Information Research Weblog

Thanks, as usual, to Peter Suber for drawing attention to the documents and minutes of an EU meeting on open access. It seems that no general point of access to the files exist, since Peter gives links to each, and I have searched the European site without success.

However, the point I want to make (and I begin to seem like a rusty record) relates to the so-called 'green' and 'gold' routes to open access. One of the points arising out of the discussions and reported in the minutes is:

The debate persists on whether to move towards open access through repositories and funding body mandates (“green” open access) or through paid open access models/'reader pays' solutions (“gold” open access). Are there are other paths towards open access? Can the two options coexist?

So, once again, we have an official body which, at present, equates the 'gold' route to OA with author charging and wonders whether or not some other method exists! Of course another method exists and it is the only one that maximises the social benefit of open access - it is the 'platinum' route of subsidised, collaborative publication of OA journals - and this comment from the EU demonstrates why this route needs to be separated from the 'gold'.

Of course, it is possible to conceive of other methods. From the point of view of what the technology allows, the notion of the quarterly journal issue with its package of papers is something of an anachronism. It would be perfectly feasible to set up a peer-review process which resulted not in an electronic journal, but in an electronic archive. By this, I do not mean the equivalent of the 'green' route, but a new, peer-reviewed repository, which used, say, RSS to notify interested parties of new items admitted to the repository.

It would be relatively easy to do this for languages with a relatively small number of native language speakers and probably easiest there in the humanities and social sciences, where the cultural context is most relevant. So, rather than having, for the sake of argument, the Electronic Journal of Bulgarian Literary Criticism (or whatever that would be in Bulgarian!) one would have the 'Bulgarian Humanities Research Repository' - run by a national research body, or by a consortium of universities - which would include not only papers on literary criticism, but on any other humanities discipline. Humanities scholars of all kinds would have point to which to submit papers and one point from which to receive papers. This idea would also have the secondary benefit of allowing national funding agencies to determine the research performance of departments, through the volume of material submitted and accepted and also through the possibility of developing a national citation index for the disciplines.

It is, of course, in the publishers' interest to encourage the assumption that 'gold' involvs user charging, since if this mode of support spreads, they have income from two directions, instead of being exposed by having only one source - subscriptions. So perhaps the EU would benefit by having less close ties to the industry and exercising a little more imagination about the options.

That wonderful TED site has just posted a recording of a speech by Lawrence Lessig - it's an excellent presentation. Go take a look.

No sooner had my last comment on the topic of Green, Gold (aka Brass) and Platinum hit cyberspace than Peter Suber comes up with yet another bit of misleading information, this time from Jan Velterop, who, in his own Weblog, notes:

Applied to OA, ‘green’ and ‘gold’ are qualifiers of a different order. ‘Gold’ is straightforward: you pay for the service of being published in a peer-reviewed journal and your article is unambiguously Open Access. ‘Green’, however, is little more than an indulgence allowed by the publisher. This, for most publishers at least, is fine, as long as it doesn’t undermine their capability to make money with the work they do. But a 'green' policy is reversible.

Of course, Velterop is entirely right that the Green route of open archiving is dependent, at present, on the 'indulgence' of the publishers - I have suggested elsewhere that open archiving can only be a temporary approach to open access, since either the publishers may withdraw their permissions, or what I have called the Platinum Route, or, possibly more likely, some alternative process of scholarly communication will come to dominate.

However, Velterop conveys the same mis-information about the Gold (Brass) route as I drew attention to in that earlier post: the statement that it involves paying the publisher to open up access. This is true for commercial publishers, but not for those journals, like Information Research, that are published freely on the basis of subsidy and collaborative effort.

I can see that I am going to have to keep on plugging away at this distinction for as long as the notion of 'Gold' is used ambiguously for all OA journals, whether they author charge or not. Let's get into the entirely sensible habit of referring to Platinum for the latter.

Peter Suber's excellent Open Access news Weblog has been mentioned frequently here and recently he's had a couple of particularly interesting (to me) posts. One relates to Eric von Hippel's making available a couple of his books, with the agreement of the publishers, as open access e-books. The interesting thing is that sales exceeded expectations in both cases. As von Hippel says, this is counter-intuitive for publishers, but it simply shows that publishers have not thought through the logic. They know that, for example, for every thousand mailings of a publicity shot they're likely to get only 2% or 3% response - or even less - so they ought to understand that publicity in the form of open access, which reaches millions of people, rather than a few thousand, is going to increase sales, even if only one or two percent of the downloaders actually buy the book. I could also see benefits if publishers make books OA when the main sales have been made and the order stream is reduced to a trickle: this could give a boost to sales well beyond what would have been anticipated.

The second item is somewhat more esoteric and legalistic. Peter has been engaged in a debate on whether or not real OA includes the right to make 'derivatives' of the work in quetion - referring to the Creative Commons' licences. There are those who hold that the right to make derivative works is a required characteristic of OA works and those who protest the opposite. What is not clear for me is what constitutes a 'derivative work': if someone uses my work to create something related, using, for example, a theoretical model and quoting from my work, I don't see that as 'derivative' in any way other than all scientific work is 'derivative', in that it builds on the earlier research. To be truly 'derivative' in my book means taking my work and re-working it, using the text and the arguments, along with new insights and ideas to create something closely associated and 'derived' from my work. In that kind of work - and I know of none - I would be, in effect, a silent collaborator and I think I would be justified in claiming to be the joint author! So I think the debate may be about two different things: creating a work that simply refers, textually and otherwise, to my own, and creating a composite work, based on my ideas, but extending, etc. I would be perfectly happy with the first form of 'derived' work, but I think that for the second I would deserve a stronger form of acknowledgement than mere citation. Should I, therefore, adopt the 'no derivatives' form of the CC licence?

While pursuing this at the CC site another question occurred to me. The CC licence has a 'no commercial use' element, which simply means that, you cannot use my work for commercial gain. However, if you publish through a toll access publisher, who is in the business of making a profit, can the publisher profit from the inclusion of my work in yours? I think I shall have to watch this carefully in future, since I get numerous requests to use the diagram of my 1996 'General Model of Information Behaviour' - in the past, I've given permission without question, but now perhaps I should say - fine, if you publish in a true (Platinum Route) OA journal, but, if not, your publisher will have to pay.

Perhaps most readers of this Weblog are now aware that Lawrence Lessig - the motivating force behind Creative Commons - is shifting his sphere of interest to corruption in American political life. Now there's a target!
To catch up with what's going on, see an interview with him and listen to his lecture at Stanford Law School
There's interesting follow up on the Weblog.

It's always ironic when papers on OA are published in non-OA journals. Such is the case with a couple of papers in the current LIBER Quarterly:

One is "Embedding Open Access into the European Landscape – the Contribution of LIBER" by Paul Ayris:

Abstract. This paper continues an earlier published history of the OAI Workshops, organised under the aegis of the LIBER Access Division, in CERN Geneva. It discusses the OAI5 Workshop, held on 18-20 April 2007, which underlines the emerging importance of Open Access to support information provision and exchange across Europe.

The other is "Public Policy and the Politics of Open Access" by David C. Prosser:

Abstract In the five years since the launch of the Budapest Open Access Initiative in February 2002, one of the most striking developments in the scholarly communications landscape has been the increasing interest taken in open access at a policy level. Today, open access (in the form of both self-archiving and open access journals) is routinely discussed and debated at an institutional-level, within research-funding bodies, nationally, and internationally. The debate has moved out of the library and publisher communities to take a more central place in discussions on the ‘knowledge economy’, return on investment in research, and the nature of e-science. This paper looks at some of the public policy drivers that are impacting on scholarly communications and describes the major policy initiatives that are supporting a move to open access.

The first of these doesn't look particularly fascinating, but I would have like to have the possibility of reading the second, without having to subscribe, but to do that I have to wait six months.

The publishers' lobby organization has changed the language of its top page - no doubt the result of the wave of opposition it aroused by attempting to mislead researchers, funders and, most importantly, the policy makers.

However, no one should imagine that this means that the organization's ideas have changed, nor its way of putting a spin on just about everything it says. For example, we are directed from the top page to:

Learn more about government intervention and the risks and unintended consequences of proposed legislation;"

and, clicking on the link, we find:

Various initiatives and proposals have been put forth by special interest groups and some legislators that would force private sector publishers to surrender to the federal government all peer-reviewed articles that report on research supported by federal research grants.

Such undue government intervention in scholarly publishing poses inherent risks and problems, including:

* Threats to the economic viability of journals and the independent system of peer review

* The potential for introducing selective bias into the scientific record

* Government data repositories being subject to budget uncertainties

* Unwarranted increases in government spending to compete with private sector publishing

* Expropriation of publishers' investments in copyrighted articles

* Undermining the reasonable protections of copyright holders"

Let's look at these in turn: the first links the economic viability of journals with the independent system of peer review, as though if the former is threatened, as it is, the latter will also be detrimentally affected. However, this is not the case: the system of peer review exists because of the willingness of academics to give their time freely to ensure the integrity of published research work. True, it is not perfect, but it works and it would continue to work in an open access world: there is no reason whatsoever to assume that if the academic community wished peer-review to continue, it would not do so. However, the academic community could do the established commercial publishers considerable damage if they withdrew their voluntary labour. How, then, would the publishers ensure the integrity of the research record? Presumably, if the subscriptions continued to flow, they would be quite happy. Methinks they do protest too much on this point!

The second point on the introduction of 'selective bias' is presumably related to the first: they are suggesting that if peer review did not exist in an open access world, and continued in the commercial publishing world, the quality of what is published would be lowered and 'bias' would result. But this is nonsense: the answer is to repeat the points above. There is no necessary connection between commercial publishing and peer review. Indeed some publishers are quite happy to publish journals with no scholarly review, or with editorial review only - are they leaping to the barricades to prevent the rise of open access? Of course not.

The notion that somehow the existence of commercial publishing is some kind of fall-back system if government-funded data repositories were to be underfunded to the extent of ceasing to exist is also nonsense. Publishers do not maintain alternative data repositories, nor do they contribute to them. Organizations such as the ESRC Data Archive in the UK collect raw data from the researchers who collect it, along with the research instruments, coding manuals, etc. No publisher does any of this work, so to link their publishing activities to the existence of data archives is simply silly.

'Unwarranted increases in government spending' - oh my, that's really a beauty! Here is an industry that obtains its raw material free of charge as a result of government, charitable foundation and industry spending on research, and then benefits from the subscriptions of the institutions that employ those same researchers, complaining that the government might cut their profits by encouraging open access publishing. That's very rich. In effect the publishers are saying: "Look government, you spend all this money to give us raw material from which we can make a profit, so please don't encourage anything that might limit those profits!" And I love the idea of 'private sector publishing'! If only! Let us imagine what 'private sector publishing' would actually involve: first, the publishers would have to pay authors to write for them, as they pay novelists and the authors of travel books, biographies, etc., etc. Then, they would have to pay academics to review the papers they had paid for to determine whether they were appropriate to publish (of course, under this system, they would rapidly forget about peer-review, since it would eat into their profits), and then they would have to market vigorously to persuade institutions to buy their products. And, at the same time they would have to compete with a public sector open access system. Can you guess what would happen? I leave it to your imaginations.

So there's a danger of government expropriating industry's investment in copyrighted articles and, final point, of undermining the rights of copyright holders. Well now, what are we to make of this? First, the industry has invested nothing in the copyrighted articles - the investment has been made by government, etc. They have an investment in the published article, but not in the original copyrighted source. And it is a moot point, I understand, from lawyer friends as to whether an author can actually sign away his or her copyright. I believe there is no case law in the UK on this point and publishers are unwilling to take a case to court in case they lose. If this is so, then the copyright holder is the author of the text and/or his or her institution, depending upon the practice of the institution and all that can be granted to the publisher is a licence to publish under negotiated terms. Perhaps those threatened copyright holders (the authors) should bear this in mind and, instead of signing away their rights - which may not actually be lawful - they should negotiate. After all, they are now in a strong position, given the existence of open access, and free, journals in so many fields.

Take all this stuff with a pinch of salt and make sure your representative in Congress or Parliament understands that lobby talk is not necessarily reporting with integrity.

According to The Association of College and Research Libraries, Information Literacy's website: http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlissues/acrlinfolit/informationliteracy.htm, it provides such a vast of valuable information for librarians, students, and researchers. The layout of the information is clearly organized for first time users and frequent users. The website provides users with the overview, standards & guidelines, resources & ideas, professional activity, and news. When I attending college for my undergraduate degree, it would have been benefical if I knew about this particular website...it probably would have made my research steps much easier.

There's an interesting little discussion going on on the Library and Information Technology discussion list at the moment, prompted by a request from the police in Worcester, Massachusetts that the public library should install a 'sniffer' to detect possible use of the Internet for 'suspect' purposes. Guest access to the LITA-L archive is said to be possible at http://lp-web.ala.org:8000/ but it looks as though the system isn't working effectively because I kept on being thrown out! Come on, LITA! Freedom of information is also about letting people read your stuff easily!

The Royal Society has announced the availability of all of its journals online - including the Philosophical Transactions from 1665.

The journals will be freely available until the end of the year but then only through subscription. Unfortunately, the Royal Society has teamed up with JSTOR in making this offer, and JSTOR is not an open access supporter.

So - this fascinating resource will not be available readily to historians of science, unless their institutions pay the subscription, or to enthusiastic amateurs, or, presumably, to school-children. Surely the archive could have been made partially open access - from 1665 to 1899, perhaps?

Once again, we have an instance of commercial interests closing down access to scholarly, scientific information.

The latest piece of nonsense to be perpetrated by the commercial world against the world of open availability of information is the action by the business yellow pages company Yell.com against the open access provider of the same kind of information, Yellowikis

This came to me via a BBC news broadcast, which included an interview with the daughter of the founder of Yellowikis (Paul Youlten) and with a lawyer unconnected with either - who seemed very keen, however, to find in favour of Yell (so much for the disinterested observer!).

Yell's case, apparently, is based on the premise that the user of Yellowikis may be so confused as to mistake it for Yell - such a user would have to be well into his or her cups to make that mistake! The two sites have practically nothing in common. Yell claims that the logo is similar - Yell's shows the Yellow Pages walking fingers, Yellowikis shows a target - both use the colour yellow and that is the only similarity.

Clearly, this is an attempt by Yell to shut down a competitor (although I hardly seem them as such myself, since Yell is much more complete!) and no doubt they hoped to frighten Youlten into just giving up: I hope that, when it does get to court, the Judge fines Yell for wasting court time, awards massive damages to Yellowikis and tells Yell to grow up and start acting like an adult company.

There's a new book out on open access publising: 'Open access: key strategic, technical and economic aspects', edited by Neil Jacobs and published by Chandos Publishing. However, on a quick scan, before doing a full review, I find that it seems to be concerned entirely with either author-charging by commercial and society publishers, or open archiving. There is no treatment of sponsorship as a business model. Since this is the model that delivers maximum social benefit, the omission is rather surprising, and the omission must be deliberate, since there are a number of open journals around that are published on this basis. As readers will know, one of these was described in Information Research Volume 11 No.3

The omission of sponsored journals is a not-too-subtle bias, which is dangerous, since books of this kind are promoted to lobbyists and politicians, who get the impression that author-charging is the only way to deliver open access when, in fact, such a system is 'closed' at the submission stage - 'open' access should be genuinely open and there are only two ways to deliver that - open archiving and free, sponsored journals.

For some weeks now, the Guardian newspaper has been running a campaign for the government to free-up commercial use of data collected with the taxpayer's money. It argues that by making the information freely available, businesses will be able to create value-added products and that the sale of these will more than compensate for the loss of any direct revenue.

The current situation was the result of a drive under the Thatcher regime to gain profit from public data by selling back to the public, who had paid for it in the first place - in some areas, e.g., the Ordnance Survey mapping services, this was very successful; in others, not.

Thursday's Technology section contained the latest on the subject; a report of a meeting held in London. For the rest, follow the link to this search output. There's also a Weblog on the topic.

There's an excellent article in today's Technology supplement of the Guardian newspaper on the need for free public access to data for which the taxpayer has already paid.

The authors make the case on the basis of economics, pointing out the the present policy of selling data militates against the development of businesses that could develop services, as well as putting an additional load on public agencies, some of which have collected the data in the first place!

No one can be surprised that the fault lies with the Thatcher regime and its "Making a business of information" strategy of the 1980s, when the idea of the 'information society' first hit and the Treasury realised it might make a little money - unfortunately, it is not making much, whereas in the USA, which makes information of this kind freely available, the impact upon the economy has been significant.

The authors point to an interesting paper by Peter Weiss - I recommend clicking on the link - it takes you to a badly designed Web page, but you'll find a link to a Word document, which is much more readable.

Bernie Sloan posted an interesting list of comments on the Google vs. Bush battle on the LITA list recently. I don't think he'll mind me passing it on in this way

• Los Angeles Times
• Baltimore Sun
• Lower Hudson Journal News (NY)
• USA Today
• The Columbian (Clark County, WA)
• Chicago Sun Times
• Unofficial Google Weblog

To these we can add, from the UK

• The Guardian
• The Times

An interesting note from John Williams, an Information Research reader in Kansas:

Those tracking the issues in your blog around IP law and copyright/patent should take a look at:

James Beesen and Robert. M. Hunt. Working Paper No. 03-17/R: An Empirical Look at Software Patents. (Philadelphia, PA: Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, 2004).

The appendix, statistical tables and a fifty-entry bibliography are a wealth of information.

John is right, here's the abstract:

U.S. legal changes have made it easier to obtain patents on inventions that use software. Software patents have grown rapidly and now comprise 15 percent of all patents. They are acquired primarily by large manufacturing firms in industries known for strategic patenting; only 5 percent belong to software publishers. The very large increase in software patent propensity over time is not adequately explained by changes in R&D investments, employment of computer programmers, or productivity growth. The residual increase in patent propensity is consistent with a sizeable rise in the cost effectiveness of software patents during the 1990s. We find evidence that software patents substitute for R&D at the firm level; they are associated with lower R&D intensity. This result occurs primarily in industries known for strategic patenting and is difficult to reconcile with the traditional incentive theory of patents.

Those interested in the IP debate as it affects open source software and the patenting of programs can find some interesting disucssions at the ZDNet site. I think that John Carroll conflates a couple of issues in talking about IP - that is, copyright and patents. Copyright on software seems to me to be entirely sensible, but to patent a way of tackling a problem through software can only, IMHO, restrict one's ability to build on those ideas.

At the same time the proposed revision to the Free Software Foundation's General Public License has been announced and is attracting debate. One of the key points in the new GPL is the provision that, if a developer uses open-source software as the basis for a program, the developer cannot claim patent infringement on its product. In other words, what starts out open source, stays open source.

Managing the Internet

Why am I not surprised that the commission set up by the UN to enquire into managing the Internet has come up not with one solution, but four?

Skype killers

With Skype so successful (at any one time, when I use it, there are more than 2.5 million other people using it) it seems inevitable that there will be competition. Two have recently been launched:

The Gizmo Project

This looks very much like a Skype copycat - even the layout of the interface is broadly similar and In and Out services are provided (i.e., you can call out to land lines and have a land line number that others can use to call in to you). I'm in the process of trying to test this one and will let you know what happens.

VoIPBuster

This one didn't get as far as testing! For several days I tried to register but kept getting a message to the effect that 'an unexpected problem' was preventing registration and 'try again later'. Well, there's only so much I'm prepared to put up with and I gave up on it. Others may have more success. [Just in case things had been resolved, I've just tried again, with the same result.]

Google in the dock

Thanks to Charles Knight for drawing my attention to this one. This is a rather complicated story which hinges upon the Internet Wayback Machine archive and a law case in which old Web pages were proving embarrassing. Mmm. You can shred old documents, but when you've put them in the public arena on the Web, that's a little difficult. It will be interesting to see what the Canadian legislators come up with. Of course, it all relates to corporate greed and misdoings—when things go wrong companies will always try suppression and if they can get the legislators to help them, they're laughing and the rest of us are weeping. But aren't parliamentarians supposed to be the representatives of the people? Ha, ha!

Anyone interested in open access journal publication—and I assume that most readers of Information Research will be interested—my like to wander over to the education pages of the Guardian where they will find an interesting piece on the Wellcome Foundation's decision to require papers reporting research funded by Wellcome to be deposited in an open access archive. As usual, of course, not much space (or rather no space!) is given over to any argument on the pros and cons of archiving versus free open access publishing. So the journal publishers win, one way or another, particularly as the archived items won't be available until six months after publication.

I posted a message a little while back about municipal broadband in the USA, noting that 'liberal' had become a term of denigration. Well, the hard right is having another go. US Congressman Pete Sessions is putting up a bill that would prevent state or local governments offering broadband services if private companies were already in the market. The news item notes:

Before winning election to Congress, Sessions spent more than 16 years at the Bell Labs in New Jersey, and served as a Southwestern Bell district manager for marketing in Dallas.

No conflict of interest there, then!

...and don't I recall that Bell Co. was a business monopoly that had to be broken up? So there's no danger of that happening again, eh?

There's a great discussion going on at C|Net about whether or not local municipalities should be offering "free" wi-fi coverage. If you want to understand the loony, neo-con, extremist rightwingers, take a look. In particular, one 'GraysonBuzz' is so far to the right that he makes George Bush look like a liberal.

Curious how in the USA, 'liberal' has become a term of abuse: just look at some of the OED meanings of the word:

• Free in bestowing; bountiful, generous, open-hearted
• Free from restraint; free in speech or action.
• Free from narrow prejudice; open-minded, candid.
• Free from bigotry or unreasonable prejudice in favour of traditional opinions or established institutions; open to the reception of new ideas or proposals of reform.
• Favourable to constitutional changes and legal or administrative reforms tending in the direction of freedom or democracy.

Apparently, these are now qualities that threaten "the American way of life" — well, they'd certainly threaten the neo-fascist state that Georgie would like to have!

Following a news item in a Google 'Alert', I hit upon an item in the World Net Daily - an online newspaper of sorts, on the suggestion that the UN might take over the 'control' of the Internet.

At the bottom of the article I found:

Related special offer:

Get the U.N. out of the U.S.!

So I clicked on the link and found myself at a site headed Move America Forward, which is devoted to getting the UN Headquarters out of the USA. Without any sense of irony a cartoon shows a jackboot on Florida kicking the symbol of the UN. With the American passion for loyalty to flags and other such symbols, this presumably has a particular kind of resonance with the followers of this movement.

The site appears to be the brain-child of "The Honorable Howard Kaloogian" - 'honour' can mean some odd things in odd places like California, where Howie is a Member of the State Assembly, and no doubt this site is part of his campaign for bigger things. 'Governor Kaloogian' perhaps, even 'President Kaloogian'? Watch out for this guy - if you think that Bush is weird, you ain' seen nuthin' yet!

I don't know about you, but whenever I see the issue of 'Internet governance' raised, I assume that big business is once again seeking to control what we can access, how we can access and when we can access. The warning shot comes in a longish article at allAfrica.com. Not one of my regular ports of call but it brings us news that the UN is setting up a Working Group on Internet Governance, about which more can be found at the UN site.

Business and governments don't like the inherent freedom of the Internet: and they worry about anything they cannot control. It's curious how those who inveigh against the lack of freedom of information in, say, China, are quite prepared to erode freedom of information on the Internet. Of course, there are some Western governments, like Blair's New Thatcherites, who don't give much prominence to their freedom of information policies anyway—mainly because they are trying, desperately, to curb the freedoms the legislation has delivered by imposing whacking great charges for access.

The UN Working Party however, has a bigger cabal of interested parties, including the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). WIPO, of course, is run for the benefit of the big corporations and, through its support for patent rights, those big corporations prevent the development of, for example, generic anti-HIV drugs, in the third world. The WTO is similarly oriented towards global corporations and the protection, predominantly, of US interests—although there are signs that the developing countries are beginning to get their act together in countering the hegemony of the developed world.

The problems that the UN Press Release mentions, '...management of Internet resources, spam, cyber-security, cyber-crime, multilingualism and data protection' are a curious mixture. 'Internet resources' are managed by those who maintain their Websites, so what does this mean? Not management of what is there, but control over who can put what on a Website, I imagine. 'Spam' - yes, a problem, but not one that is likely to find a solution in a Working Party and solutions of various kinds are being delivered already, through legislation, and technology developments that prevent the spam getting through. 'Cyber-security' - a matter for organizations with Internet connection to see to. 'Cyber-crime' - the same - and often a reality because security is lax. You can drive around the City of London with a wi-fi detector and a laptop and readily access a number of corporate sites: the only solution to that is a local one, not an international one. 'Multilingualism' - that's an odd one. Do they mean a lack of multiligual sites, or too many? In the early years of the Net, the fear was that English would dominate, now the feeling is that Chinese sites may dominate. What's the problem? 'Data protection' - see above under cyber-security.

Do you get the feeling that this Working Party is a cloak for something else? A desire on the part of those organizations that lobby the UN for control, perhaps?

See the item in Cordis News

As readers of Information Research know, I am dedicated to the idea of 'open access publishing', which takes a number of forms, from the 'self-archiving' in institutional archives that Steven Harnad champions, to truly 'open' access in the form of journals like Information Research, which levy no page charges and charge no subscriptions, to 'semi-open' access, such as those journals supported by 'author charging' - which are open to readers, but only available for publishing to those who, in one way or another, can pay the submission fees, to disciplinary 'e-print' archives such as as arXiv for physics, to the latest initiative from the National Institutes of Health in the USA, which proposes:

NIH intends to request that its grantees and supported Principal Investigators provide the NIH with electronic copies of all final version manuscripts upon acceptance for publication if the research was supported in whole or in part by NIH funding. This would include all research grants, cooperative agreements, contracts, as well as National Research Service Award (NRSA) fellowships. We define final manuscript as the author’s version resulting after all modifications due to the peer review process. Submission of the final manuscript will provide NIH supported investigators with an alternate means by which they will meet and fulfill the requirement of the provision of one copy of each publication in the annual or final progress reports. Submission of the electronic versions of final manuscripts will be monitored as part of the annual grant progress review and close-out process.

The proposal is now going through the legislative process in the USA and the publishers appear to be biting on the bullet and falling in step - but this is medicine, people may die for the lack of information, so they can't very well draw their skirts aside, can they? I wonder what their response would be if the Arts and Humanities Research Board in the UK made the same proposal?

Steven Harnad has reported on the BOAI Forum mailing list that Elsevier has signed up to Open Access - authors are given the right to put their papers on their own Web site, or their institution's repository, and can include not only the pre-print, but also make changes so that it is identical to the published version. However, they cannot use the files from the publisher's site.

As Harnad says:

For now it's down to you, Dear Researchers! Elsevier (and History) is hereafter fully within its rights to say:

"If Open Access is truly as important to researchers as they claim it is -- indeed as 30,000+ signatories to the PLoS Open Letter attested that it was http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/cgi-bin/plosSign.pl -- then if researchers are not now ready to *provide* that Open Access, even when given the publisher's official green light to do so, then there is every reason to doubt that they mean (or even know) what they are saying when they clamour for Open Access."

Elsevier publishes 1,700+ journals. That means at least 200,000 articles a year. Eprints.org will be carefully quantifying and tracking what proportion of those 200,000 articles is made OA by their authors through self-archiving across the next few months and years. Indeed we will be monitoring all of the over 80% of journals sampled by Romeo that are already green.

I remain doubtful as to whether or not this will happen, simply because UK institutions (with one or two notable exceptions) have shown not the slightest interest in supporting Open Access. We even have the Chairman of the UK Research Councils rubbishing Open Access:

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions, the director-general of the Research Councils, yesterday said that it would be "unwise" for ministers to demand that government-funded journals should be available without charge over the internet.

The man doesn't know what he is talking about - subsequently confusing open access publishing (i.e., peer reviewed journals) with non-reviewed pre-print repositories. No wonder he pops up in this week's Private Eye, which reports that in his role as Chairman of the Natural History Museum's trustees, he managed to spend £400,000 on a Price Waterhouse investigation into where £20,000 had got to...

Isn't it wonderful that our intellectual assets are in such safe hands?

As all members of the IR-DISCUSS list are aware, Information Research is an 'open access' journal, that is, it is freely available without charge to all. Unusually in the open access world, it is also free to authors - no author- funding is required to be published. One would imagine that universities would be running to sponsor the journal, but the silence is deafening :-)

The open access movement has had a number of boosts in recent days and these are recorded in the latest SPARC Newsletter. Among other things, it reports from the financial analyst firm, BNP Paribas, on the threat to commercial publishers (specifically Elsevier) of the open access trend. For example:

"Open-access could prove a more cost-effective scientific communication system for universities and research institutions. We estimate that the global scientific research community could save more than 40% in costs by switching entirely to an open-access model. We have reached this figure by comparing current annual spending on scientific journals at Cornell, Yale, and Princeton universities with estimated spending under open-access. Assuming current published article numbers of 3,900, 3,600 and 2,500 respectively, we estimate the corresponding cost savings at 20%, 35% and 40%."

"Following the sharp increase in STM journal prices in recent years, the subscription-based model limits access to scientific information. Only the cash- rich libraries can afford to carry truly comprehensive serial collections. By giving libraries free access to scientific content, open-access comes closer to the nature of scientific output as a public product."

"Open-access increases the chances of authors having their work read and cited by expanding the potential reader base, and in this sense can support and promote the authors. Open-access has the potential to improve communication among scientists, as well as among the research community and the general public (among consumer groups, lawyers and individuals)."

Funny man Michael Moore - not really funny, but hopping mad - is making quite a hit in the UK newspapers for his savagely satirical take on events in the USA. Readers of Stupid White Men may recall that he became a powerful advocate for libraries and librarians when a library attending one of his talks, in New Jersey, I think, started a national campaign to blitz his publisher Harper Collins about their attempted censorship of his book. (And who is behind Harper Collins? Does the name Rupert Murdoch ring a bell? I wonder how much he gave to the Bush campaign?)

I urge everyone who is interested in civil liberties, including intellectual freedom to read Moore - you can start with his Web site, move on to Stupid White Men, if you haven't read it yet, and get the DVD of Bowling for Columbine

Read the report in the Daily Mirror of Moore's Oscar speech, and an extract from his new book, which appears in today's Guardian

I know that many people in the USA are worried by the so-called Patriot Act and the attempts to extend powers under that act. Well, one thing we can be sure about is that unless everyone is prepared to get up and vote the bastards out of office, it won't be long before there are no such thing as civil liberties. If George Orwell was alive today he'd think that 1984 was a little late in arriving but that it had finally made it. And if anyone thinks that it is only US civil liberties that are risk, think again. There are some tough questions for Tony Blair to answer and what he and other politicians don't seem to understand is that the game has changed - it's no longer enough to have a winning smile (even if it is slipping a little lately), people know they've been conned and they are going to want a truth-teller in 10 Downing Street. Exactly who in the present bunch of politicians would qualify for that title is difficult to figure out!

Get on to it, bloggers - post and re-post these links and get people thinking. It could be the revolution of the nerds!

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The top story in the latest issue of The Onion should amuse. The top line: "An Internet worm that disabled networks across the U.S. Monday and Tuesday temporarily thrust the nation into its most severe maelstrom of productivity since 1992."

The economic impact of libraries

If you've ever wondered about the economic impact of libraries in society - and it must be on your minds more or less continually - then wonder no longer. OCLC has produced a nice .pdf file that tells all called Libraries: how they stack up. Among the interesting snippets:

U.S. libraries purchase an estimated $14 billion in goods and services annually—exceeding U.S. spending on videos and athletic footwear, and approaching the level spent by businesses on magazine advertising. U.S. libraries account for nearly half of the $31 billion spent annually by libraries worldwide.

And George Bush, of course, snipped $39,000,000 from the budget for libraries when he slipped into the White House - shows how much influence his wife, the former children's librarian, must have had. Of course, Tony Bliar and the New Thatcherites don't have to do that in the UK - they just crack down on 'waste' in the public services.

Licences for electronic resources

A useful little article on this subject at Free Pint by Paul Pedley of the Economist Intelligence Unit.

The key point, of course, is:

It is important to point out that a licence does not confer ownership rights. It merely specifies the conditions upon which databases and other copyright works can be used and exploited, and by whom. At the end of the subscription period they may well no longer have access to the materials. Indeed, it may even be a requirement of the contract that anything which has been downloaded from the electronic information product is deleted at the end of the contract term.

In other words, "Oh sure, we'll sell you this stuff - but we're going to take it back when George snips another $39 million."

Both of these items courtesy of Charles Bailey's Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog

Librarians in court

This from Yahoo News:

In a hotly contested lawsuit before a federal appeals court, two peer-to-peer companies are about to gain a vast army of allies: America's librarians.

The five major US library associations are planning to file a legal brief Friday siding with Streamcast Networks and Grokster in the California suit, brought by the major record labels and Hollywood studios. The development could complicate the Recording Industry Association of America's efforts to portray file-swapping services as rife with spam and illegal pornography.

According to an attorney who has seen the document, the brief argues that Streamcast -distributor of the Morpheus software - and Grokster should not be shut down. It asks the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the April decision by a Los Angeles judge that dismissed much of the entertainment industry's suit against the two peer-to-peer companies.

Read more about it

As publisher of a freely available journal, I was interested to find an item on the New Society site about The Public Library of Science's first free offering - PLoS Biology

Of course, it all depends on what you mean by 'free' - the journal is freely available, but asks for $1,500 for each paper published from the author or his/her institution.

Thanks to Sandy Starr of Spiked for this note:

I thought you might be interested in the following new article on spiked:

BLOG-STANDARD POLITICS - by Martyn Perks

Could blogging MPs reinvigorate the electorate?