It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views. Ralph Waldo Emerson- Self-Reliance (1841)
Institutional repositories, internet-based document servers sponsored by a university, non-profit, or for-profit organizations, allow authors to distribute authorized copies of their scholarship before or after peer review, provided that an author has implicit or explicit permission by contractual arrangement made with a publisher. There are competing definitions for pre-print and post-print, but the most popular assumption is that pre-prints are the author’s version of the scholarly paper before submission to a journal for peer review, while post-prints are the version of the paper after peer-review corrections recommended by the journal editors but still lacking journal typesetting and other publication enhancements.
Self-archiving is a cost-free way to make your publications more visible. By improving access to your articles, you can help increase the citations your research receives and improve your position in the field. But self-archiving is not only for the benefit of the author – by making your work freely accessible, you give back to the field and aid new research. Indeed, this greater community benefit is the reason behind the recent mandates for public access that many funding bodies and institutions have established (including the NIH, Wellcome Trust and the UK Research Councils). More and more, open access is part of grant requirements, usually because public sources fund the projects and the managing institutions believe that the public deserves access to the research they helped facilitate.
The simplest way to determine how a prospective publisher will react to your desire to deposit a pre-print or post-print is to look up the publisher in RoMEO to find out if your publishers’ copyright rules allow you to deposit your scholarship elsewhere. RoMEO summarizes publishers’ rules and categorizes publishers by colours, indicating what level of author author rights exists.
“What the research community needs, urgently, is free online access (Open Access, OA) to its own peer-reviewed research output. Researchers can provide that in two ways: by publishing their articles in OA journals (Gold OA) or by continuing to publish in non-OA journals and self-archiving their final peer-reviewed drafts in their own OA Institutional Repositories (Green OA). OA self-archiving, once it is mandated by research institutions and funders, can reliably generate 100% Green OA. Gold OA requires journals to convert to OA publishing (which is not in the hands of the research community) and it also requires the funds to cover the Gold OA publication costs. With 100% Green OA, the research community’s access and impact problems are already solved. If and when 100% Green OA should cause significant cancellation pressure (no one knows whether or when that will happen, because OA Green grows anarchically, article by article, not journal by journal) then the cancellation pressure will cause cost-cutting, downsizing and eventually a leveraged transition to OA (Gold) publishing on the part of journals. As subscription revenues shrink, institutional windfall savings from cancellations grow. If and when journal subscriptions become unsustainable, per-article publishing costs will be low enough, and institutional savings will be high enough to cover them, because publishing will have downsized to just peer-review service provision alone, offloading text-generation onto authors and access-provision and archiving onto the global network of OA Institutional Repositories. Green OA will have leveraged a transition to Gold OA.”
Kurt Elling playing “Steppin’ Out” (Joe Jackson) at the New Morning in Paris on May 26, 2011.
“We so tired of all the darkness in our lives
With no more angry words to say can come alive
Get into a car and drive to the other side”
You may not learn anything new in this post if you are already following this issue, but I imagine some readers are not and need some pointers.
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP AND DIGITAL SCIENCE
“Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and Digital Science note the concern amongst the scientific and library communities about the Research Works Act (H.R. 3699), currently under consideration by the U.S. federal government, and wish to clarify our position.
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)
“The nonprofit American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science, today reaffirmed its support for the current public access policy of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Contrary to recent news reports, AAAS does not endorse the Research Works Act, which would prevent the NIH from requiring its grantees to make biomedical research findings freely available via the National Library of Medicine’s Web site.” READ THE ENTIRE STATEMENT
ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY PRESS
“Dear Representative Maloney, I am the Executive Director of The Rockefeller University Press, a nonprofit organization that publishes three biomedical research journals. I am contacting you as a publisher and as your constituent in the 14th Congressional District of New York to express my strong opposition to the Research Works Act (H.R. 3699), which you and Representative Issa introduced into the House on December 16, 2011. I want to state emphatically that I support the NIH Public Access Policy and think it should be expanded to other federal funding agencies.” READ THE ENTIRE LETTER
Here is a description of how these journals offer or encourage open access (or not).
2011 Public Health Journal Openness
JOURNAL TITLE
PUBLISHER
OPEN ACCESS STATUS
Annual Review of Public Health
Annual Reviews, Inc
Closed-Toll Access
Bulletin of the World Health Organization
World Health Organization
Open-The Bulletin is distributed free.
Environmental Health Perspectives
US Department of Health and Human Services
Open-All EHP content is free online
Influenza and other Respiratory Viruses
Blackwell Publishing Inc
OnlineOpen option for articles
PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases
Public Library of Science
All content open access
Cancer Causes and Control
Kluwer Academic Publishers
Open Choice option for articles
Medical Care
Lippincott Williams & Wilkins Ltd
Closed-Toll Access
Forum of Nutrition
Karger AG
Author's Choice option for articles
Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health - Part B: Critical Reviews
Taylor & Francis
Open Select option for articles
Journal of Clinical Epidemiology
Elsevier BV
Elsevier Green Open Access fr post-print
So eight out of these 10 public health journal sources could produce open access content, depending on what authors do. In case you were wondering what happened to the American Journal of Public Health, it does show up at at no. 20.
Of course, in position 7, is a notable non-open access journal , Obstetrics and Gynecology, that does not have an open access option. Obstetrics and Gynecology is also known as the “Green Journal” for the color of its cover, not green open access. Obstetrics and Gynecology is a core journal any physician specializing in women’s health. As I scrolled down home page I eventually encountered a MOST POPULAR box highlighting most viewed, most emailed, and highest impact:
For the top ranked articles, it should come as no surprise that free articles are going to get read, emailed, and cited more. This has been the promise of the open access movement. The world likes free. So how does an article become free without an author subsidized open access option?
I decided to search free access in the publisher’s help pages. I found the answer: “Content should only be set free at the request of the Journal’s Publisher….Using the Free (Open Access) Content Rules, you can create a rule to set a specific article, issue, or supplement free. Please note that only one item can be selected per rule, but you can create multiple rules to set free more than one article, issue, or supplement….The new Free Content rule will now appear in the “Free Content” list, and all content specified in the rule will now be marked “Free” and available to anyone accessing the journal site.”
So it seems that the publisher decides what is set free, but the readers are voting for the popularity of free articles with their clicks.
Free access is not really a substitute for the systematically developed open access collections made possible by the NIH open access policy and successful open access publishers. I think it is only a matter of time before a publisher like LWW begins to offer authors a true open access option.
The bill would prohibit federal agencies from conditioning their grant funding to require that all members of the public be guaranteed online access to the research findings that their tax dollars fund;
The bill would reverse the NIH Public Access Policy and stifle critical advancements in life-saving research and scientific discovery;
The NIH Public Access Policy currently provides millions of Americans with access to vital health care information from the NIH PubMed Central database;
Under this policy, more than 90,000 new biomedical manuscripts are deposited for public accessibility each year
H.R. 3699 would prohibit the deposit of these manuscripts, seroiusly impeding the ability of researchers, physicians, healthcare professionals and patients from accessing and using this health-related information in a timely manner;
H.R. 3699 would also affect scientific research coming from other federal agencies including information on energy, the environment, climate change, and other areas that impact the well being of th epublic
Address how our library and community have benefited from the NIH Public Access Policy
The American Library Association (ALA) was out in front as early as January 9th, writing in the District Dispatch about ALA’s long-time, ardent support of increasing access to information of all types, including federally funded research. This latest bill, the Research Works Act, would act in direct contradiction and therefore the ALA vehemently opposes the bill.
SPARC®, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition suggested on January 6th that “Supporters of public access to the results of publicly funded research need to speak out against this proposed legislation. Contact Congress to express your opposition today, or as soon as possible. “
Supporters of public access need to speak out against this proposed legislation. We strongly urge you to contact these offices to express your opposition TODAY, or as soon as possible. To support you, draft letter text is available.
There are actually observers and players in scholarly communication that think the 100 or so open access blogs out there are merely a bunch of shrill malcontents bent on breaking up the marriage of convenience between overburdened faculty and experienced publishers that have historical precedent to prosper and profit from selling it right back to the institutional libraries of those that created it, or merely vending individual articles, easily discovered through PubMed or Google Scholar.
Clicking on this image will download a 20MB PPT Morality Tale of innocence, vanity, greed, betrayal and hope as a series of photo-slides with toy animals.
I think many librarians blog about open knowledge and open access, not as uninformed agitators, but rather as concerned survivors of the extraordinary last decade of the old millenium and first decade of the new millenium that saw the exponential growth of the digital library and the exponential demand by institutional clients for electronic journals and their cost. When the cost of electronic journals began a rapid escalation at a much greater rate than inflation, coupled by the initial need to subscribe to both print and electronic, the so-called serials crisis in library expenditures became a budgetary crisis as well.
Source: ARL Statistics 2003-04, Association of Research Libraries, Washington, D.C. *Includes electronic resources from 1999-2000 onward. http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/monser04.pdf
Inevitably, there are limits to what any library can afford. Biomedical libraries are also charged with maintaining subscriptions to an increasing variety of research databases and electronic clinical bedside tools at a time when budgets are finite or shrinking. The ability to maintain popular subscriptions and tactfully drop subscriptions to under-utilized resources (complemented by funding inter-library loan for articles from dropped titles) continues in most academic medical libraries.
The reaction in 2004 by the Dartmouth Biomedical Libraries was typical. There was awareness of open access alternatives and great trepidation from faculty used to a longstanding publishing-editorial partnership that created predictable and useful knowledge distribution on a need-to-know basis among peers, with libraries buying back from publishers the content and editorial expertise “donated” by faculty. The taxpayer access advocacy movement had not gained the traction and attraction it has now. There was still uncertainty voiced about whether the author-pays open access business model of PLoS or BioMed Central could survive. Still, at that moment at Dartmouth in 2004, four years before the dawn of the economic crisis, there was still concern:” …there is one matter on which research librarians, academicians, government officials, openaccess proponents, and journal editors are in agreement: the current cost of biomedical journals is too high and not in the best interests of medicine, science, or the public.” (source)
In 2012, there is still a serials crisis, because there are even greater demands on medical libraries to afford new products and face the unpleasant reality of reducing journal subscriptions as an offset for trying new things:
Given all this trending toward multiple versions of open access and the ongoing existing problems with library resource budgets, there is a lot of education that has to take place. So think of occasional shrill and fanatical behavior as PTSCB… Post Traumatic Serials Crisis Behavior and generally well-intentioned attempts to educate scholars and librarians to open access alternatives. I mentioned Green open access publisher behavior to some colleagues, and one person thought no publisher was trying to cut down less trees. I did reorient this sincere person.
I completely missed the first release of opacmo: the open access mortar. The first release of this PubMed Central text-mining tool took place at the end of July 2011, when I was gearing up to teach my August-December library school class by learning another course management system (DesireToLearn), as well as preparing the details of my participation at ETD2011. The fall flew by in a blur, but thankfully opacmo has reached its next milestone.
a named entity recognition system for biological terms, both formal and informal
a web-site which describes and defines the project
a programmatic search interface and to discover publications linked to genes, proteins, species, diseases and other ontological terms
an open-source tool suite and download center
Here’s the original introduction to opacmo:
The Open Access Mortar, a.k.a. opacmo, is a mash-up of several bioinformatical assets. opacmo links open access publications to biomedical resources and provides a search interface for easy information retrieval. opacmo lets you carry out searches for officially named terms and presents you the publications that are linked to these terms. opacmo also accounts for unofficial synonyms or common names that might be used instead of the officially accepted terms.
In a nutshell that I can get my head around, opacmo offers a new way of drilling down into the PubMedCentral Open Access Subset by using official (MeSH) terms or even common names for established or emerging biological knowledge. I really like this colorful table which shows the Subset assets harvested at the end of November:
open access subset of PubMed Central (22 Nov 2011), Courtesy of opacmo http://joachimbaran.wordpress.com/2012/01/04/opacmo-release-2-of-the-open-access-mortar/
There is much more technical explanation of the text-mining and output functions in the release 2 blog post. Naturally, the attraction I have to this project is the global potential of combining a a free text-mining search tool with the PubMedCentral Open Access Subset. Both the subset and opacmo project should evolve and expand at at a similar rate. One useful way to promote this project would be to create some searching demonstration videos that could be deposited in Vimeo or YouTube. As far as I can tell now, none are there yet.
Click on this image to get to the page with contact information for writing or tweeting to Bill sponsors or the House Committee
I don’t have much to add when there are already very articulate opinions supporting the case for retracting or opposing the Research Works Act. If you care about this and are a U.S. constituent of a House Member, please let them know your opinion.
I have well over 5,000 page views for my posts about the open access publisher InTech. More than 80% of them come from internet users that do a google search for InTech and find my postings that I have effectively tagged. That would lend credibility to the idea that InTech is continuing to use direct email marketing to find authors, and some authors want to know more about InTech and start searching.
Reading Richard Poynder’s interview with Intech’s Nicola Rylett back in October, I had some hope that the issue of insufficient editing, a form of non-service for authors and a poor publishing practice that could reflect badly on all open access publishing, would be addressed in the future books to be released. As I have said in my previous posts on InTech, I stick to looking at biomedicine and health topics in my blog. In the first week of the new year, I decided to see what was new at InTech.
My concern starts when I see no editorial introduction or preface to this field, other than the 75-word blurb on the title page, and no chapter authored by Dr. Erondu. Here are my other observations:
There are 18 chapters, a few suitably general to what seems like a general textbook, but several on specific topics such as “Fast MRI Methods for the Clinical Evaluation of Skeletal Disorders” or “Assessment of Human Skin Microcirculation and Its Endothelial Function Using Laser Doppler Flowmetry.“ Comparing this to a general textbook on medical imaging, Handbook of medical imaging: processing and analysis (not an open access book, but previewed in Google Books and subscribed in my library), we find in the typical medical imaging text 53 chapters and 900 pages. My conclusion: there is no apparent intent by the InTech editor or publisher to define the true content with a realistic title for this volume. Instead, there is a general title which misleads or obscures the nature of the content from potential readers.
I looked carefully at one chapter, Safety of Interactive Image-Guided Surgery, by Alain Beaulieu. The author relied on research sources from the 1990′s, nearly exclusively, with only two references out of more than 50 being 2006 or after. Other evidence of outdated research was the term “image-guided”. The MeSH term established in 2002 for image-guided surgery is Surgery, Computer-Assisted. There are hundreds of articles on this topic in the year 2010 alone.
I actually found, with a little digging around. that the author Alain Beualieu had created a very similar presentation in 2008 for a IEEE symposium, A Process Control System Model for Interactive Image Guided Surgery, with identical figures and some very closely resembling descriptions. In 2011, the InTech chapter does not cite this article at all, so what we have [and what an editor with curiosity could have discovered] is a kind of self-plagiarism. As long as the IEEE doesn’t mind…
So I think I can confirm that as far as I can tell from looking at this recent open access book from InTech , we have not seen a changeover to more effective and honest editorial practices. These still seem to be packaging disparate submissions into a convenient hodge-podge, calling it an electronic book, and encouraging readers to take advantage of something free, something that would be hard to sell. The only person paying and subsidizing InTech are authors. This is not credible open access, when the content is just so questionable.
I received a copy of the publicity for a new open access journal from Royal Society Publishing, Open Biology®. The registration symbol (®) is attached to the name, and with good reason. There are a couple of other open access journals that have very similar names, as you can discover with a google search:
Biology Open(ISSN: 2046-6390)from The Company of Biologists
Bentham Open started Open Biology in 2008, and publishes over 239 other titles. The Company of Biologists started Biology Open in September 2011. The Royal Society’s Open Biology also launched officially in September 2011. Here is a brief comparison of these three journals and their most formidable open access competition, BMC Biology and PLoS Biology. The last quarter article count is for research articles only.
Open Biology and the Competition
JOURNAL NAME
PUBLISHER
REGULAR FEEE
SEPT-DEC 2011 RESEARCH ARTICLES
EDITOR
Editor h Index
Open Biology
Royal Society Publishing
$1932/£1200/€1440 *
8
David Glover
43
Biology Open
Company of Biologists
$1350
16
Jordan W. Raff
22
The Open Biology Journal
Bentham Open
US$800
[0]
Francisco Ciruela
39
BMC Biology
Biomed Central
£1445 €1735 US$2265
17
Miranda Robinson
--
PLoS Biology
PLoS
US$2900
52
Jonathan A. Eisen
6
*all author charges for Open Biology will be waived for submissions received before the end of February 2012
So it appears that the three upstarts have recruited a significant editor in chief, and their article processing charges are certainly not out of line, considering where the fees are with the two established leaders of biology open access. Please remind me to revise this chart in another 6 months to see where submissions are going.