Google Books settlement: open access to my book chapters, please

Update February 3, 2010: Klaus Graf explains that book authors who are holders of the rights to the online versions of their works can make their works open access in Hathitrust. Klaus has also made his works free in Google Books. Thanks, Klaus!

In my earlier writings on the Google Books Settlement (here and here), I had mistakenly thought that none of my works would be included. After reading this letter from a group of academic authors, I realized that book chapters that I wrote might very well be included. The authors suggest that academic authors might prefer that their out-of-print books be open access. For me, this is definitely the case! Please make my works open access (CC-NC), or public domain. While I haven't opted out (and am not sure why I should have to - this is a U.S. lawsuit, and I am not a U.S. citizen), I haven't opted in, either. I wonder how many other authors hadn't thought about their chapters being included in Google Books?

Excerpts from the letter:

we believe that most unclaimed books in the GBS corpus will prove to be books written by scholars for scholars, and most such authors would prefer that their out-of-print books be available on an open access basis

In particular, we think this fiduciary should have the explicit authority to set prices for unclaimed books at $0 or make them available under Creative Commons licenses or other open access terms insofar as there is reason to think that their academic authors would prefer for them to be made available on these terms. The UWF should not have the power to authorize Google to alter the texts of books.

Comments: hear, hear! As noted above, please make my works open access. I write my scholarly works as part of my service to my profession, and for the public good, not for profit. OA for me. Under my preferred CC license for these works (CC-NC), people are free to create modifications of my work, but not for profit, which excludes Google. At any rate, I think that I have the right to say that the original which is posted should be exactly as I wrote it.

arXiv business model development

arXiv, the physics preprint server, is in the process of moving to a new form of business model, one based on voluntary contribution based on usage. Following is a suggestion for a slight tweak that I think will make the transition smoother; but don't wait, please sign up right away as the financial aspects likely need no change.

The cost of maintaining arXiv, including further developing the service to fully meet the needs of the physics community, is less than $7 per submission or 1.3 cents per download. The current approach is to ask heavy users (readers) of the service to contribute to the funding of arXiv, and 22 institutions have made this commitment so far.

My suggestion, one which would not be that different financially but might be a model that is easier to sustain into the future, is to follow a similar institution-based approach, but base the charges on approximate submissions rather than usage. Regular contributors could pay a flat fee, perhaps calculated to reflect an average of about $10 per submission (to allow for subsidy for authors from developing countries and/or to build an endowment for arXiv's future). Institutions that choose not to contribute on a regular basis could then pay one-off fees reflecting the higher administration cost associated with the one-off payment system, e.g. perhaps about $50 per submission.

To transition from the current plan, likely all that is needed is a little wordsmithing in the current document, i.e. change: "The top 100 institutions based on the previous year's download activity" to "The top 100 institutions bases on the previous year's submission activity". The list of institutions in each category are likely about the same, as it is the active physics researchers who are more likely to be doing the most reading and the most contributing.

This approach is more likely to succeed in the longer term, as this way the institution is clearly purchasing a needed service; and, if necessary, the cost of paying per submission is easily within the reach of the individual author, if necessary.

Noting a bit of inspiration from Joe Esposito on Scholarly Kitchen.

Note also that $7 per submission appears to be covering preservation costs rather than this year's submissions. Clarification on this point from arXiv would be appreciated.

For subscription journals: calculating open access success, and considering your options

Open access success is not necessarily limited to open access journals. Subscription journals can also achieve considerable OA success - by allowing, or better yet, encouraging author self-archiving. Some subscription journals also work cooperatively with open access archives, ensuring both broader access to their journals and preservation.

Because open access policy of necessity specifies deposit in an open access archive, rather than publication in an open access journal, it is entirely possible for an alert subscription journal to exceed an open access journal in open access performance on this key criterion!

To calculate open access success when your journal's articles are open access through self-archiving:

Medical journals - the key archive is PubMed. Here are instructions for assessing compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy. The search described can be modified to calculate full OA compliance for your journal, i.e. simply search for articles in your journal, and see how many come up as full-text.

Not every journal has such a convenient subject archive for this search. In this case, I recommend selecting a sample of articles from your journal and conducting a search in the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE).

If your journal's open access performance is low, what can you do? One option is to provide information to your authors about their rights to self-archive, and encourage them to make use of these rights.

If your services are contracted out, and OA performance is low, it could be a great time to explore your options
If your journal has contracted with a publishing business, how helpful are they at encouraging authors to take advantage of self-archiving rights? This is especially important when authors are required by research funding agencies or their universities to make their work publicly or open accessible, as is becoming increasingly common. If service is lacking, this might be a good time to explore your options. If your journal made the decision to contract out some time ago, you might be pleased at the expanded range of options now available. This includes a growing number of fully open access publishers (OASPA is a good place to find these folk). There are many a great many university libraries that now provide journal hosting and support services; odds are that the members of your Editorial Board are associated with one or more of these university libraries.

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

Calculating compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy

If your journal publishes articles that benefit from NIH research and you would like to know how your journal would rate on compliance, following is my search method:

From PubMed, go to Advanced Search.
At the first drop-down menu, select Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural [pt]
Under Journal, enter your Journal's title
Under Publication Date, enter:
Either: full NIH policy period: 2005/01/01 to [one year prior minus one day]
Or: mandatory NIH policy period: 2008/04/07 to [one year prior minus one day]

Note that either publication date period is an estimate, as the policy date reflects dating of research grants rather than dating of publications. There are other possible approaches to calculating this data; from a methodological viewpoint, using more than one approach and triangulating is optimal. Comments on the method are appreciated; please contact hgmorris at sfu dot ca

The Dramatic Growth of Open Access uses the full NIH policy period, at least up to Dec. 31, 2009. Full details of the search strategy used in DGOA are published in the open data edition (see the 3rd sheet).

Clarification re Health and Social Care in the Community and NIH compliance

In the December 31, 2009 issue of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access, I reported that "Wiley and Blackwell's Health and Social Care in the Community authors show a 0% compliance rate with the NIH Public Access Policy".

The evidence for this statement is based on a time frame of Jan. 1, 2005 - Dec. 30, 2008, reflecting the time frame beginning (roughly) at about the time that articles under the initial voluntary policy would have begun to be published, up until the permitted 12-month embargo period. The basis for this evidence is presented in the open data edition of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access (see the 3rd worksheet)

It has since come to my attention that there are no articles in Health and Social Care in the Community that should be available under the present mandatory NIH policy, which took effect on April 7, 2008. From this perspective, Health and Social Care in the Community and Wiley-Blackwell authors are not remiss in their obligations.

My apologies for any confusion to anyone who understandably considers the "real" NIH Public Access Policy to be, in effect, the mandated policy beginning April 7, 2008. That this question has come up underscores the importance of mandatory requirement in OA policy.

Update January 19: according to Peter Suber, "In the period since the NIH policy became mandatory, HSCC has had two submissions based on NIH funding. In the first case it deposited the manuscript in PMC within six days of receipt. The second paper was received very recently and is still in process. (Thanks to Cliff Morgan for the correction.)". As of this morning, I am not able to find any articles from this journal indexed in PubMed using the original search. This could mean nothing; it might be a glitch at PubMed, or persistent operator error, i.e. I do not wish to draw any firm conclusions until I retry the search at another time. I re-ran the Dec. 31, 2009 search yesterday evening, and once again found the result of 6 NIH-externally funded articles from 2005-2008 with no fulltext available for any of the articles.

Please note that the compliance rate reported for other journals also reflects the time frame beginning Jan. 1, 2005. To avoid further confusion, I will make adjustments to future searches of this nature.

For details about the search method I use to calculate compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy, see this DGOA post.

Open Content Alliance (OCA) vs. Google Books: OCA as superior network and better fit for an emerging global public sphere

My preprint Open Content Alliance (OCA) vs. Google Books: OCA as superior network and better fit for an emerging global public sphere is now available via SFU library and E-LIS. This preprint explores two similar projects (OCA and Google Books) via the theoretical lenses of two emerging theoretical frameworks (network theory, based on Castell's work, and the global public sphere, derived from but moving beyond the work of Habermas, Fraser, and others). Comments are welcome; it is very likely that I will continue to explore these theoretical frameworks throughout my PhD work and possibly beyond.

Brendan Rapple at Scholarly Communication News@BC (Boston College) considers this work interesting and provocative. Thanks, Brendan!

The UBC cIRcle copy will be coming. Even the most ardent self-archiver can sometimes fall behind!

Open and Evolving Scholarship

The internet has opened up new potentials for scholarship, potentials that we are only now just beginning to explore. As scholarship evolves, one of the signs of progress will be multiple versions. At first, some people will find this a challenging change; it is clearly different from the static print form. Because this change is part of the evolution of scholarship and brings both current and emerging innovations that will vastly improve scholarship, it is both necessary and desirable to embrace a variety of versions.

In a print-based world of scholarship, it was enough to have a single version of a journal article. There were significant costs involved in typesetting, printing, and mailing; while a few disciplines, such as physics and economics, have a history of sharing preprints even in the print era, most did not.

Already, it is possible for a research project to be published in numerous versions in a way that advances scholarship and makes it more accessible to all.

Here are some examples of how a research project can currently be shared in multiple versions. Not everyone will want to pursue all these approaches to sharing, and that is fine. Every discipline has its own traditions, every researcher their own comfort level with various types of sharing, and limited time.

Before the research begins: researchers can share their research questions, grant applications, or early plans. Benefits for the researcher include:

• the possibility of early peer review (if there is a problem with the question or approach - why not find out before you start the project, rather than after when the paper is done?)
• the possibility of finding collaborators to expand your research project (this has happened to me! - see Greyson et al,, University Supports for Open Access, Canadian Journal of Higher Education 2010, forthcoming); Taylor et al, Open Access Journal Supports (in progress)
  
• establishing priority

When the research is done: researchers can post openly a preprint, open data, conference presentation prior to final publication, or peer-reviewed postprint.

Benefits for the researcher include:

• the open access citation advantage
• possibility of early peer review when early forms (preprint, conference presentation) are shared
• other researchers can confirm results of rigorous studies when data is shared openly
  

Alternative versions and libre open access: in addition to these multiple versions of the research report per se, researchers can post alternative versions, or facilitate their creation by providing full libre open access including re-use rights. Examples of such alternative versions:

• abbreviated versions for the author's blog, scholarly newsletters or listservs
• audiovisual presentations (e.g. the YouTube version)
  
• translations into different languages, whether automated as through google's language services or manual
• translations into alternative formats to serve a wider variety of readers, e.g. audio or daisy versions for the print disabled
• translation into versions for lay or custom readerships, an emerging possibility for the scholarly-minded journalist or freelance writer (sometimes this will include the author)

In order to take full advantage of all of these potentials, and others of which I have not yet dreamed, it is necessary to let go of the idea that there is one single version of a research article. Approaches to citation need to evolve as well; this is not as confusing as it might seem. If there are multiple versions of an item - cite what you read. If there is another version you think readers should be alerted to, add this to the citation. For example, if you are cited a locked-down subscription version but know that a free version is available, add the URL to the free version as a service to your readers.

Multiple versions is not a new idea. For years, books have been published in multiple editions. There has never been a need to decide that one version was the authoritative version for all time, and there have been many an occasion when it was useful research to compare the differences between one edition and another.

Some useful examples of multiple versions in action: Living Reviews, an online open access peer reviewed service in which the review articles are kept up to date by their authors; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in which invited articles by experts are periodically updated (and archived on a quarterly basis for citation and preservation purposes); and Charles Bailey's bibliographies, updated frequently and available at Digital Koans. Jean-Claude Bradley and colleague's Useful Chemistry is a great illustration of sharing of research-in-progress.

Response to STM response to US Scholarly Publishing Roundtable

This is a response to the Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) responds to US Scholarly Publishing Roundtable Report and Recommendations.

STM is overstating their contributions to scholarly publishing and overlooking the much greater contributions of scholars themselves, as the unpaid writers and peer reviewers.

For example, the STM report says: "Government research grants currently cover the cost of the research only. Government research grants do not cover the costs of publication."

What is missing?

• the scholars who write the research articles and do the peer review, for free
• the U.S. National Institutes of Health funding which goes to page charges for subscription journals - to the tune of $30 million, enough to pay for full OA with online open access
  
• a portion of government research grants goes to universities for overhead - including library subscriptions - which are about 70% of STM revenue, (which is more than enough to pay for full global OA at today's rates with over 60% savings for libraries)

STM "welcomes the consultation and collaboration that has occurred with our industry". Comment: my perspective is that public policy consultation should involve the public, as the OSTP consultation has - not a secret group of individuals meeting behind closed doors.

STM, understandably, wants financial compensation if the policy requires access to the final Version of Record. From my perspective, this is unnecessary, and not necessarily desirable, as there are advantages to having multiple versions, such as for preservation purposes (one version might survive and another not), and access purposes (e.g., the author's own version may be more useful for the print disabled).

The peculiar practice of democracy? in America

The neighbours down south are a little hard to figure out sometimes. Recent consultations on open access policy are a great example. While the Office of Science and Technology Policy consultations on public access policy are a veritable model of openness and democracy, the secretive and undemocratic nature of the deliberations of the House and Science Committee read like a scene from C. Wright Mills' "The Power Elites".

My submissions to the OSTP are openly posted, as usual, on IJPE. The only thing I have to add here is applause for this completely open process; anyone can participate, and everyone can see all of the comments.

The House Science Committee is another story. A small group of 14 individual "experts" was selected in a secret fashion, and conducted meetings in secret. Much is being made of the "consensus" of 12 of the 14 individuals. There are a few librarians among this group; but what about the rest of the librarians in America? Why not invite the major library associations to select a representative, for example? Why have a group meeting to decide on the future of scholar publications - with no scholars invited to participate?

For the record, as someone who is considered an expert on scholarly communication (I have published a book on the topic, and developed and taught a course on scholarly communication), while I appreciate the group's support for free access, there are some points in the report that I strongly disagree with. For example, it is inappropriate for a group of librarians, publishers, and university administrators to make a decision that there needs to be a "Version of Record" for scholarship; this is a decision that only scholars can make. There are areas in scholarship where multiple versions of documents are the norm; for example, in both physics and economics, it is very common to post preprints or working papers. My own perspective is that there are advantages to having multiple versions. For example, having different versions presents advantages for preservation purposes (if one version does not survive, the other might). If authors are concerned about consequences of posting preprints with errors, then they can wait for peer review and post corrected versions.

For links to the report of the House Science Committee and Peter Suber's comments, see:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2010/01/house-science-committee-on-roundtable.html.

PubMedCentral Canada up and available for searching

PubMedCentral Canada is now up and available for searching, at:
http://pubmedcentralcanada.ca/

PMC Canada is the third country portal in the PMC-International Initiative, after the original in the U.S. and PMC-UK. Congratulations to partners CISTI, CIHR, and the US National Library of Medicine.

(thanks to Peter Suber, Open Access Tracking Project)

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

Strong open access growth reported by Hindawi

Hindawi Publishing reports strong growth for 2009. Submissions more than doubled, from 7,600 in 2008 to more than 16,500 in 2009. The number of accepted manuscripts grew from 2,500 in 2008 to 4,400 in 2009. Note that the growth in accepted manuscripts is smaller than the growth in submitted manuscripts, indicating an increased rejection rate.

This data and indication of strong growth at PLoS One is important in indicating that not only is growth rate of open access journals very strong (two per day based on DOAJ rates), the growth of articles published in open access journals is strong as well.

Thanks and congratulations to Hindawi's Paul Peters and Ahmed Hindawi.

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

Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Management

Following is my response to the Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Management (U.S.) (Phase 3).

Thanks once again for an opportunity to participate in this important consultation.

Question: Compliance. What features does a public access policy need to ensure compliance? Should this vary across agencies?

Response:
There should be a simple basic policy covering all agencies: mandate requirement of open access to published results of funded research, with an embargo period of no more than 6 months. Full libre open access – no embargo, re-use rights for results – should be encouraged. Beyond the basics, implementation details might best be left to the individual agency. For the NIH, for example, the PubMedCentral database initiative is well established, in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada, with discussions to extend this initiative further on an international basis. It makes sense, then, for the NIH policy to specify deposit in PubMedCentral. In addition to providing access and an easy means for monitoring compliance, this stipulation allows the NIH to carry forward the tradition of the U.S. National Library of Medicine as the world’s premiere library steward for medical literature, ensuring the preservation of the medical literature.

This centralized, government-led database approach may or may not work best for other agencies. Academic disciplines vary a great deal, and interdisciplinarity is increasingly common. The approach that I would recommend is working with existing strengths of academics and their organizations (mostly universities) and disciplines. There are only a very few highly successful, centralized subject databases similar to PubMedCentral. Where these exist, my suggestion is to work cooperatively with the existing initiative. For example, in physics, the arXiv, http://arxiv.org/was created by and for physicists who use it heavily; arXiv has established cooperative relationships with many publishers, allowing researchers to begin the submission process for publication through arXiv, and publishers also host arXiv mirror sites; for physics materials, arXiv is the obvious locus of deposit. For physics articles, then, I would recommend collaborating with and supporting arXiv, whose main site is Cornell University Library. For economics, collaboration with the distributed RePEC http://repec.org/ is recommended. In education, the U.S. Educational Resources Information Coalition (ERIC) http://www.eric.ed.gov/ is the first place to start. For library and information studies, my suggestion is to collaborate with and support the global volunteer-based collaboration, E-LIS, the Open Archive for Library and Information Studies http://eprints.rclis.org/ [disclosure: I am volunteer member of the E-LIS Governance Team]. This is not a comprehensive list of disciplinary approaches; apologies for any omission.

The vast majority of academic literature, however, does not fall into any of the disciplinary repository approaches. For most U.S. government-funded literature, therefore, what I would recommend is deposit in an institutional repository. Universities and their libraries are more than ready to cooperate in this manner, which has advantages for the U.S. university system; more on this later.

Question: Evaluation. How should an agency determine whether a public access policy is successful? What measures could agencies use to gauge whether there is increased return on federal investment gained by expanded access?

Response: Evaluation is an area where I would suggest agency-specific approaches. For example, I would argue that the NIH leadership in open access, going back to providing free access to the PubMed index, has been key to the development of the practice of evidence-based medicine. The basic idea of evidence-based medicine is that after doctors and other health care practitioners graduate, they should continue to keep up their knowledge through reading, and make use of the research literature in diagnosing and treating illness. It would make sense to hypothesize that the NIH Public Access Policy will further advance evidence-based medicine; the tools and research methods of evidence-based medicine, then will be useful in evaluation. Other positives from the NIH Public Access Policy include speeding up advances in medical knowledge, and technology transfer (for example, facilitating the discovery of new drugs). These potentials would suggest different methodological approaches.

In education, I would be very surprised if there was not a serious gap in access to the research literature for educators and parents. School libraries anywhere are lucky to have sufficient resources for the kids themselves; most would see professional development resources for teachers as a luxury. In this case, simple before and after access measurements for access to research would be suitable. Surveys of educators to determine awareness of potential access would be beneficial; there may be a need for an educational campaign, as those who are not used to having access will not automatically think to look for it once it becomes available.

For technology transfer to the private sector, economic studies similar to those conducted by Houghton et al. http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=316 would be most suitable.

Question: Roles. How might a public private partnership promote robust management of a public access policy? Are there examples already in use that may serve as models? What is the best role for the Federal government?

Response: The key partnership that I would recommend is with the researchers’ home organizations, generally universities. University libraries have well-established services and infrastructure that can greatly assist management. For example, the vast majority of university libraries have functioning institutional repositories. Virtually all university libraries participate in consortial groupings that could quickly find means to collaborate to ensure that all researchers have a repository available. University libraries have a robust technological infrastructure, reflecting their current leadership roles in providing access to (and increasingly, creation of) electronic information, and knowledgeable professional staff with established liaison relationships across campuses, across the nation. Librarians also have long-established business relationships with scholarly publishers. Even where the locus of deposit is a central repository (as with the NIH policy), librarians have expertise in assisting researchers with questions surrounding author rights retention to ensure compliance, and with deposit. The collaborative nature of the library profession means that it would be easy for any agency to work with the university library institutional repositories to ensure adherence to metadata standards to facilitate virtual repositories that will meet the specific needs of the agency, e.g. to showcase the work of the agency. [Disclosure: I am a professional librarian].

Working cooperatively with universities and their libraries has advantages for the U.S. university system as a whole. A full university IR will showcase the work of the university. Conceptually, there are strong reasons to believe that the IR will be a key evaluative component for universities in the very near future. For example, showcasing the work of a creative research department through the IR will only help to attract the best and brightest graduate students, and usage statistics for the IR will increase the university’s web presence, an emerging evaluative criteria for universities.

When work is deposited in a central repository such as PubMedCentral, it is ideal if it is cross-deposited in an institutional repository as well. This will facilitate preservation and assured ongoing access; the more copies of an item, the more likely it is to be preserved, and preservation is a key function for the academic library.

Once again, thank you for the opportunity to participate, and I hope that these comments are helpful to you.

Dramatic Growth of Open Access: Dec. 31, 2009 New Year's Eve Edition

The theme for this issue of Dramatic Growth of Open Access is a celebration of successes in 2009, areas with room for improvement, and, in keeping with the times, suggested New Year's Resolutions. We'll begin with an OA status report, followed by "leaps and bounds" growth in 2009. For other editions of this series, see: Open data - download data. View full data. View full data with 2009 growth. Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series.

OA Status Report 2009

Open Access Journals
DOAJ: 4,535 titles
Net growth 2009: 723 titles
Growth rate: 2 titles per day

Open Access Archives
OpenDOAR # archives: 1,558
New growth 2009 (ROAR): 318
Growth rate: 1 archive per day
BASE # documents: 22,007,367
Scientific Commons # documents: 32,265,678
Net growth 2009: 7.9 million documents (Scientific Commons)
Growth rate: 22,000 documents per day

Open Access Mandate Policies (from ROARMAP):
Institutional: 79 (growth 52, more than doubled); growth rate 1-2 per week
Funder: 42 (growth 12, 40% increase, growth rate one per month)
Departmental: 18 (growth 14, more than tripled); growth rate one per month
Thesis: 39
Proposed mandates: 15 (growth 5, 45% increase); growth rate one per month

Leaps and Bounds: impressive growth by percentage, in decreasing order of percentage growth

More than doubled

• departmental open access mandates, 350% growth from 4 to 18 (ROARMAP)

• institutional open access mandates, 208% growth from 27 to 79 (ROARMAP)

Over 40% growth
Total open access mandates: 198% (ROARMAP)
# items in CARL metadata harvester search: 74%
Proposed Open Access Mandates: 45%
# archives in CARL metadata harvester: 44%
Funder Open Access mandates: 40% (ROARMAP)
Peer-reviewed journals in Open J-Gate: 40%

Over 30% growth
DOAJ - # articles searchable at article level: 38%
PubMedCentral - # journals in PMC with all articles open access: 36%
Scientific Commons - # publications: 33%
DOAJ - # of journals searchable at article level: 32%
# journals in Open J-Gate: 31%

Over 20% growth
# repositories listed in ROAR: 26%
free fulltext in rePEC: 26%
# repositories listed in Scientific Commons: 20%

Welcome and good luck to BASE, aiming to be the world's best and most comprehensive search engine for Open Access Archives.

Free back issues

Highwire Free: while the # of free articles actually decreased by 6% in 2009, it may be worth noting that about a third of the articles hosted on Highwire Free - mainly representing society publishers - are freely available online.

Electronic Journals Library lists over 23,000 titles that are freely available online.

PubMed: individual journal free fulltext performance

This is a continuation of a somewhat random exploration of why free full-text availability for citations in PMC covered by the NIH Public Access policy are less than what they should be. As with the Dec. 11 issue, my findings reveal a wide range of performance by journal.

Kudos!!! to the following journals with outstanding free fulltext track records:
Biomicrofluids: 100% of the articles in PubMed in this journal published by the American Institute of Physics are available as free fulltext - even though none of these articles fall under the NIH policy!
Journal of Postgraduate Medicine: while very few of the articles in this India-based open access journal by Medknow Publications are NIH-funded, 100% of those that are, are available as free full-text, and over 76% of all of the articles indexed in PubMed are free fulltext.
Journal of Oncology by Hindawi Publications: 60 of 67 articles listed in PubMed are available as free fulltext, even though none are NIH-funded
Vulnerable Children and Youth Studies: only 3 of the articles in this Taylor & Francis journal are listed in PubMed, none NIH funded, but all are free full-text

Room for improvement

This section touches on a few journals with remarkably poor performance in taking advantage of the dissemination potential of the internet - particularly given the obvious public interest in the topics covered. Update January 18, 2010: please note that calculations of compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy reflect articles with a publication date from Jan. 1, 2005 up to the permitted 12-month embargo period. This reflects both the original policy which requested public access, and the newer policy which requires open access which took effect April 7, 2008. Compliance rates under the new required policy have not been calculated at this time, but may be added to a future DGOA. For my search method, see the DGOA Full Data edition (see the 3rd sheet), or this explanatory post. My apologies for any confusion.

Update January 19: according to Peter Suber, "In the period since the NIH policy became mandatory, HSCC has had two submissions based on NIH funding. In the first case it deposited the manuscript in PMC within six days of receipt. The second paper was received very recently and is still in process. (Thanks to Cliff Morgan for the correction.)". As of this morning, I am not able to find any articles from this journal indexed in PubMed using the original search. This could mean nothing; it might be a glitch at PubMed, or persistent operator error, i.e. I do not wish to draw any firm conclusions until I retry the search at another time. I re-ran the Dec. 31, 2009 search yesterday evening, and once again found the result of 6 NIH-externally funded articles from 2005-2008 with no fulltext available for any of the articles.

Wiley and Blackwell's Health and Social Care in the Community authors show a 0% compliance rate with the NIH Public Access Policy. According to the journal website, the journal's policy is to comply, with the expectation that Wiley will undertake the deposit. Perhaps the editor might like to get in touch with Wiley? Either that, or have a discussion with the editorial board about the future of the journal. There are a great many free or low cost journal hosting options these days; the selection is likely much richer than when the decision was made to go with Wiley-Blackwell. [Hint: if the purpose of your research is to improve health and social care in the community, why not make the research available to the community - and the many professionals, often working in agencies or volunteer organizations with minimal funding - who serve the community?]

The compliance rates are under 20% for authors of Wiley-Blackwell's Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, Taylor and Francis' AIDS Care and American Journal of Bioethics. While my selection technique is somewhat random, I selected these titles looking for topics with a high public interest, hoping to see more impressive results.

Comments: as mentioned in the December 11, 2009 early year-end edition, 2009 was the year of the open access mandate, with highly significant growth in this area. Something else that is worth noting is the dramatic growth both in open access archives and in documents available through open access archives. To some extent, this reflects early success of the open access mandate policies, but clearly, there is more to it than that. The CARL metadata harvester statistics, for example, show significant growth even though institutional open access policies in Canada are still quite rare. To me, this is an early sign that we are collectively beginning to get over the learning curve (of understanding what an open access archive is, and what it can do for us), which bodes very well indeed for future growth of open access. RePEC's "leaps and bounds" growth is especially impressive for a mature repository - kudos to RePEC and the international economics community!

Suggested New Year's Resolutions
Are you interested in contributing to further dramatic growth of open access - or perhaps looking to make sure your journal thrives in the emerging open access environment? Here are some suggested New Year's Resolutions:

For libraries:
Join SCOAP3
Join the Compact on Open Access Publishing Equity
Continue with all the great work you are already doing to advance and support open access and transformative change in scholarly communication!

For researchers:
Retain your copyright!
Publish in an open access journal if you can.
Self-archive a copy of your work for open access, no matter where you publish.

For journal people:

• If you're open access - hurray! Join OASPA.
• If you're not open access - why not? If a commercial publisher is hosting your journal, this might be a good time to review your options. Odds are that the scant options of a few years ago have evolved with a wealth of interesting opportunities.
• If you'd really like to be open access but are concerned about economic support: have a frank discussion with your academic communities and your libraries. The more people realize that we can have a fully open access scholarly publishing system - assuming reasonable journal costs, as is the case with almost all independent society journals - at much less than current expenditures - the sooner we can all transition to open access.
  

Universities and funding agencies:
Open access mandate policies - depending on local circumstances, start discussions, commit to a policy, implement, evaluate, or strengthen existing policy.

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series. For more on 2010 predictions, see my Dec. 11, 2009 early year-end edition.

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

Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Features and Technology

Following is my comment on the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy's Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Features and Technology (second phase). Reader note: this post is more technical than the average IJPE post.

Q: In what format should published papers be submitted in order to make them easy to find, retrieve, and search and to make it easy for others to link to them?

A: XML is the best format. It is important to also take into account how the researchers work; the process of submission should ideally fit into their workflow. Microsoft has been working on an automated upload feature for repositories. Ideally, researchers should be able to cross-deposit to as many open access archives as are desirable for their work (I already have 3 archives myself, and there are good reason to deposit in all of them).

Q: Are there existing digital standards for archiving and interoperability to maximize public benefit?

A:
- The Open Archives Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is key to harvesting and cross-searching metadata from all open access archives.
- Stable URLs, preferably ones that meet the standards for OpenURL (and possibly DOI), are essential.
- The SWORD protocol allows for cross-deposit into multiple archives.
- Creative Commons licensing, to facilitate both human and machine reading of licensing terms.
- For archiving (preservation): LOCKS, CLOCKSS, and Portico. For preservation purposes as well as ensured ongoing access, multiple mirror sites is recommended.
- Open standards are recommended. For example, video materials should use a format like MPEG-4. Open standards will allow the most possible people to access the materials, and will facilitate the task of preservation.

Q: How are these anticipated to change?
A: OAI-PMH is quite stable. SWORD is new; the ability to cross-deposit is very important to researchers, so watch for growth.

Q: What are the best examples of usability in the private sector (both domestic and international) and what makes them exceptional?
- E-LIS, the Open Archive for Library and Information Studies, has exceptional tools for searching, including a custom-designed subject classification scheme – not surprising for a tool developed by and for librarians: http://eprints.rclis.org/
- Google provides a very effective search engine to materials in repositories, particularly for known items. Google strikes me as more effective in this instance than Google Scholar.
- BASE, the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, aims to be the world’s most comprehensive search service for open archives, using OAI-PMH: http://www.base-search.net/
- It is worthwhile looking at initiatives that are using the same standards for journals, conferences, and archives, providing a foundation for cross-searching materials in all these venues. For example, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) http://www.doaj.org features an article-level search, based on OAI-PMH. Open Journal Systems (OJS), a free open source software, also supports OAI-PMH and there is a PKP harvester. http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs OJS is part of the Public Knowledge Project, which also includes Open Conference Systems and Open Monograph Systems (in development, to be released this February).

Q: Should those who access papers be given the opportunity to comment or provide feedback?

A: Of course; the only questions are the best venues for providing comments or feedback. My perspective is that opening up access to these papers has tremendous potential to inform public debates and commenting on a wide variety of issues; this potential will come to fruition over a period of time, as there will need to be time for learning and exploration. The most fruitful discussions, in my opinion, will be when people take ideas from the papers and bring them to their communities for discussion.

For example, it makes sense to me that a patient advocacy group might lead a discussion on research in their advocacy area, perhaps on their own website, including references to articles of interest. Researchers in this area might well wish to participate in special events with such a group from time to time; this would provide them with feedback in a focused way, and could also be a way for researchers to connect with people who might be good candidates for clinical trials.

Another example: a variety of businesspeople, scientists, and the environmentally minded public might well be interested in research that has the potential to uncover new green technologies.

What would be most helpful to facilitate this kind of discussion would be to ensure that papers have stable URLs so that these communities can reference them, ideally an easy way to export a proper citation, and creative commons licensing to ensure that rights issues are clear (and also to encourage broadest re-use rights; for example, allowing a portion of an article to be posted, with appropriate attribution, to the website of a not-for-profit discussion group).

There can be roles for journalists and media here to act as intermediaries in setting up such discussions, and also for government staff to conduct groups on public policy issues, much like this one.

Q: By what metrics (e.g. number of articles or visitors) should the Federal government measure success of its public access collections?

A: The first important metric is the number of articles that are freely available. This can involve a simple count of articles, percentage of articles covered under policies that are actually freely accessible, percentage of all scholarly articles published anywhere are freely accessible (an indirect measure of extended policy influence; as an example, hundreds of scholarly journals voluntarily participate fully in PubMedCentral in a way that goes far beyond what is required by the NIH Public Access Policy), and (a little harder) levels of inability to access materials; this may require developing a reporting system.

As for use, number of visitors, abstract views, or article downloads would be useful. It is important to focus on this kind of usage in the aggregate, and not at the individual paper level. There are potentially serious issues with using metrics to evaluate scholarly work, as I have touched on in my book chapter, The Implications of Usage Statistics as an Economic Factor in Scholarly Communication: http://eprints.rclis.org/4889/

U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Implementation

Following is my comment to the first phase of the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Implementation.

First of all, let me extend my congratulations to the U.S. government and people for pioneering in the areas of openness, with the NIH Public Access policy, and more recently, the open government initiative. This should be an inspiration to governments everywhere, including mine (Canada). I speak as a professional librarian, scholarly editor, and scholar in the area of scholarly communication.

Who should enact public access policies?

If public funding is accepted, then any published results of research should be made freely available to the public as soon as possible. Stipulating published results of research eliminates problem areas; classified research, for example, will not be published. ALL publicly funded research that is not classified should be publicly available; otherwise, it should not be publicly funded. The current version of FRPAA which limits public access to agencies with significant funding portfolios is a good practical approach.

How should a public access policy be designed?

1. Timing

The 12-month embargo period set by the early innovator in open access policy, NIH, was a very generous time period. More recently, an international standard is emerging around a maximum 6-month embargo, for example this is the period specified by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. A fairly comprehensive list of policies can be found at ROARMAP. This embargo should be viewed as a temporary measure, to allow scholarly publishers time to adjust to an open access online environment. The remainder of this section explains why.

The international publishing community has had lots of time to adjust to an environment where free online access is optimal. Discussion about open access can be found in Learned Publishing, the journal of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), dating back for about a decade. This vehicle of the scholarly society publishers (Learned Publishing), has been freely available after a one-year embargo at the voluntary discretion of the society, for many years, and is still flourishing. ALPSP has been a good role model for member publishers, with a leading-edge author’s agreement allowing authors to self-archive without restriction. Academic publishing is very different from many other businesses, in that the suppliers and customers are basically the same people (scholars and the librarians who serve the needs of scholars). A recent report by Mark Ware published by the International Association of Scientific, Medical and Technical Publishers (STM), quotes the proportion of revenue received by this group for scholarly journals from academic libraries at 68-75% (this does not account for non-academic libraries and revenue streams such as advertising which could actually benefit from public access. Combining advertising with free online access seems to work well for Google).

The scholarly publishing industry is indeed adjusting to the new environment, albeit in a somewhat uneven fashion. The number of fully open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals in the world is currently over 4,000 (about 15% of the world’s scholarly journals) according to the vetted Directory of Open Access Journals, which is consistently showing a net growth rate of 2 titles per day (Morrison, 2009).

In addition to these fully open access journals, many journals voluntarily make all their content freely available after a delay period. While I don’t have exact numbers for the latter, the difference between the 4,000 titles in DOAJ and the over 23,000 freely accessible journals listed in the Electronic Journals Library gives a rough indication, i.e. at least 19,000 journals with free back access.

A brief review of the SHERPA RoMEO Publisher Copyright Policies and Self-Archiving website can illustrate both how publishers are adapting to the environment, and the environment that they are adapting to. In the search box, pull down the menu for funders, and you’ll quickly see that the publishing community has a very great many open access mandate policies, of research funding agencies, and, increasingly, universities and departments as well, around the world. Search for a few journals or publishers, and have a look both at the self-archiving policies of most journals and publishers (providing for self-archiving is currently the norm), and the many green check marks indicating compliance with a variety of funders.

Libraries are very actively involved in assisting scholars and publishers with the transition to open access. In Canada, the Synergies project (libraries and publishers working together, with government funding) is helping scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences to move online. Open access is not required, but is actively encouraged, as this is best for the dissemination of work of Canadian scholars.

Libraries around the world are working cooperatively with the physics scholars and publishers to transition the whole field of high energy physics to open access publishing through SCOAP3. Many libraries provide funding and/or other forms of support for open access publishing, and libraries are most willing to talk with publishers and journals about means of combining subscriptions and open access. Academic libraries work with and for the scholars, who need these journals both for reading and for career advancement; ensuring that scholars have the support that they need for scholarly communication is the essence of what we do.

2. Version. The author’s final version after peer review should be specified in the policy. This is one area where different agencies might have good reasons for slightly different policies. The NIH, for example, has a mandate to preserve as well as make accessible the scholarly literature, and so has very specific requirements.

There are two advantages to requiring the author’s final version: 1) this allows publishers a bit more leeway to make money through subscriptions to their final version, which is the version that reflects most of the work actually done by the publisher, and 2) an author’s version may overcome some limitations of a publisher’s PDF. For example, if the publisher uses locked-down or image-based PDFs, these works are not accessible to the print disabled, but the author’s version may be both more accessible for the disabled, and more searchable for everyone.

3. Mandatory v. Voluntary. Public access policies should be mandatory. As illustrated by SHERPA RoMEO, when publishers must comply with public access policies to accommodate authors, they adjust.

4. Other. While the NIH provides a great role model with fair use after a delay period, the best service to scholarship is full libre open access (Morrison 2009A). That is, open access with no delay period and minimal or no restrictions on re-use. For example, when as a scholar I freely share my articles and charts with everyone, another author is free to re-use my charts, with appropriate attribution. For me, this is a gain (of a citation, exposure, mention at a conference), not at all a loss. The NIH was and is wise not to REQUIRE full open access, however it is beneficial to mention this as an ideal and encourage voluntary movement in this direction. To illustrate the appreciation the scholarly community has for this approach, consider that the U.S.-based PLoS ONE, a fully open access journal, although a very new journal, is already among the world’s largest scholarly journals and on track to becoming THE largest in 2010. Advising scholarly publishers, whether commercial or not-for-profit organizations, to move to full open access (i.e., meet the needs of the constituency served) is not only good for the public interest, it is just plain good practical business advice too.

Thank you for the opportunity to comment.

Heather Morrison, MLIS

Associate Editor, Scholarly and Research Communication

http://www.src-online.ca/index.php/src

The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics

http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com

References

Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Policy on Access to Research Outputs http://www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/34846.html

DOAJ http://www.doaj.org

Electronic Journals Library http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/index.phtml?bibid=AAAAA&colors=7&lang=en

Learned Publishing http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/alpsp/lp

Morrison, Heather. (2009) The Dramatic Growth of Open Access: December 11, 2009 edition

http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2009/12/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-december.html

Morrison, Heather. 2009A. Open Access Chapter: Scholarly Communication for Librarians: Chandos Publishing. Freely available online at http://eprints.rclis.org/16282/

ROARMAP http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

SCOAP3 http://scoap3.org/

SHERPA RoMEO Publisher Copyright Policies and Self-Archiving http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

Ware, M. (2009).The stm report: an overview of scientific and scholarly journalsclass="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"> publishing. International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM).Retrieved from http://www.stm-assoc.org, October 14, 2009

Dramatic Growth of Open Access: December 11, 2009 early year-end edition

2009: a great year for OA!
While dramatic growth continues in all aspects of open access, the story of the year and especially of the last quarter is a dramatic leap in open access mandate policies, particularly institutional and departmental policies. In the past year, institutional mandates (as recorded on ROARMAP) more than tripled, from 25 to 79. Nearly half that growth has come in the past week, from just one country - Finland, with its recent announcement of open access mandate policies at all 26 of Finland's applied sciences universities, as reported by Peter Suber on Open Access News. Update Dec. 13: Alma Swan has updated her chart on OA mandate growth. Note that our numbers are slightly different, as I include thesis mandates in the total, and Alma doesn't.

Strong growth continues in open access journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals, currently at 4,400 titles, added more than 700 titles in the past year, or about 2 titles per day.

There is plenty of holiday reading in all of those more than 1,500 repositories as recorded by OpenDOAR. Scientific Commons, now over 32 million publications, grew by more than 8 million items in 2009; that's more than 20 thousand publications per day.

Update December 15: BASE may now be the largest search engine in terms of repositories; see this chart for BASE numbers (thanks to Dirk Pieper).

E-LIS, the Open Archive for Library and Information Studies, recently surpassed an important milestone of over 10,000 items.

The percentage of NIH-funded research that is freely available after 2 years is 41% for external researchers and 50% for internal researchers. This is definitely growing; but the figure should be 100% at 1 year, should it not? This issue of Dramatic Growth illustrates, in a small way, how we can begin to figure out who has been naughty and who has been nice, to help authors meet this simple requirement of our generous research funders.

Here are some quick figures for OA compliance rates with the Public Access Policy for a few journals. Note that this is not a representative sampling, rather just a few titles selected at random from the publishers' websites:

• PLoS Medicine: 100%
• BMC Cancer: 100%
• American Journal of Epidemiology: 95%
• Addictive Behaviors (Elsevier): 37%
• American Heart Journal (Elsevier): 22%
• Annals of Surgical Oncology (Springer): 12%
• Breast Cancer Research and Treatment (Springer): 9%
  

Speaking of nice, with this issue the more than 1.6 million books provided under OCA principles or the public domain by the Open Content Alliance is recorded.

One thing to look forward to in 2010 is a very strong probably that the world's largest scholarly journal will be an open access journal, the award-winning PLoS One. OA mandate mania is sure to continue ~ not only are discussions underway at many a university and department, but now that we have a substantial and growing set of role models the benefits of an OA mandate ~ such as increased impact and web presence ~ will become that much more obvious, inspiring yet more mandates. FRPAA is on the list for a U.S. rapidly moving towards open government on many fronts.

There is no need to wait for New Year's to make your resolutions; why not join the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity today?

To everyone who has worked hard for open access all year long ~ those with visible achievements to show, and those with quieter progress alike ~ kudos, thanks for all that you do, and best wishes for a wonderful holiday.

Open Data editions of Dramatic Growth of Open Access:
DGOA Dataverse (courtesy of Harvard)

Google docs for viewing (thanks, Google!)
Google docs full data version
Google Docs Show Growth Edition

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

Open Access to the public domain

Thanks to the Open Content Alliance, we all have ready access to a great many works that are in the public domain. From a scholars's perspective, this makes it a lot easier to put our research papers into a more complete historical context.

Two examples:

Québec environmentalists now have access to a history of birds in Québec, thanks to the American Museum of Natural History Library. Charles Eus Dionne's 1906 work, Les oiseaux de la province le Québec, is just one example of an emerging and important field: the environmental history that we will need as we work towards repairing the environmental damage of the past century and restoring ecosystems to the extent that we can.

With the eyes of the world about to land on my home city of Vancouver as the 2010 Winter Olympics approaches, how lovely that we all now have access to the exquisite and prophetic early history of our city, Legends of Vancouver by poetess Pauline Johnson, thanks to the University of Toronto Library (among others).

What an enlightened approach; the public domain books are in the public domain; even though search engine Yahoo is a partner in the Open Content Alliance, these public domain works are equally available regardless of the reader's preferred search engine; I am in no way disadvantaged by my personal preference for google for most of my current searching needs.

To illustrate how easy it now is for scholars to ground their work in historical context, go to the Internet Archive and search the Open Content Alliance texts for creators like Plato, Aristotle, Ranganathan, or Dewey.

What next? Heather's wish list

Multilingual content and interfaces

Current contributors to the Open Content Alliance are primarily English language organizations. It is good to see at least a little bit of content in French, from Québec, but what would be really awesome would be full participation by the libraries and other memory organizations of Québec, so that the substantial literature of this province that is in the public domain would be freely available to all; and, of course, a French language interface. Multiply this by all of the languages of the world, and this is what I would love to see for the Open Content Alliance. OCA per se does not need to take the lead; it would make sense for each language to have a lead organization that works in its own language.

Full searching of texts and linkages

Full text searching would facilitate the scholar's task. Because many concepts overlap, and terminology for concepts changes over time and in different contexts, it would be very helpful to be able to search the links that other scholars have made between different works. This could mean a gradual integration of the scholarship of today and tomorrow into this public domain works. How useful is it, for example, for scholar after scholar to undertake the detective work to state that the idea that knowledge is, of necessity, at least to some degree always partially socially constructed, is not a new idea but rather one that extends back into antiquity? Why not make the linkages obvious and easy to find for anyone, so that scholars can focus on more timely questions, such as the implications of this concept for us today?

Google Books: please join the Open Content Alliance

Nothing would please me more than to see Google drop the most problematic aspects of Google Books, such as limiting access to public domain works and a permanent monopoly on orphan works as per the current settlement, adopt the principles of the Open Content Alliance which include broadest possible access (not always open access), and join OCA.

This post is inspired by research for the coursework I am doing towards my PhD program through the Simon Fraser University School of Communication.

University of Ottawa among North American leaders in open access

Kudos to the University of Ottawa for this welcome announcement about OA leadership, including a commitment to make University of Ottawa research openly accessible, joining the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity, providing funding for authors to wish to publish in open access journals that charge article processing fees, and a research grant to further study open access.

This post is part of the Canadian leadership in the open access movement series. Canadian open access advocate Michael Geist is at the University of Ottawa.

Open Access and Open Education for Development

This slideshow is a brief presentation for a class that I am auditing this semester at SFU, Communication in Development, co-taught by Bob Anderson and James Busumtwi-Sam.

In brief, there are tremendous resources available to scholars and educators in the developing world, including more than 4,000 fully open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals, over 32 million free publications, and major YouTube courseware suites produced by prestigious universities such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science and MIT.

Developing countries are leaders as well as beneficiaries in the open access and open education movements. The Latin American countries are leaders in the open access journals movement with the Scielo project. Africa has a pan-continental journals portal called African Journals Online. South Africa is a leader in the open educational movement, India in national open access policy development.

Resources and supports for developing countries are discussed. Two approaches to sharing knowledge are presented. One is described as a charity model, involving northern countries sharing access to journals in a limited way. The other model, open access, involves sharing by all; OA is seen as a superior model as the means to equity on a global scale.

Students with an interest in open access: this is a wonderful and fun way to introduce classmates and faculty alike to open access. As a bonus, it is easy to find creative commons licensed content to include in your presentation.

Virginia Libraries: review of Scholarly Communication for Librarians

Thanks to Cy Dillon for this review of my book, Scholarly Communication for Librarians. The review is scheduled to be published in the January issue of Virginia Libraries.

Review

In the summary of her chapter on the economics of scholarly communication, Heather Morrison says, “It is timely to look beyond the continuing serials crisis towards a future of scholarly communication online that can do vastly more for scholars than was ever possible in print, and begin to plan and prioritize accordingly.” In order to respond to this completely worthwhile call to action, it is essential that librarians—especially academic librarians—understand the current complex state of scholarly publishing and its transitional nature. Reading Morrison’s book is the most efficient way for most of us to acquire that understanding.

Admitting a significant bias toward the open access movement, Morrison, a Project Coordinator at the British Columbia Electronic Library Network and an adjunct professor at University of British Columbia's School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, constructs a careful and complete description of the current scholarly publication environment including everything from the reason researchers publish, to the workings of the traditional publishing market, and finally to the overwhelming change in information access that is driven by the internet.

One of the book’s strongest chapters examines the economics of scholarly journals using the concept of the cost per article of producing articles in various types of journals, which can vary thirty or even a hundred-fold, to make it clear that commercial publishing is all too often focused strictly on making money for the stockholders of three or four large corporations. She also describes the business model of these corporations and emphasizes that their profit margins are in the range of 30 percent. Most of us who work in academic are aware that there are science and technology journals that cost as much annually as a good small car, and we are looking forward to the day that researchers and the people who vote on their tenure realize that rigorous peer review is not limited to commercially published journals. Obviously professional society publishers and the various types of open access publishers are presented as alternatives that should attract more interest from authors as publishing changes in the digital environment.

Some readers will recognize Morrison as the author of the blog The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, a site followed by advocates of the open access movement, and, as might be expected, her chapter on open access is a clear introduction to the various approaches to making peer reviewed research literature available free online. In fact, if you are not perfectly clear on the differences between green and gold access or libre versus gratis access, this chapter is available free as a PDF file at http://eprints.rclis.org/16282/.

Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of Scholarly Communication for Librarians is Morrison’s evaluation of the roles librarians can play as scholars writing, archivists managing repositories, acquisitions experts purchasing, authorities on publishing advising faculty, reference librarians answering research questions, and advocates of open access pushing for publishing models that support availability of information over profit for private investors. It is both gratifying and sobering to imagine the impact our profession can have in the next few years as new models of publishing evolve. Morrison’s discussion of strategies for libraries and her examination of emerging trends are rich with examples of resources and concepts librarians should know if they are to serve their community well. Readers will find themselves turning to their computer frequently, so the experience of reading the book is much more involved and productive that the length of the volume would suggest.