Friday, September 28, 2007

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography Updated

Version 69 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing
Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship.
This selective bibliography presents over 3,120 articles,
books, and other printed and electronic sources that are
useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing
efforts on the Internet.

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

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

How Involved Should the U.S. Government Be in the Scholarly Journal Publishing Business?

How Involved Should the U.S. Government Be in the Scholarly Journal Publishing Business?

By Dennis D. McDonald

Wired News on March 14, 2007 posted a story about U.S. Senators John Cornyn's and Joseph Liebermann's announced decision to re-introduce last year's Federal Research Public Access Act (S.2695, also called "FRPAA"). If passed, this Act will require federally funded research to become publicly available online within six months of being published. Last year's bill is described here by the Congressional Research Service.

This bill raises the perennial debate topic about how peer reviewed journals should be funded and whether "free access" should be provided to Federally-funded research. Many of the research articles published in peer-reviewed journals originate through Government funding. Many -- but not all -- of peer reviewed journals are published by for-profit commercial publishers. Other types of publishers include university presses, professional associations, and government agencies. Federally funded research is disseminated both through for profit and through not-for-profit publication channels.

As I've discussed here and here, peer reviewed journals are only the "tip of the iceberg" when it comes to disseminating research and scholarly information. Key roles are also played by conference presentations and proceedings, seminars, blogs, email and internet distribution, listservs, telephone, etc. etc. Yet the peer reviewed journal article -- and its sponsoring journal -- continues to play a key role in the formal social and communications systems of research and scholarship.

Funding for peer reviewed journals has traditionally been provided through some mix of:

  • Front end "page charges" paid by authors, their institutions, or their funding agencies when an article is accepted for publication from among the many that are submitted for publication.
  • Advertising.
  • Subsidies provided by the journal's sponsoring organization (e.g., from professional association membership dues).
  • Individual and institutional subscription fees.

Complaints about constantly rising subscription fees have been voiced by librarians and others for many years. Recent programs to move journal reviewing and distribution online (e.g., see Public Library of Science) are an attempt to change the overall technology and economics of the system while maintaining the quality control function of peer review. Other changes to the overall economics of the journal system include the increasing use of "free" commercial tools such as Google in the indexing and retrieval of scholarly information.

T. Scott provided one of the more balanced reviews of the Senate bill last year; it is located here with a current discussion (and comments) here. An example of organized support for FRPPA is described here (The Alliance for Taxpayer Access). Organized opposition is represented by The Association of American Publishers (AAP).

In my opinion, the fundamental question is the title of this article, i.e., "How Involved Should the U.S. Government Be in the Scholarly Journal Publishing Business?" Since the Federal government is already providing so much input to the process -- funding the research and the institutions where research takes place, helping to pay for front end page charges and for library subscriptions, assisting in payment of the salaries of the researchers and scholars who perform voluntary editorial and review roles, etc. etc. -- doesn't it makes perfect sense for the Government to take the logical next step and require that processes be established to publish the information that is generated through funded research?

The devil is on the details though, especially when we start to define "free access" and the following types of questions are raised:

  • Who will be responsible for paying for the typesetting, page composition, printing, page editing, and other costs associated with the physical part of the publishing process? (Think about the costs of editing and quality control associated with complex formulas and equations.)
  • Who should pay for indexing and abstracting the articles that are thus published? Will A&I services be responsible for publishing "embargo dates" after which original articles are freely available?
  • Should non-U.S. citizens be allowed to obtain "free access" to the research that is published as a result of U.S. Federal Government funding? What about students at academic institutions that do not restrict enrollment by children of undocumented workers?
  • What happens when a U.S. Senator complains that the U.S. government is distributing research that is based on a "controversial" topic (e.g., cloning, stem cell research, evolution, genetics and homosexuality, etc.)?
  • Will volunteer article reviewers care whether or not their efforts are subsidizing both free and commercial access systems?
  • Will copyright and intellectual property laws need to be modified?
  • What will happen to low circulation specialized journals that are already subsidized by professional association membership dues if they begin losing submissions?
  • Who will pay for the cost of systems and processes that must be instituted to ensure that articles are submitted to the official reporting or publishing agency as required?
  • Will a "two-tier" system evolve where minimally reviewed and edited articles are distributed through the Federally mandated system, then a higher level of editing and reviewing is applied, perhaps mixed with more sophisticated database and communication services?
  • Will the new system just be a formalization of the processes that already exist outside the peer review journal system (e.g., conferences, seminars, emailed files, etc.)?
  • What will happen to the supplementary data that accompany some articles?
  • After all is said and done, will the hours and dollars devoted to moving to the new system end up being the same, just distributed differently? And how will we really know if the new "free access" system is really better than the old, creaky, unfair system?

I don't know the answers to these questions. I do know that many publishers are already wrestling with the question of how much to give away for free and how much to require payment for. For an example, see this presentation Free Is Good by Stephen Rhind-Tutt of Alexander Street Press.

I am also concerned about the effect that increasing involvement by the Federal government in publishing will have a negative impact on experimentation with new business and publishing models. For example, in Are Social Networking and Social Media Threats or Opportunities for Professional Associations? I suggested that professional societies -- many of which publish scholarly peer reviewed journals -- may need to adopt social networking and collaborative social media as a way to "compete" with the growth in low cost professional networking and collaboration systems on the web. Will a Federally mandated publishing vehicle help -- or hinder -- such experimentation?

Since these questions are so difficult to answer with certainty, the logical place to work out these issues will be in the realm of politics. Here's hoping the debate will generate more light than heat.



Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Documentary videos on OA

Documentary videos on OA

By Peter Suber

A collection of documentary videos on OA is a giant step closer to a screen near you, thanks to a grant from the Open Society Institute. See the September 17 announcement from Intelligent Television and BioMed Central:

The Open Society Institute has awarded a grant to support the production and distribution of the Open Access Documentary Project, a collection of online videos celebrating the benefits of open access to scientific and medical research. Intelligent Television and BioMed Central are co-producers of the Project.

The Open Access Documentary Project will facilitate the ongoing work of BioMed Central and Intelligent Television in promoting open access to science and medicine in fields as diverse as malaria research and particle physics.

The producers are now assembling an international editorial board and contacting institutions that hold archival and production resources that will be vital to the project. Principal production has begun in London, New York, and at CERN in Geneva, featuring video interviews with publishers and consumers of scientific and medical information in the developed and developing world —and with other stakeholders in open access including foundations, government agencies, and the media....


Use PRISM To Start A Dialogue On Open Access


Use PRISM To Start A Dialogue On Open Access

By Marc Meola on Scholarly Communications

In a previous post I argued that developing free and open source library systems should be an ethical issue for academic librarians. Promoting open access to scholarly literature is another ethical issue we face.

PRISM, an anti-open access group of the Association of American Publishers, has launched a nasty PR campaign that attempts to demonize open access publishing by using simple slogans to equate open access with lack of peer review, government censorship, and theft of intellectual property. (I know, it's funny, but they are actually saying this stuff. Good thing librarians know how to evaluate information, right?)

As noted in the SPARC letter to members,

the launch of this initiative provides a timely opportunity for engaging faculty members, researchers, students and administrators in dialogue on important issues in scholarly communications.

Exactly. This is the perfect time to initiate or re-initiate a campus-wide committee on scholarly communication on your campus, start a committee at your local ACRL chapter or statewide consortium, or host a lecture or forum on open access.

Most encouragingly, the Association of Research Libraries has produced an excellent issue brief with talking points that effectively counter the PRISM propaganda. ARL points out:

On peer review-

The peer review system, based almost completely on the voluntary free labor of the research community, is independent of a particular mode of publishing or business model.

On intellectual property-

Researchers themselves write and peer review the articles without receiving any payment from publishers. The federal government provides substantial public funding for scientific research. Existing and proposed policies concerning public access to federally funded research attempt to create balance between the contributions made and benefits received by publishers and allow them to continue to profit tremendously from the pool of content this funded research generates.

In addition, academic bloggers have not been shy taking on PRISM's distortions. And if you need more ammo or a broader overview of the issue, Open Access and the Progress of Science is a well-written argument for open access to science literature in general and proposes the simple solution that scientists just deposit their papers in repositories as soon as they are peer reviewed.

Peter Suber, of course, is always a good source for debunking anti-open access arguments. One of the anti-open access claims is that open access will result in journal cancellations by libraries and collapse of the whole scholarly publishing system. (Well, how about the collapse of the exorbitant profiteering barrier access scholarly publishing system?) Suber points out, however, that open access in physics has not led to journal cancellations by libraries, and that this is in fact slowing the move from toll access to open access.

The question for librarians, higher ed administrators and scholars then, is why hasn't open access in physics led to journal cancellations? Do we really want to set up two systems, an open access repository system while maintaining the old system with publisher embargoes so that libraries will have to maintain subscriptions? Do we really want to "partner" with the kind of companies that have launched such a deceptive and distorted PR campaign?

With PRISM, commercial publishers are acting like cornered rats. Maybe this shows that open access is at a tipping point. Let's make sure it tips the right way.

Comments

PERSEE: French Open Access Portal to Scholarly Human and Social Sciences Journals

PERSEE is the French Open Access Portal to the archives of scholarly journals in the fields of Human and Social Sciences. It was initiated by the Ministry for National Education, Higher Education and Research and is maintained by a consortium of public research institutions led by the University Lumière - Lyon 2 in partnership with the Higher Education National Informatics Center (/Centre Informatique National de l'Enseignement Supérieur/ - CINES).

Based on an open-source policy, PERSEE developed new tools for the production and publication of digitized contents, following international norms in the fields of digital libraries and open access to scientific information.

Since its opening in January 2005, the PERSEE portal (www.persee.fr) offers a free and immediate online access to constantly growing collections of scientific journals, along with services specifically developed for the best use of these digitized contents.

Journal List [ http://www.persee.fr/listRevues.do ]

GWLA & CRL - Digitization of government technical reports

The Greater Western Library Alliance has launched a pilot project to digitize, archive, and provide persistent and unrestricted access to federal technical reports issued prior to 1975. The pilot database currently contains the National Bureau of Standards Monograph Series and reports of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

Digitization, metadata production and hosting are being undertaken under the auspices of GWLA. CRL's role in this pilot will be to ensure that the project is designed to result in persistent and sustainable resources. To that end we at CRL will work with GWLA to ensure that selection of the reports for digitization avoids duplication of, and to the extent possible is coordinated with, other widely supported efforts, such as those of Google, ARL, Open Content Alliance, the Government Printing Office, and the government agencies themselves. We will work with GWLA, moreover, to help identify viable platforms for hosting and providing access to the materials digitized and to develop a funding plan that will sustain the effort for the long term.

UW-Madison libraries provide seed money for open access publishing

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has become the latest institution to established a fund to support open access publication fees and digital publishing by faculty and academic staff. This fund will be managed by a new Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing (OSCP). The OSCP's website also includes a wealth of information about open access publishing for authors at the university.

[ http://blogs.openaccesscentral.com/blogs/bmcblog/entry/open_access_publication_fund_at ]

PLoS and Partners Offer Video Communications With SciVee

by Paula J. Hane


With online video the hottest content on the Web these days, it is a logical progression to see it move beyond popular entertainment into more serious efforts-instruction, conference presentations, video journals, and scholarly research explanations. The scientific community
in particular seems to be embracing the new medium to enhance the dissemination and comprehension of science. SciVee (http://www.scivee.tv/) is a new site that lets scientists communicate their works as multimedia presentations incorporated with the content of their published articles.
SciVee is operated in partnership with the open access publisher the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). The so-called "YouTube for science" site has already garnered a great deal of interest and buzz in the blogosphere and media, even though it is still in "alpha" stage and its founders weren't planning for a launch at this time.

According to one founder, Philip Bourne of the University of California-San Diego (UCSD) and founding editor in chief of PLoS Computational Biology, he talked about the project at a scientific
meeting and the buzz began prematurely. "The good news," he said, "is that more than 44,000 people have already looked at the site in the last few days; the bad news is that there's not enough content yet." (There look to be five pubcasts currently available.) The site is approaching 6 million hits and is drawing interest worldwide. The beta release is planned for September, and already some 700 people have volunteered to be beta testers.

The project began with some pilot pubcasts done at UCSD to test video formats and has involved the other PLoS editors. There are currently eight people on the SciVee team. The SDSC is providing the site hosting.

Bourne said that SciVee makes it easier and faster to keep up with current scientific literature because it can deliver the key points of articles in an enjoyable way-and one to which younger audiences in particular can relate. "I think it's a natural evolution of what YouTube created. It's what grad students of tomorrow will be used to," said Bourne.

[ http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbReader.asp?ArticleId=37308 ]

Canadian Institutes for Health Research: Open Access to Health Research Publications

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has just issued this announcement:
Open access to health research publications: CIHR unveils new policy
http://www.irsc.gc.ca/e/34851.html

Les Institutes de recherche et santé du Canada à publié pour diffusion immédiate:
Libre accès aux publications sur les recherches en santé : Les IRSC
lancent une nouvelle politique http://www.irsc.gc.ca/f/34851.html

Policy details in brief:

"grant recipients must make every effort to ensure that their peer-reviewed research articles are freely available as soon as possible after publication...by depositing the article in an archive, such as PubMed Central or an institutional repository, and/or by publishing results in an open access journal. A growing number of journals already meet these requirements and CIHR-funded researchers are encouraged to consider publishing in these journals...grant recipients are now required to deposit bioinformatics, atomic, and molecular coordinate data, as already required by most journals, into the appropriate public database immediately upon publication of research results.. Researchers are encouraged to make use of the SHERPA RoMEO Publisher Copyright Policies and Self-Archiving service to determine whether publishers policies are compliant with the policy, and the policy clarifies that article processing fees for
open access publishing are an eligible expense under the Use of Grant Funds".

Notable quotes from the Press Release:

Timely and unrestricted access to research findings is a defining feature of science, and is essential for advancing knowledge and accelerating our understanding of human health and disease," stated Dr. Alan Bernstein, President of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. "With the development of the internet it is now feasible to disseminate globally and easily the results of research that we fund. As a publicly-funded organization, we have a responsibility to ensure that new advances in health research are available to those who need it and can use it - researchers world-wide, the public and policy makers.

This open access policy will serve as a model for other funding agencies, said Dr. James E. Till of the Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto [Chair of the Task Force that developed this policy]. The policy will leverage taxpayers' investment by accelerating research and by fostering its broader application.

My comments (and those of others ) on the CIHR policy as yet another example of Canadian Leadership in the Open Access Movement: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2007/09/canadian-institutes-of-health-research.html


The library community in Canada can be proud of our participation,
through strong pro-open access-submissions, in the consultation
leading to this policy.

Video -- Copyright!

Great Video on Copyright, entitled "A Fair(y) Use Tale" by Eric Faden using Disney characters.

Sorry -- will add additional information and link (creator and citation) when I locate it again, but I wanted to try and load a video.


So here goes -- Video on basics of Copyright......



Welcome

Welcome --

I needed a place to post all of the information I was gathering in terms of Scholarly Communication or the Crisis in Scholarly Communication in terms of creating a sustainable systems that fits the needs of the principle stakeholders and furthers the educational and research usage of information and information systems.

I am defining Scholarly Communication in the broadest sense......
"Scholarly Communications encompasses the authoring, publishing, dissemination, and usage of information produced for teaching, learning or research in whatever format, with the tools, measures and systems needed to provide access to and store these materials in perpetuity."



The principle stakeholders are.....
Authors – Those who produce scholarly information
Publishers – Those responsible for the publication and distribution of this information
Librarians – Those who acquire, organize, classify, and provide access to the information.
Readers – Researchers, Students, etc. – Those who use the information usually to produce
more information



However, I am personally not as interested in the ethical use of information or the plagiarism aspects of the topic. I will try to include information in these areas as I come across them but do not expect to seek them out as I foresee I will be with other areas of the scholarly communication. I will attempt to tag all of my entries such that they can be organized and retrieved quickly.

The main topic areas I hope to cover are as follows:

Scholarly Communication -- background information, links, news, etc.
Inflation of Journals and Materials
Open Access
Institutional/Subject Based Repositories
Copyright
Authors Rights
Peer Review
Plagiarism
Access to Information


Thanks -- HSM