Librarians play an effective role in educating their faculty and researchers about the opportunities and benefits of open access biomedical literature and the place of open access in scholarly publishing.  Hopefully, they also pick up on the predatory trend as well and inoculate their researchers who are desperate to publish.  Medical librarians gather annually for a meeting that features speakers, papers, and poster presentations.  This year’s activity takes place May 13- 18 in Minneapolis Minnesota.

Here are some of the presentations that relate in part or wholly to open access, found in the searchable preliminary program:

Sunday, May 15th:

About: Poster Board Number: 111
Title: ReThink: Open Access Still Moving Scholarly Communication Forward?

Monday, May 16th

Charles W. Bailey made this announcement on the ETD listserv:

Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship:

http://digital-scholarship.org/tsp/transforming.htm

This bibliography presents over 1,100 selected English-language scholarly works useful in understanding the open access movement’s efforts to provide free access to and unfettered use of scholarly literature.  The bibliography primarily includes books and published journal articles.  A limited number of book chapters, conference papers, dissertations and theses, magazine articles, technical reports, and other scholarly works that are deemed to be of exceptional interest are also included (see the “Preface” for further details about selection criteria).  The bibliography includes links to freely available versions of included works.  Most sources have been published from January 1, 1999 through August 1, 2010; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 1999 are also included.  The bibliography is available as a paperback and an open access PDF file.

The following Digital Scholarship publications may also be of interest:

(1) Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, version 78

http://digital-scholarship.org/sepb/sepb.html

(2) Digital Scholarship 2009 (paperback and open access PDF
file)

http://digital-scholarship.org/sepb/annual/ds2009.htm

(3) Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2008 Annual Edition (paperback, Kindle e-book, and open access
PDF file)
http://digital-scholarship.org/sepb/annual/sepb2008.htm

(4) Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography,
version 1

http://digital-scholarship.org/dcpb/dcpb.htm

Translate (oversatta, oversette, prelozit, traducir, traduire, tradurre, traduzir, or ubersetzen):
http://digital-scholarship.org/announce/tsp.htm

–

Best Regards,
Charles

Charles W. Bailey, Jr.
Publisher, Digital Scholarship
http://digital-scholarship.org/

The 2nd annual Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (COASP) is taking place this week,  August 22-24, at the President Hotel, Prague, Czech Republic

One of the most eagerly expected presentations was given on August 23rd, the First results of the SOAP Project (large PDF, be patient).  There is also a SlideShare version of the presentation.

On July 29th, Allan Adler, Vice President of government and legal affairs at the Association of American Publishers (AAP), told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s Information Policy, Census, and National Archives Subcommittee that FRPAA would seriously threaten the scholarly publishing industry:

“Publishers strongly believe that American taxpayers are entitled to the research they’ve paid for. As taxpayers ourselves collectively and individually, everyone in this room has paid for government‐funded research, and the data and summary reports that result from this research. But taxpayers have not paid for the private sector, peer‐reviewed journal articles reporting on that research.”

I suppose Mr. Adler is attempting to represent the traditional role of publishers that produce print and electronic journals with independent editorial oversight and marketing, most of which reach a public or private readership via a private or institutional subscription.

The problem with making such a one-size-fits-all statement is that it misses the point that both state universities and public libraries that subscribe to either print or electronic journals are using public taxation resources in their budget to provide shared public access to biomedical journal articles, via institutional journal subscriptions or aggregated article service providers.   Taxpayers are paying again.

Additionally, at nearly every non-public academic medical center, including my own employer,  where I regularly assist consumers looking for health information, costly subscription license agreements allow on-site journal access to visitors, providing public access to consumers seeking current information on health care research.

Public libraries and schools send their consumers or students to health sciences libraries for access to emerging health information.  A public librarian’s first thought is not whether their local medical center library is public or private.

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access, a coalition of patient groups, physicians, researchers, educational institutions, publishers, and health promotion organizations,  has a growing list of institutional members, which also includes the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL).

Academic health sciences libraries understand the serials crisis and the issue of taxpayer access.  Individual researchers drop their personal subscriptions to journals and depend on shared library-subscribed access.  AAHSL provides relevant links to allow libraries to understand the issues of open access.  Taxpayers are paying once for NIH research…and many libraries are paying again.

I saw the announcement on resourceshelf.com about The University of Ottawa Press decision to launch a new open access collection of 36 UOP books will be available free to the online community in the University of Ottawa’s institutional repository, uO Research,  including both French and English-language in-print titles in the arts, humanities and social sciences.  Curious about the representation of biomedicine in uO Research, I took a look at the repository.

Developed in collaboration with the University of Ottawa Library, this open access collection uses customizable DSpace opensource software, leveraging a mature product with over 900 implementation sites around the world.  One of the standard attributes of a DSpace repository is the ability to define “communities” with tagging to encourage the displaying and browsing of similar items under a department or theme.  It was easy to see that uO Research has been initially organized around academic division faculty, the Library, the University of Ottawa Press, and their electronic thesis repository collection.

I found the Faculté de médecine // Faculty of Medicine community collection to be a small but promising collection of institutional productivity, combining classic search and discovery:  full text searching,  specialized collection links, and new deposits labeled as news:

There is no limitation to the variety of potential communities, but the management of potential growth depends on articulating and adhering to policy.

I was particularly impressed by the description of  library and  academic partnership  with an emphasis that all stateholders understand and agree to the policies and procedures, available  in this clear and unambiguous format and with a clear contact person (throughout the site).

This statement is an excellent policy model for academic institutions in their own planning phase for the green variety of open access.

On July 29th, Allan Adler, Vice President of government and legal affairs at the Association of American Publishers (AAP), told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s Information Policy, Census, and National Archives Subcommittee that FRPAA would seriously threaten the scholarly publishing industry:

“Publishers strongly believe that American taxpayers are entitled to the research they’ve paid for. As taxpayers ourselves collectively and individually, everyone in this room has paid for government‐fundedresearch, and the data and summary reports that result from this research. But taxpayers have not paid for the private sector, peer‐reviewed journal articles reporting on that research.”   Ouch! I will address this in a different blog post.

He added, “For over a century, non-profit and commercial publishers have served as the government’s partner in fueling scientific discovery and innovation. The presumption now that taxpayers should have free access to peer-reviewed journal articles seriously discounts the considerable contributions of our industry and highly skilled workforce of some 50,000, who are driving the US knowledge economy and supporting our leadership in science.”

On August 2nd, In Discovery, rediscovery, and open access: Part 1, Peter Suber, Berkman Fellow at Harvard University, Senior Researcher at SPARC, the Open Access Project Director at Public Knowledge, and Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College. has another perspective:

“The NIH research budget is more than the GDP of 140 nations.  When taxpayers devote that kind of money to research, they can maximize the return on their investment by ensuring that the results are available to all who can build on them.  In addition, the cost of an NIH-funded research project can be hundreds or even thousands of times greater than the cost of publication.  To allow its results to be held hostage by publishers is the same mistake on a different scale as spending billions on a Large Hadron Collider and locking up the results in toll-access publications.”

He also said, “Leaving access barriers any higher than necessary means slowing the process of inquiry and wasting more effort and resources than necessary.”

So there are the opposite ends.  Some librarians and publishers are looking for a middle way to expand access, like the American Physical Society that I blogged about earlier this week, which is at least offering to put free access to their scholarly journals into public libraries in a nod to taxpayers.

I really encourage my readership to read the testimony from the FRPAA hearing.  In a democracy, the will of the majority becomes more important than the personalities.  I applaud the House subcommittee for putting the prepared testimony on the web for public digestion, as well as archive the webcast:

Opening Statement of Subcommittee Chairman Wm. Lacy Clay (available from the webcast)

Prepared Testimony of Mr. Allan Adler

Prepared Testimony of Dr. Steven Breckler

Prepared Testimony of Professor Ralph Oman

Prepared Testimony of Dr. Richard Roberts

Prepared Testimony of Ms. Sharon Terry

Prepared Testimony of Mr. Elliott Maxwell

Prepared Testimony of Dr. Sophia Colamarino

Prepared Testimony of Dr. David Shulenburger

Prepared Testimony of Ms. Catherine Nancarrow

Additional Document 1 Submitted by Ms. Nancarrow

Additional Document 2 Submitted by Ms. Nancarrow

Additional Document 3 Submitted by Ms. Nancarrow

Prepared Testimony of Dr. David Lipman

From the ARL SPARC press release:

Washington, DC – The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Information Policy, the Census and National Archives announced it will hold a hearing on the issue of public access to federally funded research on Thursday, July 29. The hearing will provide an opportunity for the Committee to hear the perspectives of a broad range of stakeholders on the potential impact of opening up access to the results of the United States’ more than $60 billion annual investment in scientific research.
The Subcommittee’s interest stems from the growing number of visible expressions of interest in the issue of public access that have surfaced in recent months, in both the Legislative and Executive branches of government. Notably, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy earlier this year hosted a Public Access Policy Forum on mechanisms that would leverage federal investments in scientific research and increase access to information.
Additionally, H.R. 5037, the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), which was introduced into the House on April 15 by Rep. Mike Doyle (R-PA) and is supported by a growing bi-partisan host of cosponsors, was referred to the Committee. The bill, and its identical Senate counterpart (introduced by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John Cornyn (R-TX)), proposes to require those eleven federal agencies with extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to implement policies that deliver timely, free, online public access to the published results of the research they fund.

========= END SPARC PRESS RELEASE==============

Want to see the arguments that the commercial sector will take? They are going to try to kill the House bill H.R. 5037 with this kind of argument:

• the government to become a competitor of independent publishers operating within the private sector in a well-established marketplace.
• Duplicates existing mechanisms that enable the public to access research in the sciences, social sciences and humanities published in scholarly journals.
• It would require the affected federal agencies to develop and maintain costly electronic repositories.
• Agencies will need to divert millions of dollars away from federal research grants and towards database costs.

The letter that the opposition published in the DCPrinciples web site, signed by:

Acoustical Society of America
American Academy of Pediatrics
American Association of Anatomists
American Association for Cancer Research
American Association for Clinical Chemistry
American Association for Dental Research
American Association of Immunologists
American Association of Physics Teachers
American Astronomical Society
American Chemical Society
American College of Clinical Pharmacology
American College of Radiology
American Dairy Science Association
American Dental Association
American Geophysical Union
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
American Institute of Biological Sciences
American Institute of Physics
American Medical Association
American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc.
American Psychological Association
American Physiological Society
American Registry of Professional Animal Scientists
American Roentgen Ray Society
American Society of Animal Science
American Society of Agronomy
American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
American Society for Investigative Pathology
American Society for Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics
American Society of Plant Biologists
Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology
AVS–Science &Technology of Materials, Interfaces and Processing
Cambridge University Press
Crop Science Society of America
Elsevier
The Endocrine Society
Entomological Society of America
European Association for Cardiothoracic Surgery
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB)
Genetics Society of America
Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
International Association for Dental Research
International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB)
John Wiley and Sons
Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.
The McGraw-Hill Companies
Mycological Society of America
The Optical Society
Oxford University Press
The Physiological Society
Poultry Science Association

So it has come down to special interests promising to honor and protect the public interest, even as libraries continue to drop subscriptions from many of these publishers (some public libraries do not have a single journal from any of these publishers).  Does the current system work?   Will we be better off with more open access or with the status quo?

Time for you to contact congress or plan to be in DC on July 27th.

The United Kingdom’s  SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access) is based at the Centre for Research Communications, University of Nottingham and works on projects related to open Access and repository development.

Think of SHERPA as a British equivalent of  ARL’s (Association of Research Libraries) SPARC (Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition).  Frankly,  the distinction I see is that  SPARC ‘s  public focus is on the politics of building momentum to change research publishing culture as it affects research libraries, a mission it performs very well.   SHERPA certainly relates to the politics of libraries, academic research, and publishing in the UK, and it is leveraged by the fact that  the UK embraced national health healthcare in 1948 . Taxpayer access to scientific research has been an easier concept to gain traction with the public in Britain, compared to the lobbying juggernaut that has barely slowed the hard times in the scholarly communication marketplace .

RoMEO is a tool that all of us can use, a publicly searchable database of publisher policies on the self- archiving of journal articles on the web and in open access repositories.  As of February 2010, RoMEO now covers over 700 publishers from around the globe. Of these publishers, 63% formally allow some form of self-archiving. (The rest of the RoMEO FAQ is here.)

Here is a picture of the search box (click to go to the page):

Here is the result for the Journal of NeuroTrauma search:

RoMEO covers peer-reviewed journals and serials, based on information harvested from Zetoc, Entrez and DOAJ.  Publishers are also searchable. According to the RoMEO site, “RoMEO does not provide self-archiving information on books, monographs, thesis or conference papers, however, some series titles may be covered.”

“Will libraries continue to serve as intermediaries through which researchers find open-access information, as well as that available only through subscription, and how?”  CRS Report for Congress: Open Access Publishing and Citation Archives: Background and Controversy (updated October 10, 2006)

Because this blog is focused on the biomedical publishing, research, and library realm, here are a few ways biomedical libraries have been serving as as guides in identifying and educating  their colleagues and faculty on open access information.

• The Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL) participated in the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable , a response to the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s request for a consensus statement regarding access to and preservation of federally funded research, and issued their own response to the Roundtable’s Final Report. AAHSL actually represents about 140 accredited U.S. and Canadian medical colleges and supports their academic health sciences libraries.

• University Libraries,  such as the University of Florida, are appointing a Scholarly Communication officer to educate faculty and students about scholarly publication reform and Open Access (OA) activities.

• Library catalogs allow open access journal sites and links to be discovered, like this sample of the Yale University Library online catalog.

• Libraries such as the one at the University of Toronto take the lead in organizing events around Open Access Week and creating a culture of academic awareness about scholarly publishing and archiving.

How about filling up my comment box with your own examples?

Spin is everything.

The result of the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable of key stakeholders charged on October 29th, 2009, by the U.S. House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee in collaboration with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), was released on January 12th, 2010, after reaching enough consensus to suggest something was accomplished.

The Science Magazine Blog optimistically stated that “A diverse group of scientific publishers, librarians, and university officials has come together to endorse a once-controversial idea: that all federal research agencies should require that papers published by the investigators they support be made freely available to the public as soon as possible.”  This optimism was based on a consensus of 12 out of 14 representatives.   Certainly a majority.

Of course, the two dissenting representatives are probably the most well-known polarized opposites within academic scholarship.

Y.S. Chi, Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Global Academic and Customer Relations, Elsevier, issued a dissent that attempted to avoid confrontation and vaguely suggested a fundamental inability to agree with the proposal as a whole.  He also felt it necessary to state, “I express all of my views consistent with my willingness to participate in the Roundtable as a knowledgeable and concerned citizen and not as a representative of my employer.” Huh?  Too bad that no records were kept of the intense negotiations.

Mark Patterson, Director of Publishing, Public Library of Science (PLoS), also chose the path of dissent, stating that the final report “stops far short of recognizing and endorsing the opportunities to unleash the full potential of online communication to transform access to and use of scholarly literature.”

Concurrent with the Roundtable’s deliberations, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was also running a participatory Public Access Forum.   Among the public comments received was a statement from Elsevier responding to the OSTP forum questions.  In this case, Vice Chairman Chi co-signed the contribution on Elsevier letterhead.  On record, speaking for Elsevier and not as a private citizen, the letter he co-authored with David Hansen stated, “There is no systematic quantitative evidence to show that access is an issue for researchers or the public. It is therefore unclear why the government would seek to implement any policy that pertains to the outputs of published research.”

Difference of opinion or chasm?