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

[Stavros]

Guy downloads millions of JSTOR articles, gets arrested.

Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to the Pirate Bay

 

[gjbarord]

After reading those two articles, I really do not feel sorry for the person being indicted. He made the choice to do what he did and knew what he was doing. That second article was a bit biased. I do not think that journals are evil companies? I wonder how many people have actually downloaded any of those files uploaded to pirate bay???

Right or wrong, most of the journals are intended for academic circles and universities that can easily (in most cases) afford the fees to gain access to the journals. I would say that the general public interested in these journals is a very small percentage, small enough that their opinions really do not matter to many of the journals and they are unable to influence the price of single articles. Of course, $30-40 for one PDF article seems to be a bit extreme to me but without public and academic pressure on the journals, nothing will change. If most of the population was interested in the journals, the prices would most likely go down.

Oh well. Good thread!

Greg

 

[ceph]

This would be an excellent subject for Freakonomics!

If my assessment is correct, it's clear that the journals provide an utterly necessary service, but the opportunity for corruption and profiteering is kept in check only by the existential need for the journals to maintain their reputations. I'd like to see a better system, but I can't think of one.

You nailed it. And I completely agree that the per-review process is critical.

For an example of the difference, earlier today I responded to another observational learning in octopuses post - in the media and even in posts here, keep repeating the same stories over and over again even if there is very good (admittedly less exciting) evidence that casts a lot of doubt on the truth of the original claims. Observational learning in octopuses is likely to live on in popular circles, perhaps for thousands of years. You might think that is an exaggeration but consider that we still occasionally come across the tool use story of octopuses dropping rocks into open bivalves; this one goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks! It also is a great story, it just isn't true. Peer-review helps to weed these things out of at least the scientific literature. It isn't a perfect system but it does helps keep us from repeating the same stories over and over when the data either do not exist or no longer support the conclusion.

Also keep in mind that the scientists that review journal submissions are volunteering their time - they are not compensated. So the scientists write the grants, spend taxpayer (or their own) money to do the work, write the paper, review other scientists papers, make corrections based on feedback and then sign over the copyright of their work to the journals they publish in. Those journals then charge them for copies of their own work (you do usually get a few for free). The publishing costs of small press run printing is very high but with PDFs, that is no longer true. Things are changing, but changing slowly - here is one possible reason why:

All journals are not created equal. Journals have something called Impact Factor - roughly how often papers published in them are cited in other papers. Broad journals that have been around for a long time, like Science, the journal the original 1992 Observational Learning in Octopuses papers was published in, have a very high impact factor. Specialized journals like the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, where the original enrichment paper was published, have very low impact factors. Scientist's publications are often judged by the journals they publish in. Newer journals have barriers to entry as they do not yet have a strong impact factor. On the plus side, the old way of doing things does not sit well with many scientists, especially younger ones. So things are changing.

In the mean time, why wait around? There is TONMO, You Tube and other newer ways to share your science in normal English. . . once it is published. Scientists still have to go through the peer review system first - journals understandably also require that the work be new and not published elsewhere.

Clear as mud?

James



James

 

[OB]

Plus, the niche journals have a typical subscription base of anywhere between 50 to 300 institutional libraries world wide. The high prices are fueled by scarcity of demand, combined with the necessity of access. Again, I am in favor of open access publishing, but don't expect many lay persons to be interested in 99%+ of available publications.

 

[Stavros]

How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 30th August 2011

Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the Western world? Whose monopolistic practices makes WalMart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch look like a socialist? You won’t guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but – wait for it – to academic publishers. Theirs might sound like a fusty and insignificant sector. It is anything but. Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities.

Everyone claims to agree that people should be encouraged to understand science and other academic research. Without current knowledge, we cannot make coherent democratic decisions. But the publishers have slapped a padlock and a Keep Out sign on the gates.

You might resent Murdoch’s paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier’s journals will cost you $31.50(1). Springer charges Eur34.95(2), Wiley-Blackwell, $42(3). Read ten and you pay ten times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That’ll be $31.50(4).

Of course, you could go into the library (if it still exists). But they too have been hit by cosmic fees. The average cost of an annual subscription to a chemistry journal is $3,792(5). Some journals cost $10,000 a year or more to stock. The most expensive I’ve seen, Elsevier’s Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, is $20,930(6). Though academic libraries have been frantically cutting subscriptions to make ends meet, journals now consume 65% of their budgets(7), which means they have had to reduce the number of books they buy. Journal fees account for a significant component of universities’ costs, which are being passed to their students.

Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free. The material they publish was commissioned and funded not by them but by us, through government research grants and academic stipends. But to see it, we must pay again, and through the nose.

The returns are astronomical: in the past financial year, for example, Elsevier’s operating-profit margin was 36% (£724m on revenues of £2 billion)(8). They result from a stranglehold on the market. Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, who have bought up many of their competitors, now publish 42% of journal articles(9).

More importantly, universities are locked into buying their products. Academic papers are published in only one place, and they have to be read by researchers trying to keep up with their subject. Demand is inelastic and competition non-existent, because different journals can’t publish the same material. In many cases the publishers oblige the libraries to buy a large package of journals, whether or not they want them all. Perhaps it’s not surprising that one of the biggest crooks ever to have preyed upon the people of this country – Robert Maxwell – made much of his money through academic publishing.

The publishers claim that they have to charge these fees as a result of the costs of production and distribution, and that they add value (in Springer’s words) because they “develop journal brands and maintain and improve the digital infrastructure which has revolutionized scientific communication in the past 15 years.”(10) But an analysis by Deutsche Bank reaches different conclusions. “We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process … if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn’t be available.”(11) Far from assisting the dissemination of research, the big publishers impede it, as their long turnaround times can delay the release of findings by a year or more(12).

What we see here is pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it. Another term for it is economic parasitism. To obtain the knowledge for which we have already paid, we must surrender our feu to the lairds of learning.

It’s bad enough for academics, it’s worse for the laity. I refer readers to peer-reviewed papers, on the principle that claims should be followed to their sources. The readers tell me that they can’t afford to judge for themselves whether or not I have represented the research fairly. Independent researchers who try to inform themselves about important scientific issues have to fork out thousands(12). This is a tax on education, a stifling of the public mind. It appears to contravene the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says that “everyone has the right freely to … share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”(13)

Open-access publishing, despite its promise, and some excellent resources such as the Public Library of Science and the physics database arxiv.org, has failed to displace the monopolists. In 1998 the Economist, surveying the opportunities offered by electronic publishing, predicted that “the days of 40% profit margins may soon be as dead as Robert Maxwell.”(14) But in 2010 Elsevier’s operating profit margins were the same (36%) as they were in 1998(15).

The reason is that the big publishers have rounded up the journals with the highest academic impact factors, in which publication is essential for researchers trying to secure grants and advance their careers(16). You can start reading open-access journals, but you can’t stop reading the closed ones.

Government bodies, with a few exceptions, have failed to confront them. The National Institutes of Health in the US oblige anyone taking their grants to put their papers in an open-access archive(17). But Research Councils UK, whose statement on public access is a masterpiece of meaningless waffle, relies on “the assumption that publishers will maintain the spirit of their current policies.”(18) You bet they will.

In the short-term, governments should refer the academic publishers to their competition watchdogs, and insist that all papers arising from publicly-funded research are placed in a free public database(19). In the longer term, they should work with researchers to cut out the middleman altogether, creating, along the lines proposed by Bjorn Brembs, a single global archive of academic literature and data(20). Peer-review would be overseen by an independent body. It could be funded by the library budgets which are currently being diverted into the hands of privateers.

The knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted and anachronistic as the Corn Laws. Let’s throw off these parasitic overlords and liberate the research which belongs to us.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. I sampled costs in these Elsevier journals: Journal of Clinical Epidemiology; Radiation Physics and Chemistry and Crop Protection, all of which charge US$31.50. Papers in a fourth publication I checked, the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, cost US$35.95.

2. I sampled costs in these Springer journals: Journal of Applied Spectroscopy, Kinematics and Physics of Celestial Bodies and Ecotoxicology, all of which charge Eur34.95.

3. I sampled costs in these Wiley-Blackwell journals: Plant Biology; Respirology and Journal of Applied Social Psychology, all of which charge US$ 42.00.

4. I went into the archive of Elsevier’s Applied Catalysis, and checked the costs of the material published in its first issue: April 1981.

5. Bjorn Brembs, 2011. What’s Wrong with Scholarly Publishing Today? II. What's wrong with scholarly publishing today? II

6. http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/506062/bibliographic

7. The Economist, 26th May 2011. Of goats and headaches. Of goats and headaches

8. The Economist, as above.

9. Glenn S. McGuigan and Robert D. Russell, 2008. The Business of Academic Publishing: A Strategic Analysis of the Academic Journal Publishing Industry and its Impact on the Future of Scholarly Publishing. Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship, volume 9, number 3.

The Business of Academic Publishing

10. Springer Corporate Communications, 29th August 2011. By email. I spoke to Elsevier and asked them for a comment, but I have not received one.

11. Deutsche Bank AG, 11th January 2005. Reed Elsevier: Moving the Supertanker. Global Equity Research Report. Quoted by Glenn S. McGuigan and Robert D. Russell, as above.

12. John P. Conley and Myrna Wooders, March 2009. But what have you done for me lately? Commercial Publishing, Scholarly Communication, and Open-Access. Economic Analysis & Policy, Vol. 39, No. 1. www.eap-journal.com/download.php?file=692

13. Article 27. http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml#a27

14. The Economist, 22nd January 1998. Publishing, perishing, and peer review. Publishing, perishing, and peer review

15. Glenn S. McGuigan and Robert D. Russell, as above.

16. See Glenn S. McGuigan and Robert D. Russell, as above.

17. When and How to Comply | Public Access

18. http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/documents/2006statement.pdf

19. Danny Kingsley shows how a small change could make a big difference: “Currently all universities collect information about, and a copy of, every research article written by their academics each year. … But the version of the papers collected is the Publisher’s PDF. And in most cases this is the version we cannot make open access through digital repositories. … the infrastructure is there and the processes are already in place. But there is one small change that has to happen before we can enjoy substantive access to Australian research. The Government must specify that they require the Accepted Version (the final peer reviewed, corrected version) of the papers rather than the Publisher’s PDF for reporting.”

http://theconversation.edu.au/how-one-small-fix-could-open-access-to-research-2637

20. Bjorn Brembs, as above.

 

[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]

Public Domain Day 2012: Five things we can do in the US

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

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

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.