I was looking around YouTube for student perspectives on open access, and I found a student describing her work with a medical school student journal, the University of British Columbia Medical Journal (UBCMJ)

UBCMJ has a tag line, “By Students, For the World.” If you take a look at their copyright and consent form (PDF), it is clearly stated that as an open access journal, UBCMJ will apply the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL)  to all published works. Under the CCAL, authors retain ownership and copyright to their article, but allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles in the UBCMJ, so long as the original author(s) and sources are cited.  The student authors retain copyright and grant UBCMJ the initial non-exclusive right of distribution.

This model of publishing represents what I like to call open knowledge values. What are some other medical school journal publishing models?

The School of Medicine where I work produces the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine (YJBM), which since 2007 has been published in an open access cost-subsidized edition. YJBM cites peer-reviewed articles being read by a potential larger audience, particularly in developing countries that cannot afford subscriptions.

The Open Access concept allows for free and immediate access to YJBM‘s peer-reviewed articles via the Internet, expanding articles’ potential audiences. In addition, Open Access publications are a valuable resource to authors in developing countries. Unlike the UBCMC Creative Commons license, YJBM requires authors to assign their copyright to the journal after publication acceptance.

The New Zealand Medical Student Journal (NZMSJ), starting publication in 2004,  offers medical students a opportunity to write for medical school and eventual  publishing experience in professional journals. The journal publishes research papers produced by medical students and other content that may be of interest to students. The NZMSJ has a national distribution and readership and is currently published biannually. The do occasionally receive and publish material from medical students worldwide. The editors are clearly giving away the content in an open and sharing mode, but I cannot find any explanation of copyright treatment or licensing.

In Australia in 2009, a group of students at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) proposed the creation of a national medical student journal, and the  inaugural issue of the Australian Medical Student Journal (AMSJ) as a national peer-reviewed biomedical journal for student was officially launched in April of 2010.   There are 20 medical schools with the potential to by contributing to this open access endeavor.

AMSJ is certainly open and available from the archive on their web site.  I do not observe any mention of or consideration for copyright or usage license.  In spite of the apparent focus on peer review and the immediate medical school readership, the content is available in a way the demonstrates unselfish open knowledge values. I wonder what these sincere student founders focused on quality peer review would make of the movement on the other side of the globe known as the student Right to Research Coalition?

Author: Association des Amis de la Ligne Maginot d'Alsace (France) This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

“When World War I finally ended, France vowed never again to let Germany, the so-called “beast that sleeps on the other side of the Rhine,” violate its territory. French politicians and generals conceived the Maginot Line, a network of forts and blockhouses, as an obstacle to any future invasion. Although it has become notorious as a universal metaphor for bungling, the Line in fact was not the blunder it has been made out to be. In many ways it was a model of clever engineering and technological accomplishment.”

Source: Smithsonian Magazine June 1997

More than 70 years after all the French planning went for naught, there are still arguments about the scale of failure and unabashed admiration for the design.  Most historians focus on how one-dimensional French preparations and weak assumptions were no match for a multi-front German invasion that even included air power to simply fly over the ground fortified defenses. So who is who in our publishing Maginot Line situation between a group of publishers, professional societies, and politicians and the forces of upstart library organizations, open access advocates, and taxpayers? 

I don’t think the brain trust that thought up the Research Works Act (RWA) and found politicians to do their bidding had any idea of how serious their opposition would be…not so much the advocacy bunch, but their actual content creators: uncompensated scientific authors, sometimes in their role as uncompensated reviewers.  The same tools of social networking that fanned the tinder of unrest into flames in several Arab countries has also had the effect of amplifying the unhappiness of publishers’ greatest assets:  mostly uncompensated authoring and free copyright transfer, even voluntary “page charge” supplementary income that in many cases from mere authors that simply needed to publish or perish.  So in my analogy publishers and their allies are like the French, adept at setting up a massive scholarly publishing paradigm of low cost content and editorial labor in exchange for a path to status for academic scientist tenure-seekers.

The other part of this paradigm that has grown rigid  over the last 15 years is the shift of subscription costs from individuals to academic and corporate institutional libraries.  Finally, the rise of open access publishing and the implementation of a taxpayer-supported Public Access Policy put the writing on the wall for many publishers (like the French) that there would be a tipping point.  One publisher broke ranks and acquired Biomed Central (ironically it was a German publisher).   With a shift in scholarly publishing clearly gaining momentum,  a shoring up of commercial defenses was required, and RWA was introduced in the U.S. Congress.

I think many librarians and perhaps some library administrators, having extensive business contact with publishers, and  charged with bringing research content to their academic clientele, were constantly negotiating to “un-bundle”  journal packages and cutting unaffordable subscriptions. The main army for the attack on exorbitant publishing practices such as SPARC , E-Print Network, PUBLIC LIBRARY OF SCIENCE, PMC, etc. are in my Maginot analogy like the main German attack force, and the librarian collection specialists were a second front using a more subtle, mostly non-confrontational approach.  The commercial publishing vanguard, like the French, anticipated that their formidable line could counter both of these opposing forces through their primary weapon,  AAP lobbying and the expectation that librarians, by in large, are non-confrontational and often want to play nice with publishers and not be thought of as stubborn or outspoken.

Getting back to the history,  the Maginot Line could not account for the arrival of air power that didn’t have to travel through a wall.   I don’t think publishers or AAP realized that faculty authors and editors, particularly those already beyond the tenure track, could actually use and leverage a Web 2.0 tool like an online petition to make a point of unhappiness with the largest commercial journal publisher and organize a public boycott fueled by twitter and collegial email, currently at 2468 signatures, championed by math professors.

I was sitting with a faculty member this afternoon and happened to inquire if he had heard about the Elsevier boycott petition.  At that moment he had not, but he began to tell me about all the work he had done as an editor with only glory for compensation.  So it seems that the force of research faculty may be properly aroused to the damage that the RWA could do;  and of course there is a 4th front on the side open access and reformed publishing practices, an often overlooked and underestimated group:  tax payers that fund NIH research.  Never underestimate aroused tax payers.

What about all the parents of children with rare illnesses that are in fact intelligent enough to read and understand research studies funded by their tax dollars?  Is it sufficient that they wait two weeks for an interlibrary loan of a journal article from their public library  or travel 75 miles to see a copy of a journal, if PMC did not exist?   I think 60 minutes is on this one already.

Any good historian knows that more than 70 years after the Maginot Line failed miserably to stop Germany’s invasion of France, debate still rages about whether the Line itself could be blamed for the incompetence of human actors.  Perhaps the Line did everything it was supposed to do, in spite of not being able to counter air power.   I found this message tonight in the battlefield of cyberspace:

I think I agree with noahWG.

Once again, I used the SCImago Journal Rank for the medicine category Nephrology in 2011 (also requiring that each journal had to exist for three years and have at least 100 articles over the three years) to see how many of the top-10 journals had an open access option, typically an extra author article processing charge for immediate free non-subscription access from the journal’s home page or immediate, non-embargoed access in PubMed Central. Here are the results of my quest:

Seven of these 10 journals had an open access option for a fee, while three did not. Two of those three less-open titles, the American Journal of Kidney Diseases (AJKD) and Advances in Chronic Kidney Disease (AJKD) come from the National Kidney Foundation (NKF). Why is this organization sponsoring journals that have not woken up to the advantage of an open access option? No clear reason.   They do have a public advocacy effort underway, the NKF People Like Us campaign:

Here is their pitch to be someone like them:

BE A “PEOPLE LIKE US” ADVOCATE

The NKF’s “People Like Us” is the fastest-growing and most influential advocacy movement for people affected by CKD, transplant candidates and recipients, living and potential donors, donor families and caregivers. “People Like Us” empowers, educates and encourages you to get involved on issues relating to CKD, donation and transplantation (of all organs)

So while it is technically true that all of their target PEOPLE do not have to be taxpayers, I would think there is a high probability that most are.  With a well-organized marketing effort underway to constituencies that care about organ donation and other medical issues, it must have occurred to someone that science in the open helps cures to be discovered earlier.  This is a very successful and well supported organization of $51,774,362 public support and revenue in 2011.  Salaries in 2o11 totaled $20,163,279, including very healthy salaries for Directors:

NKF FY IRS Form 990 Schedule J

Of course, this is not a public or government entity, and they get considerable financial support from the pharmaceutical industry.  Still, perhaps there should be some discussion about open access publishing options for the American Journal of Kidney Diseases (AJKD) and Advances in Chronic Kidney Disease (AJKD), providing more rapid access to the research results. That kind of advocacy is also likely to find a response from readers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)

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)

Obscured  in all the concern and unhappiness with the introduction of the anti- NIH Public Access Policy Research Works Act and its primary supporter, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), is the fact that PubMed Central is not the only place to find  free full-text articles and archives of biomedical research results.

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.

ResearchGate

According to a fast-growing, self proclaimed repository called ResearchGATE,

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.

On January 7th,  Stevan Harnad was commenting on Research Works Act (H.R.3699) (“Research Works Act H.R.3699: The Private Publishing Tail Trying To Wag The Public Research Dog, Yet Again“) and concluded with his well-know perspective of a green world transforming publishing:

“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.”

This message needs to get out in many formats and forums. Berlin 7 was one  high-profile 2009 forum. At Berlin 7,  Christ Ambruster, a Research Associate from the Max Planck Society, presented a review of the PEER project titled “Green Open Access as a global solution? Some reflections based on the PEER Project“. PEER has been investigating large-scale, systematic depositing of  final peer-reviewed manuscripts and effects on reader access, author visibility, journal viability, and the evolution European research policies . The project has run since September 2008 and will conclude with a conference in May 2012.

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.

NPG and Digital Science do not support the Research Works Act. ”   READ THE ENTIRE STATEMENT

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

The Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP) at the Berkmann Center for Internet & Society is tracking other publishers that  step into the light  at their Notes on the Research Works Act page, including:

• AAP members who reject the RWA and publicly disavow the AAP position on RWA
• AAP members who apparently reject the RWA, but whose positions require confirmation.
• Publishers who reject the RWA but are not members of AAP

The SCImago Journal & Country Rank allowed me to drill down into 2011 citation data for Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health.  Here are the top 10 cited journals in 2011:

Here is a description of how these journals offer or encourage open access (or not).

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.

I was looking at the SCImago 2011 journal ranking for Obstetrics and Gynecology and noted that the top six journals were either open access or had an open access option for authors.

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.

The publisher, the Lippincott, Williams, and Wilkins division of Wolters Kluwer, has also taken a similar tact with the journal CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing , creating an ad-hoc collection of free articles that  are labeled the “open access collection.”

Wolters Kluwer and all of its U.S.  imprints are listed in the membership of the Association of American Publishers (AAP)  and  therefore in the hot seat over the Research Works Act, a bill that seeks to remove government competition with private publishing and  overturn the current NIH public access policy requiring timely deposit of papers supported by NIH research grants.

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 Medical library Association issued an Action Alert on January 12th, asking their membership to contact House Representatives and urge them to oppose H.R. 3699,  The Research Works Act. MLA suggested using the talking points developed by the Alliance for Taxpayer Access:

• 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 Special Libraries Association (SLA) used their public policy blog to make the same points as MLA and points to the taxpayer access draft letter to Oppose H.R. 3699.

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. “

Here is how you can speak up, courtesy of www.taxpayeraccess.org:

• Representative Issa 
  @DarrellIssa
  http://issa.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=597&Itemid=73
  Fax: (202) 225-3303
• Representative Maloney 
  @RepMaloney 
  https://maloney.house.gov/contact-me/email-me (Using zip code 10128-3679)
  Fax: (202) 225-4709
• Members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee – especially if you’re a constituent.
  http://1.usa.gov/zDqnne 
• Your representative – through the ATA Action Center: http://www.congressweb.com/cweb2/index.cfm/siteid/sparc

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:

• The Columbia University Health Sciences Library in 2012 can only afford new titles by cutting underutilized titles
• The City of Hope Hospital Graff Library is also cutting journal titles and packages in FY2012.
• the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio is initiating cuts in FY2012
• The UCSF Library proposed 2012 cancellations that essentially eliminated print where electronic existed and was waiting for faculty response.

However, in 2012, there are successful open access publishers, and since 2009 some very important universities have been nurturing the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity. The number of academic medical center and university institutional repositories and their use has steadily increased, providing a place for faculty to deposit open access copies of articles from an Elsevier published journal since 2004, even from Elsevier journals that the university had to cut.

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.

The Open Access Mortar (opacmo) is a text-mining database programming project that features

• 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.