The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics

Call for withdrawal of labour from publishers in favour of the US Research Works Act

2012-01-24T14:24:00.000-08:00

Gary Hall posts a call for withdrawal of labor from publishers in favour of the US Research Works Act, which would make it impossible for the U.S. government to require public access to the published results of research that it funds:
http://www.garyhall.info/journal/2012/1/16/withdrawal-of-labour-from-publishers-in-favour-of-the-us-res.html

Among the publishers of critical and cultural theory on this list are:

Sage (who publish numerous journals in the area including Theory, Culture and Society and New
Media and Society)

Palgrave Macmillan (publisher of Feminist Review

Stanford University Press

Fordham University Press

Harvard University Press

NYU Press

Cambridge University Press

Early draft of my thesis

2012-01-22T19:07:00.000-08:00

An early draft of my dissertation, Freedom for Scholarship in the Internet Age, has been posted here: http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/open-thesis-draft-introduction-march-2011/

Nature Publishing Group - supports scholarship, not Research Works Act, SOPA or PIPA!

2012-01-20T09:29:00.000-08:00

Awesome news from Nature Publishing Group - NPG does not support the anti-open access Research Works Act, SOPA or PIPA.

Among the traditional scholarly publishers, NPG has been an early leader in supporting open access - and standing up for scholarship against the inappropriate tactics of anti-open-access lobbyists. In 2007, it was Jim Giles' article in Nature that exposed the hiring of PR pitbull Eric Dezenhall and his bizarre strategies such as linking open access with government censorship, and NPG was among the first to disavow support for the ludicrous, quickly doomed PRISM anti-OA coalition attempt.

NPG has also been an early leader in supporting NPG authors' desires for open access, such as actively encouraging author self-archiving and being among the first to begin to compete in the open access environment. Following is a list of links to previous posts about NPG on The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics. Kudos and thanks to NPG for being a stellar example of how a long-time traditional publisher can approach the process of transitioning to open access.

2007:

Opposition to open access continues, while anti-OA coalitionattempt implodes

http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2007/10/opposition-to-open-access-continues.html

We all owe a debt of thanks to Nature and Jim Giles (and tothose who leaked the documents) for releasing the story on the AmericanAssociation of Publishers' hiring of PR pitbull Eric Dezenhall, who recommendedbizarre strategies such as linking open access with government censorship andjunk science, strategies which have been reflected in OA opposition efforts,including PRISM. The latest on this can be found on OpenAccess News.

2011:

Nature Publishing Group and Scientific Reports: gettingserious about OA competition

http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/01/nature-publishing-group-and-scientific.html

2008:

Kudos: Nature self-archiving on behalf of authors

http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2008/07/kudos-nature-self-archiving-on-behalf.html

2007:

NEJM and Nature evolving toward open access

http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2007/12/nejm-and-nature-evolving-towards-open.html

Thanks to NPG's Grace Baynes for the links to NPG statements on the Research Works Act, SOPA, and PIPA.

IJPE supports the January 18, 2012 Internet Blackout

2012-01-17T17:39:00.000-08:00

For information on how to take action, see the Electronic Frontier Foundation's page on Stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation
or Michael Geist on why this important to Canadians, how and why we should take action

For more on this topic:

Elsevier wants to shut down the free web. Scholars & librarians - let's shut Elsevier down instead!

Protect the internet from censorship! Stop the stop online piracy act - some tips for all of us

Updated January 17, 2012 - date change to sort at top of page. Internet Blackout day is January 18, 2012.

Elsevier: thy name is hypocrisy

2012-01-16T14:51:00.000-08:00

The Elsevier Foundation just announced on the Liblicense list $650,000 in grants. Generous? Hang on a second - at the same time that the Elsevier Foundation is assessing medical library needs for an Eritrean future, helping Kenyan libraries serve health workers, and translating knowledge into practice for Uganda's rural health clinics, Elsevier is doing its utmost to take down PubMedCentral, which would be a tremendous loss of medical research information in the U.S. and everywhere else.

I must admit it is nice to see a little bit of graft money going to deserving folks in the developing world, and not all of it going to the likes of U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, but graft is graft, and Elsevier, thy name is hypocrisy.

When interpreting the enormous profits of STM publishers like Elsevier, it is important to take into account that the 36% profit margin comes AFTER graft pay-out, not before. This may help to explain how we can transition the whole of scholarly communication to a fully open access system - and save LOTS of money, too. Less than half of what we pay now, and up to 90% savings with a scholar-led system like most of the journals using Open Journal Systems.

A fully open access scholarly publishing system means that all of the Elsevier beneficiaries - and billions of others - will have access to all of the world's knowledge - and the opportunity to contribute, too. Let's not settle for a few crumbs, when all of us, everywhere, can have the whole pie, as is obviously doable when one copy of a scholarly work posted on the web is available to everyone, everywhere with an internet connection.

Illustrations of the global reach of the open access movement

2012-01-10T23:00:00.000-08:00

These two charts illustrate the global reach of the open access movement. The first chart illustrates the regional breakdown of the 7,385 journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Please see below for citation information. The second chart below is from OpenDOAR, illustrating the regional breakdown of open access repositories. Note that the percentages are roughly in the same ballpark for Europe (highest percentage, 40% range) and North America (second highest percentage, 20% range), while South America ranks third for open access journals and Asia for open access repositories. As further research, it might be interesting to compare these percentages with GDP or number of researchers. With a superficial glance, it looks to me like everyone around the world is contributing roughly their fair share of open access.

Citation & permissions

The OpenDOAR chart is a January 11, 2012 snapshot of this live updated chart, copied here for comparison purposes with the verbal permission of Peter Millington from a couple of years ago. Please cite OpenDOAR and see the OpenDOAR site / project for permissions.The DOAJ chart was developed from the DOAJ country statistics. As of January 10, 2012 (my time / note OpenDOAR is in a different time zone), DOAJ lists 117 countries. The chart and comments are my own, developed for my thesis. Please cite: Morrison, Heather (2012). Freedom for scholarship in the internet age. PhD Thesis (in progress). Retrieved from: http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series.

The enormous profits of STM scholarly publishers

2012-01-07T19:14:00.000-08:00

The following paragraph is a synopsis of recent STM scholarly publisher profits - and increasing profits. This is part of my open thesis - please cite as: Morrison, Heather (2011). Chapter two: scholarly communication in crisis. Freedom for scholarship in the internet age. PhD Dissertation (in progress). http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/chapter-two-scholarly-communication-in-crisis/

All are in the for-profit sector, and theprofits are enormous. As reported in the Economist (2011): “ Elsevier, thebiggest publisher of journals with almost 2,000 titles, cruised through therecession. Last year it made £724m ($1.1 billion) on revenues of £2 billion—anoperating-profit margin of 36%”. Springer’s Science + Business Media (2010) reporteda return on sales (operating profit) of 33.9% or €294 million on revenue of € 866 million, an increase of 4% over theprofit of the previous year. In the first quarter of 2012, John Wiley &Sons (2011) reported profit of $106 million for their scientific, medical,technical and scholarly division on revenue of $253 million, a profit rate of42%. This represents an increase in the profit rate of 13% over the previousyear. The operating profit rate for the academic division of Informa.plc (2011,p. 4) for the first half of 2011 was 32.4%, or £47 million on revenue of £145million, an increase of 3.3% over the profit of the previous year.

Update January 19, 2012 - Simba Information reports 3.4% growth for STM in 2011 http://www.simbainformation.com/about/release.asp?id=2503

The knowledge commons: free resources & speaking notes for Tragedy of the Market - from Crisis to Commons

2012-01-07T08:10:00.000-08:00

Free resources & speaking notes

For: Tragedyof the Market – from Crisis to Commons

Jan. 6 – 8,2012

UncededCoastal Salish Territory

Simon FraserUniversity Harbour Centre / Bonsor Community Centre Burnaby

Free resources

Journals

Directory ofOpen Access Journals

http://www.doaj.org

Over 7,000fully open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals

Open Access Archives

BielefeldAcademic Search Engine

http://base.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/en/

Metasearchthrough over 30 million items from 2,000 contributors

Medicine

PubMed

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/

Freeindexing services, U.S. National Institutes of Health, links to millions of fullfree-text documents

Medline Plus

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/

Consumerhealth information

arXiv (physics) http://arxiv.org/

Research Papers in Economics (RePEC) http://repec.org/

E-LIS (library and information studies) http://eprints.rclis.org/

Open Education

OpenEducational Resources Commons

http://www.oercommons.org/

Localresources

Public KnowledgeProject

http://pkp.sfu.ca/

Free opensource journal / conference publishing software

Ha-shilth-sanewsletter

http://www.hashilthsa.com/

BCGrasslands Magazine

http://www.bcgrasslands.org/magazine.htm

Universityof British Columbia cIRcle

https://circle.ubc.ca/

Simon FraserUniversity SUMMIT

http://summit.sfu.ca/

U Vicspace

https://dspace.library.uvic.ca:8443/

Post-colonialtext

http://postcolonial.org/

West Beyondthe West (BC historical resources)

http://westbeyondthewest.ca/search;jsessionid=C7CB7EDFD2073342C83965CF1CA53EB7

Speaking notes

Tragedy of the Market: from Crisis to Commons

The Knowledge Commons: Heather Morrison

What is the knowledge commons, what do I study?

Myarea of study is the knowledge commons. What I mean by the knowledge commons isbasically the vision that all of the collective knowledge of humankind will oneday be freely available to everyone, everywhere, through the internet. Myspecialty is open access to scholarly communication, the works of researcherswho work in universities. I acknowledge that much, if not most, of the world’sknowledge was not created by people who work at universities. This is just whatI study. First I will give a very brief overview of the history of enclosure inscholarly communication. Then, I have good news to share about the dramaticgrowth of open access, and the free scholarly resources already available. Linksto the resources I talk about can be found from my blog, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics.

A brief history of scholarship in recent decades

Fromthe 1600s to the middle of the last century, almost all scholarly journals werepublished by scholarly societies. Beginning in the 1950’s and continuing to thepresent day, there has been a strong trend for scholarly publishing to be takenover by for-profit companies. The commercial sector has gone through mergersand acquisitions so that now close to half of the world’s scholarly journalsare owned by just four companies.

Prices have risen so that university libraries and scholarscan no longer afford to buy the knowledge they need, even at the world’slargest and wealthiest universities. This is particularly true in the areasthat are seen as creating profits for our society, that is, science, technologyand medicine or STM. The costs of STM journals have become so expensive thatlibraries have had to cut back on almost all other spending, so that there isalmost no funding anymore for scholarly books, or humanities or social sciencesjournals.

This is an inelastic market. That means that it does notbounce with the conditions of the market. If a university’s researchers aredoing research in STM, the universities have to buy the journals. In 2010,Elsevier, the largest of the scholarly publishers, made over $1 billion dollar inprofits alone. This was 36% of their total revenues. This is normal for thelarge commercial scholarly publishers. 2010 was a time when many of the peoplewho do the work – the writing and peer review - at no cost to these commercialpublishers, were losing their jobs, taking unpaid furlough or otherwise tryingto manage on less than full-time salaries.

The fundamental problem is enclosure of knowledge for theprofits of the few. As Drahos & Braithwaite pointed out in their book, Information feudalism: who owns theknowledge economy?, traditionally, knowledge was seen as the classic publicgood, with two characteristics. Knowledge is nonrivalrous in nature – if I knowsomething and you do too, this does not take away from my knowledge. Knowledgewas also traditionally seen as non-excludable; there used to be no way toenclose knowledge, to stop people from knowing things. Now, with the latest ininformation technology and digital rights management, knowledge can beenclosed. As Drahos & Braithwaite point out, enclosable knowledge can beseen as the perfect commodity, precisely because it is nonrivalrous in nature.You can sell the same thing over and over, whether it’s an old Disney movie ora scholarly article, and you still have the item after the sale, to keep onselling over and over again.

Open access to scholarly knowledge

One of the remedies to enclosure of knowledge is openaccess. Open access, as defined by open access guru Peter Suber, is literaturethat is digital, online, free of charge and free of most copyright andlicensing restrictions. There are two ways to make a work open access. One isby publishing open access in the first place. This is sometimes called the goldroute to open access. The other way is to take a work published in thetraditional way and put it in an archive for open access. This is sometimescalled the green route to open access.

Dramatic growth of open access

The growth of open access in the last decade has been trulyremarkable. There are now more than 7 thousand fully open access, scholarlypeer reviewed journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, orDOAJ, and DOAJ is growing by about 4 titles every day. DOAJ is a vetted list.Librarians at Lund University in Sweden look at every title submitted for thelist to make sure they are fully open access, which means that they are freefrom the moment of publication, as well as whether the journal practices peerreview or an equivalent form of academic quality control.

When you add in all of the journals that make their backissues freely available and the journals that are not peer-reviewed, the totalis over 30,000 free journals, as tracked by the Electronic Journals Library. The Electronic Journals Library is alist collectively created by a consortium of libraries based in Europe.

Here in B.C. we have a smaller list of free journals whichwe call the CUFTS Free! Open AccessCollections, with just over 12,000 titles, created by local librarians.There is an A to Z list and the titles can also be found through the OutLookdatabase, which is available through your local university, college, or publiclibrary.

There are millions of items available through open accessarchives. The world’s largest open access archive is PubMedCentral, a serviceof the U.S. National Institutes of Health with branches in Canada and the U.K.The long-term goal is PubMedCentral International, with the world’s medicalliterature available in every country and every country contributing theirknowledge to all. If you search through PubMed, the N.I.H.’s free indexingservice to the medical literature, you will find that by two years afterpublication, about 20% of the world’s medical literature is now freelyavailable. Many journals actively contribute their whole journals toPubMedCentral, and this is a growing tendency.

Another very large archive is arXiv, the physics archive. Inhigh energy physics, by the time an article is published, most of the physicscommunity interested in the topic have already read it, because the physicistsput their working papers into arXiv even before they submit them forpublication. arXiv was started by one physicist, Paul Ginsparg. For years,arXiv has been supported by Cornell University Library, and now arXiv is movingtowards sustainable funding by having all of the libraries at universities thathave very active physics programs contribute. They are not yet at 100%, butthey do have more than 130 libraries contributing so far, and they are well ontheir way.

Research Papers in Economics or RePEC is a scattered archivemanaged by a global collaboration of volunteers in this area. E-LIS, the openarchive for library and information studies, is similar in this respect. Theserver and a little bit of staff time are contributed by the CILEA libraryconsortium in Italy. A team of over 60 volunteers from 6 contents gathers thedocuments and looks after the quality of metadata.

Historical resources are being digitized and put online.Here in BC, we have something called the WestBeyond the West portal. Through this portal, you can search for digitizednewspapers and photographs. The Internet Archive, in cooperationwith the Open Content Alliance, hasbeen digitizing public domain books for year. There are now over 3 milliontexts freely available. The Internet Archive also features movies and audio,some old and some that are being contributed today by contemporary creators.The Europeana project aims to digitize and make available all of Europe’scultural heritage.

Open education is taking off. MIT was a leader in this area,making all of their courses freely available. Recently, MIT announced aninitiative called MITx, which provides a means for people to take the MITcourses online on their own, and then go to MIT for exams and to obtain acredential – not quite the same as an MIT degree, but much better than notbeing able to afford an education.

Resources available

That’s the big picture. Some of the local resourcesavailable include the open access archives at UBC, called cIRcle, where UBCstudents and researchers are beginning to share their work; at SFU, there is asimilar service called SUMMIT, and at U Vic, it’s UVicspace.

There are many open access journals produced locally, suchas the Journal of Post-Colonial Textsfounded by Dr. Ranjini Mendes of Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

There are journals and magazines produced locally by peoplewho may or may not be university-trained scholars that are shared openly bypeople who are seeking the truth, and these are very important to the knowledgecommons. One example is the Ha-shilth-Sanewsletter developed by the Nuu-chalth-nuth tribal council, and the BC Grasslands Magazine, produced by a groupdedicated to conservation of grasslands.

The struggle continues – the challenges of success

Although there is much good news to share, I would not wantto underestimate the challenges that lie before us. Scholars are still in asystem that drives them to publish in journals owned by for-profit companies toobtain job security and advance in their careers. As I mentioned earlier, theprofits of these companies have not diminished at all, and in some cases arestill increasing. The very success of the open access movement to date iscreating challenges, from my perspective. We are now seeing some of thecommercial publishers shift from fighting open access to beginning to competefor what they must see as an open access marketplace. This may liberate moreknowledge, but it is troubling to see companies competing for open access whenat the same time they are still lobbying for laws that would further encloseknowledge. For example, Nature Publishing Group has a number of open accessinitiatives, while its parent company, Macmillan, is lobbying for the StopOnline Piracy Act in the U.S.

We are also beginning to see the entrance of new scholarlypublishers. Some of these new entrants are, or have the capacity to become,producers of high quality scholarly publishing. However, there are also whatappears to be scam artists taking advantage of scholars who want to make theirwork open access. Jeffrey Beall has started a list of Predatory Open Access Publishers to raise awareness about thesepractices.

On the other hand, scholarly publishing in spite of the highprofits remains largely a gift economy. Scholars continue to give away theirjournal articles and their peer reviewing services for free. Scholarlysocieties are still involved in publishing close to half of the world’sscholarly journals, and could thrive into the future with a little bit ofsupport. The Public Knowledge Project, initiated by John Willinsky at UBC withthe lead development work now happening at SFU Library, is one source of suchsupport, developing the free, open source OpenJournal Systems used by more than 10,000 journals around the world, most ofwhich are scholar-led, free or open access journals.

In spite of the current challenges, overall I think thatopen access to scholarly knowledge has much to offer the commons as a whole,for two reasons. First, there are the scholarly resources that are nowavailable. Second, there is the success of the movement on a global scale;hopefully there are lessons learned from this that will be of benefit to buildingthe commons in other areas of life.

Thank you for listening!

References

Drahos, P.,& Braithwaite, J. (2002). Informationfeudalism: Who owns the knowledge

economy?. London: Earthscan.

Economist(2011). Of goats and headaches: One of the best media businesses is also one

of the most resented. RetrievedSeptember 25, 2011 from http://www.economist.com/node/18744177/ (Elsevierprofits)

Morrison, H.Retracting recommendation of Nature’s Scientific Reports. The Imaginary

Journalof Poetic Economics. Retrieved Jan. 4, 2011 from http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2012/01/retracting-recommendation-of-natures.html

(explainsNature – Macmillan and Stop Online Piracy Act, with links)

HeatherMorrison, M.L.I.S., Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser University School ofCommunication

http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/

TheImaginary Journal of Poetic Economics

http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com

hgmorris atsfu dot ca

Knowledge Commons by Heather Morrison is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada License.
Based on a work at poeticeconomics.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/12/education-is-public-good-not-commercial.html.

Public access to research reports not peer-reviewed research: two major flaws in the argument

2012-01-06T22:31:00.000-08:00

Updated January 6 - now four major flaws

David Wojick at the Scholarly Kitchen argues for public access to research reports, not peer-reviewed articles. For the benefit of those unfamiliar with open access policy, note that this comes in the context of the recent revelation that the American Association of Publishers is lauding the Research Works Act which would forbid any U.S. federal funding agency from requiring public access to the results of research that it funds. For a synopsis of what is wrong with the bill and actions to fight it, see the Alliance for Taxpayer Access site.

Four major flaws with the public access to research reports, not peer-reviewed articles argument

The world does not consist only of scholars / researchers and some great unwashed "public"

Public access expands access to everyone, everywhere. For example, with medical research, public access means access for doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals, as well as social workers, teachers at all levels, journalists, entrepreneurs and other businesspeople, as well as volunteers and community-based researchers. A large percentage of "the public" in modern society has some level of post-secondary education. And there are many people without much formal education who have found reasons to teach themselves. If there is a problem people are trying to solve, or people are looking for new business ideas, they may well be motivated to learn enough to understand the scholarly literature. For more on this, see this article Andrew Waller & I wrote on this in the Letter of the LAA: http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/6842#.TwfmcyNLDNI

Intellectual freedom

Setting aside the question of whether the public can easily read the scholarly literature, a more essential matter is the fact that it is the individual's right to choose. If a patient wants consumer literature, they can go to their public library. If they want to read the actual research articles, this is their right.

Requiring more writing of researchers

Part of this argument involves more writing time for these research reports on the part of researchers. This is interesting - now scholarly publishers are now satisfied with authors giving them their work, but rather they wish to assign extra work to the researchers. If scholarly societies are advancing this argument, I would assume that they have not checked in with their members on this, as members will often be the ones required to do the extra work. Similarly, at university presses - since when does a university press have a right to assign duties to faculty? And as for commercial publishers - wow, they would have a lot of nerve to ask this!

If the services of scholarly journals publishers are not all that important, why not do away with them altogether?

The scholarly publishers who are floating this idea really ought to give this a bit more thought. If it is just fine to provide the public with results of research in a form that is not peer-reviewed, why not everyone else? That is to say, if peer review is not that important, according to the people who coordinate peer review for a living - then perhaps we can do without? That would save an awful lot of money. The Houghton studies in the U.K. found that the most cost savings with a transition to open access would come with a transformative system building peer review on top of articles in repositories and doing away with journals altogether. Costs reported are (the subscription model is with green open access):

£230 million to publish using the subscription model,
£150 million to publish under the open access model and
£110 million to publish with the self-archiving with peer review services plus some £20 million in operating costs if using the different models.

In other words, a peer review overlay system built on repositories would cost less than half the costs of the current subscriptions model. And this system does include peer review! So if the peer review that scholarly journal publishers isn't important enough to be required as part of an open access policy, then perhaps the best approach is to scrap - not the policy, but the journal system altogether. This would give significant economic relief to universities around the world struggling with the current difficult economic climate.

This post is public domain for open access advocacy purposes.

Open Government Consultation - my response

2012-01-06T13:36:00.000-08:00

Here is my response to Canada's Open Government Consultation. Please note that responses are due by January 16, 2011!

Open Government Consultation –Response from Independent Scholar

First,congratulations and kudos to the Government of Canada for activelyparticipating in the Open Government movement, and for providing thisopportunity for citizens to be involved in this consultation. I speak as an independentscholar and librarian.

Open data

The keys tomaking open data as useful as it could be are to use open and interoperableformats and best practices for licensing. Because both are evolving, mysuggestion is to just get the data up there and available with the best formatand license for now, realizing that worldwide standards are likely to changeover the next few years.

Opendata.bcprovides a widely recognized good model for licensing of open data http://www.opendatabc.ca/

TheEuropean Commission’s Open Data Strategy is one that I recommend consulting:

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/11/1524&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

Myinterests cover the range of scholarly knowledge; any and all of the open datasets mentioned would be most helpful.

In addition,I would strongly suggest that datasets resulting from research funded byCanada’s federal funding agencies be required to be made openly available assoon as possible after collection, with appropriate privacy safeguards in thecase of research involving human subjects.

Open Information

It istimely for the government to expand the agenda-setting Canadian Institutes ofHealth Research’s Policy on Access toResearch Outputs to all federal research funding agencies. Research fundedby the Canadian taxpayer should be freely available to all. The optimum mandatewould require deposit of the author’s final peer-reviewed research scholarlyarticles into an open access archive at a university (and/or PubMedCentralCanada), immediately on acceptance for publication. In the short term, anembargo date of up to 6 months might be set to allow scholarly publishers timeto adjust to the growing environment of open access in scholarly communication.

As alibrarian, I know that reports commissioned by the Government of Canada andinformation submitted to Parliament by departments and agencies often containessential research or other information (that’s why these reports get funded inthe first place), that are useful far beyond the original reason forcommissioning the reports. To get full value from these reports, these reportsshould retained, archived, and made accessible. Ideally, today, this meansputting the reports online for open access. Librarians are uniquely skilled incollecting such reports, preservation, and making the works accessible online,by providing expert metadata, and assistance to researchers. I urge the federalgovernment to encourage and help its libraries to transition to a role ofproviders of information online.

Open Dialogue

In 2010, Iactively participated in the consultation on Canada’s Digital Economy Strategy,and commented at the time that this is an enlightened approach.

For someonelike me, it is reasonably easy to find out about and participate in these sortsof consultations. However, I am a scholar whose work is closely related to theinternet and public policy; I am often on the web and on the alert for messagesabout such consultations, and have a strong background for participation. I amnot sure that all of this is true for most people in Canada, or would even betrue for me at a different stage in life. What I see as needed is active outreach. People need to understand theissues before they can provide fully informed opinions. Web-based consultationsneed to provide a means for people without ready access to the internet at hometo participate. Public libraries can play an important role in this arena. Weneed to keep in mind that not every community is connected to the internet;other means are needed to engage these citizens.

Final Comments: Open GovernmentStrategy

Are thereapproaches used by other governments that you believe the Government of Canadacould / should model?

Yes! TheUnited States has provided the whole world with an outstanding example in thefreely available PubMed index and PubMedCentral fulltext archive. PubMed is theworld’s premiere medical index; as recently as the 1990’s, I worked at alibrary at a small university college in Canada that could not afford topurchase access to what was then called Medline. Today, this index is freelyavailable, around the world, to anyone with an Internet connection. Thanks tothe policies of medical research funding agencies (including the U.S. NationalInstitutes of Health, Wellcome Trust, and the Canadian Institutes of HealthResearch, among many others), requiring public access to the results ofresearch that they fund, 20% of the world’s medical literature is now freelyavailable within two years of publication. This expanded access makes anenormous difference in finding solutions to medical problems. I am proud thatCanada is one of the first countries to participate in the envisionedPubMedCentral international, through PMC-Canada.

Asmentioned above, I recommend looking at:

Opendata.bchttp://www.opendatabc.ca/

TheEuropean Commission’s Open Data Strategy http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/11/1524&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

Also, theCity of Vancouver’s Open Data initiative:

http://data.vancouver.ca/

Again,thanks for the opportunity to participate.

HeatherMorrison

Vancouver,BC

Doctoral Candidate, Simon FraserUniversity School of Communication

http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/

The Imaginary Journal of PoeticEconomics

http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com

Privacy note: the above links areto publicly available sites.

This is a response to theCanadian government’s Open Government Consultation http://open.gc.ca/index-eng.asp

January 6, 2012

Have many not-for-profit scholarly publishers joined the private sector? If so, has anyone checked their tax status lately?

2012-01-06T11:51:00.000-08:00

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) Applaud the “Research Works Act,” Bipartisan Legislation To End Government Mandates on Private-Sector Scholarly Publishing - details here: http://publishers.org/press/56/

This is an awful bill, which would prevent the U.S. government from requiring public access to research funded by the U.S. public. For details and action steps, see the Alliance for Taxpayer Access site.

Among the members of the AAP are many traditional not-for-profit publishers, such as scholarly societies and university presses. If they are now claiming, through AAP, to be private-sector publishers, does this mean their not-for-profit status has changed? If so, has anyone checked their tax status lately?

Yet another reason for such publishers to denounce the AAP's stand and distance themselves from AAP until such time as AAP stops supporting this move against the public interest.

This post is public domain to open access advocates.

Cengage Learning VERSUS the free web and public access to research funded by the public

2012-01-06T11:18:00.000-08:00

Dear Cengage: consider this a wake-up call. Your library customers care very much about access to information and freedom of information. Please retract your support of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) as soon as possible, and denounce the actions of your membership association, the Association of American Publishers, in supporting the Research Works Act which, if passed, would be a significant blow to dissemination of research funded by the public in the public interest.

Dear Cengage customers: note that Cengage's major competitors are not on the list of SOPA supporters or members of the Association of American Publishers. Please consider adding support for fair and balanced copyright law to your list of required criteria for acquisitions.

Cengage Learning (also known as Gale) is among the supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act, arguably the worst thing ever to happen to the internet, as explained by gizmodo.

Cengage Learning is also one of the members of the Association of American Publishers which lauds the Research Works Act, which would forbid the U.S. government to require public access to the results of research that it funds. If passed, this bill would be a huge blow to the public interest. For details and action, see the Alliance for Taxpayer Access site.

Cengage Learning is a major supplier of information to libraries. The information resources actually produced by Cengage are works for hire, such as the Dictionary of Literary Biography, which are not at all affected by funding agencies public access requirements. Cengage does absolutely none of the actual work involved in coordinating peer review and copyediting of scholarly works.

Unlike commercial scholarly publishers, Cengage works in the area of aggregation, and has major competitors. I am not seeing the names of Cengage competitors on the list of SOPA supporters or AAP members.

Comments from Cengage Learning are most welcome, and will be published here if received. Please send via e-mail to hgmorris at sfu dot ca

2012-01-06T10:11:00.000-08:00

Dear Judy Garber, President, American Association of Cancer Research, and Frank McCormick, President-Elect

In Lieu of Flowers: An Open Letter to the American Association of Cancer Research

This is a call for the American Association of Cancer Research to remember your purpose: helping the millions of people around the world who suffer and die from cancer, and the doctors and researchers who dedicate their lives to helping them. Please denounce the Research Works Act, which would greatly limit dissemination of literature on cancer, and the Association of American Publishers for supporting this.

The Association of American Publishers, an association of which AACR is a member, has just lauded the Research Works Act http://www.publishers.org/press/56/

The Research Works Act would harm the basic mission of AACR to "prevent and cure cancer", by preventing policies requiring free dissemination of publicly funded works. I call on AACR to publicly denounce this action on the part of AAP and suspend its membership until such time as AAP reverses its position. If this action is not taken, AACR's basic mission is no longer "prevent and cure cancer through research, education, communication and collaboration", but rather "publishing profits above all else".

What the Research Works Act would do would be to force the U.S. government to take down PubMedCentral and the N.I.H. Public Access Policy which has been so effective in making more than 20% of the world's medical literature freely available. This would be a huge loss in access to information for researchers, doctors and patients, and is in direct contradiction to the mission of AACR, as stated on the AACR website:

The misson of AACR on your website this morning does not say: defending the interests of the private sector in the publishing industry, but rather the following. The portions of your mission directly contradicted by support for the Research Works Act are bolded.

The mission of the AACR is to prevent and cure cancer through research, education, communication, and collaboration. Through its programs and services, the AACR fosters research in cancer and related biomedical science; accelerates the dissemination of new research findings among scientists and others dedicated to the conquest of cancer; promotes science education and training; and advances the understanding of cancer etiology, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment throughout the world.

Judy Garber, as a Professor of Medicine at Harvard, please note that this action of the part of AACR is in direct contradiction to recent support by Harvard University for open access to scholarly information. Frank McCormick, remember that the University of California, like many universities around the world, is facing financial difficulties - this action could result in loss of access for the researchers, practitioners, and patients your comprehensive care centre is meant to serve.

Following is a repeat of a portion of my original "in lieu of flowers" message, sent in July of 2005 and posted to The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics. I have never received a response to this open letter. Since 2005, the growth of fully open access publishing has been absolutely phenomenal. Both not-for-profit and commercial publishers are earning healthy surpluses or profits from fully open access publishing. There is nothing at all stopping AACR from adopting an open access approach that would sustain AACR publishing without damaging the basic mission of preventing and curing cancer.

This is a noble reason for the existence of your association. My request is that AACR review its mission, and reconsider its position on the NIH Public Access Policy. I cannot see how such a review could possibly come to any other conclusion than that your mission compels you to fully support and participate in Public Access.

Change is difficult for anyone, and I have no doubt that the small changes needed for Public Access will be a little bit uncomfortable for your association. I urge you, however, to consider how many families, not only in the U.S. but throughout the world - have asked for donations to cancer research in lieu of flowers. How many have wanted to set aside their own comforts in bereavement to speed the research, so that others would be spared the agony that they and their loved ones went through. When so many are seeing the need to speed the research and placing it above their own comfort, surely your association can, too.

Surely you realize that the best way to "accelerate the dissemination of new research findings" - to borrow a phrase from your mission statement - is for cancer researchers to share their findings as openly as possible, as soon as possible. The ideal is to post the findings openly on the web, just as soon as the quality control process (peer review) is complete - generally before publication. Imposing any delay, or any restrictions on dissemination, is contrary to your mission statement.

Your mission also says that you will "advance the understanding of cancer etiology, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment throughout the world." Outside the wealthy nations, there are many universities with no journal subscriptions at all; and, many places where lack of funds to purchase resources is a deterring factor to education, period. Participating in the NIH Public Access program clearly advances your mission. Lack of access is a factor in the U.S. too, of course; not all states are equally wealthy, and not all can afford all the journals for their university libraries.

Please share this message with your Board, and your members. If your basic mission has changed from saving lives to private sector profits, your mission statement needs updating. If your mission continues to be to accelerate cancer research, then you need to reverse your stance on the NIH's Public Access Policy, from opposition to enthusiastic support and participation.

To facilitate dissemination and encourage other associations to consider their missions when thinking about open access, this is an open letter, copied to the SPARC Open Access Forum.

I congratulate the U.S. National Institute of Health and the U.S. Senate for their support for Public Access. This is one policy area where many, myself included, see the United States as providing an example of visionary leadership, which other nations would be well advised to follow. [2012 note: since the time of this writing, my own country, Canada, has begun participating in PubMedCentral international, and we are contributing our own research to PMC through PMC-Canada].

Disclosure: my personal interests in this matter are that of an advocate for open access to scholarly communications, and (like the majority of humans on this planet), a member of a family and network of friends who have directly experienced the devastation of cancer.

best wishes,

Heather Morrison, MLIS
Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser University School of Communication
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com

Open access advocates please consider this letter as public domain to you - attribution optional.

Why bother with all the work? Wouldn't a gimme money law be more to the point?

2012-01-05T15:47:00.000-08:00

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) is trying to convince U.S. Congress that the whole point of federal research funding is so that they can make a profit from selling the written results in the form of journal articles.

Another way of expressing this is, if the U.S. National Institutes of Health funds a study aiming to cure cancer, the point is not so much curing the cancer, as making sure that AAP members' pockets are filled. It's not even about profit per se, as this bill would diminish the likelihood of medical services providers making money from providing services that actually help people to combat cancer.

I believe in honest, open, and transparent government. In a democracy, that means all of us - democracy is government by the people, for the people. So I call on AAP to be honest and ask that the bill be retitled, from "Research Works Act" to a "Gimme Money Act, Association of American Publishers". It is quite possible that we all could save money by just plain buying them off. Sure, it might cost a lot - but at least they wouldn't be able to stop progress by locking up the results of research funded by the public.

The Association of American Publishers Applaud “Research Works Act,” Bipartisan Legislation To End Government Mandates on Private-Sector Scholarly Publishing
http://www.publishers.org/press/56/

Any posts I write on this topic are completely free for re-use with or without attribution by colleagues working for open access to scholarly research.

Publishers Applaud “Research Works Act,” Bipartisan Legislation To End Government Mandates on Private-Sector Scholarly Publishing

2012-01-05T10:35:00.000-08:00

The Association of American Publishers Applaud “Research Works Act,” Bipartisan Legislation To End Government Mandates on Private-Sector Scholarly Publishing
http://www.publishers.org/press/56/

Question: will the U.S. public launch a few massive class action suits against publishers for shutting down access to information that can help patients and doctors, develop green energy and new business innovation?

Elsevier wants to shut down the free web. Scholars and librarians - time to shut down Elsevier instead?

2012-01-02T18:33:00.000-08:00

Elsevier is one of the companies on gizmodo's list of companies supporting the Stop Online Piracy Act, arguably the worst proposal to date for the internet, allowing a company to shut down whole services based on a single claim of infringement.

Until Elsevier publicly disavows support for SOPA, I recommend that all authors stop contributing to SOPA, and that librarians rank all Elsevier products highly on their cancellation lists. Perhaps university academic freedom committees should direct libraries to cancel all purchases and subscriptions from publishers supporting this move which would in effect be censorship and hence completely inconsistent with academic freedom?

For more on the academic wing of the efforts to STOP SOPA Supporters, see this post.

Following is my letter to the Elsevier contact helpfully provided by gizmodo. Librarians and scholars - please get in touch with the Elsevier rep of your choice.

dear T. Reller of Elsevier,

The Stop Online Piracy Act is arguably the worst possible proposal for the internet. SOPA is inconsistent with academic freedom. Any company that supports SOPA does not deserve the support of the academic community. Please stop supporting SOPA. I strongly recommend public disavowal of support. Until Elsevier takes this action, I recommend that authors, editors, and reviewers stop contributing to Elsevier, and that librarians rank Elsevier highly on their cancellation lists.

cordially yours,

Heather Morrison
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poetieconomics.blogspot.com
with link to this post

Added Jan. 2 - see also BoingBoing

Update January 2: have the SOPA supporters even thought this through? Wouldn't this mean that the Elsevier presence in the U.S. could be stopped on the basis of one claim of copyright infringement on the Elsevier website?

UPDATE! Retracting Retraction recommendation of Nature's Scientific Reports

2012-01-02T18:16:00.000-08:00

Update January 20, 2012. I am delighted to report that Nature Publishing Group has clarified that they do not support SOPA, PIPA, or the anti-OA lobbying effort called the Research Works Act.

This post is retained for historical purposes.

Recently I pointed to Nature Publishing Group's Scientific Reports as a good example for Creative Commons licensing. Today, I found out that Macmillan, owner of NPG, is actively supporting the U.S. based Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), arguably the worst thing ever proposed for the Internet, as reported by the U.S. Congress via gizmodo

My recommendation of NPG as a good model for CC licensing is hereby retracted. No company involved in lobbying for greater copyright restrictions can be considered a good model. My current recommendation is for authors to stop publishing with NPG, and librarians please rank NPG and other Macmillan products on your cancellation lists, until such time as Macmillan publicly disavows support for SOPA.

Consumer action against SOPA is critical - librarians and scholars, note the publishers involved and TELL THEM TO STOP SUPPORTING SOPA!

Update - contact information for the Nature Publishing Group Executive Committee can be found here

Protect the internet against censorship! Stop the Stop Online Piracy act - some tips for all of us

2012-01-02T18:05:00.000-08:00

Consumer action urgently required to help stop the Stop Online Piracy Act - arguably the worst thing every proposed for the internet. Librarians and scholars take note: there are publishers on the list of SOPA supporters helpfully provided by the U.S. Congress through gizmodo. These include Elsevier, Macmillan (owner of Nature Publishing Group, Cengage Learning, McGraw-Hill Educational, Pearson Educational, and Wolters Kluwers Health, to name a few. So far consumer action has helped to convince godaddy, sony and nintendo to drop out of the list of SOPA supporters! Gizmodo has helpfully provided contact information for all SOPA supporters. While political advocacy may be best left to U.S. citizens, all of us can participate in consumer advocacy!

Excerpt from Ars Technica

Imagine a world in which any intellectual property holder can, without ever appearing before a judge or setting foot in a courtroom, shut down any website's online advertising programs and block access to credit card payments. The credit card processors and the advertising networks would be required to take quick action against the named website; only the filing of a "counter notification" by the website could get service restored.

Update January 2: have the SOPA supporters even thought this through? Wouldn't this mean that the Elsevier presence in the U.S. could be stopped on the basis of one claim of copyright infringement on the Elsevier website?

Copyright remains yours? better read the fine print

2012-01-02T15:35:00.000-08:00

This statement about author copyright from the IOS Press Author Copyright Agreement page is an excellent example of why scholarly authors should beware the phrase "copyright remains yours", and read the fine print. What IOS Press is saying is that copyright remains yours, but you may not give your work away. To post your own work in an open access archive, you must pay! Otherwise, others must pay for your work. Educational use at your own institution is okay, but any other educational institution must pay IOS Press - and notice that they are not telling the author how much they are charging. For some examples of just how much this practice costs educational institutions, please see my recent posts open access to save costs for teaching and learning and selling out feminism: 100 copies for $3,607. I highly recommend avoiding publishers with such policies. Scholars, let us not give such publishers our work as authors, reviewers, or editors.

Excerpt from the IOS Press Author Copyright agreement:

Copyright remains yours, and we will acknowledge this in the copyright line that appears on your article. You also retain the right to use your own article (provided you acknowledge the published original in standard bibliographic citation form) in the following ways, as long as you do not sell it in ways that would conflict directly with our efforts to disseminate it.
You are free to use the manuscript version of your article for internal, educational or other purposes of your own institution or company;
You may use the article, in whole or in part, as the basis for your own further publications or spoken presentations;
For a fee of €100, you will have the right to mount the final version of your article as published by IOS Press on your own, your institution’s, company’s or funding agency’s website. You can order this right together with the final published version of your article with the form sent to the corresponding author along with the proofs of your paper.

Happy 2012 Open Access Movement! December 31, 2011 Dramatic Growth of Open Access.

2011-12-31T16:40:00.000-08:00

Highlights

There are over 7,000 peer-reviewed fully open access journals as listed in the DOAJ, still growing by 4 titles per day and over 6,000 of these are in English, as listed by Open J-Gate. Electronic Journals Library keeps track of more than 32,000 free journals. There are over 2,000 repositories, linking to more than 30 million items, growing at the rate of 21 thousand items per day, which can be searched through the snazzy new Bielefeld Academic Search Engine search options. PLoS ONE, having become the world's largest journal last year, outdid themselves by doubling the number of articles published this year. PubMedCentral, arXiv, RePEC, and E-LIS growth was in the 10-15% range for the year. This issue of Dramatic Growth adds a new feature, a first attempt at comparing compliance rates with a few medical funders' open access policies - so far, Wellcome Trust is looking good!

Details and commentary

As eloquently explained by Paul Stacey, 2011 was the year of open, or as Katarina Lovrecic suggests, everything OA seems to be coming up roses. Europeana added its 20 millionth item. Creative Commons celebrated its 9th birthday, noting that there are now more than 500 million CC licensed items. Congratulations to PLoS ONE on its 5th birthday. It was only a year ago that PLoS ONE became the world's largest journal. In 2011, PLoS ONE topped off this remarkable accomplishment with one that may be even more astounding, having doubled the number of articles published in 2011 over 2010, for a total of just under 14,000 articles published in 2011. No wonder PLoS ONE has inspired at least 9 clones, as detailed by Mike Eisen.

Caroline Sutton and Peter Suber reported on growth in scholarly society open access publishers in the December 2011 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. The Social Sciences Research Network has a great statistics page featuring numbers such as their 1.3 million plus community, more than 50 million downloads, and over 300 thousand full text papers. That's just a few of the macro level indicators of fabulous open access growth that I happened to notice over the past few weeks!

Some highlights of 2011: this was the year to let the competition begin! and begin to address some of the challenges of success. PMC growth is now about one free fulltext per minute.

Following are a few figures for the year. To download the full data, go to the DGOA Dataverse
For earlier issues of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access and occasional updates, see the DGOA series post.

Just added to the dataverse: a first attempt at comparing % of free fulltext indexed in PubMed by research funder. The method involves searching PubMed for Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural [pt] OR Research Support, N.I.H., Intramural [pt], first with no date limiter, then 3 years, etc. Similar approaches were used with the search terms Research Support, Canadian Institutes of Health Research and Research Support, Wellcome Trust. Comments on the method are welcome, please send an email to hgmorris at sfu dot ca. I wonder if this search approach could be used to compare countries on their relative contributions to medical research in the future? CIHR's total contributions indexed (not just fulltext) were about 85% of what our contribution would be relative to NIH adjusted for population (Canada has about 1/10 the population of the U.S.). IF this method is sound, we're not quite pulling our weight when it comes to medical research in Canada, although we're not as far behind as I thought we might be.

Based on this method, it appears that Wellcome Trust is having the greatest success at compliance with its open access policy, having the highest percentage (62%) at the 3-year mark. Full data can be found in the DGOA Dataverse (Dec. 31, 2011 full data, 3rd tab).

% of free fulltext by research funder and date of publication
	any date	3 yrs	2 yrs	1 yr	180 days	60 days	30 days
NIH	56%	59%	49%	20%	14%	9%	8%
CIHR	35%	33%	32%	19%	16%	9%	0%
Wellcome Trust	47%	62%	59%	49%	39%	33%	17%

The Directory of Open Access Journals now has over 7,000 titles, having added a net total of 1,436, for a growth rate of 4 titles per day. Even more remarkable is the growth rate in journals and articles searchable at article level. At growth rates of over 40% in the past year, this illustrates that DOAJ titles are growing in functionality as well as numbers.

Directory of Open Access Journals
	December 31, 2011	2011 growth (numeric)	2011 growth (percentage)
# journals	7,372	1,436	24%
# journals searchable at article level	3,527	1,033	41%
# articles searchable at article level	721,271	230,860	47%

Open J-Gate provides a listing and search service specific to English-language journals. Open J-Gate now has close to 10,000 journals, of which 6,500 are peer-reviewed. In 2011, Open J-Gate added titles at a rate of over 4 per day.

	Open J-Gate
	December 31, 2011	2011 growth (numeric)	2011 growth (percentage)
# journals (total)	9,710	1,605	20%
# peer-reviewed	6,508	1,631	33%

The Electronic Journals Library tracks free journals regardless of peer-reviewed / immediate open access status. Electronic Journals Library now has more than 32,000 journals, having added over 5,000 in 2011 at a rate of 15 titles per day

Electronic Journals Library - # journals
December 31, 2011	2011 growth (numeric)	2011 growth (percentage)
32,384	5,354	20%

There are now more than 2,100 repositories listed in the vetted OpenDOAR, which added new repositories at the rate of 1 per day in 2011. The Registry of Open Access Repositories added about 2 new repositories per day in 2011.

	# repositories
	December 31, 2011	2011 growth (numeric)	2011 growth (percentage)
OpenDOAR	2,164	347	19%
ROAR	2,610	520	25%

Kudos to the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine for a snazzy new search service for the more than 33 million items available through over 2,000 repositories. A BASE search looks at more than 8 million documents more than a year ago, for a growth rate of 21 thousand documents per day.

	BASE: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine http://www.base-search.net/
	December 31, 2011	2011 growth (numeric)	2011 growth (percentage)
# documents	33,598,612	8,082,061	32%
# service providers	2,072	345	20%

Growth rates at four established disciplinary repositories, PubMedCentral, arXiv, RePEC, and E-LIS, ranged from 10-15% for 2011.

	December 31, 2011	2011 growth (numeric)	2011 growth (percentage)
PubMedCentral	2,300,000	301,387	15%
arXiv	725,963	76,570	12%
RePEC	1,135,000	150,000	15%
E-LIS	12,577	1,157	10%

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

Selling out feminism: 100 photocopies for $3,607

2011-12-29T17:53:00.000-08:00

Would you like your students to read Selling (out) Feminism: Sustainability of ideology –viability tensions in a competitive marketplace by Suzy D'Enbeau & Patrice M.Buzzanell? Communication Monographs 2011, 78:1, p. 27-52.

The cost for rights to photocopy 100 copies for library reserve is $3,607, according to the Copyright Clearance Centre. This photocopy right does not get you the article itself to copy.

In contrast, here are three options for full open access that cost more than two thirds less than this publisher wishes to charge for another photocopies for a hundred students:

OJS journals average cost per article: $188 (Edgar & Willinsky)

Hindawi's Education Research International: $500

Co-Action Publishing's Vulnerable Groups & Inclusion: $965

Printing copies for library reserve is likely of limited relevance nowadays, but good luck trying to research the costs for other re-use rights. I have tried a number of Quick Price options from the Copyright Clearance Centre, and here is the typical response that I get:

Pricing for this request requires the approval of Taylor & Francis Permissions Representative. You will be notified of the price before order confirmation. The processing period may take up to fifteen business days.

Communication Monographs is published on behalf of the National Communication Association by multinational conglomerate informa.plc through its traditional-sounding brand Routledge / Taylor & Francis.

Reference

Edgar, B. D., & Willinsky, J.(2010) (In press). A survey of the scholarly journals using open journalsystems. Scholarly and ResearchCommunication, Retrieved August 27, 2011 from http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/2773

Let's raise the floor: a proposal for Creative Commons - fair copyright, CC-free to use, rewrite noncommercial and add public domain perpetual

2011-12-29T11:07:00.000-08:00

This post is intended as a contribution to the Creative Commons (CC) 4.0 public discussion. Please submit any comments to the appropriate CC discussion list.

Abstract

This post suggests raising the floor by creating a new CC-fair copyright for works that are not freely available. This will be counter-intuitive to many a commonser, but note that this would give consumers a great way to exert pressure for fair copyright. A new CC-free to use / all rights reserves licenses is suggested, reflecting CC Version 4.0 discussions suggesting the possibility of breaking noncommercial into a stronger and a weaker license - this would be the more restricted version. Wording is suggested for noncommercial per se to clarify that educational use is not commercial, therefore permitted, and asks whether public domain should be redefined as CC-Sharelike (preferably in perpetuity). A question is raised about advertising - is this really a commercial issue, or in part a matter of creators' moral rights?

Details

Creative Commons - fair copyright
The idea is to create a new license for use with works that are not free at all, to indicate that the licensor supports and agrees to what we would like to see with copyright, including a broad set of fair use / fair dealing guidelines and a commitment to place works in the public domain in a reasonable time frame. By this I mean not current national or international law, but rather the best practices for fair use / fair dealing that we would all like to see as a minimum. Suggestions as to what this would be would be most welcome - perhaps an advocacy group for fair copyright has guidelines that would suit?

Rationale:

Strengths of this approach include:

This would give consumers - from individuals to large organizations like school districts - an opportunity to apply market pressure towards more fair copyright practices. As a librarian involved in coordinating purchase of information resources, I can see this being high on the list of desirable (or even required) criteria for purchase.
This more inclusive approach would broaden the commons, and help to bridge what I see as an "us versus them" divide. My understanding is that the experiences with free / open source software and creative commons to date have shown that people tend to start with more restrictive licensing, then move to less restrictive licensing over time. It would be psychologically a smaller leap, as a reader, listener, etc., to move from cc-fair copyright to cc-sharealike than to move from outside to inside the commons.

Weakness: proponents of a strong commons may not like this idea.

Creative Commons - free to read / all rights reserved
This is very similar to CC-fair copyright, except that the work is free to read online. With robust fair use / fair dealing, of course such uses as downloading, format-shifting, etc., for personal research and that sort of thing would be included.
Rationale: The "all rights reserved" is meant to address one suggestion that has come up in the CC Version 4.0 discussion, of dividing noncommercial into a two licenses, one with stronger and one with weaker restrictions. This would be the strong version. Sharelike might be an option with this license.

Creative Commons Noncommercial - suggested wording change
The current wording under Section 4 b - restrictions reads:

You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works.

Suggested change to:

You may not sell the content of the work for private gain. For the avoidance of doubt, educational use is not considered commercial for the purposes of this license, and is therefore permitted. Including the work in a package designed for sales to educational institutions for the purpose of private gain is commercial use and is prohibited. Providing services that facilitate uses of the work included in this license, such as copying services, are permitted provided that any fees charged are for the copying service alone and not for content provision.

Question about advertising:

Would it make sense to include: use of the work or parts thereof in advertising products or services sold primarily for public gain is considered a commercial use, and hence prohibited. The reason for why question is, I wonder if advertising conducted in such a way as to imply that the creator endorsed a product is a violation of creators' moral rights which should be reflected in all CC licenses (for those jurisdictions where this is not already covered by copyright law, and to educate those who use CC-licensed work).

Rationale: I think that this may be close to what most ordinary creators mean by noncommercial, that is, don't sell my work or create a new version and sell that. It's pretty close to why I use noncommercial. Clarifying that educational uses are allowed would be a huge benefit to everyone, everywhere. Knowledge benefits us all!

Creative Commons - public domain suggestion
Based on a recent commons on the cc-licenses list that public domain is problematic, I wonder if it makes sense to redefine public as CC-Sharealike? Ideally, this should be perpetual, or at least give the creator an opportunity to say that they think this license should be perpetual.

My four bits for today, for what they are worth! Many thanks to Creative Commons and all of the cc-licenses and cc-community participants who have helped to shape my thinking about these matters. Apologies for any conceptual errors, real or imagined. This post is part of the Articulating the Commons series.

Open access to save costs for teaching and learning

2011-12-28T21:59:00.000-08:00

Did you know that the cost to put an electronic copy of a single article on reserve for just two semesters can cost more than it would have cost to pay a professional publisher to make the article fully open access in the first place?

Over at the Copyright Clearance Center, I just looked up the cost for an article published in a Sage journal for reuse in a coursepack / library reserve for 300 students over 2 semesters as an institutional non-subscriber. The cost was $1,638 U.S. As the Copyright Clearance Center site points out, this is just re-use rights; this does not get me the actual article. Re-use for institutional subscribers apparently is free.

If my institution could not afford to subscribe to this journal, it would have been better to have paid for the article to be published as open access at PLoS ONE at $1,350 U.S. - even if the authors had nothing at all to do with the institution. Over 2 semesters, the savings would have been $288. If we needed the article for a second year, with the current system we'd need to pay Sage yet again through the Copyright Clearance Centre - if we had paid for OA through PLoS ONE instead, our total savings would now start to accumulate at $1,638 for every year the article is needed.

The article in question:
Information Seeking Related to Clinical Trial Enrollment. Z. Janet Yang, Katherine A. McComas, Geri Gay, John P. Leonard, Andrew J. Dannenberg, Hildy Dillon. Communication Research. December 2011.

Suggestion for a research project: look up authors of articles in this situation, and survey or interview them to find out whether they had any idea their work would be sold in this manner.

Is the OJS simple statement of open access the best approach, or should we do away with academic copyright altogether?

2011-12-27T13:36:00.000-08:00

Two more thoughts on scholarly communication, copyright and creative commons:

Is the Open Journal Systems default open access policy statement all that is needed for an open access journal? Following is the statement, copied from the SFU Communications Grad Students Journal, Stream. With a statement like this, is any kind of Creative Commons licensing really necessary? Perhaps it is the majority of journals in the DOAJ that do not use CC licensing at all who have this right.

Open Access Policy
This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Glyn Moody on Techdirt asks the question, Do we really need copyright for academic publishing? Copyright does not protect the kinds of things that really are important to academics, such as getting credit for ideas, but rather things that don't matter all that much to most of us, such as precisely how the ideas are expressed. This is a good question! If a researcher solves an important problem, such as finding a cure for a particular kind of cancer, what do they want - recognition, promotion, a Nobel prize - or a legal right to sue anyone who copies the precise wording used in the article describing the research that led to these results?

Just two more thoughts towards Articulating the Commons.

Why require attribution? A Creative Commons license discussion item

2011-12-26T19:19:00.000-08:00

When you choose a Creative Commons license, attribution is a given. Why?

One might argue that the notion of the individual author or creator is an invention of the Enlightenment, and one that may be beginning to fall by the wayside as the potential of the web for social creativity is starting to emerge. For example, Wikipedia uses the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license. How does this make sense for a collaboratively produced encyclopedia where individual articles are not signed by authors?

Sometimes we want attribution; other times, however, attribution would slow down the spread of great ideas. The "Occupy" movement advanced so rapidly precisely through such sharing, and the Occupy leaderful approach would not fit well at all with a focus on individual attribution.

In my own area of scholarly communication, attribution through citing is a long-standing tradition, one that makes sense as citations are important to the career as a scholar, and (more importantly) citations are necessary so that the reader can review the cited sources. However, these practices have been in place for centuries without need of legal licensing, so why would this be required through a license now?

In order to have a way of checking for further permissions, a means of contacting the licensor is necessary. This is not the same as attribution.

Noncommercial means noncommercial (creative commons discussion)

2011-12-26T18:51:00.000-08:00

To state the obvious, noncommercial means noncommercial. When people choose a noncommercial creative commons license, that's all that this tells us. It is important to understand that "noncommercial" does not necessarily mean reserving commercial rights for oneself (or one's organization). For example, a number of open access scholarly journals require authors to use a creative commons license, often one which stipulates noncommercial. It is the journal or the publisher who requires the license, but it is the authors who retain commercial rights, as I have written about in more detail here.

Another interpretation of "noncommercial" is a statement that the creator does not consider the work to belong to the domain of what can be considered commercial. My understanding is that noncommercial is the most popular element in the Creative Commons suite. Perhaps this is one way for many people to say collectively that we would like to see the sphere of what cannot be considered commercial grow.

Following is one example of how I think "noncommercial", while seemingly a restriction, if broadly used has the power to grow the commons.

If medical funders were to require that the published results of the work that they fund be made available for re-use in derivatives works, for example through the CC Attribution-only, Attribution-Sharealike, or Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike license, then derivative works could be made from large sets of medical research articles. Examples of derivatives could include value-added products designed to facilitate further research, or point-of-care tools for physicians. The problem with Attribution-only in this situation is that the value-added tools could be sold in locked-down, commercial versions. The authors, medical research funders, and those for whom the research is funded, for example the tax-paying public, might not be able to afford to purchase the value-added versions. For example, if a medical research funding organization funded research in the developing world, with CC-BY value-added tools could be created that would for practical reasons be exclusively available to the wealthy in the developed world. The sharealike provision would make sure that such products were available to all. However, if all, or a substantial portion, of these research results were available only on a noncommercial basis, this would mean that developing value-added tools would have to be done on a noncommercial basis. This step would tend to help to bring medicine from the sphere of private gain into the realm of the public good. I would argue that the society of the commons of the future that is worth striving for features a strong public health care system, and that "noncommercial" results of scholarly research therefore help to build a stronger commons. Added Dec. 26: Casey Bergman's explanation of why he left Faculty 1000 is an illustration of this issue - a toll access service built on top of open access journals.

This is a part of what I tend to mean when I use the term noncommercial, or by using the "not for sale" picture that I generally use as my Facebook picture. It would be more accurate to say that what I usually mean by noncommercial is something like "this work is not for the commercial sphere, but in the event that I need money, I wish to reserve commercial rights for myself". That is the reason why The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics is licensed as noncommercial.

Research would be needed to understand what exactly people think that a commons is, might or should be. This is not as simple as conducting a survey, from my perspective, because first of all we need to think this through. That's why I recommend Articulating the Commons.

Journals with good creative commons models

2011-12-26T16:49:00.000-08:00

Abstract

As reported by Suber & Sutton in the December 2011 SPARC Open Access Newsletter, only a small minority (15%) of society-owned fully open access journals use Creative Commons licenses, and as Shieber found in 2009, of all the journals listed in DOAJ, only 24% use CC licensing. To encourage more journals to use CC licenses, this post presents 4 journals or publishers, some from the scholarly society community and others from the commercial community, with what I consider to be good Creative Commons models. Note that I am not covering the CC Attribution only license (CC-BY), as I assume that this license is commonly understood to represent good practice for open access. In brief, in all cases the Creative Commons license is that of the author, not the journal or publisher. Cellular Therapy and Transplantation allows authors the full range of CC license choices; this model, from my perspective, is the best fit with my vision of Articulating the Commons. Co-Action Publishing and Bone & Joint Research both insist on libre open access with a CC Attribution-Noncommercial (CC-BY-NC) license which allows for re-use; both have interesting indications or clarifications on their website telling us a bit about what is meant by reserving commercial rights. Nature's Scientific Reports offers authors two choices of license, CC-BY-NC-ND (noderivatives) or CC-BY-NC-SA (sharealike), and shows responsibility by committing to donate to Creative Commons at a rate of $20 per article.

Details

Cellular Therapy and Transplantation: author choice

Thanks to Claudia Klotzenburg of Cellular Therapy and Transplantation for pointing to CTT's policies on the open science list. CTT practices what I consider to be the optimal policy for an open access journal for CC licensing, requiring authors to use a CC license, but leaving copyright with the authors and allowing the author to select the CC license of their choice from among the full set of CC license options. This is a policy that fits best with my vision of a project of involving as many of us around the planet, for years to come, in a conversation on Articulating the Commons.

The CTT Copyright Notice says (from the CTT Author Guidelines page) says:

E. Copyright Notice for Authors and Sponsors

With CTT, Authors retain the copyright of their contributions. This means that Author(s) are free to decide what they wish to do with their contribution. CTT Authors choose a Creative Commons Licence for their contribution so that every reader can see what rights are going along with this specific article.

If an article is published in CTT, the Authors of an article have granted CTT the right to publish it. By agreeing to have the final version published, Authors declare that, in their contribution, rights of third parties have not been infringed on anywhere in the document, including tables and graphics. If Authors wish to republish the article, they are kindly asked to mention CTT as the place of first publication.

Sponsors who wish to solve copyright issues concerning a CTT article: please talk to the Authors since it is them who are the copyright holders of their contributions.

Co-Action Publishing: noncommercial libre open access, author retains copyright

Co-Action publishing's Author page says:

Integrity: Under a Creative Commons license authors retain the full non-commercial copyright on their work, allowing you control over how you wish to you use the work in the future.

This model leaves copyright with the author, but does not provide the full range of CC license options. The Co-Action commercial page gives us some clues as to why Co-Action would want to restrict commercial rights. One of Co-Action's services to publishing partners is providing print copies of journals. Another is selling advertising, both online and in print. If Co-Action were to use the CC Attribution online license (CC-BY), this would mean that another company could offer exactly the same services with the material Co-Action has worked on - without having to contribute a penny to the actual work of producing the journal. This is a good model reflecting libre open access (re-use allowed), while restricting rights that are likely necessary to sustain the publisher. A healthy open access scholarly communication system for the future needs open access publishers like Co-Action!

One suggestion for improvement: Co-Action could make it a little bit clearer as to which rights are being retained through the use of noncommercial. Here is where a statement along the lines of Education is a public good, not a commercial activity would be helpful. Or a statement along these lines: these materials are free for you to read, download, and print; however you may not sell print or other value-added copies of the journal or sell advertising on a copy of the journal that you create. For these rights, please contact Co-Action Publishing and/or the author of a specific article.

Bone & Joint Research: libre open access, noncommercial, good definition of noncommercial

Authors retain the copyright of their material when publishing in Bone & Joint Research. If the paper is accepted for publication the content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License. This permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is noncommercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license. The licence can be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

Definition of noncommercial: You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works.

Nature Publishing Group offers authors two options for CC licenses: CC-Attribution-Noncommerical-Noderivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) and CC-Attribution-Noncommerical-Sharealike (CC-BY-NC-SA). In either case, it is clear that the CC license is the author's, not Nature's; in other words, Nature Publishing Group is not retaining any commercial rights to articles in this journal, but rather vesting them in the author. From my perspective, this is wise as it provides some important protection for the journal (no competitor can take the contents wholesale and use them for commercial purposes that could compete with Nature), while keeping limitations on rights to a minimum. Giving authors two choices is a better fit with my vision of articulating the commons discussed above, albeit less of a full invitation to participate than offering the full range of options. While allowing for the creation of derivatives offers some clear benefits to scholarship, from my perspective no one at present has completely thought out whether or not the benefits outweigh potential disadvantages of allowing derivatives, such as misunderstandings that could come from poor translations. Providing the option allows for a natural type of experiment, in that over time we will see which option is preferred by authors. Nature is unique in this group for offering financial support to Creative Commons, at $20 per license used. From my perspective, this is very responsible on the part of Nature, and does not appear to come with any expectations of control over Creative Commons (which would be a matter of concern), but rather is a straightforward donation.

From the Open Access FAQs of Nature Publishing Group's Scientific Reports

Who retains copyright of the open-access articles?
Content that an author has decided to make open access can be licensed under one of two Creative Commons licenses. The author can choose to opt for the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivs 3.0 Unported License. The author will thereby permit dissemination and reuse of the article, and so will enable the sharing and reuse of scientific material. It does not, however, permit commercial exploitation or the creation of derivative works without specific permission. To view a copy of this license visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0

The other choice is the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike 3.0 Unported License, which allows readers to alter, transform, or build upon the article and then distribute the resulting work under the same or similar license to this one. The work must be attributed back to the original author and commercial use is not permitted. To view a copy of this license visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0

Why does NPG give money to Creative Commons and can I decide not to give a donation?

Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. To support their efforts, and hence the open access community, Nature Publishing Group will make a donation to Creative Commons. This is not a portion of an individual APC, rather the donation is proportional to the total number of research papers published using the creative commons licences.

This post is a part of the Articulating the Commons and Transitioning to Open Access series, and is intended to inform the Creative Commons Version 4.0 discussion.

Update January 20, 2012. Note that Nature Publishing Group has clarified that NPG does not support SOPA, PIPA, or the anti-OA lobbying effort called the Research Works Act. On January 2nd, I had retracted my recommendation of NPG's license on the understanding that a subsidiary of the parent company was listed as a supporter of SOPA. Thanks to the clarification from NPG, I am delighted to retract my retraction, or to in the positive, to wholeheartedly support the CC license used by NPG's Scientific Reports.

Three pictures, one small gift to everyone, with love

2011-12-24T13:40:00.000-08:00

This holiday season dedicated to peace and joy, I wish to share with everyone around the world one very small gift, of three of my prettiest pictures, dedicated to everyone with love, under the public domain. There are strings attached, but these are the bonds of love, the glue that binds together families and communities, not the bonds of law.

This is my first attempt to use a Creative Commons public domain license, something that I asked for from Creative Commons Canada many years ago. Note that while this one post on IJPE is licensed under the CC public domain license, the overall blog license is CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike.

Even when I desire to waive my rights under copyright laws, it is not easy! This set of photos began as a flickr set however in flickr the photos are licensed as Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike, because public domain is not an option, and I prefer CC-BY-SA over CC-BY.

Creative Commons Canada does give me the tools to create a public domain license, and Google's blogger has the flexibility so that I can add license to this particular post. However, I had to do some manipulating of the CC Canada public domain text as the default copy-and-paste resulted in a warning! html broken message, and some rather funny-looking text on my blog. This is cleaned up now, but perhaps only to an extent.

Also the Creative Commons Canada Public Domain license did not give me a chance to add a "more permissions" URL, which is a little bit less than optimal, because I wrote the post to everyone, with love especially for this purpose.

This small critique is also intended with love, in the hopes of helping those who are helping us to build the commons through such means as Creative Commons licensing, and free tools for all to use (thanks, google and flickr).

Best wishes to everyone for a wonderful holiday season and great New Year. One of the 7 billion humans on this planet at this time, Heather Morrison

This post is written as part of a small project I am working on at the moment, Articulating the Commons. All are welcome to join in this project, over the next many, many years.

Legalese

To the extent possible under law, Heather Morrison has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this one blogpost, Three pictures, one small gift, noting that the overall creative commons license for The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics remain Creative Commons - Attribution - Noncommercial - Sharealike, This work is published from:
Three Pictures One Small Gift. Public domain, Creative Commons Canada.

To everyone, with love

2011-12-24T13:29:00.000-08:00

This work is hereby dedicated to the public domain, with love. You are free to reuse the work as you will. Attribution, link-backs and thank yous are all appreciated, but not legally required. You are bound, not by law by the ties of love and the sense of ethics, fairness, moral or spiritual duty that bind us all to use this work with love, respect and care for all of humankind and all of the living creature that are part of the world that we all share.

This post is intended to create a more permissions URL to use with Creative Commons licenses. It is a part of a small project that I am working on which I call Articulating the Commons. Everyone - the whole world - is invited to join me in this project, over the next many, many years.

Scholarly communication for the 1%

2011-12-22T10:28:00.000-08:00

Outsell just published a report about how much they figure the STM industry is making off the backs of academia, but at U.S. $1,295 for a 22-page report, I can't afford to read it! This is definitely scholarly communication for the 1%.

Any scholarly publisher that is making money from the works of academics, from my perspective, has an obligation to make their financial information freely available to all.

Details: http://www.outsellinc.com/store/products/1040-scientific-technical-medical-information-2011-market-forecast-and-trends-report

Creative Commons, noncommercial and formats

2011-12-22T10:15:00.000-08:00

Following is a contribution of mine to the Creative Commons 4.0 discussion. For more of the discussion, see the cc-licenses list.

Maciej Pendolski's point about differing rights depending on the format is an important one. This is not simply a matter of physical formats, but could also have applications in the digital world.

For example, the Journal of Medical Internet Research has a model where the html copy is free, but there is a charge to download the PDF.
http://www.jmir.org/

Flatworldknowledge has an innovative approach to textbooks. All books can be read free online, while specific formats are available for purchase. This includes print (in either black and white or colour), audiobooks, PDF to print it yourself, or ebooks (for ebook readers - the web-based version is free). Details at:
http://students.flatworldknowledge.com/books

There are likely many permutations of what types of formats might be available for free and which ones the creators wish to reserve rights for, and this is likely to continue to evolve over the next few years. For this reason, I think that it may not be possible to write this into a standard license.

This, to me, is another good reason to provide a larger text box for "more permissions", so that people can write what they mean by using a particular license. Perhaps CC could provide a link to some sample language for common types of extra permissions language that people might wish to include?

Another thought is that as the commons evolves, our thoughts about what can be permitted may well evolve, too. What I am hearing is that there is a tendency for people to start out granting more limited rights, then move to greater permissions over time. For this reason, I think it would be optimal to provide a means for people to revisit or update their licenses. I don't know what is involved technically, so thoughts on this are appreciated.

best,

Heather Morrison, MLIS
Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser University School of Communication
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com

Wiley Annual Report 2011: costs down, profits up

2011-12-20T22:28:00.000-08:00

The John Wiley and Sons 2011 Annual Report is now available. From the Overview, in brief, revenue from Wiley's Scientific, Technical, Medical and Scholarly division (STMS) increased slightly to just under a billion U.S., while direct contribution to profit rose from 5 to 9% (for a direct contribution to profit of $425 million, or 42.5%) - from the Detailed Financials, p. 22.

From the Overview: Revenue growth and margin improvement due to outsourcing journal production were partially offset by higher operating costs from business growth.

Another way to express this: in 2011, John Wiley & Sons decreased their costs by outsourcing journal production. This decrease in costs was sufficient to pay for increase in growth (taking over more society journals) and to reduce their net debt, and still increase profit their profits by 5 to 9%.

Update December 21: note that the Wiley profit rate of 42.5% is an understatement of the total profit from Wiley journal subscription revenue. This is because close to half of Wiley journals are published on behalf of scholarly societies. These societies also make a profit from Wiley revenues, which is subtracted as a cost before calculating Wiley's net contribution to profit from journal subscriptions. The actual percentage of Wiley revenue that goes to profit for both Wiley and the societies is somewhere between the 42.5% and the Wiley Gross Profit Rate of 73.1% (see page 22 of the Detailed Financials. That's not a typo - this is a gross profit rate of seventy three point one percent).

Articulating the commons: a leaderful approach

2011-12-20T20:44:00.000-08:00

Apologies for duplication - I think this belongs on both cc-licenses and the cc-community list. I expect that I will only write a very few messages where this makes sense.

Rather than having a few of us decide on what the commons is or should be, why not invite everyone to participate in the discussion (open source it), over at least the next few years? This would be a leaderful approach (acknowledging the inspiration of Occupy).

From a technical standpoint, what I mean is that the box that says "more permissions URL" should be expanded and renamed to something like "more detail". Actively invite anyone who licenses material to tell more about what this act means to them - kind of like a will. Ideally, there needs to be a way to bring these comments together, perhaps through data mining, and occasionally sharing some of what people have come up with.

Some reasons to consider this approach:

1.    Opening the conversation in this way may open up new understandings about what sharing means, or could mean. Some examples of things that people might want to say:
-    free for the 99%
-    free for anyone aiming for social and environmental justice
-    free to anyone not lobbying for restrictive copyright laws
-    free to anyone who has never sued a customer
-    free to use with respect

These kinds of things may or may not fit specific legal requirements, but I would suggest that building a commons is much more a cultural shift than a legal one.

My vision here is that Creative Commons is a great start towards a commons, but we all still have a great deal to learn. One reason is that before we settle on what the commons is, I think we (meaning all of humans around the world) need to consider other types of knowledge, such as traditional knowledges. The purpose this is not just to respect the traditions (important though that is). We need to learn about these knowledges not just to respect traditional peoples, but to address a gap in our own knowledge. That there is a gap is our wisdom, I would submit, is substantiated by the fact that all of our science and technology has brought us to global financial crisis and impending environmental disaster through climate change. To address this, we need to consider different ways of thinking. One example is a traditional concept that knowledge / wisdom belongs to its environment, not to us. . In Western science, we may like to take things out of their environment and study them separately, but without the ecosystem, the lifeforms we study would not exist.

2.    It seems reasonable to assume that a commons that is collectively built and protected by the largest possible number of people will be much stronger than a smaller commons designed by a few experts. I think the best way to do this is a welcoming, inclusive approach. When we can commit things straight away to the public domain, that's great! But let's not forget that free reading onscreen with absolutely no either rights or privileges is still a lot better than no access at all, or no access with paying a lot of money.

3.    There are many different types of materials that can be shared through the Internet, and communities who interact with these materials in different ways. Even within scholarly communication, there are the scholarly journal articles that scholars have traditionally given away, books which cost much more to produce and generally earn royalties for the writer, creative works which for some academics generate real income, and research data. Data would be close to useful if shared but not for re-use, while derivatives of the writers of a top scholar would almost certainly be less valuable than the original. In other words, the best and most useful openness in scholarship might well be a strong imperative to allow derivatives in some cases, and ND in other cases.

To take a non-scholarly example, I understand that some of the CC legal cases have involved music in bars. Right now the options are to allow commercial uses, or not. I wonder if it might make sense to musicians and bar-owners to have another option, noncommercial - except in bars, under the condition that the bar-owner provides patrons with a way of purchasing the musician's CDs - perhaps by distributing a flyer highlighting the night's music with websites for the musicians featured? To figure out how to do things like this, we need to facilitate conversations. This is what I mean to propose, a leaderful approach to articulating the commons.

best,

Heather Morrison, MLIS
Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser University School of Communication
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com

Join the discussion! See the Creative Commons Version 4.0 discussion launch message, and join the cc-licenses list and/or the fairly high volume cc-community list. (or view the lists' archives from these links).

Further posts on this topic:
To everyone, with love (intended as a more permissions URL for CC licenses)
Three pictures, one small gift to everyone, with love (attempt to dedicate 3 pictures to the public domain)
Creative Commons, noncommercial and formats
Creative Commons and noncommercial - CC version 4.0 discussion
Education is a public good - not a commercial activity
- more permissions URL

Update December 31, 2011 - a similar suggestion from Paul Stacey from his post 2011 the year of open:

I’ve also been thinking of the potential to go “beyond permissions to intentions”. Let me explain. Creative Commons licenses do a great job of complementing copyright by providing a mechanism for creators to express permissions they accord others in terms of use of their work. However, what is missing is any expression of creators intentions. Are they giving permissions and don’t really care how its used? Would the creator like to see derivatives of their work that others create? Is the creator really interested in finding others who want to collaborate with them on the continuous improvement of the work? This latter intention is in my view critical to the long term success of OER. All open initiatives succeed over the long term based on the size and vibrancy of the open community that gets built up around it. I really wish there was some means of expressing creator intentions so that others reusing the work can do so in ways that fulfill creator aspirations.

Creative Commons and Noncommercial: CC Version 4.0 discussion

2011-12-20T14:46:00.000-08:00

As posted to the cc-licenses list December 20, 2011

A few thoughts towards the version 4.0 discussions, focusing on noncommercial:

Noncommercial, to me, is NOT the most restrictive of the CC license elements, except in a technical sense. This is because noncommercial - the public sphere - is the very essence of the commons. As a long-term open access advocate, my considered opinion is that the strongest license for open access to scholarly works is CC-BY-NC-SA, as this is the license that most protects open access downstream. As we move towards the development of a global commons, we need to keep in mind the society that we live in at present. The kind of license that may be ideal in the society many of us are striving for can be a danger to the commons in the interim. For that matter, in a society where sharing is the default, we should question whether licenses will still be necessary. Even at present, while CC licenses are most helpful in an open access context, I would argue that licensing should not be necessary; what is more important for the longer term is developing and articulating a culture of

sharing. CC licenses is only one of many approaches.

I understand that there is some genuine confusion about what constitutes commercial use, and that this may differ by region. For this reason, it may be helpful to further refine the license terms, and perhaps include two different types of noncommercial. Some thoughts towards this end:

-    Is selling the actual conten the common element understood by anyone who uses noncommercial? If so, is this clearly spelled out in the NC license?

-    Education - learning and teaching - should not be considered commercial. Here is a post with my attempt to articulate this:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/12/education-is-public-good-not-commercial.html

-    Providing commercial services that support education is a genuine gray area, and one where there may be good reason to have two different licenses. Organizations that rely to some extent on print-on-demand services should be able to say no to this, while many creators who have no interest in bothering with this might want to say sure, go ahead. I strongly advocate for understanding the need for creators to make a living, and including those who share as much as they can while reserving some rights so that they can make a living in the commons. For this reason, I do not support efforts to remove those who choose noncommercial from CC.

-    Advertising is another gray area. Here, I am wondering whether a key issue is not so much advertising per se, as the extent, and whether reciprocal services are offered. For example, an internet search service that leads users to CC licensed content and in the process uses very limited amounts of content is a very different situation from a commercial outfit creating a mirror site of a whole journal, publishers' offerings, or scholar's blog, and selling advertising on the mirror site, or a pharmaceutical company printing off thousands of reprints for their salespeople to take to doctors' offices. In the former case, I wonder if there are fair use / fair dealing arguments, at least in some jurisdictions. If not, would this give the corporate sector reason to argue for fair use / fair dealing exemptions? In the latter case, I think many creators do actually wish to prevent such commercial use, which may impact the moral integrity of the creator as well as potential economic impact.

Many thanks to CC for great work advancing the commons over the past few years, and for the opportunity to participate in discussions towards the next round.

Heather Morrison, MLIS
Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser University School of Communication
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com

Education is a public good - not a commercial activity!

2011-12-13T14:06:00.000-08:00

The purpose of this post is to clarify that the NC (noncommercial) element in the IJPE Creative Commons license is NOT intended to inhibit educational use. Learners and educators at any level, anywhere, are free to use this blog in teaching and learning.

The reason that I am posting about this is that it has come to my attention that there are jurisdictions where education is viewed as a commercial activity. From my perspective, this should be corrected and I hope it will in time, but in the meantime I am looking for the best way to say what my intentions are with respect to sharing of my work.

On a related note, again I think this should be obvious and not need to be stated, if I have posted something for access by anyone on the web and not taken any action to restrict crawlers, etc., of course I am allowing crawling and data mining. Whether taking actual content from my blog to post elsewhere and sell ads that make it appear as I approve the ads is a different story. If you know anyone who is doing this and selling ads to companies with practices to society or the environment, let me know so that I can take action to stop them. But if you are working hard for the social good or the environment and wish to do this, go for it!

If I am okay with educational uses and crawling, one might ask, why the NC? What I am trying to get at is that if you are a student or teacher, I am happy to share my work with you with very minimal restrictions. But if you are a for-profit business selling packages of services to schools, you do not have permission to include my work for free, so please get in touch with me to discuss appropriate royalties.

The challenges of success: dramatic growth of open access early year-end edition

2011-12-11T18:30:00.000-08:00

Universal access to all knowledge will be one of humanity’s greatest achievements. We are already well on the way! from Stewart Brand's: Brewster Kahle's 30 November Long Now Talk For fun and inspiration, check out the Internet Archive for the more than 3 million books (adding 1,000 titles per day), 100,000 concerts and 1 million recordings (3 new bands uploading / day), 600,000 movies, and of course the web itself. Thanks, Internet Archive and Brewster Kahle - and wow!

2011 has been another outstanding year for the growth of open access to scholarly resources. Highlights this quarter include the remarkable growth of the Directory of Open Access Journals, with an increase of more than 600 titles this quarter alone so far, for a growth rate of 9 titles per day. On November 26, RePEC reached a major milestone. There are now One million works available online through RePEC (Nov. 26, 2011). According to the Sherpa services blog,
60% of journals allow immediate self-archiving of post peer-reviewed articles
and the Open Access Directory just sailed past our 2 millionth view of the OAD.

From my perspective, open access has entered a new phase, one in which we are beginning to see the challenges of success. How can we track all these resources and make it easy for people to find and use them? The emerging open access marketplace for commercial scholarly publishers appears to have attracted what Beall calls predatory open access publishers as I have commented on here and
here. As we begin to address these challenges, it is also timely to begin other overdue discussions, such as Dissension in the Open Access Ranks on CC Licenses.

Following are a few graphs illustrating the dramatic growth of open access over the past few years.

Peer-reviewed OA journals increased from under 2,000 in DOAJ in 2005 to over 7,000 today, with over 6,000 english-language journals listed in Open J-Gate.

Not all scholarly journals are peer-reviewed - not even subscription journals! From 2007 to 2011, the number of free journals of academic interest doubled from 16 - 32,000 as listed by the Electronic Journals Library, or 4, 000 to close to 10,000 English language journals as listed in Open J-Gate.

The number of journals contributing all articles as open access to PubMedCentral more than doubled from 288 to 696 from 2008 to 2011.

The number of open access archives has more than tripled from 2006 to 2011, from about 850 to well over 2,000.

The number of documents BASE searches has grown from 7 to 33 million from 2007 to 2011.

Even the mature RePEC more than doubled in size in the past few years, from 400 thousand online documents in 2007 to over a million today.

Links

Download data (DGOA dataverse)
Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series

Quality of commercial scholarly publishing: what role for the industry?

2011-12-10T14:44:00.001-08:00

As discussed in the June 30, 2011 issue of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access, we are seeing what looks like the emergence of a welcome competitive market in open access scholarly publishing. I would argue that this situation is creating new challenges as well as opportunities, such as the attempted entry of both new serious players and outright scam artists, as Jeffrey Beall notes in his highly useful list of predatory open access publishers, which I previously commented on here.

Beall's list highlights an obvious pitfall to watch out for with the article processing fee approach to open access, that is, scam artists who collect these fees without actually providing peer review services. Since this particular issue is associated with new commercial entrants to scholarly publishing, the purpose of this post is to query what role would be appropriate for the commercial scholarly publishing industry to take on with respect to monitoring their own sector? For example, the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) is (from the STM website) the leading global trade association for academic and professional publishers. It has over 110 members in 21 countries who each year collectively publish nearly 66% of all journal articles and tens of thousands of monographs and reference works. STM Aims and Objectives include:

to assist publishers and their authors in their activities in disseminating the results of research in the fields of science, technology and medicine;
to assist national and international organisations and communications industries in the electronic environment, who are concerned with improving the dissemination, storage and retrieval of scientific, technical and medical information;

It makes sense to me for an association like STM to take on a role of monitoring quality of scholarly publication for the commercial sector. STM and its members should never have the role of monitoring quality of scholarly publication, as this is a role that should be reserved for scholars. A number of traditional STM members are now actively involved in STM publishing, and new open access publishers such as Hindawi are members as well. It is in the interests of STM memberships to ensure that "commercial" in scholarly publishing does not become synonymous with "scam".

[Disclosure: just sent off an application to become a corresponding member of STM].

Dissension in the open access ranks on CC licenses and strategy tips for scholarly publishers

2011-12-09T13:22:00.001-08:00

Following are my tips for scholarly publishers facing pressure to adopt CC-BY licenses. I think that there are important issues here for libraries to consider. Comments, anyone?

Scholarly publishers are increasingly taking advantage of creative commons licenses. Like most open access advocates, this is something that I recommend, as it greatly facilitates understanding of permissions by readers.

However, in my opinion scholarly publishers should be aware that there are differences of opinion about mapping of open access and creative commons among advocates. There are some OA advocates who believe, very strongly, that open access is equal to the creative commons - attribution only (CC-BY) license. There are strong and valid arguments for why CC-BY is the license that most closely fits that BOAI definition of open access. However, I would argue that there are flaws in CC-BY that make it incompatible with the larger definition and aims of BOAI. For this reason, I would advocate that CC-BY-NC-SA is actually the strongest open access license, as this ensures open access downstream.

Following are some arguments that might be useful to scholarly publishers facing pressure to adopt CC-BY licenses:

Data mining is a fine thing to advance science. Allowing commercial applications means that authors and publishers that have given away their own work as OA, may not be able to afford the value-added version created through data mining. If data mining is the leap ahead that I think this is, this means that the less affluent scholars, libraries and publishers end up relatively further behind. That is, one step ahead in gaining the advantages of OA per se, and two steps behind if they cannot afford the value-add built on their work. For this reason, I strongly recommend that OA publishers in the third world use CC-NC licenses.

To survive and thrive into the future, OA publishing needs resources. For most publishers, this means money. If advocates want OA publishers to be able to provide the stronger forms of libre OA, in my opinion the solution is to find means to provide them with the financial support that would make it possible for them to do so. How? Tell advocates pushing for strong OA CC licenses to ask their libraries to join the Compact on Open Access Publishing Equity
http://www.oacompact.org/compact/

If the problem is the definition of noncommercial under CC, I would suggest that the answer is clarifying the definition. READING is not a commercial activity, regardless of who the reader is. SELLING the article - that's commercial. Data mining services is a different matter, and one that I think needs more thought before any recommendations are made.

The purpose of Creative Commons licenses is to facilitate choices for creators. I would argue that this is authors, and that what publishers should do is offer authors the full range of CC license choices. Journal-based CC licensing is not fully compatible with author's rights.

Comments and discussion are most welcome!

This message was posted today, with slight variations, to the Open Science, Society for Scholarly Publishers, and SCHOLCOMM lists.

Update December 10, 2011: for discussion on this topic, see the Open Science list archives under the subject "Open Access publications under CC-NC licenses".

Update December 17, 2011: see Cameron Neylon's post for his comments (pro defining OA as CC-BY).

Beall's list of predatory, open access publishers

2011-12-07T19:43:00.001-08:00

Beall's list of Predatory, Open Access Publishers
Beall's definition: Predatory, open-access publishers are those that unprofessionally exploit the author-pays model of open-access publishing (Gold OA) for their own profit. Typically, these publishers spam professional email lists, broadly soliciting article submissions for the clear purpose of gaining additional income. Operating essentially as vanity presses, these publishers typically have a low article acceptance threshold, with a false-front or non-existent peer review process. Unlike professional publishing operations, whether subscription-based or ethically-sound open access, these predatory publishers add little value to scholarship, pay little attention to digital preservation, and operate using fly-by-night, unsustainable business models.

Comments: kudos to Jeffrey Beall for taking on this important task, and for making a great start! In general, I am inclined to agree with most of Beall's assessments. Following are some minor suggestions for improvement:

suggest changing first sentence to: Predatory, open-access publishers are those that unethically exploit the author-pays model of open-access publishing (Gold OA) purely for their own profit, with false-front or non-existent peer review process. Rationale: a key point is that scholarly publishers are scholarly, rather than professional (although most are both). An independent scholar-publisher may be an amateur at publishing but top-notch at ensuring publication of quality scholarship.
Hindawi is on the watch list. In my opinion, Hindawi has a well-earned reputation for quality publishing, and should be removed from the list. A reason given for including Hindawi is that This publisher has way too many journals than can be properly handled by one publisher. If size were incompatible with quality publishing, what about Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, and Taylor & Francis, among others? If their size prevents them from performing quality publishing, I am certainly ready to hear this argument, but otherwise I don't know why this would be a problem for Hindawi but not other larger publishers. Another possibility is that what is meant is that extremely rapid growth is a reason for initial scepticism about quality. A brand new publisher coming out with dozens of titles should probably be scrutinized carefully before being accepted as a quality publisher. If this is the case, though, why not add Springer Open and Wiley Open to the watch list?
Medknow Publishing is also on the watch list. According to Beall, It is the publisher for many well-respected Indian professional societies and is disseminating abundant, high-quality research. However, its business model is vague and unproven. I would highly recommend that Medknow be taken off the watch list. If a publisher is disseminating abundant, high-quality research, it is inappropriate to label them as predatory or suspect. In my opinion, librarians should be working hard to figure out how to help such publishers survive and thrive. Give the high-profit STM commercials a profit cut and redirect some of the funding to the likes of Medknow, and we'd all be better off. (Note: Wolters Kluwer recently announced that they have acquired Medknow).

Confirming the Wellcome Trust's predictions about open access article processing fees

2011-11-22T21:51:00.001-08:00

In 2004, The Wellcome Trust published the report, Costs and business models in scientific research publishing. After reviewing the literature on costs of scholarly publishing and discussions with senior staff at a range of publishers (including commercial publishers), the Wellcome Trust concluded: A conservative estimate of the charge per articlenecessary for author-pays journals lies in the range $500–$2500, depending onthe level of selectivity used by the journal, plus a contribution to overheadsand profits (p. 2).

Today's actual article processing fees (APF) of successful, established fully open access publishers supports this prediction of The Wellcome Trust. The profitable Hindawi charges fees closer to the low end of the range; for example, the APF for Hindawi's Economics Research International is $400. BioMedCentral's average APF is $1,640, in the middle of the range. PLoS fees range from $1,300 for PLoS ONE to $2,900 for PLoS Biology. This is just over the top of the Wellcome Trust range - but then seven years has intervened between the publication of the report and now.

References

BioMedCentral (2011). Frequentlyasked questions about BioMedCentral’s article-

processing charges. Retrieved November 22, 2011 from http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/apcfaq

Hindawi (2011). Article processingcharges. Retrieved November 22, 2011 from

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/econ/apc/

Public Library of Science (2011). Publicationfees. Retrieved November 22, 2011 from

http://www.plos.org/publish/pricing-policy/publication-fees/

Wellcome Trust. (2004). Costs andbusiness models in scientific research publishing.

n.p.: The WellcomeTrust. Retrieved November 22, 2011 from http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/Publications/Reports/Biomedical-science/WTD003185.htm

This post is part of an early (not yet posted) draft of the economics chapter of my open thesis.

Sage "choice": a critique

2011-11-15T19:51:00.001-08:00

Sage Choice is an aptly named hybrid open access program. Authors have the option of paying a $3,000 USD fee (which does not include other charges such as page charges).

What do authors get from paying this fee? According to the Sage Choice website:

Under this program, SAGE will post to PubMed Central (PMC) or its international equivalents, such as UKPMC or PMCI on behalf of authors where their funder requires it. All other SAGE policies regarding open access archiving remain unchanged.

and Payment of the SAGE Choice fee will enable articles to be immediately available on SAGE Journals Online to non-subscribers, as well as to subscribers to that journal. It will also permit authors to submit the final manuscript to their funding agency's preferred archive if applicable.

What does this mean? Under SAGE Choice, authors cannot even post their own work to their institutional repository for open access right away, but must wait for the standard one-year Sage embargo period. There may be free access on the SAGE website, but there is no easy means of searching for these free articles. Browsing through a few SAGE journals, I haven't found any articles marked as being SAGE Choice. Providing free access either on the SAGE website or through specified repositories barely meets the criteria of gratis (free to read) open access. Which brings me to where I started: SAGE Choice is aptly named. This option is definitely the choice of SAGE, designed to fit its goal of maximum profit, not that of its scholar-authors. This is a model which I would characterize as cynically designed to prove that open access is undesirable, by deliberately developing an undesirable model; an attempt to squeeze a little extra money out of research grant funds without actually moving towards open access.

My recommendation is to avoid SAGE Choice. Authors, funding agencies and libraries should not pay the fees. While other hybrid programs may be a serious attempt at transforming journals, this one clearly is not.

Given the SAGE one-year embargo on authors' posting of post-prints along with SAGE Choice, I would rate SAGE Choice as below average in support for open access, and recommend to scholars to seek the journals of other publishers whenever possible. For options on where to publish, try the Directory of Open Access Journals, and see my post about Assessing new open access journals, or for subscription based publishers with better self-archiving options looks at the SHERPA RoMEO Publisher Copyright Policies and Self-Archiving site.

SAGE Choice (2011). Retrieved November 15, 2011 from http://www.sagepub.com/sagechoice.sp

Thesis chapter two: scholarly communication in crisis

2011-10-30T10:10:00.000-07:00

An early draft of the second chapter of my thesis, Scholarly communication in crisis, is now available as part of my open thesis approach.

Summary

Scholarly communication at present is a complex system characterized by expansion of capitalism into scholarly publishing and a process of rationalization that at times leads to irrational results in conflict with the basic goals or values of scholars. The increasing enclosure of knowledge and information through the concept of intellectual property is key in the process of commodification of resources once considered a classical public good as nonrivalrous and nonexcludable. Alternatives identified to date include the commons, cooperative approaches, open access and emerging new publishers such as libraries.

High profits for commercial publishers - or jobs for academics? Let's #occupyscholcomm

2011-10-23T14:18:00.000-07:00

Here are some snippets from some work-in-progress that may be helpful to those working to help academics understand the need to transform scholarly communication, from an economic perspective.
The elevator pitch version, for the academic / university administrator who is having a hard time letting go of those high-profit publishers' products:
Elevator pitch
Okay, Elsevier* does have some pretty snazzy journals** and useful services, and of course they need to make a profit because that's what the company is all about. So, next time we renew our Elsevier contract, how much of YOUR salary and benefits should we redirect to Elsevier profits - all, or just some?
* Replace Elsevier as appropriate with another high-profit commercial or not-for-profit that acts like a corporation.
** Replace journals as appropriate with books, bibliographies, etc., etc.

High profits for commercial publishers – or jobs foracademics?

For-profit scholarlypublishers are enjoying these gifts of ours [journal articles andpeer-reviewing services freely given away]. Commercial publishers are involvedin publishing about half of the world’s scholarly peer-reviewed journals. Theprofits, at least for the largest commercial publishers, are enormous and outof touch with the reality of academia. I am sure that we are all too familiarwith the financial realities of academia today. If you look at the website ofthe American Association of University Professors, you will see prominentlyposted a list of “Financial Crisis FAQs”, which state that the currentchallenging financial situation is being used to justify a number of measuresthat impact on academics, including “hiring and salary freezes, furloughs,salary cuts, layoffs, nonrenewals, reduction and elimination of academicprograms and colleges, revision of curricula, changes in academic policy,elimination of tenure, substantial changes in workload, and more”. In 2010, the UK announced that it wouldeliminate funding for humanities and social sciences teaching altogether,leaving the entire burden of education in these areas on the shoulders ofstudents. I study at Simon Fraser University in Canada, where a couple of yearsago we axed the Canadian Studies department.

The for-profitscholarly publishing sector is not at all sharing in this misfortune. Thelargest companies – Reed Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, informa.plc (also known asTaylor & Francis), all reported profits in the range of 30-40% in theirlatest financial statements. Wiley reported a 13% growth in profits over lastyear at this time, for a 42% profit level. To picture just how high this profitlevel is, compare this with what you are likely seeing in your personalinvestments. A bank’s interest on your savings account is probably a lot closerto .0036% than to 36%, the profitrate that Elsevier recently posted. This is an inelastic market. It doesn’tmatter if many of the people who are doing the largest share of the work –doing the research, writing up the results, doing the peer review – are losingsome of their jobs and bits of their salaries, or if the universities that are,by far, the major part of the customer base for these companies are facingextremely challenging financial times. These things don’t impact the bottomline, at all. Another way to express this is that for these for-profitcompanies, their CEOs and their shareholders – to whom we give our life’s work –it fundamentally does not matter whether we have work to live.

References

AmericanAssociation of University Professors. 2011. Financial Crisis FAQs. Retrieved October 5, 2011 from http://www.aaup.org/aaup/financial/mainpage.htm

Elsevierprofits: Economist (2011). Of goats and headaches: One of the best media businesses is also one of the most resented. Retrieved September 25,2011 from http://www.economist.com/node/18744177/

Informaplc. (2011). Half year results for thesix months ended 30 June 2011. Retrieved September 25, 2011 from http://www.informa.com/Investor-relations/

JohnWiley & Sons. (2011). John Wiley& Sons reports first quarter fiscal year 2012 results. Retrieved from http://ca.wiley.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/WileyCDA/PressRelease/pressReleaseId-100853.html

SpringerScience + Business Media. (2010). Annualreport. Retrieved September 25, 2011 from http://www.springer.com/about+springer/company+information/annual+report?SGWID=0-175705-0-0-0

This is a snippet from anearly draft of Chapter 2 of my thesis, tentatively called Freedom for scholarship in the internet age, combined with speakingnotes from my talk, Information feudalismor knowledge for all, at the Association of Internet ResearchersConference, Seattle, October 2011. I am planning to release more detailedversion(s) in the near future.

This post is part of the Transitioning to open access series.

For related posts and comments by others, check out the twitter hashtag #occupyscholcomm

Open Access Week message (from / for the British Columbia Library Association)

2011-10-23T13:24:00.000-07:00

Open Access Week starts on Monday, October 24!

A list of local events is available on the BC ELN website, at:
http://www.eln.bc.ca/view.php?id=1955

Did you know?

BCLA was one of the first library associations in the world to endorse open access. In 2004, the BCLA membership unanimously endorsed A Resolution on Open Access, drafted and put forward by the BCLA Information Policy Committee. Text of the resolution can be found here:
http://www.bcla.bc.ca/ipc/page/resolutions.aspx

The BCLA resolution was the inspiration for a similar resolution adopted by the Canadian Library Association in 2005.

By endorsing this resolution, BCLA's members facilitated participation by BCLA in national policy discussions in this area of critical importance to libraries (particularly academic libraries). As one example, BCLA spoke in favor of open access in the consultation process that led to the development of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research's (CIHR) Policy on Access to Research Outputs. This policy requires grantees, recipients of Canadian public funds, to make the peer-reviewed results of their research publicly available within 6 months of publication. This ensures that Canadians (and everyone) benefit from research funded by the Canadian taxpayer.

Staffers at federal agencies such as CIHR have pointed out the importance of having bodies such as BCLA speak out for the public interest in consultations such as these. Those who benefit financially from systems that lock down research for their private benefit have money to lobby for their interests. Even when our politicians and public servants fully understand the public interest, our voice is essential as a counterbalance.

For a recent overview of open access from a Canadian perspective, see Devon Greyson's article "Open access and health librarians in 2011" in the open access Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association, at:
http://pubs.chla-absc.ca/doi/full/10.5596/c11-021

A happy Open Access Week to all! If you are participating, please consider writing up a summary - complete with pictures - for the open access BCLA Browser!

Hope to see many of you at the next IPC event - Out of the Shadows: the Access Copyright Tariff and the Copyright Modernization Act, on Nov. 2. See the e-mail from Carolyn Soltau with the subject "Copyright workshop" for details. I understand that the planning group is investigating the possibility of taping the event as requested by several people.

Heather Morrison
Co-chair, BCLA Information Policy Committee
& Doctoral Candidate, SFU School of Communication
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/

Dramatic Growth of Open Access September 30, 2011

2011-09-30T16:40:00.000-07:00

Friends and implementers of open access around the world: we have outdone ourselves (again!). This quarter a number of initiatives have met or exceeded some interesting milestones. DOAJ is now over 7,000 journals, and still adding more than 4 titles per day. The Electronic Journals Library now lists more than 30,000 titles that are freely available. OpenDOAR now lists more than 2,000 repositories, and the BASE search engine searches more than 31 million documents in repositories. ROARMAP now lists a total of 300 open access mandate policies. Kudos to PMC for clearly posting pertinent data right on their website, and for growing the number of journals making all articles available OA by 19 to a new total of 635 - and for growing free fulltext at the rate of one per minute! Following are links to quick reference and full data versions, rationale and method, items of interest from this quarter, and noteworthy data from this quarter.

Quick Reference (for viewing)
Quick Reference and Full Data (this quarter only) for downloading
Dataverse - Full data (for downloading)
Rationale and method
Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series

Items of interest since June 30, 2011

added October 3 - July item from PLoS Blog, it's official 2010 was the first year PLoS was in the black! http://blogs.plos.org/plos/2011/07/2010-plos-progress-update/ This bodes very well for future growth of OA, especially with no price increases for article processing fees.

Walters, W. H., & Linville, A. C. (2001). Characteristics of open access journals in six subject areas. College and Research Libraries, 72(4), 372-392. Retrieved from http://crl.acrl.org/content/72/4/372.abstract. Good analysis of English-language DOAJ journals. Understates growth of OA, based on an article by Sally Morris. See here for critique of this approach.

Bhaskar Mukherjee and Mohammad Nazim have published "Open Access Institutional Archives: A Quantitative Study (2006-2010)" in the DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology.. Link to Charles Bailey's Digital Koans excerpt rather than article per se as I am not able to connect to the journal today.

Increasing percentage of content in UK PMC is fully open access

Anticipating OA Growth: Nature Publishing Group

BASE reaches 2,000 repositories (August 17, 2011

Nature News Blog: How Many Research Papers are Freely Available?

OpenDOAR exceeds 2,000 repositories listed

Mendeley exceeds 100 million papers!

PMC growth: about one free fulltext per minute

Hindawi exceeds more than 4,000 submissions in a single month for the first time

Open Conference Systems - graph illustrating increase in users

DOAJ: 7,000 journals and the DOAJ site in Turkish!

Internet Archive: 3 million texts for free

Nature Publishing Group annual letter to customers (2011) lots of stats on NPG's expanding OA options

The data
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) http://www.doaj.org/

# journals 7,070
growth this quarter: 376 titles
# journals searchable at article level: 3,253
growth this quarter: 293
# articles searchable at article level: 637,427
growth this quarter: 51,900

Electronic Journals Library

# of journals that can be read free of charge: 30, 963
growth this quarter: 1,767

Highwire Press Freehttp://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl&

# free articles 2,117,523
growth this quarter 964

OpenDOAR http://www.opendoar.org/

# repositories 2,085
growth this quarter 105

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) http://www.base-search.net/

# documents 31,044,880
growth this quarter 2,133,615
# content providers 2,027
growth this quarter 137

PubMedCentral http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/

# articles archived in PMC (from PMC website) 2,200,000
# journals that deposit all articles (from PMC website) 893
# journals that deposit NIH-funded articles (from PMC website) 296
# journals that deposit selected articles (from PMC website) 1,517
# journals actively participating in PMC (total minus predecessor minus no new content) 1,214
growth this quarter 38
# journals in PMC with immediate free access 746
growth this quarter 25
# journals in PMC with all articles open access 635
growth this quarter 19

arXiv http://arxiv.org/

# documents 704,659
growth this quarter 19,007

RePEC http://repec.org/

# of documents 1,085,000 25,000
growth this quarter 130,000
RePEC online (fulltext) 955,000
growth this quarter 30,000

E-LIS http://eprints.rclis.org/

# documents 12,319
growth this quarter 307

Open Access Mandate Policies based on ROARMAP http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

Sub-Institutional (was Departmental) 33
growth this quarter 0
Funder 52
growth this quarter 4
Institutional 132
growth this quarter 5
Multi-institutional 1
growth this quarter 0
Thesis 82
growth this quarter 2
Total 300
growth this quarter 11
Proposed Mandates 20

Storing all personal data for "security" purposes - some things to think about

2011-09-16T15:46:00.000-07:00

Thanks to openmedia.ca for alerting us to the problems with lawful access, anticipated to be part of an omnibus crime bill introduced by Harper's conservatives this coming Monday.

One aspect of lawful access expected to be included is a requirement for Internet Service Providers to retain personal data for delivery on request to law enforcement officials, with no requirement of a warrant.

There are many troubling aspects of this approach. One very troubling aspect of lawful access that I would like to highlight today is whether it is wise to assume that retaining large databases of personal information would ONLY be accessible by law enforcement officials. Wouldn't a database like this be handy for identity thieves? What about stalkers, spammers, hackers, con artists, or corporate espionage? If we build it - a large database storage everything we do over the internet, designed for retrieval at an individual level - will they come?

No doubt efforts would be made to protect these databases - but if the information is designed to be retained to hand over for security reasons, then it seems reasonable to think that others will be able to figure out how to get at this information, too. It seems almost incomprehensibly foolish to even contemplate suggesting the creation of such databases late in the summer of the phone hacking scandal. Surely this has alerted enough of us to the dangers of not attending to our privacy in the electronic age that proceeding with such a plan would be political suicide?

A scholar's notes: illustrating the value of re-use

2011-09-03T14:59:00.000-07:00

As I work on notes for my dissertation, it occurs to me that the way I tend to work is one example of the benefits for scholars (authors and readers, citers and cited alike) of reuse / derivatives of scholarly information.An example: today I am carefully reading an important article for my area by noted scholar David Prosser. As I read, I create notes and occasionally cut and paste potentially interesting quotes into my notes. Sometimes, there is a footnote, and I find that it is useful to cut and paste the footnote citation for ready reference later on. I may or may not ever use the quote, or if I use the material I may paraphrase rather than quote, however either way my ability to take notes in this way facilitates my work on my dissertation in a way that increases the likelihood of my citing the author and journal (Serials) correctly. This approach seems highly likely to increase the accuracy of my subsequent work (a hypothesis that someone might wish to test?). Increasing accuracy of citations seems highly likely to save the time of reviewers, readers, and librarians downstream, as it takes less time to track down correct citations than wrong ones (another hypothesis that someone might wish to test).

Here is an illustration of this "scholar's interim derivative":

“These issues led a study commissioned by the European Commission in 2006 to conclude that “the market under consideration is very far away from the ‘ideal perfectly competitive private market’ that has been celebrated ever since Adam Smith (1776)”.3” p. 61

Footnote:
3. Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of theScientific Publication Markets in Europe, 2006: http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/pdf/scientific-publication-study_en.pdf (accessed 21 January 2011).

From: Prosser, D. (2011). Reassessing the value proposition: First steps towards a fair(er) price for scholarly journals. Serials, 24(1), 60-63. doi:10.1629/2460. Retrieved September 3, 2011 from http://uksg.metapress.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/link.asp?id=g849j76241787320

Okay, now back to my note-taking!Cross-posted from my doctoral webpage.

Full open access to scholarly monographs - suggesting a local library consortial approach

2011-09-01T15:55:00.000-07:00

Frances Pinter (Bloomsbury Press) released a provocative 8-minute video suggesting a full flip to open access complete with CC licensing for scholarly monographs, and initiating the discussion with a vision of a global library consortial approach to payment for production of all scholarly monographs (or perhaps all of Bloomsbury's production?). What really caught my eye in this is the acknowledgement that production costs account for a third of the cost of producing a scholarly monograph. With this model, there would be room for publishers to earn additional revenue through print sales and/or added value e-versions.

This is a great start to an interesting and important conversation. The current model for scholarly monographs just isn't working. As library budgets are increasingly caught up in journal big deals, there is less and less money for monograph purchases; diminishing circulation means fewer copies from which to recoup costs, resulting in a negative spiral not unlike the serials crisis. For an excellent and in-depth examination of scholarly monographs publishing in the U.S. and the U.K., see Thompson (2005).
My perspective is that the overall approach is a great starting-point for discussion, but not practical at a global level.What I would suggest instead is a regional approach to library consortia funding scholarly monographs for full open access on a production basis. There are several benefits to this approach:

vastly expanded access to scholarly monographs as compared with the current system
avoids the problems associated with currency fluctuations - the local payers (libraries) pay in local currency
minimizes issues associated with the vastly unequal wealth of the world. Local payers in wealthy countries pay relatively high rates, local payers in developing nations pay appropriate rates for their region
payment on production rather than purchase can highlight the relationship between high quality and economic efficiency

My recommendation would be to simultaneously at least begin to address some of the factors currently pushing scholars towards overproduction of scholarly monographs, such as the push for some scholars to publish two books rather than one as described by Harley et al.

Here is my vision for what might be doable, inspired by Pinter's video: if libraries could collaborate to fund a scholarly monograph publishing system at one third of the current system, and if we could furthermore work with scholars towards a healthier scholarly communication system favoring appropriate publication over quantity of publication, then perhaps we could fund a system at perhaps one sixth of what libraries currently collectively pay that would be a very great deal more effective - free access to everyone with an internet connection, no crazy copyright restrictions, full searchability, and value added services thanks to publisher partners.

[Disclosure: I work for BC Electronic Library Network, a regionally based library consortium].

References

Harley, D., Acord, S. K., Earl-Novell, S., Lawrence, S., & King, C. J. (2010). Assessing the future landscape of scholarly communication: An exploration of faculty values and needs in seven disciplines. UC Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education. Retrieved from http://escholarship.org/uc/item/15x7385g

Pinter, F. (2011). Libraries, publishers, consortia. [Video/DVD] YouTube: Bloomsbury Press. Retrieved September 1, 2011 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niyYWVa2w6w

Thompson, J. B. (2005). Books in the digital age : The transformation of academic and higher education publishing in Britain and the United States. Cambridge: Polity.

Cross-posted to my doctoral webpage.

OpenDOAR exceeds 2,000 repositories!

2011-07-27T21:19:00.001-07:00

Congratulations to the OpenDOAR and the crew at Sherpa for exceeding 2,000 repositories listed!

This is particularly significant because OpenDOAR is a vetted list. As described on the OpenDOAR website, OpenDOAR provides a comprehensive, authoritative and quality checked list of institutional and subject-based repositories. In addition it encompasses archives set up by funding agencies like the National Institutes for Health in the USA and the Wellcome Trust in the UK and Europe.

This post forms part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series.

Thanks to Peter Suber via the Open Access Tracking Project.

Mendeley exceeds 100 million papers!

2011-07-24T20:50:00.000-07:00

Sometime this weekend, July 23/24, 2011 Mendeley exceeded 100 million papers added overall. Of these, over 1 million (1% of the total) are available for free download. Thanks to Graham Steel.

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series.

PMC growth - about 1 free fulltext per minute

2011-07-11T16:21:00.000-07:00

As of June 30, 2011 there were 3,369,548 documents available as free full text through PubMedCentral, as compared with 3,285,816 on March 31, 2011, an increase of 83,732 free documents this quarter.

There were a total of 91 days this quarter; at 60 minutes per hour and 24 hours per day, that's 131,040 hours altogether. 83,732 is .64 of 131,040.

This means that PMC is adding free documents at a rate of 2/3 of a document per minute, or, rounding up, approximately one document per minute. Thanks to the Linked Science Workshop organizers for pointing out this phenomenal growth rate of PMC, hereby supported mathematically; this fact certainly belongs in the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

Peter Suber and the open access movement

2011-07-06T16:34:00.001-07:00

Richard Poynder recently published an interview with Peter Suber, Leader of a Leaderless Revolution.

STM submission to European Institute of Innovation & Technology: a critique

2011-07-03T13:51:00.000-07:00

The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), in their latest anti-open-access lobbying ploy, has just released the STM submission on the open public consultation on the European Institute of Innovation and Technology.

Some comments:

SUSTAINABILITY of scholarly publishing - STM says: "Because the public interest is not served if access to and dissemination of trusted scientific publications and data is not sustainable". Hear, hear! By all means, let's mandate sustainability of scholarly publishing. John Houghton & colleagues have done some excellent research indicating some cost-effective solutions. In particular, the most transformative model - deposit into open access archives with a peer review overlay and dispense with journals altogether - is particularly recommended. This seems a curious argument coming from STM. I wonder if one the largest STM publishers, Elsevier, would survive if economic sustainability were mandated for scholarly publishing.

EXCLUSIVE copyright is what STM says it needs: "rules governing publication must allow publishers to obtain the exclusive use of copyrighted content in relevant media (e.g. online, electronic, print, micro-fiche etc) so that the substantial investments they make in scholarly communication can be recovered". Oh really?

This is what STM says in the consultation on the European Institute of Innovation and Technology; but what do members tell their scholarly authors? Here is what the Elsevier Author's Rights page has to say: "Elsevier wants to ensure a proper balance between the scholarly rights which authors retain (or are granted/transferred back in some cases) and the rights granted to Elsevier that are necessary to support our mix of business models". Wiley's Authors Rights section says: "Wiley-Blackwell journal authors can use their article in a number of ways, including in publications of their own work and course packs in their institution." Taylor & Francis say: 'We prefer authors to assign copyright to Taylor & Francis or the journal proprietor (such as a learned society on whose behalf we publish), but accept that authors may prefer to give Taylor & Francis an exclusive licence to publish.". The vast majority of STM members have long permitted a variety of author self-archiving practices, as detailed in the Sherpa RoMEO Publisher Copyright Policies and Self-Archiving list. (All websites viewed July 3, 2011).

This desire for exclusive copyright cannot be a goal for ALL STM members, because the members' list includes publishers of fully open access journals, such as Versita and BioMedCentral!

RECOVERING INVESTMENTS - STM's "need" for exclusive copyright is purportedly so that "substantial investments they [STM members] make in scholarly communication can be recovered". In the case of publicly funded research and/or research conducted at publicly funded institutions, the vast majority of resources that go into the research is public funding. So why shouldn't the public recoup our investment, through being able to read the results of the research (without paying again), benefiting from the research when the knowledge diffuses through society (to doctors, journalists, policy-makers, teachers, etc., etc.), and enjoying the economic benefits of spurring innovation? The work of unpaid authors and peer reviewers is greater than the contributions of publishers (valuable as they are); so how does it make sense that those who have contributed such a small portion of the share should be allowed to reap the exclusive benefit?

Finally, STM members claim that they are an indispensable link in scholarly communication. This is wishful thinking! Edgar & Willinsky's survey of 1,000 journals using Open Journal Systems illustrates just how quickly a renaissance of scholar-led publishing can happen, if we only make available the tools! This is just logical. Without scholars, there would be no scholarly publishing industry. Without a scholarly publishing industry, scholars would make do. In the extremely unlikely scenario that the scholarly publishing industry were to disappear overnight, scholarship would be, at most, inconvenienced. My prediction is that without the dead weight of the past, a new system that makes more sense given the tools we have available such as the internet, would begin to appear almost immediately.

Open access, books and the royalty argument: a research proposal

2011-07-03T12:25:00.000-07:00

The original focus of the open access movement has been the scholarly journal article, which authors have traditionally given away, while books were at first set aside, in part because authors do receive royalties from publishing books. It may be timely to reconsider this argument; for further detail, see below. Here are two potential research methods for exploring the reality behind the perception that academics earn royalties from book publishing, developed for the Research Questions section of the Open Access Directory.

Method 1: author return on investment of time

Hypothesis: the vast majority of academic authors would advance their financial situations faster by moonlighting at a second job, even at minimum wage, than by writing academic books.

estimate or calculate author time spent on writing academic books
estimate or add royalties over years book is likely to continue selling
divide royalties by author hours
compare with local minimum wage

Method 2: publisher royalties to academic authors

collect publisher records for royalties on a per-author / per-book basis
calculate range, average and mode
paint a qualitative picture of likely financial rewards for academic authors for book publishing

Note: I do not have time to conduct this research at present, but would be interested in participating in a research team or acting as a consultant if someone else would like to take this on.

Anecdotal evidence (and inspiration) from an expert

Sandy Thatcher, formerly publisher at Penn State University Press and former President of the American Association of University Presses, points out today on the scholcomm list: the fact that a significant number of authors published by university presses earn no royalties at all, it is also true that the number of authors who earn really significant royalties on academic books is very small. For them, the greatest incentive to publish a book by far lies in the indirect rewards to come in the form of tenure and promotion, whose pecuniary benefits usually far outweigh any monies actually received from book royalties. I therefore think a much stronger case for OA book publishing can be made than Peter seems ready to admit yet. And it is important to press on this point because the longer book publishing remains TA while journal publishing goes OA, the wider the "digital divide" will grow between book and journal content, which is intellectually indefensible.

Let the competition begin! Dramatic Growth of Open Access June 30, 2011

2011-06-30T19:39:00.000-07:00

Update July 5, 2011 - that there are now more than 10,000 OJS installations (thanks to Kevin Stranack), up more than 1,000 installations for 10% growth (40% annual equivalent) this quarter; also note one addition to the section on competition below. Update July 1, 2011 - correction: note that Palgrave MacMillan is offering hybrid open access, not a full OA journal as I had thought. Thanks to Roddy MacLeod. See below for further reflection and a link to Roddy's post.

This issue briefly highlights and celebrates the accomplishments to date of open access to the medical literature, and explores whether open access has already begun a new phase of competition that will accelerate growth yet again.

In the 1990's when I worked at a small university college, access to the medical index Medline was on a for-pay basis, something we could not afford, certainly not to offer on a routine basis to students. The first major success story of open access to the medical literature was when the U.S. National Library of Medicine made the index available for free as PubMed. Today, not only is the index available for free, we can also connect directly with 3.3 million of the articles indexed for free, too. The Public Access Policy of the N.I.H. is definitely a factor. Visible compliance with the strong April 2008 policy, by my calculations, is now 72%. 1,176 journals are voluntarily contributing content to PMC; of these, a majority, 616 journals, are open access.

From pioneering to consolidation - to competition?

Laakso, M. et al (2011) published a major study in PLoS One, illustrating a tenfold increase in open access journal publishing from 1993 to 2009. The authors interpret the data as illustrating three phases of open access journal publishing in this period: The Pioneering years (1993–1999), the Innovation years (2000–2004), and the Consolidation years (2005–2009).

This issue of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access includes a preliminary exploration of a thesis that OA journal publishing may have already entered a new, most welcome phase: the Competition Years (2010 - ). A few comparisons are included - to spur the competition along!

Quick reference (viewing)
Quick reference (download as excel or PDF)
Rationale and method
Dataverse for downloading data

Selected numbers

DOAJ 6,694 titles growth rate 4 titles / day
Electronic Journals Library (free journals of academic interest) 29,000 titles, growth rate 11 titles / day
OpenDOAR 1,980 repositories growth rate 1 / day
BASE 29 million documents, growth rate 11,000 / day
ROARMAP 289 open access mandate policies
PubMedCentral:

1,176 journals actively participating; increase of 92 this quarter, 1 journal / day;
721 journals immediate free access; increase of 59 this quarter
616 all articles open access; increase of 51 this quarter

Competition, anyone? This section looks at the best sources for lots of quality free content - documents and journals, acknowledging that this is the tip of the iceberg and welcoming cooperation - or competition - in tracking and assessing sources.

Best sources for lots of free documents

BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) 28.9 million
PubMed 3.3 million
Highwire Free 2.1 million
Mendeley 1 million
RePEC (Research Papers in Economics) 925,000
arXiv 685,000
DOAJ article search 585,527
Social Science Research Network (SSRN) 282,000 full-text papers

Best sources for vetted lists of active, peer reviewed, fully open access journals

DOAJ 6,694 journals
Open J-Gate 6,042 peer-reviewed english-language journals

Best sources for free journals

Electronic Journals Library 29,000 free journals
PubMedCentral journals list 1,176 journals participate; 721 have immediate free access, 616 all articles open access - title list available for free download

Milestones this quarter (that I noted) include ROARMAP exceeding 200 open access mandate policies (not counting theses), E-LIS reaching 12,000 documents, and Springer Open launched its 50th journal. Congratulations to PLoS ONE for being named SPARC Open Access Innovator - and making Public Library of Science the world's largest not-for-profit open access publisher.

Open access competition years: a preliminary argument

Following my open research approach, this argument is presented for review and critique. The basic idea is that the momentum of the open access movement already has, or soon will, create a critical mass that will transform all of scholarly publishing into a default open access position. The work of Laakso, M. et al. (2011), and my own Dramatic Growth research project, demonstrates consistent strong to dramatic growth of open access from 1993 to the present time. Laakso et al paint a picture of consistent growth, the Consolidation Years, up to 2009, while my perspective is that since this time frame, the landscape for scholarly publishing has changed in some significant ways.

One key change is that the competition tables have turned; in the early years, it was the open access publishers competing against the traditional subscription-based publishers, but today, there is a growing pool of traditional subscription-based publishers actively competing for what they obviously see as an open access marketplace. As noted above, Springer Open recently launched their 50th journal. At inception, Public Library of Science aimed to compete with the likes of Nature and Science; starting this month, Nature's new journal, Nature Communications, is actively and obviously competing with PLoS ONE, now the world's largest journal. Other traditional publishers that have come out with what appear to be serious efforts at competing in an open access environment includes Wiley, with Wiley Open. These are all fully open access journals. It is important to distinguish this from the tendency to develop hybrid open access journals, which is also growing, with Palgrave MacMillan a recent entry into this somewhat open environment. Thanks to Roddy MacLeod for pointing out some of the deficiencies of this hybrid environment in his post Subscription journals with open access content. In brief, the difficulty for readers to locate this information suggests minimal advantage for authors publishing in these venues as compared to publishing in fully open access journals, or publishing in subscription-based journals and self-archiving at no charge, and the likely dangers of double-dipping (increasing costs as libraries pay for subscriptions and additional payments are made for article processing fees), suggests that this model holds little promise for readers, authors, libraries, or, in the long term, journals and publishers. This model may well be useful for journals and publishers in the short term as a means of developing procedures to move towards full open access, but my view is that hybrid OA journals is not a sustainable model for the long term. Rather, hybrid approaches may be best viewed as like using training wheels to learn to ride a bike; helpful to get started, but the sooner they come off, the better.

This development seems sure to change the trajectory of open access growth - upwards - for several reasons. As traditional publishers gain confidence and success in open access publishing, there will be less reason to fight open access. Faculty preferring traditional publishers will find that more and more often, they do not have to choose between open access and their preferred publisher; they can have their cake and eat it too.Obviously, the entry of traditional publishers increases the number of open access journals. Perhaps a little less obviously, traditional publishers delving into open access publishing will divert content from subscription-based journals. Another way to make this point: I am predicting that as the proportion of open access content rises, the proportion of subscription-bound content will decrease.

In addition to the entry of traditional publishers into open access, a recent news release by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Wellcome Trust, and the Max Planck Institute announced plans to develop a new open-access journal aiming to compete at the top tier. It is noteworthy that not only is this a new journal; this is a whole new type of publisher. Update July 5th: just days after the HHMI/Wellcome Trust/Max Planck announcement, traditional publisher the Royal Society announced their new fully open access journal, Open Biology, which appears to be following very much the same model - full OA, rapid publishing, scientific experts in charge of the editing process. Good luck to both!

Another example of a new journal that appears highly likely to be a serious competitor in its field, a publication of a well-established society in an emerging field, is G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics. To me, it seems only natural that a new journal will be open access, and I expect that this trend will increase in the coming years. A few years ago, the default for new journals was a subscriptions basis. Today, this just doesn't make any sense. An online-only journal with no authentication mechanisms speeds up dissemination, and costs less. Besides, with library budgets already tied up in the big deal, what chance does a new subscriptions-based journal have?

Some preliminary research I reported on in March in the post Those ACTIVE! Open Access Journals illustrates that at least some relatively recent open access journals and publishers already have a higher rate of journal retention (still active after a few years) than some of the top names in traditional publishing.

To wrap things up, it looks to me like we can not only expect the current OA momentum to continue, but that are forces already at play that are likely to accelerate the transition to OA as default: movement by traditional publishers to compete in the open access environment; logic favoring open access for new publications; and as the move continues to open access, we should anticipate that some of the increase will come from diversion of articles from toll to open access venues. One of the implications for libraries is that when signing a long-term contract with a publisher, it is a good idea to remember that you are purchasing access to articles that have not yet been published - and may never be published, at least not by that publisher. Language protecting yet in case the publishers' product diminishes is advised.

References & bibliography of recent items on open access growth

ROARMAP's Green Open Access Mandates Pass the 200 Mark. Note that this is not counting thesis mandates.

Carr, L. (20110). Mendeley: downloads vs upload growth. Repository Man. http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2011/06/mendeley-download-vs-upload-growth.html and Mendeley: measuring OA rates http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2011/06/mendeley-measuring-oa-rates.html

Laakso M, Welling P, Bukvova H, Nyman L, Björk B-C, et al. 2011 The Development of Open Access Journal Publishing from 1993 to 2009. PLoS ONE 6(6): e20961. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020961
Tenfold increase in OA publishing over last 10 years PLOS ONE

Richard Poyner Open Access by Numbers

Taylor, Ann. New open access content made available by the Digital Commons Community. Recently went live: 3 new sites, 5 conferences, 6 journals, 44 image galleries, and 13 book galleries.

Whitfield, John Open access comes of age. Nature News, June 21, 2011.

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

Elsevier profits and faculty priorities

2011-06-24T13:02:00.000-07:00

According to this article in the Economist, last year Elsevier made $1.1 billion in profit last year, for a profit margin of 36%. Most of Elsevier's revenue, and hence profit, comes from academic library budgets.

Faculty have largely been shielded from the economic impact of this profit-taking from my academy, and to date most discussions about faculty publishing choices have focused on the academic freedom of faculty to publish where they please.

Is it timely to bring the economics home to faculty in a more direct way than pointing out the impact on faculty budgets? If a university were to cancel a $2 million a year Elsevier contract, this money could be redirected, couldn't it? Why not redirect $1 million a year to affordable / sustainable options such as open access publishing, and the other half to academic salaries? $1 million a year could fund 10 academic positions at $100,000 a year - or give 1,000 faculty a $1,000 a year raise.

If faculty were to see things this way, I wonder how many would agree with me that a flourishing open access scholarly publishing system is actually the optimal system for academic freedom?

Mandating sustainability. Would Elsevier survive?

2011-06-24T12:34:00.000-07:00

Elsevier's latest anti-open access tactic appears to be looking for extra $$$ (surprise, surprise) from institutions that mandate open access, specifically quoting Elsevier's Alicia Wise:

The systematic posting of manuscripts, for example because of a mandate to post, is only agreeable if done in ways that are sustainable for the underlying journal. From: https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5878.html.

Comment: if universities are considering mandates and economic sustainability for scholarly publishing, why not include a mandate supporting economically sustainable publications / publishers? For example, why not direct tenure and promotion committees to give added weight to affordable / open access publishing choices, if an author indicates that they have rejected high cost / poor access choices?

Would Elsevier survive such a mandate? Aside from high costs, Elsevier appears to be showing a lot less adaptability than other commercial publishers, such as Springer, Wiley, Nature, now Palgrave MacMillan, all of whom now have what appear to be full and serious open access options. Indeed, it seems that a very large percentage of the commercial scholarly publishing sector is poised to be competitive in an open access future, with Elsevier being the exception. My conclusion is that if economic sustainability for scholarly communication is mandated - as I would argue that it should be - and Elsevier continues to show little or no ability to adapt to the current environment, Elsevier's days are numbered. And this may be a good thing.

Advocacy strategies for open access to agricultural research

2011-05-29T14:49:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to students in my LIBR 559K class this spring (the open access class) for a great discussion on advocacy strategies for open access to the agricultural literature. Following is a summary of the discussion, posted with permission of the class, which will be cross-posted to the course blog.

Advocacy strategies for open access to the agricultural literature - summary of class discussion

Tension between public good and agribusiness - talking points

taxpayer funding
impacts everyone - whole world - we all eat (are food consumers)
food security / avoiding starvation and famine
food safety
how much funding to research on turf & lawn as compared to food? what's more important?
linkages with health and environmental science
counter to disinformation (e.g. pesticides)
agribusiness - tie conditions to subsidies?

Agriculture as a public good - possible alliances

small / family farms
rural populations
organic farmers
farmers' market customers

Strategies for talking with agricultural researchers

medicine has prestige and lots of OA / good role model
can the farmers who might benefit from this research access your articles?
adapting information to local conditions (an argument for re-use?)

Why scholarship should never be a commodity!

2011-05-24T23:03:00.000-07:00

Presentation, graduate panel, Western Canada Speaker Series, Simon Fraser University Wednesday May 18, 2011. Moderator: Rick Gruneau.

Why scholarship should never be a commodity! (Or, transformative change for scholarly communication for communication scholars). For a version of this presentation which includes a bit of explanation of what I am talking about, download the presentation-of-a-presentation from my SLAIS LIBR 559L course blog.

Housekeeping: e-mail glitch?

2011-05-16T08:26:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Pamela for reporting what appears to be a glitch with the e-mail for IJPE - the September 30, 2010 Dramatic Growth was sent out today. My understanding is that there have been some serious issues with blogger lately - at least I am able to post, unlike others - my best guess is that this might have happened as google staff worked to fix these problems. Apologies for the confusion, and please let me know when things like this happen, at hgmorris at sfu dot ca

Access Copyright: NOT a member

2011-05-14T20:44:00.000-07:00

May 16 update: please see the May 3, 2011 Canadian Association of University Teachers Copyright Guidelines for a really good explanation of our rights in Canada under fair dealing, and kudos for covering the fact that an increasing portion of academic work is now fully open access - downloable from http://www.caut.ca/pages.asp?page=18

Original post

Access Copyright is a copyright collective in Canada that has recently proposed a tariff that phenomenally outrageous, including price increases that are more than tenfold the previous negotiated agreement (which was already far too generous), but also includes reporting requirements that are onerous and completely incompatible with both privacy and academic freedom, as well as the ludicrous proposition that linking to an item is considered a copy. As a prolific writer, presenter, and occasional photographer who (like a great many people) prefers to share work openly, it is my wish to make it known that Access Copyright does NOT represent this creator! I have created an Access Copyright: NOT a member facebook page for anyone who would like to join me in making this clarification. Vendors and publishers are more than welcome. For that matter, why not prominently post an Access Copyright non-membership notice on your website?

This insanity is not limited to Canada, it seems, as is clear from this post, A nightmare scenario for higher education, from scholarly communication@duke.

What an awesome opportunity for open access advocates!

Open access: small victory over procrastination

2011-05-08T17:21:00.000-07:00

Just posted a study published in Research Strategies in 1997, Information Literacy Skills: an exploratory focus group study of student perceptions. Why the delay? When I published the study, copyright was held by Research Strategies. The journal was subsequently bought by Elsevier, which has a green OA policy - for the author's own copy - but finding the author's copy for a 1997 article is not exactly easy. Neither was finding an author's agreement; a few years ago, I contacted Elsevier and asked them for a copy of the contract, but it turns out that they don't have one either. So now after a few more years of procrastinating I have finally posted the publishers' PDF - I am teaching scholarly communication and open access after all, and ought to be as good an example as I can - on the assumption that if no one has a contract, none exists. It would be helpful if IR managers and publishers alike would clarify permission in such circumstances - keep the author's self-archiving rights for the author's own work without embargo, but allow use of the publisher's PDF after say 3 years? Anyhow this study is now more widely available, having been posted in the SFU IR, UBC cIRcle, E-LIS, Mendeley, and Academia.edu, with links from Facebook and Twitter. Alas, I am not on any information literacy listservs. SWORD people - are you looking after all of these venues and more? A single upload could sure accomplish more dissemination with less keystrokes.

Open access: definitions and major initiatives

2011-04-13T21:57:00.001-07:00

Open access: definitions and major initiatives is an early draft of a chapter (or part of a chapter) of my thesis. Designed as a basic overview, this is an updated and revised version of the open access chapter of my book Scholarly Communication for Librarians (Oxford: Chandos, 2009). The early release is part of my open thesis approach, and also to make this chapter freely available online to students of my UBC SLAIS classes this spring, LIBR 559L (scholarly communication) and LIBR 559K (open access), for whom this is required reading. This is actually a second revision, as another version is currently under review as part of a book project for the ALCTS section of ALA (eds. Pamela Bluh and Cindy Hepfer). The original chapter can be viewed in E-LIS.

Dramatic Growth of Open Access March 31 2011

2011-03-31T23:32:00.000-07:00

Highlights

The most amazing growth story of the first quarter of 2011 is that of Mendeley, jumping half a million articles downloadable for free, from 300,000 to 800,000, growth of 171% in just one quarter!! Since Mendeley is a DIY tool for researchers, this amazing growth illustrates that there is a considerable appetite for self-archiving, once the researcher has a service that appeals to them. (See Mendeley update at bottom of this post for more). Analysis this quarter focuses on the strong growth rate of so many open access initiatives in comparison to the overall 3-3.5% average growth of scholarly articles and journals. Data is presented that strongly suggests that the success rate for open access journals is already higher than that of subscription journals in this and a related post, Those Active Open Access Journals!. Congratulations to DOAJ for announcing the DOAJ new interface - and surpassing the milestone of more than half a million articles available through the DOAJ article search! As DOAJ's Anna-Lena Johannson expresses it: DOAJ now has more than 6,300 journals, more than 100 countries, over 50 languages, and more than 2,500 journals providing metadata at article level. . Another indication of the international reach of the open access movement from Katarina Lovrecic; there are 133 OA journals in Croatia, and 129 or 97% of the journals in the Croatian Hrčak portal are open access. An additional 47 journals are actively participating in PubMedCentral; the growth for journals in PMC providing immediate free access is 40, and the full open access PMC journal growth rate is 33. This issue of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access introduces two new features for the very busy - a quick numbers section, and a quick reference edition.

Quick Numbers

# of open access journals (DOAJ): over 6,000. Growth rate: 4 per day.
# of freely available journals (Electronic Journals Library): over 28,000. Growth rate: 10 per day.
# of open access repositories: close to 2,000 (OpenDOAR). Growth rate: 1 per day.
# of documents freely available (BASE): 25 million. Growth rate: 6,000 per day.
# of open access mandate policies (ROARMAP): 271. Growth rate: 1 per week or 5 per month.
% of world's scholarly literature that is freely available: 20% (Bjork et al)

For more detail and references, see the Quick Reference. The Quick Reference is available for downloading as a PDF or excel file from the SFU IR.

Open access growth compares VERY favorably with overall growth of scholarship

These charts illustrate just how dramatic the growth of open access is, in comparison with the overall average growth rates of scholarship of 3% (for articles) and 3.5% (for journals) calculated by Mabe (and cited by Ware). In 2004, a little over 62,000 articles were searchable through DOAJ, compared with over 500,000 today (490,000 at the end of 2010). IF DOAJ article search had been growing at the average rate of 3% per year, there would now be about 75,000 articles available through the DOAJ article search. DOAJ article search has grown about 7 times what one would expect given the average scholarly article growth overall over the past 6 years.

Similarly, DOAJ titles are growing much more rapidly than the overall average growth in scholarly journals of 3.5% annually. In the past 6 years, DOAJ has grown from 1,400 to over 6,000 journals. At the average 3.5% annual rate, DOAJ would now be at about 1,700 journals. DOAJ journal titles are growing more than 3 times faster than the average growth rate for scholarly journals.

In the past 10 years, BioMedCentral has grown from 241 submissions to over 35,000 submissions annually (thanks to BMC's Tara Cronin). IF BMC were growing at the average rate of 3%, we would expect only 338 submissions annually! BMC article submissions have grown over a hundred times more than one would have expected at the average growth rate for scholarly journal articles.

In a related post, the phenomenon of Those Active Open Access Journals is explored. It seems that - according to data obtained from Ulrich's - there is strong evidence to suggest that open access journals are more likely to continue to be active after a few years than journals published by some of the top commercial publishers!

Downloadable data for the Dramatic Growth of Open Access can be found at the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Dataverse.

Mendeley update April 1, 2011

Listserve discussion on SCHOLCOMM

On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 2:40 AM, Steve Hitchcock wrote:
Heather, Thank you for the data from your Dramatic Growth of Open Access series. The latest release certainly begins with a striking figure, but it probably needs some explanation and context. Where do the figures for freely downloadable articles from Mendeley come from, and what is meant in Mendeley by 'self-archiving'?

William Gun, Head of Academic Outreach, Mendeley replied:

Heather, thanks for the post. Steve, the numbers come from self-archived papers and papers marked open access in our catalog. We're currently doing a pilot project to sync the papers in a researcher's My Publications folder with their local institutional repository, so hopefully this will encourage more researchers to make their work available in this manner, where they can. You can see more about the project here: http://jisc-dura.blogspot.com/

Comment: it sounds to me like this sort of initiative has tremendous potential to advance the open access archiving movement. If self-archiving in the IR facilitates getting your work into services that faculty seem to like such as Mendeley (and what about academia.edu), that would only help with getting content into the IR. Plus I wonder what the possibilities are for linking back FROM Mendeley to the IR (or other library services)? Any discussions happening along these lines?

References

Cronin, T. (2011). Personal correspondence.

Mabe, M., & Amin, M. (2001). Growth dynamics of scholarly and scientific journals. Scientometrics, 51(1), 147-162.

Mabe, M. (2011). Personal correspondence.

Ware, M. (2006). Scientific publishing in transition: An overview of current developments. Bristol, UK: Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers; STM. Retrieved from http://pdf.aandamar.com/pdf/scientific-publishing-in-transition-an-overview-of-current.html

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

Those ACTIVE Open Access Journals!

2011-03-30T21:43:00.001-07:00

In brief, this post presents data illustrating that scholarly open access journals have rates of ongoing activity that compare VERY favorably with subscriptions-based journals (i.e. not being cancelled), based on data gleaned from Ulrich's. Also worth noting is the number of journals going back some time that are now open access - 370 journals listed as open access in Ulrich's started publishing before 1960, and of these, 98% are still active! All of the searches that I am talking about are limited to academic/scholarly, refereed journals. Ulrich's lists 3,525 such open access journals (a far cry from DOAJ's more than 6,300). Of the journals listed in Ulrich's as OA, 3,458, or 98%, are listed as active. This compares VERY favorably with ALL academic/scholarly, refereed journals, a total of 32,058, of which 28,269 or 88% are active.

Could this reflect a certain reticence on the part of Ulrich's to include open access journals until they are pretty sure that they are going to be around for a while? That would explain the discrepancy between Ulrich's OA journal list and DOAJ's. Let's look at a few other figures. The chart on the left shows the percentage of active journals by publisher. On the left-hand side, we see that the publishers with the highest percentage of active journals are open access publishers Copernicus and Hindawi with 100% and 99% active titles respectively, while on the right hand side we see that two subscriptions-based publishers, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis, have a much lower percentage of active titles overall, 85%.

The chart on the right shows the percentage of active academic/scholarly, refereed journals for open access as a whole, and for a few selected publishers both open access and subscriptions based, for journals started in the last ten (10) years, from 2001 to 2010. Note that on the left side of the chart, open access publisher Copernicus has the highest percentage of active journals, 100%, followed closely by open access as a whole with 98%. On the right hand side, we see that Elsevier, with 89% of journals started in this time frame still active, has a lower percentage of active titles than at least 4 open access publishers (Copernicus, Hindawi, BioMed Central, and Public Library of Science). Still, this could reflect a hesitancy about open access on the part of Ulrich's. I should note here that I needed to correct some of Ulrich's figures, as a number of thriving PLoS journals were listed as cancelled, apparently because they cancelled print subscriptions (in favor of a leading-edge print-on-demand service).

If Ulrich's is hesitating to add open access journals, perhaps this reflects a tendency to be conservative about adding new titles or publishers. This might make some sense - even DOAJ waits to be sure that a new journal actually publishes a bit before adding titles. To account for this, I looked at open access journals from a wide time range, and found that the percentage of active academic/scholarly, refereed open access journals was 93% or better for every time range I looked at, going back to before 1960! Needless to say, this compares VERY favorably with the 88% active titles for ALL academic/scholarly, refereed journals from all time ranges.

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

Review of Scholarly Communications for Librarians

2011-03-28T10:44:00.001-07:00

Just came across this review of my book Scholarly Communication for Librarians (Oxford: Chandos, 2009).

Citation for review: Macevičiūtė E. (2009). Review of: Morrison, Heather. Scholarly communication for librarians. Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2009. Information Research, 14(4), review no. R359 [Available at: http://informationr.net/ir/reviews/revs359.html]

NO to Google Books Settlement. Hurray for academics, access to knowledge and democracy!

2011-03-22T15:16:00.000-07:00

Today Judge Chin released a judgment Declining the Google Books Settlement. This is a victory for academia, access to knowledge, and democracy - here is why.

The Google Books Settlement is an attempt to settle a class action suit brought by some authors and publishers objecting to the Google Books project. The Google Books project per se involves digitizing library collections to provide searching for in-copyright works with fair use snippets and free access to out-of-print works, a very worthy project. The Settlement, however, had some major flaws, as Chin's judgment notes.

One significant flaw is that the plaintiffs do not represent all authors, and objections by academic authors are noted in particular: "The academic author objectors, for example, note that their interests and values differ from those of the named plaintiffs: "Academic authors, almost by definition, are committed to maximizing access to knowledge. [emphasis added]. The [Authors] Guild and the [Association of American Publishers], by contrast, are institutionally committed to maximizing profits."" (p. 28-29, quoting Samuelson). Comment: hear, hear!! Kudos and thanks to the academic authors and authors groups who took the time to express objections.

Several other flaws in the settlement suggest that turning down the Settlement is a victory for democracy as well. The settlement is described as "an attempt to use the class action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the Court in this litigation." (p. 21). Antitrust concerns (an effective Google monopoly on orphan works) are cited as well. The Settlement brings in involuntary participants, including owners of copyright in orphan works and foreign works; the objections of foreign nations are noted. As the Settlement notes, issues about copyright should be addressed by Congress, not through this approach.

For the future, let's hope that fairer and more appropriate approaches to copyright, including limiting terms (can we go back to 14 years, renewable once please?) and addressing orphan works is brought up in legislatures and international copyright venues, soon.

As for publishers and authors of works that are IN copyright, instead of suing people, why not focus on getting these works digitized and available through attractive business models such as free online / pay for print on demand?

For other works of mine of this topic, see:

Postscript: THANKS to Google and participating libraries for pushing the envelope. Clearly, more work is needed, but progress to date is already showing the potential and articulating some of the challenges still to be overcome.

Open thesis: draft introduction

2011-03-13T13:51:00.001-07:00

The first draft of the introduction to my thesis is now available and posted online as part of my commitment to an open thesis approach. Comments (moderated) are welcome and will be gathered on my SFU website. For now, the commenting function there does not appear to be working, so please e-mail me at hgmorris at sfu dot ca. I will assume any comments are for public posting unless notified otherwise. Many thanks to my senior supervisor Rick Gruneau for working with me on this experiment.

Assessing new open access journals

2011-03-06T12:53:00.000-08:00

One question that often comes up as we transition to open access publishing is how to assess new open access journals. How do we know that these are legitimate? Here is my answer, informed and inspired by conversation on the SCHOLCOMM listserv, and reflecting my own perspective.

THE KEY QUESTION for assessing the quality of any academic journal, is whether the journal is the communication vehicle for a group of serious scholars committed to appropriate quality control such as peer review.

SOME APPROACHES TO ANSWERING THIS KEY QUESTION:

If you have received a solicitation to participate in an academic journal, who did this come from? A colleague that you know and trust? A leader in your field? Or someone you have never heard of?
Who edits the journal? Again, people you know, leaders in your field? In the case of a new publisher that you heard about from someone who don't know, it is a good practice to double check with people whose names are listed as being on the editorial advisory board, as there have been instances of new publishers listing people without their knowledge or permission. Note that if the journal is legitimate, the editorial board member will appreciate your interest in the journal.
Are the peer review guidelines posted on the website? If so, are they appropriate for this discipline?
If the journal has already published some issues, what is the quality of the work included?
Who publishes this journal? What is their mandate and reputation? There are many not-for-profits involved in publishing, including university presses, university libraries, and scholarly societies. The not-for-profit mandate is not a guarantor of quality, but it is a strong indication that the primary motive is scholarship rather than profit. Reputation is another important indicator. A number of open access publishers, both not-for-profit and for-profit, have earned a reputation for quality publishing, including Public Library of Science, BioMedCentral, and Hindawi, among others. A new commercial outfit may well be aiming for top quality, but it will (and should) have its work cut out for it to establish a reputation for quality.
An indirect measure of reputation is membership in the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), as OASPA vets members on these quality questions. Note that there is a waiting list of prospective members.
Another indirect measure is inclusion of the journal in the Directory of Open Access Journals as DOAJ has a quality control vetting process.

OTHER FACTORS TO CONSIDER

Does the journal use CC licensing? Preferably one of the strong CC licenses for open access, including CC-BY, CC-BY-NC, or CC-BY-SA.
Is the journal fully open access?
Is the journal firmly committed to open access?
Asking about participation in OASPA and/or DOAJ may help nudge journals to consider these options. For some, the vetting process may help them to develop best practices in quality control.

NEW JOURNALS will not be included in DOAJ, and new publishers will not be listed in OASPA. In these situations, it is best to rely on the academic community involved in the journal as the best indicator of quality.

Caroline Sutton, President of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers' Association (OASPA) notes that she frequently gets questions about whether new publishers should be considered trustworthy, and her answer is whether the publisher supports what she articulates as the core values of open access publishers - for details, see her presentation at ALA Midwinter 2011 - towards the end of the presentation.

Thanks to Jean Amaral, Sandy Thatcher, Hope Leman, and Peter Suber for contributions to the SCHOLCOMM discussion that inspired this post.

References (added November 15, 2011 - thanks to Nicole Gjertsen).

Beall, J. Predatory Open Access Scholarly Publishers. The Charleston Advisor 11: 4, April 2010 10-17.

Beall, J. Update: Predatory Open Access Scholarly Publishers. The Charleston Advisor 12:1, July 2010, pp. 50-50.

Updated March 29, 2011 (included link to Caroline Sutton's presentation).

The path to peace is through hearts and minds

2011-03-05T20:05:00.000-08:00

Proposal for round table on The University in Crisis: Tradition, innovation, and employment in Communications departments, Emerging Scholars Network, International Association of Media Communication Researchers (IAMCR) 2011 conference

The purpose of this presentation is to explore options for humanities & social sciences in general, and communication in particular, to advocate for support and growth by articulating our value to the world. What counts is not always what can be counted. In a post-9/11 world, where our emphasis seems to increasingly be narrowing on science, technology, and commerce, we (humankind) should be asking ourselves whether the road to lasting peace could ever come through science & technology, or whether this is a matter of hearts and minds. To avoid the immanent catastrophe of global warming requires nothing less than a global change in behavior. Fixing a global financial system that is prone to the kind of crisis we saw in 2008 will take some creative thinking, not only about economics, but politics, too. The arts and culture are among the very best of what we humans do; they make life worthwhile. My thesis is that it is worthwhile for some of us scholars to spend some time analyzing and explaining why it is that humanities and social sciences in general, and communication studies in particular, matter, because when we do, our societies will soon understand the importance of supporting our work. I will draw on theories of rationalization and commodification (e.g. Weber, Marx, Lukacs) and alternatives, including values rationality (Weber), the commons (e.g. Lessig, Boyle, Ostrom), and transnational advocacy networks (Keck and Sikkink). I will further draw on my background as an open access advocate to provide some examples of how to effectively advocate in this area, and explain why providing open access to our own scholarly work can help us make the case.

Proposal submitted March 5, 2011. I am posting the proposal on submission because the work of advocating for humanities and social sciences is urgent.

Illustrating of the potential for savings with a global shift to open access

2011-03-01T21:05:00.000-08:00

This chart, Global library cost comparison with OA options, illustrates the potential for cost savings with a full flip to open access if we look for efficiencies along the way.

On the left, we see the $8 billion U.S. in revenue from journals received by the scholarly publishing industry. Of this, about $5.6 billion is revenue from academic library subscriptions. Compare this to the $2.5 billion it would cost to publish every one of the world's estimated 1.5 million scholarly articles produced annually on a worldwide basis at the BioMedCentral standard fee of $1,680, for a total of $2.5 billion. This would be full global open access to scholarly articles at less than half of what academic libraries are contributing to the system now. The savings would be even greater at average PLoS ONE fee of $1,350. On the right hand side, we see what would if happen the current $188 average per-article revenue for journals using OJS were to apply across the board, the global total of $.2 billion would be a tiny fraction of the current spend - less than 3%.

The next chart, Comparison of per-article revenue, illustrates what to me is a central point is considering the economics of transition to open access, that is: as we shift the economics from purchase to production, the cost per article is critical in determining the feasibility and sustainability of the system. On the left, we see the average per-article revenue received in the current system of over $5,000. This is compared with the BioMedCentral standard article processing fee and PLoS ONE, about a third of the current per-article revenue. Since both BMC and PLoS ONE are doing well financially, this illustrates that high quality publishing is possible at less than a third of the present revenue. On the right hand side, we see the average revenue for an OJS journal of $188, illustrating that the traditional scholarly gift economy can manage essentially the same work for about 3 percent of the current average revenue.

These numbers are meant to be suggestive only, one guideline to consider in the transition to open access.

Recommendations
If the goal is an affordable open access scholarly publishing system, it makes sense to support scholar-publishers of the type included in the OJS survey, and it makes sense to support cost-effective charges like the BMC standard and PLoS ONE.

Sources
The $8 billion U.S. annually for scholarly journals revenue is from the Research Information Network (2008)Activities, costs and funding flows in the scholarly communications system in the UK, retrieved from http://is.gd/3Q7cm as cited in the STM report. 2009. International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM). Retrieved from: http://www.stm-assoc.org/

Global annual scholarly peer-reviewed articles is estimated at 1.5 million per year, as reported by Björk et al, Global annual volume of peer reviewed scholarly articles and the share available via different open access options, ELPUB 2008, retrieved from http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~elpub2008/presentations.html

The PLoS ONE and BMC article processing fees are from the respective websites as of March 1, 2011.

The $188 average revenue per OJS journal is from a survey by Edgar, Brian & John Willinsky. A Survey of the Scholarly Journals Using Open Journal Systems. 2011. In press. Retrieved from http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/2773

This post is an update and elaboration of earlier charts I developed for IJPE and various presentations.

Typo correction March 5: number of peer-reviewed articles per year is 1.5 million, not 1.5 billion. Thanks to Douglas Carnall for spotting the error.

Tetrahedron article processing fee: overpriced. very.

2011-02-09T22:28:00.000-08:00

This post is from a Liblicense message and forms part of a February 2011 discussion revolving around Tetrahedron and Harvard's open access fund.

One point that I have not yet seen in this discussion: is Tetrahedron's article processing fee overpriced? I would argue yes, very.

If Tetrahedron is charging $3,000 per article, while the American Physical Society is charging $1,500 for their new OA journal Physical Review X, and Nature is charging $1,350 for their forthcoming OA journal Scientific Reports, and both Springer and Wiley have announced competitive lower prices on their new OA journal suites (compared to their hybrid journal prices), then perhaps Tetrahedron has priced themselves out of the emerging OA market - which in the long run does not bode well either for Tetrahedron or its publisher.

I would recommend that Harvard researchers take advantage of the opportunity to self-archive Tetrahedron articles in DASH, and NOT consider paying the Tetrahedron APF, on the grounds that the cost is excessive.

To speculate a little: is it possible that this trend toward more affordable article processing fees is an early indication of the success of COPE (Compact on Open Access Publishing Equity)? Restricting COPE funding to fully OA journals appears (to me) to be helping to inspire the creation of new affordable OA journals. In the long run, this is what will create the new, affordable OA system of which Darnton speaks.

Some of the present players in the scholarly publishing system are obviously leading in the transition, while (not too surprisingly) some may be lagging behind.

Core Values of Librarianship

2011-02-05T15:30:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the American Library Association for articulating these 11 Core Values of Librarianship. I'm repeating the full list here - for convenience as I've had trouble finding these on the ALA website before - and also because they are worth repeating. This is what librarianship is all about!

The foundation of modern librarianship rests on an essential set of core values, which define, inform, and guide all professional practice. These values reflect the history and ongoing development of the profession and have been advanced, expanded, and refined by numerous policy statements of the American Library Association. Among these are:

Access
Confidentiality/Privacy
Democracy
Diversity
Education and Lifelong Learning
Intellectual Freedom
Preservation
The Public Good
Professionalism
Service
Social Responsibility

It would be difficult, if not impossible, to express our values more eloquently than ALA already has in the Freedom to Read statement, the Library Bill of Rights, the ALA Mission Statement, Libraries: an American Value and other documents. These policies have been carefully thought out, articulated, debated, and approved by the ALA Council. They are interpreted, revised, or expanded when necessary. Over time, the values embodied in these statements have been embraced by the majority of librarians as the foundations of their practice. Adopted, 2004.

Thanks to Al Kagan for the pointer.

Bill C-32 (Canada's copyright reform act) - response from an open access advocate

2011-01-28T13:57:00.000-08:00

This is a copy of my response to the consultation on Bill C-32, Canada's copyright reform act. Details and links to other responses can be found on Michael Geist's blog. Comments are due by January 31.

Speaking as a scholarly author/creator, student, teacher, and librarian, here are my comments on what I see as the most critical aspects to consider with Bill C-32.

DIGITAL LOCKS AND PROTECTION OF DIGITAL LOCKS SHOULD BE LIMITED TO PREVENTING ILLEGAL USE OF MATERIAL

As Bill C-32 stands, circumvention of digital locks would be illegal, even if the use of the material is perfectly legal (e.g., private copying, making works accessible to the print disabled). This is a deeply troubling provision. There is no protection at all for authors such as myself who share our work freely on the Internet. What is to stop someone from putting a lock in between my work and those who would like to read it? My point is that if there are to be any provisions regarding digital locks, these should limit placing locks which circumvent legal use. If anyone places a lock on work that I have made freely available, the law should protect my right to share, and my reader's right to have the lock removed.

Facilitating legal use should be REQUIRED, not just permitted. Selling digitally locked down materials that effectively prevent use by the print disabled is a practice that deserves to be outlawed, not protected!

FAIR DEALING FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES JUST MAKES SENSE

Canada is far behind other countries such as the U.S. when it comes to sharing material for educational purposes. Canada's educational systems spend a great deal of money on materials covered by copyright, and this will not change with expanded fair dealing. It is in the best interests of creators to support education; without basic literacy, for example, there would be little need for written material of any kind.

COPYRIGHT LAW SHOULD RECOGNIZE AND SUPPORT THE EXPANDING NUMBERS OF CREATORS WHO PREFER TO SHARE WORKS FREELY
As a typical scholarly author, I write works in order to contribute to advancing the world's knowledge, and the ideal for me is to share my works freely, for example through my institutional repository:
http://ir.lib.sfu.ca/handle/1892/79/items-by-author?author=Morrison%2C+Heather
and my scholarly blog, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com

Like many in today's society, I have contributed Creative Commons licensed photos for free sharing to flickr, and occasionally participate in free collaborative services such as the Open Access Directory and Wikipedia.

As a prolific author / creator, what I would like to see is:

a guarantee that works which I have made freely available will remain freely available
elimination of automatic copyright (no copyright without registration)
elimination of Crown Copyright; replace this with a requirement for open access to government-funded work
shorter copyright periods, e.g. 14 years with one extension (and this not automatic)
make it possible to place work directly into the public domain

Many thanks for the opportunity to participate. I will post a copy of this response to my blog, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com

best,

Heather G. Morrison
Doctoral Candidate
Simon Fraser University School of Communication
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/
hgmorris at sfu dot ca

Access Copyright Insanity - Possible Solutions?

2011-01-18T15:10:00.001-08:00

Access Copyright, Canada's copyright collective, is asking for an absolutely ludicrous tariff increase (about a tenfold increase from about $3.5 to $35 per post-secondary student), at the same time that they are looking for increased restrictions (no linking please!) and paperwork (e.g. having students sign a form saying that they are in fact a student, and using the work for their studies). This is all on top of libraries paying top dollar for the content, by the way.

Some possible solutions that libraries might want to consider:

Ask Access Copyright for a complete list of members / works covered. Don't buy any of their stuff. Who doesn't have way too much to read as it is? Besides, this will filter out anyone so out of touch that they think forbidding hyperlinking on the internet makes sense.
If you MUST buy their stuff, set up a separate site on your website for this material, appropriately labelled - perhaps with an icon including a hefty lock and chain and/or wording to the effect, USE THIS LOCKED DOWN MATERIAL AT YOUR OWN LEGAL PERIL.
Send Access Copyright a bill for about 10 times what they think you should pay them. This actually does make sense for a university library; think of how many faculty and students are creators, particularly of works in the academic library. Why are WE paying THEM at all, anyway?

Another thought: if Access Copyright members have issues with people reading and citing their work, what will this do to the Open Access Citation Impact Advantage? My prediction is that this will increase the difference.

On the plus side, we should all be grateful to Access Copyright for demands that so obviously show the lunacy of lock-down in academia that faculty members are now flocking to solutions such as Open Educational Resources.

Nature Publishing Group and Scientific Reports: getting serious about OA competition

2011-01-12T17:40:00.000-08:00

Kudos to Nature Publishing Group on their announcement of their forthcoming open access publication Scientific Reports. Priced at $1,350 US per accepted manuscript and using Creative Commons licensing shows that Nature is finally getting serious about competing in the open access arena. Also of significance is that Nature is providing ethical leadership in this area by contributing support to Creative Commons in the form of $20 per article, as well as supporting broader author's rights than many OA publications by offering two CC license options.

This can be seen as a qualitative sign of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access, as it is clear that the commercial sector is seeing the growth and deciding that open access is where the market is likely to be going. In my opinion, this is also a harbinger of future OA growth, as the reasonable article processing fee is likely to attract greater uptake than many earlier OA experiments by traditional publishers. This is also a welcome sign that some of the traditional quality publishers are likely to have the flexibility to transition to and thrive in the open access environment.

Welcome to Nature's Scientific Reports! Nature is not on the list of Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) members - at least, not yet! Perhaps they are on the waiting list mentioned by OASPA President Caroline Sutton at the ACRL SPARC Forum at ALA Midwinter this weekend?

Hindawi's 40% growth in submissions in 2010

2011-01-12T17:29:00.000-08:00

Paul Peters of Hindawi reports that Hindawi exceeded 3,000 monthly submissions for the first time in December 2010, up from reaching 2,000 monthly submissions for the first time in August 2010. Overall, growth in submissions for Hindawi was 40% in 2010.

Congratulations to Hindawi for yet another indication of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access!

PLoS ONE: now the world's largest journal?

2011-01-05T17:24:00.000-08:00

This post explores data strongly suggesting that open access journal PLoS ONE is now the world's largest journal. According to Pete Binfield (personal correspondence), in 2010 PLoS One published 6,749 articles. Based on listserv discussions in 2008, the world's largest journals at that date were PHYS REV B (5782 articles) and APPL PHYS LETT (5449 articles). As of today, a search for 2010 articles at the APS website yields 6,206 articles. A search for 2010 articles for APPL PHYS LETT in IEEE's xPLore service yields 4,381 articles.

So it is timely to raise the question: is the world's largest scholarly journal now an open access journal, PLoS One? If anyone has data that can help to illuminate this issue, please join the conversation started by Daniel Mietchen at Friend Feed, or send me an e-mail at hgmorris at sfu dot ca.

Update January 21, 2012: since this post was written, in 2011 PLoS ONE growth doubled, to just under 14,000 articles published in 2011 alone. Details and chart available in the December 31, 2012 issue of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access.

Methodology Note: this post is an informal brief research project, based on consultation with library and publisher experts on the size of the world's largest journals, presented for informal peer collaboration and academic critique. It is also an update of this post from 2009 projecting PLoS ONE as the world's largest journal in 2010. The number of articles published in 2010 in PLoS ONE is less than projected, but still apparently more than enough to make PLoS ONE the world's largest research journal. This post forms part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

2010 Dramatic Growth of Open Access

2010-12-31T17:58:00.000-08:00

2010 was the strongest year for open access growth so far. In 2010, 1,401 journals were added to DOAJ for a total of 5,936 journals. The Electronic Journals Library now records over 27,000 journals that can be read free of charge; over 3,500 were added in 2010. 1,037 journals actively participate in PubMedCentral, an increase of 313 over the past year, and more than half of these journals contribute all articles as open access. PMC now provides access to over 3.2 million free articles, an increase of over 300,000 this year. OpenDOAR lists 1,817 repositories, having added 257 this year. A Scientific Commons search encompasses 38 million items, an increase of over 6 million since last year. There are 261 open access mandate policies, an increase of 83 this year.

Open access mandate policies showed the strongest growth in percentage terms, with a 90% increase in thesis mandates and a 61% increase in departmental mandates, 47% growth in total mandates, and 41% growth in institutional mandates. For links to full details and charts on OA mandate growth, see this post by Alma Swan. A total of 7 measures showed growth of 40% or better, including DOAJ's journals and articles searchable at article level. 7 measures showed growth of 30% or better, including the number of journals in PMC with immediate free access (37%) and the number of journals in PMC with all articles open access (34%), the number of peer-reviewed journals included in Open J-Gate (36%), and the total number of journals included in Open J-Gate (31%), the number of repositories listed in ROAR (34%), and the number of proposed open access mandates (33%). A further 11 measures were 10% or better, including BASE content providers, RePEC (both total items and items available online), and the number of documents in E-LIS and arXiv.

New this issue: historical data has been added to the full data edition (see the DGOA Dataverse to download), thanks to Tim Gray of Homerton College Library) and the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The show growth issue focuses on 2010 growth, and includes columns for average daily, weekly, and monthly growth for illustration purposes. New additions include Mendeley and the open data journal policies list at the Open Access Directory (the latter as a first foray into tracking the dramatic growth of open data). A first edition of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access Rationale and Methodology is now available for download from the DGOA Dataverse or for viewing as a Google Doc. For full data that is downloadable as the Dec 31 2010 full data edition or the Dec 31 2010 show growth edition, see the DGOA Dataverse at Harvard; for quick web viewing of the latest data, see the Google Docs Show Growth version. For links to all versions and commentary, see the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series.

This post was updated Jan. 1, 2010, adding links to Alma Swan's post and the services listed below, and on Jan. 2, 2010, adding links to the Polish version created by E-LIS Editor Bożena Bednarek-Michalska, which can be found here and here. Updated again Jan. 4, adding this link to MIT stats showing the popularity of open educational resources.

A Happy New Year to everyone in the open access movement!

The numbers: open access status and growth in 2010

DOAJ (peer-reviewed, active, open access journals)

5,936 journals (1,401 journals added in 2010, growth rate 4 titles per day) 31% growth
2,494 journals searchable at article level (735 added in 2010, growth rate 2 per day) 42% growth
490,411 articles searchable at article level (154,912 added in 2010, growth rate 424 per day) 46% growth

Open J-Gate

8,105 journals (1,907 added in 2010, growth rate 5 titles per day) 31% growth
4,877 peer-reviewed journals (1,297 added in 2010, growth rate 3.5 titles per day) 36% growth

Electronic Journals Library (journals that can be read free of charge)

27,030 journals (3,591 added in 2010, growth rate 10 titles per day) 15% growth

Open Journal Systems Journals: 7,500 (about 1,500 growth in 2010)

PubMedCentral Journals

1,037 journals actively participating (313 added in 2010, growth rate about 1 title per day) 43% growth
622 journals provide immediate free access (169 more than a year ago) 37% growth
532 journals provide OA to all articles (136 more than a year ago) 34% growth

PubMedCentral Articles

3.2 million articles (314,422 added in 2010) (see PMC Free tab) (11% growth)
CIHR-funded articles freely available: 4,464 (new to DGOA)
Wellcome Trust funded articles freely available: 27,572 (new to DGOA)

OpenDOAR (vetted list of repositories)

1,817 repositories (259 added in 2010, growth rate about 1 repository per day) 17% growth

Registry of Open Access Repositories

2,090 repositories (533 added in 2010, growth rate about 2 repositories per day) 34% growth

BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)

25.5 million documents (3.5 million added in 2010, growth rate about 10,000 per day) 16% growth
1,727 content providers (323 added in 2010, growth rate about 1 repository per day) 23% growth
IS BASE's number counter broken? The numbers have not changed this quarter

Scientific Commons

38 million publications (6 million added in 2010, growth rate about 16,000 per day) 19% growth
1,269 repositories (111 added in 2010) 10% growth
IS Scientific Commons' number counter broken? The numbers have not changed this quarter

arXiv

650,000 thousand documents (70,092 added in 2010, growth rate about 200 per day) 12% growth

RePEc

860,000 fulltext online (160,000 added in 2010, growth rate over 400 per day) 23% growth

E-LIS

11,420 documents (1,308 added in 2010, growth rate 3.5 documents per day) 13% growth

Mendeley

56 million metadata records; 297,189 articles freely available (new to DGOA)

Open Access Mandate Policies (from ROARMAP)

Departmental: 29 (11 added in 2010) 61% growth
Funder: 46 (4 added in 2010) 10% growth
Institutional: 111 (36 added in 2010) 41% growth
Multi-institutional: 1 (1 added in 2010)
Thesis: 74 (35 added in 2010) 90% growth
Total: 261 (83 added in 2010) 47% growth
Proposed mandates: 20 (up 5 from 2010) 33% growth

Open Data Policies: 14 (new to DGOA) (from Open Access Directory journals with open data policies, proposed list)

Highwire Free

2.1 million free articles (161,030 added in 2010) 8% growth
47 completely free sites (1 added in 2010) 2% growth
284 sites with free back issues (1 added in 2010) less than 1% growth

WANTED: macro-level metrics for open data

The open data movement is closely related to the open access movement, and of great interest and use to scholars. It is obvious that there is a lot happening; currently one of my best sources of information is Tracey Lauriault of civicaccess.ca and datalibre.ca fame. As an aside, it is a little ironic that data phenomenon / statistician Tracey is the source par excellence for qualitative information on this matter, whilst I, the critical scholar rather inclined to look with scepticism at purely quantitative research, am apparently the volunteer keeper of the quarterly statistics for the open access movement. Glen Newton points to the 70 online databases that define our planet, from Technology Review, the arXiv physics blog, as further qualitative evidence that there is a lot of quantitative data out there already.

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series.

Dramatic Growth of Open Access brief update: chart showing gold growth

2010-12-20T13:57:00.000-08:00

Revised and updated Dec. 23, 2010

This chart by Peter Hendrik, President, Springer STM Publishing, from Hendrik's presentation at the 2010 Berlin Open Access Conference in Beijing, (based on information from Thompson-Reuters) predicting possible OA article growth at 20% compared to total article growth of 3.5% by 2020 is well worth noting.

Why is this worth noting? Interesting as this projection is per se, the reason that this is important is because it reflects two players very much from the commercial traditional subscription journal market predicting stronger growth of open access articles than overall article growth. The two players are Springer and Thompson-Reuters. Such predictions are not new, of course; I have been making similar predictions for years. So what is new is not the prediction, but who is making the prediction. To the best of my knowledge, this is new; but if I am wrong, please correct me.

Other interesting aspects of Hendrik's presentation: the fact that a senior Springer Executive is presenting at an open access conference, highlighting what Springer has to offer in this area; a chart showing hybrid OA update by disciplines (not surprisingly, biology and medicine show higher update); a slide on price adjustments for hybrid journals (no figures - if anyone has figures, let me know); a slide (# 13) on gold OA growth - selected details:

From Hendrik's slide 13 - 'Gold' Open Access is growing fast

approx. 4% of ISI-indexed articles in 2009 are gold OA
BMC - 18,000 articles in 2009; 21% growth
PLoS - 6,000 articles in 2009, 50% growth
Hindawi - 4,000 articles in 2009, 75% growth

Many thanks to Hendrik for this presentation, and to A. Ben Wagner for pointing to the citation. This originally came to my attention through Stevan Harnad at the American Scientist Open Access Forum, who posted the chart linked to above in order to critique it. Harnad has posted to the effect that he thinks my brief interpretation of the chart he posted (i.e. much higher OA article growth than total article growth predicted) is full of errors. My perspective on this is that Harnad is missing the forest (the fact that it is now traditional commercial subscription publishers seeing and predicting strong open access, an excellent omen for future OA growth - if these folks are seeing the potential of OA, they have the ability to push it further forward and the incentive to do so) for the trees (the details of the numbers - from my point of view, this is forecasting and I have no concern with whether the forecast is correct or not. My perspective is that there is sufficient open access out there - archives, journals publishers - to prove the concept. The Springers of the world may need to forecast due to their commercial nature, but for most of us this is not necessary - what we need to do is not to forecast, but rather to adopt and implement strong open access policy, infrastructure for OA publishing and archives, and shift the economics to OA, to make it happen).

Libraries: is this YOUR free cash? informa (Taylor & Francis) glowing picture for investors

2010-12-16T20:23:00.000-08:00

While libraries are reeling from severe budget cuts due to the financial crisis, how are the commercial publishers that rely on us doing? Hurting too? Not really, it seems. Here is what informa (Taylor & Francis) is telling investors today:

The strong portfolio of products within the Informa stable allows the group highly favourable valuation characteristics including:

* Excellent free cash generation
* High return on capital employed
* Excellent quality of earnings - significant subscription revenues with high renewal rates
* High margins especially on data and subscription products
* High operational gearing and cost flexibility
* Products which do and will continue to benefit from technological advances and changing consumer trends

From: informa / Investor Relations

What does this mean?

Excellent free cash generation = when we send in our subscription payments, they have tons of cash on hand. In ordinary household terms: when you get your paycheque, the money is not all going to pay the bills right away, you pay these off and have lots of spending money.

High return on capital employed = for what they spend on getting the journals, they get way more money back.

High margins especially on data and subscription revenues with high renewal rates = high profits. Does it mean that they could afford to give your library a MUCH bigger discount - say 30 to 40 % more - and still more than cover their costs? Yes, it does. I don't have enough detail to specify the amount, but this does seem reasonable to ask.

High operational gearing and cost flexibility = even though they are making way more than it costs to produce the journals, they are finding ways to cut corners and make even more profits. If they are passing on some of the savings to your library, please let me know!

Products which do and will continue to benefit from technological advances and changing consumer trends = they think no matter what happens, they will just keep on making more and more money.

This post is part of the economics 101 series.

Dramatic Growth honoured by Intech's Katarina Lovrecic

2010-12-16T17:32:00.000-08:00

The Dec. 11, 2010 Dramatic Growth of Open Access has been highlighted in Katarina Lovrecic's End of the year open access highlights. Well worth a read - thanks, Katarina!

Dramatic Growth of Open Access Dec. 11, 2010 comment and reply

2010-12-16T16:08:00.000-08:00

Revised Dec. 17, 2010 - comment on renaissance of the scholar / publisher from Willinsky & Edgar added.

Phil Davis on the Scholarly Kitchen has posted the comment, For Open Access Journals, the Size does Matter, as a comment on my Dec. 11, 2010 early year-end edition of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access.

Comment

In brief

The growth of open access is particularly amazing given how little economic support has been made available so far. The economic target that I would suggest is high-quality, fully open access publishing that is economically sustainable or cost-effective. The number of open access journal titles is an indirect indication of the growth of open access publishing per se, which would ideally be measured by the number of articles published open access. As the DOAJ search by article service grows, this measure may become more feasible over time. Nevertheless, the number of titles per se is important as an indication of OA infrastructure, that is, the ability of open access to grow rapidly, given a little support. Behind the many fairly new, relatively small journals listed in DOAJ is a substantial new publishing system which can support many more titles; and small journals with relatively few articles could easily grow with even a little redirection of funding. These are just a few of the reasons why it makes a lot of sense for libraries to join the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity. Online-only, open access journals are not the same as print or subscription-based journals, and so it does not make sense to apply the same measures to assess the success of these journals - for example, the need to bundle a certain amount of articles for a print artefact, or to justify subscriptions has implications for the number of articles needed for a successful print and/or subscription-based journal that does not necessarily apply to an online open access journal. Willinsky & Edgar, reporting on a major survey of journals using OJS, describe the current situation as a renaissance of the scholar publisher.

Details

This is a welcome discussion of this important topic. Phil's main point seems to be that OA publishing is not yet a clear-cut success, particularly from an economic viewpoint. I would agree with this point. What is amazing to me is how much OA has grown with so little funding made available. To create further growth and to transition scholarly communication as a whole to open access, what libraries need to do is to transition funding to OA support. A good first step, one that does not require tough budgetary decisions, is simply joining the Compact on Open Access Publishing Equity - highly recommended as an OA New Year's Resolution.

Phil's first question, with respect to the dramatic growth of DOAJ is: "But does this type of growth really indicate economic success in open access publishing?". My comment: there is an assumption in this question, that the purpose of open access is economic success. From my perspective, this is worth querying. Why success rather than sustainability or cost-effectiveness? What kind of success is Phil looking for? High profits? Why not fully open access, high quality publishing at sustainable or cost-effective rates? - this is what I recommend.

Phil goes on to cover an article in First Monday by Frantsvåg which takes issue with the size of publishers in DOAJ, noting that most (90%) are publishers of single journals. One of Frantsvåg's key points is that small publishers lack economies of scale. From an economic perspective, I would first like to note that due to an inelastic market, mega-publishers with large portfolios of journals and fat profit margins are part of the problem, not part of the solution (a topic I deal with at length in my book, Scholarly Communication for Librarians, unfortunately not OA).

Next, I would like to point out that small publishing is typical of scholarly publishers, as Raym Crow points out in his paper on Publishing Cooperatives, downloadable from the SPARC Papers and Guides website. The dramatic growth of open access journals may reflect a renewal of scholarly leadership in this area. Publishing cooperatives is one of the solutions to creating economies of scale for smaller publishers.

Also, with modern publishing software, such as the free, open source Open Journal Systems, it is quite feasible for a single scholarly journal to manage on its own with modest support services provided by a university library or service such as Scholarly Exchange.

Another important point is that the early proliferation of many small publishing outfits likely reflects the growth in publishing support services, particularly new scholarly publishing services at university libraries. That is, behind a great many of these small publishers stands a very new publishing service representing a significant infrastructure ready to take off - just one of the reasons that I very much look forward to future editions of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access.

Edgar and Willinsky describe the flourishing growth of journals using OJS (over 7,500 journals worldwide) as a renaissance of the scholar publisher, in their report of a major survey of OJS journals.

Excerpt:
"In marked contrast to the findings of other studies, only 6 percent of these journals are
published by commercial houses, compared to the 64 percent reported by Ware and Mabe (2009) and Crow (2005). Scholarly societies published 32 percent of the titles in this sample, exceeding the 23 percent that Crow found scholarly societies “self-publishing” in his study of journals as a whole (with societies having turned over 17 percent of the journals being published to commercial publishers to publish on the society’s behalf). This leaves the vast majority of the journals in this sample as published or sponsored by an academic department (51 percent), a non-profit publisher (16 percent), research unit (10 percent) and independent group (10 percent), although these percentages cannot be added up, as respondents could choose more than one sponsor (Table 2). As well, it needs to be allowed that commercially published journals would be less likely to complete such a survey, given a noted reluctance among this constituency to share information about publishing practices (Houghton et al., 2009). Still, these results suggest that the majority of these journals fall into what can be identified as the independent or scholar-publisher titles." AND "Yet this sample also stands apart from the majority of journals. Where a small number of large commercial publishers now dominate journal publishing (Crow, 2005), this study found that commercial entities formed the smallest category of publisher. The scholar-publisher – or more accurately the group-of-scholars-as-publisher – is responsible for the majority of journals in this study, constituting a type that dates back to the earliest days of the journal, when Henry Oldenburg launched the Philosophical Transactions as an independent, albeit commercial, venture. The scholarpublisher is now experiencing, this study suggests, a certain renaissance, facilitated by online, open access."

Phil goes on to comment on an article by Walters forthcoming in College and Research Libraries, Characteristics of Open Access Journals in Six Subject Areas. Walters notes the wide variety in open access journals in publishers, with one journal publishing more than 2,700 articles in a year, while many others publish less than 25 articles per year.

Phil seems to think that journals must be of a certain size to be successful. With electronic-only, online open access publishing, I would challenge this view. A print-based journal needs to have a certain quantity of articles for regular mailings to make sense; generally somewhat the same quantity for consistency. This is not the case with online journals at all; there is no a priori reason why an online journal needs to have a particular number of articles to be a success.

One of Phil's points, that the growth of gold OA is better measured by articles than by journal titles, is something that I very much agree with (and the reason I always include the number of articles available through a DOAJ search). On the other hand, the number of journal titles is an important indication of infrastructure for OA. That is to say - if there are many OA journals that are currently publishing relatively few articles, it is highly likely that these journals could easily accomodate tremendous growth in demand for OA publishing - particularly if this transition were accompanied by a redirection of funding from subscriptions to open access. This is an indication of readiness for further growth, which is important to know!

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series