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.

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.

Routledge, the humanities and social sciences imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, announced back at the beginning of November the launch of a green open access experiment with the Library & Information Science (LIS) research community: a two-year pilot Author Rights Initiative.  To quote the explanation and rationale from the press release:

“This initiative applies to any of Routledge’s 35 library and information science journals published from Taylor & Francis’ Philadelphia office. Under this scheme, an author may post the peer-reviewed version of his or her article (although not the published pdf.) into their institutional or subject repository (although not commercial servers or for resale) immediately following publication, so long as the original place of publication is referenced and a URL link is made to the Version of Record on Routledge’s website…..

As the landscape of scholarly publishing evolves, Routledge is committed to exploring publishing models that suit customers’ needs. This initiative is intended to measure the financial viability of dropping the postprint embargo period and to find sustainable ways of extending author rights. The Routledge library and information science journals collection is an ideal testing ground for this pilot, due to the commitment and talent of the editors working on these titles, along with the wide interest in institutional and subject repositories among the author community in this field…”

The list of titles covered by this development include:

I have been focusing on teaching library science for the last four months outside of my full time professional job, and I became aware of this green open access opportunity because I had been approached by an editor of the Journal of Consumer Health on the Internet to transcribe a poster session I had co-authored and presented last spring into a scholarly article. My hesitation at that moment was my own Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI)  pledge to publish openly.  Green open access offers some wiggle room, my ability to assert that all my scholarship appears openly in my institutional repository, while in fact appearing simultaneously in a commercial journal and supporting their financial viability.

I hope there is discussion at the Association for Library and Information Science Education annual meeting this winter, regarding the opportunity for open library and information science research  presented by the Taylor & Francis experiment.

There are some strange summer mornings in the country, when he who is but a sojourner from the city shall early walk forth into the fields, and be wonder-smitten with the trance-like aspect of the green and golden world. Not a flower stirs; the trees forget to wave; the grass itself seems to have ceased to grow; and all Nature, as if suddenly become conscious of her own profound mystery, and feeling no refuge from it but silence, sinks into this wonderful and indescribable repose. [Pierre; or, The ambiguities By Herman Melville, 1853]

When you are in rhythm as an open access blogger, the green and gold paradox will appear from your imagination. I thought of this book title as a cute play on the publisher I am about to discuss; then I find the book, and it has green and gold in the first paragraph. I guess I should buy a Powerball ticket this weekend.

So I was looking for open access articles in PubMed using a combination of Medical Subject Headings (“Publishing“[Mesh]) AND “Access to Information“[Mesh]) AND “Societies, Medical“[Mesh], and one article that came up was NEFRONA project: open-access database from the journal Nefrologia. There was no abstract in PubMed, so I followed the citation to the journal website from a link in PubMed that said . Yes, there was free full text on the web site, and I decided to check their publication guidelines in English in order to see how well they documented a green or gold open access policy.  Instead, I found  a different instruction:

Sending an article to the Journal implies that it is original, has not been published, except in summary form and that it has only been sent to NEFROLOGIA. It also means that, if accepted, it becomes the Journal’s property and, therefore, total or partial publication must be authorized by the Editor. The Editorial Committee reserves the right to modify the style or shorten the texts which require it, while respecting the content of the original.

Is this a case of lost in translation, or simply the ambiguities? They seem to want the traditional publisher status of copyright holder, but they also give the articles away from their web site. I would like to suggest that they consider an additional clause granting the author the ability to store a green pre- and post-print pre-publication copy, perhaps as other journals do, with a link pointing to the final published copy.

I also checked the SHERPA/RoMEO database for Nefrologia or Spanish Nephrology Society, without any result.

We are left with the ambiguities… perhaps they will offer a clarifying comment.

And the preprint says, ahhh…Miles Davis…. Blue in Green.

Stevan Harnad has issued a polite request to SHERPA/RoMEO to update their color scheme.  Stevan’s logic speaks for itself.   Here he is on another occasion, making important points about green open access:

Stevan Harnad alerted me earlier this  year that Elsevier is a fully green open access publisher. Authors can archive pre-print or post-print copies (the one exception for Elsevier, according to SHERPA/RoMEO, is The Lancet:  only a word-processed version of a peer-reviewed, accepted, and edited article from The Lancet can be placed on a personal or institutional websites, any time after publication.)  One of the largest biomedical journal publishers providing authors with these green options has certainly added momentum to the green open access  movement.

It was a therefore a revelation for me to discover Elsevier’s  SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), a free tool to compare  the citation data of the more than 15,000 peer-reviewed journals indexed by the Elsevier  SCOPUS database since 1996.   SCOPUS  is part of the new SciVerse umbrella (hub) and prohitively expensive for many colleges and universities. The word on SJR has  not traveled very fast, and I will try to accelerate knowledge of this tool in my own environment.

How does this tool compare with the very well know subscription product Journal Citation Reports (JCR)?  The Elsevier Bibliometrics page which offers a succinct comparison with Thomson Reuters’ JCR.  Here are the major points:

• Five year Impact Factor:  Instead of counting citations in the previous two years and dividing by source items in those years,  as JCR does, SJR citations are counted in the previous five years and again divided by the source items published in the previous five years. Five years may be more appropriate for journals where it may take longer than two years to disseminate and respond to published works, as well as present more consistent year-t0-year variation.
• Journal rank within a subject category may be different when using a two or a five year impact factor, so care is needed when assessing  ranked lists to describe which metric is being utilized.
• SCImago Journal Rank, conceptually similar to the Impact Factor, uses a different scale, assigning each citation a value greater or less than one based on the rank of the citing journal. Detailed methodology is available here.
• The broader and deeper set of data from SCOPUS provides additional types of searching analysis: country ranks, country and regional comparisons,  and maps oof co-citation relationships.
• The use of SCOPUS data brings many more open access journals into journal analysis and comparison.

Rather than needing to tell you, the absence of a subscription barrier means that you can just jump right in and try it.

Yes, I feel a little late to the party, as there have been several articles looking at this new resource.

The word is getting around from places like Library Journal that the recently formed  Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI)  will meet in person for the first time at a pre-conference meeting at the Berlin 9 Open Access Conference in Washington, DC, in early November 2011.   Just as SPARC fostered a vibrant and participatory Open Access Week site that substitutes for in-person meetings, SPARC is also promising to lend its advocacy expertise and even support a COAPI meeting at their own first North American OA meeting, to be held next March in Kansas City, MO.

It would be useful for me to provide something to describe the participants before their own web site becomes available at SPARC or elsewhere.  This chart will show the COAPI institutional library, a link to their campus open access policy, and a link to their institutional repository:

The ROARMAP directory project continues to be the site to track the growth of open access repositories with  mandated archiving policies.  Here is the ROARMAP global growth tracker:

ROARMAP Quarterly Growth February 2011

I was looking at the announcement of Palgrave Macmillan open access options and started to build a table to compare publisher post-print deposit rules:

Why did I stop?

I remembered the SHERPA/RoMEO: Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving web site, which provides a listing of publishers’ copyright conditions as they relate to authors archiving their work on-line. The service categorizes publishers and their conditions as:

This database-driven enterprise now lists the policies of more than 900 publishers, including my original target Palgrave Macmillan:

So who are the publishers that in this day and age that do not allow formally support personal or institutional archiving, the “white” category in the RoMEO rating?  A short sample which links to the RoMEO entry:

• Radiation Research Society (jump through hoops, maybe you can)
• Physicians Postgraduate Press (if you must, put it in PMC)
• Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments (you would think they would want to get the word out!)
• Managed Care & Healthcare Communications (Let’s not talk about archiving, but if you must, put it in PMC)

RoMEO is an index to more than 900 publishers and their green open access archiving policies.   Institutions with scholarly communication staff can make this site an important component of a researcher’s determination of where to publish.  The rest of the academic community must build this tool into their resource pages on scholarly publishing.

I was checking out The Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) repository and saw the announcement that Open Access Fellows are Harvard students (both undergraduate and graduate) who help faculty to make deposits into DASH, answer questions about the Open Access Policies, and help depositors complete metadata descriptions of items being placed in the repository.   Great idea!

As student jobs in academic libraries have been relegated to staffing evening service points or shelving a declining number of circulated books,  providing a student job for direct open access repository assistance and indirect advocacy among student peers  and classroom instructors satisfies many constituencies on  campus.

In terms of biomedical open access, DASH currently holds 1185 articles from the Harvard Medical School and 564 articles from the Harvard School of  Public Health. 457 of the articles from the Medical School are in PLoS publications, and there are direct links to the publisher’s open access copy. There is also a deposit waiver option, which I think the Open Access Fellows must become intimately acquainted.

So far, my advanced searching of Google for “open access fellows” has not turned up any other university explicitly copying this model.  But if it is anything like the “personal librarian program” that was started at my library more than 10 years ago, there certainly will be followers.  Particularly as more academic libraries establish an “Office of Scholarly Communication” and decide student jobs are a priority.

The most significant scholarly re-focus on persistent, neglected illness in tropical areas was the support the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided to help launch in 2007  the open access journal PLos Neglected Tropical Diseases (PloSNTDS), now the leading  Tropical Medicine journal in the Journal Citation Report (JCR) impact factor ranking.  For 2009, PloSNTDS has an Impact Factor of 4.693 and also ranks in the top three paracitology journals.(sorry, this link will work only if your institution subscribes to JCR)