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Video has become the medium of choice for education and entertainment,  young and old. Take those staggering youtube statistics:

• 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute, or one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second
• Over 4 billion videos are viewed a day
• Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
• Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
• More video is uploaded to YouTube in one month than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years
• 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
• YouTube is localized in 39 countries and across 54 languages
• In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or almost 140 views for every person on Earth

I see similar staggering statistics, tens of thousands of views annually for relatively mundane instructional videos on library tools, compared to few if any attendees for equivalent medical library drop-in classes.

So it is not really surprising that the most recognized and successful  open access biomedical publisher, Public Library of the Science (PLoS), decided in 2011 to publicize their articles through a new video collaboration with Kikim Media, PBS Video, and the The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to produce Science Bytes. These are a series of short videos, based on recently published studies from PLoS, which highlight discoveries that can naturally engage a general audience. The executive producer of this  series, Micheal Schwarz, says, that this is “ next step in the natural evolution of science communication.”

Science Bytes, like PLoS articles, is an open access resource. You are free to to place this video on any site you wish, with credit for where you found it. This is the one I discovered tonight, the third in the series, on diabetes, diet, and reversing kidney damage in mice (and perhaps humans):

This is the article:

Poplawski MM, Mastaitis JW, Isoda F, Grosjean F, Zheng F, et al. (2011) Reversal of Diabetic Nephropathy by a Ketogenic Diet. PLoS ONE 6(4): e18604.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0018604

It also dawned on me that this episode was published back in September 2011, more than 6 months ago.  Was the plug pulled?  I hope not.

This statement is a direct quotation from a 2006 article “Scientific Journals are ‘faith based’: is there science behind Peer review?” by a group of public health upstarts suggesting a lack of scientific method in the peer review process could be remedied by alternative methods of scholarly quality control and new forms of data-driven review.  Predictably, a immediate respondent to this article questioned the authors’ research rigor, yet also sought common ground to “agree on the objectives of peer review and develop appropriate validated tools that can measure its effects.”

Oh, there is one other thing I noticed. The respondent admitted her competing interest as an employee of  a journal publisher, hired to conduct research on peer review and publishing.  Nice that we know it.  In most scenarios of journal peer review, there is no ability to see or know if  there would or had been a competing interest among a particular article’s peer reviewers.  A few experiments with and discussion of open peer review have not led to a trend or shift in any large measure.

The most promising game-changer in bringing a scientific method to scholarly publishing today was probably the decision of PLoS ONE to offer two-stage peer review consisting of initial determination of scientific methodological soundness, then allowing the post-publication usage metrics to provide  usage-data-driven evidence of article significance to a discipline.  In their 2009 debut of the metrics, the PLOS blog explained:

First, we are focusing on articles rather than journals. The dominant paradigm for judging the worth of an article is to rely on the name and the impact factor of the journal in which the work is published. But it’s well known that there is a strong skew in the distribution of citations within a journal – typically, around 80% of the citations accrue to 20% of the articles. So the impact factor is a very poor predictor of how many citations any individual article will obtain, and in any case, journal editors and peer reviewers don’t always make the right decision. Indicators at the article level circumvent these limitations, allowing articles to be judged on their own scientific merits.

PLoS ONE’s decision to implement the scholarly “wisdom of crowds” has attracted both authors and readers less concerned with the journal brand and more concerned with immediate access, methodological credibility, and usage. Take for example a 2011 article in PLoS ONE: NSAID Use Selectively Increases the Risk of Non-Fatal Myocardial Infarction: A Systematic Review of Randomised Trials and Observational Studies.   Here are the metrics for the article as of today:

Click to View Original Page

The metrics show positive trend, times cited from multiple sources, and impressive usage statistics.  SPARC will host Building New Measures for Impact: Article Level Metrics,  a webcast of April 12th that will focus on information on article level metrics,  with Peter Binfield.  Yes, I know what you are thinking.  His competing interest is that he is merely the publisher of PLoS ONE. At least we know it and can take it into account.

Here are the top 10 clinical genetics journals for 2011,  according to SCImago Journal Rank for today, limited to journals with at least 100 articles over the last three years:

1. Nature Genetics is the highest ranked journal by a wide margin.  In a reputation strong position, Nature Publishing Group (NPG) does not offer optional gold open access to authors of articles in Nature Genetics, as is done for some other NPG journals. NPG does offer publisher processing for NIH-funded articles bound for PubMed Central.  Authors do not assign copyright for NPG articles, though they also grant NPG an exclusive license to publish. NPG also offers guidance and support for author self-archiving after a 6-month embargo.  Stevan Harnad took them to task for their resistance to immediate self-archiving and self-labeling their efforts as “liberal.”  I would give them an Openbiomed open access grade of  C.
2. PLoS Genetics, published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), offers the a gold open access business model which funds the enterprise with an author fee.  For PLoS Genetics, the current publication fee is US$2250. Authors who are affiliated with one of our Institutional Members are eligible for a discount on this fee. PLoS applies the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) to articles, and authors retain ownership of the copyright.  Articles are automatically eligible for immediate self-archiving. An Openbiomed open access grade of  A is well-deserved.
3. Nature Reviews Neuroscience also comes from the NPG, part of the Nature Reviews family.  According to this page, In 2009 NPG rebranded the Nature Clinical Practice journals into Nature Reviews, for eight clinical specialties. For authors, no particular open access enhancement in comparison to Nature Genetics. The Openbiomed open access grade of  C also applies.
4. Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics is published by the American Heart Association and is representative of journal literature publishing the results of translational science that seeks to move laboratory discoveries aggressively into clinical practice. All AHA journals use the same author copyright transfer agreement, which causes the author to give away control and publication rights,with the one exception that  the author may post an accepted version of an article in a non-profit funders web archive and/or an author’s institutional repository, no earlier than 6 months after publication.  Nothing said about a personal web site. The Openbiomed open access grade is  C- .
5. Molecular Biology and Evolution (MBE) is published by Oxford University Press under the umbrella of Oxford Journals.MBE is one of the more than 100 journals that offer the Oxford Open option for a publication charge of £1700/$3000/€2550.  Authors from developing countries receive a significant publication charge discount. Post-Print version of articles can be placed on personal websites, your institution’s website and in institutional or subject-based repositories such as PubMed Central, as long as a 12 month embargo is respected. Authors do not assign copyright, though they also grant OUP an exclusive license to publish. The Openbiomed open access grade is  B .
6. DNA Repair is a subscription journal from Elsevier. Optional sponsored open access is available for this  journal. Only 2 articles in 2010 from this journal were sponsored open access. The charge for the sponsored option is us$3,000 plus tax where applicable.  Elsevier is fully green, which may be a reason why the number of sponsored articles is so low. Elsevier is also a full partner in Research4life, (as is OUP) and most of their article  reach developing nations that way.  The Openbiomed open access grade is  B+.
7. The Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases(OJRD) is an open access journal on the Biomed Central(BMC) open access platform. An article processing charge of £950/US$1500/€1145 is required, though an institutional membership in BMC can provide a discount. Authors retain the copyright to their work, licensing it under the Creative Commons Attribution License which allows articles to be re-used and re-distributed without restriction,provided the original work is correctly cited. BioMed Central is owned by Springer Science+ Business Media. With a APC fee substantially below PL0S, this journal rates an Openbiomed open access grade of  A+.
8. BMC Medical Genomics is another open access, peer-reviewed journal on the Biomed Central platform. Blessed with all the open access attributes of BMC, with an APC of £1230/$1945/€1485.  Being a little more than OJRD without a clear compelling reason, his journal rates an Openbiomed open access grade of  A.
9. The American Journal of Medical Genetics Part C: Seminars in Medical Genetics is a subscription journal from Wiley-Liss, a imprint of Wiley-Blackwell.  Wiley-Blackwell offers a hybrid OnlineOpen access option for over 500 journals, including this one. The OnlineOpen APC fee is fixed at US$3000 for most journals.  Wiley-Blackwell expects to receive either a signed Copyright Transfer Agreement  or an Exclusive License Form before publication; in most cases this is the copyright transfer. Only OnlineOpen submission get explicit permission to post the  final PDF of the contribution on a personal website or in a personal repository. For non-open articles, only a pre-print copy is allowed in a personal website or repository. The Openbiomed open access grade is  B.
10. Evolution, the International Journal of Organic Evolution, is a subscription journal from Blackwell, acquired by Wiley.  The open access opportunities and constraints are similar to  The American Journal of Medical Genetics Part C: Seminars in Medical Genetics  , including the OnlineOpen option. Same open access grade: B .

Only 3 journals rated a C or less, and there were a few A‘s and several B‘s.   A guess I am an easy grader.

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.

In the top 30 2009  Evolutionary Biology Journal Citation Reports(JCR) impact factor journals, we find only two titles from open access publishers:

• BMC Evolutionary Biology
• Evolutionary Bioinformatics

Another open access evolutionary biology title has not been around long enough to start being tracked in JCR. Genome Biology and Evolution (GBE) comes from Oxford University Press and has been published since May 2009.  You can find 164 open access articles from GBE available in  PubMed and PubMed Central.

Nearly two years old, the output of GBE does not compare quantitatively with the PLoS One publishing model. It is hard for any journal to catch up quantitatively to PLoS ONE.   GBE is one of six fully open scientific journals in the Oxford Open initiative.

Article-level Metrics from PLoS on Vimeo.

I am a firm believer in quality peer review for open access biomedical journals.  After all, these journals affect the health of individuals and communities all over the globe.  But we are beyond the monopoly on quality health information, according to Harnad and others,  that was characteristic of the pre-digital era when journals prided themselves on claiming to support the public interest by limiting access  to paying subscribers, including libraries.

Still, there is interest in establishing qualitative criteria for open access publishing, as there is a hill to climb for established biomedical researchers with well-conceived and executed research to buck tradition and select an immediate open access alternative to a long-standing, highly-impact-factor-ranked  peer reviewed journal. [For example, the researchers in my institution with big news that they think will be more respected in Science (Hey, you taxpayers, you get your uninhibited view in 12 months, so pipe down) than more widely read by the global and NIH taxpayer audience  in PLoS Genetics.  Still, there are scientists, even at my instition, that use the NIH’s encouragement (use of NIH grant proceeds for open access author processing fees is welcome)  to cast their traditional behavior to the wind and let everyone know what genetic research avenues hold progress.

So what kind of peer review takes place in Science?  From their Manuscript selection web page:

“Papers are assigned to a staff editor who has knowledge of the field discussed in the manuscript. Most submitted papers are rated for suitability by members of Science‘s Board of Reviewing Editors. The editors atScience consider this advice in selecting papers for in-depth review. Authors of papers that are not highly rated are notified promptly, within about 1 to 2 weeks.

Research papers that are selected for in-depth review are evaluated by at least two outside referees. Reviewers are contacted before being sent a paper and asked to return comments within 1 to 2 weeks for most papers. We are able to expedite the review process significantly for papers that require rapid assessment. Selected papers are edited to improve accuracy and clarity and for length. Papers cannot be resubmitted over a disagreement on interest or relative merit. If a paper was rejected on the basis of serious reviewer error, resubmission may be considered.”

What about that upstart PLoS Genetics? What is their version of peer review?

“Once a new manuscript has passed technical quality control, it is assigned to one of our senior editors—comprising the Editor-in-Chief, Deputy Editor, and Section Editors—depending on the subject matter, workload, and any potential competing interests. This first step usually occurs within a few working days of submission and is followed by an initial evaluation, sometimes in consultation with one or more members of the editorial board. For manuscripts that are considered further, an Associate Editor is assigned who then decides whether to invite external peer reviewers. We aim to have external reviews returned within ten days, although this can take longer depending on personal circumstances. After receipt of the reviewers’ comments, the Associate Editor makes a decision, often after consultation with other editorial board members. For manuscripts that are peer reviewed externally, the average duration between submission and first decision has been just over 30 days.”

Sounds like either publication has a peer review process in place, though such simple directions may obscure the fact of editors dealing with unmanageable quantities of submissions, as was pointed out in TheScientist back in 2006 which questioned the traditional method of peer review in the electronic age.   Although dated, this article also contains a chart comparing the submissions and reviewing patterns of several well-known subscription and open access journals.

So if the editorial board is in the driver’s seat for the standard of peer review, I have been pondering if we could come up with a metric of assessing the quality of the collective editors of a biomedical open access  journal.   I will be away this weekend for relaxation and back Monday night, but I will carry some nerdy index cards at all times, in case the vision of this editorial metric suddenly appears.

Nature Publishing, still smarting from last year’s rejection of  institutional price increases from a couple of academic library systems, has apparently studied the recent success of PLoS ONE ( as an interdisciplinary science journal, PLoSONE instantly ranked in the 2009 top 10 Biology ISI impact factor journals after two previous years of data) and launched a new gold open access journal: Scientific Reports

Some of the interesting goals are presented in the January 6th press release:

• All articles published in Scientific Reports will be open access and subject to an article-processing charge (APC) of US$1350/GB£890/ EURO1046  per accepted manuscript ( an additional 20% discount through the end of 2011)
• Authors will have a choice of two non-commercial Creative Commons (CC) licenses. NPG will make an annual donation to Creative Commons equivalent to $20 per APC paid for publication in Scientific Reports ( a maximum donation of $100,000 per year.
• Authors will be eligible for complimentary membership of the Creative Commons network.
• The focus of Scientific Reports will be natural sciences specialties, and Scientific Reports intends to publish all papers that are judged to be technically valid and original.
• Scientific Reports website will track and publicize most-downloaded, most-emailed, and most-blogged articles.
• All research papers will benefit from rapid peer review and publication, and will be deposited in PubMed Central.
• Scientific Reports will be led by a team of 15 Editorial Advisory Panel members, supported by an editorial board who will make all editorial decisions.  Scientific Reports will not have in-house editors, and will not offer developmental editing.

Now more about the Nature Publishing Group‘s views on and participation in open access, based on a press release issued by David Hoole, Director of their Intellectual Property Policy and Licensing Group.  David’s corporate bio is found with the description of the Executive Committee.   Please read through this press release, as I don’t need to repeat it here.  There is quite a lot of detailed information that only contains one exaggeration, that  one that Stevan Harnad identified a while back:

NPG does not require authors of original (primary) research papers to assign copyright of their published contributions. Authors grant NPG an exclusive licence to publish, in return for which they can reuse their papers in their future printed work without first requiring permission from the publisher of the journal….When a manuscript is accepted for publication in an NPG journal, authors are encouraged to submit the author’s version of the accepted paper (the unedited manuscript) toPubMedCentral or other appropriate funding body’s archive, for public release six months after publication. In addition, authors are encouraged to archive this version of the manuscript in their institution’s repositories and, if they wish, on their personal websites, also six months after the original publication.

Stefan takes issue, as I do, with the dichotomy of intent created by allowing authors to maintain their own copyright yet “encouraging” authors to wait six months to practice green open access.    In his blog entry last June, Stevan addressed Nature’s claims of effective open access practice while regressing on green open access.

This latest statement continues to be perplexing on this point.

Evidence 2010 will bring together international experts from the areas of education, EBM resource development, implementation, health economics and commissioning. Register now at the Early Bird rate and make savings. August 6th is the early-bird deadline.

This 2 day conference will be aimed at:

• Commissioners of evidence-based services
• Those involved in assessing the cost effectiveness of clinical interventions and services
• Developers of evidence-based resources
• Teachers and methodologists
• Those involved in implementation of evidence including front-line healthcare professionals

On the first day of Evidence 2010, there will be a debate of interest to fans of the open future:

Debate: The future of medical publishing in healthcare

Fiona Godlee  Editor in Chief, British Medical Journal

Bill Summerskill  Executive Editor, The Lancet

David Tovey Editor in Chief, The Cochrane Library

Tom Jefferson Scientific Editor PLOs ONE

Register now at the Early Bird rate and make savings.

The Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO), published by the American Society of Clinical Oncology(ASCO), is considered a top shelf medical journal, ranked 4th for impact in oncology by the current Journal Citation Reports.  JCO follows the historical standard of requiring assignment of author’s copyright to the publisher upon article acceptance.  Authors submit manuscripts with the understanding that, if accepted, the copyright of the article, including the right to reproduce the article in all forms and media, shall be assigned exclusively to ASCO. Posting articles on institutional repositories is prohibited.

The leadership of JCO certainly believe in their mission and want their journal to remain respected and useful to the clinical oncology research community. Here’s how they tell it, in very nice suits.

From the medical library viewpoint, the 2010 cost for a JCO institutional subscription is somewhere in the middle, neither cheap nor expensive, though some hospital libraries would be hard pressed to pay:

What if you are at a hospital that cannot afford a subscription to JCO?  To view a full-text article without a subscription, you can purchase access to the article for 24 hours at a cost of $19.00 per article.

By the way, ASCO had an extremely good year in 2009, ending up with a $7,800,000 surplus and net assets of nearly $50,000,000:

Excerpt from ASCO 2009 Annual Report

Yes, cancer care and research is big business. Now, before you start to think that those ASCO assets are going into ASCO-sponsored scholarships and research funding, you should be reminded that  there is an independently-operated ASCO Cancer Foundation which raises research funds and distributes grants and scholarships.

So what does the ASCO do with a $7,800,000 surplus and net assets of nearly $50,000,000?

According to the video you might have just watched above, their flagship journal JCO wants to be “the one journal that every hematologist/oncologist has to read.” So what if the cost of that journal’s subscription prevented some hematologist/oncologists in certain hospitals from reading it?  I bet there are plenty of oncologists that understand the critical nature of their research findings and would be willing to use a portion of their grant funding to publish in author-fee based open access journal, the more prestigious and noticed by colleagues, the better. PLoS gold open access has made this point.

My modest proposal is that ASCO use some of its prosperity to fund an experiment in gold open access and test the waters for those that are willing to pay for universal access to their results.  Perhaps even price this gold experiment with the additional waiver of copyright assignment and permission to place the paper on an institutional repository.

There are certainly many major publishers that are trying to maintain revenue while testing the waters of the rising tide of open access with a model such as this.