Publish Open Access

Beall's List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers

2012-01-09T11:59:00.001-08:00

Predatory, open-access publishers are those that unprofessionally exploit the author-pays model of open-access publishing (Gold OA) for their own profit. Typically, these publishers spam professional email lists, broadly soliciting article submissions for the clear purpose of gaining additional income. Operating essentially as vanity presses, these publishers typically have a low article acceptance threshold, with a false-front or non-existent peer review process. Unlike professional publishing operations, whether subscription-based or ethically-sound open access, these predatory publishers add little value to scholarship, pay little attention to digital preservation, and operate using fly-by-night, unsustainable business models.

An asterisk (*) indicates that the publisher is appearing on this list for the first time.

Academic Journals

This bogus, Nigeria-based publisher has been around for years, and continues to increase its journal fleet of over one hundred titles from all areas of study. Seeking legitimacy, it falsely associates itself with authentic organizations and conferences.

Academic Journals, Inc.

One of several Faisalabad, Pakistan-based publishers (likely one outfit with several brands), this publisher claims to be headquartered in New York. Its tag line is "Converting research into knowledge," but it ought to say, "Converting research into cash" (for the publisher).

Academic Research Publishing Agency*

This publisher, caught here in its formative stage, only has two titles. The main page invites proposals for new journal titles. Full of contradictions, this site is confusing. Its content appears to be open access, but it lists a subscription fee of $400 per year. On one of its editorial board pages it says, "Elite panel members have a decision weight equivalent of two referees," so if you know one of these elite members, you're in luck.

ANSINetwork

Another of the Faisalabad, Pakistan-based brands of open-access journals, this one ironically describes itself saying "Asian Network for Scientific Information is a leading scientific publisher and pinior [sic] in electronic publication in Asia." I think they mean "pioneer." This typo is but one example of the errors and unprofessionalism this publisher presents to the world with each page view.

Bentham Open

Among the first, large-scale gold OA publishers, Bentham Open continues to expand its fleet of journals, now numbering over 230. Bentham essentially operates as a scholarly vanity press.

Center for Promoting Ideas*

A new publisher with a ridiculous name, this operation is known to list scholars on its journals' editorial boards without their knowledge or permission.

David Publishing*

Although this publisher purports to be headquartered in Libertyville, Illinois, United States, it actually appears to operate out of China. The home page shows a view of the Libertyville Industrial Park, the supposed home of the operation, as if to prove it operates in the U.S.

Dove Press

This New Zealand-based medical publisher boasts high-quality appearing journals and articles, yet it demands a very high author fee for publishing articles. Its fleet of journals is large, bringing into question how it can properly fulfill its promise to quickly deliver an acceptance decision on submitted articles.

GlobalOpenJournals.org*

Late to the party, this publisher currently has nine titles, but I fully expect it to expand its fleet. The site says that all of its journals will publish their inaugural issues in July, 2011, but as of this writing (late November, 2011) all remain devoid of content.

Insight Knowledge

This publisher purports to be headquartered in the U.K. with offices in North America and Singapore, but it really is a storefront type operation based out of Faisalabad, Pakistan.

Institute of Advanced Scientific Research*

This bogus publisher of 12 journal titles says it's headquartered in Irvine, California. Its fleet of journal titles all begin with "Journal of Advanced Research in ..." The domain name registration does show an Irvine address, but at an apartment. Only a few of the titles have any content, but to view what little content there is, one must register with the site and agree to its terms and conditions, which I refused to do. Is a publication still considered open access when the hosting site requires registration? An organization that self-identifies as an institute when it is really just a money-making scheme is fraudulent.

InTech Open Access Publisher*

The subject of much recent debate, this Croatia-based publisher looks and acts like an innovative, scholarly publisher. However, looking under the clever disguise reveals only a sophisticated vanity press, an enterprise where anybody can, for a price, get their work published in a journal or as a monograph.

International Digital Organization for Scientific Information*

I only recently was alerted to this open-access publisher. Its fleet has 82 journal titles, including -- perhaps appropriately -- the "International Journal of Nuts and Related Sciences." Based apparently in Dubai, the "instructions for authors" page warns, "After Acceptance authors have to pay the processing handling charges," but the charges aren't listed. More information may be available from an unnamed editor at idosi_editor@yahoo.com.

International Research Journals

Another Nigeria-based operation, this publisher is notable (in a negative way) for its interesting journal issue covers (most are created from pirated photographs), and for the Gmail addresses its employees all use. The absurd banner on its main page shows a picture of part of a duckling swimming in a lake.

Internet Scientific Publications

If you love advertising, you'll love this site, for its main purpose is to make money from click-through ads. A one-man operation based out of Texas, its journal titles all begin with the phrase, "The Internet Journal of ..." It claims to be the largest independent, online medical publisher, but that claim conveniently ignores article quality, which is quite low.

Knowledgia Scientific (formerly Knowledgia Review)

Another Pakistan-based publisher (with some possible ties to Malaysia), this firm has around a dozen titles, but some have very little content. Also, some of its journals lack editors and list only a few people on their editorial boards. Currently, this publisher's website claims the firm is waiving all author fees, but I remain suspicious. Are there hidden charges? The lack of content, skipped volume numbers, and the waiving of author fees are indicators of a publisher that is failing.

Libertas Academia

The tag line under the name on this publisher's page is "Freedom to research." It might better say "Freedom to be ripped off." Based in New Zealand, this medical and scientific publisher boasts about the number of page views and downloads the articles in its eighty journals have had. Its author fees are high.

Medwell Journals

Another Pakistan-based outfit, this one makes its 34 journals open access but also offers print subscriptions, if you desire to pay for them. A slick operation with an online manuscript submission system, this publisher has been successful at attracting submissions. It's "contact us" page only yields a form, and no contact or geographical information is given. Always be wary of open-access publishers that give less than full contact information, including location, telephone numbers, email addresses, etc. At the same time, be aware that many publishers misrepresent their true business locations.

OMICS Publishing Group

This publisher's name plays off the terms "genomics" and "proteomics." It hosts about 200 journal titles, many lacking any articles. As a side business, the publisher also organizes and hosts conferences. The contact page lists offices in the United States, Australia, and India. Its pages have Facebook "LIKE" buttons and its home page falsely claims an association with EBSCO Publishing and with other publishers and organizations.

ScienceHuβ *

This new publisher of five journals purports to be from "P.O. Box 3423, CT, 06460, United States of America" and cleverly uses the Greek letter β (beta) to indicate the English letter b in its title. A check of the domain name registration does indicate a Milford, Connecticut address. Still, the unidiomatic use of English throughout the site points to a non-U.S. operation: "Call for the papers," "Instructions for the authors," etc. Many of the papers deal with Nigeria, so it's likely this publisher is yet another Nigeria scam.

Science Publications

This publisher has a fleet of 28 journals, and most of their titles begin with the phrase, "American Journal of ..." Its "contact us" page is merely a web form, and no contact or geographical information is given. The journal titles lead one to believe the publisher is North America-based, but it could be from almost anywhere, and in fact is likely not from North America.

ScienceDomain International*

This publisher's fleet of 18 journals all try to show legitimacy by having titles that begin with "American" or "British" or "International." Any journal that begins with these terms must be respected, right? The "contact us" page is chiefly a web form, but the site does list three offices, one in the U.K., one in the U.S., and one in India. The site uses the "pool reviewers" method of peer review. Although the journals do have nominal editorial boards, there is really just one big editorial board for all the publisher's journals and reviewers are supposedly selected from that big list to review each submission. Looking at individual articles, I notice that the period between submission and acceptance is generally two weeks, an indication of bogus or nonexistent peer review.

Scientific Journals International

This Saint Cloud, Minnesota-based publisher is essentially a one-man operation that employs many non-standard publishing practices. For example, the entire site has an ISSN number, and the large editorial boards are organized not by journal but by broad discipline. Also, individual journals lack editors in chief. It was reported earlier this year that the entire operation is up for sale.

Scientific Research Publishing

This publisher, like the Institute of Advanced Scientific Research, claims to be based in Irvine, California (it lists a PO box number and an email address, but no telephone number). It has over one hundred journal titles, most having started publication in 2009, and has managed to attract numerous article submissions. This high number may be because of the publisher's relatively low author fees: $300 for the first ten pages, and $50 for each additional page, a policy that also encourages shorter papers. The journals each list large editorial boards, with members from all over the world, especially China. Indeed, the pricelist (for those desiring hardcopies of the journals), lists the prices in both U.S. and Chinese currency. This publisher also publishes books and conference proceedings. I found its servers to suffer from a slow response time.

Recommendation: Do not do business with the above publishers, including submitting article manuscripts, serving on editorial boards, buying advertising, etc. There are numerous traditional, legitimate journals that will publish your quality work for free, including many legitimate, open-access publishers.

If you are involved in any form of scholarly evaluation such as, hiring, tenure / promotion review, or grant funding, be skeptical of articles published by any of these publishers listed above. Reading a list of publications or a vita, it is very difficult to distinguish legitimate journals from the illegitimate ones. One of the tricks the sham publishers use is to assign authentic-sounding and appearing titles to their journals. The presence of these bogus publishers has changed the task of scholarly evaluation, which now needs a keener eye to discern articles published in fraudulent journals.

Watchlist: We do not consider the following publishers to be predatory, open-access publishers, but they may show some characteristics of them, and we are closely monitoring them.

Hindawi

Based in Cairo, Egypt, this publisher is now on its own after its collaboration with the publisher Sage ended in 2011. This publisher has way too many journals than can be properly handled by one publisher, I think, yet supporters like ITHAKA boast that the prevailing low wages in Egypt, as well as the country's large college-educated, underemployed workforce, allow the company to hire sufficient staff to get the job done. Still, this publisher continues to release new fleet startups of journals, each group having titles with phrases in common: Advances in ... (31 titles) and Case Reports in ... (32 titles). It appears that Hindawi wants to strategically dominate the open-access market by having the largest open-access journal portfolio.

MedKnow Publications

This publisher was on the main list last year. It is the publisher for many well-respected Indian professional societies and is disseminating abundant, high-quality research. However, its business model is vague and unproven: it provides free HTML versions of articles but charges for the PDF version. Also, it needs to improve its web presence. Many of its journal websites referred to the publisher as a publisher of "Sports, technology, and medicine" (STM) journals, instead of "Science, technology, and medicine," the correct term.

PAGEPress

This Italian publisher has some of the qualities of a legitimate publisher and some of a predatory one. It has about fifty journal titles, some with intriguing names like Wine Studies and Antiqua. On the other hand, visitors to the publisher's website will encounter sloppy housekeeping in the form of dead links, and a prominent link to PayPal on every journal's home page, supposedly for the author fees but giving the publisher's real motive away. The publisher claims its content is "indexed" in SherpaRomeo, but that isn't an indexing service. PAGEPress needs to clean up its act.

Versita Open

Based in Poland (with a contact address in London, U.K.), this publisher claims to be the second-largest open-access publisher in the world, with over 200 open-access journals in its fleet. Versita Open publishes some of its titles on behalf of learned societies in Central and Western Europe. The frightening thing about an operation this large is the amount of time and resources it takes to edit a single peer-reviewed journal is multiplied in this case by 200. Versita also has for-profit publishing operations, but it appears to be slowly flipping its model to gold open-access for journals. Moreover, Versita Open also sells its open-access titles in print form, by paid subscription. Versita Open claims that there are no author fees for most of its open-access journals, so its business model is unclear. Are its for-profit titles subsidizing its open-access ones? Do the societies pay all the cost of publishing the society journals on the Versita Open platform? We think few in the U.S. have even heard of this firm, so it will be interesting to see how it progresses, and we hope it evolves into a respected open-access publisher.

About the author: Jeffrey Beall is an academic librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, in Denver, Colorado. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles on library and information science. His email address is jeffrey.beall@ucdenver.edu.

These views represent the personal opinions of the author and may not reflect the position of the University of Colorado Denver or the University of Colorado System.

New policy announced by David Willetts to make research freely available challenges business models of academic publishers

2011-12-17T12:39:00.000-08:00

David Willetts, the science minister, said the government wants to move to open access while protecting peer review.

Science minister David Willetts David Willetts, the science minister, said the government wants to move to open access while protecting peer review. Photograph: Anna Gordon/Guardian

The government has signalled a revolution in scientific publishing by throwing its weight behind the idea that all publicly funded scientific research must be published in open-access journals.

The policy is in the government document Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth published on Monday, which also includes plans for a series of cash prizes for teams to solve specific scientific challenges and a new £75m fund for small businesses to develop their ideas into commercial products.

The commitment to making publicly funded research free to access is a direct challenge to the business models of the big academic publishing companies, which are the gatekeepers for the majority of high-quality scientific research. Previous attempts by open access publishers to break this stranglehold over the dissemination of scientific results have largely failed.

The strategy sums up the coalition's work in the past 18 months on reshaping and developing the UK's science base in the face of the economic crisis. It comes a few days after David Cameron made a speech calling for increased research collaboration between the NHS and the life sciences industry, which included a £180m "catalyst fund" for universities and companies to help develop projects until they attract outside investment.

"Our starting point is a commitment by the coalition to transparency and open access to publicly funded data," said science minister David Willetts at a briefing to launch the government strategy. "Just writing my book, it was striking how you'd start researching a document and you'd soon hit a paywall and find that you had to subscribe when, sometimes, the work had come from research council projects."

He added: "We set out very clearly in the document today our commitment to open access. We want to move to open access, but in a way that ensures that peer review and publishing continues as a function. It needs to be paid for somehow. One of the clear options is to shift to a system from which university libraries pay for journals to one in which the academics pay to publish. But then you need to shift the funding so that the academics could afford to pay to publish."

He cited the example of the particle physics community in the US, which has switched from traditional scientific publishing to scientists paying to have their work appear in open-access journals. "They did that, I am told, as a switchover and the same amount of money was flowed through in a different way. It was clearly to retain the viability of learned journals in particle physics and, in turn, sustaining the whole system with peer review."

Dame Janet Finch, a former vice chancellor of Keele University, has been asked by Willetts to investigate how a similar open-access scheme might work in the UK. "We have to let her, working with the publishing industry and the research councils, find a way forward," said Willetts. "The publishing industry recognise the direction in which things are going and we have to work out a new model together."

Finch is expected to report in the first half of 2012 but, meanwhile, Willetts said the UK research councils would be reminded that research papers from the work they fund should be as widely available as possible.

Finding new ways to solve pressing scientific challenges was another element of the science and engineering strategy. Willetts said that the government would invest up to £250,000 in a series of prizes that would be awarded to groups of people who could solve specific scientific problems outlined by organisations including the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta). "[Prizes] were used a lot in the 19th century and they rather fell out of favour," he said. "They've been rejuvenated in the US and we're keen to work with Nesta, which will set up a centre of expertise in this."

In the 18th century, the British government offered a series of prizes to anyone who could develop a practical method of determining a ship's longitude at sea. It led to a flurry of experiments and the development of the marine chronometer by John Harrison.

More recently, the Ansari X-Prize offered $10m to the first team to build a reusable manned spacecraft and was won in 2004 by Burt Rutan's company Scaled Composites with its development of SpaceShipOne, subsequently the basis of the vehicles that will be used by Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. Unclaimed X-prizes are also available for building fuel-efficient cars and mass-sequencing genomes.

David Bott, director of innovation programmes at the Technology Strategy Board, which will work with Nesta to develop the prizes, said: "If you set the challenge in the right way, you unlock the creativity of the community rather than limiting it with our own lack of it." He added that prizes could be used to drive people to work together, rather than in traditional silos.

The £75m fund for small and medium-sized businesses resurrects a similar scheme run by the now-defunct regional development agencies. It will offer companies money to engage in proof-of-concept R&D projects from which new products and services could emerge.

"If you look at the overall economic strategy of the government, it is about getting back to rebalancing the economy, stimulating growth," said business secretary Vince Cable. "Much of that is going to come through from the SME [small and medium enterprise] sector, that's where jobs are going to be created."

Imran Khan, director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, said the government strategy was "an important and comprehensive analysis of the UK innovation ecosystem".

"We welcome the government's emphasis on attracting innovative businesses to the UK, and initiatives such as the new innovation inducement prizes," said Khan. "We call on the government to build on this start by setting aside serious funding to kickstart the sector and turn it into a game changer for UK economic growth – for instance, by setting aside the proceeds from the forthcoming 4G mobile spectrum auction to be reinvested in science, engineering, and innovation."

Briefing paper on Open Access Business Models for research funders and universities

2011-09-20T10:31:00.001-07:00

This briefing paper offers insight into various open access business models, from institutional to subject repositories, from open access journals to research data and monographs. This overview shows that there is a considerable variety in business models within a common framework of public funding. Open access through institutional repositories requires funding from particular institutions to set up and maintain a repository, while subject repositories often require contributions from a number of institutions or funding agencies to maintain a subject repository hosted at one institution. Open access through publication in open access journals generally requires a mix of funding sources to meet the cost of publishing. Public or charitable research funding bodies may contribute part of the cost of publishing in an open access journal but institutions also meet part of the cost, particularly when the author does not have a research grant from a research funding body.

To some extent the benefits follow the funding, institutions and their staff members being the primary beneficiaries from institutional repositories, while national research funding agencies may be the primary beneficiaries from the publication in open access of the research they fund. However, in addition all open access business models also allow benefits to flow to communities which have not been part of the funding infrastructure.

The briefing paper ‘Open Access Business Models for research funders and universities’ was commissioned by Knowledge Exchange and was written by Fred Friend.

The briefing paper is available for download here.

Publication Fees in Open Access Publishing: Sources of Funding and Factors Influencing Choice of Journal

2011-09-15T11:49:00.000-07:00

David J Solomon
College of Human Medicine, Michigan State University, E. Lansing, MI USA
Email dsolomon@msu.edu
Bo‐Christer Björk
Management and Organization, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland
Email bo‐christer.bjork@hanken.fi

Abstract - Open access (OA) journals make their full text content available for free on the Web and use other means than subscriptions or access charges for funding the publication process. Publication fees or article processing charges (APC)s have become the predominant means for funding professional OA publishing. We surveyed 1,038 authors from seven discipline categories who recently published articles in 74 OA journals that charge APCs. Authors were asked about the source of funding for the APC, factors influencing their choice of a journal and past history publishing in OA and subscription journals. Additional information about the journal and the authors’ country were obtained from the journal websites. A total of 429 (41%) authors completed the survey. There were large differences in the source of funding among disciplines. Journals with impact factors charged higher APCs as did journals from disciplines where grant funding is plentiful. Topical fit, quality, and speed of publication where the most important factors in the authors’ choice of a journal. Open accessibility was less important but a significant factor for many authors in their choice of a journal to publish. These findings are consistent with other research on OA publishing and suggest, that if OA journals meet normal quality standards, authors and their employers and funders are willing to pay reasonable APCs, the acceptable levels of which are dependent on the field of science and the quality of the journal in question.

Accepted Version 08-18-11 Version as accepted for publication by the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
(Note:This is a preprint of an article accepted for publication in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology copyright © 2011 (American Society for Information Science and Technology)
Submitted Version 6-30-2011 as submitted to the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
Supporting Tables

Creative Commons: a user guide

2011-08-31T22:58:00.000-07:00

Simone Aliprandi, a lawyer, active in consulting, coaching and in researching the field of copyright and ICT law, a leader of the Copyleft-italia.it Project, has composed a user guide, i.e. a complete manual to the world of Creative Commons licenses.

“Without neglecting useful conceptual clarifications, the author goes into technical details of the tools offered by Creative Commons, thus making them also understandable for total neophytes. This is a fundamental book for all those who are interested in the open content and copyleft world,” the book is introduced.

Of course, thanks to the CC license, it can be downloaded for free from the website.

Open access journals – what publishers offer, what researchers want

2011-08-31T22:53:00.001-07:00

The SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) project has analyzed the current supply and demand situation in the open access journal landscape. Starting from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), several sources of data were considered, including journal websites and direct inquiries within the publishing industry to comprehensively map the present supply of online peer-reviewed OA journals. The demand for open access publishing is summarised, as assessed through a large-scale survey of researchers’ opinions and attitudes. Some forty thousand answers were collected across disciplines and around the world, reflecting major support for the ideaof open access, while highlighting drivers of and barriers to open access publishing. Find the entire paper here.

Open Access Map Launched

2011-06-27T07:50:00.000-07:00

In November last year, the Open Access Map was presented as an emerging measuring tool for Open Access as a standalone discipline which is experiencing dramatic growth.

On June, 23, at the OAI7 conference on Innovation in Scholarly Communication, Alma Swan from OASIS announced the launching of Open Access Map. Anyone with an Open Access Resource or Organization they’d like to have included on the map, is invited to use the "Add Item" feature to share their contribution with the project. The world map will include all Open Access projects, services and initiatives. The tool will also involve a timeline which will show the development of Open Access over the last decade in terms of repositories, policies adopted and OA journals published.

It should present a single point from which the diversity of the OA initiatives will be discovered, and will “prevent duplication, enhance collaboration, and will generally enable an approach where new projects properly build upon existing or completed ones.” The map will also display the locations of other OA related initiatives, including funding policies, government documents, university mandates and so on. Such a unique aggregating and networking tool has the potential to catalyze additional OA developments across the world.

SPARC introduces Open-access Journal Publishing Resource Index

2011-05-26T12:00:00.001-07:00

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) today released a free online Open Access Journal Publishing Resource Index with information and documents to support the launch and operation of an open-access journal. Materials in the index will help libraries, presses, and other academic units on campuses as they work together to make the work of their researchers more widely available.

This new resource is launched in conjunction with the SPARC Campus-based Publishing Resource Center ( http://www.arl.org/sparc/partnering), which delivers a guide to critical issues in campus-based publishing partnerships, case studies, a bibliography and resource list, an index of collaborative initiatives (operated in partnership with Columbia University Libraries), and access to the LIBPRESS online discussion forum (operated by the University of California). The Center is overseen by an editorial board representing library and university press staff who are actively engaged in creating and managing publishing partnerships.

The new index complements the rich existing resource center by pointing to relevant sections in existing open-access journal publishing guides and to sample journal proposals, policies, bylaws, and other documentation to help with planning, development, and collaboration issues. Topics covered include:

•                  New Journal Planning
•                  Journal Publishing Program Policies
•                  Governance
•                  Editorial
•                  Marketing & Promotion
•                  Technical Platforms
•                  Sustainability Planning

Relevant sections of existing open-access publishing guides, including those by David Solomon, Carol Sutton, Kevin Stranack, Jan Velterop, Howard Goldstein and Raym Crow, and others are indicated under each topic area.

By highlighting samples and best practices, the index will help give campuses the tools they need to develop and maintain long-term, successful open-access publishing ventures. “As campus-based publishing gets more ambitious in scope, it’s important to build on the successes and challenges of earlier initiatives and adopt best practices,” said Raym Crow, senior consultant at SPARC. “Ultimately, campus-based publishing can offer universities greater control over the intellectual products they help create. SPARC is pleased to provide another tool to support libraries and publishers in sustainable, professional, open-access publishing.”

Lee C. Van Orsdel, Dean of University Libraries at Grand Valley State University, says faculty are beginning to consult librarians for advice on journal publishing options, including open-access models, and the SPARC site is a welcome resource. “We’re deepening our knowledge as quickly as possible, but it's a whole new area of expertise for most of us,” she said. “It will save us time and increase the probability that we can get to the right solution when advising our faculty on their best options.”

The editorial board invites contributions from other campuses to help build this resource and expand the bibliography – especially with primary research papers on collaboration issues. “SPARC hopes this will seed an effort where people will give documents to share, making it a community hub,” said Crow. Members of the board and how to contact the managing editor with suggestions are detailed on the Center home page.

The Open Access Journal Publishing Resource Index is available online at http://www.arl.org/sparc/partnering.

Sustaining open data business

2011-05-23T07:41:00.000-07:00

These thoughts on sustaining open data business were provoked by ORCID, a not-for-profit business set up by a group of large academic publishers and a few leading universities. Its aim is to provide a central directory of researchers, with profiles describing them.

ORCID is committing to provide open source software but not necessarily open data – offering some limited “non-commercial” activity of the service. Researchers can open their data by “claiming” it but what volume of them are going to do that? Do many more than 15% of academics publish their work in their local open access institutional repository?

I want to illustrate that it is perfectly possible, if not necessary, to support a business publishing open data. Strategies for successful open data companies:

Charge for quality – as geonames.org offer a cleaned up better authoritative version of a somewhat crowdsourced database
Charge for high volume – as SimpleGeo offer 10K per day calls to the service and charge a small fee after that.
Charge for private data storage – as Talis offer free triplestores for linked open data, and charge for a private data service.
Charge for analytical capacity – Fortius One offer the free GeoCommons web map making service and charge for the GeoIQ analysis package.

Of course one can always do consultancy and custom development to cover costs. Establishing a namespace, becoming a reference point for others; geoname linked data is used because it is widely used, because it arrived early in the domain.

In a survey of potential users, the most sizeable number of ORCID prospective users thought the data would only really be useful as open data. Charging for institutional access and sponsorship are seen as ways to sustain it. Yet there plenty of ways to sustain open data business, for-profit or not or in between. We might yet get a system that really serves academic publication rather than markets to it.

New Berlin Declaration

2011-04-09T12:14:00.001-07:00

This Berlin Declaration on the Future of the Digital Press was launched by the Periodical Press on 16 March 2011 in Berlin. Contrary to its namesake (the Berlin Declaration on Open Access) it does not call for OA, but for a less restrictive publishing environment where publishers are free to manage their own business models.

The declaration has five conditions:

Maintenance of existing press freedom: a call to minimise restrictions on advertising as well as freedom of expression.
Freedom to experiment and manage innovative business models: a call for parity in negotiations with digital players (not mentioned but clearly aimed at Amazon, Apple and Google).
A strong copyright protection: including tighter control over allowable reuse of content.
Reduced VAT rates for digital as well as print publications: asking for zero rates on both digital and print.
Fair competition and transparency in the digital world: asking for legislation to prevent locked-in technologies that restrict mobile platforms for digital works.

The declaration makes no mention of open access and is aimed at the trade, rather than the research publishing area. The initiating partners are the European Federation of Magazine Publishers and the Association of German Magazine Publishers.

Books vs eBooks

2011-01-08T03:23:00.000-08:00

Book "Open access in Southern European countries"

2010-12-20T10:33:00.000-08:00

This book is promoted by FECYT.

The Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) is a public foundation under the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation whose mission is to strengthen the value chain of knowledge by fostering science and innovation and trying to integrate them and bring them closer to society, in response to the needs and expectations of the Spanish science, technology and enterprise system. The Foundation’s goal is to be recognized by Spanish society as a key reference in the dissemination, information and measurement of science and innovation. It also wishes to contribute to the development of a knowledge-based economy.

Access full text book

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol

2010-11-03T10:58:00.000-07:00

As a cornerstone of Open Archives program, the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content.

The Definition

Usually referred to as simply, the OAI protocol, Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), currently in version 2.0, defines a mechanism for data providers to expose their metadata. It collects the metadata descriptions of the records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. Dublin Core metadata record, which is used with OAI-PMH protocol, can describe physical resources such as books, digital materials such as video, sound, image, or text files, and composite media like web pages. In simple terms, the protocol allows people to harvest metadata from digital libraries, repositories or reading platforms.

The Meaning

Over time, Open Archives program has expanded to promote broad access to digital resources for eScholarship, eLearning, and eScience. Accordingly, the implementation of OAI protocol ensures the increasing number of users, and a more wide accessibility with increased benefits towards scholars, researchers, students, libraries, universities and other academic institutions.
With the OAI-PMH protocol and these means of exposing structured metadata, InTech as a Data Provider allows Service Providers such as citation indexes, scientific search engines, scholarly databases, and scientific literature collections to harvest the metadata from our repository and thus make our publications available to a broader academic public.
Some of the databases, repositories and search engines that provide services based on metadata that is harvested using the OAI metadata harvesting protocol are:

BASE – Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies
CiteSeerX
Citebase Search
OAISTER
Public Knowledge Project
Openarchives.eu
Scientific Commons
Scirus

(The image is obtained from http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/images/9/9d/OAI-PMH_overview.png)

Global Map of Institutional Repositories from Eprints

2010-10-29T10:54:00.000-07:00

Here is the link to an interesting map from Eprints of newly added Institutional Repositories. It helps in creating a vivid image of the Open Access awareness growing on a truly global scale.

Links to repositories are also available with short descriptions added. Hopefully, the creators will utilize the potential of this map becoming a useful and illuminating tool for Open Access advocates.

First results of the SOAP project

2010-10-04T08:55:00.001-07:00

Video recordings of the 2nd Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing

2010-09-27T10:54:00.000-07:00

Hindawi's OA Institutional Membership Program

Results survey on payment methods by OA journal publishers

First results of the SOAP project

Interactive Open Access Publishing and Public Peer Review

Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science

Wikis as platforms for scholarly publishing

Breakout Session on Centralized Payment Mechanisms for OA Publishing Costs

Breakout Session on Publishing Ethics

Breakout Session on OA Book Publishing

Open Access Book Publishing

Open Access in Africa: Challenges, Solutions and Achievements

Specifics of Open Access Publishing and Retrodigitization in Mathematics: An Experience from DML-CZ and EuDML Projects

Tracing the Emerging Open Access Landscape in Greece: Achievements, Challenges, Prospects

Models for open access — many flavors

2010-09-25T14:04:00.001-07:00

By Karen Grigg, Associate Director of Collection Services at the Duke Medical Center Library:

Open Access comes in a variety of flavors. The two main types of open access are that of open access journals and self-archiving methods

Open Access journals are those that are freely available to the end-user. Since the reader does not pay for content, costs must be subsidized by the author or the institution. Along with publication fees, submission fees are sometimes charged.

Examples:

BioMed Central, an online publisher of free peer-reviewed scientific articles, is sustained by revenue from institutions. However, the new “Shared Support Membership” allows institutions and authors to share article costs.

Public Library of Science, or PloS, charges a publication fee that can be paid by the author or the author’s employer. PLoS also relies on donations from foundations.

Self-archiving allows authors to submit their own material online so that it is accessible to the public. There are two main varieties of self archiving; institutional repositories (IR), and Subject Based Repositories. IR are hosted by an institution, such as a university, and bundles all the research output of the institution. Often, the work is done by librarians or IT staff. One such IR is eScholarship from the University of California. A subject-based repository is hosted independently of an individual institution, and bundles the research output of a subject of discipline. Authors voluntarily self-archive their work on a pre-print server. An example of a subject repository is Arxiv, a repository for- physicists and mathematicians. Finally, authors often post articles on their own web sites, but the ability to do so requires negotiation with the publisher.

There are also some hybrid models of open access. Some publishers allow authors to decide whether or not an article can be openly accessed. Authors who would like their article to be freely available can opt to pay the publishing fee. These fees can be several thousand dollars per article. The Delayed OA model gives public access to journal articles after an embargoed period, often 6 months to 1 year. With a Partial OA journal, certain parts of the journal; often editorials or abstracts, are freely available, while the bulk of the content is for fee. Finally, Retrospective OA allows access to older journal articles that have been digitized.

For more background on Open Access Models, see:

Zhang, Sha Li. “OCLC Systems & Services | The Flavors of Open Access.” OCLC Systems & Services 23.3 (2007): 229-34. Emerald. Web. 15 Sept. 2010. <http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1622087&show=html>.

“Peter Suber, Open Access Overview (definition, Introduction).” Earlham College — Richmond, Indiana. Web. 15 Sept. 2010. <http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm>.

The economics of open access

2010-09-25T14:03:00.000-07:00

When we talk about the economics of open access, the conversation usually begins with the high cost of traditional journal subscriptions. For a nice summary of the argument that the economics of journal pricing is out of control, this portion of the ACRL toolkit on scholarly communications is an excellent resource. But that is only the beginning of the discussion. There is a lot more to say about open access economics.

One great source to grasp the nuance of the issues is a 2009 issue of the journal Economic Analysis and Policy, which itself made the transition from toll access to open availability under a Creative Commons Attribution license. A special issue of the journal was dedicated to the economics of open access; the full contents are linked to this blog post, which make finding them much easier.

I can especially recommend the first two articles in this special issue of EAP. John Willinsky does an excellent job in “The Stratified Economics of Open Access” of analyzing traditional publishing market segments and looking at how each is experimenting with open access. Conley and Wooders, in “But what Have you Done for me lately,” ask the very basic questions about what publishing an academic article should cost and what the most economically efficient model for scholarly communications might look like.

As I said, the conversation usually begins with high journal prices. Open access is not a solution, per se, to the problem of journal costs, but it is a solution to the access problem that is created by skyrocketing prices. For most academic authors, the issue of how much publishing really costs and how much of a university’s budget is actually going into shareholder value at Elsevier or Informa is very much secondary. Their concern is how to get their work into the hands of those who need it and might be able to use it. High subscription costs prevent that access and thus reduce the impact of scholarly work. That is the problem that new models of distributing scholarship, most of which are forms of open access, can solve.

As Conley and Wooders’ article makes clear, open access is not free in the sense of being without any costs, although consumers of open access articles do get the information they need without charge. Open access models are really about ways to streamline and redistribute the costs of publication so as to solve the access problem that is becoming so severe in the traditional system.

When we talk about the economics of open access, there are two factors that we should not forget. First, the are costs, known as lost opportunity costs, associated with traditional publishing that are recaptured by open access. Every time a researcher or teacher cannot get to the information she needs to do her work, or must obtain it by labor-intensive means like interlibrary loan or direct contact with the author, time and knowledge, which are both worth money, are wasted; open access reduces that loss. Second, open access provides the benefit of greater impact to the scholarly authors of articles made accessible through the various OA models. This benefit for the authors, like the benefit to the reader of quick and toll-free access, increases the overall value of research. When we examine the economics of open access, the increased value of the research itself must be part of the equation.

Taken from Duke web site

Librarians and Libraries and Open Access

2010-09-25T00:55:00.000-07:00

“Roses red and violets blue
stays unread
till paid by you”

How can librarians prove that their libraries still provide education?
Their situation is nohow a warming one. However, the solution couldn’t be more simple.

Complex Situation

Libraries order journals and books. The cost of academic material is climbing rapidly (from 1989 to 2003 by 315% according to ARL). This is possible because the market is dominated by a small number of large publishers who can demand very high prices for their publications. The world production of scholarly outputs, by contrast, has been at least doubled.

Even the most well endowed library cannot afford to provide all of the research material necessary for its students/researchers, let alone the one in the developing world. In addition, library budgets have been severely slashed everywhere.

Two Crises and the Damage Done

SERIALS PRICING CRISIS (in its forth decade according to Peter Suber)

costs climbing, number of journals growing, library budgets are being slashed
researchers must do without access to some of the journals critical to their research.

PERMISSION CRISIS (in its first decade according to Peter Suber)

legal and technological barriers are raised limiting how libraries may use the journals
legal barrier: copyright law, licensing agreement
technological barrier: digital rights management which blocks access to unauthorized users

Both crises impede research
and when research is impeded
so are all the benefits of research.
Peter Suber

Simple Solution

This would present an insoluble problem in the print machine era, however with internet technology available, both crises may be answered with Open Access to research material. The middleman can now be left out of the picture and mutual responsibility in promoting the wide dissemination of knowledge is now solely on librarians and publishers.

A report commissioned by the Wellcome Trust, for example, concludes that “open access is not only a practical, efficient and sustainable model for disseminating high-quality peer-reviewed research, but that it is a system that could also bring savings of as much as 30%“

SPARC is calling recently for stories being collected for the OA Week about Open Access causing major swerve in specific scientific study. Thus, even if it didn’t prove as a money saving solution, it will, undoubtedly prove as a “community-saving” solution.

Librarians Act Today and Envision the Year 2025

That librarians are strong advocates for Open Access is obvious when recognized that SPARC, one of the strongest OA organization on a global level, was founded by the research library community.

Other than that, librarians are:

educating faculty and administrators on campus about Open Access
building digital repositories for OA journals/books
supporting OA journals (which make more than 20% of peer-reviewed journals today)

There are weak spots to the movement with librarians not always being as engaged as
they should, but the idea is still in its growth process and the awareness is yet to be raised.

The latest report, Futures Thinking for Academic Librarians: Higher Education in 2025, sponsored by ACRL, provides nine likely, high-impact scenarios for the future of higher education and the supporting role of librarians, and it is abbreviated in bullet points by Philip Davis from Scholarly Kitchen: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2010/09/22/future-of-academic-librarians/

Taken from InTech

OASIS Topics

2010-08-28T13:20:00.001-07:00

Equity for Open-Access Journal Publishing

2010-08-10T07:34:00.000-07:00

Scholars write articles to be read—the more access to their articles the better—so one might think that the open-access approach to publishing, in which articles are freely available online to all without interposition of an access fee, would be an attractive competitor to traditional subscription-based journal publishing.

The new US administration could implement such a system through simple FRPAA-like legislation requiring funding agencies to commit to this open-access compact in a cost-neutral manner. Perhaps reimbursement would be limited to authors at universities and research institutions that themselves commit to a similar compact. As funding agencies and universities take on this commitment, we might transition to an efficient, sustainable journal publishing system in which publishers choose freely among business models on an equal footing, to the benefit of all (Full text).

Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity

2010-08-10T07:30:00.000-07:00

Scholarly publishing is going through a transformation as a result of digital means of communication, coupled with the financial predicament of libraries. With the most recent economic downturn, access to scholarly articles, so important to research progress and public advancement, will no doubt suffer.

Open-access scholarly journals have arisen as an alternative to traditional subscription scholarly journals. Open-access journals make their articles available freely to anyone, while providing the same services common to all scholarly journals, such as management of the peer-review process, filtering, production, and distribution. Since open-access journals do not charge subscription or other access fees, they must cover their operating expenses through other sources, including subventions, in-kind support, or, in a sizable minority of cases, processing fees paid by or on behalf of authors for submission to or publication in the journal.

Universities subsidize the costs of subscription journals by subscribing to them. Universities and funding agencies can provide equitable support for the processing-fee business model for open-access journals — to place the subscription-fee and processing-fee models on a more level playing field — by subsidizing processing fees as well.

The compact for open-access publishing equity supports equity of the business models by committing each university to "the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds."

MELIBEA: validating OA policies

2010-08-04T09:22:00.000-07:00

MELIBEA provides a searchable directory of open access (OA) policies. It describes the existing policies of each mandate listed and provides a clear list of criteria (e.g. length of possible embargo).

It also describes itself as a validator as it assesses each policy against a fixed set of qualitative and quantitative criteria. These are used to provide each mandate with a score that indicates how 'open' it is. For example the Wellcome mandate scores c.72% open, whereas the European Research Council (ERC) scores 60% openness.

OA articles: situation 2009

2010-08-04T09:20:00.000-07:00

A recent article in PLoS One presents an analysis of the percentage of articles available open access in 2009.

Entitled 'Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009' the paper used a random sample of 1837 articles to determine the percentage that are available OA either on the journal site or within a repository.

The findings show that the greatest percentage of OA articles on journal sites are from the biomedical areas (c.13% of articles) and the lowest percentage in physics and astronomy (c.3%).

However the percentage available in repositories showed a quite different spread. The lowest number available in repositories was in the biomedical subjects (ranging from 4.6-7.8%) and the highest was in the earth sciences area (25.9%).

Chemistry showed the lowest total OA availability (13% total).

Of articles published in 2008, they found an average 8.5% freely available at the publishers' sites plus an additional 11.9% that could be found using search engines, making the average overall OA percentage 20.4%.

It should be noted that since they looked at articles published prior to 2009 the results will not reflect the mandate enforced by the NIH at the start of 2008 – it is likely that a similar study of articles published in 2009 and 2010 (including those for whom 12-month embargoes will have expired) will be far larger in the biomedical arena.

Income Models for Supporting Open Access (by SPARC)

2010-07-24T04:21:00.001-07:00

Developing a sound business model is a critical concern of publishers considering open-access distribution. Selecting the model appropriate to a particular journal will depend not only on the expense hurdle that must be cleared, but also on the publisher’s mission objectives, size, business management resources, risk tolerance, tax status, and institutional or corporate affiliation.

This Web site and accompanying guide provide an overview of income models currently being used to support the open-access distribution of peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journals. These resources will be a useful tool both for publishers exploring new potential sources of income and for libraries weighing where to direct meager library funds.

READ or download the guide

Supply-side income models: supply-side models, funded primarily by producers of the content or by proxies that pay on their behalf.

Article Processing Fees
Advertising
Sponsorships
Internal Subsidies
External Subsidies
Donations & Fundraising
Endowments
In-Kind Support
Partnerships
Describe another model
Demand-side moels: funded primarily by consumers of the content or by proxies that pay on their behalf.

“Income models for Open Access: An overview of current practice” examines the use of supply-side revenue streams (such as article processing fees, advertising) and demand-side models (including versioning, use-triggered fees). The guide provides an overview of income models currently in use to support open-access journals, including a description of each model along with examples of journals currently employing it. Download the PDF.

Animated video explaining open access to research and why it's important

2010-05-22T08:10:00.000-07:00

Open Access 101, from SPARC from Karen Rustad on Vimeo.

Article "Open access: implications for scholarly publishing and medical libraries"

2010-05-15T14:04:00.000-07:00

Purpose: The paper reviews and analyzes the evolution of the open access (OA) publishing movement and its impact on the traditional scholarly publishing model.

Procedures: A literature survey and analysis of definitions of OA, problems with the current publishing model, historical developments, funding agency responses, stakeholder viewpoints, and implications for scientific libraries and publishing are performed.

Findings: The Internet's transformation of information access has fueled interest in reshaping what many see as a dysfunctional, high-cost system of scholarly publishing. For years, librarians alone advocated for change, until relatively recently when interest in OA and related initiatives spread to the scientific community, governmental groups, funding agencies, publishers, and the general public.

Conclusions: Most stakeholders acknowledge that change in the publishing landscape is inevitable, but heated debate continues over what form this transformation will take. The most frequently discussed remedies for the troubled current system are the “green” road (self-archiving articles published in non-OA journals) and the “gold” road (publishing in OA journals). Both movements will likely intensify, with a multiplicity of models and initiatives coexisting for some time.

Highlights

This paper reviews the factors and events leading up to the open access (OA) movement in scholarly publishing, including the evolution and current status of the National Institutes of Health public access policy.
Differing points of view of major stakeholders, such as publishers, librarians, scientists, funding agencies, and consumers are summarized.
Open access has and will continue to impact traditional scholarly publishing, serials pricing, and medical libraries in general.

Implications for practice

Open access issues may impact decision making in serials acquisition and management.
Librarians should take a lead in communicating important OA-related developments to user groups and administration.
Librarians can play major roles in connection with this new movement.

Karen M et al. J Med Libr Assoc. 2006 July; 94(3): 253–262. Full text

Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the costs and benefits

2010-05-07T13:51:00.000-07:00

A knowledge economy has been defined as: “…one in which the generation and exploitation of knowledge has come to play the predominant part in the creation of wealth. It is not simply about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge; it is also about the more effective use and exploitation of all types of knowledge in all manner of economic activities” (DTI 1998).

Introduction

In a knowledge economy, innovation and the capacity of the system to create and disseminate the latest scientific and technical information are important determinants of prosperity (David and Foray 1995; OECD 1997). Scholarly publishing plays a key role, as it is central to the efficiency of research and to the dissemination of research findings and diffusion of scientific and technical knowledge. However, advances in information and communication technologies are disrupting traditional models of scholarly publishing, radically changing our capacity to reproduce, distribute, control, and publish information. One key question is whether there are new opportunities and new models for scholarly publishing that would better serve researchers and better communicate and disseminate research findings (OECD 2005, p14).

Debate on the economics of scholarly publishing and alternative publishing models focuses almost entirely on costs, but from an economic perspective the aim is to have the most cost-effective system, not (necessarily) the cheapest. And however much one studies costs, one cannot know which is the most cost-effective system until one examines both the costs and the benefits. Hence, the aim of this project was to examine costs and benefits, and in so doing to inform policy discussion and help stakeholders understand the institutional, budgetary and wider economic implications of three of the major emerging models for scholarly publishing (i.e. subscription publishing, open access publishing and self-archiving). It seeks to build on and extend recent work on the costs and benefits associated with alternative scholarly communication models (Houghton et al. 2006) and respond to some of the gaps and challenges identified in the UK Scholarly Journals Baseline Report (EPS et al. 2006).

The project involved two major phases:

* Phase I: Identification of costs and benefits – sought to describe the three models of scholarly publishing, identify all the dimensions of cost and benefit for each of these models, and examine which of the main players in the scholarly communication system would be affected, and how they might be affected, by each of the costs and benefits identified; and

* Phase II: Quantification of costs and benefits – sought, where possible, to quantify the costs and benefits identified in Phase I; identify, and where possible quantify, the cost and benefit implications for each of the main players in the scholarly communication system; and, where possible, compare the costs and benefits of the three models for the main players in the scholarly communication system.

While wide-ranging in scope, an important focus of the work was the implication of the three models for UK higher education and for journal and scholarly monograph publishing.

Download the full report below

Documents & Multimedia

* Economic implications of alternative scholarly publishing models: Exploring the costs and benefits1

Portable Document Format (pdf) File [ 4 Mb ]

* JISC Response to Feedback on the Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models Report2

Portable Document Format (pdf) File [ 117 Kb ]

Campus-based Open-access Publishing Funds: A Practical Guide to Design and Implementation

2010-04-07T13:59:00.000-07:00

The decision to launch an Open-access Fund is a complex one for many reasons. Establishing a clear understanding of your Fund’s goals, the policies that will govern it, how it will be administered, and what tools can be used to evaluate the Fund’s results all involve careful deliberation and discussion. The relative novelty of the category, combined with demographic, philosophical, and political differences among the institutions that have established Open-access Funds to date combine to create an environment in which there are not yet transferable templates for the simple and straightforward creation of Funds. As a result, it may be challenging for those contemplating the launch of an Open-access Fund to move ahead with absolute confidence and clarity. And yet, despite this uncertainty, more than a dozen institutions (as of this writing) have launched Open-access Funds. This is a concept that clearly intrigues some within the scholarly communication community. As such, it bears further consideration and analysis. See the SPARC Guide

The Economics of Open Access Publishing

2010-03-27T01:04:00.000-07:00

Introduction, by Christian Zimmermann

The Stratified Economics of Open Access, by John Willinsky

But what have you done for me lately? Commercial Publishing, Scholarly Communication, and Open-Access, by John P. Conley and Myrna Wooders

Publishing an E-Journal on a Shoe String: Is It a Sustainable Project?, by Piero Cavaleri. Michael Keren, Giovanni B. Ramello and Vittorio Valli

Open Access Models and their Implications for the Players on the Scientific Publishing Market, by Steffen Bernius, Matthias Hanauske, Wolfgang König and Berndt Dugall

Open Access Economics Journals and the Market for Reproducible Economic Research, by B.D. McCullough

Estimating the Potential Impacts of Open Access to Research Findings, by John Houghton and Peter Sheehan

The Economics of Open Bibliographic Data Provision, by Thomas Krichel and Christian Zimmermann

The End/Future of Publishing

2010-03-16T14:35:00.001-07:00

This video was prepared by the UK branch of Dorling Kindersley Books. Originally meant solely for a DK sales conference, the video was such a hit internally that it is now being shared externally. We hope you enjoy it (and make sure you watch it up to at least the halfway point, there's a surprise!).

Online Guide to Open Access Journals Publishing

2010-02-10T12:45:00.001-08:00

The Online Guide to Open Access Journals Publishing provides practical information and tools to support the efforts of scholars and other small teams producing independent Open Access journals. The guide has been developed by Co-Action Publishing and Lund University Libraries Head Office with support from the National Library of Sweden and Nordbib.

Nyaya Health and Global Health Delivery 2.0: Using Open-Access Technologies for Transparency and Operations Research

2010-01-23T13:20:00.000-08:00

The growing field of global health delivery is in need of technological strategies to improve transparency and operations research.
Our organization has implemented several simple “Web 2.0” strategies while delivering medical and public health services in rural Nepal.
These strategies help Nyaya Health improve transparency, receive critical commentary from outside experts, and compare approaches to organizing budgets, pharmaceutical procurement, medical treatment protocols, and public health programs.
The platforms include quantitative outcomes data and logistics protocols on a wiki; an open-access, online deidentified patient database; geospatial data analysis through real-time maps; a blog; and a public line-by-line online budget.

Full text

Voices of Open Access

2010-01-22T13:54:00.000-08:00

Voices of Open Access Video Series - Teacher

Voices of Open Access Video Series - Funder

Voices of Open Access Video Series - Patient Advocate

Voices of Open Access Video Series - Student

Voices of Open Access Video Series - Physician Scientist

Voices of Open Access Video Series - Librarian

White House Signals Interest in Open Access with Public Call for Comments

2010-01-01T05:00:00.000-08:00

On December 10, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced a public forum to discuss public access to federally funded research. "The administration is dedicated to maximizing the return on Federal investments in R&D," reads the announcement in the Federal Register [PDF].

The discussion focuses largely on proposal to extend to other governmental agencies—such as the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and NASA—a public access mandate similar to the one governing National Institute of Health-funded research. The National Institute of Health (NIH) is itself the largest federal funder of research, awarding more than $30.5 billion annually, and is covered by the December 2007 mandatory public access policy requiring the deposit of funded articles into the PubMed Central digital archive.

The OSTP post also goes on to outline a number of the arguments commonly put forward in favor of open access, including simplified access to scholarly publications and a central storage and search infrastructure that would facilitate researchers' ability to use the materials.

Blog-based discussion

In line with the Obama administration's determination to use the web as a means of engaging with the public, OSTP is soliciting comment via blog in three parts: on implementation (December 10 to 20), features and technology (December 21 to 31), and management (January 1 to 7). The discussion on OSTP's blog also parallels a more traditional call for public comment to be published in the Federal Register.

In the comments on the blog, dozens of users have weighed in on OSTP's detailed initial questions about the implementation of a mandate, including which agencies should enact public access policies, what length embargo period is appropriate, which version of an author's article to submit, and whether deposit should be mandatory or voluntary.

The overwhelming majority of comments—with a plurality from one advocate, Stevan Harnad, Professor of Cognitive Science at Southampton University—are strongly in favor of a mandatory policy with little to no embargo period, covering all or most federal agencies. (A side debate has emerged regarding Harnad's role; see commentary in the blog's comments, as well as a post registering disapproval on the Society for Scholarly Publishing's Scholarly Kitchen blog.)

Allies at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

The OSTP announcement comes as yet another encouraging sign for open access advocates, following the reintroduction of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) in the Senate this year by Senators Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and John Cornyn (R-TX), and a number of open access resolutions made by faculties nationwide.

Moreoever, given the Obama administration's consistent call for transparency and its recent push for a Comprehensive Open Government Plan, those advocates see the White House as a potentially great ally if comes out strongly in favor of open access.

"It's confirmation that this is an issue that is of national importance," said Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), adding that, while many librarians have been staunch advocates for the cause of open access, the administration could influence the debate on a much broader level.

It also seems clear that, aside from the political and legislative implications, a statement from the White House could potentially persuade some administrators and faculty at institutions where open access mandates from other campuses have failed to do so in the past.

Library issue in the end

But any federal open access mandate also stands to come back around as a library and digital archives issues eventually. “[Libraries] were the first community to clue in, on a coordinated scale, to what an open access world would look like,” Joseph said. And it will likely come back down to librarians and archivists to work out many of the practical aspects of the mandate if and when it is handed down from the legislative level.

During the comment period, it will be up to librarians to advise on how an public access mandate can be shaped in order to add the least additional burden to libraries and archives. A different policy governing each governmental agency would only increase the cost of implementation, Joseph said, and it is incumbent upon librarians to help divine the closest thing to a one-size-fits-all solution

Open access: implications for scholarly publishing and medical libraries

2010-01-01T04:05:00.000-08:00

Purpose: The paper reviews and analyzes the evolution of the open access (OA) publishing movement and its impact on the traditional scholarly publishing model.
Procedures: A literature survey and analysis of definitions of OA, problems with the current publishing model, historical developments, funding agency responses, stakeholder viewpoints, and implications for scientific libraries and publishing are performed.
Findings: The Internet's transformation of information access has fueled interest in reshaping what many see as a dysfunctional, high-cost system of scholarly publishing. For years, librarians alone advocated for change, until relatively recently when interest in OA and related initiatives spread to the scientific community, governmental groups, funding agencies, publishers, and the general public.
Conclusions: Most stakeholders acknowledge that change in the publishing landscape is inevitable, but heated debate continues over what form this transformation will take. The most frequently discussed remedies for the troubled current system are the “green” road (self-archiving articles published in non-OA journals) and the “gold” road (publishing in OA journals). Both movements will likely intensify, with a multiplicity of models and initiatives coexisting for some time.

Reference:
Karen M. Albert, MLS, AHIP, Director of Library Services. J Med Libr Assoc,94(3); Jul 2006
Full text

A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access, by Peter Suber

2010-01-01T03:58:00.001-08:00

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.

In most fields, scholarly journals do not pay authors, who can therefore consent to OA without losing revenue. In this respect scholars and scientists are very differently situated from most musicians and movie-makers, and controversies about OA to music and movies do not carry over to research literature.

OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance. Just as authors of journal articles donate their labor, so do most journal editors and referees participating in peer review.

OA literature is not free to produce, even if it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature. The question is not whether scholarly literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than by charging readers and creating access barriers. Business models for paying the bills depend on how OA is delivered.

There are two primary vehicles for delivering OA to research articles: OA journals and OA archives or repositories.

OA archives or repositories do not perform peer review, but simply make their contents freely available to the world. They may contain unrefereed preprints, refereed postprints, or both. Archives may belong to institutions, such as universities and laboratories, or disciplines, such as physics and economics. Authors may archive their preprints without anyone else's permission, and a majority of journals already permit authors to archive their postprints. When archives comply with the metadata harvesting protocol of the Open Archives Initiative, then they are interoperable and users can find their contents without knowing which archives exist, where they are located, or what they contain. There is now open-source software for building and maintaining OAI-compliant archives and worldwide momentum for using it.

OA journals perform peer review and then make the approved contents freely available to the world. Their expenses consist of peer review, manuscript preparation, and server space. OA journals pay their bills very much the way broadcast television and radio stations do: those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the production costs upfront so that access can be free of charge for everyone with the right equipment. Sometimes this means that journals have a subsidy from the hosting university or professional society. Sometimes it means that journals charge a processing fee on accepted articles, to be paid by the author or the author's sponsor (employer, funding agency). OA journals that charge processing fees usually waive them in cases of economic hardship. OA journals with institutional subsidies tend to charge no processing fees. OA journals can get by on lower subsidies or fees if they have income from other publications, advertising, priced add-ons, or auxiliary services. Some institutions and consortia arrange fee discounts. Some OA publishers waive the fee for all researchers affiliated with institutions that have purchased an annual membership. There's a lot of room for creativity in finding ways to pay the costs of a peer-reviewed OA journal, and we're far from having exhausted our cleverness and imagination.

For a longer introduction, with live links for further reading, see my Open Access Overview, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm.

The Facts About Open Access: A study of the financial and non-financial effects of alternative business models for scholarly journals

2009-12-13T06:51:00.000-08:00

Discussion of Open Access tends to be strong on rhetoric but short on facts. The objective of this independent study was to determine the impact of open access on scholarly journals' financial and non-financial factors and to establish a substantial body of data about different forms of Open Access publishing, and a baseline of comparison with traditional subscription publishing.

This report by ALPSP will aid further discussion of alternative publishing models by adding to the body of evidence-based research; of course, there may be alternative interpretations of the data and both the sponsors and the researchers would be happy to discuss these.

The full report is available for download (PDF) free of charge here.

Opening the non-open access medical journals: Internet-based sharing of journal articles on a medical web site

2009-11-08T02:42:00.000-08:00

Introduction: Open access (AO) journals are freely available, but non-open access (NOA) journals are available only through payment. Similar to the music industry, one might expect a sharing of NOA articles on the Internet. This paper investigates a site facilitating such sharing amongst medical professionals.Method: A six-month snap-shot (25 May to 24 November 2008) of activities on the site.Results: Total articles requested: 6,587; total found: 5,464 (82.9%). Mean number of views of each article: 4.47. Total estimated saving (or loss): $1.4M for the year of 2008. Nature articles were the most highly requested, followed by Science, and other major medical journals.Discussion and Conclusions: This method of accessing data is highly effective, but issues are raised. Ethical issues and financial implications are the most important. NOA journal publishers should recognise the problem, research its size and implications, but the discussions must occur in the open access area.
Full text

Why Open Access?

2009-09-28T12:22:00.000-07:00

The open access movement is gaining momentum across the academic world, with some 1400 university-based repositories containing many thousands of journal articles, theses, monographs, book chapters and data sets.
Last week, more than a hundred people took part in a discussion of the future of open access at the University of Salford led by Ghassan Aouad (PVC for Research and Innovation), Julie Berry (Associate Director for Library and Learning Services) and Alma Swan, an expert in open access who is associated with the University of Southampton. I’m keen for us to get to a position where all postgraduate students and researchers at Salford deposit their research publications in our own open repository. So why?
I made the general case for open access to knowledge in a presentation to the Education in a Changing Environment conference earlier this month (see Keynote Addresses & Speeches at www.salford.ac.uk/vc for the transcript or view the video at http://www.ece.salford.ac.uk/vc_speech.php). In essence, there is a moral case because we are a public university supported by public funds, a theoretical reason because it is in the nature of knowledge to benefit in an exponential manner from dissemination, and a practical set of benefits, in that the academic world thrives on giving away our work in return for citations by others. Openly disseminated knowledge is good knowledge.
In her presentation last week, Alma buttressed this general case with the hard results of research into the benefits of open repositories. She told us that work by the World Health Organization shows that, in low income countries, fully 56% of research institutions currently have no current periodicals at all, because they can no longer afford the high and ever-increasing prices of commercial publishers’ subscriptions. This shows how closed access systems are preventing knowledge spreading to where it is often most needed.
For high income countries such as the UK, the cost of journal publications over the last 20 years has escalated at three times the general rate of inflation, while the number of serials purchased by universities has remained broadly constant. Since most academics surrender their copyright to commercial journals without receiving a fee, this means that we are paying three times as much now as our predecessors did in 1966 to read our own work in our libraries. At the same time, for-profit academic publishers have continued to give healthy returns to their shareholders
But the benefits of open access don’t stop with cost savings. Research now shows that research outputs placed in open repositories are significantly more likely to be cited, and will often result in significant increases in impact factors. Because the origins of open access requests can be summarized and analysed, researchers are able to get a good sense of who is interested in their work, allowing them to focus and strengthen research networks. And universities with open repositories find that they have many more web page links with other research institutions, strengthening research networks.
Gaining wider recognition for our research benefits everyone in the university, and not just the research community. For staff in general, improved reputation and recognition brings many advantages. And students are linked to their university for life after graduating through their qualifications, and so they have a particular interest in the way our research continues to be acknowledged over the years to come.
The University of Salford Open Repository is up and running at http://www.usir.salford.ac.uk/. Set up in 2007 it now has more than 2000 items. Expert advice on copyright is provided by Julie and her colleagues. I believe that, by putting research outputs in our repository, Salford researchers will be helping to get their own work better known, and will be contributing significantly to strengthening our reputation for high quality research work. I’ll be putting my own research outputs in the repository, and I hope that a lot of others will join me.

Why Be a Medical Editor?

2009-08-23T12:59:00.000-07:00

Jerome P. Kassirer, MD Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, Mass, and Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Conn
JAMA. 2001;285:2253.

Thousands of medical journals exist, and new ones are published each year. Curiously, despite a vast "market" for medical editors, the field has no career track, no training programs, no faculty, no schools, and no classes. Few medical students set out to become medical editors. Instead, editors spring from physicians of all stripes: those who like to write and have shown a propensity to do so; specialists and subspecialists skilled in their own domain; and physicians who have served as associate editors or as members of a journal's editorial board. With the exception of a few dozen journal editors who do their jobs full time, most medical editors work part time, sharing their editorial work with other research, education, and patient care duties.
I write about editing from some experience. During my recent tenure as editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine I presided over 425 weekly issues of the Journal. I made countless decisions about which manuscripts to accept, which to reject, and which to revise. I edited manuscripts, sometimes extensively. With a staff of outstanding dedication and excellence, I introduced multiple new clinical features and initiated series of articles on many topics, including quality of care, delivery of health care, and the techniques of molecular medicine. I added enriching graphics, redesigned the Journal's format, introduced one of the first medical journal Web sites, and wrote more than 60 editorials. I shortened the time for handling manuscripts by a third and set a friendly tone between our editors and authors who sent us their work.
Even though a career path to medical editing is rather nebulous, I would encourage medical students who aspire to spend part of their career as a medical editor. A medical journal is a special part of the world of medicine. The reports of original research are a fundamental underpinning of most journals. Research projects are simply not complete unless the work has been subjected to evaluation by a researcher's peers, published in a journal, and exposed to criticism by the medical community.
This process of peer review selects out papers that are authoritative, usually novel, and often important to the advancement of medicine. In turn, these papers become the foundation for further research and the basis of day-to-day medical practices. Often the process of successful editorial peer review and publishing is a critical determinant of an author's academic advancement. Another special purpose of a medical journal is to publish material that informs a variety of medical, social, economic, and political subjects such as abortion, assisted suicide, fatalities from handguns, and the medical use of marijuana.
Because medical editors bear some of the responsibility for the reliability of published research and, in turn, for the care of patients, the health of the public, allocation of resources, and standards of medical ethics and professional behavior, editors must be trustworthy. Readers must believe that editors will make sound and even-handed decisions, that they will be open to many points of view, and that they will select or reject material only on the basis of merit, and certainly not for business or political reasons. To preserve this trust, an editor must avoid giving favors, must not be beholden to any special-interest group, and must be willing to publish articles on controversial subjects, even if they involve the organization that owns and publishes the journal.
In order for editors to preserve freedom of action and expression, they must have no conflicts of interest that might bias them in choosing reviewers, making editorial decisions, or issuing public statements. Editors cannot be influenced by whether individual decisions will affect their journal's profitability, for example. Complete separation of editorial decisions from financial issues, therefore, is essential to ensuring the editor's independence. If it becomes known that an editor's judgment can be influenced by extraneous factors such as income from specific advertisements, the journal will lose the respect of its readers.
Editors are often visualized sitting at a desk struggling over one manuscript after another. They do that, but they do far more. They think about how electronic publishing and emerging sources of information will affect their journal. They develop and adhere to certain principles of publishing that authors and journalists sometimes find irritating. They deal with endless calls from journalists about papers they are publishing. They must be creative in envisioning the future of their discipline; they must try to discern not only what their readers might want, but, more importantly, what their readers need. They watch the medical, social, and economic events that are shaping medicine. Like editors of newspapers, magazines, and other media, they have a bully pulpit that they can exploit to benefit medicine. By commenting on contentious issues and conflicts, a skilled editor can contribute to the important debates of the times.
Few people will make their entire careers in medical editing, but many will spend years at it. If you have a creative spark and a love of language, if you derive pleasure from helping others improve their work, if you think that you can help inform the discussions about the future of medicine, and if you have thick skin, an editor's job is worth contemplating.

Peer review process

2009-08-17T00:37:00.001-07:00

Nature vs Science vs Open Access

2009-08-17T00:16:00.000-07:00

Open access: a giant leap towards bridging health inequities

2009-08-16T14:36:00.000-07:00

Bulletin of the World Health Organization 2009;87:631-635. doi: 10.2471/BLT.09.064659

Introduction
Health knowledge generated in the world’s laboratories is passed down the information chain through publications, through its impact and application, its subsequent “translation” into appropriate contexts for different user communities, arriving finally with health workers and the general public, as the diagram of the knowledge cycle from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research has shown.1 Studies have shown that access to published health research by the research communities in developing countries is no longer “fit for purpose”.2 As has been well documented, rising costs of subscriptions and permission barriers imposed by publishers have barred access to the extent that local health research and health care have been damaged through lack of information.3,4 For example, Yamey5 tells of a physician in southern Africa who could not afford full access to journals but based a decision to alter a perinatal HIV prevention programme on one single abstract. The full text article would have shown that the findings were not relevant to the country’s situation.
With the advent of the internet there is little justification for continuing to create barriers to access. Richard Smith, as the former editor of the British Medical Journal, said, “Most research is publicly funded, and when the internet appeared it made no sense for research funders to allow publishers to profit from restricting access to their research”.6 This is true not only for publicly funded research but for private health charities around the world. As the Open Access Policy of the Wellcome Trust states, “We . . . support unrestricted access to the published output of research as a fundamental part of its charitable mission and a public benefit to be encouraged wherever possible”.7
Science is a collaborative process and openness is fundamental to knowledge advancement. Nowhere has this been shown more clearly than by the 2003 outbreak of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) during which, at the height of the epidemic, there was unprecedented openness and willingness to share critical research information, leading to the identification and the genetic mapping of the responsible coronavirus by 13 collaborating laboratories from 10 countries.8 The recent release of essential H1N1 data published in several toll-access journals relevant to the H1N1 influenza pandemic points to the recognition that access to health research information is critical in the containment of infectious outbreaks.9
It is difficult to see how the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals can be achieved without free international access to the world’s publicly funded research findings or without collaborative initiatives. Goals 4 to 7 depend on the sharing of research findings for success, while Goal 8, which emphasizes the need for global partnerships for development, recognizes that sharing knowledge and capacity building establish the infrastructure for building future aid programmes.
Any solution to the inequality of access to health-care information must be based on the development of an independent and sustainable national research base. Lessons in development aid from the past few decades clearly show that mechanisms that reinforce the dependency culture are no longer appropriate.10,11
Solutions
The United Nation’s HINARI, AGORA and OARE programmes, whereby registered libraries or qualified institutions in countries with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of < href="http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/87/8/09-064659/en/index.html#R12">12 However, such donor programmes have several limitations.13 They are not driven by science (journals are donated by publishers at their own discretion rather than selected by researchers); they are only available to the poorest countries (as countries’ economies improve, they no longer qualify); some low-income countries are excluded (e.g. India, even though its GDP level qualifies it for access) because publishers fear damage to their existing sales; access is only available from registered libraries and on provision of a password controlled by libraries; publications may be withdrawn and there are no contractual arrangements regarding content continuity.
In a letter to PLoS Medicine, Villafuerte-Gálvez et al. said that, since 2003, Peruvian medical students and health professionals have substantially benefited from access to high-quality scientific information through HINARI but that recently students and faculty had not been able to gain access to several top journals that were available at the launch of the programme.14 Moreover, the number of users had dropped by 52% in 3 years. Such was the value of the donor material that copies were made available to colleagues unable to access them.
A key to resolving the deep knowledge gap lies in creating a global knowledge base that includes essential research emanating from both research communities in developing countries as well as from “international” research. Without regional knowledge, the picture is incomplete and may result in inappropriate programmes. As an example, bacille Calmette–Guérin vaccine developed in Europe for combating tuberculosis is of limited efficacy in China and India, the countries hardest hit.15 Molecular typing studies by van Embden of the Netherlands have shown that the Indian tuberculosis strains are different from those in western countries.16 Similarly, as Andrew Hattersley has pointed out, effective treatments for diabetes in the United Kingdom may not work in India and vice versa, as environmental and genetic factors can affect the success of treatments.17
It is equally crucial to ensure distribution of publications between neighbouring countries since they may share similar health problems that are seldom covered by established international journals. A study by Lown & Banerjee to assess the New England Journal of Medicine’s coverage of health issues of the developing world, found that in 416 weekly issues over an eight-year period < href="http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/87/8/09-064659/en/index.html#R18">18 Other studies have shown similar evidence of systematic bias by medical journals from developed countries against highlighting diseases of poverty, and recent reports have documented the problem of neglected tropical diseases.19,20
Overcoming the limitations
The statement and recommendations of the Budapest Open Access Initiative on which all subsequent open access developments are based, is concerned with free public access to peer reviewed publicly-funded research publications.21 It recommended two routes to achieving open access: (i) deposit author’s copy of already published articles in the author’s institutional repository (or a subject-based central repository where an appropriate one exists); or (ii) publish in an open access journal.
Both these routes have the major advantage of being driven by science and building research capacity as researchers can compile personal collections of material specific to their work, regardless of whether it has been published in local or international journals.22 Open access is sustainable as the establishment of institutional repositories is low cost in the developing world and publishing in open access journals is mostly free to authors (only a minority of commercial journals charge a document management fee, usually waived for authors from developing countries). Services that have focused on providing maximum visibility to regional journals, such as Bioline International23 (70 open access journals from 17 developing countries), SciELO24 (approximately 500 journals from Latin American and other Spanish and Portugese-speaking countries) or MedKnow Publications25 (79 journals mainly from India), show high usage both from neighbouring developing countries and from wider international communities alike. The example of Bioline International usage in 2008, showing 4.2 million full-text downloads from a global audience, is typical. Usage from the interoperable institutional repositories is equally high, and rising. The usage of full-text material from institutional repositories that have installed statistical data packages shows low-income countries are among the top users – again demonstrating a real need for previously unattainable information.26,27
As open access has become established, major international institutes and funders have begun to require that copies of articles that result from their support are deposited in institutional repositories or published initially in open access journals. In the United Kingdom, more than 90% of publicly funded medical research is covered by open access mandates. In the United States of America, the research access policy of the National Institutes of Health promises to make available publicly about 80 000 articles per year. Globally, as at 5 June 2009, there were 84 open access mandates28 from such prestigious organizations as Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Southampton University, all the United Kingdom Research Councils, the Wellcome Trust and many other institutes, universities and departments, 17% of which are from developing countries. There are now 4184 open access journals published,29 15% in developing countries and 1351 institutional repositories30 – approximately 17% of these are located in developing countries. At the same time, there is much supporting infrastructure activity – developing institutional repository networks, developing software that allows harvesting between repositories and similar regional developments.31,32 These figures demonstrate the increasing global acceptance of open access policies as a way to enhance research around the world.
Misconceptions
There have been many misconceptions about open access that have retarded its acceptance. It has been said that open access is equivalent to “vanity press” and that it lowers scholarly standards, but this is not the case since copies of author’s final accepted articles deposited in institutional repositories have already been accepted for publication following review and open access journals incorporate rigorous peer review. Again, whereas it had been feared that the imposition of author-fees by some commercial open access journals would disenfranchise authors from developing countries, it is now clear that revenues can be maintained in alternative ways, such as print subscriptions, other publishing services or reprint sales. As has been shown by the MedKnow Publications service, Mumbai, there has been an increase in subscriptions to the hard copy version since providing open access to the online version.25
It is also incorrect to say that self-archiving automatically infringes copyright in all cases. The majority (63%) of non-open access journals allow deposit of copies of published articles in institutional repositories (sometimes with an embargo period) and most open access journals allow authors to retain copyright (see statement on copyright from Science Commons and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, SPARC).33 It has been said that the connectivity problems in developing countries render open access inappropriate, yet these problems, while real, apply equally to non-open access online publications. Moreover, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) recently reported that the research needs for access to new information drive connectivity and vice versa.34 While much remains to be done, both connectivity and access to broadband are improving globally, and new mobile technology is beginning to play a major role in health care communication. It has been said that research information is not appropriate for health workers, yet access to new research drives development of new health applications and builds a strong national science base which in turn strengthens medical services and national economies.35
The way ahead
It is our view that the United Nations and other international organizations should give strong support to the open access movement, which holds such promise for both research and public health. In this respect, it is gratifying to see that one of the stated objectives in the report of the Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property is to “promote public access to the results of government funded research, by strongly encouraging that all investigators ... submit to an open access database an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts”.36 It is hoped that this will translate into action in the form of vigorous support for low-cost institutional repositories and local open access journals, as well as by raising awareness of the many benefits of open access. Initiatives such as TropIKA,37 incorporating open access medical publications for tropical diseases that are most prevalent in developing countries, are encouraging, as is the recent announcement by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in India, urging the establishment of institutional repositories in each of its more than 35 laboratories as well as conversion of all their journals to open access.38 The recent adoption of an open access mandate by the University of Pretoria in South Africa again demonstrates recognition of the importance of open access for developing regions.39
While it may be helpful to continue the donor programmes as long as they are needed, it is only through removing the barriers to access to global research that health improvements can be accelerated. Open access delivers free access to millions of research articles for all with Internet access regardless of institutional affiliation or national GDP. It builds research and health-care independence and replaces the dependency culture that is now widely criticized.40 The report of the Global Forum for Health Research states, “Strengthening research capacity in developing countries is one of the most effective and sustainable ways of advancing health and development . . . and of helping correct the 10/90 gap in health research”.41 Open access is a necessary first step. ■
Competing interests: None declared.
References
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Perceptions of open access publishing: interviews with journal authors

2009-08-07T14:21:00.000-07:00

Published at BMJ 2005;330:756 (2 April), doi:10.1136/bmj.38359.695220.82 (published 26 January 2005)

Introduction
The traditional business model in scientific journal publishing is based on subscription charges to readers. This model might restrict access to knowledge and generate undeserved profit for publishers.1-3 An emerging alternative is open access publishing, which gives lawful free access to journal content on the internet and is funded by means other than readers' subscriptions. Several models for financing this have been proposed, including an author pays model, where authors' contributions to the cost of publishing replace readers' subscriptions. The author's contribution is usually referred to as an "author charge," which might be paid by research funders or the author's institution. Some journals currently charging authors, such as BioMed Central journals, have made provision for institutional membership, which offers exemption from charges to individual authors. Currently, several biomedical publishers, including the BMJ Publishing Group,4 are considering moving towards open access funded through author charges, but we know little about authors' attitudes or likely responses to such charges. The evidence so far is limited to experiments with heavily subsidised author charges and several surveys of authors with limited sampling,5 low response rates,6-7 and polls of authors from specialty journals about their preference for author charges or subscription models.8 9
Most journals experimenting with authors' fees charge less than Wellcome's estimated cost of $2500 (£1329, 1914) for producing an article.10 Consequently, these experiments cannot anticipate the long term sustainability of such a business model. To determine what motivates authors to publish in specific journals, whether they support open access publishing, and their perceptions of journals that charge authors fees, we carried out a series of interviews with authors to explore their understanding and attitudes.

Methods
We divided the list of corresponding authors who submitted to the BMJ in 2003 into regions reflecting areas from which the BMJ receives most submissions: United Kingdom; North America; Australasia; and Europe (excluding United Kingdom). We used computer generated random numbers to select a sample of 10 authors from each region and a further 10 in the European sample for use in case of language difficulties.
Data collectionWe conducted semistructured interviews by telephone (see bmj.com for interview schedule). Authors were asked if they were familiar with the terms "open access publishing" and "author pays models" and what they understood these terms to mean; whether they were in support of open access publishing; how they felt about the idea of author charges replacing subscription costs; whether they would consider submitting papers to author pays journals; and whether they would submit to the BMJ if it introduced publication charges.
We provided definitions to participants not familiar with the terms and to those who gave inadequate descriptions. We defined open access as "the provision of lawful free access to journal content online with its production funded by means other than subscription charges." An author pays model was defined as "an alternative method of funding journals whereby subscription charges are replaced with author charges for publication." When all interviews were completed, we independently collated responses and grouped the data according to emerging themes.11 Both interviewers (SS and LT) verified subsequent themes.

Results
We attempted to contact 50 authors. Eleven were excluded (seven incorrect contact details, two absent, two language problems). Of the 29 eligible authors, 28 (72%) took part.
The 28 authors, aged 31-60, lived in the United Kingdom (seven), United States (five), Canada (two), Australia (four), New Zealand (three), the Netherlands (two), Denmark (three), Germany (one), and Finland (one). Twenty one were men. Respondents had been active researchers for between two and 30 years; 18 had been active researchers for at least 10 years. Authors had published between zero and 305 articles, and 18 had published at least 25 papers. Over half (15) had published in at least 15 different journals. Most had received research grants. Participants had a wide range of research interests.
Familiarity, support, and reservationsAll except four authors reported that they were familiar with the term "open access publishing" and defined it accurately when prompted. Some assumed open access meant publishing without peer review or printed journals. Half (14) reported that they had not previously submitted to an open access journal or were uncertain if they had. Only two had submitted a paper to an open access journal other than the BMJ. Several said that it can be difficult to discern editorial policies for specific journals because libraries subscribe to e-journals which appear to be open access, while some journals have temporary open access to selected content.
Almost all authors supported the concept of open access publishing. Authors reported benefits for themselves and other researchers, including easier and faster literature searching; reduced costs in terms of time savings, photocopying, interlibrary loans, and subscriptions; faster dissemination of results to a wider audience; more equitable access; and the potential for medicine to improve globally.
Respondents were concerned that open access publishing might lead to vanity publishing (poor quality research being published for a fee) and a flood of non-peer reviewed papers on the internet. Peer review, they said, is extremely important and resources might be directed away from this to fund open access.
Willingness to submit to open access journalsMost authors were willing to submit to open access journals. Many said open access was not a relevant factor when they were selecting a journal. Some questioned the quality and reputation of existing open access journals.
Familiarity with author pays modelTwelve authors were not at all familiar with the term "author pays model." However, another 12 were either familiar with the term or had heard of the concept of journals charging authors fees to fund publication. Several had not made the connection between author charges and open access publishing. A further four authors reported being familiar with the term but failed to describe it accurately; one believed it to be vanity publishing and three described page charges. Only nine authors could name some existing author pays journals.
Attitudes towards author chargesAuthors were mostly against author charges. Many thought there were negative implications of shifting costs to authors and that authors themselves should not be required to pay. Some thought charges might be acceptable if grant agencies and universities agreed to support authors. Some were concerned by the idea of paying to publish in non-peer reviewed journals and that the standard of publishing might decline. A few commented on the difficulty of implementing the model and the need for author charges to become standard so that the quality of journals could still be evaluated.
Several authors were concerned for those who could not afford to pay and said waivers would be necessary. Unfunded research, including methodological work, research done by junior doctors and PhD students, and researchers in developing countries, might not be published.
An author pays system might represent an additional barrier to researchers, resulting in restricted publications, which could have serious implications (box 1).
Willingness to submit to author pays journalsOverall, authors were not keen on the author pays model and would hesitate to submit to journals operating under such models. A few said charges might deter them and they would first look for journals that did not charge. Some said they would only submit to an author pays journal if all journals charged authors or if the better regarded journals they usually submit to switched to this model.
Factors of importance when selecting a journal included impact factor, reputation, readership, speed of publication, and the quality of peer review systems (box 2). Therefore, they would continue to submit appropriate papers to journals they regarded as "high quality" even if they charged. Mediating factors, however, were how much journals would charge and whether research funders would pay on the author's behalf. If fees were too high granting agencies (public funders and charities) might not be willing to pay.
Reasons cited for not previously submitting to author pays journals included lack of familiarity and perceptions that they are not widely read, that they don't have impact factors, have inferior peer review, and are not of high calibre (box 3).

Discussion
Authors were aware of the concepts of open access publishing and author pays journals. While nearly all authors supported the idea of open access publishing, few had knowingly submitted to an open access journal. Concern was expressed about implications of author charges for those who may not be able to pay. Many said they would probably continue to submit to journals they considered as high quality if they charged authors, but this would depend on price and whether they received financial support.
Box 1: Additional barriers to researchers (sample quotes)
Might restrict publications
I wouldn't want geniuses to be inhibited to publish as then I wouldn't have access to their work (U5)
But you don't want the barrier to be too high. If costs are too large it would skew the type of submissions received (AM8) I have some concerns...It is hard enough finding published literature for Cochrane as it is. It is even harder to find unpublished stuff. If the model was costly enough to drive publications underground that would make Cochrane's work even more difficult (A8)
Research process is hard enough
I would hate that. It's awkward as a scientist to go through writing your manuscript, it's time consuming. Having to find the money would make it worse (E14)
Box 2: Other factors are important when selecting a journal (sample quotes)
Charging policy would not influence choice of journal
Yes...it would not be prohibitive... But I would think more about it before submitting. The quality of the target journal you are trying to get published in is more important than having to pay a fee or not. I have not factored in open access as a reason to or not to submit. If one journal came up...of good quality...or if a journal changed to this status...it wouldn't at all influence my choice...even if there was a payment to be made (AM7)
Quality and reputation of journal
I would be willing to consider it. But what I am more concerned about is the quality of the publication. I have access to funds through which I could pay to publish...as long as the fee isn't too outrageous (AM10)
I would be quite unhappy about it. I guess if it was a really top journal [I would submit]...but I would be really unhappy about it. Basically for quite a long time I would not be able to afford to do this (A7)
This comes back to the journals we target...if they became open access journals our hands would be tied...We would continue to target BMJ, Lancet, JAMA in the first instance...this is standard with our unit and the work we do [trials]. If they became open access we would submit and pay grudgingly because they have a phenomenal reputation. There is huge motivation for researchers to pursue publications in journals with the highest impact factors. If open access had an effect on impact factors then we would move on in the long term but in the short term we would continue to target the same journals (A8)
Depends on impact factor
Yes...but again it depends on impact factor because the university I work for has guidelines. We are discouraged from submitting to low impact journals...there is a list of journals we can use. I think this is widespread, at least in top universities, particularly in the UK with the focus on the RAE [research assessment exercise] (A9)
I might. It has to do with the impact factor whether I am willing to pay. That [the impact factor] determines a lot (E14)
Findings relative to other studiesPrevious surveys in this area have been methodologically weak.5-7 We achieved a good response rate and were able to assess understanding of both the terminology and the concepts behind open access and author pays publishing. Some authors were unfamiliar with the terminology but were familiar with the ideas. In contrast, previous surveys found limited understanding of open access models, which could be due to an assumed familiarity with the terminology.5-7 The BMJ is an open access (but not author pays) journal, and this might also explain some differences. One survey found respondents associated open access with good quality, well indexed electronic material, and half the authors would not pay author charges under any circumstances.7 In contrast, some of our authors questioned the quality of existing open access journals and were more concerned about perceived quality of journals than open access or author charges.
Study limitationsOur sample was limited to authors submitting to the BMJ, where views may differ from those of other authors. However, we took a random sample of international authors, many of whom had published in many other journals so their opinions are probably representative.
Box 3: Reasons for not having submitted to author pays journals (sample quotes)
Perceived as not widely read
I would try the more traditional journals first with bigger readership. There is no point writing and getting published if no one reads it. I would submit to journals I know people read (U1)
Lack of impact factors
They are new journals and so we don't know their impact ratings, etc, yet. I would think about that side of things too (U10)
Inferior peer review systems
Not yet because I don't see them as having the same peer review impact as other journals. I would have to see their peer review comments and system to decide (U2)
Not high calibre
There are enough other journals of high calibre, I wouldn't go there [BioMed Central] (A4)
ImplicationsSeveral publishers are considering moving to open access and could therefore benefit from understanding authors' perceptions and concerns. Authors in this study reported journal quality was more important than open access when deciding where to submit. They said that initiatives such as the research assessment exercise have obliged authors to publish in journals with high impact factors. New open access journals with lower impact factors will need to do more to reassure authors of the quality of their peer review processes and impact.
Some open access journals, such as Documenta Mathematica and Journal of Insect Science, do not charge processing fees. Those considering author charges, however, need to recognise that there are problems with this model and that they may need to make special arrangements for dealing with unfunded research and submissions from developing countries.
Future researchThis small descriptive study has identified a range of attitudes towards open access publishing. Participating authors said their responses depended on how much journals would charge and whether funders and institutions would pay. The next step is to determine the acceptability of various charging models to stake-holders and to conduct a comprehensive economic analysis of these models before concluding which model is most suitable.
What is already known on this topic
Several publishers are considering the viability of adopting open access publishing models funded through "author charges," but little is known about how authors will respond to publication fees
What this study adds
Authors support the concept of open access, though few questioned had submitted to an open access journal
Authors did not know which journals publish with open access, and perceived journal quality was more important than open access when selecting journals to submit to
Authors disliked the idea of author charges without institutional support and concerns were expressed about implications for authors from developing countries and those working on non-funded research
Fives more boxes of sample quotes and the interview schedule can be found on bmj.com
Contributors: RS initiated the study; SS and LT designed the study, interviewed the authors, and interpreted the data. All authors assisted in writing the paper. SS is guarantor.
Funding: BMJ Publishing Group's research budget.
Competing interests: All authors are or were employed by the BMJ Publishing Group. RS has now left the group and is employed by the British subsidiary of the UnitedHealth Group, a large US health and wellbeing company. He is also on the board of the Public Library of Science, an open access publisher. The BMJ is currently an open access journal and is considering whether to adopt author charges to fund the publication process. The researchers who conducted the interviews and analysed the data (SS and LT) do not have a financial interest in what the BMJ decides to do. Because members of the BMJ staff were involved in the conduct of this research and writing the paper, assessment and peer review have been carried out entirely by external advisors. No member of the BMJ staff has been involved in making the decision on the paper.
Ethical approval: This study was approved by the BMJ ethics committee.

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Global Open Access: The Price of Knowledge

2009-05-30T10:32:00.000-07:00

Various business models of research publishing and diverse ways of distilling research data determine the accessibility to publicly funded research. This subject is hotly debated. What are the stakes? The "pay to publish and read" business model is the main offer to researchers and society. This system has come under intense scrutiny in the past decade. Is it good for society if readers are required to pay subscriptions to access the results? The Office of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has estimated that the world spends over US$ 2 trillion p.a. of tax-payer money to fund research which produces over 2.5 million peer-reviewed articles p.a. These articles are published in over 24,000 journals. Over 80% of these "fruits of research" are captured and (re-)sold by the subscription journals.
"Even Harvard, the university with the largest journals budget of all, cannot subscribe to all journals, and most other universities have far smaller journal budgets", says Steven Harnad, a pioneer of the Open Access movement.
In subscription journals, researchers hand over their rights to access their articles, provide these journals a free peer-review service, and often pay extra charges to publish their work - even then they are required to pay to read their own articles. The subscription model is therefore considered the most ingenious business model: peer-review service for free, ownership of priceless content at no charge, authors made to pay for extra publishing costs, authors compete with each other to give away their material and rights, and content sold back to the authors.
When a journal becomes popular with high impact, subscriptions rise as expected from a supply and demand market. Managing the submission and review process, processing the articles for publication, printing and distributing a high quality journal involves cost. But is the restriction of knowledge for society justifiable? Does it have a place in the 21st century information and knowledge society?
The dominance of subscription-based research access in the publishing industry has been mainly secured because of the need for researchers to "Publish or Perish". Established publishers provide a measure of quality, which is judged today by their Impact Factor. A journal's Impact Factor shapes researchers' choice of publisher because it gives greater visibility and automatic credit.
New journals are created for those articles that do not manage to get into the high impact journals, which has led to what has been called the "serials crisis". The serials crisis reached a threshold in the 80's resulting in worldwide protest by libraries. Open Access publishing models were thus born: "a digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions", says Peter Suber, Open Access project director at Public Knowledge.
Early Signs of Community Awareness
According to John Willinsky, Professor at the Stanford University School of Education and a major Open Access activist, the definition and the core principle of Open Access publishing lie in the following statement: "A commitment to the value and quality of research carries with it responsibility to extend the circulation of such work as far as possible and ideally to all who are interested in it and all who might profit by it". For Willinsky, the scholarly community should morally take an oath, as do physicians, that they must disseminate their research to the widest audience possible. Willinsky's ideal commitment for the way scholars should consider the value of their research, resulted in various major actions throughout the history of the global Open Access movement.
The scholarly publishing revolution by libraries took place in the context of a crisis and was helped by the Internet boom that allowed the sharing of information in a completely new way. Research libraries spent 2.7 times more for serials during 1998-1999 than during 1985-1986, yet purchased 6% fewer serial titles. Journal prices increased 215% between 1986 and 2003, while the consumer price index rose just 68%. This publishing state of emergency spurred libraries and researchers from different leading Open Access scholarly disciplines such as physics, mathematics, medicine, and neuroscience to reclaim their right to scientific literature by using innovative communications tools.
Between 1991 and 1998 researchers and libraries created a panel of online web-based repositories to archive research articles and provide access to all the international scientific community - among those, ArXiv (www.arxiv.org) the first Open e-print archive server, was set up in 1991. Open Access advocacy groups such as SPARC (www.sparc.org) began to emerge. This was soon followed by Open Access journals and archiving initiatives. Most notably was the launch of the Public Library of Science (PloS, 2001; www.plos.org) and Pubmed Central (2002; www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov). Since then, more than 2131 Open Access journals have been launched across many disciplines by researchers, foundations and companies. These are now listed in a Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org). The research community has become pro-active in the way they want to see their research published.
The most recent actions in the history of Open Access that transported the movement beyond specialized scientific communities into the political arena, is a series of Open Access Initiatives during the early 2000's. The Budapest Open Access Initiative (www.soros.org/openaccess) conference launched in 2002 by the Open Society Institute (www.soros.org) sponsored by philanthropist George Soros, led the way to international awareness and positioning in favor of the Open Access movement.
A Growing International Commitment
A growing commitment by the international community to tackle the issue of availability of publicly funded research results, and to minimize influence of commercial lobbies, has been formalized in community statements laying out a global wish, policies and guidelines. In 2002, UNESCO launched "Information for All" (www.unesco.org), an intergovernmental program facilitating universal access to information and knowledge. Two additional statements in 2003, after the Budapest statement, declared the deepest possible support from the international scientific community for the values of the Open Access movement: The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge on the Sciences and Humanities (http://oa.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html), and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access publishing (www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm).
On January 30, 2004 the OECD Ministers of Technology and Scientific Research endorsed the "Declaration on Access to research data from public funding" concluding that governments should enhance access to research data financed by taxpaying societies in order to establish and optimize a fair benefit between what the general public invests in terms of research funding and how freely they can access these results. Finally, The World Summit on the Information Society's Declaration of Principles repeated the support for Open Access from the international community. The principle states: "We strive to promote universal access with equal opportunities for all to scientific knowledge and the creation and dissemination of scientific and technical information, including open access initiatives for scientific publishing."
Despite the succession of all these historical and emblematic declarations promoting Open Access philosophy and further stressed by the involvement of the public policies, the conventional channel of research publishing still remains the dominant means of disseminating scientific results. Commercial actors still oust Open Access players in the market share, a situation that can be explained by different factors. Publishing habits and lack of knowledge of Open Access in the scientific world are among the reasons that sustain the gap between OA and traditional publishers. The OA publishing methods have to face publishing customs that, till today, firmly lie in the belief that only well established publishing houses with the most read journals provide good Impact Factors. This conviction is not completely wrong, especially for young researchers at the dawn of their careers, who are publishing their work for the first time. This is despite several studies showing that publishing in Open Access journals implies more article visibility and hence a higher "article impact".
Other studies such as the one carried out by the German Research Foundation and the one prepared by Key Perspectives Ltd for the UK JICS Scholarly communication group in 2007, also seems to indicate the lack of knowledge about Open Access in the scientific community and that awareness varies among disciplines.
What's next?
In addition to these handicaps, the Open Access movement also faces subtle pressures. The UK Ministry of Commerce for example, rejected a report drafted by the UK Scientific and Technical Committee of the Chamber of Representatives in 2004 to make Open Access mandatory to all universities and research councils. Were commercial pressures applied?
The Open Access movement still has a lot to do before making this publishing model a generality rather than an exception. Work needs to be done to inform members of the scientific community who are still not familiar with Open Access publishing and self- archiving. Most of all, the issue of availability of publicly funded research, that has now become a passionate topic of political debate, needs strong advocates. Scientific societies are in a key position to contribute to this global change, but in most cases are too grounded in 20th century traditions. Universities and libraries are leading the way as they exceed budgets far before they can obtain access to all the research needed. Governments and foundations are starting to require Open Access to the results of the research that is funded by them, but face opposing pressures from commercial interests. With the advent of radically new Internet technologies and a new generation of researchers who use the Internet as a key component of a laboratory, one wonders how long the Open Access Culture can be held back.
by Shamsa Abdulrasak

Benefits of Open Access

2009-04-24T10:23:00.000-07:00