Archive for the ‘Open Access’ Category

Here’s a discussion not to miss: Terra Incognita is hosting SPARC’s Gavin Baker discussing the linkages between open access publishing and open educational resources. More about him:

Gavin Baker is an IT and public policy consultant. Currently he is developing a student outreach campaign for SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, on the subject of open access to academic journal literature. Gavin also serves on the board of directors for FreeCulture.org, which is an international student organization that promotes the public interest in intellectual property and information & communications technology policy.

I’ll definitely be tuning in for this one.

…is when established interests threatened by disruptive innovations marshal resources to lobby against change. Here, Open Access News covers the recent launch of a lobbying group to protect traditional journal publishing models.

In addition to ICT’s making the world a smaller place, they are also making it a much more accurately and availably mapped place, and the geospatial data now available is being combined with all kinds of other data to reveal the world in new ways. Open Access News is carrying this bit on recent developments in open geospatial data, and Sramana Mitra has been carrying this related series as well. I’m not aware of any open education projects using this data, but I’m sure some are out there and more are on the way.

I’ve just finished Charles Vest’s The American Research University from World War II to World Wide Web. Vest was president of MIT when OpenCourseWare was proposed, and has been one of the strongest proponents of the project and the concept. The American Research University (published under full copyright by the U of C Press) is based on speeches given by Vest as the 2005 Clark Kerr Lecturer on the Role of Higher Education in Society.

Vest was president of MIT for thirteen years, an extraordinarily long tenure during which he witnessed extraordinary changes in how universities do business, and this book is filled with observations that can help emerging leaders of open education projects understand the pressures faced by senior leadership at universities. The book contains four chapters covering the relationship between universities and government, universities and philanthropies, universities and terrorism, and finally universities and openness. While the last is the most directly on the topic of openness (it recounts the development of MIT OCW), the others are probably as relevant, especially given that nearly all open education projects have sustainability issues, and because opening knowledge is both more challenging and important in a post 9/11 world. Very much worth the read.

This is a site worth bookmarking. A directory of over 2,800 open access jounals in the following fields:

• Agriculture and Food Sciences
• Arts and Architecture
• Biology and Life Sciences
• Business and Economics
• Chemistry
• Earth and Environmental Sciences
• General Works
• Health Sciences
• History and Archaeology
• Languages and Literatures
• Law and Political Science
• Mathematics and Statistics
• Philosophy and Religion
• Physics and Astronomy
• Science General
• Social Sciences
• Technology and Engineering

In total, the site includes more than 140,000 articles.  I’ve said this before, but as the corpus of OA articles and the prestige of OA journals increases, and as the volume of OpenCourseWare increases, an index to cross-reference the two automatically will be an important way for each to leverage the other.

The Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog has a nice summary of a series of postings by Peter Murray-Rust of the Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge, exploring how different scientific journals implement free and open access to their content.  This illustrates how, as with open course materials, open access journal content is licensed in a variety of ways, allowing a different set of downstream uses.

In the wake of Yale’s announcement, Berkeley has come forward to reaffirm its institutional membership in BioMed Central. From the statement:

In 2006, the California Digital Library (CDL) negotiated a “supporters membership” for the UC system, where the libraries pay a flat rate so that authors can take advantage of a 15% discount on article processing charges when publishing in the BMC open access journals… In the last 12 months, Berkeley researchers have published 50 articles in BMC journals. The member discount also applies to Berkeley authors who publish in Chemistry Central and PhysMath Central open access journals. The libraries are happy to continue supporting our researchers’ use of these open access resources.

(via Open Access News)

On Friday, August 10th, Open Access News carried another in their series of posts on a proposed Open Access mandate for the National Institutes of Health. OAN has been tracking a measure that’s made its way through the House supporting this concept, and this post is an editorial supporting the measure.

The numbers in the Honolulu Advertiser editorial are compelling. $28 billion a year in tax money supports research at NIH, which generates some 60,000 published studies, the vast majority of which end up in subscription-based journals for which universities pay top dollar to access.

I mentioned earlier that Yale had dropped its support for BioMed Central. BMC responds in this release on their site. Again, the discussion is mostly economic. In an absolute sense, open access may be cheaper than traditional subscription, but as the response notes, libraries can’t just move from one to the other:

…the total amount currently spent by libraries on subscriptions would be sufficient to cover the cost of peer-reviewed open access publication for all research articles. Clearly, though, libraries cannot simply transfer their acquisitions budget from subscriptions to open access overnight, since access to the subscription-only archival content currently controlled by publishers is vital for their researchers.

This doesn’t address the question of whether open access journals have sufficient heft yet to attract submissions from the top researchers in the field, which I suspect is more of what ties libraries to the traditional and prestigious subscription-based journals than archival content (though again, I’m not intimately familiar with the issues of open access, so this is a view from the outside looking in). BMC however does map out a way for universities to generate a separate funding stream for open access journals:

Biomedical research funders around the world already spend billions of dollars to support research activity. These funders are understandably concerned to ensure that the results of that research are as widely disseminated as possible so that they obtain the good value from their research expenditure. For research to be worth doing, it must be read, used and built on — open access maximizes the opportunity for such use… It is not surprising therefore, that major biomedical research funders such as NIH and HHMI now encourage open access publication, and are willing to provide financial support for it.

Encouraging research funders to support open access publication solves the acknowledged problem of generating an alternate funding stream, and it also addresses the unacknowledged issue of prestige. There are encouraging signs that at least some funders are inclined to support this approach, but as with many things in open education, this appears to be moving at the pace of cultural change. In the mean time, stop-gaps such as the institutional membership scheme that BMC has put forth will have to have sufficiently compelling value propositions to keep the ball rolling. (via Open Access News)

Like many facets of open education, open access publishing is a great idea still searching for a business model. Yale’s recent announcement that it is dropping support for BioMed illustrates the point:

BioMedCentral has asked libraries for larger and larger contributions to subsidize their activities. Starting with 2005, BioMed Central article charges cost the libraries $4,658, comparable to a single biomedicine journal subscription. The cost of article charges for 2006 then jumped to $31,625. The article charges have continued to soar in 2007 with the libraries charged $29,635 through June 2007, with $34,965 in potential additional article charges in submission.

Open education endeavors have the double challenge of trying to create social benefit and develop business models in the rapidly changing web world, and clearly there are struggles ahead.

Here’s a nice snapshot of the current state of the Open Access movement:

More than 1,000 journals are now using Open Journal Systems (OJS).

Of these:
99% are academic
49% are fully open access
40% are delayed open access
11% have yet to publish their first issue
NOT ONE JOURNAL USING OJS was found to be entirely subscription-bound

Disciplinary breakdown:
50% - sciences
23% - social sciences
14% - humanities
12% - interdisciplinary
1% - non academic

I’m occasionally asked whether I think the Open Access movement is picking up momentum or not, and I don’t have a good answer because I’m not close enough to the action. This are good data points, and it’s encouraging that there are (apparently) more in the pipeline. (via Open Access News).

Tip of the hat to Open Access News on this one: Public Library of Science has launched a user rating system on PLoS ONE. From their guidelines for rating:

PLoS ONE allows users to rate articles for subjective “quality”. Scientific work can be measured on a number of scales and to reflect this, articles can be rated in three separate categories: Insight, Reliability, and Style. Rating is done on a 1 to 5 scale with 1 being the lowest and 5 the highest rating.

1. Insight: This provides a measure of how thought-provoking a user found an article or how much it advances our scientific understanding. The scale for Insight ranges from 1, Bland, a report which provides no more than an incremental advance on the published literature; to 5, Profound, a report which substantially deepens or alters current thinking.
2. Reliability: This provides a measure of how secure a user feels the results and conclusion in a study are. The scale for Reliability ranges from 1, Tenuous, the study is preliminary and will need confirmation; to 5, Unassailable, the results are of high quality, the reasoning is tight, and the conclusions are completely solid.
3. Style: This provides a measure of how well performed and presented a user considers a study to be. The scale for Style ranges from 1, Crude, the technical accomplishment and presentation of the study is adequate at best; to 5, Elegant, the study satisfyingly presents the results of technically accomplished and expertly executed experiments.

Rating systems for online educational resources have been hard to pull off in other contexts, but because this system deals with relatively large pieces of content and because of the specificity of the rating system, I am inclined to think this version has a relatively good chance of success.

The Open Learner is pointing out an open access initiative at OSU Press. the site includes about 60 titles, mostly in the humanities. Every time I see another of these open access efforts, I think again there should be a registry of open access books and articles that can be cross-referenced against citations in opencourseware publications. There may be little crossover at this point, but over time, there will hopefully be a critical mass on both sides of the equation that will lead to significantly more benefit from both resources.

The open access journal movement is one that I’ve been watching over the fence as I’ve been working primarily to open access to teaching materials. The idea with open access journals is that the academic publishing model is essentially broken, with institution–through their faculty–creating journal articles, giving them to journal publishers for free, then paying outrageous subscription rates for access to that very same content. Open access journal seek to short-circuit this cycle, by providing alternative publication opportunities that publish the materials freely and openly.

The challenge for OA journals is that educators continue to publish in the established subscription-based journals because those are the one with the prestige, the ones that lead to tenure, promotion and recognition in the field. I’ve often said that it’s not the academic publication model that is broken, but rather the tenure and promotion model–academic journals are simply exhibiting rational responses to irrational behavior. Over time, the hope is that open access journal will begin to develop the level of prestige necessary to compete with the big traditional journals, something that may already be beginning to happen with the Public Library of Science.

If you are interested in learning more about the open access publishing movement, a good place to start is the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition web site. Spac provides resources for libraries, authors, publishers and media, as well as news and updates from the world of open access publishing.

Thus far, open access publishing and open teaching materials initiatives such as OpenCourseWares have developed in parallel, without much interaction. I’m keeping an eye out for convergences, though, especially if OA publishing gains traction and more an more of the references in courseware are to openly available journal articles.