Journals with good creative commons models

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

Copyright

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

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

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%

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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?

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

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

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

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 article necessary for author-pays journals lies in the range $500–$2500, depending on the level of selectivity used by the journal, plus a contribution to overheads and 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). Frequently asked questions about BioMedCentral’s article-

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

Hindawi (2011). Article processing charges. Retrieved November 22, 2011 from

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

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

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

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

n.p.: The Wellcome Trust. 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

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

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

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 for academics?

For-profit scholarly publishers are enjoying these gifts of ours [journal articles and peer-reviewing services freely given away]. Commercial publishers are involved in publishing about half of the world’s scholarly peer-reviewed journals. The profits, at least for the largest commercial publishers, are enormous and out of touch with the reality of academia. I am sure that we are all too familiar with the financial realities of academia today. If you look at the website of the American Association of University Professors, you will see prominently posted a list of “Financial Crisis FAQs”, which state that the current challenging financial situation is being used to justify a number of measures that impact on academics, including “hiring and salary freezes, furloughs, salary cuts, layoffs, nonrenewals, reduction and elimination of academic programs 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 would eliminate funding for humanities and social sciences teaching altogether, leaving the entire burden of education in these areas on the shoulders of students. I study at Simon Fraser University in Canada, where a couple of years ago we axed the Canadian Studies department.

The for-profit scholarly publishing sector is not at all sharing in this misfortune. The largest companies – Reed Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, informa.plc (also known as Taylor & Francis), all reported profits in the range of 30-40% in their latest financial statements. Wiley reported a 13% growth in profits over last year at this time, for a 42% profit level. To picture just how high this profit level is, compare this with what you are likely seeing in your personal investments. A bank’s interest on your savings account is probably a lot closer to  .0036% than to 36%, the profit rate that Elsevier recently posted. This is an inelastic market. It doesn’t matter 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 losing some 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 facing extremely challenging financial times. These things don’t impact the bottom line, at all. Another way to express this is that for these for-profit companies, 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

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

Elsevier profits: 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/

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

John Wiley & 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

Springer Science + Business Media. (2010). Annual report. 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 an early draft of Chapter 2 of my thesis, tentatively called Freedom for scholarship in the internet age, combined with speaking notes from my talk, Information feudalism or knowledge for all, at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference, Seattle, October 2011. I am planning to release more detailed version(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)

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

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

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

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

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!

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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.