News

Forty two Fellows of the Royal Society (including 5 Nobel Laureates) have signed an Open Letter to Lord Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society, expressing concern about the Royal Society's position statement on open access.

If you are a Fellow of the Royal Society and would like to add your name as a signatory to the Open Letter, send an email to frsopenletter@googlemail.com

See:

"Not a Proud Day in the Annals of the Royal Society"
and subsequent postings to the American Scientist Open Access Forum
today (24 November 2005).

DASER-2's theme is:
Open Access and Institutional Repositories
University of Maryland, College Park MD
2-4 December 2005

Below is the summary of my own presentation:

Institutional Repository (IR) Models:
What Works (for Open Access, OA) and What Doesn't

Stevan Harnad
Canada Research Chair
Université de Québec à Montréal
and
University of Southampton, UK

SUMMARY: Born under the influence of the Open Access (OA) movement, Institutional Repositories (IRs) for digital content are now all the rage; but whether or not they work depends on their raison d'etre. There are many things one can do with an IR. One can use it for content management, preservation, internal data-sharing, record-keeping; the content itself can be anything digital, whether courseware, "gray literature," multimedia, in-house publishing, or even bought-in 3rd-party content. None of this has anything whatsoever to do with OA, however. OA is about maximizing accessibility to institutional peer-reviewed research output in order to maximize its research impact (25%-250% of it lost if non-OA), thereby maximizing institutional research productivity and progress (and prestige and research revenue). OA content in IRs is so far very low (averaging less than 15% of annual research output) -- partly because OA has been eclipsed by the many other items on the IR wish-list, partly because even where it is the only item, wishing is not enough: not if librarians wish it, not even if researchers wish it. The two international UK JISC surveys have shown clearly exactly what is needed to fill IRs with their annual OA content: An extension of institutions' and research funders' "publish or perish" mandate to: "publish but also self-archive in your IR". The 5 institutions that so far have such a mandate (CERN, U. Southampton ECS, U. Minho, Queensland U. Tech, and U. Zurich) are well on their way to 100% OA. After a crashing failure by NIH to mandate immediate OA self-archiving, and a halting half-step by the Wellcome Trust (6-month embargo), Research Councils UK (RCUK) looks poised to do the right thing at last, and once it does, the rest of the world's research funders and institutions will follow suit. The race is now to the swift, the battle to the strong, for the 25%-250% OA impact advantage is partly a competitive advantage.

JISC Surveys (Swan & Brown): http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11005/
OA Impact Advantage: http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm
Institutional Policies: http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/
Institutional Archives: http://archives.eprints.org/ (offline because of fire)
RCUK Policy Proposal: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp
Prior AmSci Threads:
"EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?" (started Feb 2003)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2671.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2744.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2838.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2855.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3211.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3598.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4516.html


Stevan Harnad

This is an update of the press coverage of the imminent decision of the UK Research Councils' (RCUK) on their self-archiving policy proposal (See also prior update.)

"Open access to research worth £1.5bn a year" Lucy Sherriff, The Register 16 September 2005.

"Open access failings 'cost UK £1.5bn'" Jimmy Leach, Guardian: Education 16 September 2005.

"£1.5 billion lost annually in potential return on British science" Joyce Lewis, University of Southampton ECS Press Release, 14 September 2005.

"Learned societies argue open access depletes research funds" Research Fortnight, 14 September 2005.
[See also my critique of the above article.]

"Open access to research - but at what cost?" Belinda Isaac, IC Wales, 14 September 2005.
[See also Peter Suber's critique of the above article.]

"Call for free access to research" BBC News 7 September 2005.

"Results of publicly funded research should be available to all, says web creator [Tim Berners-Lee]" Zosia Kmietowicz , British Medical Journal 3 September 2005.

In their press release the UK Green Party announces that it will vote (among other things) to "require Open Access [OA] publishing for publicly-funded academies."

Since one cannot impose a business model, but only encourage it, and try to create conditions favorable to it, this vote to require OA publishing (the "golden" road to OA) is at best only a symbolic token and at worst quixotic.

It is also ironic that the Green party makes no mention of support for the "green" road to OA, which is OA self-archiving, by their own authors, of all articles published in non-OA (and OA) journals. This, unlike OA publishing itself (gold), (1) can be required, (2) has been recommended as a UK policy by the UK Select Committee on Science and Technology (but not implemented by the government), (3) is now the proposed policy of the UK research funding councils, RCUK (Research Councils UK) with a projected implementation date of October 2005, (4) would result in 100% OA for all UK research output if adopted, and (5) would serve as a model for the greening of the rest of the research world, as advocated by (6) the Berlin Declaration on Open Access and the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

The publisher lobby (ALPSP and STM) is arguing for further delay in implementing this "green" policy on the grounds that (i) it may damage their revenues and (ii) it is an attempt to impose a change in business model on them. All objective evidence is contrary to i; and ii is incorrect (gold is a business model, for publishers; green is merely a condition on receiving funding, for researchers).

Over 90% of journals are already green on author self-archiving; it is the authors who are the OA retardant, not the publishers: only about 15% of authors have so far bothered to go, even though the light is green. That is what the RCUK green policy is intended to remedy. It would be both foolish and churlish to try instead to force the journals to take that further step on behalf of the sluggish authors, by going gold, with all the risk and sacrifice accruing to the publishers and all the benefits accruing to the authors.

The Green Party should be voting to "require OA self-archiving for [authors employed by] publicly-funded academies" -- an implementable green policy that will swiftly and certainly generate 100% OA -- rather than tilting (out of "gold fever") at imposed business models that will only lead to years more of delay and needless wrangling, meanwhile failing to achieve the desired and reachable immediate result (already long overdue).

Stevan Harnad

Summary of Keynote Address to be delivered at
8th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Disstertations
Wednesday 28 - Friday 30 September 2005
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
http://adt.caul.edu.au/etd2005/etd2005.html

Maximising Research Impact
By Mandating Institutional Self-Archiving

Stevan Harnad

It is a foregone conclusion that the next generation of researchers will self archive their research output in their own Open Access (OA) Instititional Repositories (IRs) for all potential users online; they are already beginning to do it now, with their theses and dissertations. But what about the present generation of researchers? Only 15% of the 2.5 million articles being published yearly in the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed research journals is being self-archived today. Self-archiving has been shown to increase citation impact 50%-250+% by making the research available to those users whose institutions cannot afford access to the official journal version. The marginal dollar value of a citation was estimated by Diamond in 1986 to be $50-$1300 (US). Converting to Australian dollars ($65-$1700), updating their value by 170% from 1986-2005 ($110-$2890) and using even the most conservative ends of these estimates (50% x $110) and multiplying by the 85% of Australia's annual journal article output (about 35,000 according to ISI) that is not yet OA, this translates into an annual loss of $1,933,750 in revenue to Australian researchers for not having done (or delegated) the few extra keystrokes per article it takes to self-archive it. And that is without even considering the loss in revenue from potential usage and applications of Australian research findings in Australia and worldwide, nor the even more general loss to the progress of human inquiry. The solution is obvious, and Research Councils UK (RCUK) are on the verge of implementing it: a mandate to extend the existing universal requirement to 'publish or perish' to 'publish and also self-archive the final peer-reviewed author's draft in your OA IR'. Over 90% of journals already endorse author self-archiving and an international JISC author study (plus the actual experience of the two institutions -- CERN and University of Southampton ECS -- that have already adopted such a requirement) show that over 90% of authors will comply. I will present the evidence, across disciplines and countries, for the 50%-250% OA citation impact advantage.

The imminent UK Research Councils' (RCUK) decision on their self-archiving policy proposal is receiving considerable press coverage in the UK:

Results of publicly funded research should be available to all, says web creator [Tim Berners-Lee] Zosia Kmietowicz British Medical Journal 3 September 2005.

The infrastructure is there: time to populate Vanessa Spedding Research Information July/August 2005.

ALPSP and academics fight it out over Research Councils UK IR rules Mark Chillingworth Information World Review 31 August 2005.

Critiques and rebuttals continue in UK open access debate Cordis News 31 August 2005.

Scientists reignite open access debate
Clive Cookson, Science Editor, Financial Times, Wednesday, August 31 2005

ALPSP and academics fight it out over Research Councils UK IR rules
Mark Chillingworth, Information World Review 31 August 2005

Publishers make last stand against open access
Donald MacLeod, Education Guardian, Tuesday, August 30 2005

Publish university science for free, urges web creator [Tim Berners-Lee]
Richard Wray The Guardian & The Observer, Tuesday, August 30 2005

BBC Scotland (Radio)
Newsdrive, Tuesday, August 3o (16:25) 2005
(click "Listen Again" for the Tuesday broadcast; item is at about 16:25)

From: Tim Brody tdb01r@ECS.SOTON.AC.UK

I've made a number of improvements to Citebase:
http://www.citebase.org/help/info_whatsnew.php

In particular I'd like to highlight two (newish) features:

(1) Full-text access analyses* (this has been in Citebase for a while, but users may not have seen it before): Example.

* Web access logs are available for eprints.soton.ac.uk, for eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk, and for those accesses made to the UK arXiv mirror (http://uk.arXiv.org). We are in discussion with biomedcentral and eprints.rclis.org for access statistics. Usage statistics (for use in Citebase) for other arXiv mirrors, especially the all-important US ones, has been refused by the arXiv administrators.

(The Interoperable Repositories Statistics (IRS) project is developing a standard means for repositories to expose usage statistics, for which Citebase will provide an implementation platform)

(2) Support for (contextual) reference linking in PDFs using annotations.

On the following page (requires cookies): http://www.citebase.org/cgi-bin/sfx/pushcookie.cgi

Type in the URL of your institution's OpenURL resolver (if you don't have access to a resolver, CrossRef provide an experimental, non-commercial resolver at http://www.crossref.org/openurl) and click 'Set'.

Then retrieve the linked PDF from here.

You should see blue links superimposed on the reference list (scroll to page 12). While most refs are linked to their eprint in Citebase, e.g. ref 74 S. Dodelson (1994), references to articles not available from Citebase, e.g. ref 78 G. Coughlan (1983), are linked using your OpenURL resolver.

Citebase has limited coverage (reference parsing by its nature is difficult to scale well) and lacks duplication detection. Otherwise, I'm always open to comments/criticisms/suggestions. -- Tim Brody tdb01r@ECS.SOTON.AC.UK

From: Tony Cargnelutti t.cargnelutti@UNSW.EDU.AU Programme Chair

A conference on global Electronic Theses & Dissertations [ETD] movement will take place in September this year in Sydney, Australia. 

ETD2005 will explore ideas and innovative solutions used in online environments which pass on learning to a global audience. It will consider new approaches to issues of access, outreach and breaking down barriers.

The conference attracts delegates from all around the world and provides a wonderful opportunity to keep abreast of developments in this rapidly progressing environment.

Feature Keynote address by Stevan Harnad

Draft program: http://adt.caul.edu.au/etd2005/program.html

From: Charles W. Bailey, Jr. <cbailey@UH.EDU>
Subject: Open Access Webliography

A preprint of the article "Open Access Webliography" by Adrian K. Ho and Charles W. Bailey, Jr. is now available. This annotated webliography presents a wide range of electronic resources related to the open access movement that were freely available on the Internet as of April 2005.