• Sweden's Pirate Party, which supports OA, will gain its second seat in the European Parliament, thanks to reapportionment as part of the recently ratified Lisbon Treaty.
• Three more BioMed Central journals have been accepted for tracking by Thomson Reuters and will receive impact factors.
• RePEc added 16 new participating archives in October 2009.
• PubMed Central will show the table of contents for some embargoed journals before the embargoed content is available.
• The OA Hazardous Substances Data Bank added its first set of records on nanomaterials.
• John Wilbanks shares his further thoughts on why "open source" is an insufficient metaphor for open approaches to science.
• Barbara Fister on libraries: "We must position ourselves as the champions of students and faculty and their right to read and learn without ... hindrances and barriers".
• Meanwhile, Lawrence Lessig tells educational technologies to become "radical militant activists" for legal, accessible sharing of knowledge.
• The revised draft Google Book Settlement is due on November 9, Kenneth Crews reminds us.
• Anne Fitzgerald released her report on public sector information, Open access policies, practices and licensing: a review of the literature in Australia and selected jurisdictions.

The Association of Research Libraries has released its strategic plan for 2010-2012. Each of the plan's three strategic directions touches on OA, directly or indirectly.

From the strategic direction Influencing Public Policies:

... Expand ARL’s capacity for advancing open access/open science and access to data through increased advocacy and collaboration with other allied and partner organizations such as the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). ...

From the strategic direction Reshaping Scholarly Communication:

... Sponsor, conduct, and promote research that will inform the development and assessments of models of scholarly communication. ...

As previously announced, PubMed Central Canada launched during Open Access Week. The manuscript submission system will launch later this year.

See also our past posts on PMC Canada.

Liz Allen, Responding to community feedback - DeepDyve and PLoS - Q & A, Public Library of Science, November 4, 2009.

Over the past few days, a company called DeepDyve, who run a search engine that we use on the PLoS.org website, announced a rental service for research articles. DeepDyve offers two types of content on its site - restricted-access content (from traditional publishers such as OUP, Wiley-Blackwell, Sage and others) which can be "rented" for $0.99 on a "pay-as-you-go" model and open-access content, which is always free.

The open-access and library community have been asking some pertinent questions about this new launch and our involvement with it which we'd like to address in this blog post.

Q: Is PLoS charging a fee for access to articles that appear in DeepDyve?

A: There is no financial gain to PLoS - all our content is freely available online to everyone, including commercial organizations, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License that we use.

Q: Why has PLoS agreed to provide its content to DeepDyve?

A. The Creative Commons License means that no permission is required to reuse PLoS content - in fact, creative reuse for commercial as well as non-commercial purposes is encouraged. Readers might like to know that almost every organization that wants to use PLoS content in bulk checks in with us first out of courtesy and this was the case with Deep Dyve. ...

Q. Is PLoS doing this to gain eyeballs on its content?

A. PLoS content is freely available to everyone who wants to reuse it. We want as many people as possible to take advantage of this content because research information is most powerful when more people can discover and use it and naturally, we're in favor of maximum exposure for the work of PLoS authors. ...

Finally, when we raised some of the concerns of the community, listed above, with DeepDyve they were responsive and immediately made the status of open-access content clearer on their website.

See also our past post on DeepDyve.

Patrick Williams, Utah State University Press Merges With Merrill-Cazier Library, Utah State Today, November 2, 2009.

Joining a growing national trend, Utah State University Press will merge with the administrative structure of Merrill-Cazier Library at Utah State University. The transition has begun, with the arrangement officially taking effect at the start of fiscal year 2010-11.

The move was recently approved by USU’s Executive Vice President and Provost Raymond T. Coward, following a proposal from Richard Clement, dean of USU Libraries, and Michael Spooner, director of USU Press.

The merger of a scholarly press with a university library has been used at other institutions to innovatively address a number of trends in scholarly publication, Clement and Spooner said.

Digital publishing, for example, will play an important part in the future of scholarly publication, and university libraries and presses are both deeply interested in its potential for transforming the way research is distributed.

“Many university presses are moving toward open access, often under the administration of the library,” Clement said. “The most conspicuous example in the recent past is the University of Michigan Press which moved into the library and is now focusing on OA and other forms of digital publication. We propose to move the USU Press along the same path.” ...

“Among universities with presses, there is an emerging trend in this direction, and Utah State University Press now joins the first dozen or so university presses to pursue this relationship,” Spooner said.

While the decision to move USU Press to Merrill-Cazier Library was not completely budget-driven, it will result in significant savings, Clement said. With a larger staff in place, the library will assume a number of support activities for the press, including accounting, IT support, graphic design and public relations. ...

USU Press will adopt a new publication model, with open access as a central component and will move toward increased digital delivery of books. ...

“This move directly serves the needs of the university,” Clement said. “Open access allows us to go back to where university presses began — to publish work by all faculty in every discipline.”

At the same time, USU Press remains a refereed scholarly press, with the standards of rigorous peer review appropriate to a university publisher. ...

Also see coverage by Inside Higher Ed:

For the last nine months, the survival of the Utah State University Press has been in doubt, with fears that deep cuts being made to public higher education in Utah would end up killing off the publishing outlet.

This week comes news that the press will survive -- in part by embracing a new model of organization (becoming part of the university library) and a new business model (embracing open access, in which most publications would be available online and free). ...

Update. Also see coverage by Library Journal.

DigitalKoans postings will resume on 11/16/09.

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The Harvard Law Library is recruiting a Manager of Digital Lab.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

The Harvard Law Library is seeking a creative and experienced innovator to provide strategic and operational leadership as the Manager of our Digital Lab. The Digital Lab is the Library's focal point for a wide range of activities, including developing internet tools to promote and enhance access to legal information and coordinating the library's digitization efforts. Reporting to the Associate Director for Collection Development and Digitization, the Manager of the Digital Lab leads the design, creation, and distribution of technological tools for delivering content and services in support of learning and research at the Harvard Law School and beyond; manages the Library's digitization projects, including those produced onsite and those outsourced to the University's Digital Imaging Group or other external entities; develops and implements division policies, plans, goals, and procedures; ensures appropriate staffing levels, staff skills, and output. The Manager will supervise a current full time staff of five; two Development Programmers, a Web Development Librarian, a Digital Preservation Librarian, and a Digital Projects Assistant, as well as project fellows.

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Brill, an international academic publisher located in Leiden and Boston, has launched Brill Open.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

This new author service offers the option of making articles freely available upon publication. Brill Open enables authors to comply with research funding bodies and institutions which require open access.

The Brill Open option will be available for all 135 journals published under the imprints Brill, Martinus Nijhoff and VSP. Articles will be put in online open access in exchange for an article publishing fee to be arranged by the author.

Sam Bruinsma, Brill's Business Development Director, explains:"We are launching this new service in answer to a growing number of research funding bodies and universities announcing their compliance with the open access model. With Brill Open our journals are ready to meet the expected increase in contributions under this model."

In order to ensure that authors' funder requirements have no influence on the editorial peer review and decision-making, Brill Open will be made available to authors only upon acceptance of their paper for publication. Those authors who do not wish to use this service will be under no pressure to do so, and their accepted article will be published in the usual manner.

Brill's strategic intent is to adjust the future subscription price of a journal to reflect an increase in Brill Open fees. Sam Bruinsma comments: "Our view on open access developments is positive. We accept that over time an increasing part of our revenues will come through this new model. This will have an impact on the revenues from our library subscription service. The combination of these two business models will continue to support a healthy and sustainable journal program attractive to the best authors in the field."

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Rebecca Tushnet has self-archived the "Economies of Desire: Fair Use and Marketplace Assumptions" in SSRN.

Here's the abstract:

At the moment that "incentives" for creation meet "preferences" for the same, the economic account of copyright loses its explanatory power. This piece explores the ways in which the desire to create can be excessive, beyond rationality, and free from the need for economic incentive. Psychological and sociological concepts can do more to explain creative impulses than classical economics. As a result, a copyright law that treats creative activity as a product of economic incentives can miss the mark and harm what it aims to promote. The idea of abundance—even overabundance—in creativity can help define the proper scope of copyright law, especially in fair use. I explore these ideas by examining how creators think about what they do. As it turns out, commercially and critically successful creators resemble creators who avoid the general marketplace and create unauthorized derivative works (fanworks). The role of love, desire, and other passions in creation has lessons for the proper aims of copyright, the meaning of fair use, and conceptions of exploitation in markets.

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The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development has released Information Economy Report 2009: Trends and Outlook in Turbulent Times.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Contents:

• Global and regional trends in the diffusion of ICTs such as fixed and mobile telecommunications, Internet, and broadband
• Ranking of the most dynamic economies in terms of increased ICT connectivity between 2003 and 2008
• Monitoring of the “digital divide”
• Survey of national statistical offices on the use of ICT in the business sector
• A review of the changing patterns in the trade of ICT goods
• A mapping of the new geography in the offshoring of IT and ICT-enabled services.
• Policy recommendations on how developing countries can reap greater benefits from ICT
• A statistical annex with global ICT data.

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The Utah State University Press will merge with the Merrill-Cazier Library, and it will "adopt a new publication model, with open access as a central component."

Here's an excerpt from the press release

Joining a growing national trend, Utah State University Press will merge with the administrative structure of Merrill-Cazier Library at Utah State University. The transition has begun, with the arrangement officially taking effect at the start of fiscal year 2010-11. . . .

"Many university presses are moving toward open access, often under the administration of the library,” Clement [Richard Clement, Dean of USU Libraries] said. “The most conspicuous example in the recent past is the University of Michigan Press which moved into the library and is now focusing on OA and other forms of digital publication. We propose to move the USU Press along the same path." . . .

While the decision to move USU Press to Merrill-Cazier Library was not completely budget-driven, it will result in significant savings, Clement said. With a larger staff in place, the library will assume a number of support activities for the press, including accounting, IT support, graphic design and public relations. . . .

USU Press will adopt a new publication model, with open access as a central component and will move toward increased digital delivery of books. The library’s position will be enhanced as well, as academic libraries nationally take on a stronger role in the evolution of scholarly publishing.

Read more about it at "Survival—Through Open Access" and "USU Press merging with Merrill-Cazier Library."

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I'll be out tomorrow for a personal day. But check the Open Access Tracking Project for the latest updates, and I'll be back Friday.

• Stanford is dropping the requirement that dissertations be submitted to ProQuest and will instead host them in its IR, with optional embargo.
• The PEER Project (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) published its final report on workflows for publishers and repositories participating in the project's research.
• Consumers International launched a survey on barriers to access to knowledge.
• The OA collection Les Classiques des sciences sociales added its 4,000th title.
• Science Commons released a guide to copyright considerations for ontologies.
• The Fedorazon project released its final report on running a "repository in the cloud".
• The Open Source Paleontologist examines pay-per-download article prices and finds them disproportionate. Matthew Burton-Kelly comments as well.
• Andrew Spong says that participatory culture changes how the value of content is conceptualized, which makes TA publishers' value proposition "an increasingly isolated, static and entropic one."

Brill introduces Journal Open Access Service: Brill Open, press release, November 4, 2009.

Brill, a prominent scholarly publisher in the Humanities and International Law, is pleased to announce the launch of Brill Open. This new author service offers the option of making articles freely available upon publication. Brill Open enables authors to comply with research funding bodies and institutions which require open access.

The Brill Open option will be available for all 135 journals published under the imprints Brill, Martinus Nijhoff and VSP. Articles will be put in online open access in exchange for an article publishing fee to be arranged by the author.

Sam Bruinsma, Brill’s Business Development Director, explains: ‘We are launching this new service in answer to a growing number of research funding bodies and universities announcing their compliance with the open access model. With Brill Open our journals are ready to meet the expected increase in contributions under this model.’

In order to ensure that authors' funder requirements have no influence on the editorial peer review and decision-making, Brill Open will be made available to authors only upon acceptance of their paper for publication. Those authors who do not wish to use this service will be under no pressure to do so, and their accepted article will be published in the usual manner.

Brill’s strategic intent is to adjust the future subscription price of a journal to reflect an increase in Brill Open fees. Sam Bruinsma comments: ‘Our view on open access developments is positive. We accept that over time an increasing part of our revenues will come through this new model. This will have an impact on the revenues from our library subscription service. The combination of these two business models will continue to support a healthy and sustainable journal program attractive to the best authors in the field.’

Larry Johnson, NMC and UOC Release Call to Action for Open Education, New Media Consortium, November 1, 2009.

Forty internationally known leaders in open education and technology met in Barcelona on October 19-20, 2009, at the NMC's first official European event, the Open EdTech Summit, cosponsored by the Open University of Catalunya and the New Media Consortium. ...

Summit attendees generated fifty action items necessary to realize the goal of creating an institution that can meet the needs of students today and into the foreseeable future, and then ranked them. Those which ranked highest are captured here, and framed as a Call to Action - five major tasks that are perceived as critical to achieving the promise of open education: ...

4. We must enable a culture of sharing. Recognizing that the sharing and reuse of scholarly work is a key component of the university of the future, we advocate building a culture of sharing in which concerns about intellectual property, copyright, and student-to-student collaboration are alleviated and the model of proprietary work dissolves in favor of a more open one. To this end, we must establish reward structures that support the sharing of work in progress, ongoing research, highly collaborative projects, and scholarly publications of all kinds, including reputation systems, peer review processes, and new models for citation of such content. ...

Caroline Sutton, OASPA one year on: Core values, best practices and future plans, OASPA News and Commentary, November 4, 2009.

... [The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association] has established a sub-group for mixed model publishers headed by David Ross from SAGE Publications. A sub-group for scholar publishers is also being established, building upon the energy and dialogue established amongst this group at [the Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (Lund, September 14-16, 2009)]. The need to address open access books publishing was also clearly expressed and OASPA will support the establishment of a sub-group within the organization. We expect proposals for other sub-groups over the next year.

Because an exchange of information should also extend beyond our own membership, OASPA has also established groups in LinkedIn and on Facebook. ...

The OASPA blog will also be an important forum for exchanging information. ... Paul Peters of Hindawi Publishing Corporation will edit and coordinate the blog. ...

During the next month the OASPA board will hold a special board meeting to discuss the establishment of a sub-committee focused on the financing of open access publishing. In a breakout session at COASP librarians and administrators called upon publishers to aggregate their pre-payment and membership programs, and to possibly work through library consortia to negotiate centralized Open Access funding sources. Professional publishing organizations arrived at a similar suggestion during their session, and this common view of the situation by these two stakeholder groups lends hope to the possibility of creating sustainable funding sources to centrally support Open Access publishing at an institutional, consortial, or possibly even national level.

OASPA members can also expect to see new membership benefits added. A contract has been negotiated with CrossRef to provide scholar publisher members with DOIs through OASPA. ... Knowledge Exchange has also offered a discounted rate for OASPA members, and we look to establishing additional arrangements with other organizations supporting OA publishing. ...

Timothy Caulfield, Do Gene Patents Hurt Research?, Science Progress, October 29, 2009.

... There is solid evidence that commercialization pressure and the involvement of industry can:

• adversely affect the collaborative nature of research
• increase data withholding behavior (that is, stop researchers from sharing information)
• lead to the premature implementation of technologies
• distort research results and corrode public trust.

For example, a 2009 study by Hong and Walsh concluded that “commercial linkages and increased pressures from scientific competition” was a predictor of increased data withholding. This study also found that, in the realm of biology, data withholding was not correlated with patenting. Commercialization pressure, not patenting, is the problem. ...

JISC has released Fedorazon: Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

The Fedorazon project is first and foremost the experiences of a small HE/FE team running and maintaining a Repository in the Cloud for one year. Being early adopters we provide both technical, fiscal and practical advice for both our successes and failures in this endeavour. We hope this report provides insight for other institutions wishing to utilise the Cloud for their Repository instance which we wholeheartedly recommend given they read this report first and prepare accordingly.

The Fedorazon project has discovered that a 'Repository in the Cloud' is easy to get up and running (both figuratively and literally); after that, all the complexity of hardware management, political costings and human resource allocation are still right where you left them. None the less we think there are significant cost savings in the Cloud that will only increase over time. We also believe that utilising the 'network effect' of the Cloud institutions can relieve the burden of having a local hardware expert to manage the repository instance. Finally, we believe that Cloud will lead to a significant change in the way we view repository architectures, especially in regards to how a 'preservation architecture' is achieved.

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The Harvard Law Library is recruiting a Web Developer.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

The Harvard Law Library is seeking an energetic and creative web developer to join our newly created Digital Lab team. The Digital Lab is the Library's focal point for a wide range of activities including developing internet tools to promote and enhance access to legal information. The Web Developer manages the full life cycle of development projects. Reporting to the Manager of the Digital Lab, the Web Developer will design, develop, test and deploy new applications and extensions to existing applications; research coding and infrastructure technologies in connection with application design and implementation; identify integration requirements between applications; review and modify systems programs as needed to correct utility or application programs; install or customize modules and features for open source and proprietary software packages; develop and maintain documentation, participate in third party tool and product evaluations as needed, and take on other related duties as assigned. Works closely with librarian, unit director and other programmers.

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Stanford University will implement an electronic dissertation program this month.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Speaking at the Oct. 22 Faculty Senate meeting, University Librarian Michael Keller said the digital world offers a "much greater palette of expression" to graduate students, because they will be able to include more graphics, color and character sets in their dissertations than in paper copies.

"[There will be] more opportunities to link to online resources and to have those links live," Keller said during a joint presentation on the program with University Registrar Thomas Black.

The program is the result of a yearlong collaboration between Stanford University Libraries & Academic Information Resources and the Registrar's Office.

Under the program, digital dissertations will be stored in the Stanford Digital Repository, which provides preservation services for scholarly resources, helping to ensure their integrity, authenticity and usability over time.

Keller said the documents will be available to the Stanford community through Socrates, the university's online library catalog, and "available to the world" through Google, which will serve as a third-party distributor. He said the library will print one copy of each work and store it in the Stanford University Archives.

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