Open Access News

Update. I just found an OA edition of the preprint.

LR: Let's talk a little bit about your philosophy [today]. Could you discuss what you mean when you talk about "Universal Access To All Human Knowledge?"

BK: "Universal Access To All Human Knowledge" is a motto of Raj Reddy from Carnegie Mellon. I found that if you really actually come to understand that statement, then that statement is possible; technologically possible to take, say, all published materials -- all books, music, video, software, web sites -- that it's actually possible to have universal access to all of that. Some for a fee, and some for free. I found that was a life-changing event for me. That is just an inspiring goal. It's the dream of the Greeks, which they embodied, with the Egyptians, in the Library of Alexandria. The idea of having all knowledge accessible.

ACM is a publisher and maintains an online digital library. While we have a vested interest in the protection of our copyrighted information, we also shoulder a responsibility for our discipline to promote public policies that advance the open interchange of information in ways that lead to advances in computing technology of benefit to society.

ACM has concluded that current US laws provide adequate protection for collections of data. Additional legal protections would impact the availability and use of data and information that have traditionally been in the public domain, including government-funded data that might not be available from any other source. The open sharing of data and information has been fundamental to the advancement of knowledge, technology and culture. Any broadly constructed effort intended to increase protection for commercial data collections would restrict public data collections, thereby imposing an unwarranted cost on the process of scientific discourse.

Accordingly, ACM agrees with the National Academies of Science, the American Libraries Association, the US Chamber of Commerce, and other scientific societies, public interest groups and businesses that do not see a compelling need to extend new legal protections for collections of data at this time.

A poll at the web site shows an overwhelming majority of ACM members "strongly agree" with its position. (Thanks to C-FIT.)

How does Elsevier respond to the protests against its inflexible and onerous bundling policies? Quoting Elsevier Science spokesman Eric Merkel-Sobotta: "It's like having a yearly magazine subscription, not liking the October issue and then saying, 'We want a refund."'

Update. When I first blogged this, only a citation and abstract were posted to the Max Planck eDoc Server. But now the full-text is online. (Thanks to Bernd-Christoph Kaemper.)

From the section on institutional repositories, scholarly communication, and open access: "The open access community is a broad-based movement with significant library support. See in particular the work of ARL in supporting SPARC, and the formation of the International Scholarly Communications Alliance (ISCA) by major library organizations worldwide that are dedicated to the pursuit of Open Access. The development of systems of e-print archives is supported by national initiatives in several countries."

From the section on preservation and persistence: "There is an overwhelming tension between the DRM community and the open access community and it?s getting worse."

[RR] What is your reaction to the recently launched open-access journal PLoS Biology of the Public Library of Science and the basic philosophy of PLoS? Does the APS subscribe to the idea of free access to its archives and current issues of journals?

[MB] We would very much like to be able to provide open access to our journals. Again, we are not for making loss. We have to be able to recover our costs. The Public Library of Science --let me characterise it this way-- is open-access to readers but is toll-access to authors. We are the other way around. We are open-access to authors but toll-access to readers. Only one of our journals has page charges or article charges and that is Physical Review Letters and there it is essentially voluntary....But if we went to open access for readers, we have to recover the costs in some other way. We have to charge somebody for it and there would still be a problem.

[RR] Has the Ginsparg e-print archive impacted the APS journals in any way?

[MB] We make use of it. We mirror it as you know. We were the first mirror in the U.S. We use it for submissions, for example. We link to it so that if people refer to an article [in the e-print archive], we link to the article. Authors can post their articles in the e-print archive in advance of submission. In fact, we make use of that. We send the referee to the e-print archive [for downloading and refereeing]. It saves us money. In addition, we allow the final (published version) to be posted on it so that whatever is published is there. It is a form of open access. Most of the articles of high energy physics get into the e-print archive. Still this does not stop people from submitting because they want the peer review and the peer-reviewed version to be read. So, to answer your question, it has not impacted and it provides us with the benefit.

[RR] But has open access to the e-print archive impacted your subscription base?

[MB] Not that we can see. In point, this is a consequence of our collection of articles and a consequence of the fact that the e-print archive has things going back 10 years perhaps, growing during that time, but before that it is only the APS archive containing everything that we published since 1893.

Being aware that the National Institutes of Health is engaged in a review of its policies regarding the dissemination of research conducted with NIH funding, we encourage NIH support of open access to journal articles documenting agency-funded research....

Although the potential of the Internet to reduce costs and expand dissemination was widely anticipated, experience has shown that vested publishing interests --immune from normal market forces because of their control of "must have" content-- have blocked the realization of these potential benefits. This situation impairs scientific investigation and impedes the fullest sharing and application of research findings....

[T]he subscription-based journal model currently prevalent no longer maximizes access to research material. Nor is it economically sustainable. After years of active engagement in market-based experiments aimed at introducing competitive forces to achieve expanded dissemination of research, our organizations have concluded that open-access business models are a highly promising means of addressing the fundamental needs of science and medicine in a digital age....

[T]he opportunity to maximize U.S. taxpayers' return on their investment in NIH will not be fully realized until the power of the Internet and corresponding new financial models are embraced. We encourage NIH to unleash this potential by earmarking a portion of NIH grant funds to be used only for open-access publication and recommending to grantees that they avail themselves of this option.