Opening scientific communication

Statement with regard to the NIH request to comment on the design of their Policy with regard to open-access.

I. General
The term ‘policy’ is reserved for a longterm policy, to be valid for many years to come, in contrast to a business model, which has to comply with the existing policy, and is reflecting the actual strategy to earn money.

We praise NIH for the strategy to ask external experts before fixing its long term policy with regard to scientific document access.

We discuss here the Policy of NIH, necessary with regard to handling scientific documents of external authors in the general field of health sciences. NIH intends to store and post scientific documents on the Web.

To design a policy means to envisage the far away future scenario with regard to Scientific Information Management. This needs a minor percentage of finances of the total costs of science and academic education. Thus, historically, scientists have at each time exploited fully all technical possible services, which could make research and education more effective, or asked the market for it. Read the rest of this entry »

In two previous posts, Losing Our Mind and Recovering Our Mind , I tried to explain why constitution and technical preservation of OA knowledge volume should be completed by an equally important task of its proper, context-driven structural composition.

Now let me emphasize major points of the idea of such intelligent OA in a hopefully more concise and clear way. For a necessary minimum, one can omit explanations after items in bold. Read the rest of this entry »

On February 2008, a petition was launched about evaluation of research written in French. It is intended to the public national agency for the evaluation of research (AERES).
The problem is that the scientists who had taken this initiative have chosen to use the web site and means of communication of a private publisher, namely Hermes-Lavoisier, for the petition instead of using their own scientific networks.
Hermes who is against any kind of open access (blue, yellow, green) reacted abruptly against this comment (see it and the answer on the american-scientist-open-access-forum).

The question of the evaluation of research undertaken in other languages than English may be the concern of several countries in Europe (one example among others is the significant proportion of papers written in German in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences in Germany).

It is closely intertwined with open access issues. Read the rest of this entry »

Inspired by Franck Laloë’s inquiry into actual reliability of the current knowledge preservation tools ( Figaro article , in French), I have expressed, in the previous post on this blog, a related concern about sensible, context-rich information preservation for present and future generations, in connection with practical use of the growing volume of scientific publications in Open Access on-line archives. While Stevan Harnad emphasises, in his e-mail response to my post, the difference between the digital preservation (DP) of the original copy of a published material and open access (OA) to additional, “redundant” copies of the same material placed by the author in OA repositories, my concern about immediate, efficient access to the context-rich scientific information of interest, i.e. to scientific research results/ideas, has much to do just with the final purpose of OA initiative, including DP issues only as a necessary but finally less “burning” component. Read the rest of this entry »

Philippe Aigrain has recently attracted our attention to interesting ideas of Franck Laloë about the necessity (and current lack) of reliable, long-term digital memory facilities ( Figaro article , in French). Indeed, there seems to be complete chaos around those issues of “long-term digital memory of humanity” that certainly have a direct relation to OA problems, especially now that (OA) information stocks seem to grow essentially. Many things are certainly preserved, but too often with an arbitrary relation between information importance and conservation. Franck Laloë discusses apparently the possibility of “very reliable” conservation of any information, which may evoke a mystical notion of Akashic records. It’s true that today’s successes of information technology (especially its hardware part) imply a possibility of “eternal”, or at least “practically eternal”, conservation of all kind of information in digital form, so that nothing can ever be lost. [For example, this kind of attitude is behind the Gmail facilities trying to assert that at least everything you ever put or read in your e-mail exchange will be preserved, forever and for free! - They’re great, Google, aren’t they?] Read the rest of this entry »

“An Open Access Manifesto”, written and directed by Romel Espinel and Josh Hadro, Pratt Institute wins one of the first annual SPARKY awards from SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (there is also a SPARC Europe). Here is the movie (source at http://blip.tv/file/517300).

Click To Play

The grand winner, Share (a movie about the power of sharing) fully deserves its designation. Watch it and share it at http://blip.tv/file/488550.

[English version below]

L’Europe investit des millions d’euros provenant des contribuables européens pour financer la recherche européenne. Le but est de générer les rendements maximaux pour ces contribuables européens en termes de l’utilisation et de l’application des résultats de ces recherches pour contribuer au progrès scientifique ainsi qu’au progrès de la R & D et ses applications industrielles.

C’est ce qu’on appelle « l’impact scientifique » . La citation est une des mesures les plus indicatives de l’impact scientifique: plus une recherche est utilisée, plus elle génère de nouvelles recherches, plus elle est citée.

Pour pouvoir être utilisée et appliquée, une découverte doit être accessible. Les recherches sont publiées dans les revues avec comité de lecture, mais les abonnements ne maximisent pas l’accès à ces résultats, car toutes les institutions de recherche ne sont pas en mesure de s’abonner à toutes les revues. Elles ne peuvent s’offrir l’accès qu’à une faible fraction des revues. De l’impact scientifique est donc inutilement sacrifié. Combien d’impact scientifique se perd-t-il ainsi? Read the rest of this entry »

On Sun, 23 Dec 2007, [anonymous] wrote:

Dear Father Christmas,
   My wish goes towards allowing any researcher free access to current scientific information — and when I say free, I mean without any constraint of fees, subscription, copyright. And what would be better than having open archives/repositories?
   But I know this is pure utopia.
   Even you, Father Xmas, are you on Open Access?
   Since you are a creation of human intellect, someone must have an exclusive copyright on you, so is it even allowed to quote you without permission?
   How to get out of this dilemma? Recently, in France and Germany, lawmakers wrote a new law, punishing anybody intending to infringe copyright with enormous fines…
   My fellow European scientists are afraid and no longer dare to express their ideas. Father Xmas, give us some suggestions to be discussed in our Forum, but do not tell anybody else: we don’t want to be prosecuted…

REPLY FROM FATHER XMAS, NORTH POLE:

Dear little boys and girls everywhere who yearn for Open Access:

Yes, there is a way that you can have the Open Access you say you so fervently desire. But Father Christmas cannot give it to you, any more than Father Christmas can give you big muscles, if that is what you yearn for. All Father Christmas can do is tell you how you yourselves can build the big muscles you desire (by exercising daily with increasing weights). And for Open Access it is exactly the same: It depends entirely on you, dear children, each and every one of you.

Nor can you build big muscles from one day to the other. If you try to lift too heavy a weight, too early, you only cause yourself muscle strain. So don’t insist on too much overnight. Start with one simple fact that is easy to assimilate:

There is nothing whatsoever — nothing physical, nothing legal — that prevents you from depositing your own final, peer-reviewed drafts (postprints) of every single one of your own current research journal articles in an OAI-compliant Institutional Repository, right now: Nothing. Not copyright law. Not technology. Not cost. Not expertise. No point in writing to Father Christmas to wish for that, because it is already entirely in your own hands:

Your institution has no Institutional Repository yet? Then, for the time being, deposit your postprints in a central repository, like CogPrints or Depot or Arxiv or HAL or PubMed Central. But do the deposit now.

The journal in which it is published does not yet endorse immediate OA self-archiving? Then, for the time being, set access to the deposit as Closed Access rather than Open Access for as long as the journal embargoes access. But do the deposit now.

That’s all. If all the little boys and girls did that before Christmas this year, on Christmas day all the current research worldwide would be visible worldwide, 62% of it already Open Access (because 62% of journals already endorse immediate OA self-archiving).

For the remaining 38% deposited in Closed Access, the metadata (author, title, journalname, date etc.) would be immediately visible worldwide, so any user who wanted to access the full-text could immediately email the author to request an eprint by email. That is not immediate 100% OA, but it is almost-immediate, almost-OA. Many Repositories already have a button whereby eprints can be requested and emailed semi-automatically: one keystroke from the requester, one keystroke from the author.

If all of you deposited all your current postprints before Christmas, boys and girls, all Repositories would soon have that button. And the growth of the OA muscles in this way, worldwide, keystroke by keystroke, would soon hasten the natural and well-deserved death of the remaining publisher-embargoes. (Yes, dear children, it is within the spirit of Christmas to speak about the “death” of evil things, such as plagues, hunger, war, injustice, and research access embargoes!)

So, dear little boys and girls, there are some things for which wishing or writing a letter to Santa Claus is not quite enough. Time to start exercising your little fingers. And if you find doing the keystrokes for depositing all your current articles before Christmas too low an ergonomic priority as long as it remains voluntary — first, congratulations for having published so much at such a young age!

And second, instead of just writing to St. Nick, I suggest writing to the Principal, Rector, Vice-Chancellor or Provost of your school, to make known to them your fervent desire for OA, pointing out also your faintness of will about doing the keystrokes voluntarily as long as you feel you would be doing those dactylographics alone. Father Christmas’s elves understand that as little researchers, you are already so busy and overloaded that you cannot steal the time to exercise your fingers in this way while your school gives you so much other homework to do if your other school-mates are not required to do it too.

So if you all write to your Principal asking that the school itself should make this digital muscle-building part of its standard athletic curriculum for all its pupils — making the keystrokes mandatory for all of you — then that mandate will ensure OA self-archiving its proper place in your hierarchy of priorities. The rewards will be felt in your year-end marks (if you don’t mind Father Christmas talking about such unpleasant matters at a time we should be thinking of toys rather than toil!), because self-archiving builds the citations as surely as it builds muscles.

So don’t worry about reforming copyright law. Copyright law is just the Cheshire Cat’s grin, suspended in thin air, without you. It will reform itself in due course, if you just do what is already in your own hands (and always has been, ever since the dawn of the online era), right now, on the night before Xmas 2008.

Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving.

“Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?”

Your faithful old

Kris Kringle

This copyright reform concerns OA to german scholarship published before 1995. It is an opportunity to make those works OA, but it requires action before the end of this month. For more information, please see Peter Suber’s weblog and for more details his previous post.

From a press release of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access

Washington, D.C. - October 24, 2007 - The U.S. Senate last night approved the FY2008 Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations Bill (S.1710), including a provision that directs the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to strengthen its Public Access Policy by requiring rather than requesting participation by researchers. The bill will now be reconciled with the House Appropriations Bill, which contains a similar provision, in another step toward support for public access to publicly funded research becoming United States law.

Last night’s Senate action is a milestone victory for public access to taxpayer-funded research, said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a founding member of the ATA). This policy sets the stage for researchers, patients, and the general public to benefit in new and important ways from our collective investment in the critical biomedical research conducted by the NIH.

Under a mandatory policy, NIH-funded researchers will be required to deposit copies of eligible manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online database, PubMed Central. Articles will be made publicly available nolater than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Read the rest of this entry »