| June –July 2005 |
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IN THIS ISSUE: |
| 1. U.S. Senate Supports NIH Public Access Policy & Requests Data |
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One month after the U.S. House of Representatives endorsed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access policy and called for measures to judge its effectiveness, the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee followed suit, requesting a prompt and thorough report evaluating the success of the policy. The Senate report accompanying the Fiscal Year 2006 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations bill requests a report from NIH by February 2006 that will include data on the total number of applicable works submitted since the May 2 implementation date, as well as the embargo period selected by each submitting author. Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC, the founding organizational member of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), noted that ATA members are committed to continuing to work to ensure the implementation of a meaningful public access policy at NIH, and are encouraged by this strong signal of support from Congress. ATA believes that the NIH policy's success will be measured by the number of articles deposited in PubMed Central and made accessible to the public soon after publication, and has consistently asked that the NIH publicly post such statistics to help gauge the policy’s effectiveness. Last month, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni issued a positive response [PDF] to ATA’s request to post these critical submission data on the NIH public access website. Data released by the NIH at a recent meeting of the NIH Public Access Working Group indicate that the number of submissions since the policy's implementation is very low. Based on annual data, NIH funding is responsible for about 65,000 scholarly articles per year. Therefore, NIH grantees could have chosen to place approximately 11,000 articles on PubMed Central—making this taxpayer-funded research available free to the public. However, statistics provided by NIH show that only three percent of this number, or 340 articles accepted for publication, have been submitted by NIH grantees. |
| 2. Partner News |
SPARC members are encouraged to apply their purchase commitment to support these worthwhile publications.
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NIH’s PubChem Gains in U.S. Senate As reported in the last issue of SPARC E-News, the American Chemical Society (ACS) has asked that NIH significantly alter its PubChem online, openly accessible database, claiming that it unfairly competes with Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), an ACS service. The Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), of which SPARC is the founding member, opposed the ACS position and worked to garner support for the continued operation and full functionality of PubChem. The U.S. House and Senate reports accompanying the FY'06 Committee on Appropriations, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies Appropriations bills provide guidance to NIH related to PubChem and its relationship with the private sector. The report language as approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee differs from the House report language with more support for PubChem. The Senate report calls upon NIH to “work with the private sector chemical information providers, with the primary goal of maximizing progress in science while avoiding unnecessary duplication and competition with private sector databases.” The Senate focus on advancing science is notable. A conference to resolve differences between the House and Senate bills is expected in the Fall. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
New Public Library of Science Open Access Journal PLoS has announced the debut of its newest open access journal, PLoS Computational Biology which is a peer-reviewed journal reporting major biological advances achieved through computation. The journal publishes research from one of the most rapidly growing and exciting areas of scientific inquiry. As a collaboration between a scholarly society, the International Society for Computational Biology, and an open access publisher, the journal also provides further momentum to the shift towards unrestricted access and use of all scientific and medical literature. The editor in chief is Dr. Philip E. Bourne, a professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of California San Diego, co-director of the Protein Data Bank and senior advisor to the Life Sciences at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. In the inaugural issue, founding editor Bourne and co-founding editors Steven E. Brenner and Michael B. Eisen explain the vision behind PLoS Computational Biology: What motivates us to start a new journal at this time? Computation, driven in part by the influx of large amounts of data at all biological scales, has become a central feature of research and discovery in the life sciences...Open access—free availability and unrestricted use—to all articles published in the journal is central to the mission of PLoS Computational Biology, and distinguishes this new journal from most scientific journals which still needlessly restrict access to their contents. Open access revolutionizes the way we use research literature, and takes much inspiration from the field of computational biology itself. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Cornell Introduces New Electronic Resources Cornell University Library has announced two new electronic resources now published online using the Digital Publishing System (DPubS) software, an open source publication delivery and management system Cornell developed collaboratively with Pennsylvania State University Libraries. The electronic resources are:
These new resources result from an initiative to generalize the DPubS software, supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. |
U.K. Research Group Rules on Government-Funded Research Access The eight U.K. Research Councils, under the umbrella of Research Councils U.K. (RCUK), have proposed to make it mandatory for research papers arising from Council-funded work to be deposited in openly available repositories at the earliest opportunity. RCUK’s position would apply to new grants awarded after October 1, 2005. SPARC Europe calls for wide support for the proposed policy. David Prosser, director, commented that “We are currently in the position where U.K. researchers cannot get easy access to all the work of their peers, despite the vast majority of it being published online. So, while the U.K. Government has greatly increased research spending…the return on this investment is not maximized. If implemented, the RCUK policy would rectify this.” RCUK spent over a year consulting universities, academic libraries, researchers, and publishers to develop a fair, well-balanced policy that covers research outputs in the form of journal articles or conference proceedings. SPARC Europe encourages submission of favorable comments that support the draft during the public comment period set to end August 31st. To further improve access to publicly funded research, the Research Councils will also make funds available for researchers to pay open access journal publication fees. In total, RCUK proposes:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Canadian Library Association’s OA Resolution The Canadian Library Association (CLA) has endorsed a resolution on open access which encourages members to implement open access “as expeditiously as possible.”
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By Paul Peters While advocates of Open Access publishing have tended to focus on the social benefits of this new publishing model, there are a number of economic advantages inherent in open access publishing that are equally compelling. Speaking as a commercial publisher who has recently embraced open access, I can honestly say that it is the most promising business model available to small and mid-sized publishers today. In the current academic publishing market there are a number of factors that make it very difficult for smaller publishers to compete with the major publishing houses like the Springer Group and Elsevier. First, the market is highly insulated from economic competition due to the way that the subscription system is structured. Second, as libraries are forced to cut their serials spending, smaller publishers who are not protected by “Big Deal” schemes are the first to suffer. Finally, it is very difficult for smaller publishers to successfully launch new journals, since the barrier to entry in the toll-access system is so high. Under the current toll-access business model, authors choose where to publish their work largely unaware of the costs associated with a particular journal. This is because libraries, not researchers, traditionally pay the costs of publishing through subscription fees. Therefore when authors decide where to publish, they mainly consider the prestige, publishing quality, and production speed of a journal, ignoring price considerations. In addition, libraries have a limited ability to choose which journals they wish to buy, since large commercial publishers often bundle their journals (“the Big Deal”). These bundles, which account for a large part of many libraries’ serials budgets, offer discounted prices, but libraries are not free to choose which titles they purchase. In this system, it is the size, not the efficiency, of a publisher that determines their ability to compete in the marketplace. Over the past few years, even the wealthiest libraries have been forced to cancel subscriptions due to a widening gap between library budgets and journal prices. While “Big Deal” packages protect the major publishing houses from these cancellations, small and mid-sized publishers have been struggling to maintain subscriptions. Recent mergers between several large publishers will only make the situation worse. Therefore, small and mid-sized publishers need to find new sources of revenue and new business models that better enable them to compete. The idea behind open access is remarkably simple. Researchers, who often spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in research costs in order to produce a single article, will be asked to pay for the costs of publishing. In return, the publishers make their articles freely available online. Open access journals undergo the same peer-review and quality control as toll-access journals, which is necessary to maintain the academic prestige of a scientific publication. Authors benefit by increasing the visibility of their work, and readers benefit by having free access to scientific literature without any subscription barriers. In an open access publishing model, authors will choose where to publish by weighing the prestige, publishing quality and production speed of a particular journal against the costs associated with that journal. In addition to increasing competition in the STM publishing market, open access will also help to reduce the enormously high barrier to entry that the toll-access model imposes on smaller publishers. If one of the larger publishing houses decides to launch a new journal, they can include it as part of their “Big Deal” package and it will immediately be distributed to hundreds of libraries. However, a small publisher who wishes to launch a new journal must convince libraries to subscribe, which is very difficult if the journal is still in its first few years. In addition, since the journal may only have a few subscribers during the early years, it will have a very limited readership, which will make it difficult to attract high quality papers. Launching new journals can easily become a vicious circle for smaller publishers: nobody wants to publish their best work in a journal without many subscribers, but nobody wants to subscribe to a journal that doesn’t receive high-quality submissions. Since open access journals do not limit their readership to a small group of subscribers, they can attract both authors and readers immediately. In order to illustrate the benefits of open access, I would like to describe the experience we had with one of our first open access journals, the EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking. In mid-2003, we launched this journal with the support of the European Association for Speech, Signal and Image Processing (EURASIP) and immediately began to receive submissions. By the end of 2004, EURASIP JWCN had already published 33 full-length articles in its first two issues. This year, we expect that the journal will publish its 100th article, which is quite a success for a two-year-old journal. Moreover, according to the ISI databases, EURASIP JWCN has already begun to receive citations from other prominent publications. At the moment, Open Access may not be economically viable in every discipline, but in many well-funded fields it can be a very successful publishing model. The accomplishments of the Public Library of Science and BioMed Central have shown that open access can work in the life sciences, but I believe that this is only the beginning. By the end of 2005, we at Hindawi Publishing expect to have launched open access journals in numerous fields including electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, materials science, biotechnology, and the geosciences. While we expect to see some bumps along the way, I truly believe that we can make open access succeed in these communities.
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IFLA Satellite meeting No 17. Open access: the option for the future? Rikshospitalet University Hospital Organized by the IFLA sections: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication, OAI4 CERN, Geneva, Switzerland The fourth workshop in the series, which began life as the Open Archives Initiative Workshop in 2001, is a forum for technical issues associated with scholarly communication.
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The list that follows is a sampling of recent articles on open access, taxpayer access, and/or SPARC. Drake, Miriam A. A Cauldron Bubbles: PubChem and the American Chemical Society. Information Today Newsbreak, June 6, 2005. Kaiser, Jocelyn. House Approves 0.5% Raise for NIH. Science Online, June 10, 2005. Kestenbaum, David. Chemical Society: NIH Database Hurts Business. NPR All Things Considered: Health & Science, June 12, 2005. Marshall, Eliot. Britain’s Research Agencies Endorse Public Access. Science, July 8, 2005. Morrissey,Susan R. NIH and ACS Spar Over PubChem: Agency's new chemical database draws concern from ACS for similarities to CAS Registry. Chemical and Engineering News, June 13, 2005. Morrissey,Susan R. House May Ask NIH To Limit PubChem. Chemical and Engineering News, June 20, 2005. Pickering, Bobby. US Congress fails to back ACS. Information World Review, June 16, 2005. Sternstein, Aliya. Publishers make appeal to lawmakers in NIH dispute. Federal Computer Week, June 13, 2005. Wills, Eric. American Chemical Society Lobbies Against a Free NIH Database That It Sees as a Competitor. Chronicle of Higher Education, June 10, 2005. |
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Send corrections, comments and responses to Alison Buckholtz. Want to receive SPARC E-News in your email inbox? Fill out and submit the online form for a complementary subscription. © SPARC 2005: |
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updated: August 5, 2005 |