Good Intro to Open Access

Christine Hamilton-Pennell, On the Verge of Revolution - Open-access Publishing, Free Pint, July 13, 2006. Excerpt by Open Access News Blog:

Online scholarly publishing is definitely in flux, and it's not yet clear which digital models will survive the shake-out. But one online development arguably holds the greatest potential for revolutionising scholarly publishing: the push for free and open access to scholarship and research.

According to Peter Suber, open access project director at Public Knowledge, a public-interest advocacy group in Washington D.C. focusing on information policy: "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."...

Commercial publishers, as well as professional societies, are concerned about the move toward open-access publishing. They believe it leads to an untenable business model that threatens the viability of niche journals. Nevertheless, they recognise that OA is here to stay, and may even become the dominant scholarly publishing model. They are experimenting with different business models, including online subscriptions offering free access to content after an embargo period (usually two to twelve months)....

Since there are no costs incurred for licensing, rights management or subscription administration, it should theoretically cost less to produce an open-access journal than its traditional counterpart....[S]erious e-journals perform quality checks, and most commentators see no reason why the traditional refereeing system with editorial boards can't be used in the online environment. The quality of content in scholarly journals is more a function of the quality control system in place than the publishing medium....

National legislation has been introduced in the United States that would require every federal agency that sponsors more than $100 million annually in research (a total of 11 agencies) to establish an online repository and make its grantees deposit articles within six months of publication. There is also increasing pressure from outside the U.S., particularly in the European Union, to have mandatory posting of publicly sponsored research in centralised, free online repositories...

Mandating Open Access in the US

Ray, English, Open Access to Federally Funded Research--The Time is Now, Portal, July 2006 (Thanks to John Russell and Peter Suber OA News blogs):

[I]mplementation of a comprehensive U.S. policy would have enormous implications for access to research both in this country and abroad. In addition to its immediate benefit for researchers, success in changing U.S. national policy would substantially strengthen international efforts to establish public access to government-funded research, and it would give a large boost to the worldwide open-access movement.

It is especially encouraging that the effort to provide public access to federally funded research has strong bipartisan support in Congress. The Cornyn-Lieberman and Cures bills are, in each case, sponsored by a conservative Republican and a moderate Democrat. Earlier congressional support for the NIH public access policy spanned the political spectrum. Given such bipartisan support, it is realistic to believe that the NIH policy can soon be strengthened and that the public access provision of the Cures bill and the Cornyn-Lieberman bill can eventually be passed into law.

Blackwell's Critique of Open Access

Andrew Robinson, Open access: the view of a commercial publisher, Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis, 4 (2006) pp. 1450-1453. Robinson is the Director of Medical Publishing at Blackwell Publishing, which publishes JTH. Excerpt by Peter Suber (Open Access News, 15 July 2006):

Believers in open access (OA) argue that the subscription-based journal model is like a clot blocking the free-flow of scientific research to vital research organs and the public, cutting off the supply of ideas and innovations. But believers in traditional journals argue that, with a single cut, there is a real risk that scientific research will leak in an uncontrolled fashion that would be impossible to stem. The end result will be an undifferentiated pool of unreviewed research, which will, because of its lack of structure, not only halt the diffusion of innovation to the same vital research organs, but also challenge the viability of the whole body by affecting other systems, such as peer review and societies like the International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis.
I will argue for a delicately balanced system that allows research that is published in journals to flow to the organs that need it, rapidly and efficiently. But I will also argue for a process of evolution, not revolution, in a spirit of experimentation, to safeguard what works well now, but also to ensure that neither sustainability nor quality is compromised....

Comment by Peter Suber: This is one of the longest anti-OA articles I've seen, perhaps because it compiles just about every tired myth and misunderstanding ever circulated about OA: that OA threatens peer review, that researchers have all the access they need, that lay readers don't need access, that funder OA mandates are primarily intended to serve lay readers, that researchers in developing countries are served as well by HINARI as they would be by OA, that OA journals discriminate against indigent authors, that there is no OA impact advantage, that because OA is not very well-known among reseachers it must not be very desirable, and that the serials pricing crisis is really a problem of library budgets.

A Primer for Israeli Universities: Innovations at the U of California

The University of California is the SPARC Innovator for July 2006. From the SPARC announcement:

The University of California Office of the President (UCOP) launched the UC Office of Scholarly Communication in 2004 to support and coordinate a plethora of diverse, cutting-edge initiatives that help scholars and researchers regain control of their work, while exploring innovative means of scholarly communication. This simple organizational act represented the culmination of work conducted over a ten-year period by UC administrators, faculty, and librarians who took a focused, activist stance to change the status quo. In the late 1990s, for example, UC initiated the California Digital Library and as part of it, the eScholarship repository. Since then it has moved from strength to strength. For example, it has developed groundbreaking contracts with publishers which have helped to curtail hyperinflation in the price of online journal subscriptions; developed guidance for faculty on ways to manage intellectual property and retain copyright; developed, through the academic faculty senate, a series of white papers advocating shifts in scholarly communication; established innovative new scholarly publishing programs and forged an electronic publishing alliance between the CDL and the University of California Press; and created a Scholarly Communication Officers group comprising senior librarians at each of the 10 UC branches to harmonize local and system-wide planning and action. For its extraordinarily effective institution-wide vision and efforts to move scholarly communication forward for the benefit of its faculty, students, and the public, SPARC has named UC a SPARC Innovator...

According to John Ober, Director of Policy, Planning, and Outreach co-director – with Catherine Candee – of UC’s Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC), the [California Digital Library or CDL] “was built from a set of principles that explicitly included the need to influence the marketplace for scholarly content to become more sustainable.”...

UC’s faculty have taken an even stronger position with regard to copyright management. In 2006, the Faculty Senate endorsed a proposal recommending to the President that the University’s copyright policy be amended to enable open access to UC research...

Source: P Suber. Open Access News (17 july 2006) [FullText]

Must Read: Book Chapter "Open Access in the United States". By peter Suber

Suber, Peter (2006) Open Access in the United States, in Jacobs, Neil, Eds. Open Access : Key strategic, technical and economic aspects. Chandos Publishing.

Great must read "survey of the most important, current open-access projects in the United States".

Full Text is freely available as Adobe Acrobat .PDF reprint. Also see other articles in this book.