International OA News

Today, the G8 Science Ministers released a Statement that strongly endorses open access to the results of scientific research - both data and publications.

An excerpt:

We recognise that effective global scientific research and public understanding of science and commercial innovation by enterprises is supported by free and rapid public access to published, publicly funded research. The generation, sharing and exploitation of scientific knowledge are integral to the creation of wealth and the enhancement of our quality of life. We recognise that G8 nations have an important opportunity and responsibility to promote policies that increase access to the results of publicly funded research results to spur scientific discovery, enable better international collaboration and coordination of research, enhance the engagement of society and help support economic prosperity.

Today in the U.S. ...

"President Obama signed an Executive Order directing his administration to take historic steps to make government-held data more accessible to the public and to entrepreneurs and others as fuel for innovation and economic growth."

Accessible data is open and machine-readable. This allows entrepreneurs to more easily incorporate the data into new and innovative technologies. Let the app coding begin!

Today the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced a new directive to federal agencies to develop open-access policies within the next six months.

Here is the text from the brief press release:

The Obama Administration is committed to the proposition that citizens deserve easy access to the results of scientific research their tax dollars have paid for. That’s why, in a policy memorandum released today, OSTP Director John Holdren has directed Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research. OSTP has been looking into this issue for some time, soliciting broad public input on multiple occasions and convening an interagency working group to develop a policy. The final policy reflects substantial inputs from scientists and scientific organizations, publishers, members of Congress, and other members of the public—over 65 thousand of whom recently signed a We the People petition asking for expanded public access to the results of taxpayer-funded research.

To see the new policy memorandum, please visit: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_access_memo_2013.pdf

To see Dr. Holdren’s response to the We the People petition, please visit: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/increasing-public-access-results-scientific-research

Ten years have passed since the landmark meeting in Budapest that many people view as the unofficial beginning of the open access (OA) movement. The meeting produced the first definition of "open access" as well as the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI).

To mark the 10 year anniversary of the BOAI, leaders in the OA movement met once again in Budapest and developed new Recommendations for the next 10 years. These recommendations were released today.

(From the press release announcement):

"The Open Access recommendations include the development of Open Access policies in institutions of higher education and in funding agencies, the open licensing of scholarly works, the development of infrastructure such as Open Access repositories and creating standards of professional conduct for Open Access publishing. The recommendations also establish a new goal of achieving Open Access as the default method for distributing new peer-reviewed research in every field and in every country within ten years’ time."

And from the preamble to the new recommendations themselves:

"Nothing in the last ten years makes OA less necessary or less opportune. On the contrary, it remains the case that “scientists and scholars...publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment” and “without expectation of payment.” In addition, scholars typically participate in peer review as referees and editors without expectation of payment. Yet more often than not, access barriers to peer-reviewed research literature remain firmly in place, for the benefit of intermediaries rather than authors, referees, or editors, and at the expense of research, researchers, and research institutions."

AND

"The problems that previously held up the adoption and implementation of OA are solved, and the solutions are spreading. But until OA spreads further, the problems for which OA is a solution will remain largely unsolved. In this statement, we reaffirm the ends and means of the original BOAI, and recommit ourselves to make progress. But in addition, we specifically set the new goal that within the next ten years, OA will become the default method for distributing new peer-reviewed research in every field and country."

Momentum in the Open Access movement seems to be picking up speed this summer with some notable news from Britain, and an impending response from the White House regarding the Access2Research petition (see my earlier blog entries for more on this).

Jennifer Howard, from the Chronicle of Higher Education, sums it all up very well in her Aug 13, 2012 article: A Push Grows Abroad for Open Access to Publicly Financed Research.

No news on the Canadian front however...

On July 1st 2012 a new Open Access Policy came into effect at the World Bank. From their April 10, 2012 press release:

“Knowledge is power,” World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick said. “Making our knowledge widely and readily available will empower others to come up with solutions to the world’s toughest problems. Our new Open Access policy is the natural evolution for a World Bank that is opening up more and more."

Now the World Bank has been named as SPARC's July 2012 Innovator:

"For being a pioneer in sharing research on such a global scale, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition recognizes the World Bank as its July 2012 Innovator. "

An update on the "We the People Petition" I blogged about last time:

25,000 Advocates Urge White House to Open Taxpayer-Funded Research to Everyone
“We the People Petition” hits 25,000 signatures in just two weeks

Washington, DC – June 4, 2012 - The movement to make taxpayer-funded research freely available online hit a new milestone on Sunday when advocates hit their goal of 25,000 signatures to a “We the People” petition to the Obama administration. The petition,
created by Access2Research (a group of Open Access advocates, including SPARC’s
Executive Director, Heather Joseph), requests that President Obama make taxpayer-funded research freely available.

On Monday (May 21) a petition calling for Public Access to all Federally Funded Research was posted to the White House "We the People" website:

Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research

If the petition garners 25,000 signatures within 30 days, it will be reviewed by White House staff, and considered for action. At the time of my writing this blog post the petition has nearly 16 000 signatures - more than halfway there in less than a week!

You DO NOT need to be an American to sign, but you do need to register on the website (a short and simple procedure).

See this video promoting the petition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FoYxzPZDuw

The full text of the petition is here:

"We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.

The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research."

See more info at the access2research website.

There was some big news out of the U.K. this week that had many open access advocates buzzing online:

The government of the U.K. announced that, within 2 years, it plans to provide open access to all publicly funded research results.

See the comments article by universities and science minister, David Willetts in The Guardian.

Another Guardian article provides further details:

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales will act as an unpaid consultant to "...initially advise the research councils on its £2m Gateway to Research project, a website that will act as a portal, linking to publicly funded UK research all over the web."

Academic librarians have long lamented the unsustainable escalation in journal subscription prices (i.e. the "serials crisis") - but a solution, and real change, needs to come from a shift within the values and behaviours of the academics who are the primary contributors to, and consumers of, these journals.

On April 17, 2012 the Faculty Advisory Council at Harvard University released a memorandum to all faculty "...to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library."

Excerpt:

"Harvard’s annual cost for journals from these providers now approaches $3.75M....Prices for online content from two providers have increased by about 145% over the past six years, which far exceeds not only the consumer price index, but also the higher education and the library price indices."

The Faculty Advisory Council suggests several options for faculty and librarians to consider to help shift this untenable situation including the critical, but elusive target: “move prestige to open access.”

As Robert Gonzales over at io9 puts it:

"What does it say about the world of academic publishing, the accessibility of knowledge, and the flow of information when the richest academic institution on the planet cannot afford to continue paying for its peer-reviewed journal subscriptions?"

Not all are applauding Harvard's stance though...
Michael Eisen, a biologist at UC Berkeley (and co-founder of the Public Library of Science), has written a withering response to the Harvard announcement:
20 years of cowardice: the pathetic response of American universities to the crisis in scholarly publishing

The Research Works Act (RWA) is now officially dead.

As reported in this blog back in January, the RWA is a bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representations in December 2011 that would repeal the National Institutes of Health's Public Access Policy - and cause a severe setback in the Open Access movement.

The introduction of this bill ignited a firestorm of opposition online, led by Micheal Eisen who also exposed the major contributions made by Elsevier to the election campaigns of the sponsors of the bill.

This revelation seemed to be the spark that finally spurred action among academics. The Cost of Knowledge boycott, initiated by Tim Glowers and Tyler Neylon, enlisted more than 7000 researchers who pledged not to support any Elsevier journal (publish, edit, review).

On February 23, 2012, 11 Research University Provosts signed an essay on Values and Scholarship in InsideHigherEd that provided strong support for the signatories of the Cost of Knowledge boycott.

In addition to individual researchers, publishers also started to publicly oppose the RWA (Peter Suber and Richard Poynder maintained lists of these).

All of the negative press accumulated to a point that Elsevier finally backed away from its support of this bill on Feb 27, 2012, and within hours, Representatives Issa and Maloney withdrew the bill.

Want more details? Peter Suber's SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #163 (Mar 2, 2012), provides an extremely comprehensive summary of these events... "a biography and obituary" of the RWA.

Happy anniversary BOAI!

It was Valentine's Day, February 14, 2002 when the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) was officially launched. This is seen by many as the birth of the Open Access movement.

The first paragraph of the Initiative reads:

"An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge."

In December the Research Works Act (RWA) was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. If this bill passes it will effectively put an end to the National Institutes of Health's Public Access Policy - and cause a severe setback in the Open Access movement.

The NIH Public Access Policy ensures that tax-payers (who ultimately funded the research) have access to the published results of that research. Researchers that receive funding from NIH are required to deposit a copy of their peer-reviewed articles in the open archive PubMed within 12 months of publication. The RWA will forbid this requirement.

Criticism and discussion of this is bill is growing rapidly online and in editorials.

Peter Suber, the well-known Open Access advocate, has started a Google+ thread on this topic that includes many comments and links from others in the OA community.

See also Michael Eisen's New York Times op-ed piece, and several entries in his blog. Michael Eisen is a biologist at UC Berkeley and co-founder of the Public Library of Science OA journals.

From Eisen's NYT op-ed:

"But it is not just Congress that should act. For too long scientists, libraries and research institutions have supported the publishing status quo out of a combination of tradition and convenience. But the latest effort to overturn the N.I.H.’s public access policy should dispel any remaining illusions that commercial publishers are serving the interests of the scientific community and public.

Researchers should cut off commercial journals’ supply of papers by publishing exclusively in one of the many “open-access” journals that are perfectly capable of managing peer review (like those published by the Public Library of Science, which I co-founded). Libraries should cut off their supply of money by canceling subscriptions. And most important, the N.I.H., universities and other public and private agencies that sponsor academic research should make it clear that fulfilling their mission requires that their researchers’ scholarly output be freely available to the public at the moment of publication. "

"Our goal is a transformation in the accessibility of research and data."(6.10, p.78)

There is a lot of buzz online regarding a new policy report released last week from the British government.

The “Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth” report may be downloaded from here.

From the press release:

"The strategy, launched by Business Secretary Vince Cable and Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts, sets out the Government’s plans to boost economic growth through investment in research and innovation across the UK."

The relevant Open Access statements begin in section 6, p.76, here are just a few of examples:

6.6 “The Government, in line with our overarching commitment to transparency and open data, is committed to ensuring that publicly-funded research should be accessible free of charge.”

6.8: “Government will work with partners, including the publishing industry, to achieve free access to publicly-funded research as soon as possible and will set an example itself.”

6.9 "The Research Councils expect the researchers they fund to deposit published articles or conference proceedings in an open access repository at or around the time of publication. But this practice is unevenly enforced. Therefore, as an immediate step, we have asked the Research Councils to ensure the researchers
they fund fulfill the current requirements. Additionally, the Research Councils have now agreed to invest £2 million in the development, by 2013, of a UK ‘Gateway to Research’.

The entire report: http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/innovation/docs/i/11-1387-innovation-and-research-strategy-for-growth.pdf

The Berlin 9 Open Access Conference took place last week (Nov 9-10, 2011) in Washington D.C. It is the first time that this highly regarded annual OA meeting has been held in North America. In recognition of this event, there was a surge in North American signatories to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.

From the Nov 9, 2011 press release:

"Thirty-three research institutions, associations, and foundations in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico have made a commitment to Open Access to research by signing the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. These top private, public, and non-profit organizations join nearly 300 more from around the world in another clear sign of the growing demand for change in the way scientific and scholarly research results are communicated and maximized....

"The Berlin Declaration promotes the Internet as a medium for disseminating global knowledge. Its goal is to make scientific and scholarly research more accessible to the broader public by taking full advantage of the possibilities offered by digital electronic communication. Signatories support actions that ensure the future Web is sustainable, interactive, and transparent – and that content is openly accessible – in order to realize the vision of a global and accessible representation of knowledge."

The open access movement has mostly focused on counteracting the high-cost of serial publications. But now there is the beginnings of an open access movement for books too!

"OAPEN is an initiative in Open Access publishing for humanities and social sciences monographs. The consortium of University-based academic publishers who make up OAPEN believe that the time is ripe to bring the successes of scientific Open Access publishing to the humanities and social sciences."

Browse the titles available so far: http://oapen.org/search?browse-all=yes

The first official call for papers of the new Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication (JLSC) has just gone out!

The inaugural issue of JLSC will focus on the theme of “Defining Scholarly Communication” and is due out in Spring 2012.

From the About JLSC page:

"The Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication is a quarterly, peer-reviewed open-access publication for original articles, reviews and case studies that analyze or describe the strategies, partnerships and impact of library-led digital projects, online publishing and scholarly communication initiatives.

JLSC provides a focused forum for library practitioners to share ideas, strategies, research and pragmatic explorations of library-led initiatives related to such areas as institutional repository and digital collection management, library publishing/hosting services and authors’ rights advocacy efforts. As technology, scholarly communication, the economics of publishing, and the roles of libraries all continue to evolve, the work shared in JLSC informs practices that strengthen librarianship.

The Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication is a shared intellectual space for scholarly communication librarians, institutional repository managers, digital archivists, digital data managers and related professionals."

In June three well-known research organizations, The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust, announced they intend to start a new top-tier open access biomedical and life sciences journal.

From the June 27, 2011 press release:

"All research published in the journal will make highly significant contributions that will extend the boundaries of scientific knowledge.

A team of highly regarded, experienced and actively practising scientists will ensure fair, swift and transparent editorial decisions followed by rapid online publication. The first issue of the journal, whose name has yet to be decided, is expected to be published in the summer of 2012."

...

"The journal will be an open access journal: the entire content will be freely available for all to read, to reproduce and for unrestricted use. This open access system will also enhance opportunities to share content and to more directly engage the reader."

And from the July 11, 2011 press release:

"Randy Schekman, a distinguished cell biologist and the 14th editor of ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’, has been named the first editor of a new journal"

SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has just announced that it will host a new North American meeting on Open Access in March 2012. This will be an expansion of the already successful biennial SPARC meeting on digital repositories.

From the press release:
“There is a clear need for a regular, North American event where the community can get together and discuss all aspects of the burgeoning Open Access movement,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC.

The SPARC 2012 Open Access meeting will be held March 11-13 at the Kansas City Intercontinental Hotel. Further details will be available on the SPARC Web site this fall.

The Berlin Open Access Conference Series will be held in North America for the first time this year! The conference will take place in Washington DC November 9-10, 2011.

Some background from the conference website:

"In 2003, a landmark meeting organized by the Max Planck Society and the European Cultural Heritage Online project brought together international experts with the aim of developing a new web-based research environment using the Open Access paradigm as a mechanism for having scientific knowledge and cultural heritage accessible worldwide.

As a result of the meeting, leading international research, scientific, and cultural institutions issued and signed The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, a document that outlines concrete steps to promote the Internet as a medium for disseminating global knowledge."

"In order to support continued adoption of the principles outlined in the Berlin Declaration, as well to track progress on their implementation, the original signatories agreed to support regular follow-up meetings. As a result, Berlin Open Access conferences have been convened annually since 2004. The conference series now takes place in locations around the world; to date Germany, Switzerland, England, Italy, France, and – most recently – China – have hosted this prestigious gathering."

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is the first place to search for Open Access journals by subject area or title. DOAJ is a quality controlled list - if you are wondering about the quality or legitimacy of an OA journal check to see if it is listed in the DOAJ.

"The Directory aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content."

Recent milestones:
The DOAJ now has over 6400 OA journals listed, from more than 100 countries, and in more than 50 languages! And they have just launched a new search interface - go check it out: www.doaj.org

And, as always, if you want to learn more about Open Access please visit the Open Access LibGuide.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH funded research. It requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central. (The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has a similar policy adopted January 1, 2008).

Reposting from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access Website:

"...April 7, 2011 will mark the 3rd Anniversary of the implementation of the policy opening up access to articles reporting on the results of NIH-funded research. The policy has shown tremendous signs of success. PubMed Central now contains more than 2 million full text articles reporting on the latest NIH-funded research, and nearly a *half a million* individuals access these articles each day."

Heather Joseph, Executive Director at SPARC, is collecting stories on what your experience has been like with this policy. You can send stories directly to her: heather [at] arl [dot] org.

PLoS ONE, an interactive open access journal for scientific and medical research, is now the largest peer-reviewed journal in the world (by number of published articles per year). See Heather Morrison's charts comparing PLoS ONE (6,749 articles) to the next largest titles PHYS REV B (5782 articles) and APPL PHYS LETT (5449 articles).

As Peter Suber points out in this month's SPARC Open Access Newsletter:

"Size isn't quality. But a reputation for low quality would deter author submissions and function as a limit on size. When PLoS ONE launched in late 2006 and announced that it would review submissions for methodological soundness and rigor, but not for significance and impact, many OA skeptics and TA publishers predicted that it would become a warehouse for low quality. But that's not what happened, in part because reviewing for soundness and rigor is a barrier against low quality. In fact, something else happened instead. Not only did PLoS ONE attract voluminous submissions, including breakthrough submissions. It attracted imitators from other publishers."

It seems 2010 was great year for Open Access! Heather Morrison lists numerous stats for the year on her Dramatic Growth of Open Access blog entry, and states that "2010 was the strongest year for open access growth so far."

Peter Suber has also released his comprehensive summary of Open Access in 2010 in the SPARC OA Newsletter #153. It is extensive, so if you want just the "highlights of the highlights" scroll down to section 10!

BioMed Central's 5th annual Excellence in Open Access Research Award "...recognize[s] excellence in research that has been made universally accessible by open access publication." Nominations should be for research papers published in 2010. Deadline for nominations is December 31, 2010.

Peter Suber points out in the most recent SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN) that October 2010 was the most prolific month for OA mandates in history. Alma Swan tracked the progress of mandate adoption in October in this graph.

SPARC has issued their synopsis of the 4th international Open Access Week:

"The largest, most successful International Open Access Week yet has just come to a close. With just under 900 participants in 94 countries, this year’s event was no less than three times larger than it was just a year ago. Hundreds of videos, photos, blog posts, and more were released to promote and highlight the benefits of Open Access to research and take the conversation even more deeply into the research community – and they absolutely did."

Read the rest of the SPARC blog entry HERE.

In celebration of Open Access Week (October 18-24), SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) is showcasing the stories of two exceptional families who have embraced Open Access as a value and have advanced their own work – though not always without reservations. The personal stories of brothers Jonathan and Michael Eisen (both evolutionary biologists), along with Neil Buckholtz and his son, Josh (neuroscientists), grappling with the pros and cons of Open Access are now profiled on the SPARC Web site:
http://www.arl.org/sparc/openaccess/openfamilies/

Open Access Week 2010 from SPARC on Vimeo.

Description:
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has announced top international researchers will champion the importance of Open Access for advancing research at an online event to launch this year’s Open Access Week (October 18 – 24, 2010).

Nobel Prize-winning scientist and Director of the U.S. National Cancer Institute Dr. Harold Varmus will offer welcoming remarks. Varmus, a long-time champion, has been an unparalleled leader in promoting Open Access in a succession of key roles – from introducing the topic of wider access and launching PubMed Central to increase public access to the literature as the Director of the National Institutes of Health, to helping to found the Public Library of Science, one of the world’s leading open-access publishers.

Varmus will be joined by Dr. Cameron Neylon, a Senior Scientist at the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, biochemist, and author of the widely read “Science in the Open” blog. Neylon will highlight the kinds of scientific advances Open Access can facilitate, and discuss current examples along with future opportunities. A host of leading researchers from around the globe will also add their voices to the event.

In this issue of SOAN Peter Suber discusses why even a strong supporter of Open Access may not systematically self-archive...

"I have a confession to make. For as long as I've urged scholars to support OA, I've urged them to self-archive. But I wasn't systematic about doing it myself until last year."

Read more HERE.

As always, he also provides a comprehensive "Round-Up" of OA-related news from the past month.

In the September Issue of the SOAN Peter Suber continues his contemplation of Garvey's contention that " ... in some disciplines, it is easier to repeat an experiment than it is to determine that the experiment has already been done." (See W.D. Garvey, Communication: The essence of science, Pergamon Press, Oxford 1979, p. 8.)

"In short, when we want to redo research, OA helps us do so. When we'd rather look up past research than redo it, OA helps us there too. OA doesn't remove or reduce the need to test untested results, but it does remove the need to work around a dysfunctional access system."

Read the rest of the newsletter here.

In the August issue of the SOAN, Peter Suber contemplates "Discovery, Rediscovery, and Open Access"

"In 1979, William Garvey made a remarkable claim: " ... in some disciplines, it is easier to repeat an experiment than it is to determine that the experiment has already been done." (See W.D. Garvey, Communication: The essence of science, Pergamon Press, Oxford 1979, p. 8.)

Of course digitizing research makes it easier to find. But when finding it is still hard (because search tools are weak or access barriers block crawlers) or when retrieval is hard (because the work is toll-access or TA) or when the original experiment is particularly easy to repeat, then repeating the experiment can still be the path of least resistance. "

Read the rest of the newsletter here.

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) recently released the results of a commissioned study into the economic returns of public access policies (see the press release here).

The study, “The Economic and Social Returns on Investment in Open Archiving Publicly Funded Research Outputs,” was authored by John Houghton, Bruce Rasmussen, and Peter Sheehan of the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies at Victoria University, Australia. See the full report here.

The authors developed a model to measure the impacts of the proposed US Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) on returns to public investment in R&D. Preliminary results indicate that "...over a transitional period of 30 years from implementation, the potential incremental benefits of the proposed FRPAA archiving mandate might be worth around 4 times the estimated cost..."

The "FRPAA would require that 11 U.S. government agencies with annual extramural research expenditures over $100 million make manuscripts of journal articles stemming from research funded by that agency publicly available via the Internet." http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/frpaa/index.shtml

On July 23, 2010, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released a statement in support of Open Access to Information.

An excerpt:

"UNESCO promotes and supports Open Access—the online availability of scholarly information to everyone, free of most licensing and copyright barriers—for the benefit of global knowledge flow, innovation and socio-economic development."

Recently there has been a very high profile showdown developing between two powerhouses in academia and publishing: the University of California (UC) and the Nature Publishing Group (NPG). As Peter Suber puts it: "...we may be witnessing a face-off between the world's most powerful university and the world's most powerful publisher."

Peter Suber has written a very comprehensive summary of the whole affair thus far in the SPARC Open Access Newsletter #147.

On June 4, 2010 UC sent a letter to all its faculty stating that NPG was trying to raise the price of UC's site license by 400% (more than $1 million!). If NPG did not negotiate a more equitable increase, UC told its faculty that it would not renew any NPG titles next year. Indeed a boycott of all NPG-associated activities (authorship, editorship, board membership, peer-reviewing, advertising of UC positions in NPG publications) is already under serious discussion among UC faculty. It is worth noting that this is a faculty-led revolt, with support from the UC Library system.

Nature replied in a press release on June 9, 2010 complaining that UC already enjoyed a large discount from list subscription prices and NPG was merely attempting to reduce the discount.

UC responded on June 10, 2010 that they are clearly challenging the unreasonable SITE LICENSE FEE not SUBSCRIPTION PRICES. Most institutions never pay the list price anyway.

Suber has some strong words for publishers:
"Publishers like to argue that all of their price increases reflect increased costs. But they've done a very bad job at making the case. It's hard to believe that their costs have been rising faster than inflation since the 1970's or 1980's....It's hard to believe that costs rise faster than inflation when authors give publishers their raw material free of charge, and when referees evaluate and help refine the raw material free of charge. It's hard to believe that costs continue to rise faster than inflation after publishers shift to e-only publishing and drop their print editions."

"Bravo to UC for acting decisively in its own interest. Bravo for drawing the line. Bravo for vowing to use its rare bargaining power to fight back."

Stay tuned, this will be an interesting battle to watch.

SOAN #146 is now available!

In this edition Peter Suber discusses the 27 known cases of unanimous faculty votes for institutional OA policies. ROARMAP actually lists 90 university-based green OA policies but not all of these were unanimous or they were adopted solely by administrators.

Last year at this time there were 12 unanimously voted-in policies, now this number has more than doubled to 27. As Suber notes:

"This is a special subset of green OA policies showing a very wide base of faculty support. It's worth isolating because it provides especially strong evidence against the contention that faculty are indifferent or resistant to OA and "must be coerced" by mandates. That contention always ignored the survey evidence, got too much mileage out of the word "mandate", and failed to take into account that mandates can be self-imposed by faculty, even self-imposed with enthusiasm and unanimity."

And :

"This special subset also jolts us to recognize the kind of consensus that is growing among faculty. When was the last time the faculty on your campus voted unanimously for a substantive policy of any kind? As unanimous votes become commonplace, we have to work to remember how rare and revealing they are."

Peter Suber is a noted authority on OA, and a Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College. His periodic newsletters are a good source for the latest international news regarding developments in the open access movement.

SOAN #145 is now available.

In this edition of the newsletter Suber provides a comprehensive discussion of the recently introduced Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA, H.R. 5037) in the House of Representatives of the United States. The FRPAA basically seeks to extend the NIH mandate to all the other major funding agencies of the U.S. federal government.

"FRPAA would liberate more research literature than any other policy ever proposed in any country. If adopted, it would do more for the the worldwide momentum of OA than any step in our history and more than any step on the horizon."

The leaders of 27 American universities have signed an open letter in support of this Act.

Peter Suber has released another SOAN (SPARC Open Access Newsletter):

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/04-02-10.htm

Suber always provides a useful "roundup" of recent open access related news. An article from the UofS's student newspaper, The Sheaf, has made it into the roundup this time:

http://thesheaf.com/2010/03/print-your-own-textbooks/

Two years to the day after the Faculty of Arts and Sciences became the first school at Harvard to vote an open-access policy, the Harvard Business School enacted their own policy on February 12, 2010, becoming the fifth Harvard school with a similar policy. More...

Press release

The current SPARC newsletter contains Peter Suber's summary of Open Access in 2009. It is lengthy, so if you're short on time scroll down to the "Highlights of the Highlights" (section 10): the 10 best and 10 worst OA developments of the past year.

Yesterday (Dec 10, 2009) the Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP), an executive office of the President of the United States, launched a consultation process on Public Access Policy. This is part of Obama's Open Government Initiative.

See the news release here.

"The Administration is seeking public input on access to publicly-funded research results, such as those that appear in academic and scholarly journal articles. Currently, the National Institutes of Health require that research funded by its grants be made available to the public online at no charge within 12 months of publication. The Administration is seeking views as to whether this policy should be extended to other science agencies and, if so, how it should be implemented."

Basically, the U.S. government is seeking public input on what their policies should be regarding access to published federally-funded research results. The online discussion will focus on three main topics: Implementation (Dec 10-20), Features and Technology (Dec 21-31), and Management (Jan 1-7).

An interesting discussion has already begun on the first topic: Implementation.

As Peter Suber notes on his Open Access News blog "This is big"; it's "...the first explicit sign that President Obama supports the OA policy at the NIH and wants something similar at other federal agencies."

There does not seem to be any requirement that those who comment be American citizens, so please feel free to register and join the discussion!