開放近用運動相關討論
Lists
Related to The Open Access Movement
毛慶禎 輔仁大學圖書資訊學系副教授
http://www.lins.fju.edu.tw/mao/oai/lists.htm
2004/11/21
- 學科差異
- 論壇
- 錯誤的認知
- 支持的機構
- 宣告獨立的學刊
- 開放近用典藏
- 學會的開放近用政策
- 支持線上典藏及學刊的工具
- 大學對高價學刊的反擊
- 主動支持
- 其他的討論
1. 學科差異
- 部份學科有本印本索引、線上索引或搜尋引擎, 其他則闕如。
- 部份學科有交換印前出版的文化, 其他則闕如。
- The literature in some fields is pure text, perhaps with an
occasional table or illustration, while in others it relies heavily on
images or even multi-media presentations.
- In some (the sciences), journal literature is the primary
literature, while in others (the humanities) journal literature only
reports on the history and interpretation of the primary literature,
which lies in books.
- In some fields, both truth and money are at stake in the
results reported in scholarly literature, while in others, only truth
is at stake.
- In some fields (some of the sciences), most published
research is funded, while in others (the humanities and many sciences)
very little is.
- In some disciplines (the sciences), the cost of research is
greater than the cost of publication, while in others (the humanities),
the reverse is true.
- In some disciplines (the sciences), the demand for articles
drops off more sharply after they are published, while in others (the
humanities) it declines slowly and sometimes even grows. This affects
whether a journal would lose subscribers and revenue by offering open
access after an embargo period of a certain length.
- In some fields, most journal publishers are for-profit
corporations, while in other fields most are non-profit universities,
libraries, or professional societies.
- In some fields (the humanities), nearly all publishing
researchers are employed by universities, while in others (the
sciences) the fraction is significantly smaller.
- In some fields, the sets of journal readers and journal
authors are nearly identical or overlap significantly, while in others
they overlap only slightly.
- In some fields, the need for copy editors is greater than in
other fields (i.e. to compensate for language deficiencies in
submissions by non-native speakers, to minimize academic obscurities
for a less specialized audience, or simply to present a clearer and
more professional text).
- In some fields, more cutting-edge research is presented
first in conferences than in journals and in other fields the reverse
is true.
- In some fields, research will be impeded if access to
journal literature is not timely, while in others timeliness matters
much less.
- In fields with higher
rejection rates (social sciences and humanities), the cost of peer
review per accepted paper will be higher than in fields with lower
rejection rates (the natural sciences).
- In most fields, the author of an article is the copyright
holder for everything in the article and can consent to open access for
all of its contents. In other fields (e.g. art history), scholarly
authors will want to include images under copyright by others, have to
seek permissions, and may fail for some, fail for all, be delayed in
trying, or have to pay permission fees. (Note that permission to
reproduce images for open-access publication will be harder to obtain
than permission for traditional publication.)
- In some fields, the average set of differences between
submitted preprints and edited postprints is small. In others it is
large. When large, the cost of publication is higher, unless all the
editing is done by volunteers, and the freely archived preprint is a
less adequate substitute for the postprint.
- In some fields (like medicine) many journals still use the Inglefinger
Rule, which tends to inhibit preprint archiving. Most fields that
once used the rule have stopped using it.
- Journals in some fields and specializations can attract
advertising, in adequate or significant amounts, while journals in
other fields and specializations cannot.
Discussion forums devoted to open-access issues
- Here I'm limiting the list to discussion forums centered on
OA issues or where OA discussions are frequent and welcome. There are
many forums on related issues such
as digital libraries, electronic publication, and online education.
- American
Scientist Open Access Forum (aka AmSci Forum, September98 Forum)
from American Scientist.
Moderated by Stevan Harnad.
- BOAI
Forum. The forum associated with the Budapest Open
Access Initiative. Moderated by Peter Suber.
- Economics of
Open Access. Moderated by Alastair Dryburgh.
- Eprints
Community. The forum associated with the eprints archiving software.
- OAI-Eprints
list from the Open Archives
Initiative.
- Open
Access Now Forum from Open Access Now.
- PLoS Community
Boards from the Public
Library of Science.
- ScholComm from the American Library Association.
On scholarly communication.
- SSP-L
from the Society for Scholarly
Publishing.
- SPARC-IR
from SPARC. On institutional
repositories.
- SPARC
Open Access Forum (SOAF) from SPARC.
Formerly called the FOS Forum. On open-access developments
broadly construed, especially issues raised by the SPARC Open
Access Newsletter or Open Access
News blog.
Incomplete realizations of open access
- By incomplete realizations of open access I mean steps in
the right direction that do not go all the way, half-measures,
compromises, or hybrid models that only partially fulfill the promise
of open access. From one point of view, they count as progress and
deserve support. From another point of view, they attempt to satisfy
users with something less adequate and thereby delay true open access.
Many journals that take these steps are experimenting and over time
take further steps toward full open access.
- I hope that friends of open access will (1) advocate full
open access and do what they can to implement it, (2) encourage
experimentation for those not yet willing to implement it, and (3)
praise steps that make access easier and wider even if they stop short
of full open access.
- online but not free, perhaps even expensive
- online, not free, but affordable
- free and online but only citations, abstracts, or tables of
contents, not full-text
- free online preprints (in a preprint archive or at the
author's home page) but not free online postprints
- free online preprints (at the journal site) from the moment
of submission or acceptance, but free online postprints only some time
after print publication
- free online special issues but not free online regular
issues
- free online searching but not free online reading
- free online reading but not free copying or printing
- free online reading but other uses limited to "fair use" (or
"fair dealing")
- free online reading, printing etc. but only one article at a
time, hence not free or efficient crawling
- free and online but only for the text, not for charts,
illustrations, multi-media addenda, data sets, and so on.
- free and online but only for the current issue, not back
issues
- free and online but only for back issues, not the current
issue
- free and online for all issues but only some number of
months after toll-access publication
- free and online for all issues but only for a limited time
(introductory offers)
- free and online but only after an article has been accepted
and before it is published
- free and online but only for registered users, even if
registration is free
- free and online but only for editor-selected articles from
the toll-access edition or only for a supplement to the toll-access
edition (this can produce true OA for the selected articles)
- free and online but only for author-selected and prepaid
articles from the toll-access edition (this can produce true OA for the
selected articles)
- free online access for some readers (e.g. those paying
society dues, those employed by a certain institution, those living in
a certain country), but not for all internet users
Institutions that support open access
- I don't want to get into the business of listing individual
institutions. But here are some clusters of institutions that support
open access. This way of doing it makes the list far from complete but
easier to maintain. It's a start.
Journal declarations of independence
- By a journal declaration of independence, I mean the
resignation of editors from a journal in order to launch a comparable
journal with a friendlier publisher. The kinds I'm collecting for this
list usually have two stages. First, an editor or group of editors
resigns from the journal in order to protest its high subscription
price or audience-limiting access rules. This is usually accompanied by
a public statement explaining "the causes which impel them to the
separation" (to quote Thomas Jefferson). Second, some of the resigning
editors create a new free or affordable alternative journal to compete
with the first and to embody their vision of wide access.
- I borrow the term "declaration of independence" for this
phenomenon from the SPARC
project to assist journals in Declaring
Independence. Of course, SPARC borrowed the term from the U.S. Declaration
of Independence.
- Chronological order.
- In June 1989, Editor Eddy van der Maarel and most of his
editorial board resigned from Vegetatio (W. Junk, then Nijhoff,
then Kluwer) in order to launch the Journal of Vegetation Science
(Opulus Press and the International Association for Vegetation
Science).
- In December 1996, Shu-Kun Lin resigned as editor of Molecules,
then published by Springer-Verlag, and relaunched the journal with
Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI). Springer sued to prevent
Shu-Kun Lin from using the same for the MDPI journal but eventually
dropped its suit.
- In November 1998, Michael Rosenzweig and the rest of his
editorial board resigned from Evolutionary Ecology (Chapman
& Hall, then International Thomson, now Kluwer), which Rosenzweig
had launched in 1986, in order to create Evolutionary Ecology
Research. Its birth and early survival were assisted by SPARC.
- In 1998 most of the editorial board of the Journal of
Academic Librarianship resigned to protest the large hike in the
subscription price imposed by Pergamon-Elsevier after it bought the
journal from JAI Press. Several of the editors who resigned then
created Portal: Libraries and the Academy at Johns Hopkins
University Press.
- In November 1999, the entire 50 person editorial board of
the Journal of Logic Programming (Elsevier) resigned and formed
a new journal, Theory and Practice of Logic Programming
(Cambridge).
Its birth and early survival were assisted by SPARC.
- In January 2000 (to take effect in July 2000), Henry
Hagedorn resigned as editor of the Archives of Insect Biochemistry
& Physiology (Wiley-Liss) in order to form the Journal of
Insect Science (University of Arizona library). JIS is a free
online journal with no print edition. It plans to offset the costs of
online publication with author fees. Its birth and early survival were
assisted by SPARC.
- Early in 2001, a handful of editors of Topology and Its
Applications (Elsevier) resigned in order to create Algebraic
and Geometric Topology (University of Warwick and International
Press), a free online journal with an annual printed volume. Its birth
and early survival were assisted by SPARC.
- Over a nine month period in 2001, forty editors of Machine
Learning (Kluwer) resigned from the editorial board and published
their reasons in a public letter dated October 8, 2001. One of those
resigning, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, created the Journal of Machine
Learning Research as a free online alternative with a quarterly
print edition published by MIT Press. About two-thirds of the Machine
Learning editors joined her at the new journal
- Elsevier has published the European Economic Review
since 1969. In 1986 the European Economic Association (EEA) adopted it
as its official journal. But the EEA grew increasingly unhappy with
Elsevier's subscription price and its requirement that the publisher,
not the association, hire the journal's editors. In 2001 the EEA
started the process of declaring independence from Elsevier. In March
2003 its new official journal, the Journal of the European Economic
Association, was launched by MIT Press at about one-third of the
Elsevier subscription price.
- On July 3, 2003, The entire 40+ person editorial board Labor
History (Taylor and Francis) resigned in protest over the journal's
high subscription price and lack of editorial independence. The same
editors then launched Labor with non-profit Duke University
Press. Labor is a partner of SPARC,
which assisted in the
transition and launch.
- On August 13, 2003, the Society for the Internet in Medicine
named the open-access Journal of Medical Internet Research as
its new official journal, replacing the subscription-based Medical
Informatics & Internet in Medicine. (This is a decision by a
scholarly society, not journal editors, but I include it on the list
because of the family resemblance to a true declaration of
independence.)
- On September 22, 2003, Compositio
Mathematica announced that it was leaving Kluwer to be published by
the London Mathematical Society and distributed by Cambridge University
Press (starting in January 2004). The journal's editor of 20+ years,
Gerard van der Geer, explained in a public note that the move was
triggered by a long series of unwanted Kluwer price increases. The LMS
edition of the journal is not free, but priced one-third below the
former price.
- On December 31, 2003, the entire editorial board of the Journal
of Algorithms resigned in order to protest the high price charged
by the publisher (Elsevier). On January 21, 2004, the same board then
launched a new journal, Transactions on Algorithms, published
by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
- [old journal] Journal
of Algorithms (Elsevier)
- [new journal] Transactions on Algorithms [no web site yet]
(ACM)
- Letter
from Donald E. Knuth to fellow members of the Journal Algorithms
editorial board outlining the problem, describing the open-access
solution, and asking them to choose among four options.
- Public
statement by the former Journal of Algorithms editors
explaining their resignation. Forthcoming in the March 2004 issue of SIGACT News.
- Hal Gabow has the dates and some other details on his home page.
- George Porter discusses some of the aftermath in a May 14, 2004 STLQ blog
posting.
- On January 27, 2004, Editor in Chief Dominique Boullier and
the entire editorial board of Les cahiers du numérique resigned
from the journal and released an open letter explaining why. They point
to CduN's high price and limited online access policy which
"contradict our objectives as researchers".
Open-access archives
Open-access policy statements by learned societies and
professional associations
- Here I'm collecting policy statements on how academic
authors, journals, and publishers should treat the opportunities
created by the internet for free online access to research literature.
- I'll accept statements by learned societies and professional
associations in any field, from any country, in any language, whether
they are favorable or unfavorable to open access. If you find
statements by universities, libraries, or foundations, I'd like to see
them too; I may start a separate list of them.
- Alphabetical by organization.
- American
Anthropological Association. AAA offers its members free online
access to a vast array of resources in anthropology, including
datasets, photos, videos, and the full-text contents of all AAA
journals.
- American
Physical Society. The copyright transfer agreement the APS uses
with its journals, allowing
authors to post articles to eprint servers. February 2001.
- American
Psychological Association. June 1, 2001.
- Association
for Computing Machinery. See especially 1.1, 3.1, 5.1. This 1998
policy has been updated and supplemented by current rules for preprints.
- Association of
Learned and Professional Society Publishers. The model "license to
publish" that it recommends for use by society journals.
- Florida Entomological
Society. The statement of its journal, Florida Entomologist.
- The
Geological Society. The policy that applies to all of its journals.
- Higher
Education Funding Council for England. This excerpt of the 1996
Research Assessment Exercise is the only part relevant to open access,
and the only part still on the web.
- ICSU-UNESCO.
ICSU = International Council for Science. UNESCO = United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
- Institute
of Physics. See paragraphs 3.1 and 3.2.
- International
Mathematical Union. Endorsement of "open access" as a goal for all
mathematical literature (May 15, 2001). The IMU has also endorsed copyright
advice for mathematicians; see especially point 3.c from the
Executive Summary. Also see the IMU's short
version of the Hodges checklist.
- International
Union of Pure and Applied Physics. July 2001 Report of an IUPAP
working group on scholarly communication. Recommendations, not yet
policy. Also see the report on a
subsequent November meeting which adopted steps toward the realization
of the July recommendations.
- Medical
Library Association. October 2003 statement of policy.
- Russian
Society of BioPsychiatry. I can't find the actual text yet and have
linked to a news account of the statement.
There must be more than this! If you know of any others,
please send me an email.
For policy statements by journal publishers, see the list at
the Self-Archiving
FAQ and Project SHERPA.
Tools to support online archives and journals
- I formerly had a list of software tools to support online
journals here. But I've removed it (April 2, 2002) because SPARC has created a
much
better one (with which I helped a bit). I retain this pointer in
case external links still point to my old list.
University actions against high journal prices
- Here I'm collecting significant university actions to
protest, resist, reverse, or extricate themselves from high journal
prices, inflexible bundling arrangements, or oppressive licensing
terms. I'm especially interested in large-scale cancellations, new
institutional policies, Faculty Senate resolutions, public statements,
and recommendations to faculty, librarians, and administrators.
- I quote substantial excerpts from public statements, when I
can, because I know it is difficult to read them all separately and
pull together their notable elements.
- When I know of news stories about the university actions, I
include them. But I haven't gone out of my way to hunt them down. The
university actions are primary.
- I only list each university once, and include subsequent
actions and related news stories in the same entry. In the case of the
University of California, since many of the separate campuses acted
before the system acted, I list them separately. In the case of the
four university members of the Triangle Research Libraries Network
(TRLN), I list them under the entry for the TRLN.
- While the list so far is limited to U.S. universities,
that's only because I don't know of similar actions elsewhere. I
welcome additions and corrections.
- Chronological order, starting in the fall of 2003. There are
earlier actions, but they do not seem to be part of the current wave.
As I learn about earlier actions, I will consider adding them.
- University of California at Berkeley: Journal
Prices and Scholarly Communication, memorandum to the Academic
Senate Faculty from Thomas Leonard, University Librarian, and Anthony
Newcomb and Elaine Tennant, co-chairs of the Academic Senate Library
Committee, September 4, 2003. The memorandum contains an introduction
by Robert M. Berdahl, Chancellor.
- Summary: The University cancelled an undisclosed
number of journals. It emphasized that the problem was runaway journal
prices, not the library budget: "Berkeley will continue to face this
runaway serials pricing even after the present budget crisis is over."
Recommendations: "Faculty need to become aware of the pricing policies
of journals (including commercial electronic journals) in their
fields....Submit papers to quality journals that have reasonable
pricing practices. Modify any contract you sign with a commercial
publisher to ensure that you retain the rights to use your work as you
see fit, including posting it to a public archive. Consider declining
offers to review for unreasonably expensive journals and to serve on
their editorial boards....Make changes in scholarly communication a
recurring topic at departmental meetings. Consider taking over the
publication and distribution of research within your scholarly
community. This has already begun at Berkeley, particularly with our
colleagues in the Sciences and the Social Sciences....Encourage your
professional associations to maintain reasonable prices for scholarship
and to establish access terms that are friendly to faculty and other
users....The appearance of unconscionable pricing for academic
journals...is a problem that has come upon the academy suddenly and has
now reached crisis proportions. We will have no one to blame but
ourselves if we do not begin to address it at once."
- On September 15, 2003, the Berkeley Graduate Student
Assembly released a public
statement on the pricing crisis and journal cancellations. It cites
the California Digital Library and Project Euclid as good examples of
"alternate publication models", but adds that they cannot suffice. "The
success of alternate models requires awareness on the part of faculty
and students of the problems inherent in the current model. The
Graduate Assembly calls on faculty, administrators, and graduate
students to support a significant culture change in academia; we must
create an environment in which faculty and students can choose to
publish their cutting-edge research outside the standard academic
publishing industry."
- The Berkeley library set up a web site with
background information on the problem and more detail on the Berkeley
response. The site includes a useful FAQ.
- University of California at Santa Cruz: Resolution on ties with
Elsevier Journals, adopted by the Committee on the Library and sent
to the Faculty Senate, October 24, 2003.
- The resolution is dated October 8, because that is when it
was submitted to the Faculty Senate for discussion. The Faculty Senate
adopted it on October 24.
- Summary: Elsevier journals cost 50% of the UC online
serials budget but attracted only 25% of the usage. Elsevier profits
rose 26% the previous year. Elsevier has been inflexible in
negotiations. Taking the University of California system in its
entirety, 10-15% of Elsevier content was written by UC faculty, 1,000
UC faculty serve on Elsevier editorial boards, and 150 serve as senior
editors. The resolution recommends using the California Digital
Library, the related eScholarship Repository, and peer-reviewed OA
journals from PLoS and BMC. It urges faculty to retain copyright, the
right of postprint archiving, and the right to distribute copies of
their work to their classes. "Therefore, the UCSC Academic Senate
resolves to call upon its tenured members to give serious and careful
consideration to cutting their ties with Elsevier: no longer submitting
papers to Elsevier journals, refusing to referee the submissions of
others, and relinquishing editorial posts. The Senate also calls upon
its Committee on Academic Personnel to recognize that some faculty may
choose not to submit papers to Elsevier journals even when those
journals are highly ranked. Faculty choosing to follow the advice of
this resolution should not be penalized."
- University of California at San Francisco: Challenges
to Sustaining Subscriptions for Scholarly Publications, memorandum
to all UCSF faculty from Karen Butter, the University Librarian, and
Leonard Zegans and David Rempel, co-chairs of the Committee on Library,
November 1 2003.
- Summary: The memorandum cites many of the same
numbers
and complaints as the Santa Cruz resolution (above). While singling out
Elsevier it also generalizes that many commercial publishers are using
unsustainable business models. "The Committee suggests that all UC
faculty consider alternatives to publishing in and editing Elsevier
journals. New initiatives, such as Public Library of Science and BioMed
Central, promise high-quality peer-reviewed content at affordable
prices. The Committee also suggests that faculty consider taking action
by retaining certain intellectual property rights, such as including
the right to post their work with an institutional
repository....Therefore, should the negotiations with Elsevier fail,
the Committee on Library strongly recommends that members of the UCSF
faculty give serious and careful consideration to their association
with Elsevier and consider the following actions: cease submission of
papers to Elsevier journals, refuse to referee the submissions of
others, and relinquish editorial posts. We would encourage any UCSF
faculty who elect to alter their relationship with an Elsevier journal
to notify the journal of their reason for doing so. Authors may also
consider crossing out the provision in a standard publication contract
that gives exclusive ownership of a published article to the publisher
and thereby retain the right to publish the work in an electronic
medium (e.g. UC's eScholarship Repository or others.)"
- The memorandum links to the web site
on scholarly communication created by the University of California
libraries (systemwide), which recommends that faculty "[s]upport open
access journals and self-archiving".
- Harvard University: Letter to the
Harvard faculty from Sidney Verba, Director of the University Library,
December 9, 2003.
- Summary: The letter announces Elsevier cancellations,
which took effect January 1, 2004. The cancellations were "driven not
only by current financial realities, but also —and perhaps more
importantly— by the need to reassert control over our collections and
to encourage new models for research publication at Harvard....Elsevier
journals are by far the most expensive....Elsevier's 2004 contract
proposal to NERL was not responsive to Harvard's objectives....Of
greatest concern to the Digital Acquisitions Committee and to the
University Library Council was the lack of any option by which Harvard
could prune its holdings and reduce its level of spending. Libraries
wishing to cancel subscriptions could do so, but only by incurring
steeply increased fees that obliterate any potential savings —while
Elsevier's revenues continued to rise....Toward this end, we have
foregone the NERL Elsevier license in 2004 in order to regain control
over Harvard library collections in a manner that responds to the
University's academic programs. Instead, the libraries will purchase
online access to Elsevier journals individually and
selectively....Declining the bundled agreement and intentionally
reducing our outlay for Elsevier titles will ultimately give us the
ability to respond to the marketplace unfettered by such artificial
constraints....We believe this action can be a springboard for a
vigorous and sustained effort to foster new models of research
publication at Harvard. This effort could take many forms, all of which
will require the active involvement of Harvard's research community. On
many levels, Harvard is changing the ways in which it does business."
- Jeffrey Aguero, Libraries to
Cut Academic Journals, Harvard Crimson, November 24, 2003.
- Anon., Libraries
take a stand, Harvard University Gazette, Feburary 5, 2004,
p.10-11.
- Cornell University: Resolution
regarding the University Library's Policies on Serials Acquisitions,
with Special Reference to Negotiations with Elsevier, adopted by
the Faculty Senate, December 17, 2003.
- Summary: "At Cornell, Ithaca campus library budgets
for materials increased by 149% during [the period 1986-2001], but the
number of serials titles purchased increased by only 5% —at a time when
the number of serials published increased by approximately 138%....Over
the last decade Elsevier's price increases have often been over 10% and
occasionally over 20% on a year to year basis....The [Elsevier]
contract has been priced as a 'bundle,' that is, in such a way that, if
the library cancels any of the Elsevier journals it currently
subscribes to, the pricing of the other individual journals the library
chooses to keep increases substantially. (The actual process is
somewhat more complicated than this, but this is the end result.)
Because the prices of the journals that are retained greatly increase
when others are cancelled, the only way to achieve any real savings is
to cancel a great many journals....The library, in consultation with
affected faculty, has identified several hundred Elsevier journals for
cancellation at the end of 2003....[T]he University Faculty Senate
endorses the library's decision to withdraw from Elsevier's bundled
pricing plan and undertake selective cancellation of Elsevier
journals....Recognizing that the cost of Elsevier journals in
particular is radically out of proportion with the importance of those
journals to the library's serials collection (measured both in terms of
the proportion of the total collection they represent and in terms of
their use by and value to faculty and students), the University Faculty
Senate encourages the library to seek in the near term, in consultation
with the faculty, to reduce its expenditures on Elsevier journals to no
more than 15% of its total annual serials acquisitions expenditures
(from in excess of 20% in 2003)....Recognizing that the increasing
control by large commercial publishers over the publication and
distribution of the faculty's scholarship and research threatens to
undermine core academic values promoting broad and rapid dissemination
of new knowledge and unrestricted access to the results of scholarship
and research, the University Faculty Senate encourages the library and
the faculty vigorously to explore and support alternatives to
commercial venues for scholarly communication."
- The resolution links to a Cornell
web site with background information on the problem and more
details on the Cornell response.
- Paula Hane, Cornell
and Other University Libraries to Cancel Elsevier Titles,
Information
Today, November 17, 2003.
- Jonathan Knight, Cornell
axes Elsevier journals as prices rise, Nature, November 20,
2003 (accessible only to subscribers). Blog
summary.
- Anon., After
failed negotiations, CU Library cancels Elsevier journal package,
Cornell
Chronicle, December 11, 2003.
- Doris Small Helfer, Is the Big Deal Dead? Searcher,
March 2004. Primarily on the Cornell action. [Not online.]
- University of California system: Letter
to all UC faculty from Lawrence Pitts, Chair of the Academic Senate,
and the head librarians of the 11 UC campuses, January 7, 2004.
- Summary: The letter cites and summarizes the
preceding
actions taken by several of the UC campuses (above) and announces the
cancellation of "approximately 200" journals. "The economics of
scholarly journal publishing are incontrovertibly unsustainable. Taming
price inflation is not enough. Unless we change the current model,
academic libraries and universities will be unable to continue
providing faculty, students, and staff with the access they require to
the world's scholarship and knowledge. Scholars will be unable to make
the results of their research widely available. These are not
statements about any single company, about the strengths and weaknesses
of for- and not-for-profit publishing, or about the prospects of
open-access versus subscription-based journal models. They are merely
observations about economic reality....[W]e are have been paying more
for access to a smaller proportion of the world's published knowledge.
If we are to halt or even reverse that trend, we must aggressively ramp
up and institutionalize our efforts to change the scholarly
communication process....The UC Libraries are working aggressively
to...support alternative means for publishing scholarly materials that
make high-quality
peer-reviewed work available at an affordable price."
- The university created a Special
Committee on Scholarly Communication to examine new methods of
scholarly communication.
- Also see the web site
on scholarly communication created by the University of California
libraries (systemwide), which recommends that faculty "[s]upport open
access journals and self-archiving".
- On April 29, 2003, the UC Systemwide Library and Scholarly
Information Advisory Committee adopted a resolution on Digital
Library Journal Collecting Principles. "To align costs with value,
the Committee recommends that UC libraries, in close consultation with
the faculty, initiate a Systemwide review and renegotiation of the
University's contracts with publishers whose pricing practices are not
sustainable."
- Jennifer Murphy, Library
struggles to fund access, Daily Bruin, November 17, 2003.
- Elsevier issued its own press
release on the California contract, emphasizing the volume of
material the deal makes accessible to California users, January 10,
2004.
- Anon., UC
System Inks Five Year Deal with Elsevier, Stops Price Inflation,
Library
Journal, January 14, 2004.
- Yvette Essen, Market
Report, The Telegraph, January 20, 2004. Whether budget cuts in
California will force the University of California to renegotiate its
contract with Elsevier. Blog
summary.
- List
of Elsevier titles for which the University of California libraries
currently have subscriptions.
- Triangle Research Libraries Network: Changes in Elsevier
Science Access, memorandum to the Faculties (of Duke University,
North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill) from Peter Lange, Provost at Duke, James Oblinger,
Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor at NCSU, and Robert Shelton,
Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor at UNC at Chapel Hill, January
14, 2004.
- The memorandum speaks for the entire TRLN consortium, which
has four university members. However, the memorandum is only addressed
to the faculties of three members. I don't know why the fourth, North
Carolina Central University, was omitted.
- Summary: "[T]he member universities of the Triangle
Research Libraries Network (TRLN) have decided to discontinue the
consortial arrangement by which they provided access to electronic
journals published under the Elsevier Science imprint....Throughout
months of renewal negotiations with Elsevier, TRLN and its member
libraries have articulated two principal objectives: [1] To regain and
maintain control over library collecting decisions in order to meet the
constantly evolving information needs of faculty, researchers, and
students; and [2] To manage overall costs in order to keep Elsevier
expenditures consistent with materials budgets that have not been
increasing at anywhere near Elsevier's annual inflation rate.
Elsevier's final offer fails to meet both of these
objectives....Because Elsevier Science has not offered TRLN a pricing
model responsive to the needs of the consortium, TRLN has elected to
terminate its consortial arrangement with Reed Elsevier. Each TRLN
library will now make individual arrangements for Elsevier journal
access on its own campus....Although libraries and universities are
supporting new publishing models in an effort to maintain access to
high-quality, peer-reviewed research at a manageable cost, there is
still a reliance on the products of for-profit publishers. As a result
of this dynamic, libraries can no longer offer the same range of
publications to the academic community....The libraries...will begin to
explore with you new models of scholarly communication that may, in the
long term, help reduce costs and make scholarly information more widely
available."
- TRLN member North Carolina State University adopted a
separate Resolution
on Bundled Content and Elsevier on December 2, 2003. "Whereas, open
access and communication of scholarly research are fundamental to
intellectual and academic freedom and critical to economic growth and
development...Resolved, that the North Carolina State University
Faculty Senate affirm the responsibility of the university, through its
Libraries, to maintain strong and flexible control over the state funds
entrusted to it and for the Libraries to continue to make sound fiscal
decisions that will provide balanced collections that meet the current
and future needs of NC State Faculty and Students including the ability
to decline highly restrictive offers, such as those recently proposed
by Reed Elsevier for its ScienceDirect online product."
- Eric Ferreri, Colleges ax
journals deal, the Durham NC Herald-Sun, January 12, 2004. Blog
summary.
- Anon., TRLN
to Forgo the Big Deal, Library Journal, January 14, 2004.
- Kenneth Ball, Libraries
cancel Elsevier contract, North Carolina State University's
TechnicianOnline,
January 16, 2004.
- Kenneth Ball, Senate
Backs Libraries, North Carolina State University's Technician
Online, December 4, 2003. Blog
summary.
- Anon., NCSU
Faculty Takes Hard Line on New Elsevier Deal, Library Journal,
December 8, 2004.
- Joseph Schwartz, Campus
to drop journal contract, U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's
Daily
Tar Heel, January 16, 2004.
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): Announcement
on the MIT Libraries web site.
- I blogged
this news on February 6, 2004, when it seemed to be fairly new. But the
web site says it was last updated on December 16, 2003. I haven't yet
been able to find other web pages showing which date is more accurate.
My guess is that it's February news and the revision date on the page
is in error.
- Summary: "The MIT Libraries have recently taken steps
to reduce the impact of two large commercial publishers on our ability
to make responsible decisions in selecting information resources for
use at MIT. Specifically, we declined three-year renewal contracts that
would have required us to guarantee on-going spending levels with Wiley
InterScience and Elsevier Science. These actions ensure that if the
Libraries need to reduce spending in the next year or two, we can make
those decisions based solely on the specific needs of the MIT user
community, without giving unfair advantage to certain publishers....The
decision to decline the three-year renewals was difficult because the
terms for one-year renewals were considerably less attractive. However,
the one-year renewals put us in a position of being able to cancel
titles next year if we need to."
- The announcement links to an MIT web page
with more background information.
- University of Connecticut, Resolution,
adopted by the Faculty Senate, February 9, 2004.
- Summary: "Access to the scholarly literature is vital
to all members of the academic community. Scholars and their
professional associations share a common interest in the broadest
possible dissemination of peer-reviewed contributions. Unfortunately,
the business practices of some journals and journal publishers is
inimical to these interests and threatens to limit the promise of
increased access inherent in digital technologies. Development of
library collections is more and more constrained by the rising costs of
journals and databases. Faculty, staff, students, and university
adminstrators must all take greater responsibility for the scholarly
communication system. Therefore, the University Senate calls on all
faculty, staff, and students of the University of Connecticut to become
familiar with the business practices of journals and journal publishers
in their specialty. It especially encourages senior tenured faculty to
reduce their support of journals or publishers whose practices are
inconsistent with the health of scholarly communication by submitting
fewer papers to such journals, by refereeing fewer papers submitted to
such journals, or by resigning from editorial posts associated with
such journals. It encourages them to increase their support of existing
journals and publishers whose practices are consistent with the health
of scholarly communication. The Senate also calls on University
administrators and departmental, school, college and University
committees to reward efforts by faculty, staff, and students to start
or support more sustainable models for scholarly communication. It
calls on them to provide financial and material support to faculty,
staff, and students whose work helps to ensure broad access to the
scholarly literature. It also calls on professional associations and
the University to invest in the infrastructure necessary to support new
venues for peer-reviewed publication."
- Before it adopted this resolution, the Faculty Senate
deleted a recommendation (contained e.g. in the Santa Cruz resolution)
that tenure and promotion committees should respect faculty decisions
to follow the advice of the resolution. See the minutes of the
faculty meeting (scroll to item 8).
- Also see the University of Connecticut Libraries' web site
on the scholarly
communication crisis.
- Stanford University: Faculty
senate approves measure targeting for-profit journal publishers, a
press release issued February 24, 2004. The press release is based on a
February 19 vote of the Faculty Senate.
- A slightly revised
version of the press release was issued on February 25, 2004.
- Summary: With one dissenting vote, the Faculty Senate
voted to encourage "libraries to cancel some costly journal
subscriptions and faculty to withhold articles and reviews from
publishers who engage in questionable pricing practices. The motion
singled out publishing giant Elsevier as deserving special attention.
'We're not doing this to position ourselves to negotiate more
effectively with Elsevier,' said University Librarian Michael Keller.
'We're doing this to change the whole scene. We're trying to change the
fundamental nature of scholarly communication in the journal
industry.'...'I think it's going to take a long time for its prestige
and cachet to wear out,' [biology professor Robert] Simoni said. 'There
are still so many people who think publishing in Cell is going
to make their career that they'll still get submissions. But if
institutions like Stanford and others stop subscribing to journals like
Cell, authors will eventually realize that their work
is not being seen. This is an evolutionary change and it will take
time."
- My summary is based on the press release. But also see how
the action was recorded
in the Faculty Senate minutes.
- Michael Miller, Fac
Sen discusses journal fees, The Stanford Daily, February 6,
2004. Stanford discusses how to respond to the serials crisis.
- Ryan Sands, Fac
Sen addresses costly journals, The Stanford Daily, February
20, 2004.
- Linda Cicero, At
What Cost? Stanford Magazine, June 2004.
- University of Maryland: Changes in
Access to Journals Published by Reed Elsevier, a letter from
William W. Destler, Provost, to the faculty, February 20, 2004.
- Summary: The university cancelled consortial access
to
the Baltimore campus subscriptions and converted the College Park
campus subscriptions to electronic-only. It describes the failed
Elsevier negotiations in language similar to that in the TRLN statement
above, and then continues. "By retaining the ability to cancel titles,
the Libraries maintain the option of building collections with other
publishers' titles where they provide greater value to the campus
community....The University of Maryland is working with other research
universities to address this crisis. One example of this type of work
is the Libraries' participation in the Scholarly Publishing and
Academic Resources Coalition [SPARC]....I firmly believe that
universities must address this crisis in the system of scholarly
communication. Our libraries need our support in their work with the
university community to regain control of their budgets, their
collections, and the intellectual property that is the ultimate output
of the research enterprise. I encourage you to continue to engage in
discussions with our library faculty about what we are doing to explore
new models of scholarly communication and restore a measure of
rationality to the publishing system. It is important to extend the
discussion beyond our campus as well, especially for those of you who
serve on editorial boards of journals published commercially or by
learned societies."
- Indiana University at Bloomington: Resolution
on Journals, Databases, and Threats to Scholarly Publication,
adopted by the Bloomington Faculty Council, February 27, 2004.
- Summary: "The continuing escalation of serial prices,
which have more than doubled in the past 10 years, is unsustainable in
the long run. The increase is due to a number of factors: the
information explosion, the expansion of electronic capabilities by
publishing groups, as well as the growth of mega-publishers whose
profits greatly exceed the Consumer Price Index....Scholars and their
professional associations share a common interest in the broadest
possible dissemination of peer-reviewed contributions. Unfortunately,
it is the business practices of a few large journals and journal
publishers that threaten to limit the promise of increased access
inherent in digital technologies. Therefore, the Bloomington Faculty
Council [A] calls on all faculty, staff, students, and university
administrators of Indiana University Bloomington to work toward a more
open publishing system by increasing their support of existing refereed
journals and publishers whose practices are consistent with open access
to scholarly communication and to support those who make such choices
when considering tenure and promotion; [B] encourages faculty and staff
to separate themselves from publishers with a narrow focus on profits
at the expense of open scholarly publication; [C] calls on the
university Libraries to educate faculty, staff, students, and
university administrators on the business practices of different
journals and journal publishers and their impact on the health of
scholarly communication and on our Libraries at Indiana University
Bloomington." The preamble adds the specific recommendations that
faculty consider "withholding publications from their journals or
choosing not to sit on their editorial boards" and that "[i]n tenure
and promotion decisions faculty and staff must be confident that there
is departmental and university support for their decisions to publish
in referred journals with more open access."
- Chris Freiberg, Council approves code
revisions, Indiana Digital Student News, March 3, 2004.
- Macalester College: Background Information
on Science Direct Decision, February 29, 2004.
- Summary: Macalaster decided not to sign a three-year
renewal of ScienceDirect. "The reality is we just can't commit to the
inflexibility of not cancelling any Elsevier titles....[W]e invited
faculty members in the sciences divisions to a meeting on Monday, Nov.
10th. At that meeting, we shared the details of the contract and we
presented three options including to stay as a participant within the
deal, and we explained that by not participating we would not have
electronic access to the Elsevier titles we purchased in print. It was
a small group, but they were all in agreement, giving up electronic
access and access to a significant number of journals that many of them
used was a sacrifice that needed to be made and one that they
supported."
- The page links to other university resolutions and
summaries
of the pricing crisis. It also links to Macalaster-produced PPT
slides on the options Macalaster faced.
- Macalester signed the joint press release issued by four
private Minnesota liberal arts colleges in May 2004, spurning
ScienceDirect in favor of open access. See the next entry below.
- Carleton College, Gustavus Adolphus College, Macalester
College, and St. Olaf College: Press
Release on Science Direct Decision, May 2004.
- Summary: The four decisions were independent, but the
colleges issued a joint press release. "While the reasons and decision
processes were somewhat different on each campus, we are all convinced
that the escalating prices for many scientific journals are
unsustainable and that the time has come for change....Our faculties
are aware that this decision will result in a painful reduction in a
overall journal access in the short term. But they are supporting us
because they understand that it is in the long term interests of our
institutions to reassert control over our collections and to encourage
new, more sustainable publishing models....Open access journals are a
clear alternative to the unsustainable bundling of journals, which
prohibits cancellations and which consistently increase at rates of
5-8% per year. We are working with other colleges and universities to
address this crisis by supporting the work of SPARC, Public Library of
Science, and other groups that seek to increase broad and
cost-effective access to peer reviewed scholarship. In declining the
Science Direct offer we are joining an increasing number of
institutions signaling that we are serious in our demands for
reasonable pricing for scholarly communication." The press release
recommends that faculty at the four colleges avoid writing or reviewing
"for journals that are not moving towards an open access model" and
that they retain the rights to authorize open access. It recommends
that the four colleges establish institutional repositories and adopt
"policies that signal that publication in quality open access journals
is acceptable in the institutions' system of rewards and recognition."
- Anon., Four
Small Minnesota Colleges Say No to the "Big Deal", Library
Journal, May 25, 2004.
- Other institutions contemplating
action (alphabetical order)
- Columbia University: See Megan Greenwell, CU
Senate Postpones Resolution Yet Again, Columbian Spectator,
March 1, 2004.
- Also see the web site
on the problem and solutions created by the Columbia Health Sciences
Library.
- Georgia State University: See Beth Flanningan, Libraries
join fight for greater research access, Georgia State University
Villager, March 23, 2004.
- Johns Hopkins University: See the public
letter from Winston Tabb, Dean of University Libraries, in the
Spring 2004 issue of Science @ C-Level.
- San Jose State University: See Claudia Plascencia, Academic
journals to be sacrificed in library cuts, San Jose State
University Spartan Daily, March 24, 2004.
- University of Iowa: See Kristen Schorsch, UI
libraries brace for cuts, Iowa City Press-Citizen, December
2, 2003.
- University of New Mexico: See Rivkela Brodsky, Faculty
senate to modify curriculum, Daily Lobo, August 25, 2004.
- University of Oregon: See Chuck Slothower, University
Libraries to cut several serial subscriptions, Oregon Daily
Emerald, February 21, 2004. A plan to cancel more than 300 titles
in May, and a call for faculty input on the titles to be cut.
- University of Utah: see Andrew Kirk, Library
struggles to afford journals, The Daily Utah Chronicle,
March 11, 2004.
What you can do to help the cause of open access
- This list is more comprehensive than earlier lists but still
far from complete. I expect to revise and enlarge it regularly.
- This list borrows from the BOAI list (which
I helped write), Stevan
Harnad's list, the BMC list,
and my own earlier list (now offline).
- I welcome your
ideas and comments.
- Overview of contents:
- Universities
- Faculty
- Submit your research articles to OA journals, when
there are
appropriate OA journals in your field.
- Deposit your preprints in an open-access, OAI-compliant archive.
- It
could be a disciplinary or institutional archive.
- If
your institution doesn't have one already, then faculty or librarians
should launch one. See the list for librarians,
below.
- There
is no comprehensive list of open-access, OAI-compliant archives, but
I've listed the best lists above.
- If
you have questions about archiving your eprints, then see Stevan
Harnad's Self-Archiving FAQ.
- Deposit your postprints in an open-access OAI-compliant archive.
- The
"postprint" is the version accepted by the peer-review process of a
journal, often after some revision.
- If
you transferred copyright to the journal, then postprint archiving
requires the journal's permission. Many journals consent in advance to
this. Some will consent when asked. Some will not consent. For journal
policies about copyright and author archiving, see the searchable database
maintained by Project SHERPA.
- If
you have not yet transferred copyright to the journal, then ask to
retain copyright. (More below.)
- If
the journal does not let you retain copyright, then ask at least for
the right of postprint archiving.
- If
it does not let you retain the right to archive your postprint, then
ask for permission to put the postprint on your personal web site. For
many journals, the difference between OA through an archive and OA
through a personal web site is significant.
- If
it does not let you put the postprint on your personal web site, then
simply post the preprint and the corrigenda (differences between the
preprint and postprint) to the archive or to your personal web site.
- Ask journals to let you retain copyright.
- When
you can, negotiate either (1) to retain copyright and transfer only the
right of first print and electronic publication, or (2) to transfer
copyright but retain the right of postprint archiving.
- Many
journals say that authors must transfer copyright, but will show some
flexibility if you ask individually. Even when journals refuse to let
authors retain copyright, it's important for them to hear from authors
who want them to change their policy about this.
- For
advice on negotiating the copyright transfer agreement with a journal,
and suggested language to include in the agreement, see SPARC's page on
Copyright
Resources for Authors.
- Deposit your data files in an OA archive along with
the articles built on them. If possible, cite the data files in the
articles so that readers know where to find them.
- Negotiate with conventional journals to try the
Walker-Prosser method of experimenting with OA.
- Namely:
if the journal is not already OA, it might still offer OA to individual
articles when the authors or their sponsors pay an upfront fee to cover
the journal's costs in vetting and preparing the text. See Thomas
Walker's article that first proposed this method and David Prosser's
article that refined it.
- There's
no harm in asking, and it helps the cause if the labor of asking
journals to consider OA experiments is distributed among the authors
with an interest in OA publication.
- Consider launching an OA journal in your area of
specialization.
- When asked to referee a paper or serve on the editorial
board for an OA journal, accept the invitation.
- When asked to referee a paper or serve on the editorial
board for a toll-access journal, consider declining and explaining why.
- Faculty
needn't donate their time and labor to journals that lock up their
content behind access barriers where it is less useful to the
profession. Universities should support faculty who make this otherwise
career-jeopardizing decision. Faculty don't need to boycott priced
journals, but they don't need to assist them either.
- If you are an editor of a toll-access journal, then
start an
in-house discussion about converting to OA, experimenting with OA,
letting authors retain copyright, abolishing the Ingelfinter rule, or declaring independence (quitting and
launching an OA journal to serve the same research niche).
- For
more ideas of what journals can do, see the list for journals below.
- Ask the journals to which you regularly submit articles
to
do more to support OA. For example, see the list of what
journals can do, below.
- When applying for research grants, ask the foundation
for
funds to pay the processing fees charged by OA journals. Many
foundations are already on the record as willing to do this. For
the rest, it's important to ask.
- Volunteer to serve on your university's committee to
evaluate faculty for promotion and tenure. Make sure the committee is
using criteria that, at the very least, do not penalize faculty for
publishing in peer-reviewed OA journals. At best, adjust the criteria
to give faculty an incentive to provide OA to their peer-reviewed
research articles and preprints, either through OA journals or OA
archives.
- For
more on how these criteria need revision (and therefore how you could
help if you served on the committee), see the section on administrators, below.
- See the list of what administrators
can do. Work with your administration to adopt university-wide policies
that promote OA. When administrators don't understand OA, educate
them.
- Of
all the items on that list, the most important may be to urge your
institution to create an open-access OAI-compliant eprint archive and
adopt policies encouraging faculty to fill it with their research
articles.
- Work with your professional societies to make sure they understand
OA. Persuade the organization to make its own journals OA, endorse OA
for other journals in the field, and support OA eprint archiving by all
scholars in the field.
- If
the society launches a disciplinary eprint archive for the field,
consider offering to have your university host it, just as arXiv (for example) is hosted by Cornell.
- Also
see the list of what learned societies can
do.
- Create an online index or database of the OA sources in
your
field.
- Consider becoming an individual member
of the Public Library of
Science.
- Keep up with open-access
news.
- Write opinion pieces (articles, journal editorials,
newspapers op-eds, letters to the editor, discussion forum postings)
advancing the cause of OA.
- Help document
the benefits of open access or the harms caused by the lack of it.
- See the overview
of the issues for university faculty (from Create Change).
- Educate the next generation of scientists and scholars
about
OA.
- Make
sure that new researchers (and experienced older researchers too!)
understand their self-interest in OA. Make sure they understand that OA increases
the impact of research articles.
- Or,
at a minimum, don't let myths about OA circulate without challenge,
e.g. that OA violates copyright, dispenses with peer review, or
presupposes that journals have no expenses.
- When
you meet students, colleagues, or administrators who are curious and
want to know more, or who misunderstand and need some facts, direct
them to my Open
Access Overview.
- Librarians
- Launch an open-access, OAI-compliant institutional
eprint
archive, for both texts and data.
- The
main reason for universities to have institutional repositories is to
enhance the visibility and impact of the research output of the
university, its publishing faculty, and the institution itself.
- A
more specific reason is that a growing number of journals allow authors
to deposit their postprints in institutional but not disciplinary
repositories. Even though this is an almost arbitrary distinction,
institutions without repositories will leave some of their faculty
stranded with no way to provide OA to their work.
- "OAI-compliant"
means that the archive complies with the metadata harvesting protocol
of the Open Archives Initiative
(OAI). This makes the archive interoperable with other compliant
archives so that the many separate archives behave like one grand,
virtual archive for purposes such as searching. This means that users
can search across OAI-compliant archives without visiting the separate
archives and running separate searches. Hence, it makes your content
more visible, even if users don't know that your archive exists or what
it contains.
- There
are a handful of open-source packages for creating and maintaining such
archives. The four most important are eprints (from Southampton
University), DSpace (from MIT), CDSWare (from CERN), and FEDORA (from Cornell and U. of
Virginia).
- When
building the case for an archive among colleagues and administrators,
see The Case for
Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper, by Raym Crow.
- When
deciding which software to use, see the BOAI Guide to
Institutional Repository Software.
- When
implementing the archive, see the SPARC Institutional
Repository Checklist & Resource Guide.
- If
your institution wants an archive but would prefer to outsource the
work, then consider BioMed Central's Open Repository service.
- Help faculty deposit their research articles in the
institutional archive.
- Many
faculty are more than willing, just too busy. Some suffer from tech
phobias. Some might need education about the benefits.
- For
example, see how the St. Andrews University Library offers to
help faculty.
- Consider publishing an open-access journal.
- Philosophers'
Imprint,
from the University of Michigan, is a peer-reviewed OA journal whose
motto is, "Edited by philosophers. Published by librarians. Free to
readers of the Web." Because the editors and publishers (faculty and
librarians) are already on the university payroll, Philosophers'
Imprint is a university-subsidized OA journal that does not need to
charge upfront processing fees.
- The
library of the University of Arizona at Tucson publishes the OA
peer-reviewed Journal of
Insect Science. For detail and perspective on its experience, see
(1) Henry Hagedorn et al., Publishing
by the Academic Library, a January 2004 conference
presentation, and (2) Eulalia Roel, Electronic
journal publication: A new library contribution to scholarly
communication, College & Research Libraries News,
January 2004.
- See
the BOAI Guide
to Business Planning for Launching a New Open Access Journal.
- See
SPARC's list of journal
management software.
- See
the list of what journals can do, below.
- Consider rejecting the big deal, or cancelling journals
that
cannot justify their high prices, and issue a public statement
explaining why.
- See
my list of other universities that have already
done so. If they give you courage and ideas, realize that you can do
the same for others.
- Give
presentations to the faculty senate, or the library committee, or to
separate departments, educating faculty and adminstrators about the
scholarly communication crisis and showing how open access is part of
any comprehensive solution. You will need faculty and administrative
support for these decisions, but other universities have succeeded in
getting it.
- Help OA journals launched at the university become
known to
other libraries, indexing services, potential funders, potential
authors, and potential readers.
- Include OA journals in the library catalog.
- The Directory of
Open Access Journals
offers its journal
metadata free for downloading. For tips on how to use these
records, see the 2003 discussion
thread on the ERIL list (readable only by list subscribers) or Joan
Conger's summary
of the thread (readable by everyone).
- Take
other steps to insure that students and faculty doing research at your
institution know about OA sources, not just traditional print and
toll-access sources.
- Offer to assure the long-term preservation of some
specific
body of OA content.
- OA
journals suffer from the perception that they cannot assure long-term
preservation. Libraries can come to their rescue and negate this
perception. For example, in September 2003 the National Library of the Netherlands agreed
to do this for all BioMed
Central journals. This is a major library offering to preserve a
major collection, but smaller libraries can do the same for smaller
collections.
- Annotate OA articles and books with their metadata.
- OA
content is much more useful when it is properly annotated with
metadata. University librarians could start by helping their own
faculty annotate their own OA works. But if they have time (or
university funding) left over, then they could help the cause by
annotating other OA content as a public service.
- Undertake digitization, access, and preservation
projects
not only for faculty, but for local groups, e.g. non-profits, community
organizations, museums, galleries, libraries. Show the benefits of OA
to the non-academic community surrounding the university, especially
the non-profit community.
- Negotiate with vendors of priced electronic content
(journals and databases) for full access by walk-in patrons.
- A
September 2003 article
in Scientific American suggests that only a minority of
libraries already do this.
- Help design impact measurements (like e.g. citation
correlator) that take advantage of the many new kinds of usage data
available for OA sources.
- The
OA world needs this and it seems that only librarians can deliver it.
We need measures other than the standard impact factor. We need
measures that are article-based (as opposed to journal or institution
based), that can be automated, that don't oversimplify, and that take
full advantage of the plethora of data available for OA resources
unavailable for traditional print resources.
- Librarians
can also help pressure existing indices and impact measures to cover OA
sources.
- Join SPARC, a
consortium of academic libraries actively promoting OA.
- See the overview
of the issues for librarians (from Create Change).
- Administrators
- Adopt a policy: In hiring, promotion, and tenure, the
university will give due weight to all peer-reviewed publications,
regardless of price or medium.
- More:
The university will stop using criteria that penalize and deter
publication in OA journals. All criteria that depend essentially on
prestige or impact factors fall into this category. These criteria are
designed to deny recognition to second-rate contributions, which is
justified until they start to deny recognition to first-rate
contributions. These criteria intrinsically deny recognition to new
publications, even if excellent, that have not had time to earn
prestige or impact factors commensurate with their quality. Because
these criteria fail to recognize many worthy contributions to the
field, they are unfair to the candidates undergoing review. They also
perpetuate a vicious circle that deters submissions to new journals,
and thereby hinders the launch of new journals, even if the new
journals would pursue important new topics, methods, or funding and
access policies. Therefore they retard disciplinary progress as well as
the efficiency of scholarly communication.
- On
February 27, 2004, the Indiana University Bloomington Faculty Council
adopted a resolution
with this language: "In tenure and promotion decisions faculty and
staff must be confident that there is departmental and university
support for their decisions to publish in referred journals with more
open access." (Details above.)
- See to it that the university launches an open-access,
OAI-compliant archive. See details under librarians,
above.
- Adopt policies encouraging or requiring faculty to fill
the
institutional archive with their research articles and preprints.
- For
example, the university could require that any articles to be
considered in a promotion and tenure review must be on deposit in the
university's OA archive, with a working URL in the resume. For articles
based on data generated by the author, the data files should also be on
deposit in the archive. For books, authors should deposit the metadata
and reference lists. For other kinds of output, faculty could
deposit the metadata plus whatever other digital materials they wish to
make accessible.
- According
to the JISC/OSI
Journal Authors Survey Report (February 2004, pp. 56-57), when
authors are asked "how they would feel if their employer or funding
body required them to deposit copies of their published articles in one
or more [open-access] repositories...[t]he vast majority, even of the
non-OA author group, said they would do so willingly." (Italics
in original.)
- See
the exemplary
policy at Queensland University
of Technology that took effect on January 1, 2004. "Material which
represents the total publicly available research and scholarly output
of the University is to be located in the University's digital or
'E-print' repository, subject
to the exclusions noted...."
- Also
the model
policy developed at Southampton University.
- For
other exemplary university policies, see the summaries
provided by signatories to the Southampton Declaration of
Institutional Commitment.
- Also
see the notes on developing a
policy from the Eprints
Handbook.
- The
university could pay for a digital librarian (whole or fractional FTE)
to help faculty put their past publications into digital form, deposit
them in the university archive, and enter the relevant metadata. Many
OA-friendly faculty are simply too busy to do this for themselves.
- Many
universities have institutional archives, but do nothing to fill them.
Faculty who understand the issues already have an incentive to deposit
their articles and preprints. But the university should create
incentives, and offer assistance, to those who don't yet understand the
issues or who don't have the time to deposit their own eprints.
- Adopt a policy: faculty who publish articles must
either (1)
retain copyright, and transfer only the right of first print and
electronic publication, or (2) transfer copyright but retain the right
of postprint archiving.
- Adopt a policy: when faculty cannot get the funds to
pay the
processing fee charged by an OA journal from their research grant, then
the university will pay the fee.
- If
the university is worried about a runaway expense, then it could cap
the number of dollars or articles per faculty member per year, and
raise the cap over time as the spread of OA brings about larger and
larger savings to the library serials budget. In the case of
publications based on funded research, the university could offer to
pay the fees only when the funding agencies have been asked and will
not pay.
- Adopt a policy: all theses and dissertations, upon
acceptance, must be made openly accessible, for example, through the
institutional repository or one of the multi-institutional OA archives
for theses and dissertations.
- Some
of the multi-institutional archives providing OA to electronic theses
and dissertations are the Australian
Digital Theses Program, Cyberthèses,
Digitale
Dissertationen in Internet, Networked
Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, and Theses Canada.
(There are many others.)
- For
the experience of CalTech in adopting such a policy, see Betsy Coles
and George S. Porter, Smoothing
the Transition to Mandatory Electronic Theses, American Library
Association, April 2003. Also see Kimberly Douglas, Betsy Coles, George
S. Porter, and Eric Van de Velde, Taking
the Plunge: Requiring the ETD, a conference presentation from May
2003.
- Also
see Kimberly Douglas, To
Restrict or Not to Restrict Access: The PhD Candidate's Intellectual
Property Dilemma, a conference presentation from May 2003.
- Adopt a policy: all conferences hosted at your
university
will provide open access to their presentations or proceedings, even if
the conference also chooses to publish them in a priced journal or
book. This is compatible with charging a registration fee for the
conference.
- Adopt a policy: all journals hosted or published by
your
university will either be OA or take steps to be friendlier to OA. For
example, see the list of what journals can do,
below.
- Have your institution sign the Declaration of
Institutional Commitment to implement open-access policies on
campus.
- If your university is in the UK, or if it is subject to
any research
assessment
process similar to the UK's Research
Assessment Exercise, then consider the model
policy from Stevan Harnad et al. for ensuring that institutional
research output is OA and that faculty use standardized,
online CV's linking to OA versions of their research articles.
- Support, even reward, faculty who launch OA journals.
- For
example: give them released time, technical support, server space,
secretarial help, promotion and tenure credit, publicity, strokes.
- Related:
give due recognition to faculty who serve as editors or referees for OA
journals, at least if this recognition is given for similar service on
important traditional journals. Most OA journals, because they are new,
haven't acquired the prestige of established, conventional journals,
even if their quality is just as high or even higher. Universities
should support faculty who help bring about a superior publishing
alternative, not just those who bring prestige to themselves and the
university through existing channels.
- Consider buying an institutional membership
in BioMed Central, or an institutional
membership or sponsorship in
the Public Library of Science.
- If your university uses DSpace, then consider
joining the DSpace Federation.
- Sign
the Budapest Open Access
Initiative as an institution.
- Sign the Declaration
of Institutional Commitment to implement the Budapest Open Access
Initiative, the Berlin
Declaration, and WSIS Principles
on open access to research literature.
- Students
- As the researchers of the future, take your changed
expectations with you. Researchers will finally take advantage of the
internet in scholarly communication when a generation that has grown up
with the internet occupies positions of responsibility in universities,
laboratories, libraries, foundations, journals, publishers, learned
socieites, government funding agencies, and legislatures.
- As expert users, help faculty, e.g. by archiving their
papers for them or pointing them to relevant OA resources.
- As programmers, develop open-source tools for open
access.
- Take part in the student-led Free Culture movement.
Make sure that open access to research literature has its place on the
agenda along side open-source software, copyright reform, and other
free culture issues.
- Other
- Use the university OA infrastructure as another way to
offer
outreach to the community. For example, invite community groups to use
the university's OA archive. The university could offer to digitize,
host, and preserve content for some non-profit organizations in the
area.
- Public universities should explain to the citizens of
their
state, state legislators, and state newspapers, why their new OA
policies are maximizing the return on tax dollars, and how they put the
university in the vanguard of enlightened institutions. Private
institutions can make the same argument to donors, parents, and
students.
- If a university adopts a systematic plan to promote OA,
through its faculty, librarians, and administration, then it should
launch a central web site for the plan, and perhaps a newsletter, to
explain its many facets, monitor progress, publicize the rationale, and
show which elements are still to come.
- For
those who worry about funding this grand plan: Many parts of the plan
are either costless or result in net savings. Many others will bring
waves of good publicity, which will help the bottom line through
improved recruitment and retention, soft money, or alumni loyalty. All
parts directly advance the university's mission to share, preserve, and
extend knowledge.
- Journals and publishers
- Let authors retain copyright. Ask only for the right of
first print and electronic publication.
- Let authors archive both their preprints and their
postprints.
- See the many
journal publishers who already do.
- Letting authors archive their preprints really means
abandoning the Ingelfinger rule; more on this below.
Since authors are usually the copyright holders at the time they
archive their preprints, journals have no right to block it, only a
right to refuse to consider submissions that have previously circulated
as preprints; this is what they should reconsider. Letting authors
archive their postprints only applies if the journal asks authors to
transfer copyright in the postprint to the journal.
- Allowing these forms of OA isn't a "sacrifice" or
"concession" to authors and readers. It gives you a competitive
advantage in attracting submissions over journals that do not permit
them.
- Experiment with open access.
- For example, a journal can give authors the choice
between
open access and conventional publication. Authors who choose OA must
pay an upfront processing fee to cover the journal's costs in vetting
and preparing the article. This method was first described by Thomas
Walker (here)
and later refined by David Prosser (here).
- Experiment with advertising, priced add-ons, and
auxiliary
services to generate the revenue needed to cover your expenses, so that
you can offer OA to more and more full-text research articles.
- If you enhance your authors' basic texts with expensive
add-ons, consider offering OA to the basic texts and only charging for
access to the enhanced edition.
- If you can't offer immediate OA to full-text articles,
then
consider offering OA after some delay or embargo period.
- If you still use the Ingelfinger rule (a policy against
accepting papers previously published or publicized), then modify it to
permit preprint archiving.
- If you will accept papers whose preprints have
previously
been circulated online, say so explicitly on your web site. Many
researchers are deterred from preprint archiving by groundless fears of
the Ingelfinger rule.
- Make sure your journal's copyright and archiving policies
are accurately listed by Project
SHERPA.
- Consider providing free online access to your article
metadata,
even if you aren't ready to provide free online access to the articles
themselves.
- If the metadata are harvestable under the OAI protocol, then your
articles will be more visible, searchable, and discoverable. Read this case study on how Inderscience, a medium-sized
publisher of priced journals in engineering and business, created an
OAI-compliant archive
to expose the metadata for its publications. Inderscience decided that
the OAI methods for sharing metadata were more effective and less
expensive than traditional marketing.
- Book publishers should consider the same strategy.
- If your back run is not already digital, then participate
in
the PubMed
Central Back Issue Digitization program, which includes PMC-hosted
free online access to the newly-digitized back run.
- If you are considering the OA business model, then see the
BOAI Guide
to Business Planning for Converting a Subscription-based Journal to
Open Access.
- Journal editors: If your publisher resists your
efforts to lower the journal price, revise its copyright and archiving
policies, or initiate OA experiments, then consider changing
publishers.
- If you are already a peer-reviewed, open-access journal,
then:
- Deposit your accepted papers in an OAI-compliant archive. This
additional source for your published papers assures authors and readers
that the papers will remain OA even if your journal dies, is bought
out, or changes its access policies. For example, both BMC and PLoS deposit all their
published papers in PubMed
Central.
- Make sure you are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals.
- Share your business data with researchers studying the
OA-journal business model. If you are economically viable, your data
will help document the viability of the model and help persuade
skeptical publishers to experiment with OA. The ALPSP is one organization seeking
business data from OA journals as part of just such a study.
- See Getting your
journal indexed from SPARC.
- You may benefit from the experience of the Public Library of Science.
See its guide, Publishing
Open-Access Journals, originally released in February 2004, but to
be updated as needed.
- Learned societies and professional associations
- If you publish a journal, consider making it open access.
- Adopt the policy that all conferences sponsored by your
society will provide open access to their proceedings, even if you also
choose to publish them in a priced journal or book. See details under "universities", above.
- Encourage your members to archive their preprints and
postprints in open-access, OAI-compliant archives.
- Endorse open access for all journals, dissertations, and
conference proceedings in your field. See the policy
statements already made by other learned societies and professional
organizations.
- Maintain a comprehensive and up-to-date online list of OA
resources in your field. Societies have more credibility and more
resources than individuals, who tend to take the lead in maintaining
such guides.
- Foundations and research funding agencies
- Put an OA condition on research grants, so that in
accepting
a grant, the grantee agrees to provide OA to the results of the funded
research.
- The condition should give grantees a choice of ways to
provide OA. In particular, it ought to give grantees the choice between
OA archives and OA journals.
- For one way to do this, see my Model
Open-Access Policy for Foundation Research Grants. I don't pretend
that foundations could adopt it as is. But it does try to imagine the
practical complexities of putting an OA condition on research grants,
and it offers contract terms that address these complexities. If my
solutions to these problems don't suit a particular foundation, then
perhaps my annotations will at least identify some of the issues and
help it save time in its deliberations.
- According to the JISC/OSI
Journal Authors Survey Report (February 2004, pp. 56-57), when
authors are asked "how they would feel if their employer or funding
body required them to deposit copies of their published articles in one
or more [open-access] repositories...[t]he vast majority, even of the
non-OA author group, said they would do so willingly." (Italics
in original.)
- When a grant recipient publishes the results of funded
research in an OA journal that charges a processing fee, offer to pay
the fee. Consider the cost of OA dissemination to be part of the cost
of research.
- Even better: encourage grantees to submit their
work
to OA journals when there are suitable ones in the field.
- Even better: earmark some grant funds for OA
journal
processing fees. That way grantees will not have to reduce their
research funds in order to pay the fees.
- Give grants to universities to help create institutional
eprint
archives and to provide the necessary support for filling and
maintaining them.
- Give grants to individual researchers to cover the
processing fees charged by open-access journals.
- Give grants to new open-access journals to help them launch
and establish themselves. Give grants to newly formed editorial boards
that want to launch new open-access journals.
- Give grants to open-access journals to cover the processing
fees of authors who cannot afford to pay them.
- Give grants to conventional journals to cover the costs of
converting to open access.
- Give grants to conventional journals to cover the costs of
digitizing their back runs, on the condition that they will then
provide open access to them.
- Allow your grants to be used for building endowments for
open access
journals and archives. Endowed OA journals and archives will not need
to
seek further funding from any source.
- Ask researchers applying for grants to deposit their
existing peer-reviewed research articles in OA archives, and to
maintain a standardized,
online CV linking to OA versions of these articles. For more
details, see this 2003
article by Stevan Harnad, Les Carr, Tim Brody, and Charles
Oppenheim.
- Governments
- Put an OA condition on government research grants, so that
in accepting a grant, the grantee agrees to provide OA to the results
of the funded research.
- See the section on foundations
above, for more detail, especially on giving grantees a choice between
OA archives and OA journals.
- Funding agencies could make exceptions for classified
research, patentable discoveries, and publications that generate
revenue for authors such as books and software.
- The issues are largely the same between private and
public
funding agencies. But governments can adopt uniform legislation
covering all government agencies that fund research. Governments can
also appeal to the taxpayer argument (that taxpayers should not have to
pay a second fee for access to the results of taxpayer-funded research)
in addition to the return-on-investment argument (that any funding
agency will increase the return on its investment in research if it
makes the results OA and thereby makes them more discoverable,
retrievable, accessible, and useful).
- Permit recipients of government research grants to use
grant
funds to pay the processing fees charged by OA journals.
- Insure that, as a matter of law, works produced by
government employees in their official capacity are in the public
domain. (This is already the case in the United States; see 17 USC
105 and its legislative
history.)
- Treat government-funded works in the same way. In
the U.S., the Public
Access to Science Act (submitted by Martin Sabo in June 2003) would
have this effect.
- Or learn from the U.S. experience with the Sabo bill by
requiring open access itself (through archives or journals), rather
than just a legal precondition of open access (the public domain). For
details on how to do this, see the section on foundations
above. In addition, use copyright-holder consent, rather than the
public domain, as the legal precondition for open access, and avoid
alienating the important constituencies and legislators who are
friendly to both open access and copyright. Finally, make reasonable
exceptions e.g. for classified research, patentable discoveries, books,
and software. The open-access bill should apply only or primarily to
works that authors willingly publish without payment, such as journal
articles and dissertations.
- Consider a nationally-coordinated program to insure open
access to the research output of the nation. This was pioneered by
Holland with Project
DARE. Similar initiatives (with interesting differences) are under
consideration or under way in Australia, Canada, Germany, and India.
- Sign
the Berlin
Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.
- Citizens
- See the list of what governments
can do. Demand that your government take some of those steps. Talk to
your representatives about the issues. Make clear that these issues are
important to you, and that you expect your government to support
science and the public interest over the private interests of
publishers.
- In particular, demand that research funded by taxpayers be
made available to the public free of charge.
Lists maintained by others
參考資料