The Nobel prize for physiology or medicine was announced today.  According to the Associated Press,

...French researchers Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier were cited for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV; while Germany's Harald zur Hausen was honored for finding human papilloma viruses that cause cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women....

According to Jonathan Eisen, two of the three have published OA articles in PLoS journals:

...[C]heck out the recent PLoS One paper by Françoise Barré-Sinouss [and four co-authors]..., The CD85j+ NK Cell Subset Potently Controls HIV-1 Replication in Autologous Dendritic Cells [April 9, 2008]....

Also see PLoS Pathogens paper by Harald zur Hausen [and seven co-authors], Recognition of Conserved Amino Acid Motifs of Common Viruses and Its Role in Autoimmunity [December 16, 2005]

The Journal of Artificial General Intelligence is a new, no-fee, peer-reviewed OA journal which started accepting submissions on September 30, 2008.  JAGI gives authors a choice between traditional and open peer review.

John Dupuis, Interview with Dorothea Salo of Caveat Lector, Confessions of a Science Librarian, October 5, 2008.  Excerpt:

...Dorothea Salo [is the] Digital Repository Librarian at University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the blog Caveat Lector. Dorothea is well known for her role in the institutional repository and scholarly communications communities; she's the author of the widely read eprint on IRs "Innkeeper at the Roach Motel," forthcoming in the Fall 2008 Library Trends....

Q1. ...[W]hat do you think about "libraries' feasible and proper roles in scholarly communication?"

I think a lot of things. I think the institutional repository was a noble and worthwhile experiment, but as a tool for redressing the imbalances in the scholarly-communication system, it is a failure. It may be reborn if the Harvard experiment succeeds, but that very much remains to be seen. This doesn't mean that I think IRs are useless; they don't have to be, though they often are. It does mean that we're going to have to go after the serials crisis in other ways.

I think we libraries have a lot of market power that we are not using properly. I've heard publishers talk about their industry, and what they invariably say is "we will follow the money." That means libraries; as individual subscriptions dwindle, WE are the ones with the money. They'll follow us -- but we aren't leading them toward open access. We're squealing like stuck pigs about the stalemate, yes, but we're not reallocating any of our serials funds to support gold open access. I think this is a serious mistake....

There is also a serious and ugly undercurrent of anti-OA backlash among faculty....Librarians trifle with that at our peril, and we know it. So we sigh, and put every cent we have toward subscriptions, and feel backed against the wall....

I want to see us cancelling overpriced journals, regardless of their impact factors or usage statistics, and standing up to faculty when they ask why. We need to say "no" loudly and clearly more often, and we need to divert some of the serials money we save thereby to gold open access. (Some should go back to monographs, of course.)

As a matter of strategy, then, the open-access movement needs to target serials and e-resources librarians with requests for support of gold OA....

I think some of us [librarians] have futures as publishing support specialists. Open Journal Systems isn't going away. I don't know how big this will become, truthfully, but I do know that I trust librarians a lot more than I trust other potential and actual players in this space. Big-pig publishers lost credibility as scholarship's dutiful handmaidens long ago, and I'm nearly as cynical about scholarly societies, which had their chance to stand with us but stuck by the big pigs instead. A pox on both their houses; if the scholarly societies are right and open access sinks some of them, I'm perfectly baffled as to why I as a librarian should care....

Q7. In terms of the future of IRs over the next, say, five years, what would the best and worst case scenarios be?

Worst case is easy: they are defunded and die. Harvard delayed that, but I don't think they have prevented it. If the software remains obtuse and difficult, if the goals remain socio-culturally impractical, if the services remain under-resourced and poorly understood, IRs are doomed. At a good many institutions, I believe this is inevitable, still; it's just going to take a little longer than I initially thought. The five-year time horizon you specify should suffice.

Best case: IRs shift from "warehouse at the end of the digital train tracks" to a set of services and systems that manage, safeguard, and shepherd the digital products of the research process all the way through, soup to nuts. We have successful examples of this already, particularly in Australia, and Europe is starting to build them as well. In this country, I suspect they aren't going to grow out of IRs -- they'll be part of the funder-initiated and IT-spearheaded movement to cope with research data locally. This is my warning call to libraries: if we're not in on these discussions, we'll be shut out of the resulting services, and that's bad for all concerned....

Q8. ...What major changes do you see happening in the next few years in terms of some of the major issues such as journal publishing, publishers' business models, the role of scholarly societies, and the open access movement? ...

The publishing lobby will continue its stunning mendacity, largely though not entirely unopposed by rank-and-file publishers. There will be more open-access journals. It is likely to become harder to assert that open-access journals are unsustainable, but that won't stop the publishing lobby from trying -- and it won't stop a few gold journals from folding, either. We will continue to argue about citation advantages, and just what a citation is worth. Faculty will continue to feel whipsawed by all this....

NISO brings together Data Thought Leaders, an announcement from NISO, October 3, 2008.  (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)  Excerpt:

We held the last of the Mellon-funded Thought Leader Meeting series Wednesday.  The topic of this meeting was on Research Data and explored many of the issues surrounding the use, reuse, preservation, and citation of data in scholarship....

Some work done by the JISC had been focused on mandating deposit of materials for the purpose of preservation. Unfortunately, the project didn’t succeed and was withdrawn in 2007. One of the potential reasons that more than $3 million investment turned out to be a disappointment was possibly its focus on archiving and preservation of the data deposited and not focused on reuse and application of deposited data. In order for the preservation to be deemed worth the investment, simultaneous focus on the reuse of the data is critical to ensuring that the investment sees some form of return — apart from developing a large repository of never-accessed data.

While there was some discussion during the day that related to encouraging use and sharing of research data and methodologies, technical standards will not help with what is inherently a political question.  Many of the rewards and recognition in the scholarly process come back to the formalities of publication, which have developed over centuries.  As with many standards-related questions, the problems are not normally related to technologies per se, but often hinge on the political or social conventions that support certain activities.  That said, the development of citation structures, descriptive metadata conventions, discovery methodologies, and curation strategies will add to the growing trends of utilizing these data forms in scholarly communications.  By expanding their use and ensuring that the content if preserved and citable, NISO could help encourage expanded use of data in the communication process.

The report of this meeting will be publicly available in a few weeks on the NISO website....

The Open Access Directory (OAD) now hosts the official list of Events celebrating Open Access Day. 

The list is sponsored by the Open Access Day founding partners, PLoS, SPARC, and Students for Free Culture. 

Because OAD is a wiki, you can edit and enlarge the list and we hope you will.  If your group or institution is planning something for OA Day, or if you know of an event not already included, please take a moment to add it.  Editing OAD is limited to registered users, but registration is free and easy.

Statement in support of the investigative work of Richard Poynder, October 5, 2008.  Excerpt:

Richard Poynder, a distinguished scientific journalist specializing in online-era scientific/scholarly communication and publication, has been the ablest, most prolific and most probing chronicler of the open access movement from its very beginning. He is widely respected for his independence, even-handedness, analysis, careful interviews, and detailed research.

Richard is currently conducting a series of investigations on the peer review practices of some newly formed open access journals and their publishers. In one case, when a publisher would not talk to him privately, Richard made his questions public in the American Scientist Open Access Forum....

Those groundless threats and accusations appear to us to be attempts to intimidate. Moreover, Richard is being portrayed as an opponent of open access, which he is not. He is an even-handed, critically minded analyst of the open access movement (among other things), and his critical investigations are healthy for open access.

He has interviewed us both, at length. While the resulting pictures were largely favorable, he didn't hesitate to probe our weaknesses and the objections others have raised to our respective methods or styles of work. This kind of critical scrutiny is essential to a new and fast-growing movement and does not imply hostility to the subjects of his investigation or opposition to open access.

Trying to suppress Richard Poynder's investigations through threats of legal action is contemptible. We hope that the friends of open access in the legal community will attest to the lawfulness of his inquiries and that all friends of open access will attest to the value and legitimacy of his investigative journalism.

Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad

The big news for this monthly feature is that we have now topped a quarter million working papers listed in RePEc. In terms of traffic, we have recorded 675,205 file downloads and 2,704,001 abstract views on the reporting RePEc services. Note that these numbers are, as always, the results of heavy adjustments in order to count legitimate human readers.

New contributors to RePEc for the month are: Queen’s University (II), Universität Giessen, World Bank (II), Bangladesh Development Research Center, Nottingham Trent University, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER), Emerald Insight, Universidad de Antioquia, Watson Wyatt Worldwide. ...

Campus MovieFest, the world’s largest student film festival, is a new sponsor of the 2008 Sparky Awards, a contest that recognizes the best new short videos on the value of sharing information. The competition promotes discussion of free and open access to information by inviting students to consider the issues and creatively express their views. ...

As a sponsor, Campus MovieFest (CMF) will draw the attention of tens of thousands of student filmmakers to the Sparky Awards. The winner of the 2008 Sparky Awards will be screened at the CMF Southern Grand Finale in Spring 2009.

SPARC has also announced that 2008 contest judges will include noted media experts:

• Michael Wesch, the anthropologist whose innovative video explaining Web 2.0 has been viewed more than seven million times on YouTube;
• Media scholar and filmmaker Kembrew McLeod, whose book and documentary film entitled Freedom of Expression®: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property have received broad critical acclaim; and
• University of Pennsylvania cinema studies professor Peter Decherney, author of Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American and leader of the 2006 petition for an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for media professors to use clips in teaching.

The 2008 Sparky judges panel also includes:

• Nicole Allen, director of The Student PIRGs’ “Make Textbooks Affordable” campaign
• Barbara DeFelice, Digital Resources Program Director, Dartmouth College, representing ACRL
• Rick Johnson, SPARC’s founding Executive Director and senior advisor
• Rich Jones, leader of the Students for Free Culture Boston Chapter
• Jennifer McLennan, Director of Communications at SPARC
• Jessica Reynoso of Campus MovieFest
• Crit Stuart, Director of Research, Teaching, and Learning at ARL
• Anu Vedantham, Director of the Weigle Information Commons at Penn Libraries ...

John Wilbanks, of Science Commons - a project of Creative Commons - says the plethora of machine-generated data, that characterises today's scientific activity, needs the power of open networks to make sense of it properly.

"The value of any individual piece of knowledge is about the value of any individual piece of lego," Wilbanks said in a keynote address to the Open Access and Research Conference [Brisbane, September 24-25, 2008] ...

"It's not that much until you put it together with other legos." ...

Paul Ginsparg, The global-village pioneers, PhysicsWorld, October 1, 2008.  A very enjoyable reminiscence over an important career, including the launch of arXiv.  Excerpt:

...For purely practical reasons, authors at the time [1980s] used to post photocopies of their newly minted articles to only a small number of people. Those lower in the food chain relied on the beneficence of those on the A-list, and aspiring researchers at non-elite institutions were frequently out of the privileged loop entirely. This was a problematic situation, because, in principle, researchers prefer that their progress depends on working harder or on having some key insight, rather than on privileged access to essential materials....

At the Aspen Center for Physics, in Colorado, in the summer of 1991, a stray comment from a physicist, concerned about e-mailed articles overrunning his disk allocation while travelling, suggested to me the creation of a centralized automated repository and alerting system, which would send full texts only on demand. That solution would also democratize the exchange of information, levelling the aforementioned research playing field, both internally within institutions and globally for all with network access.  Thus was born xxx.lanl.gov, initially an e-mail/FTP server....

Not everyone appreciated just how rapidly things were progressing. In early 1994 I happened to serve on a committee advising the APS about putting Physical Review Letters online. I suggested that a Web interface along the lines of the xxx.lanl.gov prototype might be a good way for the APS to disseminate its documents. A response came back from another committee member: “Installing and learning to use a World Wide Web browser is a complicated and difficult task — we can’t possibly expect this of the average physicist.” So the APS went with a different (and short-lived) platform....

In the direction of less-than-anticipated change, a decade and a half ago I certainly would not have expected the current metastable state in physics publications, of preprint servers happily coexisting with conventional online publications, the two playing different roles....

arXiv has passed the milestone of 500,000 deposits.  From today's announcement:

Reinforcing its place in the scientific community, the arXiv repository at Cornell University Library reached a new milestone in October 2008. Half a million e-print postings --research articles published online-- now reside in arXiv, which is free and available to the public....

More than 200,000 articles are downloaded from arXiv each week by about 400,000 users, and its 118,000 registered submitters live in nearly 200 countries...Fifteen countries host mirrors of the main site....

[Paul] Ginsparg developed arXiv in 1991, when he was working for Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. When Ginsparg came to Cornell as a faculty member in 2001, the repository came with him and is now a collaboration between Cornell University Library and Cornell's Information Science Program. The Library maintains the repository; information science handles research and development....

One of the bloggers for the JISC Information Environment Team blog has posted some notes on the Fifth International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects.  Excerpt:

Headline message from the conference - Don't mention the ‘Preservation’ word! (it's confusing and people worry about it) … it's all about enabling future ACCESS to spectacular resources.

Comment.  I like the way this flips the conventional wisdom at many institutional repositories:  "Don't mention open access (people don't know what it is or they will make up things to worry about); get faculty to deposit their manuscripts by talking about PRESERVATION."  Now who's right?

The American Physiological Society has released a September 18 supplement to Martin Frank's written and oral testimony at the September 11 hearing on the Conyers bill.  Excerpt:

...During the course of the hearing, several issues were raised that I thought needed clarification and comment....

Setting the Record Straight on Public Access Policies in Other Countries

Some have suggested that the NIH public access policy requiring that manuscripts of scientific articles be made available for free access on the Internet is more conservative than similar policies in other countries. This is not the case. While public access policies in Canada, Australia and France have a 6-month embargo period, they are conditional policies that do not require authors to deposit their manuscripts.

The Canadian Institute of Health Research policy specifically states publications must be made freely accessible “where allowable and in accordance with publisher policies.” Australia’s public access policy “encourages researchers to consider the benefits of depositing their data and any publications,” rather than requiring deposit, making this policy voluntary....

Proponents of the NIH public access policy also argue that the NIH policy is more conservative than the policies adopted by private funding bodies that require authors to deposit their articles within six months of publication. It is important to note, however, that these private funding bodies such as Wellcome Trust, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, British Heart Foundation, and Arthritis Research Campaign provide either the authors or publishers funding of between $1,000 and $5,000 per article to help offset the cost of peer review and other publishing costs and make the articles free for public access. The NIH has made no such arrangements with publishers. It allows the grantee to use a portion of their grant funds to defray the publisher fees, but leaves the author paying from his or her own pocket when the grant period is over or when grant funds are used up for research....

Comments

• Frank is right that some funder OA policies, even some using mandatory language, leave loopholes for publishers whose copyright policies do not allow OA on the funder's terms.  But he leaves the false impression that no funders anywhere, except the NIH, close that loophole.  In the article I published yesterday on the Conyers bill, I say more about the these two kinds of funder OA mandates (see the third bullet section) and list eight funders in the second category:  the Arthritis Research Campaign (UK), Cancer Research UK, Department of Health (UK), Howard Hughes Medical Institute (US), Joint Information Systems Committee (UK), Medical Research Council (UK), Wellcome Trust (UK), and --for now-- by the National Institutes of Health (US).
• He also confuses things by mixing together policies which merely request or encourage OA with policies that use mandatory language but allow exceptions or opt-outs.  I admit that we don't have good vocabulary for all these variations on the theme and that the word "mandate" doesn't cover them all very well.  But it goes without saying that the "request" policies are weaker than the "require" policies, and that there are many "request" policies.  If the question is whether any funders outside the US have policies as strong or stronger than the NIH policy, then we should look past the "request" policies and focus on the "require" policies.
• Frank acknowledges that some funder OA mandates use six month embargoes while the NIH allows a 12 month embargo.  But he seems to think that only private funders fall into this category, or at least he only lists examples of private funders.  However, the private funders in this category are outnumbered by the public funders and public-private partnerships:  the Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, European Research Council, Cancer Research UK, Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Executive Health Department, Department of Health (UK), Fund to Promote Scientific Research (Austria), Genome Canada, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Joint Information Systems Committee (UK), and the National Cancer Institute of Canada. 
• Nor does he mention that the NIH is the only medical research funder with an OA mandate, public or private, in any country, using an embargo longer than six months.
• Frank acknowledges that the NIH allows grantees to use grant funds to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals.  But he doesn't mention that it allows the grant funds to cover publication costs at both OA or TA journals.  Nor does he mention that the NIH pays out $100 million/year for this purpose.

Richard K. Johnson, Free Our Libraries!  Why We Need A New Approach to Putting Library Collections Online, Boston Library Consortium, September 25, 2008.  Excerpt:

...[A] momentous, ill-considered shift is now afoot that threatens to limit the public rights in the collections assembled and maintained, often at public expense, in libraries around the globe.

Today Google and other businesses are scanning millions of books from the world’s great libraries and offering access to them on the Web. This conjures up the vision of a vast, free, Internet public library of accumulated knowledge. It seems like a marriage made in heaven—the union of corporate capital and enormous library collections, carrying knowledge into virtually every home and workplace.  Unfortunately, it’s not....

Barriers to use of digital texts are popping up almost as fast as books are being scanned. The rights that readers enjoyed in the print world are being eroded as books are electronically transformed. In the process, we’re at risk of losing some of the rights we enjoyed under copyright....

Before the Internet, there was little argument over what people could do with public domain works. They could do anything. But technology makes it possible to impose new technical and contractual protections that can be applied willy-nilly to in-copyright and public domain works alike....

For example, companies that are scanning library collections have required users to gain online access to books solely via proprietary search engines. They also have prohibited users from employing third-party computing tools such as screen readers for the visually impaired or scholarly text analysis tools. In effect, they are securing and enforcing a monopoly on the digital texts of works that are in the public domain. Of course, other businesses might also scan a library’s collections, but this is a substantial undertaking and, as a practical matter, isn’t apt to happen anytime soon....

From a commercial perspective, it seems pretty simple. If a company pays to scan works, shouldn’t they get to decide who can see them and under what conditions?  No, they shouldn’t be allowed to make such a decision. The works they’re exploiting are available as a result of public funding or the tax advantages afforded non-profit institutions, so the public’s interest should take precedence....

Update. For more on the event where Johnson delivered this paper, see the report we posted yesterday.