Open Access-9: "Benefits of OA"

The following mail I received from Professor Subbiah Arunachalam, MS Swaminathan Fellow, which I am sure all those who are interested in OA will find useful:

2009/4/30 Subbiah Arunachalam

Friends:

Evidence is mounting that opening up science can bring in tremendous benefits. But convincing the bosses of Indian science about the advantages of open access continues to be a pretty difficult task. Now James Boyle has written about the stellar multiplier effect that open access can bring to the economic returns of scientific research.

Stimulus for cyberinfrastructure

James Boyle, What the information superhighways aren’t built of…, Financial Times, April 17, 2009. (Thanks to Lawrence Lessig.)

… We know that the United States’ experiments with freely providing publicly generated data — on everything from weather to roads to navigation — yield an incredible economic return. More than 30-fold by some estimates. We know that investment in basic science can provide stellar multipliers.

Some scholars have been arguing that the architecture of the internet, its embrace of openness as a design principle, might revolutionize science if we could apply the same principles there — if we could break down the legal and technical barriers that prevent the efficient networking of state funded research and data. Imagine a scientific research process that worked as efficiently as the web does for buying shoes. Then imagine what economic growth a faster, leaner, and more open scientific research environment might generate.

Streamlining science, learning from the success of the internet, more open access to state funded basic research: these kinds of initiatives are the ones that might provide the ”superhighways of the mind,” the ”freeways of the information age” — but they are too abstract, more likely to involve open data protocols than bundles of wires, and thus they garner little attention. Now would be an ideal time to invest in the architecture of openness, but this kind of architecture doesn’t get built with cement. …

Permanent link to this post Posted by Gavin Baker at 4/29/2009 12:45:00 PM.

Most funding agencies in India have clearly failed to see the tremendous advantages of open access to peer-reviewed scientific literature and should be held responsible. [The Science Academies have done better.]

There is one more dimension to it.

Government invests heavily on research – on salaries of scientists and professors, on buildings and other infrastructure, equipments, chemicals, research grants, libraries, travel to conferences, and so on. And yet when Indian scientists write research papers and want to publish them they merrily give away the copyright to government-funded research to journal publishers, often commercial publishers operating from the Western world. So far no one seems to be bothered about it. Neither the politicians, be they communists or Congressmen or followers of other parties, nor students (belonging to politically affiliated student unions or unattached) have raised their voice against this unethical practice. And our scientists continue to sign on the dotted line when they receive the copyright agreement form from journal publishers.

They need not do that. They can always attach an addendum which can clearly state that they (or their institution) would retain the copyright, the right to reproduce portions of the articles in their future work, the right to self-archive their work either in an institutional archive or in a central archive (such as PubMed Central), and the right to make multiple copies for non-commercial purposes (such as distributing to students they teach). Funding agencies should insist, as such agencies in the UK have done, that researchers should make their peer-reviewed research publications openly accessible.

Subbiah Arunachalam

Grateful thanks to Professor Subbiah Arunachalam and Mr James Boyle.

Open Access-8: "US Congressional Records Set Free!"

I am reproducing below a mail I received from Mr.Subbiah Arunachalam, which may be of interest to many of you. He has very kindly given the source as well, which is Peter Suber’s article, “OA for CRS Reports” from “Open Access News”. Some hot topics like “US Casualties in Iraq”, “Causes of the Financial Crisis”, “The Federal Medical Assistance Percentage in Medicaid” etc find a place in these reports:

“Congressional reports commissioned by the United States Congress and held till now as quasi-secret documents are now freely available thanks to Wikileaks. As of today nearly 6.800 reports running to more than 127.000 pages (and valued at nearly a billion dollars) are available to the public. Active contributors to this project include the Federation of American Scientists, the National Council for Science and the Environment and the Thurgood Marshall law Library of the University of Maryland.

It is only fair in a democracy that all reports generated using public funds are made available to the public.”

Grateful thanks to Mr.Subbiah Arunachalam and Mr.Peter Suber, Open Access News.

Eyecatchers-122: "Two Million Books/Articles/Images in Public Domain!"

A news item in the Newscape section of The Hindu, Madurai edition of November 21. 2008 caught my eye. It was about the Europeana Digital Library, which was launched on November 20, 2008. It had to be closed after it was swamped by Internet users. Then I went to their website (www.europeana.eu). Swamped is right. 10 million hits per hour! Naturally they had to close down. However, they have offered to come up with a robust version by mid-December.

In the meanwhile some info about the Europeana project.

Europeana is a search platform for a collection of European digital libraries with digitized paintings, books, films and archives. The project was initiated by the European Commission. The Library contains around two million digital items, all of them already in public domain.

I repeat for the sake of bloggers, all the 2 million items are in the PUBLIC DOMAIN, which means you can use, re-use, distribute, re-distribute, excerpt and probably modify also; of course, with ncessary credit/attribution. Sort of bonanza, what you think!

The project aims to have 10 million works by 2010, when Europeana is due to be fully operational.

Grateful thanks to The Hindu and Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Open Access-6: "Open Access and the New Possibilities Offered by Digitization"

As open access takes on strength and visibility, new possibilities appear. The capacity to link documents together constantly grows in importance. Linking research articles with their underlying data is also being increasingly discussed. Researchers are not yet used to sharing data with others. But, with computers, new forms of exploitation of vast corpora of documents and data are becoming possible. Even a perfunctory use of Google makes this point clear. In the end, one may even wonder whether the venerable article and the mode of publishing it has generated for the last three and a half centuries will make sense much longer in the new environment.

In the end, exactly as Origen has taught us, the changes in communication technologies shift our relations to documents and transform the meaning we ascribe to their existence. If this is true, then it is time to go back to fundamentals. Fundamentally, science is open knowledge and its energy flashes out of the shock of ideas. The end result of this fundamentally agonistic activity is a critical edition of sorts, always striving to reach perfection, yet never ended or ending. Seen from on high, science is little more than an endless concatenation of texts that correct or refute each other, topic by topic, argument by argument, fact by fact. One might say, however scandalous this might sound at present, that science is a kind of Wikipedia, but a Wikipedia where attribution is closely monitored and where participation depends on credentials. If this characterization of science succeeds in capturing some of its essence, it becomes legitimate to ask whether the researcher will still be an “author” of “articles” 30 years from now. The author form is a child of print, and authorship is different from attribution. Whether authorship will still be needed in a few decades is a question well worth asking.

The answer is far from certain….But a choice remains before us: will scientists and scholars finally recover the control over the tools needed for their great conversation, or will it increasingly be taken over by commercial interests? This is what open access is all about….

Excerpt from “Digitizing and the Meaning of Knowledge” by Jean-Claude Guédon, Academic Matters, October/November 2008.

Posted by Peter Suber in “Open Access News” at 11/22/2008 01:28:00 PM

Grateful thanks to Jean-Claude Guédon, Academic Matters, Peter Suber and Open Access News.

Open Access-5: "Open Access Day"

Today is Open Access Day. Enthusiasts of OA world over have planned various events to celebrate the occasion. It looks very good and encouraging.

For details:

http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Events_celebrating_Open_Access_Day

Open Access-4: Google Directory for Open Access Resources

It is heartening to note the growing support for the Open Access Movement and here is something for those who are interested in Open Access from Google Directory of Open Access Resources.

It has listed 5 categories and two related categories. Under the category, Free Access Scientific Archives Google Directory lists 52 references. Those who would like to look them up can click the URL below and see for themselves the 52 Open Access Resources under Science; 33 under Free Access Theory; 82 under Free Online Literature; 41 under Free Online Poetry; and 10 under Organizations.

Under related categories, 835 under Computers; and 82 under Computers-Open Source.

http://www.google.com/Top/Science/Publications/Archives/Free_Access_Online_Archives/

Grateful thanks to Google Directory.

Open Access-3:

Open Access-3: Another interesting and informative mail from Mr.Subbiah Arunachalam

Research in Indian academic institutions – universities, IITs, IISc and other deemed universities and national laboratories – is by and large supported by taxpayers’ money. But when the researchers finish some work and want to publish it, they give away the ENTIRE RIGHTS to journal publishers. Often these are commercial firms like GReed Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer and John Wiley. As most of these journals are very expensive – some of them charging annual subscription of over $10,000 – most Indian libraries would not be receiving them. As a result work published by an Indian researcher often goes unnoticed by researchers in the same field working in other Indian institutions. Besides the government which supported the research has no claim on its results. I suggest that we work towards mandating open access for all publicly funded research and Indian authors NOT surrendering all rights to publishers when they sign the publishers’ copyright agreement.

Incidentally, no research performed in US Government laboratories (such as Brookhaven National Laboratory or Oak Ridge National Laboratory) is copyrightable! We should enact legislation in India to the effect that copyright to all research performed in government laboratories (CSIR, ICMR, ICAR, DAE, ISRO, etc.) will vest with Indian entities (say the laboratories or the council or department) and that all research supported fully or partially with public funds will be made freely available through open access. Faculties in both Harvard and Stanford Universities (some and not all) have voted unanimously to mandate open access to their research publications. The National Institutes of Health in the USA and six of the seven research councils in the UK have long ago mandated open access to all research they support. The Wellcome Trust, a major funder of biomedical research, has also mandated open access for all the research it supports. We need to adopt a similar nationwide open access mandate in India.

I tried to convince the Bioinformatics centres supported by the Department of Biotechnology. We first talked about it seven years ago at the annual meeting held at Pune. The idea was approved, but till this day the DBT has not implemented it, although this topic comes up virtually in every annual meeting of the coordinators of the Bioinformatics centres. I have also written to many other science managers of the country with limited success. Three CSIR laboratories have set up institutional open access archives and it is likely many more will do so in the near future. May be we should alert the CGA!

I request this group to take this up as its agenda.

Best wishes.

Arun
[Subbiah Arunachalam]

Grateful thanks to Mr.Subbiah Arunachalam.

Open Access-2: "NIH mandates open access to all research it funds"

eMail from Mr Subbiah Arunachalam dated August 14, 2008. This may be of great interest to all Open Access enthusiasts, particularly in the S&T field:

Friends:

NIH has mandated open access to all research it funds. Now a taskforce appointed by NSF has recommended open access to be followed consistently by all US government agencies. Six of the seven research councils in the UK have mandated open access. It is high time that Indian funding agencies mandate open access to all research supported by them. Equally imporant is that the Indian funding agencies should stop Indian researchers giving away all rights to the published papers (resulting from work supported by the Indian taxpayers) to journal publishers. In the US research papers written by scientists working in US government laboratories are UNCOPYRIGHTABLE. We should follow this example in India.

I am recommending mandating open access not because the American and British funding agecies have adopted it. But because of the tremendous benefits OA can bring.

Best wishes.
Subbiah Arunachalam

Grateful thanks to Mr.Subbiah Arunachalam.

Open Access-1: A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access by Peter Suber

Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder.

In most fields, scholarly journals do not pay authors, who can therefore consent to OA without losing revenue. In this respect scholars and scientists are very differently situated from most musicians and movie-makers, and controversies about OA to music and movies do not carry over to research literature.

OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance. Just as authors of journal articles donate their labor, so do most journal editors and referees participating in peer review. The campaign for OA focuses on (1) royalty-free literature, i.e. that which authors give to the world without expectation of payment, or (2) literature reporting publicly-funded research. Peer-reviewed journal articles in nearly every field and every country have the first property. Articles in the sciences tend to have both properties. –>

OA literature is not free to produce, even if it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature. The question is not whether scholarly literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than by charging readers and creating access barriers. Business models for paying the bills depend on how OA is delivered.

There are two primary vehicles for delivering OA to research articles: OA journals and OA archives or repositories.

OA archives or repositories do not perform peer review, but simply make their contents freely available to the world. They may contain unrefereed preprints, refereed postprints, or both. Archives may belong to institutions, such as universities and laboratories, or disciplines, such as physics and economics. Authors may archive their preprints without anyone else’s permission, and a majority of journals already permit authors to archive their postprints. When archives comply with the metadata harvesting protocol of the Open Archives Initiative, then they are interoperable and users can find their contents without knowing which archives exist, where they are located, or what they contain. There is now open-source software for building and maintaining OAI-compliant archives and worldwide momentum for using it. The costs of an archive are negligible: some server space and a fraction of the time of a technician.

OA journals perform peer review and then make the approved contents freely available to the world. Their expenses consist of peer review, manuscript preparation, and server space. OA journals pay their bills very much the way broadcast television and radio stations do: those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the production costs upfront so that access can be free of charge for everyone with the right equipment. Sometimes this means that journals have a subsidy from the hosting university or professional society. Sometimes it means that journals charge a processing fee on accepted articles, to be paid by the author or the author’s sponsor (employer, funding agency). OA journals that charge processing fees usually waive them in cases of economic hardship. OA journals with institutional subsidies tend to charge no processing fees. OA journals can get by on lower subsidies or fees if they have income from other publications, advertising, priced add-ons, or auxiliary services. Some institutions and consortia arrange fee discounts. Some OA publishers waive the fee for all researchers affiliated with institutions that have purchased an annual membership. There’s a lot of room for creativity in finding ways to pay the costs of a peer-reviewed OA journal, and we’re far from having exhausted our cleverness and imagination.

For a longer introduction, with live links for further reading, see my Open Access Overview,

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm.

This is an open-access document.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

Peter Suber Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College Senior Researcher, SPARC peters@earlham.edu

Article on “Open Access” from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access

Grateful thanks to Peter Suber and Wikipedia.