Archive:Open Access Training/Presentation Notes

Taking Action on Open Access - Jan. 13, 2007

 * Heather Joseph - Open Access: Taking Action
 * Bio
 * Executive Director, SPARC
 * SPARC
 * http://www.arl.org/sparc
 * Coalition of academic & research libraries
 * "Address market imbalances in the scholarly communication system."
 * "Explosion in knowledge" - "formats and volume"
 * "Poor price signaling"
 * "Publisher monopoly of must-have content"
 * Content "copyright (or exclusive license)" transferred to publisher
 * Publishers want to maximize financial return, not dissemination
 * Created as "catalyst for action"
 * "Expand dissemination of research results"
 * "Reduce financial pressures on libraries"
 * "Leverage the networked... environment to better serve scholarship"
 * Program focuses
 * Educate on "problems and opportunities for change"
 * Business & publishing demonstrations incorporating positive changes
 * Including alternative journals (non-profit)
 * Policy advocacy
 * New focus on Open Access - see it as
 * "immediate free, online availability of research results [produced] without expectation of payment"
 * "an access model, not a business model"
 * NOT just "author pays"
 * Access & Innovation
 * International Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Report on scientific publishing, 2005.
 * "Governments would boost innovation" & ROI in publically-funded research by making research results more publicly available
 * Text mining makes new innovations potentially possible that were infeasible to discover previously - but wait, specific talk on this later.
 * CSFB, Sector Review: Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishing. April 6, 2004.
 * "expect governments (and taxpayers)" to examine the fact that they are essentially funding the same purchase three times"
 * Public research funding
 * Academics' salaries
 * Funding to libraries that buy the output
 * "We do not see this as sustainable in the long term"
 * Note: publishers' profit margins ~38% last year
 * Also note - no scholars are paid for submitting articles (which includes surrendering all rights)
 * MIT internal review - even MIT, "wealthiest private research institution in the U.S." can afford access to less than 70% of peer-reviewed research that they want to provide for their users.
 * The majority of other institutions in the U.S. are in even worse situations
 * 25 U.S. University Provosts, an Open Letter to the Higher Education Community, 7-24-06.
 * "broad dissemination of the results of scholarly inquiry and discourse... is mission critical" for higher education.
 * Open Access has advantages for researchers - in citations
 * Lawrence, Steve (2001). "Free online availability substantially increases a paper's impact." Nature, Vol. 411, No. 6837, p.521.
 * Many other papers available
 * Advocacy
 * "Networks" of libraries ready to take issue-oriented action
 * Larger coalition of library organizations, ready to act on larger/slower issues
 * Wider coalitions on specific issues, beyond academic community - Alliance for Taxpayer Access
 * http://www.taxpayeraccess.org
 * Taxpayers entitled to open access to scientific articles on government-funded research
 * Advocacy success - NIH Public Access Policy (1-year embargo, voluntary) - but only 4% compliance
 * Cor(n?)yn & Lieberman bill in the Senate on these issues - will be re-introduced this year, possibly 1Q
 * Current proposed name Federal Research Public Access (FERPA) - welcome suggestions!
 * Committments made in the House to introduce a corresponding bill
 * Need visible support from active researchers, research/faculty groups/unions, *student groups*
 * Gavin Yamey MD, Public Library of Science (http://www.plos.org)
 * Stories
 * Ham MF et al. Open-access publishing. Lancet. 2004;364:24-5.
 * Group of jr. doctors from Indonesia begin research - stopped by costs.
 * Yamey G. Africa's visionary editor. BMJ, Oct 2003; 327: 732.
 * WHO asked James Tumwine to investigate outbreak of "nodding disease" in Sudan.
 * Stopped by costs.
 * Basic Problem
 * Publicly funded research results end up privately owned, and shared only at very high costs.
 * Researcher does the work, hands it (and the copyright) to publishers
 * Extremely high costs charged by the publishers - single high-profile drug trial can lead to over $1 million in revenue
 * Such information is essentially a global public good - so this constitutes a global health crisis.
 * Most audiences have no access to primary literature - including medical & research audiences audiences
 * Solution now available
 * Internet makes global dissemination possible at extremely low costs.
 * Subscription fees might have made sense before - each copy had non-trivial incremental cost.
 * Online publishers have only one-time fixed cost (incremental cost trivial, order of pennies or less) - suffices to recover fixed costs upfront, such as... the Open Access model!
 * Open Access (as by PLoS)
 * Characteristics
 * "Free, unrestricted online access"
 * Users "licensed to download, print, copy, redistribute, and create derivative works" (CC Attribution License)
 * Author retains copyright (not the publisher)
 * Papers immediately in a public, searchable repository
 * Some advocate self-archiving in public repositories as easier to achieve - but copyright restrictions from other publishers make this hard - and no business model (in fact, could destroy current journal system with no replacement).
 * Advantages
 * No financial barriers
 * Open to searching & technical (data/text-mining) sorts of analysis
 * Network of literature (citation graph) can even be joined into other networks, including data systems
 * Financing
 * Still costs money to produce an article
 * Publication charge per published article
 * Currently at $2000-2500 (waivers for poorly funded researchers)
 * Myths
 * Quality must be worse
 * Nothing intrinsic that changes peer-review process - in fact, most OA journals committed to stringent peer review for their own survival.
 * Unfair to developing world authors
 * If authors can't pay publication free, waived - no questions asked.
 * Editors made blind to author's ability to pay.
 * Initiatives started to cover publication fees in poorer countries (e.g. OSI support covers 50 countries)
 * No impact factor
 * Calculated (by secret method) by Thomson Scientific.
 * Any new journal has inherently no impact factor.
 * New ways to measure impact offered by OA journals.
 * PLoS Biology - 14.7
 * PLoS Medicine - 8.4 (same as British Medical Journal, a 200-year old journal!)
 * Already plenty of free online journals
 * Most (75%) are not free in any way.
 * Free access different from open access - copyright restrictions may still apply.
 * HINARI uses a GNP cutoff for free access of $3000 (per capita) - misses Brazil, Indonesia, among others.
 * Abstracts should be enough
 * Doesn't seem fair to developing-world researchers.
 * Abstracts are often wrong
 * Ward et al. looked at abstracts from 7 big pharmacy journals - dangerous errors in over 61%.
 * PLoS One
 * New journal from PLoS
 * Inclusive (of all fields, all significance levels)
 * Objective peer review
 * Post-publishing community commentary, annotation, etc.
 * Personalizable interface
 * Software named Topaz - incorporates personalizable interface, directly visible annotation, etc.
 * John Wilbanks (sp?), Science Commons (http://www.sciencecommons.org)
 * 1655 - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London created - essentially the first scientific journal
 * Note - this journal now lives on the Web, and is closed-access.
 * Side note - the early articles are public domain, but not publically available. But, public domain, cuts off relatively early - e.g., Watson & Crick's article on the structure of DNA is not in the public domain.
 * Budapest Open Access Initiative
 * Basically, definition coincides with the CC Attribution License - except that there's a concept of scientific integrity that may be incompatible with the sweeping freedoms of such licenses.
 * Trust chain, which starts with peer review, potentially broken.
 * Though - there's no legal way to distinguish this, so the license options are binary: derivative works allowed, or no derivative works allowed.
 * At least one counterargument, among several others proposed by others at the meeting - this shouldn't be enforced via copyright law!
 * Defamation, libel, etc. present more proper legal options
 * Springer offers options to authors - pay to use a CC license (BY-NC v2.5) on your article
 * Price - $3,000
 * Figures called into question for accuracy by others at the meeting
 * Exponential advances in research methods
 * Basic analysis on information available on p53 - would take 111 years to read all of the papers
 * 6 months ago - it was 105 years
 * So in 6 months - "added 6 years to the cognitive burden"
 * "'the article as PDF' is worse than outdated" - should be able to "decompose the article"
 * Text, data, etc. should be separable, giving better information access
 * Linking articles' information changes things tremendously - completely new results can be found that were buried in the "details" and left undiscovered due to various separations (between fields, between locations, etc.)
 * The limitations on this are enforced on the basis of copyright, and implemented deeply in the DRM
 * Contextualizing
 * Open access to digital information - necessary, not sufficient
 * More ideal - "Free and open sharing of information, data, and materials regarding published research"
 * Information - tools used, raw data sets, commentary on the results/methods, etc.
 * This is getting worse, not better.
 * Speaker's definition of a true "science commons"
 * Text
 * Experimental tools
 * Data
 * Infrastructure to use it all