Scientists are talking, but mostly to each other: a quantitative analysis of research

[gjbarord]

Good stuff Stavros!

Greg

[Stavros]

A parallel issue with book copyrights

I might not be an author

September 12, 2011
by seth godin

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The Author’s Guild is suing the University of Michigan and other college libraries because of their selfish, heinous plan to digitize and freely share old books for which authors cannot be found.

The Author’s Guild, which does not speak for me, nor for any author I know or possibly have ever met, says that this plan could lead to a “potentially catastrophic, widespread dissemination” of books.

Catastrophic?

It’s catastrophic to share dusty books for which the author cannot be found? Why?

Either books are a cultural treasure, part of our heritage and discourse and worthy of discussion, or they are merely a way to make a living. If being an author means that you view the distribution of your work (after you’re so far gone as to be unfindable) as catastrophic, I’m probably not an author.

Count me out.

[Stavros]

Academic papers are hidden from the public. Here’s some direct action.

September 16th, 2011 by Ben Goldacre in academic publishing,

This week George Monbiot won the internet with a long Guardian piece on academic publishers. For those who didn’t know: academics, funded mostly by the public purse, pay for the production and dissemination of academic papers; but for historical reasons, these are published by private organisations who charge around $30 per academic paper, keeping out any reader who doesn’t have access through their institution.

This is a barrier to the public understanding of science, but also to ongoing scholarship by people who’ve wandered away from institutional academia. There are open access alternatives, where academics pay up-front and the paper is free to all readers, but these are patchy, and require your funder to pay a thousand pounds per paper. If the journal your work is best suited for doesn’t do open access, then you might reasonably accept a closed access journal.

The arguments are big. What I find interesting is the recent rise of direct action on this issue.

Aaron Swartz is a fellow at Harvard’s Centre for Ethics, and a digital activist. He has been accused of intellectual property theft on a grand scale, and the federal indictment document, available in full online, describes an inspiringly nerdy game of cat and mouse.

Swartz denies all charges. Allegedly, he bought a laptop to harvest academic papers from the website JSTOR. Using a guest login at MIT – they last 14 days – he set a program running to download papers in bulk. JSTOR and MIT smelt a rat: they blocked access to whole ranges of computers in MIT, creating havoc. Swartz set two computers on the job, running so fast that several JSTOR servers stopped working.

So then, allegedly, he tried a slower approach. You’ll have seen racks of flashing network equipment in office buildings. He opened one up, in a quiet basement, plugged in a laptop, with some external hard drives, hid them under a box, and left this package quietly downloading papers by the million. Months later he was seen returning, peering cautiously through cracks in doors, carrying his bicycle helmet over his face and looking through the ventilation holes. He was arrested and bailed for $100,000: he had downloaded 4.8 million academic papers.

It’s hard not to be impressed, and this is not the first time Swartz has taken public data access into his own hands. In the US, court records are available online, but at a cost, in a scheme generating a $150 million budget surplus. When free access was given at 17 libraries, Swartz set up a script to harvest the lot. He got 19,856,160 pages before the system was shut down.

Now, the US government allege that Swartz intended to release his vast academic paper stash for free on file-sharing websites. This may be true, but he did not do so. Shortly after his arrest, however, a posting appeared on the Pirate Bay website, declaring the release of an immense file, free for download. It contains 33 gigabytes worth of academic papers from the UK journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. This file, explained the poster, was an act of protest about Swartz’s arrest. The papers in it range from the seventeenth century up to 1923, and are mostly out of copyright.

These are, in some respects, remarkable tales of Robin Hood behaviour. JSTOR expended huge effort on scanning these Royal Society papers in the 1990s, when scanning was tougher, and they should be thanked. But it’s hard to believe we can’t find any better way to do so: JSTOR sells each paper for between $8 and $19, while the Royal Society estimate that the pay-per-view income from the public accessing them is half a percent of their journal income.

One major problem with the current publishing model is that it’s hard to give access for free to the motivated public, while still gathering income from institutions. My hunch is, at some stage, this problem may be partially sidestepped, when someone manages an illegal workaround that individuals can play with, but which no university could endorse. I may be wrong: but either way, these are very interesting times for information.

[Stavros]

IEEE Refuses to Accept Public-Domain Papers

D. J. Bernstein
Notes on writing papers

Don't publish with IEEE!
Before you read this page, you should understand (1) authors putting papers online to benefit readers, (2) commercial publishers using copyright to limit #1, and (3) authors dedicating papers to the public domain as one way to stop #2. I have a separate page discussing these issues.

It turns out that, in response to #3, IEEE is overriding its scientific referees and flat-out refusing to accept public-domain papers.

I learned about this from a UIC graduate student who had submitted a paper to a conference whose proceedings were to be published by IEEE. After the paper was accepted, IEEE notified the student that a copyright transfer was required. The student declared his intention to put his paper into the public domain. The IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager threatened the student with non-publication of the paper. Faced with this pressure, the student capitulated and, rather than eliminating the copyright, transferred it to IEEE.

When I heard about this incident, I asked the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager to explain his overall assertion that IEEE refuses to publish public-domain papers:

Works from government authors are in the public domain, and I find it difficult to believe that IEEE refuses papers from government authors. I see that the IEEE Copyright Form has a special section for government authors.

How many public-domain papers does IEEE actually publish? Surely you have the exact figures for each year. Is it fair to say that, in fact, IEEE publishes many public-domain papers?

The IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager refused to answer these questions.

In his messages to the student, the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager had asserted that ``IEEE needs to be the owner of the work ... by assignment.'' Obviously this is impossible for papers in the public domain: copyright assignment isn't possible when the copyright no longer exists. I looked at the IEEE Copyright Policies and found that public-domain papers were clearly exempted from the copyright-transfer requirement:

Such transfer shall be a necessary requirement for publication, EXCEPT for material in the public domain.

(Emphasis added.) I asked the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager to explain the contradiction between his statements and the IEEE Copyright Policies. His only response was the rather idiotic comment that ``IEEE policy requires authors to submit an IEEE Copyright Form in order for publication to occur''; needless to say, the IEEE Copyright Form is written by the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights office.

In his messages to the student, the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager had explained IEEE's alleged need for being ``the owner of the work'' as follows: ``We can put it into the Xplore database and license it to others as one of our ongoing electronic distribution of IEEE publications.'' I asked the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager for clarification:

When there is no copyright, IEEE is completely free to do these things. It can distribute the work as widely as it wants, and it can authorize others to do so. All IEEE gets out of a copyright is the power to _stop_ the distribution of the information.

If the public domain is a problem for IEEE, how does IEEE publish works from government authors? Do you have a better explanation for your desire to be the owner of the work? Is it fair to say that IEEE actually _does_ want to stop the distribution of scientific information?

Naturally, the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager refused to respond.

The IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager had also devoted some effort to trying to fool the student into believing that papers could not simply be dedicated to the public domain. I asked for clarification:

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has commented that ``It is well settled that rights gained under the Copyright Act may be abandoned.'' The standard way to abandon copyright is by a clear written dedication of the work to the public domain. One example of a public-domain dedication is http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain; surely you're aware of attorney Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons effort.

You stated that ``there is a specific legal process for placing your work in the PD.'' When the student asked you for details, you refused to answer. Instead you said that you were ``dubious about the idea of simply declaring one's intention to inject a work into the public domain,'' and that IEEE needed to be able to ``prove'' its rights.

If IEEE has trouble ``proving'' its rights to publish a public-domain paper, then how does IEEE ``prove'' alleged authorship of a paper whose copyright is allegedly transferred, and how does IEEE ``prove'' an allegation of government employment? Is the ``legal process'' you mentioned something more than making a clear written dedication of the work to the public domain? If so, what exactly is the process? Why didn't you answer the student's question regarding this process? Is it fair to say that the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Office is trying to intimidate authors into transferring copyright to IEEE?

The IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager refused to respond.

The bottom line is that IEEE is refusing to accept public-domain papers except from government authors. IEEE has no justification for this position. IEEE's action is a blatant attempt to maintain control over papers that would otherwise have been freely available to the public. Unfortunately, at least in this student's case, the attempt succeeded: a paper that was accepted by IEEE's scientific referees, and that would have been in the public domain without IEEE's pressure, is now part of IEEE's copyright portfolio.

Consequently, I am blacklisting IEEE here. I recommend that authors find another publisher. Springer, for example, tacitly (although quite unhappily) allows public-domain papers, and AMS explicitly does not require a copyright transfer.

[Stavros]

Princeton goes open access to stop staff handing all copyright to journals – unless waiver granted

Prestigious US academic institution Princeton University will prevent researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers, except in certain cases where a waiver may be granted. The new rule is part of an Open Access policy aimed at broadening the reach of their scholarly…
Princeton Princeton University hopes its new Open Access policy will pressure academic publishers to stop requiring the copyright to the papers they publish. Flickr/Yakinodi

Prestigious US academic institution Princeton University will prevent researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers, except in certain cases where a waiver may be granted.

The new rule is part of an Open Access policy aimed at broadening the reach of their scholarly work and encouraging publishers to adjust standard contracts that commonly require exclusive copyright as a condition of publication.

Universities pay millions of dollars a year for academic journal subscriptions. People without subscriptions, which can cost up to $25,000 a year for some journals or hundreds of dollars for a single issue, are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research. Individual articles are also commonly locked behind pay walls.

Researchers and peer reviewers are not paid for their work but academic publishers have said such a business model is required to maintain quality.

At a September 19 meeting, Princeton’s Faculty Advisory Committee on Policy adopted a new open access policy that gives the university the “nonexclusive right to make available copies of scholarly articles written by its faculty, unless a professor specifically requests a waiver for particular articles.”

“The University authorizes professors to post copies of their articles on their own web sites or on University web sites, or in other not-for-a-fee venues,” the policy said.

“The main effect of this new policy is to prevent them from giving away all their rights when they publish in a journal.”

Under the policy, academic staff will grant to The Trustees of Princeton University “a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles published in any medium, whether now known or later invented, provided the articles are not sold by the University for a profit, and to authorise others to do the same.”

In cases where the journal refuses to publish their article without the academic handing all copyright to the publisher, the academic can seek a waiver from the open access policy from the University.

The policy authors acknowledged that this may make the rule toothless in practice but said open access policies can be used “to lean on the journals to adjust their standard contracts so that waivers are not required, or with a limited waiver that simply delays open access for a few months.”

Academics will also be encouraged to place their work in open access data stores such as Arxiv or campus-run data repositories.

Princeton University spokesman, Martin A. Mbugua, said the policy was not an outright ban on staff handing copyright to journal publishers.

“It is a new open access policy that gives our faculty an advantage, and the option of seeking a waiver,” he said.
A step forward

Having prestigious universities such as Princeton and Harvard fly the open access flag represented a step forward, said open access advocate Professor Simon Marginson from the University of Melbourne’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education.

“The achievement of free knowledge flows, and installation of open access publishing on the web as the primary form of publishing rather than oligopolistic journal publishing subject to price barriers, now depends on whether this movement spreads further among the peak research and scholarly institutions,” he said.

“Essentially, this approach – if it becomes general – normalises an open access regime and offers authors the option of opting out of that regime. This is a large improvement on the present position whereby copyright restrictions and price barriers are normal and authors have to attempt to opt in to open access publishing, or risk prosecution by posting their work in breach of copyright.”

“The only interests that lose out under the Princeton proposal are the big journal publishers. Everyone else gains.”

Professor Tom Cochrane, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Technology, Information and Learning Support at the Queensland University of Technology, who has also led an Open Access policy mandate at QUT welcomed Princeton’s new rule but warned that the waiver must not be used too regularly, lest the policy be undermined.

If all universities and research institutions globally had policies similar to Princeton’s, the ultimate owner of published academic work would be universities and their research communities collectively, Professor Cochrane said.

“They are the source of all the content that publishers absolutely require to run their business model,” he said.

Dr Danny Kingsley, an open access expert and Manager of Scholarly Communication and ePublishing at Australian National University said the move was a positive step and that the push for open access should come from the academic community.

In practice, however, the new policy requires staff have a good understanding of the copyright arrangements they currently have with journal publishers in their field.

They will need to ensure future publisher’s agreements accommodate the new position and if not, obtain a waiver from the University.

“This sounds easy but in reality might be a challenge for some academics. There is considerable evidence to show that academics often have very little understanding of the copyright situation of their published work,” she said.

“What will be most telling will be the publishers' response over the next year or so. If they start providing amended agreements to Princeton academics then the door will be open for other universities to follow this lead. I suspect however they will not, as generally the trend seems for publishers to make the open access path a complex and difficult one.”

[Stavros]

Academia.edu Raises $4.5 Million To Help Researchers Share Their Scholarly Papers

Academia.edu, a social network for researchers, is having a good year. In 2011 it’s tripled its total registered userbase to 800,000, and today it’s announcing some major news that ensures the site will be expanding well into the future: it’s just raised $4.5 million in a funding round led by Spark Capital, with participation from True Ventures. This is the company’s second round of funding, after a $2.2 million round in late 2009 (the investors from that round participated in this one as well).

Academia.edu can be thought of as a social network for academics, in that it allows them to forge connections and follow updates around their field, but it has another benefit: it gives them a powerful, efficient way to distribute their research. Unlike, say, a personal website, which probably won’t have much in the way of analytics or search engine optimization, Academia.edu will let researchers keep tabs on how many people are reading their articles with specialized analytics tools, and it also does very well in Google search results. Academics are uploading 2,500 articles to the site each day, and, as a result, the site is now drawing some 3 million unique visitors, many of whom are arriving at the site’s articles via Google.

Founder Richard Price (whose Academia profile you can check out here) says that aside from getting an increasing amount of traction with researchers, the site is also benefitting from a recent movement among universities and researchers that’s referred to as ‘Open Science‘. If you’ve ever tried looking up scholarly papers online, you’ve likely encountered one of the many paywalls put up by the journals those papers were published in. Access to these papers can be very expensive, depending on the journal — in some cases prohibitively so. In short, the information is fragmented and doesn’t flow freely.

Recently some scientists have begun to combat this by deeming their papers ‘open access’, thereby making them publicly accessible for free. Princeton now requires researchers to get a waiver if they want to assign all copyright to a journal; MIT and Harvard have both enacted open access policies as well. Many researchers believe that this open access will help streamline the research itself, allowing for faster innovation.

Academia.edu benefits from this movement because it means that researchers are free to share papers amongst themselves on the site. Price says that Academia.edu is already the largest platform for sharing these research articles, and the company looks to help foster this trend going forward.

Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. The company’s mission is to accelerate the world’s research. Academics use Academia.edu to share their research, monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow.

[Stavros]

Source: Everybody's Libraries

It’s New Year’s Day again, and in much of the world, this means another year’s worth of works enter the public domain. That’s a cause for celebration, as Europe and many other countries that have “life+70 years” copyright terms welcome works by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jelly Roll Morton, and Elizabeth von Arnim into the public domain. The Communia Project’s Public Domain Day website focuses on works by these and many other authors that are entering (in many cases, re-entering) the public domain in “life+70 years” countries. Meanwhie, folks in Canada, New Zealand, and other countries that have held the line at the “life+50 years” terms of the Berne Convention can now freely enjoy the works of people like James Thurber, Ernest Hemingway, and H.D.

There’s not so much excitement about Public Domain Day in the US, where no published works are scheduled to enter the public domain for another 7 years, due to a 20-year copyright extension enacted in 1998. But Americans don’t have to simply sigh and contemplate what might have been if our copyright terms hadn’t been extended. The new year still provides a number of important opportunities for Americans to improve access to the public domain.

1. Find and free newly public domain unpublished works

Some works are going into the public domain in the US today: works never published prior to 2003 (or copyrighted under US law prior to 1978) by authors who died in 1941– the same authors whose published works go into the public domain in Europe today.

But who would care about such obscure works? one might ask. Well, if you’re at all interested in understanding the dense, allusion-laden fiction of Joyce, or the psychology of Woolf, or the jurisprudential thinking of Louis Brandeis, or the inner lives of any of the rest of the “class of 1941″, having the right to freely access, publish, and build on their unpublished works can be crucial.

Up until now, for instance, scholars studying James Joyce have often been frustrated by sharp restrictions and legal threats made by the administrator of Joyce’s literary estate. In 2008, Rebecca Ganz characterized the administrator thus: “[His] primary purpose is to quell any scholarship that he finds distasteful or an invasion of his family’s privacy. He has a history of harassing authors and artists until they buckle under the strain of trying to obtain legal rights to quote from the late author’s writings.” Scholars wishing to invoke Joyce’s unpublished works in their work have either had to undertake multi-year legal battles, or cut back on the lines of inquiry they might otherwise pursue.

American libraries and archives have many illuminating papers by authors who died in 1941– even non-US authors like Joyce and Woolf. US digitizers, librarians, and archivists can open up and publicize these works. In some cases, we’re uniquely positioned to do so, since their unpublished works may still be under copyright in some other countries.

2. Increase worldwide availability of public domain works

Many of the millions of digitized books on the Internet are hosted in the US, in large-scale repositories like Google Books, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive. Many of these services give limited access to non-US readers or materials. Google and HathiTrust, for instance, limit non-US access by default to books published as long as 140 years ago, to avoid falling afoul of “life+70 years” copyright terms abroad. JSTOR likewise limits access to non-US journal volumes published in 1870 or later.

With another year’s worth of copyrights expiring in “life+70 years” countries, it should be safe for these US-based services to also open up worldwide access to another year’s worth of works, further freeing up the public domain. HathiTrust is also willing to manually review copyrights on specific books to open up access. If you come across any books in HathiTrust solely by authors who died in 1941 (or before) that are currently labeled only as “public domain in the United States”, you can request that they review it for opening up access worldwide. Just use the “Feedback” button at the bottom of the book’s HathiTrust page, or the suggestion form on my Online Books Page; and make sure you ask specifically for non-US access.

3. Restore access to obscure copyrighted works from 1936 (and earlier)

After libraries and archives expressed concerns about the fate of obscure works under longer copyright terms, Congress included a special exemption in their 1998 copyright tem extension. The exemption, codified as section 108(h) of the copyright law, states that “during the last 20 years of any term of copyright of a published work, a library or archives, including a nonprofit educational institution that functions as such, may reproduce, distribute, display, or perform in facsimile or digital form a copy or phonorecord of such work, or portions thereof, for purposes of preservation, scholarship, or research”, under certain conditions. In particular, if the institution finds, after a reasonable investigation, that such a work is not “subject to normal commercial exploitation” (such as by being in print) and cannot “be obtained at a reasonable price”, and no rightsholder has filed a claim otherwise, the work qualifies for this special exemption. As of this year’s Public Domain Day, qualifying publications from 1936 join what is now 14 years of works in this category.

So far, I have found very little digitized content online where this exemption is explicitly invoked. (There are advantages to explicitly doing so, both because it helps clarify the right to use the material, and helps prevent inadvertent unauthorized propagation of the works, such as the commercial reprints of digitized books that are now common on many large bookselling sites.) Yet many of the works in HathiTrust’s (currently suspended) orphan works initiative, and in the Internet Archive’s lending library, and more besides, could well qualify for this treatment– and unlike orphan works, where legislation has yet to be passed, the exemption for these materials is already explicitly authorized by statute.

Providing online access for these works is not without controversy. A 2002 article by lawyer Mary Minow details some of the potential possibilities and risks. While she concludes that libraries can put such works on the Web, the recent Author’s Guild complaint in its lawsuit against HathiTrust includes some push-back against this idea. But as the public domain in the US recedes further into history, and digital library projects increasingly look for ways to make our cultural heritage available online, American libraries would do well to proactively establish and exercise these rights for older works now languishing in obscurity.

4. Strengthen and sustain coalitions for reasonable copyright limits

The curtailment of the public domain is just one aspect of the overreach of copyright law in the US and elsewhere. Right now, Congress is considering two bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), whose enforcement provisions threaten to disrupt the core structures of the Internet and enable far-reaching censorship, in the name of stopping piracy. Supporters of these bills hoped to have them passed by Christmas, but opposition from both “left” and “right” sides of the political spectrum has slowed the process down, caused some companies to withdraw support, and led to the proposal of less harmful alternatives for fighting piracy.

It’s still quite possible that SOPA and PIPA will pass, though. Public Domain Day provides an opportunity for Americans to reflect on some of the good reasons for limiting the power and scope of copyright enforcement, and to redouble efforts to keep those limits reasonable. Moreover, a coalition that can stop SOPA and PIPA can also work to prevent further extensions of copyright terms. This can ensure that Americans will have more to celebrate in Public Domain Days to come– especially starting in 2019, when the remaining 1923 copyrights should finally expire in the US.

5. Give copyrights of your own to the public domain

Of course, those wishing to maximize public access and use of their works don’t have to wait for their copyrights to expire on their own. They can dedicate them to the public domain any time they want. Public Domain Day is a particularly auspicious time to make such gifts, no matter what country you’re in. And with tools like the CC0 declaration, it’s easier than ever to do so.

A few years ago, I started an annual personal tradition of reviewing copyrights to works I’d created more than 14 years ago (the original initial term of copyright enacted by the founders of the US, and also approximately the ideal copyright term given in a recent economic analysis) and dedicating works to the public domain that I didn’t feel needed further copyright. Accordingly, today I dedicate all the work of my creation that I published in 1997, and for which I still control rights, to the public domain. For me, this consists primarily of websites like The Online Books Page as of that year, and other online writings. But others have dedicated more high-profile material to the public domain after the same term. And I’d be very happy to hear from others who are making similar dedications today (whether or not it’s after 14 years).

So, happy Public Domain Day to everyone in the US and elsewhere! We all have things to celebrate, and things we can do, in the name of the public domain.

[Stavros]

Research Bought, Then Paid For
By MICHAEL B. EISEN
Published: January 10, 2012

Berkeley, Calif.

THROUGH the National Institutes of Health, American taxpayers have long supported research directed at understanding and treating human disease. Since 2009, the results of that research have been available free of charge on the National Library of Medicine’s Web site, allowing the public (patients and physicians, students and teachers) to read about the discoveries their tax dollars paid for.

But a bill introduced in the House of Representatives last month threatens to cripple this site. The Research Works Act would forbid the N.I.H. to require, as it now does, that its grantees provide copies of the papers they publish in peer-reviewed journals to the library. If the bill passes, to read the results of federally funded research, most Americans would have to buy access to individual articles at a cost of $15 or $30 apiece. In other words, taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.

This is the latest salvo in a continuing battle between the publishers of biomedical research journals like Cell, Science and The New England Journal of Medicine, which are seeking to protect a valuable franchise, and researchers, librarians and patient advocacy groups seeking to provide open access to publicly funded research.

The bill is backed by the powerful Association of American Publishers and sponsored by Representatives Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, and Darrell Issa, a Republican from California. The publishers argue that they add value to the finished product, and that requiring them to provide free access to journal articles within a year of publication denies them their fair compensation. After all, they claim, while the research may be publicly funded, the journals are not.

But in fact, the journals receive billions of dollars in subscription payments derived largely from public funds. The value they say they add lies primarily in peer review, the process through which works are assessed for validity and significance before publication. But while the journals manage that process, it is carried out almost entirely by researchers who volunteer their time. Scientists are expected to participate in peer review as part of their employment, and thus the publicly funded salaries most of them draw through universities or research organizations are yet another way in which taxpayers already subsidize the publishing process.

Rather than rolling back public access, Congress should move to enshrine a simple principle in United States law: if taxpayers paid for it, they own it. This is already the case for scientific papers published by researchers at the N.I.H. campus in Bethesda, Md., whose work, as government employees, has been explicitly excluded from copyright protection since 1976. It would be easy to extend this coverage to all works funded by the federal government.

But it is not just Congress that should act. For too long scientists, libraries and research institutions have supported the publishing status quo out of a combination of tradition and convenience. But the latest effort to overturn the N.I.H.’s public access policy should dispel any remaining illusions that commercial publishers are serving the interests of the scientific community and public.

Researchers should cut off commercial journals’ supply of papers by publishing exclusively in one of the many “open-access” journals that are perfectly capable of managing peer review (like those published by the Public Library of Science, which I co-founded). Libraries should cut off their supply of money by canceling subscriptions. And most important, the N.I.H., universities and other public and private agencies that sponsor academic research should make it clear that fulfilling their mission requires that their researchers’ scholarly output be freely available to the public at the moment of publication.

These steps would not only accomplish an important public good — unlimited access to the latest scientific and medical findings — but they would also send a powerful sign of gratitude to the taxpayers, on whose continued support our research depends.

Michael B. Eisen, an associate professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, is a founder of the Public Library of Science, an organization devoted to making research freely available.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on January 11, 2012, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Research Bought, Then Paid For.

[Architeuthoceras]

and here

[Stavros]

JSTOR Tests Free, Read-Only Access to Some Articles
January 13, 2012, 10:32 am
By Jennifer Howard

It’s about to get a little easier—emphasis on “a little”—for users without subscriptions to tap JSTOR’s enormous digital archive of journal articles. In the coming weeks, JSTOR will make available the beta version of a new program, Register & Read, which will give researchers read-only access to some journal articles, no payment required. All users have to do is to sign up for a free “MyJSTOR” account, which will create a virtual shelf on which to store the desired articles.

But there are limits. Users won’t be able to download the articles; they will be able to access only three at a time, and there will be a minimum viewing time frame of 14 days per article, which means that a user can’t consume lots of content in a short period. Depending on the journal and the publisher, users may have an option to pay for and download an article if they choose.

To start, the program will feature articles from 70 journals. Included in the beta phase are American Anthropologist, the American Historical Review, Ecology, Modern Language Review, PMLA, College English, the Journal of Geology, the Journal of Political Economy, Film Quarterly, Representations, and the American Journal of Psychology .

The 7o journals chosen “represent approximately 18 percent of the annual turn-away traffic on JSTOR,” the organization said in an announcement previewing Register & Read. “Once we evaluate how the beta is going, including any impact on publishers’ sales of single articles, and make any needed initial adjustments to the approach, we expect to release hundreds more journals into the program.”

Every year, JSTOR said, it turns away almost 150 million individual attempts to gain access to articles. “We are committed to expanding access to scholarly content to all those who need it,” the group said. Register & Read is one attempt to do that.

In September 2011, JSTOR also opened up global access to its Early Journal Content. According to Heidi McGregor, a spokeswoman for the Ithaka group, JSTOR’s parent organization, there have been 2.35 million accesses of the Early Journal Content from September 2011 through December 2011. “About 50% of this usage is coming from users we know are at institutions that participate in JSTOR (e.g. we recognize their IP address), and the other 50% is not,” she said in an e-mail. ”We absolutely consider this to be a success. In the first four months after launch, we are seeing over 1 million accesses to this content by people who would not have had access previously. This is at the core of our mission, and we’re thrilled with this result. The Register & Read beta is an exciting next step that we are taking, working closely with our publisher partners who own this content.”

Ms. McGregor said that JSTOR would consider expanding the three-article, 14-day restrictions, depending on how the beta test goes. “We are testing whether we can provide more free access in ways that help people around the world but that also balance the need to sustain, preserve, and invest in services to support the use of this content going forward,” she said.

[Stavros]

Elsevier = Evil

Posted on: January 16, 2012 12:45 PM, by PZ Myers

Along with SOPA and PIPA, our government is contemplating another acronym with deplorable consequences for the free dissemination of information: RWA, the Research Works Act. This is a bill to, it says, "ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector", where the important phrase is "private sector" — it's purpose is to guarantee that for-profit corporations retain control over the publication of scientific information. Here are the restrictions it would impose:

No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that--

(1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or

(2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work.

This is a blatant attempt to invalidate the NIH's requirement that taxpayer-funded research be made publicly available. The internet was initially developed to allow researchers to easily share information…and that's precisely the function this bill is intended to cripple.

Who could possibly support such a bill? Not the scientists, that's for sure; and definitely not the public, unless we keep them as ignorant as possible. The corporations who love this bill are the commercial publishers who profit mightily from scientists' work. And first among these is Elsevier, the gouging publisher scientists love to hate.

If passed, the Research Works Act (RWA) would prohibit the NIH's public access policy and anything similar enacted by other federal agencies, locking publicly funded research behind paywalls. The result would be an ethical disaster: preventable deaths in developing countries, and an incalculable loss for science in the USA and worldwide. The only winners would be publishing corporations such as Elsevier (Ł724m profits on revenues of Ł2b in 2010 - an astounding 36% of revenue taken as profit).

Since Elsevier's obscene additional profits would be drained from America to the company's base in the Netherlands if this bill were enacted, what kind of American politician would support it? The RWA is co-sponsored by Darrell Issa (Republican, California) and Carolyn B. Maloney (Democrat, New York). In the 2012 election cycle, Elsevier and its senior executives made 31 donations to representatives: of these, two went to Issa and 12 to Maloney, including the largest individual contribution.

So Elsevier bought a couple of politicians to get their way. It's typical unscrupulous behavior from this company; at least they stopped organizing arms trade fairs a few years ago, so we know their evil can be checked by sufficiently loud public opinion.

Tell your representatives to kill RWA. It's another bill to benefit corporations that will harm science.

[Stavros]

Cracking Open the Scientific Process



Timothy Fadek for The New York Times
A GLOBAL FORUM Ijad Madisch, 31, a virologist and computer scientist, founded ResearchGate, a Berlin-based social networking platform for scientists that has more than 1.3 million members.

By THOMAS LIN

Published: January 16, 2012

The New England Journal of Medicine marks its 200th anniversary this year with a timeline celebrating the scientific advances first described in its pages: the stethoscope (1816), the use of ether for anesthesia (1846), and disinfecting hands and instruments before surgery (1867), among others.

For centuries, this is how science has operated — through research done in private, then submitted to science and medical journals to be reviewed by peers and published for the benefit of other researchers and the public at large. But to many scientists, the longevity of that process is nothing to celebrate.
The system is hidebound, expensive and elitist, they say. Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only “if you’re stuck with 17th-century technology.”

Dr. Nielsen and other advocates for “open science” say science can accomplish much more, much faster, in an environment of friction-free collaboration over the Internet. And despite a host of obstacles, including the skepticism of many established scientists, their ideas are gaining traction.

Open-access archives and journals like arXiv and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years. GalaxyZoo, a citizen-science site, has classified millions of objects in space, discovering characteristics that have led to a raft of scientific papers.

On the collaborative blog MathOverflow, mathematicians earn reputation points for contributing to solutions; in another math experiment dubbed the Polymath Project, mathematicians commenting on the Fields medalist Timothy Gower’s blog in 2009 found a new proof for a particularly complicated theorem in just six weeks.
And a social networking site called ResearchGate — where scientists can answer one another’s questions, share papers and find collaborators — is rapidly gaining popularity.

Editors of traditional journals say open science sounds good, in theory. In practice, “the scientific community itself is quite conservative,” said Maxine Clarke, executive editor of the commercial journal Nature, who added that the traditional published paper is still viewed as “a unit to award grants or assess jobs and tenure.”

Dr. Nielsen, 38, who left a successful science career to write “Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science,” agreed that scientists have been “very inhibited and slow to adopt a lot of online tools.” But he added that open science was coalescing into “a bit of a movement.”
On Thursday, 450 bloggers, journalists, students, scientists, librarians and programmers will converge on North Carolina State University (and thousands more will join in online) for the sixth annual ScienceOnline conference. Science is moving to a collaborative model, said Bora Zivkovic, a chronobiology blogger who is a founder of the conference, “because it works better in the current ecosystem, in the Web-connected world.”

Indeed, he said, scientists who attend the conference should not be seen as competing with one another. “Lindsay Lohan is our competitor,” he continued. “We have to get her off the screen and get science there instead.”

Facebook for Scientists?
“I want to make science more open. I want to change this,” said Ijad Madisch, 31, the Harvard-trained virologist and computer scientist behind ResearchGate, the social networking site for scientists.
Started in 2008 with few features, it was reshaped with feedback from scientists. Its membership has mushroomed to more than 1.3 million, Dr. Madisch said, and it has attracted several million dollars in venture capital from some of the original investors of Twitter, eBay and Facebook.

A year ago, ResearchGate had 12 employees. Now it has 70 and is hiring. The company, based in Berlin, is modeled after Silicon Valley startups. Lunch, drinks and fruit are free, and every employee owns part of the company.

The Web site is a sort of mash-up of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, with profile pages, comments, groups, job listings, and “like” and “follow” buttons (but without baby photos, cat videos and thinly veiled self-praise). Only scientists are invited to pose and answer questions — a rule that should not be hard to enforce, with discussion threads about topics like polymerase chain reactions that only a scientist could love.

Scientists populate their ResearchGate profiles with their real names, professional details and publications — data that the site uses to suggest connections with other members. Users can create public or private discussion groups, and share papers and lecture materials. ResearchGate is also developing a “reputation score” to reward members for online contributions.
ResearchGate offers a simple yet effective end run around restrictive journal access with its “self-archiving repository.” Since most journals allow scientists to link to their submitted papers on their own Web sites, Dr. Madisch encourages his users to do so on their ResearchGate profiles. In addition to housing 350,000 papers (and counting), the platform provides a way to search 40 million abstracts and papers from other science databases.

In 2011, ResearchGate reports, 1,620,849 connections were made, 12,342 questions answered and 842,179 publications shared. Greg Phelan, chairman of the chemistry department at the State University of New York, Cortland, used it to find new collaborators, get expert advice and read journal articles not available through his small university. Now he spends up to two hours a day, five days a week, on the site.
Dr. Rajiv Gupta, a radiology instructor who supervised Dr. Madisch at Harvard and was one of ResearchGate’s first investors, called it “a great site for serious research and research collaboration,” adding that he hoped it would never be contaminated “with pop culture and chit-chat.”
Dr. Gupta called Dr. Madisch the “quintessential networking guy — if there’s a Bill Clinton of the science world, it would be him.”

The Paper Trade
Dr. Sönke H. Bartling, a researcher at the German Cancer Research Center who is editing a book on “Science 2.0,” wrote that for scientists to move away from what is currently “a highly integrated and controlled process,” a new system for assessing the value of research is needed. If open access is to be achieved through blogs, what good is it, he asked, “if one does not get reputation and money from them?”
Changing the status quo — opening data, papers, research ideas and partial solutions to anyone and everyone — is still far more idea than reality. As the established journals argue, they provide a critical service that does not come cheap.

“I would love for it to be free,” said Alan Leshner, executive publisher of the journal Science, but “we have to cover the costs.” Those costs hover around $40 million a year to produce his nonprofit flagship journal, with its more than 25 editors and writers, sales and production staff, and offices in North America, Europe and Asia, not to mention print and distribution expenses. (Like other media organizations, Science has responded to the decline in advertising revenue by enhancing its Web offerings, and most of its growth comes from online subscriptions.)

Similarly, Nature employs a large editorial staff to manage the peer-review process and to select and polish “startling and new” papers for publication, said Dr. Clarke, its editor. And it costs money to screen for plagiarism and spot-check data “to make sure they haven’t been manipulated.”

Peer-reviewed open-access journals, like Nature Communications and PLoS One, charge their authors publication fees — $5,000 and $1,350, respectively — to defray their more modest expenses.

The largest journal publisher, Elsevier, whose products include The Lancet, Cell and the subscription-based online archive ScienceDirect, has drawn considerable criticism from open-access advocates and librarians, who are especially incensed by its support for the Research Works Act, introduced in Congress last month, which seeks to protect publishers’ rights by effectively restricting access to research papers and data.
In an Op-Ed article in The New York Times last week, Michael B. Eisen, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a founder of the Public Library of Science, wrote that if the bill passes, “taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.”
In an e-mail interview, Alicia Wise, director of universal access at Elsevier, wrote that “professional curation and preservation of data is, like professional publishing, neither easy nor inexpensive.” And Tom Reller, a spokesman for Elsevier, commented on Dr. Eisen’s blog, “Government mandates that require private-sector information products to be made freely available undermine the industry’s ability to recoup these investments.”

Mr. Zivkovic, the ScienceOnline co-founder and a blog editor for Scientific American, which is owned by Nature, was somewhat sympathetic to the big journals’ plight. “They have shareholders,” he said. “They have to move the ship slowly.”

Still, he added: “Nature is not digging in. They know it’s happening. They’re preparing for it.”

Science 2.0
Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has refused to conduct peer review for or submit papers to commercial journals. “I got tired of giving free labor,” he said, to “these very rich for-profit companies.”

Dr. Aaronson is also an active member of online science communities like MathOverflow, where he has earned enough reputation points to edit others’ posts. “We’re not talking about new technologies that have to be invented,” he said. “Things are moving in that direction. Journals seem noticeably less important than 10 years ago.”

Dr. Leshner, the publisher of Science, agrees that things are moving. “Will the model of science magazines be the same 10 years from now? I highly doubt it,” he said. “I believe in evolution.

“When a better system comes into being that has quality and trustability, it will happen. That’s how science progresses, by doing scientific experiments. We should be doing that with scientific publishing as well.”
Matt Cohler, the former vice president of product management at Facebook who now represents Benchmark Capital on ResearchGate’s board, sees a vast untapped market in online science.

“It’s one of the last areas on the Internet where there really isn’t anything yet that addresses core needs for this group of people,” he said, adding that “trillions” are spent each year on global scientific research. Investors are betting that a successful site catering to scientists could shave at least a sliver off that enormous pie.

Dr. Madisch, of ResearchGate, acknowledged that he might never reach many of the established scientists for whom social networking can seem like a foreign language or a waste of time. But wait, he said, until younger scientists weaned on social media and open-source collaboration start running their own labs.
“If you said years ago, ‘One day you will be on Facebook sharing all your photos and personal information with people,’ they wouldn’t believe you,” he said. “We’re just at the beginning. The change is coming.”

A version of this article appeared in print on January 17, 2012, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Cracking Open the Scientific Process.

[DWhatley]

This was from an Octobot post entitled Science copies how squid change color (colour since is a BBC video ) but the scientists are primarily promoting the speed the internet and tools have added and the open source that will allow ease of access to their new findings. Very cool!

[DWhatley]

Another octobot post from Science 2.0 blog's Squid A Day, this one entitled Neurotoxins In Stranded Squid (With Bonus Rant About Academic Publishing) calling for more "to each other" communication

This is why we in the life sciences (and all the rest of science) really need to get on board with arXiv or something like it. If we were posting pre-prints of our work, we would be connected. We each would have been able to cite the other group's article, and write more comprehensive dicussions. We could even have improved each other's work--Group #1 might have been inspired to look at PST, and Group #2 to look at plankton blooms in the water.

I hope in a few years we'll look back on this as the Time for opening science . . .

[Architeuthoceras]

Through venues such as the "Present and Past Symposium" held every four years, fossil cephalopod workers, for the most part, all know what the others are working on. I know my work has been enhanced because I attended the last one. TONMO could also be a good venue for collaboration if we could only get more scientists to join up, and share their work...

[Stavros]

Another octobot post from Science 2.0 blog's Squid A Day, this one entitled Neurotoxins In Stranded Squid (With Bonus Rant About Academic Publishing) calling for more "to each other" communication

Through venues such as the "Present and Past Symposium" held every four years, fossil cephalopod workers, for the most part, all know what the others are working on. I know my work has been enhanced because I attended the last one. TONMO could also be a good venue for collaboration if we could only get more scientists to join up, and share their work...

This point of 'doing' science definitely deserves a thread of its own. Unfortunately, most grad programs do not teach us on how to form collaborations and more often than not, a student strives to become a 'one-man-show' rather than a collaborator outside his/her lab. Different folks may have different reasons for deciding to go solo- pride and inability to trust others have a lot to do with it, as well as the false romantic belief of a lone, silent researcher succeeding against all odds and with no help from the gods.

However, the main reason for this is the fact that science is highly competitive and it feels, therefore, more natural for one not to share results, or for early-career researchers to wait until they are able to publish results before coming in the open to establish their presence. At the end of the day though, science is social and depends on clear communication and community collaboration. Collaboration slices down the time it takes for a project to get done (resources, equipment, skill set and so on), and that means more projects at the end of the day. And it's more fun this way. The learning that takes place in settings like this, working with new people and sometimes from different fields, is unparalleled and definitely not matched by a lone worker. Lastly, the other extreme is when there are a lot of roosters and only one dawn, meaning that for the sake of doing team-work, people are put on a project that requires one person only and that can be costly as well.

[Stavros]

Been busy the last 3 weeks, here are some of the articles written since.

Comfort is the death knell of academia: why I’m standing down as a journal referee

Concerned that his field is completely beholden to closed access publishers, Matthew Todd calls an end to his time as a referee and author for Elsevier journals and joins over 2,500 academics who have signed an online petition in an effort to push for open access publishing and the transformative benefits that they see lying behind the ability to tinker, re-mix and play with open data.

----------------

Academics to boycott Elsevier journals

Thousands to refuse work related to publisher over profit-making tactics

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Elsevier — my part in its downfall

Timothy Gowers, professor of mathematics at Cambridge, has suggested that mathematicians should boycott leading journals published by Elsevier.

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The Cost of Knowledge

The key to all these issues is the right of authors to achieve easily-accessible distribution of their work. If you would like to declare publicly that you will not support any Elsevier journal unless they radically change how they operate, then you can do so by filling in your details in the box below.

[Stavros]

Not sure how much change this will bring to the status quo, but it surely is an exciting time in academia...



Critics say campaign unfairly singles out firm over widespread practices
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Posted: Feb 17, 2012 9:54 AM ET
Last Updated: Feb 17, 2012 11:23 AM ET

Dutch-based Elsevier publishes 250,000 articles a year and its archives contain seven million publications.

To publish or not to publish? That is the question medical and science academics are asking after 6,000 of their colleagues boycotted one of the world's largest publishers.

The "Cost of Knowledge" campaign was started by an international group of researchers in January after a blog post by Cambridge University math professor Timothy Gowers. He criticized the Dutch-based publisher Elsevier for charging "very high prices" for access to its articles, using a "ruthless" approach to negotiations with academic libraries and supporting legislation that could hamper the move to more open access to published research.

Since then, thousands of researchers around the world, including several university and government researchers in Canada, have publicly committed to the protest by declaring they will not publish in Elsevier journals, peer review papers for those journals, or do editing work for them.

But others say they don't know what all the fuss is about.

Elsevier publishes 250,000 articles a year and its archives contain seven million publications.

This week a number of Australian academics joined a global protest against the scholarly publishing powerhouse.

"The boycott is saying we are no longer going to provide our services to you for free. We are no longer going to write articles and submit them to your journals, and we are no longer going to review for your journals," says Danny Kingsley an expert in scholarly communication at the Australian National University's Centre for the Public Awareness of Science.

The petition's signatories have two complaints: the publisher is charging excessively for its journals, and is pushing to stop free access to taxpayer funded research.

"Well for a start it's just a moral issue that money that [the scienstists are] spending in taxes is having to be double-dipped to prop up a publishing industry which is making extraordinary profits in times where other industries are falling down completely," says Kingsley.

"The feeling has been for some time that the research itself has been paid for by the public purse and the peer-review process and often the editorial process is also being paid for by the public purse in the form of academic salaries; and then the public purse has to again pay to get subscriptions to the work."

In 2010, Elsevier made $1.6 billion for an operating profit margin of 36 per cent.

Andrew Wells from the Council of University Librarians believes Elsevier is being unfairly singled out.

"The practices that Elsevier has both in dealing with authors and in selling scholarly content to libraries are very similar to those used by many other scholarly publishers such as Wiley-Blackwell and Taylor & Francis and Springer," he says.

"The real issue here is how the whole scholarly publishing system works and certainly that's a good topic for authors."
Blocking pre-publication

Academics often submit an original research paper to their university before it goes to peer review and is published. University websites typically make these available to the public for free.

Elsevier wants to change that arrangement and has thrown its support behind three bills currently before the US Congress. They could, among other things, prevent universities from holding pre-publication versions of research papers.

It means Australian academics will have to pay to access research that's already been paid for.

Gavin Moodie, the principal policy advisor at RMIT University in Melbourne added his name to the boycott.

"But it has been stronger in its opposition to digital publishing rights and its attempt to close down websites which it claims infringes copyright. I think that's the main distinction from the other big publishers and that's mainly why I signed the petition," says Moodie.
Research at stake

Kingsley says researchers depends on funding from two sources; through block funding to university and grants funding.

"A large portion of what your grant relies on is your track record of publication," she says. "So publication is central, not just to actually having research continue, in that you can read what other people have done and continue with that, but also it's central to your career in terms of being able to have some money so that you can do your research."

Some Australian research bodies such as the National Health and Medical Research Council will change their funding model later this year. They'll mandate that any work they contribute to must be available to the public for free.

With files from CBC News
© Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2012

[OB]

Every single scientist looking for open access publication of their paper is free to submit to PLoS One, if they wish. The reason why they often don't, is that open access publishing requires authors to pay for publication, rather than their institutional libraries for access (subscription). That, combined with the outdated notion of using the Impact Factors of journals published in (to see how well Academic groups are performing), will mean we have quite a bit of road, still ahead.

You can not have a free system, where both the author as well as the reader get to publish and access for free, respectively. The taxmoney spent on research is gone, and unless we wish to cannibalize some of that to pay for the publication and dissemination of the acquired knowledge, someone will always have to pick up the tab.

The much more fundamental discussion is why we as societies spend trillions of Euros and US dollars annually on pointless ads, sales and marketing activities, unnessesary consumer goods, company restructurings, bloody wars in far away places and then some, when we could be spending a tiny fraction of that on science and technology and VASTLY improve our outlook within 4 to 5 generations.... Why aren't we on Mars, yet? Why does the majority of people think the latter to be a nonsensical question? Think about it.

[Stavros]

Thanks for clarifying OB. I'm sure it's going to take time for things to shift, especially to get public's interest on it.

What part of the process of publishing a journal is more costly? Paying the staff or paying the printer? I guess a solution would be to only have PDFs to save the printer costs, but I'm sure there are multiple reasons why it has not been applied yet.

I'm just glad that some are willing to fight this fight for the rest of us in academia- it's not worth going against the system all the time.