Open Access News

The registry proposal was endorsed today by the American Medical Association (AMA). It is now under consideration by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which represents journals like The Journal of the American Medical Association, The New England Journal of Medicine, and The Lancet. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) initially opposed the proposal but now says it "might reconsider" its position. More coverage.

(PS: If the registry would be OA, this is an excellent idea. If it wouldn't be OA, then those who need these data will face the same access barriers that we now see for those who need access to research literature. It won't be enough to give access to university-affiliated researchers and practicing physicians. Patients who take medicine and those who act for them will also need access. The AMA and the ICMJE also need to consider that if public health requires public access to medical information, then the same principle entails open access to peer-reviewed research literature.)

Since its launch last year, BioMed Central's Open Access XML full text corpus has more than doubled in size, and now comprises more than 5000 articles. It is being used by data-mining researchers all over the world, and is also being put to many other uses. For example, the European Patent Office receives a feed of BioMed Central's XML data and uses it as part of its process of scanning for prior articles relating to patent applications. In another new development, BioMed Central has just released an XSLT preview stylesheet, which can be used to convert the BioMed Central article XML format into HTML for display purposes. The stylesheet is covered by a Creative Commons license, which allows it to be freely reused, adapted, and redistributed.

The Brazilian statements on the 50th Anniversary of IBICT, one of the world's oldest information science organizations, makes Brazil the first Latin American country to enter this arena and to support freer dissemination of scholarship and research results. At the same time, ISTEC as a sponsor of this conference announced that the President of the organization would be signing the Berlin Declaration at their next meeting.

There was an unexpected grass roots "open letter" and proposal from the participants that was read at the end of the final day. The gist of the proposal was that the "participants urge all funding agencies, research institutes, and their own universities to support open access through education, reallocated funding and dedicated digital library research projects." A general vote by conference attendees was in overwhelming support of the proposal.

Update (6/21/04): Fortnow links to a page affirming the group's decision to move the special issue to SICOMP.

Update. This is not an unsigned news story, just a verbatim copy of an EU press release. The EU has since posted the official version of the press release to its web site (another copy).

The scientific publishing process has during the past few years undergone considerable changes. The socio-economic structures have, however, not changed much, and many academics and librarians view the current situation as highly unsatisfactory. This has triggered a number of initiatives to set up e-print repositories and electronic peer reviewed journals, which usually offer the full text for free on the Web. Serious in-depth research studying the way the scholarly communication system is affected by the Internet is needed. In this article a formal process model of the scientific publishing process is presented (the Scientific Publication Life-Cycle Model). The model has been developed in particular to provide a basis for studying the cost implications of different business models. It describes the life-cycle of the single publication, in particular the refereed journal article, from the research leading to it and writing it, to being read by other researchers years later or used as a catalyst for practical implementation. Conclusions are drawn about the usefulness of the modelling methodology for this particular purpose as well as of future uses of the model itself. In addition to providing a basis for cost studies the model could function as a road map for different types of open access initiatives.

At stake are the abilities of libraries to offer universal access to information;consumers to have competitive access to diverse sources of content, including noncommercial content; citizens to have free or cheap access to the government information that their tax dollars have financed; and students to perform research and collaborate online with each other. At stake are the ability of musicians and other artists to pioneer new forms of online creativity; creators in all media to freely quote and use a robust public domain of prior works; computer users to benefit from the innovations of competitive markets; and individuals to control how intimate personal information will be used.

Update. For more coverage, see Corey Murray, Copyright: Can it hold knowledge hostage? eSchool News, August 1, 2004.

Update. The authors have now deposited an OA version of the article in the University of Melbourne Eprints Repository.

Ethan Zukerman has blogged a longer version of Jean Claude Guédon's presentation. I expect that longer versions of the other presentations will soon be online, either at the conference site or elsewhere.