Open Access News

Open access roundup

2009-11-06T16:39:00.003-05:00

Sweden's Pirate Party, which supports OA, will gain its second seat in the European Parliament, thanks to reapportionment as part of the recently ratified Lisbon Treaty.
Three more BioMed Central journals have been accepted for tracking by Thomson Reuters and will receive impact factors.
RePEc added 16 new participating archives in October 2009.
PubMed Central will show the table of contents for some embargoed journals before the embargoed content is available.
The OA Hazardous Substances Data Bank added its first set of records on nanomaterials.
John Wilbanks shares his further thoughts on why "open source" is an insufficient metaphor for open approaches to science.
Barbara Fister on libraries: "We must position ourselves as the champions of students and faculty and their right to read and learn without ... hindrances and barriers".
Meanwhile, Lawrence Lessig tells educational technologies to become "radical militant activists" for legal, accessible sharing of knowledge.
The revised draft Google Book Settlement is due on November 9, Kenneth Crews reminds us.
Anne Fitzgerald released her report on public sector information, Open access policies, practices and licensing: a review of the literature in Australia and selected jurisdictions.

PMC Canada launches

2009-11-06T16:36:00.001-05:00

As previously announced, PubMed Central Canada launched during Open Access Week. The manuscript submission system will launch later this year.

See also our past posts on PMC Canada.

ARL strategic plan focuses on OA

2009-11-06T15:23:00.003-05:00

The Association of Research Libraries has released its strategic plan for 2010-2012. Each of the plan's three strategic directions touches on OA, directly or indirectly.

From the strategic direction Influencing Public Policies:

... Expand ARL�s capacity for advancing open access/open science and access to data through increased advocacy and collaboration with other allied and partner organizations such as the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). ...

From the strategic direction Reshaping Scholarly Communication:

... Sponsor, conduct, and promote research that will inform the development and assessments of models of scholarly communication. ...

PLoS and DeepDyve

2009-11-06T14:20:00.002-05:00

Liz Allen, Responding to community feedback - DeepDyve and PLoS - Q & A, Public Library of Science, November 4, 2009.

Over the past few days, a company called DeepDyve, who run a search engine that we use on the PLoS.org website, announced a rental service for research articles. DeepDyve offers two types of content on its site - restricted-access content (from traditional publishers such as OUP, Wiley-Blackwell, Sage and others) which can be "rented" for $0.99 on a "pay-as-you-go" model and open-access content, which is always free.

The open-access and library community have been asking some pertinent questions about this new launch and our involvement with it which we'd like to address in this blog post.

Q: Is PLoS charging a fee for access to articles that appear in DeepDyve?

A: There is no financial gain to PLoS - all our content is freely available online to everyone, including commercial organizations, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License that we use.

Q: Why has PLoS agreed to provide its content to DeepDyve?

A. The Creative Commons License means that no permission is required to reuse PLoS content - in fact, creative reuse for commercial as well as non-commercial purposes is encouraged. Readers might like to know that almost every organization that wants to use PLoS content in bulk checks in with us first out of courtesy and this was the case with Deep Dyve. ...

Q. Is PLoS doing this to gain eyeballs on its content?

A. PLoS content is freely available to everyone who wants to reuse it. We want as many people as possible to take advantage of this content because research information is most powerful when more people can discover and use it and naturally, we're in favor of maximum exposure for the work of PLoS authors. ...

Finally, when we raised some of the concerns of the community, listed above, with DeepDyve they were responsive and immediately made the status of open-access content clearer on their website.

See also our past post on DeepDyve.

Housekeeping

2009-11-04T21:34:00.000-05:00

I'll be out tomorrow for a personal day. But check the Open Access Tracking Project for the latest updates, and I'll be back Friday.

Open access roundup

2009-11-04T21:00:00.002-05:00

Stanford is dropping the requirement that dissertations be submitted to ProQuest and will instead host them in its IR, with optional embargo.
The PEER Project (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) published its final report on workflows for publishers and repositories participating in the project's research.
Consumers International launched a survey on barriers to access to knowledge.
The OA collection Les Classiques des sciences sociales added its 4,000th title.
Science Commons released a guide to copyright considerations for ontologies.
The Fedorazon project released its final report on running a "repository in the cloud".
The Open Source Paleontologist examines pay-per-download article prices and finds them disproportionate. Matthew Burton-Kelly comments as well.
Andrew Spong says that participatory culture changes how the value of content is conceptualized, which makes TA publishers' value proposition "an increasingly isolated, static and entropic one."

Brill launches hybrid option for 135 journals, will adjust subscription prices

2009-11-04T20:42:00.002-05:00

Brill introduces Journal Open Access Service: Brill Open, press release, November 4, 2009.

Brill, a prominent scholarly publisher in the Humanities and International Law, is pleased to announce the launch of Brill Open. This new author service offers the option of making articles freely available upon publication. Brill Open enables authors to comply with research funding bodies and institutions which require open access.

The Brill Open option will be available for all 135 journals published under the imprints Brill, Martinus Nijhoff and VSP. Articles will be put in online open access in exchange for an article publishing fee to be arranged by the author.

Sam Bruinsma, Brill�s Business Development Director, explains: �We are launching this new service in answer to a growing number of research funding bodies and universities announcing their compliance with the open access model. With Brill Open our journals are ready to meet the expected increase in contributions under this model.�

In order to ensure that authors' funder requirements have no influence on the editorial peer review and decision-making, Brill Open will be made available to authors only upon acceptance of their paper for publication. Those authors who do not wish to use this service will be under no pressure to do so, and their accepted article will be published in the usual manner.

Brill�s strategic intent is to adjust the future subscription price of a journal to reflect an increase in Brill Open fees. Sam Bruinsma comments: �Our view on open access developments is positive. We accept that over time an increasing part of our revenues will come through this new model. This will have an impact on the revenues from our library subscription service. The combination of these two business models will continue to support a healthy and sustainable journal program attractive to the best authors in the field.�

Toward a culture of academic sharing

2009-11-04T16:08:00.002-05:00

Larry Johnson, NMC and UOC Release Call to Action for Open Education, New Media Consortium, November 1, 2009.

Forty internationally known leaders in open education and technology met in Barcelona on October 19-20, 2009, at the NMC's first official European event, the Open EdTech Summit, cosponsored by the Open University of Catalunya and the New Media Consortium. ...

Summit attendees generated fifty action items necessary to realize the goal of creating an institution that can meet the needs of students today and into the foreseeable future, and then ranked them. Those which ranked highest are captured here, and framed as a Call to Action - five major tasks that are perceived as critical to achieving the promise of open education: ...

4. We must enable a culture of sharing. Recognizing that the sharing and reuse of scholarly work is a key component of the university of the future, we advocate building a culture of sharing in which concerns about intellectual property, copyright, and student-to-student collaboration are alleviated and the model of proprietary work dissolves in favor of a more open one. To this end, we must establish reward structures that support the sharing of work in progress, ongoing research, highly collaborative projects, and scholarly publications of all kinds, including reputation systems, peer review processes, and new models for citation of such content. ...

Utah State UP joins library, will focus on OA

2009-11-04T13:42:00.003-05:00

Patrick Williams, Utah State University Press Merges With Merrill-Cazier Library, Utah State Today, November 2, 2009.

Joining a growing national trend, Utah State University Press will merge with the administrative structure of Merrill-Cazier Library at Utah State University. The transition has begun, with the arrangement officially taking effect at the start of fiscal year 2010-11.

The move was recently approved by USU�s Executive Vice President and Provost Raymond T. Coward, following a proposal from Richard Clement, dean of USU Libraries, and Michael Spooner, director of USU Press.

The merger of a scholarly press with a university library has been used at other institutions to innovatively address a number of trends in scholarly publication, Clement and Spooner said.

Digital publishing, for example, will play an important part in the future of scholarly publication, and university libraries and presses are both deeply interested in its potential for transforming the way research is distributed.

�Many university presses are moving toward open access, often under the administration of the library,� Clement said. �The most conspicuous example in the recent past is the University of Michigan Press which moved into the library and is now focusing on OA and other forms of digital publication. We propose to move the USU Press along the same path.� ...

�Among universities with presses, there is an emerging trend in this direction, and Utah State University Press now joins the first dozen or so university presses to pursue this relationship,� Spooner said.

While the decision to move USU Press to Merrill-Cazier Library was not completely budget-driven, it will result in significant savings, Clement said. With a larger staff in place, the library will assume a number of support activities for the press, including accounting, IT support, graphic design and public relations. ...

USU Press will adopt a new publication model, with open access as a central component and will move toward increased digital delivery of books. ...

�This move directly serves the needs of the university,� Clement said. �Open access allows us to go back to where university presses began � to publish work by all faculty in every discipline.�

At the same time, USU Press remains a refereed scholarly press, with the standards of rigorous peer review appropriate to a university publisher. ...

Also see coverage by Inside Higher Ed:

For the last nine months, the survival of the Utah State University Press has been in doubt, with fears that deep cuts being made to public higher education in Utah would end up killing off the publishing outlet.

This week comes news that the press will survive -- in part by embracing a new model of organization (becoming part of the university library) and a new business model (embracing open access, in which most publications would be available online and free). ...

Update. Also see coverage by Library Journal.

What's next from OASPA

2009-11-04T13:20:00.002-05:00

Caroline Sutton, OASPA one year on: Core values, best practices and future plans, OASPA News and Commentary, November 4, 2009.

... [The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association] has established a sub-group for mixed model publishers headed by David Ross from SAGE Publications. A sub-group for scholar publishers is also being established, building upon the energy and dialogue established amongst this group at [the Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (Lund, September 14-16, 2009)]. The need to address open access books publishing was also clearly expressed and OASPA will support the establishment of a sub-group within the organization. We expect proposals for other sub-groups over the next year.

Because an exchange of information should also extend beyond our own membership, OASPA has also established groups in LinkedIn and on Facebook. ...

The OASPA blog will also be an important forum for exchanging information. ... Paul Peters of Hindawi Publishing Corporation will edit and coordinate the blog. ...

During the next month the OASPA board will hold a special board meeting to discuss the establishment of a sub-committee focused on the financing of open access publishing. In a breakout session at COASP librarians and administrators called upon publishers to aggregate their pre-payment and membership programs, and to possibly work through library consortia to negotiate centralized Open Access funding sources. Professional publishing organizations arrived at a similar suggestion during their session, and this common view of the situation by these two stakeholder groups lends hope to the possibility of creating sustainable funding sources to centrally support Open Access publishing at an institutional, consortial, or possibly even national level.

OASPA members can also expect to see new membership benefits added. A contract has been negotiated with CrossRef to provide scholar publisher members with DOIs through OASPA. ... Knowledge Exchange has also offered a discounted rate for OASPA members, and we look to establishing additional arrangements with other organizations supporting OA publishing. ...

Pressure to commercialize vs. data sharing

2009-11-04T12:59:00.001-05:00

Timothy Caulfield, Do Gene Patents Hurt Research?, Science Progress, October 29, 2009.

... There is solid evidence that commercialization pressure and the involvement of industry can:

adversely affect the collaborative nature of research

increase data withholding behavior (that is, stop researchers from sharing information)

lead to the premature implementation of technologies

distort research results and corrode public trust.

For example, a 2009 study by Hong and Walsh concluded that �commercial linkages and increased pressures from scientific competition� was a predictor of increased data withholding. This study also found that, in the realm of biology, data withholding was not correlated with patenting. Commercialization pressure, not patenting, is the problem. ...

Housekeeping

2009-11-02T18:51:00.001-05:00

I'll be out tomorrow as I'm an election official here in Virginia. But the Open Access Tracking Project keeps rolling, and I'll be back Wednesday.

Open access roundup

2009-11-02T17:22:00.002-05:00

The repository directories OpenDOAR and ROAR are conducting a user survey to inform future development of the services.
An editorial in a University of Minnesota student newspaper endorses OA.
An article in the new issue of IFLA Journal looks at OA repositories in computer science.
Texas A&M University Press is collaborating with the university's IR and the Texas Digital Library for OA publication of selected press books.
The new issue of EDUCAUSE Review features an overview of Bibliotheca Alexandrina's digital initiatives.
Phil Barker discusses the possibilities of repository deposits via RSS.
If you maintain an archive indexed by RePEc, Christian Zimmermann has some suggestions for you.
Arthur Sale isn't happy with Australian Research Online's repository harvesting practices.
The Open Knowledge Foundation updated its tools, Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network and Open Shakespeare.
About 5,000 previously unpublished documents from the American Founding Fathers are now digitized and OA. Funding was provided by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the project was managed by Documents Compass, and access is provided through Rotunda, the digital imprint of the University of Virginia Press.

Publishers accommodating MIT, Wellcome OA policies

2009-11-02T16:27:00.003-05:00

The Endocrine Society, which publishes titles including the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism and Endocrinology, developed a hybrid OA option for Wellcome Trust funded authors. For a $3,000 fee, the publisher will deposit the final published version in PubMedCentral for immediate OA, under a CC BY-NC license. The option is only available to Wellcome grantees.
The European Respiratory Society, which publishes the European Respiratory Journal, will revise their policies to confirm UK PMC Funders Group grantees are allowed to self-archive their final authors manuscript in PubMedCentral 6 months after publication.
Four society publishers recently confirmed that their journal policies permit compliance with the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy, with no addendum or other special action necessary. The societies are the American Mathematical Society, the Optical Society of America (see announcement), the American Institute of Physics, and the American Vacuum Society (see announcement).

OAIster will continue as a separate OA resource

2009-11-02T15:54:00.002-05:00

OCLC makes OAIster records available through WorldCat.org to ensure long-term public access to digital resources, press release, October 30, 2009.

The University of Michigan and OCLC today announced that they have successfully transitioned the OAIster database to OCLC to ensure continued public access to open-archive collections, and to expand the visibility of these collections to millions of information seekers through OCLC services.

OAIster records are now fully accessible through WorldCat.org, and will be included in WorldCat.org search results along with records from thousands of libraries worldwide that add their holdings to WorldCat. OCLC plans to release a freely accessible, discrete view of the OAIster records in January 2010 through a URL specific to OAIster. OAIster records will also continue to be available on the OCLC FirstSearch service to Base Package subscribers ...

OCLC plans to release a freely accessible, discrete view of the OAIster database in 2010 that will be updated regularly. This will allow WorldCat.org searchers to view only items harvested through OAIster.

"OCLC has been very responsive to issues and needs brought up by the OAI community," said [Kat Hagedorn, OAIster/Metadata Harvesting Librarian at the University of Michigan]. "The creation of a free, separately accessible view of OAIster within OCLC is an example of their recognition of the value of OAIster in the world of metadata management."

Now that all OAIster records are accessible through WorldCat.org, the oaister.org Web site has been redirected to a new OAIster Web site at OCLC. ...

This reverses OCLC's previously announced plan (reported here) to end free access to OAIster as a separate database after its transfer from the University of Michigan.

New OA journals

2009-11-02T14:48:00.002-05:00

OA journal announcements, launches, and conversions spotted in the past week or so:

The Revue internationale de p�dagogie de l�enseignement sup�rieur (International Journal of Pedagogy of Higher Education) converted to OA. The journal is published by the Association internationale de p�dagogie universitaire and hosted by Revues.org. The journal was founded in 1980 and previously published under the title Res Academica. The two latest issues are now online; backfiles are forthcoming.
Allergy, Asthma & Clinical Immunology converted to OA; see the announcement or editorial. The journal is published by the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and BioMed Central. The journal was founded in 1996 as the Canadian Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
The Bulletin of the Geological Society of Denmark converted to OA. See a brief announcement in English or a longer announcement in Danish. The journal has published in English under the Bulletin title since 1970.
The Journal for International Counselor Education is a new peer-reviewed OA journal hosted by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries. See the launch editorial.
Automated Experimentation is a new peer-reviewed OA journal published by BioMed Central.
The Journal of Participatory Medicine, a new peer-reviewed OA journal by the Society for Participatory Medicine, published its first issue. (See also our past post announcing the journal.)
The International Journal of Physiotherapy & Rehabilitation is a new peer-reviewed OA journal now soliciting submissions for its first issue.

November SOAN

2009-11-02T12:10:00.001-05:00

I just mailed the November issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. This issue takes a close look at a few threads in the argument that knowledge is and ought to be a public good. The roundup section briefly notes 223 OA developments from October.

Open access roundup

2009-10-30T18:43:00.002-04:00

Of the 28 founding members of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories launched last week by the (European) DRIVER project, 5 are from outside Europe.
OA, writes Richard Grant, is socialism -- provoking a 150+ comment discussion. Apparently not all of his readers agree.
Christopher Kelty thinks that Kickstarter, a "funding platform" where supporters pledge to support a project before production, could be a revenue model for OA.
Libraries, writes Barbara Fister, "have to figure out how to stop equating the price tag with our actual worth, roll up our sleeves, and find interesting new ways to make good information freely available."
Rufus Pollock says he tries to practice open notebook social science.
The aim of open approaches in science "isn't to replicate 'open source' as we know it in software," writes John Wilbanks, but "to create the essential foundations for distributed science".
The Lyon library says the details of its digitization agreement with Google are confidential (Google translation).
The new issue of Research Library Issues features an interview with Peter Hirtle on Cornell University Library's decision not to claim restrictions on its digitized public domain materials.
Our spiritual cousins at Open Education News passed the 1,000 post milestone this week.

New book on A2K

2009-10-30T18:31:00.002-04:00

Hala Essalmawi, ed., The Access to Knowledge Movement: Opportunities, Challenges and the Road Ahead, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, November 2009. Contents:

Hala Essalmawi, Introduction
James Love, Demand, Take and Supply: The Ecology of Access
Barbara Stratton, A2K Quinquennium � Now we are five � The Library perspective
William New, Access To Influence In WIPO�s Development Agenda
Manon Ress, Limitations and Exceptions for Reading Disabled Persons: A New Paradigm at the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights
Mohammed El Said, Access to Knowledge, Education, and Intellectual Property Protection in the Arab World � The Challenges of Development
Denise Rosemary Nicholson, Addressing Access To Knowledge Issues In Africa
Brian Fitzgerald, Anne Fitzgerald and Kylie Pappalardo, The A2K Movement in Australia (2006 � 2009)

U.S. House Science committee considering OA -- in secret

2009-10-30T14:07:00.004-04:00

The Association of American Universities yesterday posted a series of documents relating to a previously-unpublicized effort by the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology. From the proposal, Roundtable on Public Access to Federal Research and Data:

... The House Science and Technology Committee, which has oversight of the federal civilian R&D enterprise, has a strong interest in [the question of public access]. The Committee seeks to convene a Roundtable of the key stakeholders to explore and develop an appropriate consensus regarding access to and preservation of federally funded research information that addresses the needs of all interested parties.

The progress of science and technology is very dependent on:

The wide dissemination of research results and data from which new science is born;

A peer review system that ensures the quality and integrity of scientific research results and analyses; and

Preservation and access to the archive of historic and current research results.

The federal government is an important funder of basic and applied research in the United States. As a result of this stewardship, the government should provide resources and establish policies where appropriate to facilitate access to scientific data and publications and preserve an accessible record to both entities. In doing so, the government must take into account the important role of the private sector in this enterprise. ...

To this end, a Roundtable forum is proposed to discuss these issues. ... Participants will be asked to contribute their expertise and proposed solutions on the respective role of the federal government, libraries, institutional repositories and the scholarly publishers on the topics of access and preservation of the results of federally funded research. ...

The total number of participants will be limited (to approximately 10) in order to facilitate the scheduling and productivity of the meetings. The initial roundtable meeting will be chaired by representatives of the House Science and Technology Committee with appropriate support and advice from staff in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Roundtable participants will be selected by the S&T Committee based on their interest and expertise on the issue. ...

To promote an open dialogue and exchange and to foster working toward a fair and balanced solution, participants will be at the table as knowledgeable individuals, but not as official representatives of their parent organizations. ... Participants will be asked to refrain from public disclosure of Roundtable deliberations until a consensus report has been completed. ...

The proposal is undated, but the status report states the roundtable was convened in "early summer 2009".

The AAU documents also include a list of participants and biographies of the roundtable members.

From the status report, dated October 29, 2009:

... In-person meetings and conference calls have taken place over the summer and early fall, with the goal of producing a consensus report containing views and recommendations before the end of the year. The Roundtable report will be submitted to the HSTC and OSTP and subsequently will be made widely available to all stakeholders as well as the broader public. Members of the Roundtable will be available for comment regarding the report after its public release. ...

Comment. Observers of American politics will know the central role of Congressional committees in policymaking. To date, two committees have given significant consideration to OA: the House Appropriations Committee, which passed the NIH mandate (and the earlier voluntary policy), and the House Judiciary Committee, whose chairman introduced the anti-public access Fair Copyright in Research Works Act and which held a hearing on the bill. (FRPAA was referred to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, but that committee has not held a hearing on that bill in either its current or previous form. In addition, questions about OA have occasionally been asked of executive branch officials and nominees in their oversight committees.) Noticeably absent from that list, as I've previously noted, are committees with jurisdiction over science or education -- arguably the committees best suited to consider policies issues facing the research community and higher education. This effort changes that.

In addition, the involvement of the Executive Office of Science and Technology Policy is the first significant public engagement of the Obama White House with OA. (The Bush White House expressed mild concern about the NIH mandate, but ultimately signed a bill containing the measure.)

Accordingly, this process has the opportunity to shape discourse about public access in a major way. Unfortunately, since it's secret, we don't have much to go on until the recommendations are released and the participants' vow of silence is lifted.

At first glance, the proposal itself is fairly even-handed. The biggest criticism I can level so far is that, while presuming increased access to be beneficial, it fails to ask the crucial question of what exactly are the benefits of access and the costs of lack of access. Nevertheless, the proposal counters two claims sometimes heard from (or implied by) opponents of OA: that greater access is not necessary (e.g. that benefits from OA would be negligible) and that government has no proper role in access and preservation.

There's also the question of focus. This roundtable was tasked with considering access and preservation to publications and data from federally-funded research, rather than a narrower focus only on peer-reviewed article manuscripts. While other types of documents should be considered, that shouldn't distract from a swift recommendation for a FRPAA-style mandate.

In tagging the documents for the OATP, Peter remarks, "Is the membership list balanced? Read it and decide for yourselves." Of course, the theory behind this arrangement is that members will check their agendas at the door and work together as unbiased experts, so "balance" wouldn't matter. We'll only learn later (if ever) if practice followed theory in this case.

Update. Post title revised to more accurately reflect the essence of the matter.

Open access roundup

2009-10-29T22:51:00.001-04:00

RoMEO, the database of publisher OA policies, is surveying users about how to make the service better.
Two more student organizations have signed the Student Statement on The Right to Research: the Simmons College Library and Information Science Student Association and the University of Tennessee Student Government Association. Also see coverage in the Tennessee Daily Beacon.
OpenTheGovernment.org issued an action alert for OA to Congressional Research Service reports.
The Fall 2009 issue of the Digital Commons newsletter highlights universities using the repository software.
The Public Knowledge Project released a case study of the the Isfahan University of Medical Sciences' use of PKP's Open Journal Systems publishing software.
DeepDyve launched an article "rental" program: $0.99 for 24 hours of viewing (no printing or downloading).
The ticTOCs project released its recommendations on RSS feeds for scholarly publishers, including the recommendation for feeds to include licensing information.
The American Library Association's Office for Information Technology Policy is soliciting nominations for its L. Ray Patterson Copyright Award in recognition of individuals or groups who have helped "promote the progress of science and useful arts".

Recruiting volunteers for the Open University Campaign

2009-10-29T22:46:00.002-04:00

Kevin Donovan, Call for Participation: Join the Open University Campaign!, Students for Free Culture, October 27, 2009.

As many of you know, following the Free Culture 2008 Conference, Students for Free Culture began the Open University Campaign � an initiative to increase collaboration, sharing, and openness at the level of higher education. ...

A primary method through which this will be accomplished is through �report card� style profiles of leading institution of higher learning, similar to College Sustainability Report Cards. Students for Free Culture has already begun this work by defining principles of measurement, researching available resources, and developing surveys to be distributed to universities.

Mirroring the Wheeler Declaration, the Open University Report Cards, as currently envisioned, will evaluate schools on five topics:

Open Access: Are faculty required to make their scholarship open access? Is the university press publish open access materials? ...

Establishing credible criteria under which schools will be assessed will be essential to creating a respected resource. For example, Which schools� open access policies are currently lacking important criteria? ... The volunteers currently involved with the project are working through these questions on the wiki page, and we encourage you to join the conversation.

In order to make this a successful endeavor, Students for Free Culture needs your involvement!

Are you a student who can research official university open access policies? ...

Are you statistically-inclined and can handle data on universities?

Are you a web developer who could create a public website for the Open University Report Cards?

Are you a graphic designer who could create posters to raise awareness on campuses?

The Open University Campaign recognizes that scholastic advancement occurs most readily in an environment of sharing, openness and collaboration. By providing a cross-index of leading universities, the project will add important comparative measurements to encourage increased academic openness. Our hope is that these resources will provide a platform from which openness activists can endeavor to improve the scholastic environment.

See also our past posts on the Wheeler Declaration.

Guide to copyright and digitization

2009-10-29T20:57:00.002-04:00

Cornell University Library Publishes New Digitization Manual, press release, October 29, 2009.

How can cultural heritage institutions legally use the Internet to improve public access to the rich collections they hold?

Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for Digitization for U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums, a new book by published today by Cornell University Library, can help professionals at these institutions answer that question.

Based on a well-received Australian manual written by Emily Hudson and Andrew T. Kenyon of the University of Melbourne, the book has been developed by Cornell University Library�s senior policy advisor Peter B. Hirtle, along with Hudson and Kenyon, to conform to American law and practice.

The development of new digital technologies has led to fundamental changes in the ways that cultural institutions fulfill their public missions of access, preservation, research, and education. Many institutions are developing publicly accessible Web sites that allow users to visit online exhibitions, search collection databases, access images of collection items, and in some cases create their own digital content. Digitization, however, also raises the possibility of copyright infringement. It is imperative that staff in libraries, archives, and museums understand fundamental copyright principles and how institutional procedures can be affected by the law.

Copyright and Cultural Institutions was written to assist understanding and compliance with copyright law. It addresses the basics of copyright law and the exclusive rights of the copyright owner, the major exemptions used by cultural heritage institutions, and stresses the importance of �risk assessment� when conducting any digitization project. Case studies on digitizing oral histories and student work are also included. ...

As an experiment in open-access publishing, the Library has made the work available in two formats. Print copies of the work are available from CreateSpace, an Amazon subsidiary. In addition, the entire text is available as a free download through eCommons, Cornell University�s institutional repository, and from SSRN.com, which already distributes the Australian guidelines. ...

New report on undisclosed clinical trial data

2009-10-29T19:24:00.001-04:00

Nancy Watzman, How Congress and Special Interests Kept Clinical Trial Data Secret, Sunlight Foundation, October 28, 2009.

Meet Bray Patrick-Lake, a 39-year-old mother of two and director of a Colorado nonprofit serving the homeless. In 2008, she volunteered for a clinical trial, regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, testing a medical device designed to close a hole in her heart, in hope of putting an end to the migraine headaches that were ruining her life. Three months later, she found out over the Internet that St. Jude Medical Inc., the manufacturer of the device, had terminated the study. (Read all the details here.) ...

Now Patrick-Lake can�t find out the results of that clinical trial. That�s because pharmaceutical and medical device industry lobbyists�including those representing St. Jude Medical, Inc. and its trade association, AdvaMed�convinced Congress in 2007 to insert a last-minute provision in the Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act that allows medical device manufacturers to withhold data disclosure to a public government database, ClinicalTrials.gov, when their products fail to make it to the market. ...

For the lobbyists and members of Congress, it was business as usual in Washington. The lobbyists got a few phrases changed in a lengthy bill�phrases that would have required public access to results of clinical trials that did not lead to an approved medical device or drug. ... For Patrick-Lake, Washington�s standard operating procedures have left her�and the public�in the dark about the device in her heart.

What is true for Patrick-Lake is true for the thousands of people who volunteer for studies of drugs or medical devices every year that companies for one reason or another do not bring to market. What industry claims is proprietary information could be useful to doctors and patients as they decide what sort of treatment is best for any number of conditions. As Steven Nissen, chairman of the cardiology department at the Cleveland Clinic, says, �If you expose human beings to an experimental treatment, the public has a fundamental right to see the results of those experiments.� ...

A tale of two medical students

2009-10-28T19:13:00.002-04:00

Sunil Bhopal and Rossetta Cole, Access to information for medical students - Sierra Leone, Healthcare Information For All by 2015, October 28, 2009.

We are two medical students from the UK (Sunil Bhopal, University of Leeds) and Sierra Leone (Rossetta Cole, College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences, Freetown). We are trained in a similar manner, first in lectures and other formal teaching arrangements in a university, and then by spending more and more time in hospitals until we emerge finally as junior doctors ready to tackle the next hurdle. We met when I (Sunil) spent a month on medical elective in Freetown.

The starkest difference in our education has been in access to information. While in Leeds I (Sunil) have access to thousands of books through the university library, hundreds of journals in print and online and am a mere (university funded) bus ride away from a copyright library containing everything ever printed in the UK, in Freetown I (Rossetta) have had to make do with 20 year old donated textbooks, no paper journals, and access to HINARI online journals once (through a local internet cafe) over the 6 year course.

The issue of accessing information is a particular problem in Sierra Leone where there is no bookshop selling new books, and no medical text book importer. ...