Houghton report on Open Access published released

The JISC-funded report “Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the costs and benefits” by John Houghton et al. was released today:

– press release
– full report (pdf)

From the report:

A reduction of revenue to the publishing industry, should it arise, would imply a reduction of activity and employment in the industry. Such adjustments are difficult for those concerned, but an economy is a dynamic system and, over the business cycle, is likely to achieve something close to ‘full employment’. As a result, the capital and labour no longer employed in publishing would be employed in an alternative activity. Given the relative size of the publishing industry and the rate at which alternative publishing models are being adopted, it is unlikely that the UK economy would have difficulty adjusting to such a change

Technorati Tags: Institutional repositories, Open Access

Libraries shun Google/Microsoft in favour of Open Content Alliance

A New York Times story from last week:

Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.

The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance

The key issue is the terms of Google & Microsoft deals that prevent making the scanned material available to other commercial search services. Google pays the scanning costs (estimated by NYT to be $30 per book) whereas the libraries have to share the costs if they go with OCA.

Technorati Tags: Google, Libraries, Open Access, Rights

PLoS Hubs

PLoS has launched PLoS Hub for Clinical Trials, the first of a planned series of such Hubs:

Launched in September 2007, the PLoS Hub for Clinical Trials collects PLoS journal articles that relate to clinical trials. The Hub is a destination site for researchers to share their views and build a dynamic, interactive community.

Currently, the PLoS Hub for Clinical Trials features articles originally published in PLoS Clinical Trials, along with clinical trials articles from PLoS ONE.

In the future, this new resource will expand to include articles from all the PLoS titles that publish clinical trials. It will also feature open-access articles from other journals plus user-generated content.

Registered users can rate, discuss and annotate articles in the Hub. More details in the PLos FAQ at Questions about the PLoS Hubs

At present, the Hub is little more than a filtered view of articles from PLoS Clinical Trials and PLoS ONE (which PLoS Clinical Trial is being merged into). But it is interesting to see another publisher attempting to create a destination site for a particular research community – some others (albeit very different approaches) include Elsevier’s OncologySTAT and Topic Pages, and IOP Publishing’s community sites such as MedicalPhysics.org and Environmentalresearchweb.org.

Technorati Tags: Elsevier, Open Access, PLoS

University of California: faculty attitudes and behaviour regarding scholarly communication

A very interesting study has been published by the Office of Scholarly Communication at the University of California: Faculty Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding Scholarly Communication: Survey Findings from the University of California. They surveyed the 5000-odd members of the UC faculty in November 2006 and got 1118 responses, a very healthy 23% response rate.

Key findings of the survey were:

Faculty are strongly interested in issues related to scholarly communication, e.g. as evidenced by the high response rate to the survey.
Faculty generally conform to conventional behavior in scholarly publication, albeit with significant beachheads on several fronts. The overwhelmingly rely on traditional forms of publishing, such as peer-reviewed journals and monographs. They believe in traditional measures such as citations and impact factor as proxies for the value of research. They also believe in peer review as an effective mechanism for maintaining the quality of published scholarship. There is limited but significant use of alternative forms of scholarship, with 21% of faculty having published in open-access journals, and 14% having posted peer-reviewed articles in institutional repositories or disciplinary repositories.
Faculty attitudes are changing on a number of fronts, with a few signs of imminent change in behaviours.
The current tenure and promotion system impedes changes in faculty behaviour. The current tenure and promotion system drives them to focus on conventional publishing activities that are accorded the most weight toward their professional advancement. Faculty appear more interested in the act of publishing than in the process of dissemination. Furthermore, faculty appear to believe that nearly all published materials eventually
appear online through the efforts of publishers or aggregators, and are accessible to almost anyone on the Internet.
On important issues in scholarly communication, faculty attitudes vary inconsistently by rank, except in general depth of knowledge and on issues related to tenure and promotion.
Faculty tend to see scholarly communication problems as affecting others, but not themselves. For example, they feel that too much research is being published, they do not believe that they are publishing more than they ought to.
The disconnect between attitude and behavior is acute with regard to copyright. In other words, they way copyright is a big deal for scholarly publishing, but only a minority see it as an important factor for their own publishing, and even fewer take action to retain copyright rights.
University policies mandating change are likely to stir intense debate.
Scholars are aware of alternative forms of dissemination [such as open access journals and repositories] but are concerned about preserving their current publishing outlets.
Scholars are concerned that changes might undermine the quality of scholarship. Many respondents voiced concerns that new forms of scholarly communication, such as open access journals or repositories, might produce a flood of low-quality output.
Outreach on scholarly communication issues and services has not yet reached the majority of faculty. They were largely unaware of a University Senate proposal to require faculty to grant the University a nonexclusive licence to place their publications in a repository, and were overwhelmingly unaware of eScholarship services
The Arts and Humanities disciplines may be the most fertile disciplines for University-sponsored initiatives in scholarly communication. Ironically, perhaps because the sciences have led in the adoption of new forms of scholarly communication such as disciplinary repositories and online journals, they were less interested in supporting University-sponsored initiatives, while the Arts & Humanities faculty express greater interest in alternatives, the need for change, and a call for discussion and help.
Senior faculty may be the most fertile targets for innovation in scholarly communication. Perhaps counterintuitively, the survey results overall suggest that senior faculty may actually be more open to innovation than younger faculty. However, senior faculty are free from tenure concerns and appear more willing to experiment. Because they are also involved in making academic policy and serving as role models
for junior faculty, their efforts at innovation are likely to have broader influence within their departments

Some of these findings echo those of earlier surveys, such as the large-scale surveys undertaken by the CIBER group at UCL (e.g. the dissociation between attitudes and behaviour.)

The finding that faculty are conservative in their publication behaviour because of the pressures of the rewards and promotion system also won’t come as a surprise to most observers, however dismaying to advocates for new models. The size of the effect is striking, though. There was an echo in the reported “Young scientists and the culture of fear” discussion reported at the recent Nature/Google/O’Reilly Scifoo meeting.

The last two findings are fascinating, because they fly in the face of the conventional wisdom, which posits for instance a “generational effect” that will eventually see the old dinosaurs replaced by a “born digital” generation that takes newer, more informal styles of scholarly communication for granted. On the contrary, the survey suggests (and the Scifoo discussion echoes) that younger scientists quickly work out what they have to do to get promoted, so surely by the time they become senior faculty members themselves they will be thoroughly socialised in the old models?

Some of the findings appear contradictory on the face of it. For instance, faculty are reported to be strongly interested in issues related to scholarly communication, yet hardly any of them knew anything about the Senate’s licensing/repository proposal nor about UC’s eScholarship services. Unlike issues of attitude versus behaviour, this is not explained by the pressure of the rewards/promotion system. It may be that the outreach and advocacy work of repository and open access advocates has worked to the extent that faculty are persuaded that scholarly communication is a hot topic, but they have not been moved to action because their own experience belies this, with, for example, unparalleled access to online resources (UC is not, of course, a typical university).

Technorati Tags: Online publishing, Open Access

Open Access opinion piece in Financial Times

The Financial Times today publishes a signed opinion piece by James Boyle, professor of law at Duke Law School,, and a co-founder of Science Commons, entitled The irony of a web without science, arguing in favour of the proposed US legislation that would require open access to authors’ postprint versions of articles a year after publication.

… This is no Voltairean call to strangle the last commercial publisher with the entrails of the last journal rep. Commercial journal publishers and learned societies play a valuable role in the assessment and dissemination of scientific knowledge – though we might wish that the availability of worldwide, free distribution had not caused their prices to rise quite so sharply. …

Pending legislation in the US balances the interest of commercial publishers and the public by requiring that, a year after its publication, NIH-funded research must be available, online, in full. Similar suggestions have been made in Europe though the debate still concentrates too much on making accessible something that can be read by the human eyeball, rather than something that can be mined by computers.

Update 10/9: The FT published a letter from Michael Mabe (Chief Executive of STM) in response: Paying for research does not pay for its publication

Technorati Tags: Online publishing, Open Access

The Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM)

It’s been hard to miss the uproar that followed the launch of The Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM). The PRISM Coalition is a new lobbying organisation formed by The Executive Council of the Professional & Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP). From their press release:

A new initiative was announced today to bring together like minded scholarly societies, publishers, researchers and other professionals in an effort to safeguard the scientific and medical peer-review process and educate the public about the risks of proposed government interference with the scholarly communication process.

(That is, to campaign against research funders such as the National Institutes of Health mandating the deposit of authors’ postprints in open access repositories.)

The criticism from the open access blogging community has been deafening, at least for those who hang out in the echo chamber that is the blogosphere. Blog posts are too numerous to mention but here are a few: Open Access News, Information Research Weblog, Peter Murray-Rust, A Blog Around the Clock (includes links to yet more comment), and lots more.

The criticism ranged from the detailed and forensic (Peter Suber’s Open Access News entry cited above) through heavy-handed satire (The PISD Coalition) to the downright ugly (“lying profitmongering scum”).

The storm in blogoland was picked up by the quasi-mainstream press in the form of Salon (“Science publishers get even stupider”) and Wired (“Astroturf Spreads to Science Journals: Publishing Industry Forms Front Group to Cheat Public”), whose writers both weighed in with their own brands of polemic.

It was left to the ever-reliable John Blossom on ContentBlogger to give the voice to the kinds of worries that many in the mainstream STM publishing industry might have about PRISM:

The primary problem with PRISM is that it seems to be advocating on a range of issues which, while valid in their own right, are more about fear, uncertainty and doubt – those familiar sales tools – than the real issues at hand.

… If the purpose of PRISM is to convince legislators that there is an advocacy group that supports the publishers’ goals then my sense is that they are going to fail. The site is not very convincing and lacks information about its supporters or any input from them that would influence people into thinking that there is a broad base of support for PRISM’s views.

… With some added focus and some sponsorship of honest debate between government research sponsors, scientists and publishers PRISM may yet serve a positive and constructive purpose as an advocacy group. But if PRISM remains little more than an “astroturf” organization* that defends the commercial interests of publishers then it’s not likely to gain the needed respect from any of the parties that it needs to influence in this debate.

(*An “astroturf” organisation is one that tries to position itself as a grass-roots movement when in fact it is created by others wanting to appear to have grass roots support.)

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Peer review

Why don’t researchers like to comment on journal articles?

Last year the Nature open peer review trial found that

… A small majority of those authors who did participate received comments, but typically very few, despite significant web traffic. Most comments were not technically substantive. Feedback suggests that there is a marked reluctance among researchers to offer open comments.

It seems that researchers are just not yet ready to use these kinds of comment facilities. Further evidence comes from PLoS ONE, the open access online journal of everything from the Public Library of Science. PLoS ONE has a deliberately low barrier to publication in the form of minimal peer review and intends that the better work will float to the surface through users’ comments and ratings. But despite PLoS ONE having been surprisingly successful at attracting authors (given that authors have to pay $1250 publication charge for a journal with no impact factor and low peer review standards), it has been much less successful at getting users to comment on articles.

PLoS ONE has therefore hired a well-known science blogger, Bora Zivkovic as Online Community Manager with the specific responsibility for drumming up comments. Bora has recently published a FAQ on the PLoS blog for PLoS ONE users thinking of commenting, which includes this extract:

Q: I think the article has a major problem, but I am afraid to challenge a big name in my field.
Your nervousness is understandable. But, if you believe that you have identified a real problem with the article and you feel confident about it, it is likely that other readers will feel the same. Be the first one to comment about it (try to use non-confrontational language such as ‘could’ not ‘should’ etc) and read the responses of others who may agree or disagree with you. On PLoS ONE everyone is equal and everyone is expected to treat others with equal respect. Courage to challenge authorities will gain you a fair reputation among your peers.

So, “Courage to challenge authorities will gain you a fair reputation among your peers.” Do I hear the sound of hollow laughter …?

On the other hand, the Rapid Response feature of the British Medical Journal is very popular (so much so that editorial moderation had to be tightened to curtail the “bores who monopolised conversations for compelling personal reasons”). What’s the difference? It may be that the BMJ Rapid Responses were seen as simply an electronic version of an already existing (and popular) feature, the Letter to the Editor, whereas the Nature and PLoS One examples were wholly or partly attempts to develop new forms of peer review. Despite the many well-known problems with peer review, it seems the scientific community is extremely conservative about changes to it.

Technorati Tags: Online publishing, Open Access, Peer review

Society-owned journals and their publisher partners

I’ve just finished writing a second draft of an article aimed at giving advice to societies on the choice of the publishing partner, which will (I hope) appear in a future issue of Learned Publishing. The article is essentially a distillation of what I’ve learned over the past few years working with a fair number of societies either renegotiating the publishing contracts or going out to tender for a new deal.

My article is intended to be pretty well neutral on what societies should be looking for in terms of the business model: whether to be moving to open access or to be aiming for the biggest financial return. The advice to societies is to work out in advance exactly what it is you want from a publisher before you start the beauty parade: as in many things in life, if you don’t know what you want, you probably won’t get it.

But it seems this “journal transfer market” is potentially under fire as a result of the decision by the American Anthropological Association to move their journals from the University of California Press to Wiley-Blackwell. There’s a longish article in Inside Higher Education, Publishing & Values, that discusses the issues in an interesting and readable way:

Some object to the move from a university press to a commercial entity and fear a lessening of commitment to important scholarship that may not make money. Others see this as a sign that the anthropology association — which has won praise for the online offerings of its journals — is taking a hard line against the open access movement embraced by many of its members (and the library world). Still others see the move as a sign that scholarly societies are facing tough decisions about their missions — without good mechanisms for involving the academic rank and file in making decisions.

There are two underlying issues discussed in the article. One is the question of whether university presses are staying competitive (or indeed can in principle stay competitive):

At the same time, Wantland [journals manager for the University of Illinois Press and chair of the Scholarly Journals Committee of the Association of American University Presses] said that the anthropology move may force university presses to look at their weaknesses. “Not only are we all saddened, but we have to take a step back and see what it is we are not offering,” she said. In particular, she said in-house staff to work on technology may be an area where many university presses can’t compete with the big commercial operations.

Clifford Lynch of CNI was quoted as saying:

“The innovation side of this is particularly tough,” he said, and much more difficult financially than just going open access and putting basic articles online. “When you start thinking not only about can we go digital in our publishing because it makes it easier to get worldwide access, but because it may allow us to publish different kinds of things, exploring a richer palette of scholarly communication and bringing in primary data and visual materials, that takes capital,” he said. “It takes human capital. It takes financial capital. It takes technical capital. And a lot of these societies don’t have it and don’t have access to it, which is why some of them feel they have to go off to large players,”

The other issue concerns the role of societies and whether they shouldn’t be making the journal content universally available rather than living off rich journal rents to fund their other activities (quoting Lynch again):

“They’ve got missions that often speak very broadly to disseminating and advancing knowledge in their discipline. They’ve got a membership that in some disciplines is increasingly convinced that the way to do that is more openness in publication and more innovation in publication, but these societies have got sort of addicted to these revenue streams from their publication programs over the last few decades, and are trying to figure out if they want to make the transition to a new model and — if so — how do they navigate the transition.”

Of course, the publishers (both commercial and not-for-profit) that are generating these addictive revenue streams argue that their model is the one that has delivered the biggest increase in access to literature ever: their retained capital allowed them to make the technology investments that Lynch speaks of, and the (consortia-based) licensing model has broadened access enormously while simultaneously cutting the average cost per journal article use by an order of magnitude or so.

(In the case of the AAA news, there’s also an important back story that complicates the issue. The AAA leadership last year came out against the proposed US legislation requiring tax-funded researcher to deposit an open access copy of their research papers within 6 months of publication. This brought them into conflict with many individual AAS members, who were “enthusiastic about the legislation and were stunned and angry to find their association coming out against it.”)

Technorati Tags: Blackwell, Online publishing, Open Access, Wiley

SciVee: YouTube for Scientists

PLoS together with the (US) National Science Foundation and the San Diego Supercomputing Center have launched a really interesting new site SciVee for scientists to upload video presentations about their papers. (The papers have to be available in an open access version: currently just PLoS articles, with future support for any article in PubMedCentral. At a later phase in the project it will accept abstracts from non-OA articles) As described in Slashdot:

The National Science Foundation, Public Library of Science and the San Diego Supercomputing Center have partnered to set up what can best be described as a “YouTube for scientists”, SciVee“. Scientists can upload their research papers, accompanied by a video where they describe the work in the form of a short lecture, accompanied by a presentation. The formulaic, technical style of scientific writing, the heavy jargonization and the need for careful elaboration often renders reading papers a laborious effort. SciVee’s creators hope that that the appeal of a video or audio explanation of paper will make it easier for others to more quickly grasp the concepts of a paper and make it more digestible both to colleagues and to the general public.

SciVee was also discussed in the Fink & Bourne’s article Reinventing Scholarly Communication for the Electronic Age in the August issue of CTWatch Quarterly which I mentioned recently.

It’s possible to add synchronised audio to powerpoint presentations using general (non-scientific) services like Slideshare but the SciVee implementation includes a lot of useful dedicated tools, such as links to the references and figures (which pop up in separate windows without interrupting the presentation), a link to the full text (ditto), the ability to switch between a view of the presentation slides and the abstract, which will make it much more useful for this particular application.

Technorati Tags: Online publishing, Open Access

CTWatch Quarterly: the coming revolution

Communication & Technology Watch Quarterly’s August issue is devoted to The Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communication & Cyberinfrastructure, guest-edited by Lee Dirks and Tony Hey of Microsoft.

I haven’t had time to read it yet but there looks to be a lot of interest, including these that I turned to first:

The Shape of the Scientific Article in The Developing Cyberinfrastructure, by Clifford Lynch

Web 2.0 in Science, by Timo Hannay

… which is not to say that the other articles aren’t all well worth reading too!

Technorati Tags: Online publishing, Open Access, Technology & software, Web2.0