SPARC Open Access Newsletter 第 141 号
2010 年 1 月 2 日
Peter Suber 著
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-10.htm
目次

Open access in 2009

Erratum （訂正）

Roundup （最近のニュース）

Coming this month （今月のイベント）

Credits （著作権表記）
Open access in 2009
(1) 資金援助機関におけるオープンアクセス・ポリシー
・ カナダの 5 つの資金援助機関が OA 義務化を採択。
・ 米国の 2 つの公的機関が OA 義務化。
・ Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council が，英国の 7 つの研究会議の中で 7
番目に OA 義務化を採択。
・ 合計で，10 ヶ国 15 機関があらたに義務化。
・ European Science Foundation (ESF) と European Heads of Research Councils
(EuroHORCs)が，共同で OA 義務化を計画。ESF は欧州 30 ヶ国のメンバ 80 機関を
代表し，EuroHORCs は，欧州 24 ヶ国の主要な公的資金援助機関を代表するので，
そのメンバの半数が採択すれば，義務化した世界の資金援助機関の数は倍以上に増
加することになる。
・ 著名な公私の資金援助機関が共同で実施した調査の結果として，医療研究分野での
Green libre OA の義務化が推奨された。この調査を支援した機関が必ずしも義務化
するとは限らないが，義務化についての調査し，これに投資することになるだろう。
・ PubMed Central Canada をはじめ，様々な資金援助機関が，義務化に呼応して，ある
いは，義務化の予兆として OA リポジトリを設置した。
・ 機関リポジトリのフィージビリティ調査の実施は，その機関が OA ポリシーを検討
している印である。たとえば，米 National Science Foundation (NSF)が Johns Hopkins
図書館に，NSF の資金による研究のための OA リポジトリに関して調査をするため
に 30 万ドルのグラントを与えた。NSF は NIH に次いで巨大な公的資金援助機関な
ので，ここの義務化は連邦政府の他の機関に与える影響が大きい。
・ Japan Association of National University Libraries（日本の国立大学図書館協会）など
多くの機関が OA の義務化を呼びかけた。
・ 4 年前に，米 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)は，OA を義務化するので
はなく， OA を約束したファンディングの申請書を優先するという新しい方法を採
用した。2009 年まで，これに続く機関はなかったが，JISC が NEH と共同支援の際
に初めて，同じ方法を採用し，続いて同様のケースが 3 例あった。
・ NIH ポリシーを覆そうとする法案，Fair Copyright in Research Works Act が再提出さ
れたが，今回はさほどの注目も支持も集めなかった。
・ Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)が，再提出された。この法案は米連邦の
主な資金援助機関において OA を義務化するもので，2006 年に最初に提出された。
再提出された法案は多くの機関や科学者から支持を得ている。
・ この法案より，もっと影響力が大きいかもしれないのが，オバマ大統領による連邦
政府内に OA ポリシーを普及させるためのパブリックコメントの募集である。White
House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)に提出だれたコメントの多くは，
短いエンバーゴで Green OA の義務化を支持するものである。
(2) 大学におけるオープンアクセス・ポリシー
・ 応用科学分野のフィンランドの大学 26 校が，共同で OA 義務化を採択した。これ
までの共同の義務化としては，これが最大数である。
・ フィンランドの他に，2009 年で OA を義務化した大学の数は 13 ヶ国で 26 校に達し
た。内訳は，Australia (1), Belgium (2), Colombia (1), Denmark (1), India (1), Ireland (1),
Russia (2), Scotland (2), South Africa (1), Spain (2), Switzerland (1), Ukraine (1), UK (5),
and US (5).
・ フィンランドと合わせて合計 52 校に加えて，部門での義務化が 8 件あったので，
これを加えると 60 の大学が 2009 年に OA を義務化した。2008 年の 13 校に比べる
と飛躍的に増えている。
・ このうち，13 校の義務化は教員の全会一致の投票で決まった。
・ フィンランドの 26 校は，libre OA ではなく，リポジトリにデポジットする時に自
動的に CC ライセンスを付与するよう著者に求めるものである。
・ Liege と Oregon 図書館のポリシーは，IR にデポジットした論文だけでプロモーシ
ョンや評価を行うというもの。
・ 大学での Green OA を増加させるために，2009 年に新しく SPARC Campus Open
Access Policies project と Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS)の二つの事業が開始した。
・ 現在，ポリシーを検討中の 53 機関を SPARC プロジェクトがフォローしている。
・ EOS は欧州のレクター（名誉総長）達によって開始した。彼らは Green OA のため
に活発に活動している。
・ JISC もまた，OA ポリシーの普及を助けた。彼らは，機関に，実践的な OA ポリシ
ーの作成，実施方法をアドバイスした。
・ LIBER (Ligue des Bibliotheques Europeennes de Recherche: 欧州研究図書館協会)の戦
略計画 2009-2012 は，欧州において OA（特に Green OA）を推進するために SPARC
Europe と DRIVER の連携を挙げている。JISC も，JISC's Research 3.0 campaign, JISC
roadmap for repositories 2009-2013, JISC Strategy 2010-2012 の中で Green OA の行動計
画を出している。
・ 学生の活動も，昨年度より盛り上がっている。米国の 6 つの学生連盟が共同で OA
義務化を呼びかける声明を出した。この連携は，500 万人以上の学生を代表する 19
の学生団体に拡がっている。
・ 2008 年に開始した学生のキャンペーンは，Open Education Campaign と名前を換え
て，大学における OA 義務化への運動を含めて活動している。
・ エルゼビアは英国の大学に，エルゼビアの論文を IR にデポジットするのではなく，
ジャーナルのサイトにリンクするように働きかけている。ただし，ポストプリント
のアーカイビングについては，blanket permission（包括的許可）を与えている。
(3) 増加の数値
・ 2009 年に，Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)は，723 の査読付き OA ジャー
ナルを加え（昨年度比 19％増），合計で 4,535 誌をリストしている。
・ 世界の OA リポジトリの数は：
Scientific Commons – 193 増加（20％），合計 1,158
Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) – 318 増加（26％），合計 1,557
Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) – 262 増加（20％），合計 1,558
・ Scientific Commons によると，これらのリポジトリに登載されているアイテム数は，
7,887,824 増加（33％）
(4) Open access archiving オープンアクセス・アーカイビング
・ 機関リポジトリの他に，ナショナル・リポジトリ等の組織的な新しい動きもあった。
・ Depot は，デポジットを著者の IR に送るか，著者の IR がない場合は，それを流通
させるという英国の包括的リポジトリであったが，これを世界中の研究者が使える
ようにした。OA リポジトリの連結は，JISC 支援のプロジェクトで，デポジットを
適切なリポジトリに送るという Depot の機能を独立したサービスにするというもの。
European Commission は，Depot のように，IR のない著者が CERN のリポジトリに
デポジットできるようにする OpenAIRE プロジェクトを立ち上げたが，Depot によ
って，OpenAIRE は不要になるだろう。
（参考）
http://johokanri.jp/stiupdates/contents/2009/11/003884.html
・ NIH は，機関リポジトリの連携に前向きで，IR から PubMed Central に直接フィー
ドすることも検討する予定。実現すれば，NIH のグラントを受けた研究者は，ロー
カルの IR にデポジットすれば，SWORD プロトコルを通して PMC にデポジットす
ることができるようになる。Harvard Medical School(HMS)が OA 義務化の計画を発
表した際に目指したのは，ふたつの義務化をカバーすることである。つまり，一度
ローカルにデポジットすれば，PMC にも自動的にデポジットできるということで
ある。arXiv も，SWORD を通して IR からのエクスポートを受け付けると発表した。
・ マイクロソフトが，SWORD をもとに OA リポジトリに直接デポジットできるワー
ドのアドインを発表した。SWORD は，JISC Repositories and Preservation 会議の参
加者から，最も画期的プロジェクトとの評価を受けた。
・ 国際組織 Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)が，OA Week に設立され
た。COAR は，世界中の 1000 以上のリポジトリのネットワークで，共通の標準と
ポリシーを推進する。28 の共同創設機関は，欧州，北米，アジアの 17 ヶ国を代表
する。
・ JISC が，リポジトリ改善プロジェクトのホストを開始。この中には，OA リポジト
リと引用データを統合する BiblioSight も含まれる。また，コーネルの arXiv は NSF
からグラントを受けて，ソーシャル・ネットワーキング，論文のコンセプトを即時
に特定する，論文を文脈で見て，関連する研究を発見する等の新しい価値を研究し
ている。
・ OA リポジトリの価値，現況，教員のリポジトリに関する認識等について研究した
調査書も多く発表された。
・ 次のようにリポジトリ・ツールも沢山開発された。一部抜粋

Journal TOCs API：IR マネージャーが，リポジトリにデポジットするべき新し
い論文の発見を助けるツール

The JISC IncReASe プロジェクト：arXiv からメタデータをインポートするツー
ル
・ 私は，大量の OA の動向を発見，広報するジョブを一度にこなす Open Access
Tracking Project (OATP)を発表した。このプロジェクトは現在，フェーズ 1 の段階で，
今後フェーズ 2 に進化させる予定。
・ 現在，Southampton と Minho のリポジトリが，新しいデポジットを”tweet”している。
・ ほとんどのリポジトリ・ソフトウェアがアップグレードし，いくつか新しいパッケ
ージも出た。
・ Fedora Commons と DSpace Foundation が合併して DuraSpace を設立。
・ Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE)が，ハーベストする各リポジトリの統計を
追加した。また，初めて OAIster を抜いて，世界最大のクロス・アーカイブ検索エ
ンジンになった。
・ NIH が AllPlus Search（NIH Library, the NIH Library Catalog, PubMed, MedlinePlus を
カバーするメタサーチ・エンジン）のデモ版を発表。
・ 新しいサーチエンジンも出た。以下一部抜粋

オープンエデュケーション・リソースのサーチエンジン

OA と TA の学術技術誌の新しいサーチエンジン：TechJournalContents

BioMed Central のサーチエンジン：Quertle
・ WIPO が，パブリックドメインにアクセスを増加させるツールに関して調査プロジ
ェクトを開始。研究情報を共有するための新しいツール，SciMate (Scientific Material
Transfer Exchange)を Christpehr Dyer が出した。Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL)が，
ドキュメントを NLM XML に変換する 4 つの補助ツールを作った。CARPET
(Community for Academic Reviewing, Publishing and Editorial Technology) が，学術出
版ツールのプラットフォームを開始。
・ African Copyright & Access to Knowledge Project (ACA2K)が，アフリカの各国に OA
機関リポジトリを設立し，アフリカの研究成果の普及を求めた。
(5) オープンアクセス・ジャーナル
・ （3）で紹介した 2009 年に創刊された OA ジャーナルの他に，OA に変更したジャ
ーナルは下の通りである。また，アフリカのオンラインジャーナル 346 誌が，現在
OA 化を検討中である。
OA への変更；

TA から OA：

TA からハイブリッド OA： 615 誌

ハイブリッド OA から完全 OA： 1 誌

TA からエンバーゴつき OA：

OA に変更したデータベース：7

バックファイルのみ OA に変更： 32 誌
48 誌
8誌
これに対して OA からの変更；

OA から TA：

完全 OA からコンテンツの一部を OA:：
3誌
2誌

完全 OA からハイブリッド OA： 1 誌

no-fee OA から fee-based OA： 1 誌
・ fee-based OA ジャーナルの出版費用を負担するファンドを作る動きは 2009 年以前
に始まったが，景気後退の中でも，その動きは活発になっている。9 月にハーバー
ドが Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE)を設立。創設機関は，Cornell,
Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, the University of California at Berkeley であったが，その後，
Columbia, the University of Ottawa, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center も参加。
この他に，Lund University と Universities of Oregan and Tennessee が 2009 年にファン
ドを初め，世界的には 22 機関がファンドを持つ。これに対して，財政的理由で 2009
年にファンドを中止したのは，University of Amsterdam のみ。
・ 3 月に，Universities UK (UUK) と Research Information Network (RIN)が，大学と資金
援助機関に対して，教員とグラント受給者にかわって出版費用の支払いを推奨。
Biosciences Federation が，その提言を受け入れた。Wellcome Trust は，そのための資
金を増資，Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)もコミット。JISC が，
英国の機関に国家ファンドを創設すべきか調査する等の動きがある。
・ 英国 National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)が，公的機関として初めて，NIHR
の研究者のためのディスカウント契約を BMC と結んだ。ファイザーは，自社の研
究者だけでなく，低所得国の研究者のために，BMC ジャーナルの出版費用のファ
ンドを創設。シュプリンガーとカリフォルニア大学が，購読料にシュプリンガーの
ハイブリッド OA 雑誌に掲載する同大学の著者の出版費用を含める契約をする。こ
れは，シュプリンガーが，米国の機関と結ぶ契約としては初めて。
・ 多くの機関が，査読付き OA ジャーナルの成長を学術コミュニケーションの将来に
対する投資であり，Green OA への攻撃をゆるめる方法であるとみている。という
のは，Green OA が査読付き TA ジャーナルのキャンセルにつながるなら，TA ジャ
ーナルを財政的に支援して査読付き OA ジャーナルにすることができるという保証
を与えるからだ。現在のところ，Gold OA への支援は，fee-based OA に限られてい
て，70％の査読付き完全 OA ジャーナルに対してはなされていない。
・ OA オプションの取得率に応じて購読料を下げるという約束を守らない二重取りの
ハイブリッド型ジャーナルからファンドを引き上げるという動きも多少ある。
Wellcome Trust は，この二重取りを避けるためにハイブリッド型出版者に透明性を
求めている。Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)は，大学や資金援
助機関に対して，fee-based OA ジャーナルへ出版費用を払う意思を明確にするよう
求めている。
・ Bentham Science 発行の Open Information Science Journal (TOISCIJ)が，コンピュータ
が自動生成した無意味論文をアクセプトした。これが偽造と判明して編集者が辞任
した。同社出版部門のディレクターは，「偽造と分かっていたが，著者を特定する
ために，アクセプトしたと見せかけた。」と主張した。
・ エルゼビアが，メルク社の広告論文を査読誌と装うなど，偽装雑誌をあわせて 9 誌
出版。同時期に，同社の別部門が，OA は査読を損なうなどとロビー活動していた。
（参考）
http://shinka3.exblog.jp/11491989/
・ 2009 年に，14 の OA の雑誌・書籍の出版者が創立。
・ University of California が，書籍・雑誌の OA 出版プラットフォーム eScholarship を
再始動。
・ CERN プロジェクト，SCOAP3 は，あらたに，カナダ，フィンランド，スペインと
米国の 62 機関から参加を得た。
・ Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)が，メンバを倍増。British
Medical Journal と Oxford University Press も加え，9 月に第 1 回会議を主催し，年会
を計画している。
・ トムソンロイター社が，OA ジャーナル 5 誌が各分野で 2008 年最高のインパクトフ
ァクターを獲得したと報告。そのうち 4 誌は PLoS が発行。もう 1 誌は Journal of
Medical Internet Research。
・ PLoS ONE が，論文レベルのインパクトデータを公開開始。その後，PLoS の全て
の雑誌 7 誌が，同様のサービスを開始した。
・ SHERPA が RoMEO データベースと API に大幅なアップグレードを行った。また，
2009 年に，600 出版者の著作権とセルフアーカイビングのポリシーを掲載した。
（現
在，その 62％が，なんらかの形でセルフアーカイビングを許可している。）
・ ジャーナルや出版者は，新しいポリシーとビジネスモデルの模索を続けている。
SPARC が，Raym Crow による OA ジャーナルのビジネスモデルについての詳細な
報告書を発行。
・ PLoS は，2010 年中に財政的自立の見込み。すでに 3 誌はブレークイーブンとなっ
ている。
・ 州のオープンレコード法を使って，出版者と学術図書館のビッグディールを公開さ
せようという訴訟があった。エルゼビアは，ワシントン州立大学との契約公開の阻
止に失敗。
・ DOAJ が，OA ジャーナルの長期保存プログラムを開始し，SPARC Europe から学術
コミュニティにおける業績について優秀賞を受賞。
(6) データ
(7) 書籍
(8) ライセンシング
(9) 景気後退の影響
・ 世界的景気後退は，OA のための資金が枯渇する一方で，その需要は増すという複
雑な影響を及ぼしている。
・ 少なくとも OA ジャーナル 5 誌が発行中止になり，3 誌が OA から TA に変更した
（※この中に Nagoya Mathematical Journal が含まれている。
）
・ arXiv が，利用の多い機関に出資を求めている。
・ 図書館の予算がカットされる中，エルゼビアが一人勝ちしている（2009 年前半の
STM 部門の利益は 29％アップ）。
・ 米国，カナダ，英国において，景気刺激策として，また，予算削減によるアクセス
ギャップを埋めるために，OA を支援する動きがあった。
・ 主要な図書館と研究機関が，景気後退に関するポジションペーパー（政策方針）を
発表し，出版者に値上げしないように，学術コミュニティに OA の促進を求めた。
(10) ハイライト中のハイライト
2009 年のワースト 10
10. American Anthropological Association（米国人類学会）が，有料論文で同学会の出版
物のアクセスポリシーについて議論を求める。（同学会は，昨年，主要 2 ジャーナルに
35 年のエンバーゴをつけたことでこのリストに掲載）
9.
84％以上の OA ジャーナルが，オープンライセンスを利用していない，もしくは，
libre* OA である。Green OA は，
許諾条件は出版者によって異なると言い訳をできるが，
Gold OA には言い訳がない。
（*注記：Peter Suber 氏はフリーという言葉は誤解されやすいので”libre”を使うことを提
唱している。
）
8. メリーランド大学において OA ポリシーに反対投票（大学における唯一の反対投票）
。
Green OA と Gold OA の混同，免責オプションの提示なし，ポリシーを検討中の他の機
関への警笛等。
7. オレゴン州の司法長官 John Kroger が，公文書法の遵守に関する州の手引書の複製
について許可と支払を命じた。
6. Advanced Biological Laboratories が，医者の診断や治療に役立つデータベースの利用
にパテントを要求。また，ロイヤルティの支払を要求して，OA の HIV 薬剤耐性デー
タベースを閉鎖の危機にさらす。
5. 南アフリカの科学技術部門が，知的所有権を実施する規則や，公的資金によるソフ
トウェア・オープンソースや研究成果を OA にするために政府の許可を要する規則を設
ける。
4. Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)*に関する秘密交渉。この交渉は，著作権
を強化するもので，ロビイストを入れて非公開で行われている。透明性の原則に反し，
国家安全の名のもとに秘密に交渉しているオバマ政権をはじめ，参加している民主主義
国家は，これを恥じるべきである。
（*注：
http://chizai.nikkeibp.co.jp/chizai/gov/20080401.html
「模倣品・海賊版拡散防止条約（Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement：ACTA）」（仮称）
とは，日本が知的財産の保護に関心の高い国々に呼びかけ，模倣品や海賊版の拡散を防
止するために知的財産権の執行を強化する目的で締結を目指す国際条約である。2005
年７月に開催された G8 グレンイーグルズ・サミットにて当時の小泉首相が提唱した。）
3. The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act（研究成果公正著作権法案）が昨年に続いて
再提出。この法案は，
OA ポリシーを阻止するために著作権法を改正しようとするもの。
2. David と Anderson の捏造に対する Bentham の対応。第 1 に，
査読誌を標榜するのに，
コンピュータで自動生成された無意味な論文をアクセプトしたこと。第 2 に，著者を見
つけ出すために意図的にしたと言い訳をしたこと。第 3 に，OA ジャーナルに汚名をき
せるネタを与えたこと。
（参考）
http://transact.seesaa.net/article/121446028.html
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/min2-fly/20090613
1. Heidelberg Appeal*が OA を非難。科学者達が，Google Books が著作権と著者の自由
を侵害しているとする嘆願書に署名をつのっている。その中で，OA についても非難し
ている。
（参考）
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/03/german-petition-against-google-books.html
http://www.textkritik.de/urheberrecht/index_engl.htm
（*注記）Heidelberg Appeal
72 人のノーベル賞受賞者を含む 4000 人の科学者が（二酸化炭素と地球温暖化は無関係
であると主張し）Heidelberg Appeal（ハイデルブルグ控訴）に参名している。
2009 年のベスト 10
10. Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE)など，有料 OA ジャーナルの出版
費用を賄う新らたな手段。Green OA のポリシーをもたずに Gold OA を支援している機
関もあり，これは後退である。また，Gold OA のほとんどのファンドが，無料の OA ジ
ャーナルには提供されていないのは片手落ちである。しかし，Gold OA を支援するため
に，著者と資金援助団体以外から初めて組織された一歩であることは，ここに挙げる価
値がある。
9.
Depot リポジトリが，英国のみのサービスから国際的サービスになる。また，
OpenAIRE が立ち上がる。二つのユニバーサルな OA リポジトリは，地域リポジトリが
あれば，そこにデポジットし，なければ，独自のリソースでそれを普及する。これによ
り，資金援助機関は IR へのデポジットの義務化が容易になり，研究者は IR がないとい
う理由でセルフアーカイビングを遅らすのが困難になる。
（参考）
http://johokanri.jp/stiupdates/contents/2009/11/003884.html
8. 資金援助機関による OA 義務化雪崩現象の兆候。第 1 に，
European Science Foundation
(ESF) と European Heads of Research Councils (EuroHORCs)が，共同で OA の義務化を発
表。ESF は，欧州 30 ヶ国の 80 の参加機関を代表し，EuroHORCs は，欧州 24 ヶ国の主
要な資金援助機関を代表している。第 2 に，Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Burroughs
Wellcome Fund, Google Foundation, Merck Company Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, US
Department of Health and Human Services, US Department of Homeland Security, US
Department of State の共同支援で出された報告書が，医療研究の libre Green OA 義務化を
推奨。
7. パブリックドメインの作品の電子的複製への規制をはずすコーネルのポリシー。
6. Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)が，7 つの英国研究会議の中
で 7 番目に Green OA の義務化を採択。
5. SPARC の Campus Open Access Policies project (COAP) と Enabling Open Scholarship
(EOS)が，大学に OA ポリシーを普及。
4. フィンランドの応用科学分野の大学による Rector’s Conference。第 1 に，フィンラ
ンドの同分野の 26 大学が，共同 OA リポジトリを設立。第 2 に，この 26 機関が合同で
OA 義務化を採択。これは，現在もっとも包括的な義務化である。第 3 に，他のコンソ
ーシアに拡大の検討をするきっかけを与えた。
3. Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)の再提出。これは，NIH ポリシーの強化
と，連邦政府内にその普及を約束するもので，幅広く超党派的支援を得るものである。
2. オバマ政権が，連邦政府内に NIH ポリシーを普及する方法についてコメントを募集。
結果は出ていないが，これは，FRPAA より迅速に採用可能で，調整も簡単である。オ
バマ大統領の OA に関する立場が初めて見えてきた。
1. 10 ヶ国で 15 の資金援助機関による Green OA が義務化し，14 ヶ国で 60 の大学によ
る Green OA が義務化した。このうち，13 は教員による満場一致の投票で決定。
（原文）
Welcome to the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #141
January 2, 2010
by Peter Suber
Read this issue online
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-10.htm
Contents

Open access in 2009

Erratum

Roundup

Coming this month

Credits
---------SOAN is published and sponsored by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources
Coalition (SPARC).
http://www.arl.org/sparc/
Additional support is provided by Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL), experts in converting
research documents to XML.
http://www.dclab.com/public_access.asp
---------Open access in 2009
2009 was Open Access Year in the Netherlands, but it might have been Open Access Year
worldwide. The growth on every front was extraordinary. In this review of the highlights, I
won't cover individual new OA journals, repositories, or databases; and like last year, the
volume has forced me to omit most new developments in open education, public-sector
information (PSI), and wikis. Last year I had a special section on OA to humanities research,
but this year I cut that as well to make room for a section on the recession. As always,
apologies to the many projects I had to omit.
If you're in a hurry, jump to Section 10 for some highlights of the highlights.
BTW, if you track these things, March 31 was OA Day in Copenhagen, and October 19-23 was
OA Week worldwide.
(1) Open access policies at funding agencies
Five Canadian funding agencies adopted OA mandates in 2009, the most for any country. One
was a private funder, the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research. One was a
public-private partnership: The Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance, which strengthened
its existing OA policy from a request to a requirement. Three were public agencies: the Fonds
de la recherche en sant・du Qu 饕 ec, the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation , and
the Canadian Cancer Society. (The CCS mandate was adopted without fanfare when the
Society absorbed the the National Cancer Institute of Canada and adopted the NCIC's OA
mandate as its own).
Two public agencies in the US adopted OA mandates: the Institute of Education Sciences (IES),
within in the Department of Education, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research
(NCAR), a federally funded lab sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
The UK Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council was the seventh of the seven
Research Councils UK to adopt an OA mandate. New OA mandates were also adopted by the
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hungarian Scientific Research Fund, the Norwegian Research
Council, Swedish Research Council, the Spanish principality of Asturias, and the International
Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT). Lithuania adopted a new law
requiring that publicly-funded research be "made public" online. That comes to 15 new funder
mandates in ten countries.
We could easily add the Science Foundation Ireland to this list, since its OA mandate, adopted
in 2008, took effect in 2009. Also in 2009, Ukraine started to implement the national OA
mandate it adopted in 2007. The Autonomous Community Government of Madrid extended its
2008 mandate from selected research projects to all Madrid-funded research.
OA mandates are known to be under consideration at the Irish Research Council for Humanities
and Social Sciences, the UK Department for International Development (DFID), Denmark's
Electronic Research Library (DEFF), Poland's Ministry of Science and Higher Education, the
Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, the Yemen parliament, and the US Senate (more on
latter below).
There are already a few Europe-wide OA mandates, for example from the European Research
Council (2007) and the European Commission's FP7 pilot project (2008). In 2009 the EC
showed that it wants to continue in the same direction. In a report on e-science infrastructure, it
promised "reinforce [its] catalytic investment under FP7 in scientific data infrastructure, to
support accessibility...policies." Later in the year it charged a session on OA at an EC-hosted
conference (European Research Area Conference 2009, Brussels, October 21-23, 2009) "to
come up with recommendations for policies on Open Access that the Commission can take
forward."
The European Science Foundation (ESF) and the European Heads of Research Councils
(EuroHORCs) plan to issue a joint OA mandate. The ESF represents 80 member organizations
in 30 European countries and EuroHORCs represents all the major public funding agencies in
24 European countries. If endorsements of mandatory OA from ESF and EuroHORCs incline
even half their members to adopt mandates, that would more than double the number of funder
OA mandates in the world. Something to watch.
Similarly, a group of high-profile public and private funders sponsored a study that
recommended green libre OA mandates for medical research. The co-sponsors, convened by
US Institute of Medicine, included the Gates Foundation, Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Merck
Company Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and three cabinet-level departments in the
US. This doesn't mean that the sponsoring organizations will adopt mandates of their own, but
it means that they have heard the argument and have some investment in it.
A diverse group of funding agencies launched OA repositories in 2009, some in response to
existing OA mandates and some as likely harbingers of mandates to come. After much
anticipation, PubMed Central Canada launched as a joint project of the Canada Institute for
Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research
(CIHR), and the US National Library of Medicine (NLM). The NLM also launched Rapid
Research Notes (RRN), an OA repository to speed up the dissemination of new results. The
Christie NHS Foundation Trust launched an IR, the first OA repository within the UK National
Health Service. The UK Department for International Development (DFID) launched an
institutional repository, R4D (Research for Development), as did France's Office National de
l'Eau et des Milieux Aquatiques (ONEMA) and Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology
and Research (A*STAR). The Indian Academy of Sciences plans to launch an institutional
repository and a adopt a policy to fill it.
If studying the feasibility of an institutional repository is a sign that a funding agency is
contemplating an OA policy, then we should expect policies from the Italian National Research
Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche) and the US National Science Foundation
(NSF). In 2009 the NSF gave the Johns Hopkins Libraries a $300,000 grant to study the idea
of an OA repository for NSF-funded research. In addition, the NSF Advisory Committee on
Cyberinfrastructure adopted the statement that OA for "data, publications, and software" is a
"critical component" of the NSF vision of advanced cyberinfrastructure, a statement which Lee
Van Orsdel and Kathleen Born interpret as a recommendation for an OA mandate. The NSF
tilted a litle further toward OA when the National Center for Atmospheric Research became the
first of the NSF's Federally Funded Research and Development Centers to adopt an OA
mandate. Why this matters: the NSF is the second-largest public funder of non-classified
research in the US, after the NIH, and the publishing lobby routinely cites its lack of a mandate
as model for the NIH and other federal agencies to follow.
In 2009 we saw notable calls to mandate OA for publicly-funded research from the Charter for
Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge; the Declaration Concept Web Alliance; the
latest drafts of the Paris Accord Round II; the latest revision of the Internet Rights Charter; the
Japan Association of National University Libraries; the European Commission's Expert Group
of 13 academics; the UK Free Our Books and Research Papers project; the Dutch science
minister, Ronald Plasterk; and the the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk
Onderzoek (NWO), the largest Dutch public funding agency. The NWO not only announced a
general endorsement of OA, but pledged 5 million Euros to support it.
Three French associations -- the Consortium Universitaire des Publications Num 駻 iques
(COUPERIN), Association des directeurs et des personnels de direction des biblioth 鑷 ues
universitaires et de la documentation (ADBU), and Association du r 駸 eau des 騁 ablissements
utilisateurs de l'ABES (AURA)-- issued a joint call for mandating green OA to publicly-funded
research, encouraging gold OA, and starting talks between the government and French
publishers on their OA policies. Jesse Brown, Stephane Couture, Michael Geist, and Jonathan
Vianou called for OA to publicly-funded research in Canada.
The Academic Library Manifesto (from the Research Libraries Group), Kigali Declaration
(from 27 African governments and four intergovernmental organizations), Manchester
Manifesto (from members of Manchester's Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation),
Singapore Declaration (from medical journal editors), and an update of the of the 44-year-old
Declaration of Helsinki all called for wider and more equitable access to research.
The draft Medical R&D Treaty from 2005, which includes an OA mandate, was removed from
the World Health Organization (WHO) global strategy in 2009, with the approval of the
pharmaceutical industry and Obama administration. However, the draft treaty was taken up by
the WHO Expert Working Group on R&D Financing, and is still alive. (Disclosure: I helped
draft the OA provision of the treaty.) While the OA mandate in the treaty is unaffected by the
move, the World Health Assembly (WHA) adopted a watered down version of the same
recommendation ("strongly encouraging" rather than requiring green OA) for its own global
strategy. James Love directly recommended an OA mandate to the World Trade Organization
(WTO).
Lars Fischer launched a petition asking Germany's Bundestag to mandate OA for
publicly-funded research. The petition was endorsed by the Coalition for Action on Copyright
for Education and Research, the German Initiative for Networked Information (DINI), the
German Library Association, Wikimedia Germany, and the Working Committee of the
Parliament and Government Libraries. It gathered 23,631 signatures before the two-month
sign-on period ended last month. It needed 50,000 to guarantee that the Bundestag Petition
Committee would open a public discussion, but the committee may still elect to do so. Earlier
in the year the German government agreed to re-evaluate an OA proposal by Gerd Hansen it
first considered in 2006. The proposal would give authors a statutory right to self-archive their
journal articles six months after publication, regardless of the terms in any copyright transfer
agreement they might have signed.
Dinesh Abrol called for the open licensing of publicly-funded research in India, and India's
Council of Scientific & Industrial Research recommended that each of its 40+ laboratories adopt
OA mandates.
In the US, the OA mandate at the NIH was made permanent by a bill passed by both houses of
Congress signed by President Obama. After all the new OA mandates around the world in
2009, we end the year in one respect exactly as we ended in 2008: the NIH is still the only
funder of medical research with an OA policy allowing an embargo longer than six
months. Every other one caps the permissible embargo at six months.
James Leach, the new chairman of the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH),
publicly supported OA for publicly-funded research. Four years ago his agency adopted a
novel form of funder OA policy. Instead of encouraging or requiring OA for the research it
funded, it favored funding applications which promised OA. As far as I can tell, no other
funders followed its lead until 2009. JISC was the first to do so when it partnered with the
NEH to sponsor a series of Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants. The Polish
Ministry of Culture and National Heritage was the second. A third is in the offing: the Cancer
Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) will "likely favor open access" when
evaluating grant applications.
The Universidad Carlos III de Madrid adopted a
university-variant of the NEH approach. When research groups request university funds to
improve their web sites, the institution will give preference to those that promise to provide OA
to their research through the institutional repository.
Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) re-introduced the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, a bill to
overturn the NIH policy and prevent all federal agencies from adopting similar policies. But
the 2009 bill is not gathering much attention or support. Pushing in the opposite direction, new
bills in the House and Senate would mandate libre OA for federally-funded "educational
materials" that could be used in textbooks.
Of proposed mandates, the largest by far was the re-introduction of the Federal Research Public
Access Act (FRPAA) in the US Senate. First introduced in 2006, the bill would mandate OA at
all the major US federal funding agencies. During the year, the new FRPAA was endorsed by
85 presidents and provosts of US universities, 41 Nobel laureates, seven major US library
associations, six major US student organizations, Autism Speaks, Electronic Frontier
Foundation, Essential Action, IP Justice, IssueLab, the Genetic Alliance, Knowledge Ecology
International, OXFAM America, Public Knowledge, and Universities Allied for Essential
Medicines. It even received support from business-oriented groups such as NetCoalition
--whose members include Amazon, Bloomberg, Google, and Yahoo-- and the Committee for
Economic Development --whose major sponsors include General Electric, IBM, Merrill Lynch,
Pfizer, and Toyota North America.
But potentially larger even than FRPAA was President Obama's call for public comments on
ways to extend OA policies across the federal government. The White House Office of Science
and Technology Policy (OSTP) is collecting comments, so far overwhelmingly in favor of a
government-wide green OA mandate with a short embargo period. At the end of the comment
period (January 21, 2010), the OSTP will formulate a policy which the President could
implement by executive order. The OSTP consultation was preceded by a consultation from
the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on how to improve OMB Circular A-130, the
major US regulation on public access to federal government information and research.
John Houghton and colleagues bolstered the case for national OA mandates by showing that the
benefits of OA far outweighed the costs, using data from Denmark, the Netherlands, and the UK
(complementing their 2006 study of Australia). In the UK, for example, gold OA could save
the higher education sector ｣80 million/year, green OA could save ｣115 million/year, and the
two together could yield an additional ｣172 million/year in financial returns to UK businesses
from easier access to research. OA in the Netherlands could save the Netherlands € 133
million/year.
Ten US and Canadian university presses called for OA to publicly-funded research. Their
statement --organized by 2009 SPARC Innovator Mike Rossner, Executive Director of
Rockefeller University Press-- was the first in support of OA from a group of mostly-TA
publishers and the first from a group of mostly-book publishers. CENDI, the group of science
and technology information managers for US federal agencies, continues to recommend OA to
federally funded research and look for ways to make to happen. Some agencies are so
determined to recover their research output that they are buying copies of published articles
from the journals.
New national working groups or web sites to organize OA activity were launched in Cuba,
Denmark, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and Romania,
(2) Open access policies at universities
In October, 26 of Finland's Universities of Applied Sciences adopted a joint OA mandate. That
is by far the largest number of institutions adopting a common OA policy in the history of
OA. The joint mandate is a sign of serious commitment by the 26 rectors and the Finnish
Ministry of Education, which governs the 26 institutions. It's also a dramatic reminder to other
national ministries and private consortia that joint mandates make a giant step toward OA and
without having to reinvent the wheel at individual institutions.
Outside Finland the number of university OA mandates in 2009 also came to 26: Abertay
Dundee University, Boston University, the Universit・catholique de Louvain, Copenhagen
Business School, Dublin Institute of Technology, the University of Edinburgh, two schools
within Harvard University (the Graduate School of Education and the John F. Kennedy School
of Government), University of Liege, Madurai Kamaraj University, University of Kansas,
University of Leicester, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Universitat Polit 鐵 nica de
Catalunya, University of Pretoria, Roehampton University, Universidad del Rosario, two
schools within the Russian Academy of Sciences (the Vologda Scientific-Coordination Center of
the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute and the Keldysh Institute of Applied
Mathematics), University of Salamanca, University of Salford, University of St. Gallen,
Ternopil State Ivan Puluj Technical University, University College London, Victoria University,
and the University of Westminster.
The 26 non-Finnish mandates were spread among 13 countries: Australia (1), Belgium (2),
Colombia (1), Denmark (1), India (1), Ireland (1), Russia (2), Scotland (2), South Africa (1),
Spain (2), Switzerland (1), Ukraine (1), UK (5), and US (5).
I'm counting Colombia's Universidad del Rosario and Switzerland's University of St. Gallen
here although their policies were adopted in 2008 and not publicized until 2009. I'm also
counting the University of Liege, whose mandate was experimental in 2008 and moved out of
its experimental phase in 2009. I'm *not* counting one adopted mandate at a university not
ready to to make a public announcement. Nor am I counting new mandates limited to theses
and dissertations, of which there were at least five in 2009: the University of Central Florida,
University of Chicago, Kansas State University, the University of Montreal Faculty of Medicine
and Faculty of Management, and Stanford University.
Adding the Finnish and non-Finnish mandates together, we have 52. In addition to these, we
saw eight departmental mandates: two units at the Brigham Young University (Library Faculty
and Department of Instructional Psychology and Technology), the University of Calgary
division of Library and Cultural Resources, the Coventry University Department of Media and
Communication, the library faculty at the University of Northern Colorado, the library faculty at
Oregon State University, and two units at the University of Oregon (Library Faculty and
Department of Romance Languages). For the second year in a row, library faculties lead all
other faculties in adopting departmental or "patchwork" OA mandates.
That comes to an even 60 university OA mandates adopted in 2009, compared to 13 in
2008. The 13 in 2008 outnumbered the mandates from all previous years combined. The new
mandates in 2009 outnumber those in 2008 by more than a factor of four, and more than double
the number from all previous years combined.
A staggering 13 of the new mandates in 2009 were adopted by unanimous faculty votes. We
may be starting to forget how surprising they are. It was astonishing when the Harvard Faculty
of Arts and Sciences broke the ice with a unanimous vote in February 2008, and then when
three more unanimous votes followed in the same year. (Open challenge: Name any another
substantive policy topic on which even one faculty vote, let alone 13 in one year, have been
unanimous.) But in 2009 the number of unanimous votes grew more than threefold. Not
counting the Finnish mandates --for which one procedural act created many policies-- half the
mandates adopted in 2009 mandates were adopted by unanimous faculty votes. If you're
looking for reasons to tip the scales, you could count the vote at the Harvard Graduate School of
Education, for which there were a few abstentions but no dissenting votes. You could also
count two unanimous faculty votes for non-mandatory policies (below).
In 2009, as in every year since the first university OA mandate in 2003, more universities
adopted strong policies or mandates than weaker policies requesting or encouraging OA without
requiring it. In 2009, non-mandatory OA policies were adopted at the University of Bergen,
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, University of Geneva, University of Guelph School of
Environmental Sciences, the library faculty at the Gustavus Adolphus College, Venezuela's
Universidad de Oriente, University of Tampere, Trinity University, Utrecht University, and the
University of Washington. The University of Ottawa adopted a green OA policy but has not yet
released the details; it may or may not be a mandate. Two of the non-mandates --at Gustavus
Adolphus and Universidad de Oriente-- were adopted by unanimous faculty votes, which I did
not count in the tally of unanimous votes for mandates.
Taking the mandatory and non-mandatory policies together, two include the rule that only
articles on deposit in the IR will be used for the purposes of promotion and other internal
evaluations (Liege, Oregon library faculty) and three provide some degree of libre OA (Liege,
Northern Colorado library faculty, Oregon library faculty). While the 26 Finnish mandates
don't require libre OA, their repository automatically offers depositing authors the chance to
attach a CC license to their work.
In 2009 we saw the first mandates from primarily undergraduate, liberal arts institutions
(Gustavus Adolphus, Oberlin, Trinity), and the first from primarily undergraduate applied
science institutions (the Finnish 26). The mandate at the Universit・catholique de Louvain, and
the Finnish mandates, were the first to require deposit in consortial repositories. The US saw
its first university-wide mandates (Boston University, Kansas University, and MIT) and its first
mandate from a public university (Kansas).
Two initiatives new in 2009 will work systematically to increase the number of green OA
mandates at universities: the SPARC Campus Open Access Policies project and Enabling Open
Scholarship (EOS). They came too late in the year to explain the explosive growth of
university policies in 2009, but should certainly accelerate that growth in years to come.
The SPARC project tracks 53 institutions now considering policies, most of them not yet ready
to be named in public. But there is public knowledge of policy deliberations, or internal
activity to start deliberations, at the University of Cardiff, Concordia University, Duke
University, University of Florida, Harvard Medical School, the University of Pennsylvania,
University of S 縊 Paulo, Texas A&M University, the University of Virginia, the University
Wisconsin Milwaukee, and Yale University.
EOS was launched by a group of European university rectors and OA leaders. Rectors were
active on other fronts as well. Italy's university rectors (Conferenza dei Rettori delle
Universit・Italiane, or CRUI) began developing national guidelines for providing OA to Italian
ETDs. Ten rectors added their names to the 2008 Belgorod Declaration, calling for university
OA policies Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. A group of 26 Ukrainian rectors published the Olvia
Declaration, calling on Ukrainian universities to launch repositories and adopt OA policies to
fill them. According to my sources, the 26 Finnish mandates should be credited to the 26
rectors even more than to the Ministry of Education. If presidents and provosts are the US
equivalent of rectors, this is the place to note that 85 presidents and provosts of US institutions
endorsed FRPAA and called for an OA mandate to publicly-funded research in the US.
In addition to EOS and the SPARC projects, JISC helped spread OA policies by assembling an
InfoKit on repositories, mandates, and advocacy literature. (It also released a separate toolkit
for recruiting staff for repository projects.)
凬 ico de
Acesso Aberto de Portuga) created an OA policy kit to help universities formulate and
implement OA policies. The Association of College and Research Libraries updated its
Scholarly Communication Toolkit. Alma Swan and Leslie Chan launched OASIS (Open
Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook), a collection of documents, videos, and other
resources on "the concept, principles, advantages, approaches and means to achieving" OA. Its
focus on practical details should help any institution draft, adopt, and carry out an OA policy.
The LIBER (Ligue des Biblioth 鑷 ues Europ 馥 nnes de Recherche) Strategic Plan 2009-2012
includes collaboration with SPARC Europe and DRIVER to promote OA in Europe, especially
green OA. Green OA activism is also built into JISC's Research 3.0 campaign, the JISC
roadmap for repositories 2009-2013, and the JISC Strategy 2010-2012. The Vice Chancellor at
the University of Salford, Martin Hall, blogged his intention to increase OA archiving at the
university. The Harvard University Task Force on University Libraries reaffirmed the libraries'
efforts to reform the scholarly communications and support the university's role in the OA
movement.
In 2009 student activism for university OA policies surpassed that in any previous
year. Student groups worked --and are working-- for OA policies at Columbia University,
Georgetown, Uppsala, and Yale. Students at the University of New Mexico are trying to
persuade professors to adopt OA textbooks. The Student Senate at the University of Tennessee
discussed the launch of an OA repository for the university. Student editorials at Stanford and
the University of Pennsylvania called on their institutions to launch OA journal funds. David
Wiley's students at Brigham Young University not only compared 41 OA policies in the US, but
recommended for an OA policy for BYU. A coalition of six American student associations
issued a joint statement (Student Statement on The Right to Research) calling on universities,
research funders, and researchers to mandate OA to research. The coalition has since grown to
19 student organizations representing more than five million students.
Students for Free Culture scaled up its Open University Campaign (launched in 2008), and
changed its name to the Open Education Campaign (to prevent confusion with the Open
University).
The campaign includes a recommendation that universities adopt OA
mandates. MIT students, who already have an OA mandate at their school, began lobbying for
FRPAA and an OA mandate for the nation.
Elsevier confirmed that it is lobbying UK universities to link to Elsevier articles at the journal
sites rather than deposit copies in locally-hosted IRs, though it still gives blanket permission for
postprint archiving.
(3) Some growth numbers
In 2009, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) added 723 peer-reviewed OA journals,
representing 19% growth over the previous year. Last year it grew by 812 journals journals or
27%. In 2008, it added 2.2 titles per day, but in 2009 the rate was closer to 1.99 titles per
day. It now lists a total of 4,535 peer-reviewed OA journals.
While the DOAJ grew significantly in 2009, it grew more slowly in 2009 than in 2008. So far
we don't know why. There could have been fewer new launches, which the recession makes
likely. (But there weren't fewer conversions to OA; on the contrary; see Sections 5 and
9.) Some number of new launches might have gone unnoticed or still be working their way
through the DOAJ's indexing backlog.
The number of OA repositories grew by 193 or 20% in Scientific Commons, 318 or 26% in the
Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), and 262 or 20% in the Directory of Open
Access Repositories (OpenDOAR). Using the ROAR figures, more than six new repositories
launched every week during 2009. Scientific Commons now lists 1,158 OA repositories
worldwide, ROAR 1,557, and OpenDoar 1,558.
The number of items on deposit in these repositories grew by 7,887,824 items or 33% according
to Scientific Commons. That's more than 21,600 items per day.
(Most of the numbers in this section not attributed to others were gathered or computed by
Heather Morrison, Project Coordinator for the British Columbia Electronic Library
Network. Her end-of-2009 figures were recorded on December 31, 2008.)
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Apn66wofwO7adHdUVG1BVGRIMG1OYTFqTTh
YelMxWFE&hl=en
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Apn66wofwO7adF93d1lIS1VCVHhnZ0pTemVFX1h
TT0E&hl=en
(4) Open access archiving
In addition to the OA repositories launched at individual institutions in 2009, more than six per
week (Section 3), in 2009 we saw several new, systematic attempts to cover scholars and
institutions not previously covered. Wales launched a project to put an institutional repository
(IR) in every Welsh university. Mozambique launched a single national repository for all its
institutions.
The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft launched a program to fund OA
repositories in Germany. New Zealand launched a consortial repository for its Crown Research
Institutes and several government departments. The Austrian Library Network and Service (ﾖ
sterreichischen Bibliothekenverbund und Service) is creating a national OA repository for
ETDs. The Federated Network of Institutional Repositories of Scientific Documentation in
Latin America is spreading IRs through Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico.
Mendeley made rapid progress toward its goal of becoming the world's largest OA research
repository. In February it received $2 million in venture capital, and by November had 8
million works on deposit, 100,000 users, and a growth rate of 100% every 10 weeks. Twidox,
another universal repository, moved into its public beta.
Depot was formerly a universal repository for scholars in the UK, either redirecting deposits to
the author's IR or accepting and disseminating deposits when the author had no IR. In 2009
Depot generalized itself and became international, offering the same service to scholars
everywhere. The OA Repository Junction is a JISC-funded project to turn a component of the
Depot into a stand-alone service for directing deposits to any appropriate repository. The
European Commission previewed its own Depot-like universal repository, OpenAIRE, resting
on a CERN repository for authors without their own IR. While Depot might make OpenAIRE
unnecessary, OpenAIRE is a welcome sign that the EC is ramping up its commitment to green
OA and preparing the needed infrastructure. Sweden is so committed to distributed over
central repositories for its national green infrastructure that the Swedish Research Council
postponed its adoption of an OA mandate until it was sure that all Swedish institutions had
IRs. (The Council announced its OA mandate in October 2009.)
The NIH said that it is "open to closer collaboration with institutional repositories" and will
"consider" direct feeds from IRs to PubMed Central. That would allow NIH grantees to deposit
in their local IR, which would in turn deposit in PMC, perhaps through the SWORD (Simple
Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) protocol. When Harvard Medical School went
public with its plans for an OA mandate, it revealed that it was aiming at just such a model in
which faculty --likely to be covered to two mandates (NIH and HMS)-- would deposit once,
locally, and the IR would automatically take care of the second deposit to PMC. Earlier in the
year arXiv announced that was ready to accept SWORD-mediated exports from IRs.
Microsoft released a Word add-in for SWORD-based direct deposits into OA repositories. A
new script at the SWORD PHP Library allowed authors to use any email client to deposit
articles in any SWORD-enabled repository. A JISC project used SWORD to load-test the
major repository packages, and automatically loaded a a DSpace repository with more than
300,000 deposits of 9 MB each (and counting). Another JISC project uses SWORD to transact
the direct deposit of teaching materials from Moodle into an IR. SWORD was named the most
innovative project by participants at the JISC Repositories and Preservation conference.
DRIVER will add the eIFL.net countries to those whose repository content it harvests and
distributes. The Research Councils UK are studying ways to harvest final reporting
information from a grantee's IR. A new tool from the Waterford Institute of Technology will
harvest content from the OA repositories of Ireland, and a new tool from the National Library of
Sweden and the Uppsala University Library will do the same for the OA repositories of
Sweden. The Australian Research Online gateway is harvesting the OA repositories of
Australia. But unlike other national initiatives, the Australian project departs from the OAI
standard and has led at least two repositories to modify their OAI interface to fit the
non-standard harvester, threatening the interoperability that the OAI standard was designed to
secure.
The international Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) launched during OA
Week as an outgrowth of DRIVER. COAR will network more than 1,000 OA repositories
worldwide and promote common standards and policies. Its 28 co-founding organizations
represent 17 countries in Europe, North America, and Asia. The Council of Australian
University Librarians (CAUL) launched the CAUL Australian Institutional Repository Support
Service (CAIRSS). A new project from the InterAcademy Panel on International Issues (IAP)
will help science academies in developing countries support institutional repositories and OA
digitization projects.
The Open Grid Forum started a Digital Repositories Research
Group. DuraSpace created the DSpace Ambassador Program to help new and potential DSpace
users make a good start and get their questions answered.
Perseus is developing a digital library in the field of classics, the Scaife Digital Library,
distributed over institutional repositories, a first for a disciplinary collection. (The Scaife
Digital Library is named after Ross Scaife, a classicist and OA activist who died in
2008.) PhilPapers, a new OA repository for the field of philosophy, entered its public
beta. Erich Weichselgartner described plans to launch an OA European Psychology Publication
Platform. The Corporate Governance Network is a new disciplinary repository from
SSRN. Alex Golub laid down Mana'o, the OA repository for anthropology, though it might be
revived if he can find another individual or organization to take it on.
As we've come to expect, JISC launched a host of repository-improvement projects, including
BiblioSight, for integrating citation data into OA repositories; Personal Engagement with
Repositories through Social Networking Applications (PERSoNA); Supporting, Harnessing and
Advancing Repository Enhancement (SHARE); and PIRUS2, a successor to the 2008 PIRUS
project (Publisher and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics). Cornell's arXiv received a
$833,000 grant from the US National Science Foundation to add new features for social
networking, quickly identifying an article's main concepts, seeing articles in context, and
finding related work.
A group of Saarland University researchers ran a survey on how to improve OA repositories; a
group from the University of Southampton ran one on how to improve OpenDOAR (Directory
of Open Access Repositories) and ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories); and SHERPA
ran one on how to improve the RoMEO database. A couple of repository-enhancement projects
released their final reports: the Cambridge Tetra Repositories Enhancement Project (CTREP)
and the Embedding repositories & consortial enhancement (EMBRACE) project.
Even apart from the John Houghton studies (noted in Section 1), a number of important studies
in 2009 highlighted the value of OA repositories, our distance from taking good advantage of
them, or both. The Association of Research Libraries Digital Repository Issues Task Force
recommended ways in which research libraries could support repositories. The University of
Strathclyde's Online Catalogue and Repository Interoperability Study (OCRIS) project will
recommend ways to connect repository contents with the traditional library OPAC. Research
and Markets published a (TA) report on practices at 56 institutional repositories in 11 countries,
and the Primary Research Group published a (TA) report on university faculty on the use
repositories and attitudes toward OA. Charles Bailey published the first version of his
Institutional Repository Bibliography. A study by Sally Morris and the Publishing Research
Consortium found that researchers tended to underestimate how often publishers permit green
OA for the accepted version of an article and tended to overestimate how often they permit
green OA for the published version of an article. A study by the Research Information Network
(RIN) found that researchers have trouble accessing all the work they can now discover, and
that access barriers slow their research, hinder collaboration, and "may well affect the quality
and integrity of work produced...."
Kumiko V 騷 ina found that 83% of faculty at six Canadian universities would self-archive if
their funder or employer required it --an even higher percentage than Alma Swan found in her
pioneering studies in 2004 and 2005. However, 86% didn't know whether their university had
an IR. Doug Ray reported that only 27% of articles published in 20 top LIS journals during
2007 had OA versions on deposit in repositories. (We need more studies like this in every field,
and preferably every year.) The PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research)
study of the effects of green OA on TA journal subscriptions released its final report on
repository deposit procedures, assigned its behavioral and usage research to teams from
Loughborough University and University College London, and called for tenders on its
economics research.
Australia's draft research assessment system requires deposit in IRs and OA whenever
possible. When OA is not possible, research evaluators will have privileged access to dark
deposits in the IRs. To make life easier for faculty, and to encourage IR deposits, Queensland
University of Technology configured its IR to report suitable publications to Australia's Higher
Education Research Data Collection for annual research assessment. Zoe Corbyn reports that
Universities UK recommended OA for all papers submitted to the next Research Excellence
Framework.
2009 was another mast year for repository tools. The Journal TOCs API will help IR managers
discover new articles which ought to be on deposit in their repositories (and help make
repository metadata consistent by matching it with the journal's). The PUMA project
(Akademisches Publikationsmanagement) from the University of Kassel gooses the incentive to
deposit in IRs by using deposit metadata to update author web pages and the institutional
research reporting system.
New tools for EPrints export records and searches in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and
offer multiple points of access into complex documents such as document files with separate
text and illustrations (both from Southampton). The JISC IncReASe project released an
EPrints plug-in for importing metadata from arXiv. A new tool from Southampton University
(EP2DC) allows authors who deposit an article in an EPrints repository to deposit associated
data files in remote data repositories. A new tool from the University of Leeds allows anyone
using Symplectic publishing software to deposit new work directly in EPrints repositories. (On
the latter front, the Research Libraries Group's Academic Library Manifesto recommended the
integration of publishing platforms with repository services.) New tools for DSpace allow
managers to make use of controlled vocabularies (from Andy Bagdonov), to streamline the
testing and installation of new modules (from JumpBox), and to identify available add-ons and
extensions (from DSpace itself). CONTENTdm repositories can now make use of an
open-source image viewer from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
ArXiv launched a system of author feeds to follow new work, and author identifiers to
disambiguate searches. Dave Bacon created arXiview, an iPhone app for searching and
browsing arXiv (the University of Florida released a similar app for its OA Digital
Collections). Philip Gibbs launched viXra, an OA physics repository with no restrictions on
what may be deposited, for those who believe that arXiv unfairly excludes some submitted
papers.
I launched the Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) to do a number of jobs at once: to
crowdsource the job of discovering and broadcasting new OA developments, to ensure that our
alert system would scale with the continuing growth of the OA movement, to make a larger
volume of news easier to read or skim, and to make up for my need to step back from blogging
at Open Access News and give time to my new position at Harvard's Berkman Center. The
OATP news feed is available on a blog-like web page as well as by RSS, Twitter, and
email. The project is now in Phase 1, and should move into Phase 2 later this year (more later,
I promise).
At least two IRs --Southampton and Minho-- now tweet their new deposits. BioMed Central
now has a "Post to Twitter" option in the sidebar of each of its OA articles. A tool from Robert
Simpson ranks arXiv papers bases on their popularity on Twitter. Stuart even Lewis wrote a
script to tweet open data on New Zealand tides. RePEc allows users to integrate their RePEc
data into Facebook.
All the major repository software packages upgraded and some new ones entered the
ring. ContentDM upgraded to version 5, DSpace to 1.5.2, EPrints to 3.1.3, Fedora to 3.3,
MOAI to version 1.08, PURE to 3.15, and VITAL to 4.0. Microsoft released Zentity 1.0, its
repository platform, and announced that it would soon open the source code and release an
Article Authoring Add-in for Word. The US National Science Digital Library released its OA
repository software, EduPak 1.0, and the University of Rochester announced the alpha version
of own, IRplus. The National Archive Institute of Portugal opened the source code for its
麩 ticos (Repository of Authentic Digital Objects,
RODA). The Colegio de San Juan de Letran-Calamba released LSpace, a simplified version of
DSpace written in Visual Basic and designed as an OA book repository, and Sun Microsystems
launched its open-source Enterprise-Wide Digital Repository and Archive, based on its Open
Archive Framework and incorporating open-source components from Drupal and Fedora. The
Federal Digital System (FDsys) from the US Government Printing Office (GPO) entered its
public beta; FDsys will replace GPOAccess as the OA repository for US federal government
information.
The Fedora Commons and DSpace Foundation merged to form DuraSpace, in part to reduce
duplicated effort in pursuit of a common mission. The Fedora and DSpace software will not
merge, but take advantage of new opportunities for sharing and synergy as they evolve. One of
DuraSpace's first projects is DuraCloud, a cloud-based repository service. The Mellon
Foundation released a report on DuraCloud, and DuraSpace and the Library of Congress
launched a prototype. On the same front, CloudSocial is a new cloud-based repository for open
educational resources from the University of Michigan Medical School. DocumentCloud is a
forthcoming cloud-based repository, funded by the Knight Foundation, where journalists can
provide OA to the documents on which they base their investigations and published
articles. The next iteration of EPrints will support cloud-based storage in Amazon's
S3/Cloudfront.
The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) added some new features, including statistics
on each repository it harvests. It also became the world's largest cross-archive search engine,
apparently the first to surpass OAIster. The Hathi Trust repository released a sophisticated new
full-text search engine which includes faceted search and "similar to" recommendations; unlike
the Google search of the same content, the Hathi engine lists every page containing the
searchstring.
The NIH launched a demo version of AllPlus Search, a metasearch engine covering the NIH
Library, the NIH Library Catalog, PubMed, and MedlinePlus. Bioalma launched novo|seek, a
search engine and customized front-end for Medline, PubMed, and PubMed Central. The
PubMed Central search engine was upgraded to cover articles on deposit but under embargo,
and the PubMed search engine was upgraded to flag OA articles in its search
returns. Springer's AuthorMapper, which searches journal articles and plots the location of
authors on a map, added a filter for OA articles. Both the Google and Yahoo image search
engines added filters for CC licenses. Sprixi is a new search engine dedicated to CC-licensed
and public-domain images.
There were new, free Google custom search engines for archaeology (WikiArc), the arts and
humanities (JURN), business (FUSE), and economics (Economics Search Engine). There were
two new search engines for open educational resources, Ensemble (from Scott Wilson) and
DiscoverEd (from ccLearn), and two for law, MetaJuris, covering OA legal databases, and and
LexisWeb, a free search service from TA LexisNexis. TechJournalContents is a new search
engine OA and TA scholarly technology journals.
Quertle beefed up its biomedical search engine with 60,000 peer-reviewed articles from BioMed
Central. The search engines at WorldWideScience and CiteSeerX were upgraded. The
Universities of Sheffield and Hertfordshire are creating a search engine of OA resources on
modern British history, and Deep Web Tech relaunched its deep-web search engine,
ScienceResearch.com. Stephen Wolfram launched Wolfram|Alpha, the free "knowledge
engine" that returns direct answers and graphs, not just a list of pages which might contain
answers. In short order it opened its API and won a slew of awards, including "Best of What's
New" in computing for 2009 from Popular Science.
WIPO launched a research project on tools for increasing access to the public domain,
eXtensible Catalog produced an OAI Toolkit for sharing records via OAI-PMH. SciMate
(Scientific Material Transfer Exchange) is a new suite of tools from Christopher Dyer for
sharing research information and physical specimens. Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL)
created four tools to aid in the conversion of documents to NLM XML and support LinkOut
from PubMed Central to publisher web sites. CARPET (Community for Academic Reviewing,
Publishing and Editorial Technology) officially launched its platform for scientific publishing
tools.
The African Copyright & Access to Knowledge Project (ACA2K) urged African countries to
"create and populate Open Access Institutional Repositories/Research Archives to showcase
African research." The First International Conference on African Digital Libraries and
Archives, held in Addis Ababa, "identified, as a key priority area, the need to develop an
integrated open access information platform for Africa." It called the United Nations Economic
Commission for Africa (UNECA) to lead the initiative. Eight universities in seven southern
African countries agreed to together on open education and OA research.
(5) Open access journals
Leaving aside the newly launched OA journals (Section 3), in 2009 I counted 48 journals that
converted from TA to OA, two of which had charged subscriptions for more than 30 years. All
346 journals from African Journals Online are en route to OA. By contrast and despite the
recession, I know only three journals that converted from OA to TA, only two that converted
from full OA to OA for just a subset of their content, only one that converted from full OA to
hybrid OA, and only one that converted from no-fee OA to fee-based OA. I counted 615 that
converted from TA to hybrid OA, and one from hybrid OA to full OA. I counted eight that
converted from TA to delayed OA, including one which had charged subscriptions for more than
80 years. Seven databases converted to OA, and 32 journals converted only their backfiles to
OA, including five which had been publishing for more than 100 years and six which had been
publishing between 25 and 99 years. (All these numbers are based on what I noticed in my
daily blogging, and could well be undercounts.)
2009 was not the first year that universities established funds to pay publication fees at
fee-based OA journals. In January there were already more than 15 university funds
worldwide. (It's hard to be sure because some funds were temporary and it's easier to count
launches than expirations.) But the campaign to launch university funds stepped up
considerably in 2009, which is remarkable in light of recession-squeezed budgets and the lower
cost of green OA. In September, Harvard launched the Compact for Open-Access Publishing
Equity (COPE), a commitment to launch a fund and encourage other institutions to do the
same. The founding institutions were Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, and the University of
California at Berkeley. At the time, only Berkeley had a fund and only Harvard and MIT had
green OA mandates. Since then, Columbia, the University of Ottawa, and the Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center have also joined. Apart from COPE, journal funds appeared at
Lund University and the Universities of Oregan and Tennessee in 2009, bringing the worldwide
total to 22, according to the Open Access Directory list of funds, which itself launched in
2009. The research committee at Norway's University of Agder recommended that the
university launch a fund. By contrast, only one fund, at the University of Amsterdam, had to
close in 2009 for financial reasons.
In March, Universities UK (UUK) and the Research Information Network (RIN) helped turn the
tide by recommending that universities and funders should start to pay publication fees on
behalf of faculty and grantees. The Biosciences Federation publicly endorsed the UUK/RIN
recommendations. The Wellcome Trust was already paying fees for grantees, and committed 2
million pounds above and beyond its earlier commitment. The Netherlands Organisation for
Scientific Research (NWO) committed 5 million Euros. JISC asked UK institutions whether it
should create a central fund for the nation. The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) took
an indirect approach and now funds universities which in turn cover publication fees incurred
by their faculty.
Scientific Research, FWF) adopted a policy to cover publication fees not just for OA journals
but also for OA monographs. The Research Councils UK suggested that they may soon move
beyond their green OA mandates to support for gold OA.
The UK National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) entered a "Supporter Membership
arrangement" with BMC to discount the fees for NIHR-funded researchers. It's not the first
funder to do so, but it's the first public funder. Pfizer began to pay publication fees at BMC
journals for its own scientists, and created a fund to cover fees for researchers from low-income
countries. It's not the first corporation to cover its own researchers, but it's the first to launch a
fund for others. It may be a sign that pharmaceutical companies --and soon perhaps other
companies-- recognize their interest in barrier-free access to peer-reviewed research. Springer
and the University of California struck a deal allowing UC's subscription payments to cover
publication fees for articles by UC authors at Springer's hybrid OA journals. It's not Springer's
first such deal, but the first with a US institution.
These funds and subsidies are small potatoes compared to the money spent every year on
subscriptions. But they matter because they are a sign that more and more institutions see the
growth of peer-reviewed OA journals as an investment in the future of scholarly communication,
and even as a way to disarm objections to faster-growing, wider-ranging, and less expensive
green OA. (How does do gold OA funds disarm objections to green OA? By providing
reassurance that if green OA eventually triggers cancellations of peer-reviewed TA journals,
then we'll have viable peer-reviewed OA journals to take their place and financial support for
TA journals that choose to convert.) So far this type of financial support for gold OA is limited
to fee-based OA journals and doesn't reach the 70% peer-reviewed OA journals which charge no
fees at all.
Within the movement to launch university OA funds, there is a mini-movement to withhold
funds from hybrid journals using a double-charge business model (i.e. refusing to promise to
reduce subscription prices in proportion to author uptake of the OA option). In 2009, the new
funds at Cornell, Harvard, Lund, and Oregon all took this position.
EMBO joined the (still small) group of hybrid OA publishers promising to avoid double-charges
for its OA articles. The Wellcome Trust called for greater transparency from hybrid publishers
on whether they were shunning or embracing the double-charge business model. The Open
Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) called on universities and funding agencies
to clarify when they were willing to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals.
The Open Information Science Journal (TOISCIJ) from Bentham Science accepted a paper of
computer-generated nonsense submitted by Philip Davis and Kent Anderson, and sent them a
bill for $800. When they exposed the hoax, the editor of TOISCIJ resigned, but claimed that
the article had been accepted without his knowledge or approval. A board member of an
unrelated Bentham journal also resigned, to dissociate himself from the company. Bentham's
director of publications did not resign and defended the journal's action, claiming that "we were
aware that the article submitted was a hoax, and we tried to find out the identity of the
individual by pretending the article had been accepted for publication when in fact it was
not." The hoax should deter this kind of embarrassing behavior, whether it arises from
incompetence or dishonesty, and reduce the number of scams giving OA journals a bad
name. But there's no doubt that it also feeds hasty generalizations about OA journals and
steepens the incline for the honest majority of OA journals.
On the other side of the access watershed, Elsevier published a collection of Merck-funded,
Merck-authored articles puffing Merck products, and disguised the collection as a
peer-reviewed journal ("Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine"). When caught it
admitted that it had published five other fake journals for other pharma companies. The tally of
its fake journals eventually rose to nine. Elsevier was also caught paying users for five-star
ratings of its textbooks at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. At the time of both incidents, another
arm of the company was lobbying Congress with the argument that OA would undermine peer
review.
I counted 14 new OA journal or book publishers established in 2009: Bloomsbury Qatar
Foundation Journals, Bookbon, Fountain Publishers, French Creek Press (and its academic
division, Kenwood Academic), Impact Journals, iMedPub Journals and Books, MediaCommons
Press, Open Academic Press, Open Access Press, Open Access Publications, Open Monograph
Press, Page Press, and Sciyo. Mysteriously, one of them, Advanced Research Journals, initially
linked from its logo to the Elsevier ScienceDirect home page, though it stopped when the link
was publicized.
The University of California relaunched eScholarship (formerly eScholarship Repository) as an
OA publishing platform for books and journals. Soon after, it launched University of California
Publishing Services (UCPubS) to combine the OA publishing from eScholarship with the print
publishing of the University of California Press. Indiana University proposed a cooperative
digital publishing infrastructure to serve many journals, university presses, and non-profit
societies at make it unnecessary for them to turn to commercial publishers. Co-Action
Publishing and two partners launched Open Access Solutions, a suite of services and
professional skills to help small OA publishers preserve their independence from large
publishers.
A new platform called BestThinking publishes unrefereed OA articles by attributed authors, like
Citizendium or Google Knol, and plans to enter the STM journal market. Meantime, Knol
added peer-review management features and did enter the STM market, starting with PLoS
Currents: Influenza, the first journal in the PLoS Currents series. All the peer-reviewed
journals from Internet Medical Publishing will also use Knol. Publiss is a new suite of
web-based publishing tools optimized for OA. The Public Knowledge Project released Open
Journal Systems version 2.3.1, translated it into Basque, Danish, Romanian, and Welsh. The
PLoS journals upgraded to Ambra upgraded to version 0.9.5.
SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) launched a branch in South Africa based on the
original in Brazil. All ScieELO journals are OA, and at year's end SciELO South Africa had a
portfolio of seven titles.
CERN's project for converting TA journals in particle physics to OA, SCOAP3 project
(Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics), recruited new
members or expressions of interest from institutions in Canada, Finland, Spain, and 62
institutions or campuses in the United States.
The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) nearly doubled its membership in
2009, and just last month signed up the British Medical Journal and Oxford University Press. It
announced its first cohort of elected board members and officers, launched a blog, hosted its
first conference on OA publishing (Lund, Sweden, September 14-16, 2009), and plans an annual
series of conferences.
In 2009, Thomson Reuters reported that five OA journals had the highest impact factors in their
fields for 2008. Four were from PLoS: PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases (first in Tropical
Medicine, out of 15), PLoS Pathogens (first in Parasitology, out of 25), PLoS Computational
Biology (first in Mathematical & Computational Biology, out of 28), and PLoS Biology (first in
Biology, out of 71). The fifth was the Journal of Medical Internet Research (first in Medical
Informatics, out of 20). (The founding editor and publisher of JMIR, Gunther Eysenbach, also
won the first Public Knowledge Project Community Contribution Award for editors.) The
Journal of Nuclear Medicine, which is OA after a six-month embargo, ranked first in the field of
medical imaging.
PLoS ONE began releasing article-level impact data, including page views, citations, usage,
social networking links, comments, user ratings, and press coverage. Soon all seven PLoS
journals were doing the same. Late in the year they added blog coverage, as measured by
ResearchBlogging.org.
Mendeley plans
to support article-level
impact
metrics
as
well. Citemine created a new metric of what is worth reading by integrating a bidding system
into OA repositories, when bids represent user judgments of a paper's promise in attracting
future citations.
SHERPA introduced a major upgrade to its RoMEO database and the RoMEO API. During
2009 it passed the milestone of cataloguing the copyright and self-archiving policies of 600
publishers. (Currently 62% allow self-archiving in some form.) The University of Stuttgart
and the Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek launched a German version of RoMEO, and the
Universities of Barcelona and Valencia launched Dulcinea, a RoMEO cousin for Spanish
journals. OAKList, the Australian supplement to RoMEO, added a web form allowing users to
submit new information on publisher copyright and archiving policies. The CAUL Australian
Institutional Repository Support Service launched Open Access Policies Search, which searches
journal copyright policies across RoMEO, OAKList and AcqWeb. ccLearn launched a more
distant RoMEO cousin, University Copyright Ownership Policies (UCOP), wiki-based database
of university policies on who owns what work produced by faculty.
Inderscience Publishers converted its 345 journals to hybrid OA, Brill converted its 135 journals,
Walter de Gruyter its 100, and Schattauer Verlag its 20, and Nature Publishing Group an
additional 11. Nature launched a new hybrid journal, Nature Communications, its first
online-only journal. Hogrefe introduced a hybrid OA option for Psychologischen Rundschau.
A handful of hybrid OA journals liberalized their terms in order to comply with the policies of
the Wellcome Trust and the UK Funders Group, which require libre OA when they pay
publication fees. The Royal Society modified its hybrid business model to charge by the article,
not by the page. Mamiko Matsubayashi and colleagues released a study showing that, in
biomemedicine in 2005, TA and hybrid OA journals published nearly twice as many OA articles
as full OA journals.
Journals and publishers continued to experiment with new policies and business models. Open
Medicine began publishing selected articles in three formats (HTML, PDF, and wiki) and
encouraged readers to modify the wiki versions. David Linden argued in an editorial that the
Journal of Neurophysiology should drop the the Ingelfinger rule, and asked readers to weigh in
on the question. When PLoS articles depend on open-source software, PLoS journals may soon
ask authors to submit the software along their manuscripts; if the manuscripts are published, the
software would be available from a special repository. DeepDyve will "rent" journal articles
for $0.99 each; the fee buys 24 hours of access without any rights to print, download, or
screen-capture.
SPARC released a report by Raym Crow detailing the many business models used by OA
journals. A study by the National Humanities Alliance concluded that publication fees were
"not currently a sustainable option" for eight surveyed journals in the social sciences and
humanities. It did not investigate other business models for OA journals or acknowledge that
most OA journals don't charge fees. In the wake of the report, the eight societies publishing the
journals studied in the report expressed a determination to find viable no-fee models for
providing OA.
Stuart Shieber's systematic scan of all journals in the DOAJ found that fewer than 20% charged
publication fees.
Bill Hooker redid a 2004 Cornell study on what universities would pay if all
peer-reviewed journals converted to OA, corrected its false assumptions (among others, that all
OA journals charged publication fees), and concluded that universities would pay less in that
hypothetical future world than they pay now for TA journals. Heather Morrison calculated that
libraries would save "at least 64%" from such a conversion.
PLoS expects to become financially self-sustaining during 2010. Three of its journals --PLoS
One, PLoS Genetics, and PLoS Pathogens-- have already broken even.
Sami Kassab at Exane BNP Paribas reported that Elsevier cut the 2010 prices for its nuclear
physics journals by 20% while raising prices on its other titles, which he interpreted as an effect
of market pressure from OA. At the same time Bernd-Christoph Kaemper noted that
submissions at Elsevier's high-energy physics journals declined by 30% to 50% in the last 4
years.
Ted Bergstrom, Paul Courant, and R. Preston McAfee used state open-record laws to force the
disclosure of Big Deal contracts between publishers and academic libraries. Elsevier failed to
persuade a court to block the release of the Washington State University contract. In France, a
journalist forced the disclosure of the book-scanning contract between Google and the City of
Lyon.
Nature Publishing Group and Oxford University Press added an OAI-PMH interface for their
journals, and Drupal became OAI compliant. OCLC finished the job of incorporating the
OAIster database into WorldCat. Contrary to some early doubts, it also promised a separate,
OA version of the OAIster records by this month (January 2010). OCLC also released a suite
of tools to support OAI-PMH data sharing among museums. The George Mason University
Center for History and New Media released Omeka 1.0, new software for publishing
OAI-compliant scholarship and cultural heritage exhibits. eXtensible Catalog released its OAI
Toolkit for sharing library records through the OAI-PMH.
The DOAJ launched a long-term preservation program for OA journals, in partnership with
National Library of the Netherlands, and received the SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding
Achievements in Scholarly Communications, 2009. Mir@bel (Mutualisation d'Informations
sur les Revues et leurs Acc 鑚 dans les Bases En Ligne) is a new OA index of online journals,
especially Francophone journals in humanities and social sciences.
The Council of Editors of Learned Journals formulated principles for the future of scholarly
journals, the second of which calls for the removal of price barriers, at least for "Web 2.0
journals that take their primary responsibility as curatorial." The Association of Research
Libraries (ARL) prepared a set of talking points for outreach to scholarly societies, including
outreach to convert society journals to OA. When India's Council of Scientific & Industrial
Research recommended that its 40+ laboratories adopt OA mandates (noted in Section 1) it also
recommended that they convert their TA journals to OA.
(6) Data
I won't even try to suggest the range of the individual projects providing open data in
2009. But I can point out some important peaks in the range. For example, initiatives to
provide OA to data and research on the H1N1 flu virus were announced by the American
Medical Association, American Society for Microbiology, American Veterinary Medical
Association, CABI, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, EBSCO, DynaMed,
Gale, Nature, PLoS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Public Health
Agency of Canada, the Society for General Microbiology, and Springer. The genome sequence
of the H1N1 virus is OA at the US National Center for Biotechnology Information, but
sequences of the Mexican viruses are on deposit in GISAID's EpiFluDB and not OA.
The principle behind the H1N1 initiatives was clearly that the public deserves OA to important
research (or as I sometimes put it, "the more knowledge matters, the more OA to that knowledge
matters"). But so far the application of the principle has been selective at best. Climate
research is one area where sharing knowledge and accelerating research are at least as urgent
and where OA initiatives could help at least as much.
The organizing committee for next year's World Climate Conference called for OA to climate
data. The Environment Department of the World Bank launched the Climate Change Data
Portal, an OA repository. The University of Delaware and Stroud Water Research Center
received a $4.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop an OA
observatory for signs of climate change in the Christina River Basin. Critical Climate Change
is a new OA monograph series from the Open Humanities Press and the University of
Michigan. A peer-reviewed OA article became the most-downloaded paper from the American
Meteorological Society when bloggers started citing it to correct an error in a George Will
column on global warming. When emails stolen from climate researchers at the University of
East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit suggested that some researchers might have fudged some
data, scientists of many kinds called for open data for all climate studies. Because the scientists
calling for open data were joined by some serious politicians concerned to keep climate science
credible with the public, and by some opportunistic politicians who don't follow and don't
accept climate science, the odds rose that public policy on climate research might shift toward
OA.
The Open Data Commons released version 1.0 of the Open Database License (ODbL), making
it the chief alternative to the public-domain approach embodied in the Science Commons
Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data. OpenFlights was among the first to use the
ODbL, for its airline flight data. Peter Murray-Rust, Cameron Neylon, Rufus Pollock, and
others formulated the Panton Principles for open data, named after a Cambridge pub,
recommending the public domain for open data. The European Molecular Biology Laboratory
(EMBL) kept a foot in each camp; when converting part of its SIDER database of medicines to
OA, it used CC-Zero for some of the data and CC-BY-NC-SA for the rest.
The CASIMIR meeting in Rome issued the Rome Agenda, recommended immediate OA, and
"the least restrictive terms possible", for datasets underlying new publications. The Toronto
International Data Release Workshop updated the 1996 Bermuda Principles with the Toronto
Statement, urging even earlier, pre-publication data sharing. An International Summit on
Proteomics Data recommended "rapid and open" sharing. Participants in a meeting on health
research in Bamako, Mali, drafted the Bamako data sharing code of conduct. The Open
Knowledge Foundation created two groups on open research data: the Working Group on Open
Data in Science and the Linking Open Data Group.
Several projects codified best practices on sharing and preserving data sets: the Open Data
Commons, the PARSE.Insight study group, the UK Data Archive, the University of Edinburgh,
the US Interagency Working Group on Digital Data, and the US National Academy of Sciences'
Committee on Ensuring the Utility and Integrity of Research Data in a Digital Age. The
DISC-UK DataShare project released a guide for OA repositories planning to include data files.
Germany's DINI (Deutsche Initiative f・ Netzwerkinformation) is working out a data-sharing
policy and released the first version its position paper. The US National Research Council
launched a new, OA-friendly Board on Research Data and Information. Sweden became the
first country to pledge funding for the European Life Sciences Infrastructure for Biological
Information (ELIXIR), an ambitious project to preserve and provide OA to biological
data. The UK adopted the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE), the EU
directive for sharing spatial data, and made its first contribution --the Environment Research
Funders' Forum (ERFF) research database-- to WorldWideScience.org. The US National
Institutes of Health (NIH) called for public comments on plans to revise its data-sharing policy
for genome data.
The pharmaceutical industry endorsed principles for OA to clinical drug trial data, even for
negative results. GlaxoSmithKline adopted a voluntary open data policy, along with other
progressive measures like a patent pool for all its patents on drugs for neglected
diseases. Merck spun off a non-profit subsidiary, Sage, which will develop and distribute open
data well beyond clinical drug trials. (John Wilbanks of Science Commons is among the
founding board members.) The Biotechnology Industry Organization testified before Congress
in support of the open data for clinical trials and the Pharmaceutical Research and
Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) drafted a set of Principles on Conduct of Clinical Trials
and Communication of Clinical Trial Results, which took effect on October 1.
Studies published in PLoS Medicine and Nature showed that, so far, clinical drug trials are only
selectively registered in ClinicalTrials.gov, and that properly registered studies are only
selectively published in journals. An editorial in BMJ called for OA to raw data from clinical
drug trials and argued that voluntary OA policies are not enough. Carol Gorman argued that
OA to drug trial data would deter pharma flacks from ghostwriting one-sided articles for
peer-reviewed journals.
After widespread criticism for restricting the use of WorldCat biblioigraphic data, OCLC agreed
to scrap its policy and write a new one. Among the groups calling for a change were the
Association for Research Libraries (ARL) and the International Coalition of Library Consortia
(ICOLC). At the same time Talis and LibLime began providing OA to 5,000,000+
bibliographic records on the ㍍ iblios.net platform under under an Open Data Commons Public
Domain Dedication and License.
The infrastructure for open data expanded significantly in 2009. Talis launched Talis
Connected Commons, a new service to host open data sets. Eligible data sets must use either
the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License or Creative Commons
CC-Zero. The National Research Council Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical
Information (NRC-CISTI) created an OA Gateway to Scientific Data. The International
Atomic Energy Agency converted its International Nuclear Information System (INIS) database
to OA. The Open Knowledge Foundation launched the Open Data Grid and opened it for
deposits.
CODATA's Polar Information Commons will host open data arising from the International Polar
Year. DataBasin is new open data repository on conservation biology from the Conservation
Biology Institute. Barcode of Life Data Systems created an OA repository for DNA barcodes
to monitor endangered wildlife. Dryad, an OA data repository for evolutionary biology and
ecology, received a $2.8 million grant from the US National Science Foundation. Duke
University, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
created a federated data cloud for sharing data among scholars at the three institutions. EDINA
launched ShareGeo, an OA repository for geospatial data and the successor to GRADE
(Geospatial Repository for Academic Deposit and Extraction).
Spain's Montegancedo
Astronomical Observatory became the world's first to give users not only OA to its data, but free
online access to the equipment controls. Sweden launched a publicly-funded project on open
data in the arts and humanities.
The Global Biodiversity Information Facility began empaneling a task force to developing a
framework for providing OA to "primary biodiversity data". Ian Donaldson draftred the
Biolibrarian Proposal, which would create a network of biology librarians to help researchers
deposit and retrieve open data from repositories and databases.
Microsoft Research released Project Trident, a gratis software package for researchers in
data-intensive fields such as medicine and astronomy to facilitate data analysis and visualization
which, at the researcher's choice, may be private or public. The US government released
DataFerrett, a free tool for searching, browsing, combining, and analyzing open data released by
the federal government. The OECD launched the Factbook eXplorer, a beautifully interactive
front end to the open data in the OECD Factbook 2009. myExperiment is an open-source
project combining OA repositories Web 2.0 features in order to create "Research Objects" or
"self-contained pieces of reproducible research" merging texts and data. European Open Data
Inventory is a new project from Open Knowledge Foundation and EU Transparency to identify
open datasets about the EU. A group of British researchers described Scratchpads, a
framework for disseminating open biodiversity data. eCAT is a new electronic lab notebook for
gathering, managing, and sharing data online.
The International Journal of Robotics Research began publishing what it calls "data papers"
--TA articles accompanied by OA datasets. BMJ required every original research article to
include a data-sharing statement, explaining "which additional data -if any- are available, to
whom, and how." An opinion piece in Nature called for open data to accompany published
research articles. Although PLoS Biology or PLoS Medicine already require open data to
accompany published papers, a study in PLoS ONE found that only one in 10 of the authors
publishing in those journals actually shared their data, despite repeated requests and pointers to
the data-sharing policies. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences retracted a
paper when it discovered that the authors had shared their data too soon, as opposed to too late
or not at all.
Editorials called for open data in Scientific American (in paleoanthropology) and AgInfo News
(in agriculture). An editorial in The Hindu was the first outside the US to condemn the
Conyers bill (which would repeal the OA policy at the NIH).
(7) Books
The parties to the Google book-scanning lawsuit submitted an amended version of their
settlement agreement to the US District Court, and Judge Denny Chin gave it his preliminary
approval. The final fairness hearing is scheduled for February 18, 2010. The settlement will
allow rightsholders to choose gratis and/or libre OA for any Google-scanned books, and allows
two institutions at a time to enjoy unrestricted access to the entire digitized corpus, including the
copyrighted books, for "non-consumptive research" or text-mining. The settlement doesn't
affect Google's scanning of public-domain books, which are already at least gratis OA. If
revenue from the sale of orphan works remains unclaimed by rightsholders, some of it may, but
need not, be spent on projects that support OA. The settlement covers more academic
monographs than non-academic books, but was negotiated by non-academic authors on behalf
of all authors. (More on its OA implications in SOAN for December 2009.)
Earlier in the year, the Internet Archive joined with Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other
partners to form the Open Book Alliance (OBA), which quickly became a major voice against
the Google book settlement from the side of greater openness. Other important voices from the
same side included the Open Access Trust and Germany's Coalition for Action: Copyright for
Education and Research (Aktionsb・dnis: Urheberrecht f・ Bildung und Wissenschaft), and
many individuals such as Robert Darnton, Peter Eckersley, Pamela Samuelson, and Siva
Vaidhyanathan.
Google upgraded its book-scanning contracts with Universities of Michigan, Texas, and
Wisconsin. The new contracts widen public access to Google-scanned books from those
libraries and allow the libraries to challenge the prices Google sets for institutional
subscriptions. The five-year first phase of Google's digitization project at Oxford's Bodleian
library came to end with the scanning of the bulk of the university's 19th century
books. Google made more than more than a million public-domain books available for the
Sony ebook reader, and more than two million for POD editions from On Demand Books. It
launched a version of Book Search for mobile phones, with more than 1.5 million
public-domain books for US users and more than half a million for users outside the US.
Chinese officials accused Google of infringing the copyrights of more than 20,000 Chinese
books scanned from US libraries without permission from the Chinese rightsholders. Google
denied infringement and the two sides are talking. France had the same grievance, and a
French court found Google guilty of infringement; Google is appealing. Before anyone
concludes that the French verdict is what we would have seen in the US lawsuit, if the case had
not been settled, we should remember that French law has no equivalent of fair use.
Almost as the verdict was being read, President Nicolas Sarkozy pledged $1.1 billion toward the
digitization of French literature, mostly books.
The project will be a public-private partnership,
and Google may be one of the private partners. Well before the verdict, French resistance had
broken down and the Biblioth 鑷 ue Nationale de France began talking to Google about
supplementing BNF's own, smaller digitization program.
The Japanese Diet neatly removed the legal obstacle causing so much trouble in the US, China,
and France. It amended Japanese copyright law to allow the National Diet Library to digitize
copyrighted books without further permission. The new law distinguishes the right to digitize
from the right to display or distribute, and only provides the former. The latter must still be
negotiated with rightsholders; consequently, some of the digital editions will be OA and some
TA. (At the same time that it amended the law, the Diet allocated ･12.6 billion to digitize
about 920,000 titles.) Imagine a litigation-free, mass-digitization program for copyrighted
books, and a legislature concerned to make it possible. Imagine copyright amendments that
actually loosen restrictions rather than tighten them.
In Norway, the national copyright management agency, Kopinor, cleared the way for the
National Library of Norway to digitize more than 10,000 Norwegian books, some public
domain and some under copyright, and provide gratis OA at least to Norwegian IP
addresses. Kopinor did the legal mine-clearing in consultation with the National Library and
the Ministry of Culture.
During 2010 the European Commission will start reviewing ways to revise European copyright
laws in order to support the digitization and online distribution of books. The revisions may
include a compulsory license for books under copyright. Part of the purpose, as in Japan and
Norway, is to stimulate book scanning independently of Google, to avoid the legal risks which
blew up for Google, and to avoid the legal shortcomings of the Google book
settlement. Viviane Reding, the EU commissioner for information society and media, hopes
that Europe's book-digitization program will be faster, larger, and more clearly lawful to all
stakeholders than the Google program.
The European Commission also launched the EU Bookshop, an OA collection of 12 million
pages from more than 110,000 EU publications from 1952 to the present, digitized by the EC
Publications Office. The EU-wide Europeana now contains 4.6 million digitized books, maps,
photographs, film clips and newspapers, more than doubling its size in the year since its
launch. It aims to have 10 million items by 2010.
The German government released a preview of Die Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German
Digital Library), will will launch in 2011 as a part of Europeana. Germany also funded
TextGrid's acquisition of the large Zeno.org digital library; TextGrid, Wikimedia Germany,and
Creative Commons Germany will soon make it OA under CC-BY licenses.
At the end of 2009, the Hathi Trust consortial OA repository had over 5.1 million digitized
books on deposit. The University of California libraries completed its five-year book
digitization project with the Internet Archive; the 200,000 public-domain books digitized in the
project will be OA through the Hathi Trust.
Yale University is negotiating with Google and the Open Content Alliance to host 30,000
public-domain books scanned by Microsoft out of the Yale library before Microsoft dropped its
book digitization program. Harvard University and the National Library of China will digitize
and provide OA to all 51,500 volumes of the Harvard-Yenching Library, the largest university
collection of rare East Asian literature in the Western world. Columbia University and the
National Library of Korea are collaborating on a project to digitize rare books from Columbia's
Starr East Asian Library and make the results OA. York University began digitizing its
public-domain books with the Internet Archive. Cornell is providing OA through the Internet
Archive to about 80,000 books digitized out of the Cornell library, and making about 90,000
available from Amazon in print-on-demand (POD) editions. The Open Knowledge Commons
will digitize 30,000 volumes of public-domain medical literature under a grant from the Sloan
Foundation.
The University of Pittsburgh Press plans to release nearly 500 of its out-of-print books in gratis
OA editions (and eventually in priced, paperback editions as well). Firenze University Press
launched a series of 60+ OA books in all fields. The University of Oslo launched a new series
of OA books, Oslo Studies in Language. Texas A&M University Press is providing OA to
selected titles in collaboration with the university IR and the Texas Digital Library. Parlor
Press and the the University of Colorado WAC Clearinghouse began publishing Writing Spaces,
a series of OA books on writing. Bloomsbury Academic launched OA book series on the ethics
of genetics, co-edited by Nobel laureate John Sulston. Columbia University Press released its
first OA book and has plans for more. The Open Humanities Press and the University of
Michigan Library's Scholarly Publishing Office are collaborating on five new OA book series.
The Dutch Royal Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies launched Aceh Books, an
OA collection of more than 600 books about Aceh, Indonesia. The books are digital
replacements for 400 years' worth of print books about Aceh destroyed in the Tsunami of
December 2004. UNESCO launched Majaliss, an OA collection of digitized books in Arabic,
became a publisher of new OA books with an OA book on OERs. The Library of Congress
scanned the first 60,000 books in its book-digitization program.
Foundation Publishers is a new publisher of OA books, based in Uganda. French Creek Press
is a new book publisher whose academic division, Kenwood Academic, will combine OA with
POD. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht started providing OA to selected monographs on education
research published by its imprint, V&R unipress. Spain's Editorial Flamboyant began
publishing OA children's books from public-domain editions of the stories and public-domain
illustrations.
The Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani from the Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana converted
to gratis OA, as did the Gutenberg-e book series from Columbia University Press.
The Internet Archive now hosts about 1.6 million public-domain OA books, and adds about
1,000 new ones every day. It's now converting all of them from PDF to the EPUB
format. EPUB (new in 2007) is a free and open standard using XML to make ebooks readable
on a wide range of devices. Google is producing EPUB editions of its public-domain books (in
addition to PDF), and has already finished more than one million. Project Gutenberg made
most of its public-domain OA books available in the EPUB format, and the New Zealand
Electronic Text Centre (NZETC) chose the EPUB format for the 1,150 public-domain OA books
it digitized from the Wellington University library. As far as I can tell, Hindawi became the
first journal publisher to adopt the EPUB format, and will soon offer all its articles, back to
January 2008, in EPUB as well as PDF and HTML.
The World Public Library grew to more than 2,252,000 ebooks. The collection is free for one
month each year, and available for unlimited use the rest of the year for an annual fee less than
the price of one book ($8.95).
The University of Pennsylvania and Kirtas Technologies are digitizing 200,000+ public-domain
books from the Penn libraries. Kirtas will recoup its expenses by selling POD editions; Penn
can decide to make the digital editions OA, but for now is choosing TA. The university is also
digitizing books from its library, for OA, with the Internet Archive, the Lyrasis Mass
Digitization Collaborative, and the Sloan Foundation. The New York Public Library and Kirtas
Technologies and McGill also announced book-scanning projects with Kirtas.
The University of Michigan Press was put under the control of the library, and moved to a
model in which its monographs will be TA digital and POD (as opposed to OA digital and
POD). At Utah State University, the press was also merged with library, but the new institution
will focus on OA publishing. The Cornell library, which publishes Islandica, Cornell's
101-year old book series on Iceland, will start publishing new volumes in dual OA/TA
editions. The Digith 鑷 ue des Biblioth 鑷 ues de l'Universit・Libre de Bruxelles released 64 OA
digitized books from the school's university press, with more to come. Library-press
collaborations have become so common that SPARC and the Columbia University Libraries
begain maintaining a list of them.
Records for OA books in the Hathi Trust have been added to the catalog of the Prospector
Library and OCLC's WorldCat. The Provider-Neutral E-Monograph Record Task Group is
developing guidelines on how libraries should catalog books that exist in both digital and print
editions (hence including OA and TA editions).
The US National Science Foundation awarded $2.7 million to the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst, Tufts University, and the Internet Archive to study text-mining tools for large
collections of digitized books. The project testbed will be the 1.6 million+ OA books already
online at the Internet Archive. Stanford researchers are planning a text-mining center to study
Google-scanned books, Highwire journals, and the university's licensed content. As noted, the
Google book settlement will allow a small number of lucky researchers to text-mine its entire
digitized corpus, including the books under copyright.
2009 was a breakthrough year for OA textbooks. In the US, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL)
introduced the Open College Textbook Act (S.1714) in the US Senate mandating that all
"educational materials such as curricula and textbooks" funded by any federal agency "be
licensed under an open license" and "made available free of charge". Bill Foster (D-IL)
introduced a similar bill in the House (Learning Opportunities With Creation of Open Source
Textbooks, or LOW COST, HR 1464). California became the first state to approve OA
textbooks for use in public high schools. The state received a $100,000 grant from the
Department of Education to make the approved OA books handicap-accessible. The state of
Florida created an OA textbook task force and OER repository; the University Press of Florida
launched an OA imprint, which now publishes OA editions of 89 textbooks and 21 monographs
from the press' backlist and uses the state repository as its publishing platform. The Florida
program received $300,000 in funds from the federal government to create a "national model"
for other states.
Two of President Obama's appointments have track records promoting OA textbooks: Aneesh
Chopra, the new Chief Technology Officer and former Secretary of Technology for the state of
Virginia, and Martha Kanter, the new Undersecretary of Education and former chancellor of the
Foothill-De Anza Community College District in Santa Clara County, California. Under
Chopra's leadership, the state of Virginia published its own OA physics textbook, vetted and
refined by public feedback. Under Kanter's leadership, the Foothill-De Anza Community
College District won the California Community College Board of Governors 2008 Technology
Focus Award for organizing a consortium of 85 community colleges to produce OA textbooks
and other open content for education. The Hewlett Foundation gave the 85 community
colleges (the Community College Collaborative for Open Educational Resources) a $1.5 million
grant to support the OA textbook project.
Flat World Knowledge, the OA textbook publisher, started its public beta. Two months later it
secured an additional $8 million in venture funding. In one semester (Spring 2009 to Fall
2009) the users of Flat World OA textbooks jumped from 1,000 students on 30 campuses to
40,000 students on 400+ campuses. The Danish publisher, Ventus Publishing, launched
Bookboon, an imprint specifically for OA textbooks. Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher
Education released a study of faculty attitudes toward OA textbooks.
Barnes & Noble released the Nook, its ebook reader. Unlike the Amazon Kindle, the Nook
allows readers to share and re-sell their ebooks. (As I go to press, a hacker has broken the
Kindle DRM and released an app allowing users to translate Kindle books into Mobi
format.) Sony released the Daily Edition, an ebook reader capable of displaying OA books, for
example, from the Google book-scanning project. Kobo is a new company selling ebooks and
an ebook readers; the ebooks are OA and EPUB through its partnership with the Internet
Archive. Other hardware ebook readers released in 2009 were the Astak Mentor, Bookeen
Cybook Opus, Foxit eSlick, Fujitsu FLEPia, Hanvon Iriver Story, Interead COOL-ER, Samsung
Papyrus. Gallica introduced a Flash-based book viewer, and the Open Library upgraded its
open-source Book Reader.
Eucalyptus is ebook-reading software written as an iPhone app. Apple originally rejected it on
the ground that it could display OA books, some of which "contain inappropriate sexual
content" such as the Kama Sutra. After three days of needless controversy, Apple reversed
itself and accepted Eucalyptus as an iPhone app. (People who worry about the many digitized
books under Google's control should think about how Apple would exercise comparable
power.) Google announced plans to launch Google Editions, an ebook store whose books will
be accessible from any web-enabled computer or reader, not just from dedicated devices. The
Internet Archive launched BookServer, an open platform for discovering, selling, loaning, and
giving away ebooks, and indexing them for search.
PaperC is a new online platform for digital books that are OA for reading and TA for printing or
annotating. The Public Knowledge Project and Athabasca University Press announced the
open-source Open Monograph Press and plan to release the software later this year.
O'Reilly
Media's Open Feedback Publishing System supports public comment on book manuscripts
before publication. To allow feedback, the manuscripts are OA of course.
Brian O'Leary began a research project, sponsored by O'Reilly Media and Random house, on
whether or how much OA editions can stimulate sales of TA books. His findings to date
suggest that sales for books without OA editions "start higher and peak later" than books with
OA editions, but that the latter reach a second peak, higher than the first, after about five
months. (I can't tell whether the OA editions he studied appeared to users as unauthorized or
whether the publisher was promoting them.) Random House reported that four of its books saw
"significant sales increases" soon after the company released OA editions. The ALPSP
surveyed 400+ scholarly book publishers on a similar set of questions. More than 60%
reported that participating in Amazon's Look-Inside-the-Book program had a positive effect on
sales; fewer than 2% reported a negative effect. A JISC study showed that OA editions of
textbooks "may not negatively [affect] print sales to students."
In addition to these studies, we had first-person reports from Cory Doctorow, R.J. Keller, David
Pogue, and Christopher Kelty on how OA editions of their books boosted net sales. (The
Doctorow and Keller books were novels, the Pogue book a technical guide to Microsoft
Windows, and the Kelty book a scholarly monograph.) Toni Prug estimated that Douglas May
had 26 times more readers of his OA monograph on government than he would have had from a
conventional priced, printed edition.
OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) released the results of a study of
"user needs in relation to open access book publishing" and launched a new survey on the
"funding of monographs in the humanities and social sciences".
orschung (Fund to Promote Scientific Research,
FWF) agreed to pay publication costs for OA monographs and anthologies. Walter de Gruyter
became the first publisher to extend its hybrid OA policy to book chapters.
The National Book Trust of Uganda (NABOTU) recommended libre OA books as the "best way
for boosting educational quality" for Ugandan students, and a major report from the Academy of
Science of South Africa (ASSAf) called for OA to books. (ASSAf has supported OA journals
since April 2008).
(8) Licensing
OA journals find it much easier than OA repositories to use open licenses and implement libre
OA. Nevertheless, only 15.6% (708 out of 4,535) of the OA journals in the DOAJ currently
use CC licenses (as of January 1, 2010). The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
(OASPA), the SPARC Europe Seal of Approval program, and SURF all recommend the most
open of the CC licenses, the CC-BY or Attribution license, but only about 9.9% (449 out of
4,535) of the OA journals in the DOAJ currently use CC-BY. When OA journals don't use CC
licenses, or any other open licenses, they operate under all-rights-reserved copyright policies,
block all uses beyond fair use (or the local equivalent), and fail to free users to realize the
benefits of libre OA.
The percentage of OA journals using open licenses increased by about one point since I pointed
out the problem three months ago (Ten challenges for OA journals, SOAN for October
2009). If we continue at this rate --say, one percentage point every three months-- then we'll
need more than eight years to reach the cross-over point when a majority of OA journals offer
libre OA, and more than 21 years to reach 100%. We really should be able to do better than
that.
In 2009, Creative Commons officially launched CC-Zero (CC0), after six years of thinking
about how to improve upon its earlier method for assigning content to the public domain. CC
also began a project (with Nike, Best Buy, and Yahoo) to develop CC licenses for patent-holders
who wish to waive some of the rights they receive under patent law. The Open Data Commons
released version 1.0 of the Open Database License (ODbL) after months of public feedback on
earlier drafts. Germany's Digital Peer Publishing (DiPP) released an English translation of
version 3.0 of the DiPP license.
Cornell lifted restrictions on Cornell-digitized public-domain books, and publicly acknowledged
that the digital reproductions are themselves in the public domain. It explained its rationale in a
public statement: to support OA, to encourage valuable uses and reuses of the literature, and to
avoid copyfraud (false claims of copyright). Its exemplary policy should be widely
imitated. Just as OA journals should use open licenses, digitization projects targeting works in
the public domain should not impose new restrictions on use or reuse. But not all digitization
projects follow this principle. The Seegras Logbook pointed out examples of copyfraud in
Google Book Search. The US National Archives and Records Administration, yet again,
digitized public-domain records with a private partner and allowed the private partner's TA site
to be the exclusive digital distributor, apparently without an expiration date. A public-private
partnership digitized the Burney Collection of public-domain 17th and 18th newspapers, but
made the results TA rather than OA. The London School of Economics deposited a group of
images with "no known copyright restrictions" in Flickr Commons, but attempted to bar
commercial use without permission and payment. The city of Schenectady, NY, claimed that
its ordinances were under copyright, charged for digital access, and even denied a
freedom-of-information request for digital copies, all while planning to provide OA copies later
this year.
Amazon seems to understand the Cornell logic of lifting restrictions on
public-domain works, but decided that restrictions were more important than public-domain
content. In September it stopped, at least temporarily, making public-domain books available
on the Kindle. Barnes & Noble just seems confused. It explained that it had to add DRM to
its public-domain ebooks in order to protect their copyrights.
The Open Knowledge Foundation is compiling a list of the works entering the public domain in
2010.
The English-language Wikipedia migrated from the GNU Free Documentation License to
CC-BY-SA, and influenced many other wikis to do the same. It's now much easier for OA
works under CC licenses to incorporate Wikipedia content, and vice versa. At the same time,
however, the Shuttleworth Foundation migrated from CC-BY-SA to CC-BY as its default
license for open educational resources.
Google announced that rightsholders of Google-scanned, copyrighted books may put CC
licenses on the digital editions, and persuaded the Authors Guild and and Association of
American Publishers to add the same option to their revised settlement agreement (Section 7
above). The Open Book Alliance brief in opposition to the Google Book Settlement argued for
compulsory licenses as the part of the solution to the anti-trust problems in the settlement.
In 2009, the University of Liege became the first university to require libre OA, and was soon
followed by the department-level libre OA mandates from the University of Northern Colorado
library faculty and the University of Oregon library faculty.
Both the OA textbook bills in the US Senate and US House of Representatives (Sections 1 and 5
above) require libre OA. This is notable in part because the older and more widespread funder
OA mandates for research articles still limit themselves to gratis OA. The only exception is
from the Wellcome Trust and UK Funders Group; they don't require libre OA merely for
funding research, but they do require libre OA when they also fund publishing costs. Are the
OA textbook bills a sign that legislators want to treat textbooks differently from research articles
or that the libre star is rising and we'll start to see more libre mandates for research articles as
well?
The Wellcome Trust libre OA mandate for subsidized articles continued to win the
accommodation of publishers. Among the publishers agreeing to provide libre OA in exchange
for publication fees are the American Chemical Society, the American Psychological
Association, the American Society of Hematology, the American Journal of Tropical Medicine
and Hygiene, and the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE). While libre green OA
mandates are still rare, a group of influential funders convened by the the US Institute of
Medicine in May recommended libre green OA mandates for medical research (Sections 1 and
10).
The Nature Publishing Group made a small step toward libre green OA when it granted limited
permission for text-mining green OA manuscripts. (But NPG is still an outlier in the other
direction for requiring an embargo on self-archived articles.)
The needless difficulties faced by Joseph Lorenzo and Danah Boyd persuaded the University of
California at Berkeley to lower the hurdles for future students wishing to put CC licenses on
their doctoral dissertations. JISC released a briefing paper to ensure that JISC-funded research
projects were aware of their CC options. For researchers who do choose CC licenses,
FairShare is a new tool to help track the re-use of their CC-licensed work.
While I don't have time to cover OA initiatives for public sector information (PSI), I can
mention that the major ones are not only large, but committed to libre OA. To mention just a
few: In the US, the Obama administration launched data.gov, a rapidly growing portal of libre
OA datasets which "do not, and should not, include controls over their end use" (to quote from
the site's data policy). The Australian government launched data.australia.gov.au, and the UK
government is launching data.gov.uk, both inspired by the US initiative. The Australian site
uses CC-BY licenses, and the early data sets released by the UK government support use and
reuse. Australia and New Zealand both called for public comments on proposals to require CC
licenses for PSI. A growing number of city governments committed themselves to libre OA for
at least some of their PSI in 2009: Atlanta, Madrid, New York, Portland (Oregon), Toronto,
Vancouver, and Washington DC.
Recommendations for libre OA for government data came from the Association for Computing
Machinery Public Policy Committee, the participants in a March 2009 Communia Workshop on
Accessing, Using, Reusing Public Sector Content and Data, the UK Society of Information
Technology Management, and the UK Power of Information Taskforce. Recommendations for
libre OA more broadly, encompassing research, came from IssueLab, the National Book Trust of
Uganda, the PARSE.Insight study, and a major report from Harvard's Berkman Center on the
copyright licensing policies of private foundations.
(9) Effects of the recession
The worldwide recession has had mixed consequences for OA: on the one hand, drying up
money to pay for it, and on the other, strengthening the case for it and increasing the
demand. Tight library budgets have hurt OA journals and TA journals alike. Virginia Tech
cancelled nearly $900,000 worth of subscriptions. About 70% of the Association of Academic
and Health Science Libraries faced budget cuts. Budget cuts at the University of California
libraries were as high as 20% on some campuses. In the UK, about 40% of university libraries
will have to cut back on acquisitions and about 20% will have to cancel "big deals" bundling
hundreds of journal titles.
At least five OA journals folded up: Innovate (from the Fischler School of Education and
Human Services at Nova Southeastern University), the Medscape Journal of Medicine (from
Medscape and WebMD), and the four journals formerly published by Icthes World Care. At
least three converted from OA to TA: the Journal of Clinical Investigation (from the American
Society for Clinical Investigation), the Nagoya Mathematical Journal (from Duke University
Press), and the Royal Historical Society bibliography of British and Irish history (from the
Royal Historical Society). The Journal of Visualized Experiments converted from full OA to
hybrid OA. Haematologica converted from no-fee OA to fee-based OA. The Canadian
Medical Association Journal, formerly full OA, continues to provide OA to new research
articles, but started to charge for access to some of its other content. At eMJA, the online
edition of the TA Medical Journal of Australia, research articles will be OA for two weeks after
publication and then move behind a pay wall for a year; other content will not be OA at
all. When the budget of the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI)
was cut by 70%, the Institute decided to privatize the 17 OA journals from the National
Research Council of Canada, which will probably mean that they will convert to TA.
Tight budgets forced Utah State University to lay down its OpenCourseWare program, the
second-largest in the United States after MIT's. The University of Amsterdam cited "a
precarious financial situation" as the reason it had to lay down its OA journal fund.
The US National Science Foundation (NSF) stopped funding the OA botanical database,
Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR). If TAIR began charging subscriptions, two-thirds
of surveyed researchers said they would be reluctant to submit their data to it. Arxiv, Bioline,
Depot, H-Net, and probably many other projects without publicity, faced funding difficulties
and had to find new arrangements to survive. ArXiv is asking institutions that log the most
usage to make voluntary contributions
While libraries were cutting their budgets, Elsevier, for one, did well. In 2008, its profits were
up 11% over the previous year. In the first half of 2009, overall profits were down, but profits
in the STM division were up 29%.
As noted in Section 5, many more journals converted from TA to OA than the other way around
(roughly 100 to 1) and many more converted from TA to hybrid than from OA to hybrid (more
than 600 to 1).
Demand is up as well. The hard news for universities and libraries, and the loss of access to TA
literature due to budget cuts and cancellations, made the logic of OA even more compelling to
decision-makers at every level. California's adoption of OA textbooks was only partly a
response to the opportunities of the new medium; it was also a response to the rising prices of
printed textbooks and the state budget crisis. When directors of major US law libraries released
the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship, they made the case for OA; but at
the same time, they argued that the shift was especially necessary and attractive "in light of the
financial challenges currently facing many law schools...."
In France, not only did President Nicolas Sarkozy find $1.1 billion for digitizing French
literature, but he acknowledged that only part of the rationale was to foster French culture and
compete with Google. The rest of the rationale was economic stimulus. Ironically, in a time of
greater prosperity, the money for this project would have been harder to find.
In the US, Canada, and UK, there were a series of calls to support OA as economic stimulus, as
a way to close access gaps caused by budget cuts, or both. I made such an argument in
November 2008 (in an open letter to the next President of the US), Michael Geist made another
in January 2009, as did Prue Adler and Charles Lowry of the Association of Research Libraries,
and James Boyle made one in his Financial Times column in April. Carl Malamud made
another just last week, citing the French $1.1 billion as an example to be followed in the US.
Major library organizations and research institutions published position papers on the recession,
making recommendations to publishers (to hold or reverse price increases) and the scholarly
community (to move forward with OA). There were notable examples from the International
Coalition of Library Consortia (January), the Association for Research LIbraries (February),
Research Information Network (March), NorthEast Research Libraries (April), the University of
California Libraries (May), and the Medical Library Association and the Association of
Academic Health Science Libraries (May).
The Medical Library Association's Ad Hoc Committee for Advocating Scholarly
Communications compiled a list of publishers who froze 2010 subscription prices at 2009
levels. When last updated in September, it listed 45 publishers. None of the titans --Elsevier,
Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis-- was on the list.
Jonathan Eisen brought the case down to individual authors: if you don't provide gold or green
OA to your work, "it is likely fewer and fewer colleagues will be able to get your paper as
libraries are hurting big time and will be canceling a lot of subscriptions."
(10) Some highlights of the highlights
The worst of 2009:
10. The American Anthropological Association. For using a toll-access article to invite
discussion on the access policies of the association's publications. (Last year the AAA made
this list for adopting a 35 year embargo on the OA backfiles of its two leading journals.)
9. The 84+% of OA journals that do not use open licenses or provide libre OA. For missing
an opportunity to better serve research and researchers, though fortunately an opportunity it's
not too late to seize. Green OA has the excuse that permissions depend on publishers; gold OA
doesn't have any excuses.
8. The University of Maryland's negative vote on an OA policy (so far the only negative vote
on any campus). Mixing green and gold OA to the confusion of the faculty, not offering a
waiver option, and calling for a vote before finishing the job of faculty education. A wake-up
call to other institutions developing policies.
7. John Kroger, Attorney General for the State of Oregon. For demanding permission and
payment to reproduce the state's guide to compliance with public-records laws. (Kudos to
University of Oregon Economics Professor Bill Harbaugh for scanning a copy, posting it online,
and challenging Kroger to issue a take-down notice. Kudos to Carl Malamud and
Public.Resource.Org for weighing in Harbaugh's behalf.)
(Last year the State of Oregon made
this list for claiming copyright in its statutes, a claim it relinquished when challenged.)
6. Advanced Biological Laboratories. First for seeking (and thanks to the US Patent Office,
obtaining) a patent on the use of databases to help doctors make decisions to diagnose and treat
diseases. Second for demanding a royalty payment that threatens to shut down the (OA) HIV
Drug Resistance Database.
5. South Africa's Department of Science and Technology. For its regulations implementing
the 2008 Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Funded Research and Development Act,
regulations which minimize access to publicly-funded research in order to maximize copyright
protection and commercial exploitation, and which require special permission from the
government to make any publicly-funded software open-source or any publicly-funded research
OA.
4. The secret negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) which, despite
the name, is largely concerned with new levels of copyright enforcement. For excluding the
public and the press, while inviting in corporate lobbyists. Every democratic nation
participating should be ashamed, including the Obama administration which put aside its
transparency principles and cited national security as a reason to keep the drafts and
negotiations cloaked.
3. The reintroduction of the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (a.k.a. Conyers bill), for the
second year in a row. Last year's caption still applies: "Amending copyright law to block an
OA policy consistent with current law, while pretending to be motivated by the policy's
copyright violations. Harmful bill + misleading title + deceptive rhetoric, brought to you by
lobbyists paid with your subscription dollars."
2. The Bentham behavior in the Davis-Anderson hoax. First for accepting a piece of
computer-generated nonsense in a supposedly peer-reviewed journal. Second for claiming to
have done it on purpose to discover the real names of the authors. Third for feeding antecedent
ignorance and prejudice to give OA journals a bad name.
1. The Heidelberg Appeal rant against OA. Rabble-rousing by scholars who should know
better. Raising up a straw man and soliciting signatures to tear it down. If the authors and
signatories were as sloppy and confused in their professional work, they'd be unemployed.
The best of 2009:
10. The Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE) and other new ways to pay
publication fees at fee-based OA journals (Section 5 above). Some institutions launch funds to
support gold OA without having policies to support green OA, which is backwards, and most
funds to support gold OA don't extend to no-fee OA journals, which is one-sided. But the funds
themselves deserve a place on this list for taking a needed step toward the support of gold OA,
and the first organized step to spread the costs beyond authors and funders. All during a
recession.
9. The morphing of Depot from a UK service to an international service and the launch of
OpenAIRE. Two universal OA repositories that will direct deposits to local institutional
repositories, when they exist, and otherwise use their own resources to disseminate them. For
making it easier for funding agencies to require deposit in IRs and harder for scholars without
IRs to put off self-archiving.
8. Signs of an avalanche of future OA mandates from funding agencies. Two signs in
particular: First, the announcement in Section 9.2 of their 2009 roadmap that the European
Science Foundation (ESF) and the European Heads of Research Councils (EuroHORCs) will
issue a joint OA mandate. This would be smaller news if the ESF didn't represent 80 member
organizations in 30 European countries and if EuroHORCs didn't represent all the major public
funding agencies in 24 European countries. Second, the recommendation of libre green OA
mandates for medical research in a report co-sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Google Foundation, Merck Company Foundation, Rockefeller
Foundation, US Department of Health and Human Services, US Department of Homeland
Security, and US Department of State.
7. Cornell's policy to lift restrictions from its digitized copies of public-domain works. For
realizing that the previous restrictions were unnecessary for the institution, harmful for
researchers, and skating close to copyfraud. For jolting other institutions --universities,
libraries, museums, government agencies, and non-profits-- to remember that ordinary
digitization does not introduce new a copyright to a public-domain work, to remember the
institutional mission, and to remember the user.
6. The UK Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the seventh of the
seven Research Councils UK to adopt a green OA mandate. For completing the UK royal
flush.
5. The SPARC Campus Open Access Policies project (COAP) and Enabling Open Scholarship
(EOS). For sharing information, strategic advice, case histories, and best practices in order to
to spread OA policies to more universities.
4. The Rectors' Conference of Finnish Universities of Applied Sciences. First for creating a
consortial OA repository for 26 of Finland's Universities of Applied Sciences. Second for
adopting a joint OA mandate for the same 26 institutions, the most encompassing institutional
OA mandate to date. Third for inspiring other consortia to think big.
3. The reintroduction of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). For promising to
strengthen the NIH policy and extend it across the federal government. For winning support
from a wide range of academic, non-profit, and commercial institutions. For earning bipartisan
support in a degenerate age when nothing has bipartisan support.
2. The Obama administration's call for comments on how to extend the NIH policy across the
federal government. The result may be more wide-ranging than FRPAA, or less; we'll have to
wait and see. But it can be adopted sooner and tweaked ad lib. For bringing a second wind
from the executive branch (while the legislative branch continues to consider FRPAA), and the
first sign of Obama's position on OA. For its potentially to be as strong and far-reaching as any
OA policy anywhere.
1. Fifteen green OA funder mandates in 10 countries (Section 1) and 60 green OA university
mandates in 14 countries (Section 2), including 13 by unanimous faculty votes. For giving us a
year in which we averaged five university mandates and more than one funder mandate every
month. For breathtaking momentum in the right direction.
* Postscript. For links to all the developments and organizations mentioned here, see the
searchable archive of Open Access News and the "oa.new" tag library from the Open Access
Tracking Project.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
http://www.connotea.org/tag/oa.new
Also see my annual reviews from previous years:
Open access in 2008
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-09.htm#2008
Open access in 2007
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-08.htm#2007
Open access in 2006
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-07.htm#2006
Open access in 2005
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-06.htm#2005
Open access in 2004
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-05.htm#2004
Open access in 2003
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-04.htm#2003
Here are some other, related reviews of 2009:
Esther Wojcicki, Creative Commons In 2009: The Accomplishments In Promoting Worldwide
Sharing, Huffington Post, November 21, 2009.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/esther-wojcicki/creative-commons-in-2009_b_366548.html
Daniel Mietchen's poll on the breakthroughs of the year in open science, December 1, 2009.
http://www.demochoice.org/dcgridhballot.php?poll=SciOPEN09
http://friendfeed.com/danielmietchen/20353ffe/what-is-your-breakthrough-of-year-in-open
Amelia Hassani, The Year in Gov 2.0.0.9, OhMyGov, December 15, 2009.
http://ohmygov.com/blogs/general_news/archive/2009/12/15/the-year-in-gov-2009.aspx
Richard Poynder, Open Access in 2009: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. December 16, 2009
http://poynder.blogspot.com/2009/12/open-access-in-2009-good-bad-and-ugly.html
Ten Stories That Shaped 2009, LIS News, December 18, 2009.
http://lisnews.org/node/35338/
Jeremy Adam Smith, The 12 Best Shareable Books of 2009, Shareable, December 21, 2009.
http://shareable.net/blog/the-ten-best-shareable-books-of-2009
Mike Carroll's list of seven major CC events in 2009,
https://support.creativecommons.org/pcp/20
I'm grateful to many friends who answered last-minute queries to supply missing facts or nail
down uncertain details. Thanks to Subbiah Arunachalam, Gavin Baker, Matt Cockerill,
Heather Joseph, Mark Shelton, Stuart Shieber, and Alma Swan.
---------Erratum
In last issue I said that currently, before the Google settlement is approved, the options to price
Google-scanned books at zero, and put them under a CC license, were only available to Google
Partners.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/12-02-09.htm#gbs
I was wrong about that. The options are available to anyone holding the rights to a book
scanned under the Google Library Project. The zero-price option is available today on the
"Manage book" web form, and the CC option may appear on that form at any time, even before
the settlement is approved. Neither option, however, will have any effect until or unless the
settlement is approved. Thanks to the Google settlement email help line for this clarification.
BookSettlement@RustConsulting.com
To find the form and exercise these options now available, go to the Google settlement home
page, sign in (creating an account first if necessary), see the Google list of your books in the
system, click on one, scroll down to "Manage book", and select the options you like.
http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/
----------
Roundup
Here's what happened, or what I noticed, since the last issue of the newsletter, emphasizing
action and policy over scholarship and opinion. I put the most important items first, with
double asterisks, and otherwise cluster them loosely by topic.
+ Policies
** Twenty-six of Finland's Universities of Applied Sciences adopted a joint OA mandate
(October 2009), which took effect yesterday, January 1, 2010.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/12/26-oa-mandat#es-at-one-stroke.html
** The faculty of the University of Northern Colorado Libraries unanimously adopted an OA
policy.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/12/another-unanimous-vote-for-oa.html
** The University of Abertay Dundee adopted an OA mandate.
https://portal.abertay.ac.uk/portal/page/portal/Library/Researchers/Researchrepository/Repositor
ypolicies
** The Dublin Institute of Technology adopted an OA mandate.
http://bit.ly/6egFmm
** The University of Ottawa adopted a green OA policy (details not yet available), launched an
OA journal fund, joined the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE), launched a
fund for creating OERs, agreed to support the publication of OA books from the University of
Ottawa Press, and funded a research grant to support research on the OA movement.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5286.html
http://www.oacompact.org/news/2009/12/8/university-of-ottawa-signs-compact.html
** The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) called for public
comments on "enhancing public access to archived publications resulting from research funded
by Federal science and technology agencies." Comments are due January 21, 2010. Basically,
should President Obama extend some version of the NIH policy across the federal government?
http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2009/E9-29322.htm
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/12/obama-administration-wants-oa-for.html
http://blog.ostp.gov/2009/12/09/ostp-to-launch-public-forum-on-how-best-to-make-federally-fu
nded-research-available-for-free/
* This research access initiative is part of the Obama administration's new Open Government
Directive, which includes a raft of new OA data sets.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ogi-directive.pdf
http://blog.okfn.org/2009/12/08/us-government-announces-more-open-government-data/
http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/commitments
* For example, the US Department of Energy launched Open Energy Info (OpenEI), a
wiki-based platform to provide OA to the department's digital tools and data. OpenEI is part of
the Obama administration's new Open Government Directive.
http://en.openei.org/wiki/Main_Page
* For at least one of the new "open" datasets from the US federal government --TARP
transaction data-- users must agree to "terms of use" before they are allowed to download
anything.
http://blog.sunlightfoundation.com/2009/12/14/treasury-imposing-terms-of-use-to-access-tarp-d
ata/
* The UK government announced plans to release a large number of libre OA public data files.
http://blog.okfn.org/2009/12/07/uk-government-announces-lots-of-new-open-data/
* The Australian government released a Declaration of Open Government, including a
commitment to OA for PSI.
http://gov2.net.au/about/draftreport/
* Columbia University joined the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE) and
announced plans to launch a fund to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/news/libraries/2009/20091211.compact.html
* The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center also joined the Compact for Open-Access
Publishing Equity (COPE).
http://www.oacompact.org/news/2009/12/14/memorial-sloan-kettering-cancer-center-joins-com
pact.html
* The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) took out a membership with BioMed Central and
will pay publication fees for its researchers who publish in BMC journals. (CAS adopted a
green OA mandate in February 2009.)
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/presscenter/pressreleases?pr=20091209
* The petition calling for OA to publicly-funded research in Germany was endorsed by the
Working Committee of the Parliament and Government Libraries.
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/6065456/
* The OA Working Group of the Groupement Fran 軋 is de l'Industrie de l'Information (French
Association of Electronic Information Industry, GFII) issued its OA recommendations. Among
them: the humanities will need different solutions from the STM fields, and institutions should
not adopt OA mandates without embargoes.
http://www.gfii.asso.fr/IMG/doc/oa_propositions_def_eng.doc
* Oxford's Global Economic Governance Programme created an independent Expert Taskforce
on Global Knowledge Governance to recommend principles for the future of global knowledge
governance.
http://www.globaleconomicgovernance.org/project-ip
* The Euopean Commission called for public comments on the EU 2020 strategy. The strategy
doesn't mention OA, but does highlight the role of knowledge is creating a healthier, smarter,
and greener economy. Comments in support of OA will be relevant.
http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/secretariat_general/eu2020/consultation_en.htm
* JISC released its Strategy 2010-2012, reaffirming its "commitments to the open agenda,
including open source, Open Access, open educational resources, and supporting open research
and open innovation."
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/aboutus/strategy/strategy1012.aspx
* At the Universit・Libre de Bruxelles, a faculty group opposing OA won two seats out of 17 on
the administrative council.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/12/faculty-pushback-against-oa-at-belgian.html
* Alma Swan updated her graph showing the fast-growing number of institutional and funder
OA mandates over the past few years.
http://www.openscholarship.org/jcms/c_6226/open-access-policies-for-universities-and-research
-institutions?hlText=policies
+ Journals
* Bloomsbury Publishing and the QATAR Foundation created Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation
Journals (BQFJ), a new OA journal publisher in Doha, Quatar.
https://arl.org/lists/sparc-oaforum/Message/5315.html
* Sciyo is the new name of OA journal publisher formerly known as I-Tech (Austria 2004) and
In-Tech (Croatia 2008). In 2010 it will pay author royalties based on the number of times their
articles are downloaded.
http://www.newswiretoday.com/news/62358/
* Teaching Classical Languages is a new peer-reviewed OA journal, sponsored by the Classical
Association of the Middle West and South (CAMWS). TCL is the successor to CPL (Committee
for the Promotion of Latin) Online.
http://tcl.camws.org/
* In Education, launched in 1993, converted to OA.
http://ineducation.ca/
* The Anthropology of East Europe Review converted to OA after 27 years of publication.
http://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/aeer/announcement/view/18
* tic&soci 騁・ launched in 2007, converted to OA and moved to Revues.org.
http://www.revues.org/7280
* ﾉ conomie rurale converted to delayed OA, with a moving wall of two years, and moved to
Revues.org.
http://www.revues.org/7277
* Pr 馼 istoires M 馘 iterran 馥 nnes (successor to a journal established in 1982) converted to OA
and moved to Revues.org.
http://www.revues.org/7258
* ALT-J, the Journal of the Association for Learning Technology, converted to dalayed OA with
an 18 month moving wall.
http://www.newswiretoday.com/news/61545/
* Medical Education Online, an OA journal launched in 1996, moved to Co-Action Publishing.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/12/oa-journal-moves-to-co-action-raises.html
* The American Anthropological Association is making 85 year's worth of research publications
OA, 1888-1974. (Why stop at 1974? Last November the AAA adopted a policy to provide
delayed after a 35 year moving wall.)
http://blog.aaanet.org/2009/12/15/aaa-provides-free-access-to-85-years-of-american-anthropolo
gist-and-more/
* A collection of journal backfiles, reports, and monographs from The Fund for Folk Culture is
now OA through the institutional repository of Indiana University.
http://jasonbairdjackson.com/2009/12/07/fund-for-folk-culture-publications-available-online-thr
ough-indiana-afs-partnership/
* The new Open Law Journals Group published its draft principles.
http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/script-ed/vol6-3/openlaw.asp
* The Thomson Reuters Web of Science includes 494 peer-reviewed OA journals, 4.5% of the
11,000 in the full collection. The Transforming Scholarly Communication blog posted a list of
the 494.
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/scholcom/accessdenied/206168.html
* PLoS added blog coverage, as measured by ResearchBlogging.org, to it article-level metrics
for its journal articles.
http://www.plos.org/cms/node/500?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaig
n=Feed:+plos/Blog+(Public+Library+of+Science+Blog)
* Jim Till gathered details on which OA journal funds will pay fees at hybrid journals and which
will not.
http://tillje.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/policies-of-oa-journal-funds-about-hybrid-oa/
* Five more universities joined SCOAP3: Carnegie Mellon, Creighton, Macalester College,
Northeastern, and the University of Kentucky.
http://scoap3.org/news/news70.html
* NITLE launched a prediction market on when the number of journals in the DOAJ will reach
4,700.
http://markets.nitle.org/markets/24462
+ Repositories and databases
* The Association for Learning Technology officially launched its institutional repository.
http://www.newswiretoday.com/news/61545/
* Kenji Takeda released EP2DC, a service connecting an EPrints text repository with a remote
data repository.
http://ktakeda.blogspot.com/2009/12/ep2dc-linking-eprints-with-research.html
* The University of Hong Kong added HKU ResearcherPages to its IR for each its affiliated
authors. The new pages will include author-centric bibliometrics, article-level metrics,
authority control, and topics on which the author could speak to the media. The code will
become part of DSpace version 1.6.
http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind09&L=american-scientist-open-access-forum&D
=1&O=D&F=l&S=&P=108807
* In November 51 new DSpace repositories (in 8 countries) registered with DuraSpace, a record.
http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/duraspace/2009/12/01/dspace-community-continues-to-grow/
+ Data
* An editorial in BMJ called for OA to raw data from clinical drug trials.
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/339/dec10_2/b5405
* Freetable is a new data repository, in a pre-launch phase and seeking public
comments. Apparently it plans to offer a uniform mechanism for accessing and modifying
datasets on deposit.
http://freetable.org/
* Microsoft and the European Environment Agency launched Eye on Earth, a joint project
superimposing EEA data on Bing maps to show real-time on air and water quality in 32
countries.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/new-virtual-map-includes-uptodate-air-and-water-q
uality-readings-1853047.html
* The European Space Agency agreed that data from the upcoming Sentinel satellite missions
will be open.
http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEMXK570A2G_environment_0.html
* All the data from the NASA/ESA ExoMars Trace Gas Mission Orbiter will be OA through
Planetary Data System.
http://www.universetoday.com/2009/12/22/mars-2016-methane-orbiter-searching-for-signs-of-li
fe/
* Australia's Government 2.0 Task Force draft report recommended that by PSI be libre OA
under CC-BY licenses. The public comment period ended on December 16, 2009.
http://gov2.net.au/files/2009/12/Draft-Government-2-0-Report-release.pdf
http://gov2.net.au/blog/2009/12/07/draftreport/
* Geoscience Australia adopted CC-BY as as the default licence for its website.
http://creativecommons.org.au/node/274
http://www.ga.gov.au/about-us/news-media/media/releases/2009/20112009_commons.jsp
* DataCite is a new project to assign DOIs to datasets in order to support attribution, citation,
and linking. It's a joint project of libraries and research institutions in Australia, Canada,
Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK, and the US.
http://www.datacite.org/
* The Sunlight Foundation launched an OA database of the expenditures of the members of the
US House of Representatives.
http://blog.sunlightfoundation.com/2009/12/02/sunlight-creates-database-of-members-expenditu
res/
* The Open Knowledge Foundation launched a prototype of the OA database, Where Does My
Money Go?
http://blog.okfn.org/2009/12/11/where-does-my-money-go-prototype-launched/
* The US House of Representatives adopted a bill that would require Grants.gov, the
government grants database, to make all its data OA and searchable. The Senate has already
adopted a similar bill.
http://blog.sunlightfoundation.com/2009/12/15/improving-federal-grantmaking-transparency/
* The UK government is soliciting public comments on its proposal to provide OA to
gegraphical data from the Ordnance Survey.
http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/corporate/ordnancesurveyconsultation
* The "climategate" affair, in which stolen emails (on one interpretation) suggested that some
researchers might have falsified some data, elicited many calls for open data.
http://bit.ly/4wMC75
http://bit.ly/4w3XA1A
http://bit.ly/7yfhwR
http://bit.ly/5LDtsV
http://bit.ly/6KUx1s
http://bit.ly/5LDtsV
http://bit.ly/782jCl
+ Books
* A French court found Google guilty of copyright infringement for digitizing copyrighted
books from a French publisher (La Martini 鑽 e) in US libraries, without permission. Google
will appeal. This would be the same case that went to settlement in the US except that French
law has no equivalent of fair use.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/19/technology/companies/19google.html
* The city of Lyon released its Google book-scanning contract, after previously arguing that it
was confidential. A journalist had sued to force its disclosure.
http://culture.france2.fr/livres/e-livre/Le-contrat-Google--Ville-de-Lyon-rendu-public-59237822
.html
* The Gutenberg-e book series is now gratis OA. The books are published by Columbia
University Press in collaboration with the American Historical Association and the American
Council of Learned Societies.
http://www.gutenberg-e.org/
* The Columbia University Libraries joined the HathiTrust.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/news/libraries/2009/20091216.hathi.html
* Cornell University is making nearly 80,000 public-domain books digitized from the Cornell
library OA through the Internet Archive.
http://communications.library.cornell.edu/com/news/PressReleases/Cornell-University-LibraryPartners-with-the-Internet-Archive.cfm
* The first systematic book-scanning program at the Library of Congress has now digitized
60,000 public-domain books.
http://www.america.gov/st/educ-english/2009/December/20091223172644xlrennef0.264187.ht
ml
* French President Nicolas Sarkozy committed 2% of a $51 billion economic stimulus package
($1.1 billion) to the digitization of French books and historical documents.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/world/europe/15france.html
* The German government published a preview of Die Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German
Digital Library), approved by cabinet in December to launch in 2011 as a part of Europeana.
http://www.germany.info/Vertretung/usa/en/__PR/P__Wash/2009/12/03__DigitalLibrary__PR.h
tml
* The Open Knowledge Commons received $1.5 million from the Sloan Foundation to digitize
30,000 volumes of public domain medical literature.
http://www.knowledgecommons.org/
* The Wellcome Library, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and King's College London are creating an
OA library of 500 Islamic manuscripts.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5293.html
* With German public funding, TextGrid acquired the Zeno.org digital library and with partners
(Wikimedia Germany and Creative Commons Germany) plans to make it OA under CC-BY
licenses.
http://bit.ly/645nlv
* The Universit・des Antilles et de la Guyane launched Manioc, an OA digital library on the
Caribbean, Guiana Shield and Amazonia.
http://blog.bnf.fr/gallica/?p=1064
* A hacker released an app called Unswindle that breaks the DRM on Amazon's Kindle
translates its contents into Mobi format.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=6544&tag=nl.e540
* Kobo is a new company selling ebooks and ebook readers. The books are in the open EPUB
format and readable on any device. Through its partnership with the Internet Archive, the Kobo
catalog contains over two million books, of which 1.8 million are in the public domain and OA.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6712125.html?industryid=47145
* With his publisher's permission, David Pogue created an OA edition to one his technical books
on Microsoft Windows. The year after setting it loose, the book's print edition sold more copies
than the year before.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/technology/personaltech/17pogue-email.html
* DFWCatholic.org launched Wikatechesis, an OA wiki-based catechism.
http://www.dfwcatholic.org/dfwcatholic-org-launches-wikatechesis-123/.html
* The Open Library reported on its recent growth and future plans.
http://blog.openlibrary.org/2009/12/04/an-update-on-open-library/
* Klaus Graf compiled a list of Large Digital Libraries of Pre-1800 Printed Books in Western
Languages, organized by nation.
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/6107864/
* Charles Bailey released version 77 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography.
http://www.digital-scholarship.org/sepb/sepb.html
+ Studies and surveys
* Hellenic Academic Libraries Link published a report on the state of OA in Greece.
http://openaccess.inist.fr/sites/openaccess/IMG/pdf/OA_in_Greece_report_2009v.1.pdf
* Information Research published a report on OA institutional repositories in Spain.
http://informationr.net/ir/14-4/paper415.html
* The Research Information Network (RIN) released a report showing that researchers can
discover new work more easily than they can access or retrieve it, and that access barriers slow
their research, hinder collaboration, and "may well affect the quality and integrity of work
produced...."
http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/using-and-accessing-information-resources/overcoming-barriersaccess-research-information
* PARSE.Insight released the results of its survey of TA and OA journal publishers on their
preservation strategies. The report includes publisher views on the future of various business
models, including OA models.
http://www.parse-insight.eu/downloads/PARSE-Insight_D3-4_SurveyReport_final_hq.pdf
* PLoS released the results of its surveys of authors who submitted work to PLoS journals in
2008.
http://www.plos.org/cms/node/505
* The Nordbib programme published a report by Ingegerd Rabow on the history and practice of
institutional repositories and current research information systems (CRIS).
http://www.nordbib.net/Initiatives---Reports/Reports/CRIS-status.aspx
* The JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme released its final report.
http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/435/
+ Software and tools
* Geozon Science Media is developing Publiss, web-based publishing tools optimized for OA.
http://www.geozon.info/english-summary/
* The PLoS journals are upgrading to Ambra version 0.9.5.
http://www.plos.org/cms/node/504
* The Public Knowledge Project released Open Journal Systems version 2.3.1.
http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/2683
* The University of Rochester released version 1.0 of its open-source institutional repository
software, IR+.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5304.html
* The US Environmental Protection Agency released a web tool and interactive map to show the
locations EPA enforcement actions.
http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/d0cf6618525a9efb85257359003fb69d/3342886e4aa8
95db8525769500589311!OpenDocument
* Sprixi is a new search engine dedicated images in the public domain or under CC licenses. It
harnesses user responses to improve the match between keywods and images.
http://www.sprixi.com/
* The University of Stellenbosch launched a wiki for documenting its IR and ETD program.
http://ir.sun.ac.za/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
* Sugar is an open-source learning platform allowing uses to share their work with classmates
or the public.
http://www.teleread.org/2009/12/07/sugar-on-a-stick-what-it-means-for-e-books-and-education/
* IRtalk is a new forum "to discuss, communicate, share information on all open access and
institutional repositories related issues in Africa and South Africa."
http://lists.lib.sun.ac.za/mailman/listinfo/irtalk
* The CARPET project (Community for Academic Reviewing, Publishing and Editorial
Technology) launched a discussion forum.
http://www.carpet-project.net/en/content/forum/
+ Awards and milestones
* The German language edition of Wikipedia passed the milestone of one million articles.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/12/31/german-language-wikipedia-celebrates-1-million-articles/
* The Universidad de Los Andes institutional repository contains about 19,000 deposits.
http://epublishingtrust.blogspot.com/2009/12/venezuelas-technology-mecca.html
* RePEc passed several milestones in November: 450,000 listed abstracts, 150,000 cited
articles, and 22,000 registered authors.
http://blog.repec.org/2009/12/09/repec-in-november-2009/
* SURFshare is soliciting nominations for its annual Open Access Awards for promoting OA in
the Netherlands.
http://www.openaccess.nl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=158:nominate-forsurfshare-open-access-award&catid=1:news-archive
* The government of Australia announced the two winners of MashupAustralia, a competition
for the best mashups of open PSI.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/329732/mashupaustralia_competition_winners_anno
unced
* URISA Journal turned 10 years old. (URISA = Urban and Regional Information Systems
Association.)
http://www.directionsmag.com/press.releases/?duty=Show&id=41291
* Creative Commons turned seven years old.
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/19346
+ Other
* UC Publishing Services (UCPubS) is a publishing platform combining the OA expertise of the
University of California's eScholarship program with the print expertise of the University of
California Press.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5291.html
* PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine), the aggressive, deceptive,
anti-OA lobbying arm of the AAP/PSP launched in August 2007, allowed its domain name
(prismcoalition.org) to lapse.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/12/early-christmas.html
* Springer, the world's largest OA publisher since acquiring BMC in 2008, was sold by one
private equity firm (Cinven and Candover, from Britain) to two other private equity firms (EQT
and GIC, from Sweden and Singapore).
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6711381.html?nid=2673&source=title&rid=17392268
* The first results from Large Hadron Collider's ALICE Collaboration were published in
Springer's European Physical Journal C where they were OA under a CC-BY-NC
license. Another 23 papers from the CMS collaboration, are now OA through arXiv and will
soon be published in the OA Journal of Instrumentation.
http://scoap3.org/news/news71.html
* The Research Information Network (RIN) is holding a series of workshops to show how
Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation can help researchers.
http://www.rin.ac.uk/news/freedom-information-tool-research
* InWeave (Intellectual Wealth and Value) is an open-science project "investigat[ing]
mechanisms provide society with Intellectual Wealth of the greatest value...."
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5292.html
* The US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) allowed CustomFlix to
digitize some publicly-funded, public-domain films and sell them on its web site. NARA can
post OA copies to its web site only if it buys them from CustomFlix and CustomFlix has already
amortized its costs through sales of TA copies.
Carl Malamud has a strategy to open up access
to the films.
http://www.archivesnext.com/?p=750
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/04/watch-americas-publi.html
* PubMed Central introduced a shorter and more flexible URL format.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/nd09/nd09_pmc_urls.html
* The British Medical Association awarded a ｣10,000 grant to Healthcare Information for All
by 2015 (HIFA2015).
http://dgroups.org/ViewDiscussion.aspx?c=e95b885f-14b0-4452-a819-06cf188ee6b0&i=fe05ae
d9-8eeb-426a-8439-f7427eb54284
* David Prosser shifted from Executive Director of SPARC Europe to Executive Director of
Research Libraries UK.
http://www.rluk.ac.uk/node/581
* LexPublica is a new source basic legal documents such as common business contract
templates under CC licenses.
http://lexpubli.ca/
* The Executive Policy Brief for Egypt from the African Copyright and Access to Knowledge
(ACA2K) Project recommended OA for teaching and learning materials.
http://www.aca2k.org/attachments/154_ACA2K%20EGYPT%20EPB%20WEB-071209.pdf
* The Open University Campaign renamed itself the Open Education Campaign in order to
avoid any confusion with the Open University.
http://wiki.freeculture.org/Open_University_Campaign
* Thanks to lobbying by David Wiley, the State of Utah adopted a rule allowing teachers to
share their teaching materials under CC licenses. Before this, it was unclear who owned the
copyright on those materials and hence unclear who could authorize sharing under open licenses.
http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/1156
* Vital Signs, a field-based student research program at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute,
adopted the CC-BY license for its research.
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/19482
* Students at Wake Forest University are collecting waste oils for a biodiesel project and hope to
make it a model for OA green energy projects at other universities.
http://www.biodieselmagazine.com/article.jsp?article_id=3940
* The Palo Alto High School student newspaper began using CC licenses.
http://voice.paly.net/view_story.php?id=9299
* An Argentinean court dropped criminal infringement charges against Professor Horacio Potel
for distributing unauthorized OA Spanish editions of copyrighted works by Derrida and
Heidegger.
http://bit.ly/5gsOcH
* Francis Muguet, chemist, lawyer, and OA activist, died in October at age 54. He was the
chairman of the Civil Society Scientific Information Working Group of the the World Summit
on the Information Society (disclosure: and recruited me to serve on the group with him) and a
master at negotiating the bureaucracy of the United Nations to advance the cause of OA.
http://www.iis.ru/en/content/view/400/91/
---------Coming this month
Here are some important OA-related events coming up in January.
* January 1, 2010. The BMJ "pico" policy takes effect.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/09-02-09.htm#abridgment
* January 1, 2010. The OA mandate at the University of Salford takes effect.
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5188.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/about/news/2791
* January 1, 2010. The OA mandate at the Swedish Research Council takes effect.
http://www.vr.se/inenglish/fromus/news/newsarchive/news2009/news2009/theswedishresearchc
ouncilrequiresfreeaccesstoresearchresults.5.227c330c123c73dc586800012074.html
* January 1, 2010. Co-Action Publishing and the Lund University Library should finish the
final version of their guide to best practices for OA journals.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/01/forthcoming-guide-to-best-practices-for.html
* January 1, 2010. The OA mandate at the University of Helsinki takes effect. The policy was
announced in June 2008.
http://www.helsinki.fi/ejulkaiseminen/rinnakkaistallennus/pdf-tiedostot/decision260508_eng.pd
f
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/06/oa-mandate-at-u-of-helsinki.html
* January 1, 2010. The OA policy at the University of Bergen takes effect. The policy was
announced in June 2009.
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=University%20of%20Bergen
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/06/oa-policy-for-u-of-bergen.html
* January 1, 2010. The OA mandates at 26 Finland Universities of Applied Sciences take
effect. The policy was adopted in October 2009.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/12/26-oa-mandates-at-one-stroke.html
* January 28, 2010. Deadline for objections to the amended Google Books Settlement to be
filed with the court. Judge Denny Chin of the Southern District of New York gave preliminary
approval to the amended settlement on November 19, 2009.
http://thepublicindex.org/docs/amended_settlement/order_granting_prelim_approval.pdf
* OA-related conferences in January 2010.
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/2010#January
* Other OA-related conferences
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Events
==========
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