In this issue:

1. SPARC News

2. Partner News
3. Industry Roundup
4. Create Change: Interview with Linda Hutcheon

5. Upcoming Workshops
6. Articles of Interest

 

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Editor's Note:  The article "PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access" in the January 25 issue of Nature details the Association of American Publishers' (AAP) hiring of a public relations firm known for its aggressive "marketplace defense" tactics to counter the growing movement for public access to scientific research.  According to Nature, the AAP's public relations specialist advised AAP to focus on a "media messaging" strategy, which includes making claims such as "public access equals government censorship."  The article has generated a firestorm of controversy and extensive further coverage in the Washington Post, Scientific American, Salon.com, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and on a wide variety of blogs.  (See "Articles of Interest" below for a complete bibliography.)   

 

1. SPARC News

 

SPARC Expands with Japanese Membership, Increase in North American Libraries

SPARC's principles are catching on around the world, most recently in Japan - where SPARC Japan launched in December with 600 members. SPARC Japan is a collaboration of Japanese academic institutions and scholarly societies working to promote and make widely available the work of Japanese researchers.  SPARC Japan (http://www.nii.ac.jp/sparc/) is an initiative of the Tokyo-based National Institute of Informatics, a national research institute, and is supported by more than 600 university libraries affiliated with library associations. These libraries bring SPARC's membership around the world to over 800.  For information on SPARC Japan's innovative programs and its extensive roster of publishing partners, please see http://www.arl.org/sparc/announce/06-1218.html.

 

This launch comes on the heels of a 10% growth in SPARC's North American membership during the past 18 months.  For information on SPARC membership or to view the complete roster, please see http://www.arl.org/sparc/org/members.html.

SPARC Innovator: OSI's Melissa Hagemann

SPARC has selected Melissa Hagemann, the Program Manager of the Open Access Initiative at the Open Society Institute (OSI), as the newest SPARC Innovator.  Hagemann was chosen in recognition of her seminal role in launching the Open Access movement with her OSI colleagues and the new possibilities that now exist for scholars, institutions, and the public as a result. To read the profile of Hagemann, or for more information about the SPARC Innovator program, please see http://www.arl.org/sparc/innovator/.

 

SPARC-ACRL Forum at ALA Receives Superior Reviews

 

The SPARC/ACRL Forum on the impact of emerging federal research access policies on libraries, attended by over 300 people at the recent ALA meeting, stimulated two days' worth of discussion among SPARC and ACRL members who gave the program superior reviews.  Those who missed the Forum can still benefit from the speakers' comments and the lively question-and-answer session that followed by listening to the SPARC Podcast, which will go online in February.  

SPARC on Public Access in Australia

 

SPARC has made public its comments on access to peer-reviewed papers and associated data in Australia.  Input was solicited for the Productivity Commission's November 2006 draft report on "Public Support for Science and Innovation."  To read SPARC's letter, please see http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/SPARCcomment-Australia.pdf.

  

Society Renews Call for Public Access

The National Society of Consulting Soil Scientists, which represents 156 private soil consulting firms in the U.S., has declared its support for the Federal Research Public Access Act. The society is the first to publicly announce its support for the bill, which is backed by SPARC and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. For further information, see:  http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/media/Advisory07-0130.html.

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2. Partner News

 

Public Library of Science
http://www.plos.org

The Public Library of Science has launched PLoS ONE, an innovative new publishing platform that challenges the limitations of traditional journal publishing. PLoS ONE is designed to publish primary research from all areas of science, and employs both pre- and post-publication peer review and annotation to maximize the impact of its reports. Although PLoS ONE began accepting manuscript submissions only in August, it already receives in excess of 100 submissions per month and launched with the publication of 100 peer-reviewed research articles. The articles are published under an open access license, free for everyone to read, reuse, and build upon. To read more about PLoS One and its far-reaching impact on scholarly publishing, please see "Is this the end of the scholarly journal?" by Gregory M. Lamb in the January 24, 2007 issue of the Christian Science Monitor (http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0124/p14s02-stss.html).

BioOne
http://www.bioone.org

BioOne has launched its new full-text collection, "BioOne.2." BioOne.2 includes 41 titles from 26 publishers in the fields of organismal and integrative biology, including the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology, the Field Museum and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. BioOne.2 is also home to a number of prestigious international publications including six titles from Japan's UniBio Press. As with BioOne.1, many titles participating in BioOne.2 have not been available online until now. All participating titles will be available in full-text XML, providing for a sophisticated and fully linked online presence. Institutions may subscribe to BioOne.2 either in combination with BioOne.1 (at a discount) or as a separate subscription.

BioMed Central
http://www.biomedcentral.com

BioMed Central has launched BMC Systems Biology, the first open access journal focused solely on the entire emerging subject of systems biology. A peer-reviewed online journal, BMC Systems Biology has published its first articles online at http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcsystbiol. BMC's suite of open access journals now numbers over 170.

California Digital Library/eScholarship
http://www.cdlib.org/programs/escholarship.html

The CDL Publishing Group and the University of California Press are chairing a Task Force on Scholarly Publishing Initiatives aimed at exploring the changing role of university-based publishing in support of emerging academic fields and research agendas. This task force is currently surveying scholarly publishing needs across the UC campuses and within particular points of interdisciplinary convergence, with the goal of proposing new models of academic publishing that better serve university constituencies -- both authors and researchers. Data compiled from this outreach effort will serve as the foundation for future scholarly publishing projects to be developed jointly by the CDL Publishing Group and the University of California Press.

Directory of Open Access Journals
http://www.doaj.org

The Directory of Open Access Journals is now home to 2500 journals, quality-controlled scientific and scholarly electronic journals that are freely available on the web. The goal of the Directory of Open Access Journals is to increase the visibility and accessibility of open access scholarly journals and promote their increased usage and impact. The directory aims to comprehensively cover all open access scholarly journals that use an appropriate quality control system. Journals in all languages and subject areas are included in the DOAJ. The selection criteria have been updated based on feedback from users. (http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=loadTempl&templ=about#criteria).

Scholarly Publishing Office
http://spo.umdl.umich.edu/

The Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library, in collaboration with The University of Michigan Press, has published the first annual Best of Technology Writing 2006 and is open for nominations for The Best of Technology Writing 2007. The essays were selected through an open, online nominating process. The print version is available from retail stores and from the Press directly. The online version is available free of charge at http://www.digitalculture.org. In other Scholarly Publishing Office news, two digital scholarly resources are now online for free to the public:

• A London Provisioner's Chronicle, 1550-1563, by Henry Machyn; edited by Richard W. Bailey.
• The French Revolution at the Grassroots: A Critical Bibliography of Recent Works on Villages, Small Towns and Small Rural Regions During the Revolutionary Period; by Peter Amann.
  

 

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3. Industry Roundup

 

New UC Report on Value-Based Pricing for Journals

 

The University of California libraries have made available a report describing their work on "value-based" prices of scholarly journals.  Authored by a task force of the ten-campus library system's Collection Development Committee, The Promise of Value-based Journal Prices and Negotiation: A UC Report and View Forward is a direct outcome of the UC libraries' collective strategic priority to advance economically balanced and sustainable scholarly communication systems. The report details UC's rationale for value-based journal prices and modeling of prices for scholarly materials that are reasonable, transparent, and based upon the value of the material to the academic mission of the University of California. The report describes a value-based approach that borrows from analysis done by Professors Ted Bergstrom (UC Santa Barbara) and R. Preston McAfee (Caltech) on journal cost-effectiveness (http://www.journalprices.com ). The UC approach also includes suggestions for annual price increases that are tied to production costs; credits for institutionally based contributions to the journal, such as editorial labor; and credits for business transaction efficiencies from consortial purchases.  The Promise of Value-based Journal Prices and Negotiation: A UC Report and View Forward is available at: http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/cdc/valuebasedprices.pdf . 

Information Access Alliance Urges DOJ & FTC to Explore Remedies for Journal Bundling

 

In December 2006, the Information Access Alliance (IAA)--representing ARL, the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, the American Association of Law Libraries, the Medical Library Association, SPARC, and the Special Libraries Association--submitted comments for the ongoing Joint Hearings on Single-Firm Conduct and Antitrust Law being held by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The IAA's actions were prompted by John Wiley and Sons' plans to acquire Blackwell Publishing, a publisher of scientific, technical, and medical (STM) journals, for a price of $1.08 billion. This increase in concentration in an already concentrated market is cause for substantial concern on the part of the library community because the combined company will control more than 1,200 titles, many of them scholarly society journals.  (The IAA letter to the Department of Justice is available at http://informationaccess.org/wiley.blackwell.pdf.)

 

The hearings are exploring this area of law and soliciting input from interested stakeholders. The comments discuss journal bundling and other issues regarding anticompetitive single-firm conduct in the scholarly journal market. In the comments, the IAA urges the DOJ and FTC to review and analyze the problem of journal bundling and to explore the application of appropriate remedies. The comments are now available on the IAA Web site at http://www.informationaccess.org/.  Information on the hearings is available at

http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/public/hearings/single_firm/sfchearing.htm.

 

Petition to EC on Public Access to Research: Over 13,000 Signatures

 

SPARC Europe, JISC and other partners are circulating a petition to the European Commission to support public access to research outputs shortly after their publication. The petition urges the Commission to require that articles arising from EC-related funding be made publicly available in open access archives after a given time embargo period. It also calls on the Commission to explore a European-wide approach to policies and practices surrounding the development of digital repositories as a means of making the fruits of European research more visible, and maximizing the return on public investment in research.

In January 2006 the European Commission published the Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe. The Study resulted from a detailed analysis of the current scholarly journal publication market, together with extensive consultation with researchers, funders, publishers, librarians, and research policymakers The Study noted that "dissemination and access to research results is a pillar in the development of the European Research Area" and its primary recommendation was a call for public accessibility to publicly funded research results. Now, a year after publication of the Study, SPARC Europe, JISC, and their partners are urging the EC to endorse the recommendations in full.  For further information on the petition, and to sign it, please go to: http://www.ec-petition.eu/

 

UK PubMed Central Now Live

 

A UK version of the PubMed Central database, UKPMC, is now online and is freely available at http://ukpmc.ac.uk.  Based the U.S. National Institutes of Health free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov), UKPMC provides a stable, permanent, and free-to-access online digital archive of full-text, peer-reviewed research publications. Launched in December, the UKPMC database already holds over 620,000 full-text articles.

 

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4. Create Change: Interview with Linda Hutcheon

Editor's Note: Linda Hutcheon, a literary theorist and University Professor at the University of Toronto, has contributed her innovative ideas on digital scholarship in the humanities to the Create Change web site.  An excerpt of the interview follows.  The complete text can be found at: http://www.createchange.org/cases/humanities.html.

It's been suggested that the Internet revolution has been slow to arrive in humanities scholarship. Is that true?

I think we are catching on: online journals and other resources, especially databases, have become normal - and important. What's taking longer to catch on is recognizing the legitimacy of new forms of scholarship as well as new forms of publishing. A group recently formed to study 19th century culture - NINES (Network Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) - has established an integrated publishing environment for peer reviewed online work. They are advocates as well as professional facilitators, because they are showing us the rich potential of electronic media and therefore new ways of conceiving of scholarship. I think we will see more of that in the future.

What is the biggest barrier to change?

Time. People need time to learn new ways of doing scholarship.  People are so busy with the day to day that they don't have time to think about this issue. As new opportunities with open access become more available, more groups will get excited. And the younger generations will teach the older ones.

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5. Upcoming Workshops

European Commission Conference: Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area

Brussels, February 15-16, 2007

http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/page_en.cfm?id=3459

OAI5--5th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication
CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, April 18-20, 2007
http://oai5.web.cern.ch/oai5/

ELPUB 2007
Vienna, Austria, June 13-15, 2007
http://www.elpub.net/

First International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference
Vancouver, July 11-13, 2007
http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/493

Berlin 5 Open Access: From Practice to Impact: Consequences on Knowledge Dissemination
Padova, Italy, September 19-21, 2007
http://oa.mpg.de/openaccess-padua/index.html

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6. Articles of Interest

 

Albanese, Andrew.  SPARC at Ten.  January 18, 2007. http://www.libraryjournal.com/clear/CA6408230.html

Biello, David.  Open Access to Science Under Attack.  Scientific American, January 26, 2007. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?

SID=mail&articleID=60AADF2C-E7F2-99DF-383C632C90DD1AA5&chanID=sa001

Brown, Susan. Publishers' Group Reportedly Hires P.R. Firm to Counter Push for Free Access to Research Results.  Chronicle of Higher Education, January 26, 2007. http://chronicle.com/

Butler, Declan.  "Rebels hold their own in journal price war.  Nature, January 25, 2007. http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070122/full/445351a.html

 

Giles, Jim.  PR's 'Pit Bull' Takes on Open Access.  Nature, January 25, 2007. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v445/n7126/full/445347a.html

 

Glenn, David.  "Planned Merger of 2 Big Journal Publishers Worries Many Academic Librarians," Chronicle of Higher Education, December 4, 2007. http://chronicle.com.

Houghton, John and Steele, Colin and Sheehan, Peter. Research communication costs in Australia: Emerging opportunities and benefits. Centre for Strategic Economic
Studies, Victoria University, Melbourne. http://eprints.anu.edu.au/archive/00003519/

Joseph, Heather. Public Access: Bringing It All Back Home.  portal: Libraries and the Academy - Volume 7, Number 1, January 2007. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_academy/v007/7.1joseph.html

Lamb, Gregory M.  Is this the end of scientific journals?  Christian Science Monitor, January 24, 2007. http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0124/p14s02-stss.html

Leonard, Andrew.  Science publishers get stupid.  Salon.com, January 25, 2007. http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/01/25/free_information/index.html

Leonard, Andrew.  The pit bull of public relations reveals all.  Salon.com, January 29, 2007. http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/01/29/dezenhall/.

Sulston, John.  Free market must serve, not restrain, research.  Financial Times, November 30, 2006. http://www.ft.com

Weiss, Rick. Publishing Group Hires 'Pit Bull of PR': Association Turns to Dezenhall to Fight Patient Advocacy.  January 26, 2007.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/25/AR2007012501705.html

© SPARC 2006. SPARC e-News is an open-access publication distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.