Today’s the Last Day: Make the Case for Open Access | Peer to Peer Review
The time to send messages to the White House ended January 21
Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 1/21/2010
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Have you told the White House what you think about open access to publicly funded research? The Office of Science and Technology Policy has been accepting comments for weeks now, but the window of opportunity to add your thoughts closes today.
You haven’t commented yet? Do it now. Don’t worry. I’ll wait for you.
Okay, now that you’re back, I want to confess that there’s a lot involved that I don’t personally understand: the technical requirements, the need for uniformity, the way the deposits should work—I don’t have opinions on the fine points. What I do believe, though, is that the research funded by our tax dollars is important because it’s a public good. We wouldn’t be funding it with public dollars otherwise. It’s good for academic science, but it’s good for industry, too. (See also what ALA/ACRL and ARL have to say.)
Sharing science
My son is a physics postdoc at the Argonne National Laboratory. He does things with our tax dollars that I couldn’t begin to explain, but I do get that what he does may end up improving batteries that will be sold in products that we’ll be using—laptops, cars, you name it. It’s good for consumers. It’s good for business. And it’s especially good for pushing forward the frontiers of what we know about materials at a very fundamental level. (I mean, he fires photons at stuff to see what happens. That’s pretty basic.)What if students or faculty at my college need to read up on the latest research published by the people whose synchrotron is funded by our taxes? Well, they’re probably in luck. Physicists are big on sharing. They’ve been doing it for years, through arXiv and by making their own society publications open access friendly. Not everything is available, of course, but quite a lot is. They still publish massive amounts of research, but somehow they feel their interest in supporting a quality publishing operation is not incompatible with fast and free dissemination of results.
Not on the same page
Other science disciplines taught at my campus aren’t quite as open. In biology, there are myriad worthy societies that rely on earnings from library subscriptions, and there are even more commercially-published journals that rank high in importance. Neuroscience is an exciting concentration that is attracting a lot of students but, oy, it’s expensive. Like physics, chemistry has a major society that represents many branches of the field, but its journals are pricey and the logic of open access is not wired into the discipline as it is in physics.We also pay a lot just to find out what we don’t have. Our most expensive specialized databases are those covering chemistry and mathematics literature. The vast majority of what these tools index is published in journals we can’t afford, but, if we expect our faculty to be active scholars (and we do), there’s really no alternative. We have to hope that the land grant university up the road whose library we depend on will have enough tax-supported funding to provide access to the fair-use articles we can obtain, and that we’ll be able to afford copyright fees for the rest. For this to work, somebody, somewhere, has to buy a subscription.
Many small colleges like mine are going straight to paying commercial publishers for articles at point of need, and they’re saving a lot of money on subscriptions. But this means that, by design, there is no public asset to explore, even on a licensed, temporary basis. Scientific research is thus a disposable unit purchased for individuals, a solution that still costs libraries thousands of dollars per year. That’s a savings that comes at a steep cost.
Whose crisis?
This situation, of course, is often mistakenly called “the serials crisis.” It might be more accurate to call it the humanities crisis, because both my library and the research university we count on have less money for books, which are the lifeblood of many humanities disciplines. We know we have to pay fees for journal articles, because the only way we share them is by copying. Thanks to the first sale doctrine, we can share a book until it falls apart—and it’s politically a lot easier to not buy a book than it is to cancel a journal or database subscription.Here’s another thing: it has always seemed peculiar to me that the “5/5 rule” CONTU guideline for the interlibrary loan (ILL) of articles is a flat rate of five articles, published within the most recent five years, regardless of the size of a journal. We can get five articles from a science journal that publishes 1000 short articles a year—and five articles from a humanities journal that publishes 20 long articles a year. That doesn’t seem right, but such are the peculiar metrics of copyright compromises. It’s considered fair use to request by ILL some 20 percent of the humanities journal before paying copyright fees (which tend to be very affordable, anyway) but only one half of one percent of the big science journal, for which copyright fees typically cost the price of a scholarly trade paperback in the humanities. No wonder we’re buying fewer books.
Science in the public interest
We have a long way to go before we sort out the economics of publishing in a digital world. Book publishers are sweating over when to release ebooks, and the newspaper of record is poised to start charging frequent flyers.But this one is a no-brainer. We believe science is valuable enough that we pour public funding into it. We need to make sure that the results of that funding helps advance our knowledge of the physical and natural world, and that won’t happen if libraries can no longer afford it. Let’s make sure our investment pays off—for the public good.
The White House wants to hear from us. Add your comments to the open forum today.
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her next mystery, Through the Cracks, will be published by Minotaur Books this year.
Today’s the Last Day: Make the Case for Open Access | Peer to Peer Review - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal
White House Mulls Plan to Broaden Access to Published Papers -- Kaiser 327 (5963): 259 -- Science
White House Mulls Plan to Broaden Access to Published Papers -- Kaiser 327 (5963): 259 -- Science
White House Mulls Plan to Broaden Access to Published Papers Jocelyn Kaiser Should all papers that result from U.S. taxpayerfunded research be made freely available? The White House science office likes the idea and has asked for input on whether many federal agencies should formally adopt it. So-called open access advocates are enthusiastic in comments submitted to a White House forum, but some scientific societies remain wary, fearing that a too-broad public-access policy could kill journal subscriptions. Both sides agree that the White House appears to be moving toward a plan. "They're focusing not on should we do this but how would we do this," says Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a librarian group and open-access proponent. The push for mandatory release of research papers started 2 years ago at the National Institutes of Health, which required that grantees send copies of their peer-reviewed, accepted papers to the agency. NIH posts the final manuscripts or published papers in its free PubMedCentral archive; release can be delayed on request up to 12 months after publication. The objective has been to give patients and the public broader access to research results. Despite grumbling from publishers, NIH says the policy is working smoothly. Last month, as part of President Barack Obama's "open government" activities, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) launched an online discussion about whether the NIH model should be expanded to other agencies. The OSTP forum asks nine questions, including how to ensure that authors comply. About 400 comments have been submitted so far from scores of individual scientists, librarians, publishers, and others. The majority support broadening public access, says OSTP Assistant Director of Life Sciences Diane DiEuliis, a neuroscientist on detail from NIH. "There was a fair consensus on the general issue," she told Science by e-mail, as well as on other questions, such as "embargo times": how long an author and journal can keep a paper under private control. Many suggested using the current NIH embargo12 monthsand preferred central repositories like PubMedCentral rather than university archives. But even a 12-month delay worries some nonprofit scientific publishers. For example, mineralogists and anthropologists argued that their papersunlike those in biomedical researchmay have a very long "half life" and that releasing the full text on the Internet could cause journals to lose subscribers. Katherine McCarter of the Ecological Society of America, which has not yet submitted comments, says that for ecology journals, "even a 1-year delay could be a real disincentive to buy a subscription." The cost of producing a single paper can run significantly higher in social sciences because papers need more space and require a "more robust peer-review process," argues William E. Davis III, executive director of the American Anthropological Association. His letter warns that mandatory release of such papers "could well result in the demise of the very journals that ... advocates seek to make more freely available." Despite such concerns, OSTP seems to be moving inexorably toward a general open-access policy. DiEuliis says OSTP will sort through all comments (the deadline has been extended until 21 January) and send suggestions to an interagency working group. This panel will also consider a report due this week from a group of publishers and other stakeholders that OSTP and the House Science Committee convened last June. One possibility, DiEuliis says, is that OSTP could draft an executive order or memo that would set out "minimum standards" but "give agencies flexibility to create custom plans.
White House Mulls Plan to Broaden Access to Published Papers -- Kaiser 327 (5963): 259 -- Science
Med students hoist P2P Jolly Roger to get access to papers - Ars Technica
Med students hoist P2P Jolly Roger to get access to papers - Ars Technica
Med students hoist P2P Jolly Roger to get access to papers A study provides evidence that file sharing takes place with some very specialized media: the research papers published in scientific journals. By John Timmer | Last updated October 29, 2009 6:15 AM CT
The ease with which information can be spread through the Internet has exacerbated tensions among those who pay for, conduct, and publish scientific research. Many journals still require subscription or per-article payments for access to the research they publish, which often leaves the public, who funds a significant percentage of the research, on the wrong side of a pay wall. So far, however, there's been little evidence that the public has been interested enough in research to engage in the sort of widespread file-sharing that plague other content industries. But a new study suggests that may just be because nobody's looked very carefully.
The study, which was spotted by TechDirt, appears in an open-access journal, so anyone can read its entire contents. It describes the sharing of over 5,000 research papers on a site frequented by medical professionals, and the formal community rules that governed the exchange.
During the six months in 2008 that the author tracked the activity on the site, which was a discussion board focused on medical fields, it had over 125,000 registered users. Anyone could start an account, but many of the fora were focused on specific issues, such as those faced by nurses and residents. In addition to those, however, there was a section called the Electronic Library that contained a forum called "Databases & Journals—Requests and Enquiries."
Up to three times a day, users were allowed to submit a request for a published research article, accompanied by a link to the free abstract hosted at the journal's website. Other users would then download the full article and host it somewhere, providing a link in the discussion. If everything was set up properly, the site would track the number of downloads.
Over the course of six months, over 6,500 articles were requested, and over 80 percent of those requests were successfully filled. The articles received a mean of 4.47 views, with one attracting 177 downloads. The author found that the requests roughly paralleled the journal's impact factors, with Nature and Science coming out on top, followed by more specialized medical journals. Figuring an average cost of $30 a download (the price requested by many journals), the publishing industry was potentially losing $1.4 million a year due to the site, although it's unlikely that many of the downloaders would have actually exercised their option to buy an article.
According to the author, the site (which is never named) went inactive in early 2009, although its contents were indexed via Google prior to that point.
The author considers this behavior in the context of the Open Access debate, which has played out in Congress and research institutions. He also terms the file sharing behavior among people involved in the medical profession "ethically dubious," given it involves the distribution of copyrighted material.
There is, however, an alternate way of viewing this that the author doesn't discuss: at least some medical professionals are apparently unable to obtain the publications they feel are needed for their training or practice; given their job responsibilities, it seems unethical to withhold these materials.
In addition, it's worth noting that, although this sort of informal sharing would be obviated if all research was open access, it has a very different history from the formal open access movement. For many years, it was traditional for anyone publishing a paper to order a stack of what were termed "reprints"—essentially the journal article without the rest of the journal's contents—from the publisher, in order to share with colleagues or anyone who was interested, but did not have access to the journal. With the advent of digital publishing, this sort of service shifted to the emailing of PDFs—in a lot of ways, the file sharing seen here could be viewed as the next logical step in this publication sharing process.
In any case, the amount of sharing that goes on is undoubtedly much larger than the file exchanges observed in the study. Many authors are now choosing to simply place articles where anyone can find them, either ahead of print at places like the arXiv, or after, on their university's servers. Offers to share paywalled articles also occur in public forums that aren't dedicated to this exchange, at least based on some of the comments attached to Ars' science articles.
Many publishers are readily adapting to and, in some cases, embracing the increased demands for public access to research results. But there remain a number who are resisting the trend. The study suggests that publishers might do well to adopt some sort of formalized access system, or they may end up facing a growth in the sites that encourage the same sort of sharing that has caused the movie and film industries so much indigestion.
The Internet Journal of Medical Informatics, 2009. DOI unavailable.
Med students hoist P2P Jolly Roger to get access to papers - Ars Technica