Richard Poynder: Beyond Selfish Interests

One of the better articles on Open Access, Open Access: Beyond Selfish Interests, has just appeared on Richard Poynder’s blog, Open and Shut? It’s a long piece – over 12,500 words – but thoughful and insightful, and goes well beyond the usual rhetoric.

I’m not the first to commend it; Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad have both praised it highly: Peter said

“if I were convening a meeting on long-term strategy, I’d assign this article in its entirety as background reading. I encourage you to read it for the same reason”,

while Stevan said

“… he characteristically takes the OA debate and developments several layers deeper than the one at which most of the usual suspects customarily think and reason. … But I won’t do a critique, because his essay is just too good to harry with niggles. Read it and make up your own mind.”

Over on The Parachute, though, Jan Velterop concedes that while it is well-written (too well written, in fact, since because of this “one may not easily spot that some of his observations are presented as foregone conclusions, yet are not supported or warranted”) but takes issue with a couple of points.

Technorati Tags: Open Access

The Digital Mathematics Library

This is not news but for some reason the enormous Digital Mathematics Library had not made much of an impression on me before today when I stumbled across it. The DML site now offers links to 211 digitized journals/seminars (> 4,017,902 pages) and to 2170 digitized books (> 484,904 pages). Much if not most of the content is open access (the exceptions are mainly links to journals held on JSTOR). The coverage is certainly historical, with for instance articles from a 1691 journal just a couple of clicks away on the French Gallica archive.

The DML project is described in a September 2003 article (that’s how behind the times I am on this!) by Allyn Jackson in Notices of the American Mathematical Society. DML is a retrodigitisation project; from Jackson’s article:

The grand vision of the DML is to have all of the mathematical literature online and available through a central source to anyone who has a computer and an Internet connection. … The initial goal of the DML is the retrodigitization of all of the past mathem atics literature. … the grand vision of the DML is feasible: with today’s technology, it is actually a tractable task to put all 50 million pages of the past mathematical literature online.

The older literature is particularly important in mathematics:

Unlike researchers in many other disciplines, especially in the sciences and engineering, mathematicians rely heavily on past literature while working at the frontiers of research. Having that literature available electronically would have a large impact on current research in mathematics.

The DML project is actually a fairly loose federation of separate digitisation projects, including Numdam (a French project supported by CNRS providing delayed open access to digitised maths journals), Göttinger Digitalisierungs Zentrum (the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft programme for retrospective digitisation of library materials), and Emani (an archiving & preservation project ).

Technorati Tags: Open Access

Stanford colloquium on academic journal pricing

Stanford held a colloquium to discuss journal pricing on 6 November. It was covered in the Stanford Report by Barbara Palmer under the headline Ongoing crisis in academic-journal pricing is the focus of recent colloquium. An extract:

Although there was little clear consensus about strategy among presenters, faculty and staff at a Nov. 6 colloquium on issues in scholarly publishing, there were two points on which almost everyone agreed: The high costs for journal subscriptions charged by commercial publishers in recent years are unsustainable, and the ability to distribute articles electronically has fundamentally changed academic research and publishing.

The colloquium, sponsored by Stanford University Libraries, invited presenters from Stanford and other institutions to discuss issues including ways in which institutions and scholars are responding to the ongoing crisis in journal pricing. From 1986 to 2003, the unit cost of serials purchased by academic research libraries rose by 215 percent compared with a 68 percent rise in the consumer price index over the same time period, said Doug Brutlag, professor of biochemistry and current chairman of the Academic Council’s Committee on Libraries. The Faculty Senate passed a resolution in 2004 encouraging faculty to consider journal pricing as well as reputation when considering where to publish or serving on editorial boards.

There is a big discrepancy between the prices charged by for-profit and nonprofit journals, reported Ted Bergstrom, professor of economics at the University of California-Santa Barbara, in a talk titled “The Changing Economics of Scholarly Journals.” Bergstrom presented data comparing journal costs in 2004 that showed that the price-per-page of for-profit journals was about three times the average price-per-page of nonprofit journals.

I think it is a shame that these discussions don’t reflect the reality that (for the larger publishers (i.e. those most criticised) the headline journal subscription price per title is no longer the only, or perhaps not even the most important, measure of the price of a journal. The widespread adoption of electronic licensing of bundles of journals has reduced the average price per subscription substantially. It is sometimes argued (e.g. in Grace Baysinger’s slides at this meeting) that journal bundling means the library buys journals it doesn’t need. But there is lots of evidence on substantial increased use of journals under “Big Deal” and similar licences, with substantial use coming from previously non-subscribed titles (and also from surprisingly old digitised journal archives, but that is another story), and substantial reductions in the average cost of accessing an article. For example, LISU (Loughborough University’s Library and Information Statistics Unit) note in their 2005 annual report that such deals were partly responsible for lowering the average cost per title of current UK serial subscriptions by 23% over the 5-year period to 2003/04.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t budgetary problems for libraries, or to deny the benefits of open access, but it would be better to conduct the debate with more rounded data.

More on Self-archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Co-existence or Competition?

A couple of days ago I blogged on a new survey by Chris Beckett and Simon Inger of Scholarly Information Strategies looking at whether or not self-archiving of authors’ journal articles on open archives would be likely to lead to cancellation of journal subscriptions by libraries.

I had also conducted a survey of librarians’ opinion on the same topic earlier this year which received responses from 340 librarians (report available on the ALPSP website here; free summary article here). Although my methodology was much less sophisticated than this study’s (and there was some criticism on one of the lists that some of my questionnaire begged a key question), there are nevertheless some puzzling differences between the findings in the two surveys:

(1) Librarians in this new survey expressed no preference for the publisher’s final version over the author’s refereed post-print. I have no particular argument with the librarians on this but they appear to say something different in my survey. When we asked “What freely available versions would you consider an acceptable substitute for the journal?”, 97% chose the final journal pdf but only 39% the author’s post-print. The recent finding does seem anomalous, though: as the authors say, it is not concurrent with current observed behaviour. If it is a true finding, then it’s a concern for those who think there is value in the copy-editing, linking, formatting etc. that publishers do.

(2) This survey finds that a 6 month embargo had little impact (on librarians’ preference for (delayed) OA material rather than the paid-for version), but that longer periods (12/24 months) had larger effects. Overall, the direction of the preference for more immediate material is hardly surprising, but the key point for many publishers is where the tipping point lies, and on this there appears to be a conflict with our earlier findings. The very different methodologies makes it hard to compare reliably, but my data showed only 18% of librarians regarded material embargoed for 4 or more months an acceptable substitute for a subscription.

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Encyclopedia of Earth

I blogged a short note about Scholarpedia recently, which itself came hard on the heels on the launch of Citizendium. Here is another project using wiki tools to develop an encylopedia using expert and/or accredited authors.

About the EoE – Encyclopedia of Earth:
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Earth, a new electronic reference about the Earth, its natural environments, and their interaction with society. The Encyclopedia is a free, fully searchable collection of articles written by scholars, professionals, educators, and experts who collaborate and review each other’s work. The articles are written in non-technical language and will be useful to students, educators, scholars, professionals, as well as to the general public.

The Need for a New Reference on the Environment
The motivation behind the Encyclopedia of Earth is simple. Go to Google™ and type in climate change, pesticides, nuclear power, sustainable development, or any other important environmental issue. Doing so returns millions of results, some fraction of which are authoritative. The remainder is of poor or unknown quality.
This illustrates a stark reality of the Web: digital information on the environment is characterized by an abundance of “great piles of content” and a dearth of “piles of great content.” In other words, there are many resources for environmental content, but there is no central repository of authoritative information that meets the needs of diverse user communities. Our goal is to make the Encyclopedia of Earth the largest reliable information resource on the environment in history.

Scholarpedia

Scholarpedia, as described by itself:

Scholarpedia, the free peer reviewed encyclopedia written by scholars from all around the world.
Scholarpedia feels and looks like Wikipedia – the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Indeed, both are powered by the same program – MediaWiki. Both allow visitors to review and modify articles simply by clicking on the edit this article link.

However, Scholarpedia differs from Wikipedia in some very important ways:

Each article is written by an expert (invited or elected by the public).
Each article is anonymously peer reviewed to ensure accurate and reliable information.
Each article has a curator – typically its author — who is responsible for its content.
Any modification of the article needs to be approved by the curator before it appears in the final, approved version.

Herein also lies the greatest differences between Scholarpedia and traditional print media: while the initial authorship and review processes are similar to a print journal, articles in Scholarpedia are not frozen and outdated, but dynamic, subject to an ongoing process of improvement moderated by their curators. This allows Scholarpedia to be up-to-date, yet maintain the highest quality of content.

Scholarpedia is currently covering just three areas, computational neurodynamics, dynamical systems, and computational intelligence. They have some big names signed up to write articles (e.g. Lorenz on the Butterfly Effect, Mandelbrot on Fractals and Mandelbrot set, etc.) but every article I tried to look at just had a “coming soon” stub like this:

Remains to be seen whether Scholarpedia will prove any better at getting over-committed superstars to deliver on time than conventional publishers!

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Wikipedia

Self-archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Co-existence or Competition?

Earlier this year I conducted a fairly simple survey of librarians’ attitudes to the availability of self-archived journal articles as a possible substitute for subscribed journals. (ALPSP survey of librarians on factors in journal cancellation – ALPSP charge for the full report but there is a free summary and a free version of my article in Learned Publishing is here.)

We found that the key factors in selecting candidate journals for possible cancelation were (in order): relevance (to the research and/or teaching programme); usage; and price. Availability of the same content in an open-access archive was in a distant fourth place. One possible reason was the relatively low level of knowledge of what was available: only 16% of respondents had estimates of the overlap between their collections and archives, and only 31% had plans to introduce systems to measure this overlap.

Chris Beckett and Simon Inger of Scholarly Information Strategies have now done a much more sophisticated piece of research on the same topic, commissioned by the Publishing Research Consortium. According to the summary:

“Overall the survey shows that a significant number of librarians are likely to substitute OA materials for subscribed resources, given certain levels of reliability, peer review and currency of the information available. This last factor is a critical one – resources become much less favoured if they are embargoed for a significant length of time.”

Librarians showed a strong preference for the refereed version, as opposed to an unrefereed pre-print, but

“Librarians showed an insignificant shift in preference between any version of an article once it had been refereed, irrespective of the inclusion of editorial changes such as copy editing.”

Embargoes appear critical: delay in availability reduces the attractiveness of a product offering:

“The survey tested the effect of embargoes on OA and licensed database content set at 6, 12 and 24 months; a significant impact on librarians’ preference for OA, and licensed database, content was seen when embargoes were set to 12 and 24 month.”

Technorati Tags: Open Access

BMJ fails to get NHS to renew Clinical Evidence

Connecting for Health (part of the NHS in England) has not renewed its contract with BMJ Publishing which made access to Clinical Evidence freely available at the point of use to doctors, CfH has chosen a rival service, Prodigy Knowledge, which is supplied by the vendors of the Prodigy clinical software systems.

Clinical Evidence is a highly “value-added” database of clinical knowledge. According to its own website, “Clinical Evidence summarises the current state of knowledge and uncertainty about the prevention and treatment of clinical conditions, based on thorough searches and appraisal of the literature. It is neither a textbook of medicine nor a set of guidelines. It describes the best available evidence from systematic reviews, RCTs and observational studies where appropriate, and if there is no good evidence it says so.”

Peter Suber has blogged this as an open access issue. It seems to me to be much more a contractual haggle about the perpetual access terms in a national site licence than a typical OA issue.

Second Life, libraries and Open Access

The simulation game Second Life got a fair bit of coverage a few weeks ago when Reuters announced it was opening a virtual news bureau there. Now the UK library systems vendor Talis and the Alliance Library System have just issued a joint press release, announcing their work together to extend and enhance current Info Island/ Second Life Library capabilities through the establishment of a brand new island inside the virtual world; Talis Cybrary City. According to the annoucnement, “… Cybrary City which will be part of Info Island/Second Life Library services [will] provide a space for participating libraries to showcase their local resources. With Cybrary City, there will also be an area for hosting continuing education events, conferences for librarians and the development of information tools for the collaborative library.”

Apparently there is already a Second Life Public Library. According to Jenny TheShiftedLibrarian:

Neither [library] currently offers reference services, programming, or anything other than a place to gather and some nonfiction books. What could we do with these spaces in the game?

“…Conceiving and planning the library began almost from the moment Jade first became a volunteer SL mentor, in November of 2003. ‘The library is really just a reflection of my desire to bring understanding of SL to residents,’ she says. Features like a coffee shop and open-air reading rooms are also a reflection of Jade’s desire to create ‘a social atmosphere for residents who prefer not to go to clubs.’

Though the library has yet to begin producing articles, Jade says the institution will take an active role in acquiring content….

Visitors to the library will access its holdings through searchable and browsable terminals linked to a r/l database that will return a notecard visitors will be welcome to keep, free of charge. The system’s code is being written by Jade, Christopher Omega, and Robin Huber. Librarians will also be on hand eventually to help visitors navigate the system.” [The Second Life Herald]

“Acquiring content.” That sounds familiar, doesn’t it? What if we could get some of our databases in there, so users could find articles about Second Life in our commercial databases? What if we could get Open Worldcat in there? It sounds like the team could use some preservation and archival help, too! In addition, Lori wondered if perhaps we could build a library in the teen version of Second Life and have programs on gaming, teen coffee houses, and ongoing lists of good reading as well as places to find ebooks.

Second Life has its own economy (the game’s currency, the Linden dollar can be exchanged for US$ – current rate is about SLL280 = USD1), and indeed a large part of the appear of the game for many players seems to be about creating things within the game that other users are prepared to pay for. So it will be interesting to see whether Second Life journals develop on a subscription, PPV or open access model, or some new model not as yet in use here!