Vancouver enters the age of the open city

Update: Vancouver City Council endorsed this motion on May 21, 2009.

Text of the central portion of Andrea Reimer's motion:

Be it resolved that the City of Vancouver endorses the principles of:

* Open and accessible data: The City of Vancouver will freely share with citizens, businesses and other jurisdictions the greatest amount of data possible while respecting privacy and security concerns.
* Open standards: The City of Vancouver will move as quickly as possible to adopt prevailing open standards for data, documents, maps and other formats of media.
* Open source software: The City of Vancouver, when replacing existing software or considering new applications, will place open source software on an equal footing with commercial systems during procurement cycles.

from: CBCnews.ca

A motion to go before Vancouver City Council to support open standards, open data, open source: http://eaves.ca/2009/05/14/vancouver-enters-the-age-of-the-open-city/

Thanks to Cory Horner and the civicaccess list.

This post is part of the Canadian Leadership in the Open Access Movement series.

[Disclosure: I am very proud to call Vancouver home!]

Enhancing the debate on open access: knowledge for all, not just all researchers

The International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) and the International Publishers Association (IPA) have just released a joint statement on Enhancing the debate on open access, calling for a more rational, less heated approach to open access.

Excerpt from the IFLA/IPA statement:

2. IFLA and IPA recognise that the concerns of academic authors must be at the heart of this debate - their scientific freedom, and their needs as researchers, teachers, authors, reviewers and users are paramount.
3. IFLA and IPA acknowledge that the broadest possible access to scholarly communications is an important shared objective and that potential access to all research by all researchers, irrespective of geographical location or institutional affiliation is a shared aspiration of libraries and publishers.

Comment:

This statement places the concerns of academic authors at the centre of the debate, and assumes that access for all researchers is at issue. What about the rest of us? Students, educators, the taxpayers who fund much of the academic research, medical and other professionals, the developing world where there are many fewer academic authors and researchers? My perspective: knowledge is for all, and the goal of open access is access for all.

The Open Access Imperative and Education

As originally posted to the liblicense list, May 12, 2009.

Recently, a question was raised on liblicense as to whether open
access is necessary outside of the field of medicine.

The answer is: YES!!

While the moral imperative of open access is perhaps most easily seen
in the field of medicine, the same arguments apply across the
disciplines.

One example is the field of Education. Even at the very
wealthiest universities where students and faculty have access to
all the literature in this field, access to the scholarly
literature for the practising educator, parents and other
professionals involved in education (such as school-based social
workers), is for all practical purposes limited to what is freely
available. Evidence-based practice is this area - teachers who
are able to keep up with the latest in their field and look up
answers to issues that come up in the classroom - requires open
access. School library budgets tend to be very limited; a school
library that has all the resources that it needs to meet the
needs of the students is indeed fortunate. A school library with
sufficient resources to meet the needs of teachers and
administrators is truly exceptional.

Fortunately, ERIC, the Educational Resources Information Centre,
has been making education indexing freely available for some
time, and is now providing as much full-text as possible.

The ERIC website can be found at: http://www.eric.ed.gov/

Education is a common human need, and is of necessity taught at
many post-secondary institutions that are not so wealthy. Here,
freely accessible resources can make a huge difference in the
quality of education for the future educator.

Outside of the wealthy, developed world, free access to scholarly
educational information could well be the key to making it
possible to training new educators. In our global world, we need
an educated populace around the world. If our neighbours
understand about environmental issues and how to identify and
deal with a potential new pandemic, we all benefit. This
understanding requires education, starting with the basics.

What goes around, comes around. Fortunately, lately a good deal
of what is going around is free access to the best of the
knowledge of humankind, our scholarly literature.

WolframAlpha: glimpse of the future

This 13-minute video is highly recommended as a glimpse of what can be done when data are open and our computational power is shared: http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html.

Highlights: type in 5 miles per minute and almost instantly have a list of useful and interesting conversion information; type in france fish production and quickly find out the total fish production per year in France - and that it is 1/5 of the annual trash production of New York!

See also Peter Suber's post on this topic on Open Access News.

Michael Geist's creative open access initiative!

Michael Geist has recently launched a very innovative approach to open access education, with his Friday Forum - a weekly series of virtual conferences - open access. The first Friday Forum features a virtual conference, consisting of selecting videos from other conferences, including speeches by OA leaders Melissa Hagemann, John Willinsky, and Peter Suber, Carl Malamud, Subbiah Arunachalam, Leslie Chan, and the publisher's perspective by Dr. Frances Pinter.

This post is part of the Canadian Leadership in the Open Access Movement series.

Hat tip to Peter Suber on Open Access News.

Heather's April-May 2009 presentations

My latest three presentations are now available in E-LIS:

Open Access in Canada - Overview and Update. BC Library Conference, April 2009.
With Devon Greyson, Don Taylor, and Andrew Waller. Highlight: Andrew's early announcement of the University of Calgary Libraries and Cultural Resources open access mandate policy.

Open Access: What's in it my for my library?. Alberta Library Conference, April 2009.
With Andrew Waller. Focus on the practical aspects of connecting readers with all those open access resources.

Open Access: Dramatic Growth & Policy.
Blogfesores, University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, May 8, 2009.
This presentation focuses on the dramatic growth of open access, with an emphasis on Puerto Rican / Latin leadership in the gold road, or open access publishing, and an overview of open access policy developments around the world.

University of Calgary Library Faculty Open Access Mandate

Kudos to the University of Calgary Library Faculty for their Open Access Mandate! Details are available at Open Access in Libraries & Cultural Resources, featuring a picture of Canadian librarian OA activist Andrew Waller seated at the desk.

This is a faculty-led mandate, in which Libraries & Cultural Resource staff commit to making their own work open access.

Text of the mandate:

As an active member of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, Libraries and Cultural Resources at the University of Calgary endorses the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing and the Berlin Declaration.

LCR academic staff members believe that the output of our scholarly activities should be as widely disseminated and openly available as possible. Our scholarly output includes but is not limited to journal articles, books and book chapters, presentations if substantial, conference papers and proceedings, and datasets.

Effective April 17, 2009, LCR academic staff commit to

* Deposit their scholarly output in the University of Calgary’s open access scholarly repository
* Promote Open Access on campus and assist scholars in making their research openly available
* Where possible, publish their research in an open-access journal"

Thanks to the University of Calgary Libraries and Cultural Resources for yet another example of Canadian Leadership in the Open Access Movement. Note that this is an inititiative that any library can take, without waiting for the university as a whole to adopt a mandate. This will provide a great training ground so that the library will be well prepared to provide support when the institution-wide mandate is adopted. This is assuming that every institution will eventually adopt an open access mandate; the benefits of OA to the institution are so compelling that my position is that ubiquitous institutional OA mandates are a matter of time (and hard work on advocacy, of course). For evidence of this coming ubiquitous OA mandate, see this post on the European University Association unanimous commitment to OA policy development.

ERIC adds 192,000 free fulltext from its microfiche collection

Kudos to ERIC, the Education Resources Information Centre, for digitizing and making freely available over 192,000 free full-text documents from its microfiche archive. This is over 55% of the archive. We can all help ERIC further this effort by helping to contact rightsholder to clear permission for the rest. This adds significant value to the free ERIC Index.

Hat tip to Peter Suber on Open Access News.

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

Canadian Health Services Research Foundation Open Access Policy

Another Canadian OA mandate! The Canadian Health Services Research Foundation now has an open access policy. For details and expert comment, see the blogpost of Canadian health librarian - OA advocate Devon Greyson at Social Justice Librarian.

Hat tip to Open Access News.

Open Sesame to the Digital World: an open access high school library

Congratulations to teacher-librarian Judith Comfort for a fabulous website and presentation at the BC Library Conference on her Open Access School Library.

Excerpt:

Open access, open mind

Teacher-librarians are needed more than ever.

Open Access has exploded online and captured the imagination of librarians, scholars, and students on a global scale. But how much of this has filtered down to school-age children?

Push open the door of the bricks-and-mortar school library. The place is abuzz with kids packing so many batteries, screens & wires that the security gate screams in protest. Gone are the study carrels as teachers expect collaboration amongst students.

Comment: Judith Comfort points out that teacher librarians are needed more than ever in the internet age, and I agree. While there is more information readily available on the web than anyone could ever read on virtually any topic, students need skills to know what to do with this information - basic literacy, information literacy, and media literacy skills. How to read, interpret, and evaluate the information. In the knowledge age, we will need knowledge workers, and this includes teachers, and librarians, of all types.

Thanks to Convenor Janet Mumford. This post is part of the Canadian Leadership in the Open Access Movement series.

Free access to The Cochrane Library for Canada

Announcement from The University of Ottawa's Cochrane Center:

The University of Ottawa’s Cochrane Center now offers Canadians free access to the health information found in The Cochrane Library Ottawa, April 15, 2009— The Canadian Cochrane Network and Centre announces today that everyone in Canada with access to the Internet will be able to view the full content of The Cochrane Library, an on-line resource that provides evaluations on health treatments.

The Canadian Cochrane Network and Centre, in partnership with the Canadian Health Libraries Association, has successfully secured a national license to The Cochrane Library. In essence, the license provides a subscription for every Canadian with access to the Internet to benefit from the immense volume of health information found in The Cochrane Library. Everybody will be one click away from the best available evidence on the effectiveness of treatment procedures including which ones may be harmful. “There are so many opinions and competing interests on the Internet claiming they have the best answers about people’s health care. Having access to The Cochrane Library will allow individuals to learn what the research says about what they need for better health.

This is truly ground-breaking,” remarked Dr Jeremy Grimshaw, Director of the Canadian Cochrane Network Centre (CCNC), Senior Scientist at the Ottawa Health Research Institute (the research arm of The Ottawa Hospital) and Professor at the University of Ottawa. While this new access will help inform health consumers, healthcare providers will also benefit from this pilot project. Healthcare practitioners will save valuable time to research the best patient treatment options through easy access to this wealth of health information.

“Health librarians across the country have long recognized and promoted the importance of access to the Cochrane Library as a key resource for evidence-based practice and decision-making,” said Dianne Kharouba, Canadian Health Libraries Association. To access the best on-line resource on health treatments, please visit:
www.thecochranelibrary.com.

Comment

This is a geographically limited form of access, not true open access. However, it should be noted that the Canadian Cochrane Centre does not have the rights to make this resource openly accessible to everyone in the world. Rather, they have extended access as broadly as they possibly could. Let's hope that all the Cochrane centers worldwide are inspired by this example, and work together to provide open access to this excellent resource to everyone, everywhere. This would be very good news indeed; the Cochrane Library brings together the best possible evidence on medical matters from around the world, and so is considered an authoritative source that health care professionals and consumers alike are well advised to consult.

This part is part of the Canadian leadership in the open access movement series.

Thanks to Sandy Slade.

Update April 20: free access is only for those who do NOT currently subscribe; institutions with subscriptions must continue their subscriptions. Thanks to Denise Koufogiannakis. While I do not know the full details, from my perspective if revenue from subscriptions is expected to continue, it is essential to involve the subscribers in the evolution towards a full open access model.

Don't leave Canada behind / open letter to Canadian government from Canadian researchers

Before research can be made open access - it has to happen! As stated in this letter from the Canadian research community: A new economy is coming out of this crisis and research and development will be the lifeblood to that new economy.. Canadian researchers are calling on the Canadian government to not leave Canada behind.

Excerpt:

Dear Prime Minister, Dear Leader of the Opposition

U.S. President Barack Obama is taking advantage of the current financial crisis to push his country forward in new directions by greatly boosting funding to scientific research and education as a means to jump start innovation in a new economy. The scope of his vision is stunning, including an increase of more than $15 billion in scientific research, and a promise to double the funding for education in the next 10 years. For more details, see


http://www.sciencedebate2008.com/www/index.php?id=62

Our government has also tried to stimulate the research / university sector in Canada, wishing to take important initiatives. At the heart of the plan is a $2 billion dollars infrastructure fund for shovel-ready renovation projects in post-secondary institutions, a fund that was actively solicited by university presidents. There is also an additional $750 million for the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), and $87.5 million over three years for doctoral scholarships. While these funding announcements are surely welcome, we would like to share our concerns as to the potential effect of some of these decisions, in particular in view of the bold and visionary course taken by the Obama administration south of the border.

Thanks to Danielle Dennie.

MIT open access policy: a model for Canada?

The latest CAUT Bulletin features the article MIT Faculty to Make Articles Freely Available to Public, which I am quoted as pointing to the MIT open access policy as a potential model for Canadian faculty. The full text of the article follows:


MIT Faculty to Make Articles Freely Available to Public

Faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have voted unanimously to make their scholarly articles available to the public for free on the internet.

“The vote is a signal to the world that we speak in a unified voice; that what we value is the free flow of ideas,” said MIT faculty chair Bish Sinyal.

Under the new policy, faculty grant MIT nonexclusive permission to post their articles on an open-source institutional repository. MIT, its faculty and the public at large will have the right to use and share the articles for any purpose other than to make a profit. Authors may opt out on a paper-by-paper basis.

The MIT initiative “is a very exciting development,” said Heather Morrison, an adjunct professor
at the University of British Columbia’s school of library, archival and information studies and chair of the Canadian Open Access Working Group. “It represents faculty taking control of their work and ensuring their research is read and used by as wide an audience as possible.”

Morrison traces the roots of the new policy to changes that have occurred in scholarly communication over the last decade.

Articles published in academic journals are one of the major ways faculty authors share their research results. Under the traditional private sector publishing model, authors transfer their copyright to publishers who in turn sell the work back to universities for a subscription fee. The amalgamation of private publishers into a few large corporations has facilitated rapid increases in these fees — increases that have far outpaced the rate of inflation.

Morrison says while this model is highly profitable for publishers, it conflicts with core academic values, including the commitment to the widest possible dissemination of knowledge.

“The high cost of journal subscriptions has meant that libraries have had to cut back on the number of subscriptions and limit purchases elsewhere in their collections,” said Morrison. “In response, librarians and faculty began to explore other means of scholarly publishing.”

Aided by new forms of digital information technology, an open access movement gained momentum with the creation of free online journals and institutional digital repositories making research openly available to anyone.

Morrison also notes the open access move by MIT faculty is not devoid of self-interest.

“Public tolerance for the traditional private sector model of publishing is waning,” she said. “The Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. and all the granting agencies in the UK are declaring top-down open access mandates. MIT’s policy is the first faculty-driven, university-wide initiative of its kind in the U.S. By seizing the initiative MIT faculty are making their own rules about the dissemination of their work, not having them imposed.”

The policy also means articles by MIT faculty are likely to have a higher citation factor than the works of faculty at other institutions that are locked down by private publishers.

For academic staff in Canada the decision by MIT faculty serves as a possible model for disseminating their own work. It will also have a positive economic impact. When a professor or librarian provides a student a direct link to an MIT article, the need for a course pack or photocopying fee disappears, reducing educational costs.

Link: intellectual property advisory on open access and ownership of scholarly work

Ontario contributes $4.7 million more for lab of Toronto-based open access researcher

According to an article by Megan Olivie in today's Toronto Star, Ontario is contributing about $4.7 million to the lab of open access researcher Aled Edwards, leader of one of the world's largest public-private partnerships in basic research, the International Structural Genomics Consortium, a not-for-profit organization run out of the Universities of Toronto and Oxford and Stockholm's Karolinska Institutet – is among the world's largest public-private partnerships in basic research. More than a hundred labs cooperate with the consortium, which also receives funding from the major pharmaceutical companies. By cooperating at the basic research stage, everyone benefits from advances in discovery - faster discovery of new cures and treatments benefits us all, while new drugs mean new business for the pharmaceuticals.

Excerpt:
That so-called "big pharma" has funnelled money into the consortium, even during a recession, shows how seriously it is considering the open access philosophy, says Roderick McInnes, scientific director of the Institute of Genetics at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, which has funded the Structural Genomics Consortium from the beginning...this is a Canadian success story.

This is another illustration that open access is Good for Business, and another example of Canadian Leadership in the Open Access Movement.

Thanks to Leslie Chan.

Open Access Learning: Canadian Learning Commons Conference

News from the Open Education Movement:

June 11-13, 2009, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: The Canadian Learning Commons Conference. This year's theme: Open Access Learning, "a timely and important topic for anyone whose focus is on library, learner support, faculty development, technology, or disability services".

Dramatic Growth of Open Access: March 31, 2009

Synopsis

This quarter, the growth of open access has been dramatic in open access journals, open access archives, and, perhaps most noteworthy, open access policies. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is on the verge of an important milestone - 4,000 fully open access, peer-reviewed journals, double the number of the largest commercial publisher. DOAJ is growing at the rate of 2 titles per day. OpenDOAR lists 1,373 repositories, an increase of about 70 this quarter. Scientific Commons now encompasses 26 million items, an increase of 2 million. 663 journals are now voluntarily participating in PubMedCentral, an increase of 119 (22%) this quarter. 447 journals provide immediate free access through PubMedCentral, an increase of 29 (7%) this quarter. There are 11 more open access policies, for a total of 72 policies worldwide, and 4 more proposed policies, for a total of 14 proposed policies. One decrease is noted - not in open access per se, but rather subscription journals providing free back issues: Highwire Press seems to have 212,000 fewer free articles, a decrease of 10%. This is a bit puzzling, as Highwire has added 1 more completely free site, and there is an increase of 11 sites providing free back access. Any background on what is happening here would be most appreciated.


Selected Numbers

Directory of Open Access Journals

• 3,999 titles
• 105 titles added in the last 30 days
• 1,423 journals searchable at the article level
• 266,451 articles

Open J-Gate (English-language open access journals)

• # journals: 4,830
• peer-reviewed: 2,652
  

# of Repositories

• OpenDOAR: 1,373
  
• OAIster: 1,096
• Registry of Open Access Repositories: 1,301
• Scientific Commons: 981

# of items in Repositories

• Scientific Commons: 26 million
• OAIster: 20 million
• PubMed: free items: 2.6 million
• arXiv: 530,000 items
• RePEC: 727,000 items, 615,000 online
• E-LIS: 8,976 items
  

PubMedCentral

• journals participating: 663
• journals providing immediate free access: 447
• journals with all items open access: 306

CARL Metadata Harvester

• 17 archives
• 92,000 items

Open Access Mandate Policies (from Registry of Open Access Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP)

• Departmental: 6
• Funder: 35
• Institutional: 31
• Total: 72
• Proposed: 14
  

The largest collection of open access and free journals that I am aware of (so far) is at the University of Nottingham Library, with 23,971 "free e-journals". (But no spreadsheet for the rest of us to download, that I can see!)

In related news, Creative Commons just passed 100 million photos on flickr, as reported by Larry Lessig

Recently, I posted the DOAJ Growth Rate 2005-2008. This illustrates not only a healthy and growth DOAJ title growth rate, but an even more impressive rate of growth of journals providing article-level searching, and the articles obtainable through a DOAJ search.

Dramatic Growth Full Data

• Quarterly growth edition

• Open Data Edition

Either of these Google spreadsheets can be downloaded; use the Edit key at the bottom of the screen. The dataverse version will be updated at a later date due to technical issues.

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

Update April 2: DOAJ exceeded 4,000 titles on April 1, and has issued a major announcement on Long-Term Preservation of Open Access Journals. The PubMedCentral journal list has been updated with additional information - the April 2, 2009 PMC title list is available here. Thanks to Peter Suber on Open Access News.

Canadian channels on YouTube.edu

New YouTube Channel, just for higher ed videos!

Canadian channels so far:
Concordia University
Université de Montréal

Thanks, You Tube - Chronicle of Higher Education - and Open Access News.

Directory of Open Access Journals Growth 2005-2008

The following charts illustrate the Dramatic Growth of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) over the past few years. In brief, from December 31, 2005 to December 31, 2008, the number of titles in DOAJ jumped from just under 2,000 to over 3,800 (almost doubled in 3 years). The increase in searchable content is even more remarkable, though! The number of journals searchable at article level more than doubled, from under 500 to over 1,300. The number of articles retrievable through these journals tripled, from about 80,000 to about 240,000. Plus, as the following charts illustrate, not only did DOAJ grow dramatically from 2005 - 2008; the growth rate also grew dramatically, by every measure examined.













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

MIT adopts a university-wide OA mandate

On Wednesday, March 18, MIT adopted a university-wide OA mandate. For the full text, see Open Access News.

This is important, because it is the second university-wide mandate in the U.S., after Boston University, and the first U.S, university-wide mandate adopted unanimously by faculty themselves. It iis a strong mandate, and a great role model for anyone considering an open access policy.

Taylor & Francis: free, free, free?

3 of the 4 items prominent on the Taylor & Francis website as of today focus on free: Free online access, Free articles, Free alerting service.

None of this "free" stuff has anything to do with open access, of course - this is free samples or metadata designed to attract subscribers. But does it suggest a company struggling to position itself for a future where information is free?

If so, this may be a good sign for the future of T & F. What next? My advice: work on your iOpenAccess program to make it a real open access program, and work with libraries on combined iOpenAccess / subscription deals.

This post is part of the Transitioning to Open Access series.