From: American Scientist Open Access Forum.

Short version see also the article recommended: Research with purpose

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From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG] On Behalf Of Arthur Sale
Sent: Friday, May 26, 2006 8:56 PM
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Proposal for Australia to mandate research article deposit

Apologies for cross-posting – Arthur Sale

I have yesterday forwarded a submission to the Australian Research Council (one of Australia’s two public research funding councils, covering all but biomedical research) regarding requiring grantees to deposit their published articles arising from the grant in an OAI-PMH repository. The ARC asked for submissions on its Funding Rules and Funding Agreements. I have extracted below the Executive Summary and the signatories. My personal thanks to all those who provided comment or agreed to support the submission. I hope for a good outcome.

If you are interested in reading the full submission, please see http://eprints.comp.utas.edu.au:81/archive/00000277/.

Executive Summary

The submission is addressed to making a change in the reporting requirements for all funded schemes, which will make it a requirement of receiving the grant to deposit an electronic copy of any refereed research journal or conference articles deriving from the grant with the institution administering the grant. Minor changes are needed in the Funding Rules and the Funding Agreements. Precise wording is supplied to eliminate any concerns by publishers and to make the implementation easy.

The benefits to Australia are that Australia’s ARC publicly funded research is made visible to all through the Internet, and in the majority of cases publicly accessible. This will raise Australia’s research impact and is consistent with Australia’s espousal of a level playing field in the dissemination of research, and with activities currently underway or implemented in the USA, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union.

5 Signatories

Submission prepared by

Arthur Sale

Professor of Computing (Research), University of Tasmania. Previously Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Information Services), University of Tasmania, and National Vice-President of the Australian Computer Society Inc. Recipient of the 2004 Individual Achievement Award from the ICT Industry, and recipient of the 2001 ANCCAC Award for best Australian paper in ICT. See also http://www.comp.utas.edu.au/app/staff_profile.jsp?user=ahjs.

Stevan Harnad

Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science at Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada, and Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Southampton, UK. He is an External Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Founder and editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences (a paper journal published by Cambridge University Press), Psycoloquy (an electronic journal sponsored by the American Psychological Association) and the CogPrints Electronic Preprint Archive in the Cognitive Sciences. He is also moderator of the American Scientist Open Access Forum. See also http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/vita.html.

Alma Swan

Director, Key Perspectives Ltd. Alma held a faculty position at the University of Leicester until 1985, when she moved into science publishing. In 1996, she jointly founded Key Perspectives, a consultancy serving the scholarly publishing industry. Since 1991 she has been tutor for two business strategy courses on Warwick Business School’s MBA programme and holds honorary roles as business mentor and teacher for the Institute for Entrepreneurship (part of the School of Management) at Southampton University.

Peter Suber

Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, Open Access Project Director at Public Knowledge, and Senior Researcher at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). Author of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, the Open Access News weblog, and principal drafter of the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

Other support

Many other members of the Open Access community have expressed their personal support for the recommendations in Section 3. Their names are listed in the open access forum post by Arthur Sale.

As i go two days over my guest blog status, i wanted to share a couple of resources for "further reading" in regards to Open Access and other issues:

Found via New York Academy of Medicine Library's Grey Literature Report:
Federal funding for health services research.

My cubicle neighbor at the University of California at Berkeley helped work on the UC Berkeley Faculty Conference on Scholarly Publishing March 31, 2005 [i can still hear her hair pulling at times] which resulted in this webpage Scholarly Publishing — New Models that provides nice background information and links.

If you are looking for databases of freely available OA journal information available on the internet there are many "out there", but two i recommend are:

Gold Rush which provides access to over 50 open access databases and over 8000 open access journals in a variety of subject areas.

Genamics JournalSeek that includes a description of the journals as well as link outs to database and indexing information via Openly Jake.

And, i close with a link to a letter from my predecessor, Judith C. Wilkerson, who in November 2004 published a Comment on NIH Notice NOT-OD-04-064 Open Access to Taxpayer Funded Research to the National Institutes of Health's Director Dr. Elias Zerhouni in which she notes, among other things:

It is a public policy mistake to delay access to the public that paid for research and the US research community, especially if content is released immediately to third world countries that could be our enemies. It is not is the best interest of the country or its citizens. Nor is it fair.

Don't forget to share you views with Congress as legislation is being considered and remember to: OpenTheGovernment.org!

Perhaps i'll see some of you in NOLA.

While not necessarily "governmental" -- a recent article in the PLoS Biology by Gunther Eysenbach is generating a lot of blogging regarding green and gold Open Access: two parallel “roads” towards OA: OA journals and self-archiving.

Interesting enough, the article that identifies these roads is by Stevan Harnad, Tim Brody, et al "The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access" is in a non-OA journal: Serials Review Volume 30, Issue 4, 2004, pp 310-314. Which is owned by Elsevier which has recently sent a letter offering authors the ability to make their articles open access: Elsevier offers OA hybrid journals via Peter Suber's Open Access News.

However, if you want to follow some of the discussions of the PLoS article and other OA issues,there are some starting points:

Caveat Lector's Open Access

Stevan Harnad's Open Access Archivangelism

and of course, in the same issue of PLoS Biology issue Open Access Increases Citation Rate

The National Library of Medicine works with medical libraries via LinkOut: a service of Entrez [i.e., PubMed] that allows direct links from PubMed and other Entrez databases to a wide range of information and services. "LinkOut aims to facilitate access to relevant online resources in order to extend, clarify, and supplement information found in the Entrez databases".

On October 4, 2005, the Environment Protection Agency notified Congress of its intent to reduce the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) reporting requirement for covered facilities from annual to biannually; and a rulemaking proposal to raise the reporting thresholds from 500 to 5000 pounds. See: Toxics Release Inventory 2006 Burden Reduction | OMB Watch | ALA GODORT’s Resolution on Protecting the Toxics Release Inventory Program

Congress is scheduled to vote this week on an amendment that would prevent the EPA from rolling-back reporting requirements for toxic pollution under the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI). Know as the Pallone-Solis Toxic Right-To-Know Amendment to the Interior Appropriations Bill, a variety of organizations are urging action for supporting the amendment: ALA Legislative Action Center and OMB Watch

The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 bill would require that federally funded research appearing in peer-reviewed journals be made openly accessible in digital repositories within six months of publication. See: beSpacific and Red Tape Blog. For additional discussion, be sure to include Open Access News and American Scientist Open Access Forum

For some excellent background information on Open Access, good starting points include:

• Electronic Journals and Open Access via the National Network of Libraries of Medicine
• Medical Library Association: Statement on Open Access
• Open Access: Where You Publish Makes A Difference via Stanford University Lane Medical Library & Knowledge Management Center
• WMC Library - Open Access via Weill Cornell Medical Library

When I interviewed for my current position as Head, Serials Services at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center’s Robert M. Bird Health Sciences Library, there was a proposal for the potential privatization of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. Due to efforts of the American Library Association (ALA) and the Medical Library Association (MLA) and many other interested organizations and individuals, it appears that Environmental Health Perspectives [EHP] is now an open access journal and the website proudly notes that “all content is freely available to everyone online immediately after publication”.

Open Access, like Information Literacy, has a number of definitions and interpretations, and my hope in this guest blog is to provide some avenues of information on the topic. Those of us who remember “early threats” to access to government funded research may recall that one of the first, if not the first, journal of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to be privatized. In 1997, the Government Printing Office’s Library Program Service was notified that the Journal of the National Cancer Institute had been "privatized." Ownership was transferred from the National Cancer Institute to Oxford University Press - USA, Inc. Superintendent of Documents Wayne Kelley said that the letter went on to explain that "because the Journal is no longer a publication of the U.S. Government, copies of the Journal and JNCI Monographs will not be provided to the Depository Library Program nor will sale copies be available at the GPO bookstore." and that "the new price, from Oxford, is $120 for an individual and $150 for an institution". Current pricing for the OUHSC library for this title is $585 for print and online. And, fortunately, Oxford Journals does include JNCI and other titles in it’s “ Open Access experiments”.