University of Amsterdam established an OA publishing fund

U of Amsterdam has an OA publishing fund

In January 2007, the University of Amsterdam launched an Open Access fund to help its faculty pay the publication fees at fee-based OA journals. From the fund page:

Since January 2007, the UvA has a dedicated fund of 150.000 EUR per year for the full financing of open access publishing. Researchers can utilise the OA fund in order to finance OA publication costs until the end of 2009. All applications will be honoured as long as the funds last. NB: these funds are solely earmarked for financing the costs of ‘open access’ publication and not for ‘ordinary’ publication costs.

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provides a complete overview of all ‘open access’ journals, incl. the so-called ‘hybrid’ journals by Elsevier, Springer, Blackwell, etcetera. for which the funds may also be used.

The UvA is a member of the Public Library of Science (PLOS) and BioMed Central, entitling us to a discount when publishing in these publisher’s journals....

Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer in the U of Amsterdam library tells me that the fund will be evaluated after three years and has received an average of two applications per week.

Comment. Kudos to Amsterdam. When the U of Nottingham announced its OA fund earlier this month, I wondered whether there were others. I thank Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer for letting me know about the Amsterdam fund and I repeat my call for others. We'll see many more of these as time goes on, but I want to identify the early leaders.

Source: Peter Suber OA News Blog (26 June 2007) [FullText]

Peter Suber Comments on Howard Hughes Medical Institute Mandate for Open Access by Its Grantees

HHMI is finally mandating that its grantees provide OA to their published articles based on HHMI-funded research within six months of publication. We knew last October that it was planning to adopt a mandate, but now it's a reality. Moreover, HHMI is taking the same hard line that the Wellcome Trust has taken: if a grantee's intended publisher will not allow OA on the funder's terms, then the grantee must look for another publisher. This is all to the good. Funders should mandate OA to the research they fund, and they should take advantage of the fact that they are upstream from publishers. They should require grantee compliance, not depend on publisher permission.

But unfortunately, HHMI is continuing its practice of paying publishers for green OA. I criticized this practice in SOAN for April 2007 and I stand by that criticism. HHMI should not have struck a pay-for-green deal with Elsevier and should not be striking a similar deal with Wiley. HHMI hasn't announced how much it's paying Wiley, and it's possible that the Wiley fees are lower than the Elsevier fees. But it's possible that they're just as high: $1,000 - $1,500. We do know that its Wiley fees will not buy OA to the published edition, but only OA to the unedited version of the author's peer-reviewed manuscript. HHMI hasn't said whether its Wiley fees will buy unembargoed OA or OA with a CC license. The Wellcome Trust's fees to Elsevier buy three things of value --immediate OA, OA to the published edition, and OA with a CC license-- while HHMI's fees to Elsevier buy none of these things. If HHMI gets all three of these valuable things for its Wiley fees, then it's basically paying for gold OA and no one can object to fees that are high enough to cover the publisher's expenses. But paying for green OA, when the publisher's expenses are covered by subscription revenue, is wrong and unnecessary even if the fees are low. For details, see my April article.

Source: Peter Suber. HHMI mandates OA but pays publishers to allow it. Open Access News Blog (26 June 2007) [FullText and update]

Milestone for PubMed Central: one million-article mark reached

As Peter Suber reports at his OA News Blog (22 June 2007), PMC now hosts more than 1,000,000 free online full-text research articles. From yesterday's press release:

PubMed Central (PMC), NLM's free digital archive of full-text journal articles, reached the one million-article mark the week of June 18. The millionth article reportedly came from the American Journal of Pathology. Now in its seventh year, PMC is enhanced each week with articles from over 350 important life sciences journals whose publishers have agreed to deposit current issues. All of the content submitted to PMC is converted to a normalized electronic format for long-term storage and display on the web.

Many of the participating publishers have also benefited from the PMC Back Issue Digitization Project, where NLM scans older issues from cover to cover, starting with volume 1, and creates PubMed citations for articles that are not in PubMed. Jointly sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK, the NLM scanning project has collected and collated over 5 million pages of material. As of June 2007, these scanned articles accounted for 675,000 of the million articles in PMC....

Nature Precedings is Live

Timo Hannay, Nature Precedings is live, Nascent, June 18, 2007. Hannay is Nature's Director of Web Publishing. Excerpt:

"...One thing that we've already added since [the launch] is a 'bridge' from our journal manuscript submission system to Nature Precedings. This allows NPG authors to submit their manuscripts for immediate pre-publication in Nature Precedings while they are being considered by the relevant journal. It's heartening to see people already beginning to use this (though as I write the system is misbehaving — please hang on in there while we get it fixed)...

There have been some unfounded initial concerns that Nature will have some special rights to the content, or that we'll be charging for some aspect of the service. On the contrary, all the content is released under the Creative Commons Attribution License and the service is free to authors and readers. In fact we're working with some of our partners to mirror the content to ensure it's long-term free availability (whatever might happen to Nature Publishing Group)..."

Librarianship and Open Access

Heather Morrison, Candice Dahl, and Jennifer Richard, Librarianship and the Open Access Journal : State of the Union, a slide presentation at the Canadian Library Association Conference 2007 (St. John's, May 23-26, 2007), thanks to Prof. Suber OA News blog.

Feasibility of Developing a Usage Factor for STM Journals

More on the feasibility of a Usage Factor

The UKSG has released its final report on the feasibility of developing a Usage Factor for journals and journal articles. From the text (dated May 2007 but announced and released June 15, 2007):

...Based on [surveys and interviews] it appears that it would not only be feasible to develop a meaningful journal Usage Factor, but that there is broad support for its implementation. Detailed conclusions and recommendations are provided in Section 4 of this report. Principal among these are: 1. the COUNTER usage statistics are not yet seen as a solid enough foundation on which to build a new global measure such as Usage Factor, but confidence in them is growing and they are seen as the only viable basis for UF; 2. the majority of publishers are supportive of the UF concept, appear to be willing, in principle to participate in the calculation and publication of UFs, and are prepared to see their journals ranked according to UF; 3. there is a diversity of opinion on the way in which UF should be calculated... 4. the great majority of authors in all fields of academic research would welcome a new, usage-based measure of the value of journals; 5. UF, were it available, would be a highly ranked factor by librarians, not only in the evaluation of journals for potential purchase, but also in the evaluation of journals for retention or cancellation; 6. publishers are, on the whole, unwilling to provide their usage data to a third party for consolidation and for calculation of UF. The majority appear to be willing to calculate UFs for their own journals and to have this process audited. This is generally perceived as a natural extension of the work already being done for COUNTER. While it may have implications for systems, these are not seen as being problematic...; 7. there are several structural problems with online usage data that would have to be addressed for UFs to be credible. Notable among these is the perception that online usage data is much more easily manipulated than is citation data; 8. should UKSG wish to take this project further there is a strong likelihood that other agencies would be interested in contributing financial support

From elsewhere in the body of the report:

...6 of the 7 authors are interested in knowing how frequently their articles are accessed online. One author currently monitors the Web of Science to access how frequently his articles are being cited; he would find the usage equivalent of this very valuable. Other authors mentioned that they are also very interested in where and by whom whom their articles are being used. The majority of the authors were not familiar with COUNTER....

[In response to the question whether usage data should cover articles from the previous 2 years, the previous 5 years, or some other period, one interview subject suggested:] Go for 2 years. UF should be more immediate than IF. Given the trend towards free availability of research articles after a period, paid access is going to be increasingly regarded as being for a shorter period after publication. Librarians will want metrics to cover the period for which they are paying. Five years would be too long....

[In response to a question about benefits for participating publishers, one suggested:] By participating in this process, publishers will influence it, helping to develop useful measures in which they can have confidence. Currently journal publishers are under a lot of pressure to demonstrate the value they provide. The challenge from open access has further stimulated this...
[T]he number of sites on which the full text of a particular article will be available is likely to grow in the future, as a result of an increase in open access publishing and institutional repositories. This will increase the difficulty in obtaining a 100% global figure for journal usage. This need not be an insurmountable obstacle to the calculation of comparable UFs, but it is a potential problem...

Librarians indicated that, if UF were available, it would become the second most important factor ( after ‘feedback from library users’) in decisions in the purchase of new journals, while it would be the third most important factor ( after ‘feedback from library users’ and ‘usage’) in retention/cancellation decisions...

Source: P Suber News Blog [16 June 2007) [FullText]

Nature Launches An Open Access Resource

Nature has launched Scintilla. From its about page:

Scintilla collects data from hundreds of news outlets, scientific blogs, journals and databases and then makes it easy for you to organise, share and discover exactly the type of information that you're interested in.
For example, you can keep track of life science podcasts, or the latest papers on schizophrenia, DNA methylation or immunology. Interested in physics blogs? Scintilla can help.

You can rate items and recommend them to any colleagues who've also signed up to the site. You can also create or join groups centered around particular areas of interest (like bioinformatics or open science).

A short tutorial is available if you'd like a little help with getting started...

Source: OA News Blog

ritish Medical Journal Publishing Director Talks on Open Access

Siân Harris, Physicians and researchers have different needs, Research Information, June/July 2007. An interview with Alex Williamson, publishing director at the BMJ Group. Excerpt by Open Access News blog:

Do clinicians want open access?

There is a tendency to generalise with open access. We tend to be lumped into the category of biomedical research but doctors don’t treat rats. Biomedical research tends to be too far removed from the day-to-day activities in a hospital to be of practical interest to many practicing clinicians.

What’s more, clinical journals aren’t quite like pure science research publications, where the readers and authors are the same group of people. Journals like ours do appeal to researchers but, in the main, they are read by practicing clinicians, many of whom will never write a journal paper. And, if they do, they are often simply writing up work that they think will interest colleagues, without receiving any funding to do so.

We have a hybrid open-access model, which started in September last year. Uptake has been around two per cent of authors. I would be surprised if we moved to the open-access model. I think we’ll stay with the hybrid model. All our material is free after 12 months anyway...