copyrighted books come up in a search, Google will display a full citation and up to three passages of text containing the searchstring. It will also link to nearby libraries where the book can be borrowed and to Amazon for users who would rather buy a copy. For public-domain books, Google will display passages of text containing the searchstring and a link to the full-text book for reading. When you reach the readable full-text, you'll find that Google does not allow downloading or printing. Moreover, early reports suggest that these readable books will be image files, not text files, and hence not searchable outside the Google index unless you do your own OCR. (Google is unlikely to offer full-text public-domain books in a more convenient form, since that would make them available for indexing in rival search engines.)
To get all this content into its index, Google will digitize the volumes at its own expense. At roughly $10 per volume, 15 million books will cost it $150 million. The deal is non-exclusive, so that any other company with that kind of money could digitize the same books. Yahoo and Microsoft may be considering it; the Internet Archive is already doing something similar (more below). Google will earn money on the deal at least by bringing in new users, which will translate into greater ad revenue. It may eventually place ads in its digital copies of the scanned books, but hasn't yet decided whether to do so. Google will share ad revenue from copyrighted books with publishers. But it will not, apparently, share revenue with participating libraries. Google has applied for a patent on a method for providing "subscription-like access" to copyrighted content, which hints at another business model for covering its costs.
At least at first, books will rarely come up near the top of a hit list, if only because very few other sites will link to them. Google hasn't yet announced a separate interface or relevancy algorithm for searching books, but it may have to develop at least one of them in order to attract enough book-searching traffic to repay its investment. (It already has a special syntax; throw the word "book" into a search, and the hits from scanned books will be segregated for separate viewing.)
The five participating libraries will get free copies of the bits scanned from their books. All of them plan to offer enhanced access to their own patrons, for example, printing and downloading of public-domain texts, and integration into the library catalogue. A few news reports suggest that some of the libraries might provide the general public with OA to the full-texts. But so far none of the participating libraries has explicitly said that it would do so. I'm still unsure whether the Google contract even permits it.
Michigan is letting Google scan all 7 million of its books, excluding only some rare books that might be damaged by the scanning process. The other libraries are only letting Google scan subsets of their collections and will open the gate further if they are happy with the experiment. Oxford and NYPL are offering only public-domain books; Stanford is offering 2 million of its 8 million volumes; and Harvard is offering only 40,000 of its 15 million volumes.
Scanning Michigan's 7 million books will take about six years. If that seems like a long time, consider that the Michigan collection occupies about 132 shelf-miles of books. If Google ends up scanning the entirety of the Harvard or Stanford collection, let alone both, the job will take even longer. Books will appear in the Google index roughly as they are scanned; you won't have to wait years to see the effect on your research.
This is the project that has been known in some circles as Project Ocean, ever since John Markoff used that term in the New York Times on February 1, 2004. But Google is no longer using that name and, strangely, given the project's magnitude, Google hasn't given it a new name either. It will simply be a part of Google Print --the largest part and the part extending the program from publishers to libraries. The project is not yet integrated with Google Scholar, though integration would enhance both projects.
The library project is breathtaking in its scope and cost, and revolutionary in its implications. It's significant for half a dozen reasons. I'm sure other reasons will soon be apparent to everyone.
* It will hugely expand the universe of free online books for reading and expand it even further for searching. Even if the project were limited to Michigan's 7 million books, it will far exceed what most libraries conceive to be a core collection. We don't know what it will do to teaching and research, let alone pleasure reading and autodidacticism. But we can be sure that removing access barriers to collections of this magnitude and utility will change basic practices. Because of its scale, this is a quantitative change that will bring qualitative changes in its wake.
* While a handful of governments and corporations had the money and --I contend-- the interest to undertake this project, none had stepped up to the plate. Google was willing to spend big to make this happen, and it was willing before anyone else. If there are financial risks, copyright thickets, and logistical problems, and there undoubtedly are, Google had the courage and vision to see that risks were worth taking and the problems worth solving. (This doesn't detract from earlier digitization projects from others, some of them very large; none is this large.)
* The project will give Google an unmatched critical mass of important texts for scholarly research. That will attract researchers. That will in turn increase the importance to researchers of having their content indexed by Google, through Google Scholar, CrossRef Search, or routine crawling. There are two ways to make content more visible: index it in the right tools, and draw more eyeballs to the tools that already index it. Google has long since learned the secret of doing both at once, and this project will be a huge leap forward on both fronts.
* Now or soon, if you make your work OA, then Google will find it, crawl it, and add it to its index. Hence, the eyeball-attracting critical mass it is developing also operates as an incentive for authors and publishers to provide OA to their work.
* This project makes copyrighted and revenue-producing books freely accessible to some degree online (at least for searching, and for reading relevant extracts) without antagonizing publishers. If free online searching and sampling increase net sales for some kinds of books --already proved for many kinds of books-- then this project will bring this fact home to many more publishers.
* It's now more important than ever to protect and expand the public domain. Projects like this show vividly what is pirated from the public when the public domain is shrunk by retroactive extensions of the term of copyright.
Google library project home page
http://print.google.com/googleprint/library.html
Google press release on the library project, December 14, 2004
http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/print_library.html
Google Print FAQ, which now covers the library project
http://print.google.com/googleprint/about.html
Press releases from the five participating libraries:
--Harvard University Library
http://hul.harvard.edu/publications/041213news.html
--New York Public Library
http://www.nypl.org/press/google.cfm
--Oxford University Library
http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/po/041214a.shtml
--Stanford University Libraries
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/2004/pr-google-011205.html
--University of Michigan Library
http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2004/Dec04/library/index
Harvard University Library's FAQ on the project
http://hul.harvard.edu/publications/041213faq.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110304624758583096
The Google library project stimulated an orgy of press stories. Here' s a selection of the better accounts and comments.
Barbara Quint, Google's Library Project: Questions, Questions, Questions, Information Today, December 27, 2004.
http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb041227-2.shtml
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_26_fosblogarchive.html#a110424842501121205
John Blossom, Open Stacks: Pondering the Value of Copyrighted Content in a World of Online Archives, Commentary, December 20, 2004.
http://www.shore.com/commentary/newsanal/items/2004/20041220copyright.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_19_fosblogarchive.html#a110372695571456552
Carolyn Said, Revolutionary chapter: Google's ambitious book-scanning plan seen as key shift in paper-based culture, San Francisco Chronicle, December 20, 2004.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/12/20/BUGROAD6QT1.DTL
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_19_fosblogarchive.html#a110372577690045956
Michael Gorman, Google and God's Mind, Los Angeles Times, December 17, 2004.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-nugorman17dec17,1,2263077.story
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_19_fosblogarchive.html#a110365375034144708
Also see this reply to Gorman: Kevin Drum, Google and the Human Spirit, Washington Monthly, December 17, 2004.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_12/005344.php
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_19_fosblogarchive.html#a110365375034144708
The Electronic Library, an unsigned editorial in the New York Times, December 21, 2004.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/21/opinion/21tue2.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_19_fosblogarchive.html#a110364933349229470
Barbara Quint, Google and Research Libraries Launch Massive Digitization Project, Information Today, December 20, 2004.
http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb041220-2.shtml
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_19_fosblogarchive.html#a110357458643994979
Rory Litwin, On Google's Monetization of Libraries, Library Juice, December 17, 2004.
http://libr.org/juice/issues/vol7/LJ_7.26.html#3
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110329796475841366
NPR has run two broadcasts on the project: (1) "All Things Considered" on December 14 included a Michele Norris interview with Carol Brey-Casiano, president of the American Library Association, on the Google library project, and (2) "Talk of the Nation" on December 15 focused on the Google library plan and featured guests Michael Keller, head librarian at Stanford, and Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4229570
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4227895
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110320637373090865
Peter Grier and Amanda Paulson, Google plans giant online library stack, Christian Science Monitor, December 15, 2004.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1215/p01s02-ussc.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110314974272144117
Janice McCallum, Google Scholar Flunking Relationships 101?, Commentary (the Shore Communications blog), December 14, 2004.
http://shore.com/commentary/weblogs/2004_12_01_m_archive.html#110303978628673016
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110312594436064426
Anon., Google to Digitize Library Book Holdings, Outsell Now, December 14, 2004.
http://now.outsellinc.com/now/2004/12/google_to_digit.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110312537294765004
Mike Wendland, U-M's entire library to be put on Google, Detroit Free Press, December 14, 2004.
http://www.freep.com/money/tech/mwend14e_20041214.htm
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110305562562452560
Gary Price, Google Partners with Oxford, Harvard & Others to Digitize Libraries, SearchDay, December 14, 2004.
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3447411
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110303937095799369
Stephen M. Marks, Google To Scan Library Books, Harvard Crimson, December 14, 2004.
http://www.thecrimson.com/today/article505061.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110303750711027829
Anon., Harvard Libraries and Google announce pilot digitization project with potential benefits to scholars worldwide, Harvard University Gazette, December 14, 2004.
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/daily/2004/12/13-google.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110303593453933607
Scott Carlson and Jeffrey Young, Google Will Digitize and Search Millions of Books From 5 Leading Research Libraries, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 14, 2004.
http://chronicle.com/free/2004/12/2004121401n.htm
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110303389823309586
John Markoff and Edward Wyatt, Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database, New York Times, December 14, 2004.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/14/technology/14google.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110303158480921408
* Postscript. One day before the Google announcement, Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive (IA) announced a very similar project. But just as the press began to pay attention, Google stole the spotlight and most journalists never returned to the IA story. (The IA announcement is dated December 15 but was released on December 13.) That's a shame, because the IA project is more progressive and revolutionary than the Google project.
The IA project will digitize more than one million books from a dozen libraries in five countries. It's open to any library that would like to participate. It's already begun and already has 27,000 books online with another 50,000 to come in the first quarter of 2005. But above all, IA will offer full open access to the public-domain books in the collection. Like Google, IA will pay the costs of digitization itself, and it will include copyrighted books alongside public-domain books. IA will offer searching of its digital texts, even if not Google-quality searching. However, it will open its files to crawling, including Google crawling, so that we will have the best of both worlds.
We should be careful when comparing the magnitude of the two projects. IA is digitizing fewer books, although a million books would have been a major news story in any other news week. But Google isn't providing full open access to any of its books. Even when Google provides free online full-text reading, it will disable printing and downloading. From the perspective of open access, therefore, the IA scale is much larger than Google's.
Internet Archive
http://www.archive.org/
IA Open-Access Text Archive
http://www.archive.org/texts/
IA press release on the Open-Access Text Archive
http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=25361
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110312395712458432
Mark Chillingworth, Internet Archive to build alternative to Google, Information World Review, December 21, 2004.
http://www.iwr.co.uk/IWR/1160176
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_19_fosblogarchive.html#a110363728526238561
Guy Dixon, The Race to Digitize the Print Universe, Globe and Mail, December 15, 2004. On several large-scale Canadian digitization projects, including the IA project with the University of Toronto.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20041215.wxgoogle15/BNStory/Entertainment/
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_19_fosblogarchive.html#a110355933873227142
Anon., Internet Archive, Libraries Collaborate on Open-Access Text Archives, Library Journal, December 27, 2004. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA490132?display=NewsNews&industry=News&industryid=1986&verticalid=151
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_19_fosblogarchive.html#a110389729676530915
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Top stories from December 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 top stories from December:* The NIH plan is signed by the president, moves forward.
* Publishers and disease groups announce patientINFORM.
* Progress continues on OA to taxpayer-funded data.
* University policies advance OA.
* U.S. Treasury Department lifts most of the trade embargo on scientific editing.* The NIH plan is signed by president, moves forward.
The omnibus appropriations bill, in which the NIH public access plan was one small provision, was approved by Congress on November 20 and signed by President Bush on December 8. We're now waiting for NIH to finish digesting the 6,000+ comments it received during the public comment period. When it's finished, it will release the final version of its policy and start to implement it. Insiders tell us not to expect to see the final version until the first or second week of January.
I've updated my FAQ on the NIH public-access policy to reflect the steps leading up to Congressional approval and some new questions about the policy's terms and consequences.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/nihfaq.htm
Here are some news stories on the NIH plan.
Tom Costello's NBC News story on the NIH plan (aired November 28, 2004) now has a stable home online where you can read the transcript and replay the video.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6660340
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110314850622622124
The NIH has posted some PPT slides briefly summarizing the public comments on its public-access plan.
http://www.nih.gov/about/publicaccess/publicaccesscomments.ppt
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110311840896552905
Amanda Schaffer, Open Access: Should scientific articles be available online and free to the public? Slate, December 14, 2004.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2111023/
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110307063788818665
Elias Zerhouni, NIH Public Access Policy, Science Magazine, December 10, 2004.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5703/1895
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_05_fosblogarchive.html#a110263204776914616
Daithí Ó hAnluain, Calls for Open Access Challenge Academic Journals, Online Journalism Review, December 10, 2004.
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/121004ohanluain/
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_05_fosblogarchive.html#a110278876025296306
Dee Ann Divis, NIH moves closer to open access, United Press International, December 6, 2004.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/NIH%20moves%20closer%20to%20open%20access
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_05_fosblogarchive.html#a110243597903210829
* Publishers and disease groups announce patientINFORM.
A group of publishers and journal-publishing disease groups announced the Spring 2005 launch of patientINFORM, a free, online service dedicated to making original medical research intelligible to lay readers. The groups responsible for patientINFORM opposed the NIH public access plan, raising suspicions that the new initiative is designed to support an argument that the NIH plan is unnecessary and that the same needs are being met by the market. Two things are clear, however. (1) Free online high-quality medical information intelligible to lay readers is a good thing. The more, the better. (2) The NIH plan will definitely help lay readers, but its primary rationale is to help researchers who lack access through their institutions because of skyrocketing journal prices. Helping researchers helps everyone, and no amount of medical information restated for lay readers can fill the need for direct access by researchers to the peer-reviewed literature itself.
patientINFORM home page
http://www.patientinform.org/
patientINFORM press release, December 8, 2004
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-12/wc-son120904.php
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20041208005420&newsLang=en
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_05_fosblogarchive.html#a110254637633916121
SPARC press release raising suspicions about the motives of the founding organizations
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-12/wc-son120904.php
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_05_fosblogarchive.html#a110261856360005226
Bernard Wysocki, Jr., Medical Publishers Propose Data Sharing, Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2004.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?H26453E0A
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_05_fosblogarchive.html#a110262214910656555
* Progress continues on OA to taxpayer-funded data.
On December 1, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) adopted an open-access and interoperability policy for taxpayer-funded weather, water, and climate data. The new policy was opposed by private, for-profit weather services, like AccuWeather.
The NOAA press release, December 1, 2004
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2004/s2348.htm
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_11_28_fosblogarchive.html#a110212547937644565
Daniel Terdiman, Weather Data for the Masses, Wired News, December 4, 2004.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65919,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_05_fosblogarchive.html#a110233825753432088
Two weeks later, President Bush signed a new Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) policy for the United States that provides open access to GPS data for civilian users and interoperability with the GPS data generated by other countries.
http://news.corporate.findlaw.com/prnewswire/20041215/15dec2004161122.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_19_fosblogarchive.html#a110367709157013301
Erick Turner called for a non-OA publicly-funded drug registry at the the FDA to become OA. See his article, A Taxpayer-Funded Clinical Trials Registry and Results Database, PLoS Medicine, November 30, 2004.
http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0010060
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_26_fosblogarchive.html#a110424598191861342
The ICSU published Scientific Data and Information (December 2004), a report of its Committee on Scientific Planning and Review (CSPR).
http://www.icsu.org/Gestion/img/ICSU_DOC_DOWNLOAD/551_DD_FILE_PAA_Data_and_Information.pdf
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110331427056768288
UNESCO published a November 2004 update to Paul Uhlir's March 2003 report, Policy Guidelines for the Development and Promotion of Governmental Public Domain Information.
http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=15862&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_19_fosblogarchive.html#a110373804366491207
* University policies advance OA.
The University of Minho in Portugal adopted a policy mandating that its faculty deposit their research (with a few exceptions), and that grad students deposit their theses and dissertations, in the university's open-access repository. The university also decided to sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge. The new policy was adopted on December 6, 2004, and will take effect on January 1, 2005.
This is the first university policy I know of with an explicit mandate for OA archiving by its faculty. The Queensland University of Technology was the pioneer on this trail, and had a similar policy in place more than a year ago. But QUT stopped one hair short of a mandate, and merely announced the expectation that faculty scholarship "is to be" on deposit in the university repository. The new Minho policy says that faculty "must" archive their publications. Kudos to the Minho rector and administration for their forthright and beneficial policy. Moreover, they adopted it for the right reason. Quoting Eloy Rodrigues' English translation of the press release: 'It's in the best interest of University of Minho...to maximise the visibility, usage and impact of the scientific output of its schools/departments and teachers/researchers.'
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/1399.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_19_fosblogarchive.html#a110356156411239694
The University of Southampton committed itself to providing open access to the research output of the university.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/1382.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110320403730508339
JISC released a supportive statement on the University of Southampton commitment to open access.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=free_access_to_university_research_news171204
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110329879885920653
The Boston College Libraries started publishing open-access journals edited by BC faculty.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/1389.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110329230653363853
The University of Zurich signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge.
http://www.unizh.ch/index.en.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110321448993488125
The Swedish Association of Higher Education (SUHF) signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge.
http://www.suhf.org/pdf/Undertecknad%20berlindeklaration.pdf
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_11_28_fosblogarchive.html#a110208081435301067
The Swiss Consortium of Higher Education Libraries (Konsortium der Schweizer Hochschulbibliotheken) refused to renew ScienceDirect for 2005 because of Elsevier's high price and unacceptable conditions.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/1392.html
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110331128587517900
* U.S. Treasury Department lifts most of the trade embargo on scientific editing.
In response to lawsuits and protests from publishers and authors, the U.S. Treasury Department reversed its position on applying trade embargoes to scientific editing. Previously publishers had to apply to the government for a license to edit work by citizens of embargoed nations such as Cuba, Iran, or Sudan. But now the Treasury Department has given a blanket license, making individual applications unnecessary. Publishers and authors suing the government praised the step but will not drop their lawsuits until the government concedes that no kind of license is required for editing and that it has no power to embargo "information and informational materials".
New Treasury Department policy
http://www.treasury.gov/press/releases/js2152.htm
John Dudley Miller, OFAC reverses embargo ruling: Decision allows US publishers to edit manuscripts from Cuba, Iran, and Sudan, The Scientist, December 16, 2004.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20041216/02/
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110329639220240993
Lila Guterman, Treasury Department Removes Restrictions on U.S. Publications by Authors in Embargoed Countries, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 16, 2004.
http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2004/12/2004121602n.htm
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110321624499859230
Press release from the publisher and author groups suing the U.S. Treasury Department,
December 15, 2004
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20041215005916&newsLang=en
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110321902810004046
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Coming up later this month
Here are some important OA-related events coming up in January.
* January 1, 2005, Academic Commons officially launches.
http://www.academiccommons.org/
* January 1, 2005, BioMed Central changes the way it calculates institutional membership fees.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/instmembership
* January 1, 2005, Science Commons (from Creative Commons) officially launches.
http://science.creativecommons.org/
* January 1, 2005, the SHERPA Digital Preservation Project officially launches.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_12_fosblogarchive.html#a110339053339131544
* January 1, 2005, the year-long Company of Biologists experiment with OA would have expired. But the web site currently gives no time limit, suggesting that the "experiment" has been indefinitely extended.
http://www.biologists.com/web/openaccess.html
* January 1, 2005, Oxford's Nucleic Acids Research converts to a "full open access" business model.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/825.html
* January 1, 2005, three journals published by the American Institute of Physics will adopt a hybrid OA model (OA at the author's choice for a $2000 fee).
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/1297.html
* January 1, 2005, the online edition of PNAS will include an institutional membership automatically with every institutional site license.
http://www.pnas.org/subscriptions/rates2005.shtml#institutional
* January 1, 2005, the UK Freedom of Information Act takes effect.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_19_fosblogarchive.html#a110389610709701198
* January 1, 2005, the University of Minho policy mandating OA archiving by its faculty takes effect.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_19_fosblogarchive.html#a110356156411239694
* January 7, 2005, BMJ will start to charge for access to "some of its content".
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/327/7409/241
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/aboutsite/subscriptions.shtml
* Notable conferences this month
Advancing Knowledge and the Knowledge Economy
http://advancingknowledge.com/
Washington, D.C., January 10-11, 2004
American Library Association Midwinter Meeting (at least two sessions on OA)
http://www.ala.org/ala/eventsandconferencesb/midwinter/2005/home.htm
Boston, January 14-19, 2005
--One of the OA sessions: Establishing an Institutional Repository, sponsored by LITA, Friday, January 14, 9:00 am - 4:30 pm. [no separate web site yet]
--The other OA session: In the Public Interest : Open Access and Public Policy, sponsored by SPARC and ARL, Saturday, January 15, 4:00 - 5:30 pm
http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/ala05mw/index.html
One of the OA sessions at the ALA Midwinter Meeting will be In the Public Interest : Open Access and Public Policy
a session sponsored by SPARC and ARL, Saturday, January 15, 4:00 - 5:30 pm
http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/ala05mw/index.html
Open Content Licensing (OCL): Cultivating the Creative Commons (sponsored by the Queensland University of Technology)
http://www.law.qut.edu.au/about/news.jsp#ocl
Brisbane, January 18-19, 2005
Rising to the Challenge: publishers' response to recent Open Access initiatives (sponsored by the PLA and ALPSP)
http://www.alpsp.org/events/s250105.htm
London, January 25, 2005
Institutional Repositories: Leadership, Direction and Launch
http://www.eprints.org/jan2004/
Southampton, January 25-26, 2005
(These are two separate one-day workshops, the first for archive administrators and tech support staff, and the second for Pro Vice Chancellors, senior librarians, archive managers and researchers.)
Everything you always wanted to know about e-journals but were afraid to ask... (sponsored by UKSG)
http://www.uksg.org/events/270105.asp
Coventry, January 27, 2005
* Other OA-related conferences
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/conf.htm
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Housekeeping
* I've added 15 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
* I'm now moderating every message to the SPARC Open Access Forum (SOAF), the discussion forum associated with this newsletter. Formerly, I only moderated the first message from each new subscriber. Trusted subscribers could post without moderation. We had to change this policy when spammers started spoofing the addresses of trusted subscribers. Score another victory for the spammers, another defeat for trust.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/List.html
http://www.arl.org/sparc/soa/index.html#forum
==========
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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http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm
Open Access Overview
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
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Peter Suber
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters
peter.suber@earlham.edu
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