Open Access News

(PS: Berners-Lee invented the web, not the internet. We know that there were open-access initiatives on the pre-web internet. But it should be just as clear that open access blossomed on the web and owes much of its feasibility and current appeal to this revolutionary, royalty-free technology.)

• John B. Hawley, Is free affordable?
• Thomas J. Walker, Open access by the article: an idea whose time has come?

Recently, we have witnessed a major shift in the landscape of publishing. Open Access, once a minor tremor, now dominates discussion everywhere. Each week brings a new declaration from a major society, publisher, consortium, or government agency taking one side or another on this important topic. [...]

Do open access journals have greater impact than those that do not allow free access to all readers? This question is important at ISI because our mission is to help researchers find the highest quality scholarly literature, regardless of its business model....The current study is part of an ongoing analysis within ISI of the overall performance of OA journals. [...]

ISI currently covers nearly 200 OA journals in its products (See Appendix I for a list of titles). This number, though small in comparison to the total number of journals in ISI's databases, is quite significant in terms of the progress made by the OA movement....We have not included journals for which only part of the content is freely available --when the archive is openly accessible but the most recent issues are not, for example.

We have found that the number of OA journals identified as Open Access and covered in ISI databases is growing rapidly, partly because new journals are founded and older journals are changing their access models, but also because better lists of such journals are becoming available. Each of the OA journals covered by ISI was subjected to the same rigorous selection process as any other journal included. These journals all adhere to high publishing standards, are peer reviewed comparably to other journals in their respective fields, and are cited at a level that indicates they compete favorably with similar journals in their field. The chief difference between these and some other journals covered by ISI is that the entire content of the OA journals is available without cost to the user.

The report presents data by discipline and year. In some disciplines there are OA journals in the top rank of impact factors, and in other disciplines there are not. In some disciplines, OA journals exceed the average ISI journal for citations to older articles (say, those from 1999) and in some fields they don't. Even if the performance of OA journals is in flux in all disciplines, this is a detailed and important snapshot that deserves close study. (Thanks to Jill O'Neill on Information Community News.)

• Susan K. Martin, A Wedge in the Door of Scholarly Communication
• Deborah Schmidle and Barbara Via, Physician Heal Thyself: The Library and Information Science Serials Crisis

Now about the article: Adam argues that OA to primary literature in journals may stimulate the market for "secondary publications which abstract, assess, cite and measure or increase the accessibility of all the free, open access, primary literature." If true, this is a reason for some publishers of priced literature to welcome and support OA.

The statement is signed by American Association of University Professors, American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression American Civil Liberties Union, American Library Association, First Amendment Project, National Coalition Against Censorship, Peacefire, PEN American Center, and the People For the American Way Foundation. (Thanks to C-FIT.)

Update. Norm has created an OA edition of his article by depositing it in E-LIS. Thanks, Norm!

• The first is a news story by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, U.S. Eases the Squeeze on 'Sanctioned' Authors. Excerpt: "The Treasury Department has reversed a controversial ruling that would have required U.S. scholarly journals to obtain the government's permission to edit papers from countries under a U.S. trade embargo. A new policy directive, spelled out in a 2 April letter to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), is expected to resolve months of confusion about how to handle manuscripts from those countries."
• The second is an editorial by Donald Kennedy, A Welcome Retreat at Treasury. Excerpt: "We couldn't see a 'national interest' for the United States in this rule, and certainly the interest of the international scientific enterprise was being poorly served. After all, the unfettered exchange of information encourages scientific progress in all nations, including the United States....A more recent OFAC stunt then extended the Treasury Department's policy into a new area. On a week's notice, some 40 U.S. academics hoping to attend a neurology meeting in Cuba were told that they couldn't go under the terms of OFAC's general license and couldn't get a specific license either....Science appreciates Treasury's willingness to own up to a mistake and is grateful to IEEE and the other groups who led the effort to get the policy changed....The real story here is that this reversal sets an example for an administration that is notoriously reluctant to admit error. Perhaps we can hope for more of the same. The Treasury Department itself could set the next example by lifting the Cuba prohibition and declaring that basic research symposia and laboratory visits are not appropriate subjects for 'trading with the enemy' sanctions. Who knows, the self-correction virus might even spread --to a White House announcement of a connection between anthropogenic emissions and global warming! We dream on."

• Adapt existing OAI-PMH harvesting (Arc) and Lucene indexing software to the grid
• Deploy a cluster to do parallel, high performance search based on Lucene engine
• Develop software support to move indices and metadata between low and high latency nodes."

For more details, see the grant proposal to the Mellon Foundation.

• Valentina Comba, Open Archives Initiative (OAI) 3 Workshop
• Gerry McKiernan, E-profile: Open Archives Initiative Data Providers. Part I: General