A great step towards OA for all publicly funded research!

President Bush has signed the omnibus appropriations bill (Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007, HR. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. Researchers funded by the NIH will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine's online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.

Worldwide, this now makes a total of 35 OA mandates already adopted and 8 more proposed so far, see ROARMAP: http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/. The NIH now joins 6 of the 7 UK Research Councils, the Wellcome Trust and many other prestigious providers of research funding in acknowledging the immense value of open access to research publications and scientific progress.

To researchers, this means a far greater volume of essential research publications are now available free to all with access to the internet. So congratulations to all who have worked so hard to reach this immensely important end of year present.

Where are we now? - OA strides ahead

It’s the time of year to assess the progress of on-going developments, and looking critically at OA is no exception. Both Peter Suber and Heather Morrison (see http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/12-02-07.htm#predictions and http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2007/12/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-2007.html respectively) have provided very encouraging statistics to end the year.

It is now important to remind all libraries and scientific users in the developing world that there are now vast quantities of OA material available for free and immediate use from OA journals and Institutional Repositories.

For example, in Heather Morrison’s blog, the following information is provided:

"There are already more journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals than in the holdings of the world's largest commercial scholarly publisher. There are more non-embargoed, scholarly journals in DOAJ than in the largest of the aggregated packages purchased by libraries.Some brief and approximate figures (non-embargoed, fulltext, peer-reviewed journals):

DOAJ: 3,000 journals
Science Direct: 2,000 journals
EBSCO Academic Search Complete / Gale Cengage
Academic OneFile: 1,700 journals"

For full details, see Directory of Open Access Journals: Already the Biggest of the Big Deals? . . . . Could the Directory of Open Access Journals already be the world's biggest big deal, or aggregation of scholarly journals?’

And how many OA articles are now available from Institutional Repostories?

Heather Morrison provides the following statistics (though not all articles in OAI, for example, are published refereed research articles):

“Scientific Commons: Close to 17 million items, from 7 million authors
OAIster: 14 million items, 914 contributors
PubMedCentral, the world's largest open access archive, hits the one million mark June 21, 2007
rePEC, Research Papers in Economics, surpasses half a million records in the third quarter, about 400,000 or so were online
OpenDOAR lists more than 1,000 repositories November 21, 2007.”

Many developing countries are in the top 15 countries using IRs, as recorded by a number of repositories able to provide this kind of information.

So these facts provide a wonderful end of year gift with which to celebrate the transition from 2007 to 2008. We should be hugely encouraged and celebrate!

It’s the time of year to assess the progress of on-going developments, and looking critically at OA is no exception. Both Peter Suber and Heather Morrison see http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/12-02-07.htm#predictions and http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2007/12/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-2007.html respectively) have provided very encouraging statistics to end the year.

It is now important to remind all libraries and scientific users in the developing world that there are already vast quantities of OA material available for free and immediate use from OA journals and Institutional Repositories.

For example, in Heather Morrison’s blog, the following information is provided:

‘There are already more journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals than in the holdings of the world's largest commercial scholarly publisher. There are more non-embargoed, scholarly journals in DOAJ than in the largest of the aggregated packages purchased by libraries.Some brief and approximate figures (non-embargoed, fulltext, peer-reviewed journals):

DOAJ: 3,000 journals

Science Direct: 2,000 journals

EBSCO Academic Search Complete / Gale Cengage Academic OneFile: 1,700 journals’

For full details, see Directory of Open Access Journals: Already the Biggest of the Big Deals? . . . . Could the Directory of Open Access Journals already be the world's biggest big deal, or aggregation of scholarly journals?’
And how many OA articles are now available from Institutional Repostories? Heather Morrison provides the following statistics (though not all articles in OAI, for example, are published refereed research articles):
‘Scientific Commons: Close to 17 million items, from 7 million authors
OAIster: 14 million items, 914 contributors
PubMedCentral, the world's largest open access archive, hits the one million mark June 21, 2007
rePEC, Research Papers in Economics, surpasses half a million records in the third quarter, about 400,000 or so were online
OpenDOAR lists more than 1,000 repositories November 21, 2007’
Many developing countries are in the top 15 countries using IRs, as recorded by a number of repositories able to provide this kind of information.

So these facts provide a wonderful seasonal gift with which to celebrate the transition from 2007 to 2008. We should be hugely encouraged and celebrate!

Botswana Open Access Summit

Vice Chancellors at the Open Access leadership summit of the Southern African Regional Universities’ Association (SARUA), November 20-22 2007, were told it is important for Africa to generate new knowledge and contribute to internationally knowledge-based development and innovation.

The Minister of Education for Botswana, Jacob Nkate, was giving a keynote address at the 'Open Access' leadership summit of SARUA. He said through research and innovation, tertiary education provides the basis for the society to adapt and advance in this era of modern technology.

"Open access approaches and models promote universal unrestricted free access to full-text scholarly materials and scientific research via the Internet which in turn accelerates knowledge transfer," he said, adding that public good requires the removal of prevention barriers to this research and its publication.

More news to follow.

Posted by Electronic Publishing Trust for Development

Botswana Open Access Summit

Vice Chancellors at the Open Access leadership summit of the Southern African Regional Universities’ Association (SARUA), November 20-22 2007, were told it is important for Africa to generate new knowledge and contribute to internationally knowledge-based development and innovation.

The Minister of Education for Botswana, Jacob Nkate, was giving a keynote address at the 'Open Access' leadership summit of SARUA. He said through research and innovation, tertiary education provides the basis for the society to adapt and advance in this era of modern technology.

"Open access approaches and models promote universal unrestricted free access to full-text scholarly materials and scientific research via the Internet which in turn accelerates knowledge transfer," he said, adding that public good requires the removal of prevention barriers to this research and its publication.

Now 100 Institutional Repositories in eIFL-net countries

The Open Society Institute-supported eIFL network has helped in the establishment of nearly one hundred OA Institutional Repositories in developing and emerging countries and is moving towards linking up with the EU DRIVER project! This is terrific news and shows that, through hard work, enthusiasm and international cooperation, organisations in these countries are recognising the enormous benefits that open access will bring to their scientific research and economies. Many congratulations to all concerned!

*

eIFL INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES SETTING THE PLATFORM FOR INTERNATIONAL CO-OPERATION

Contributed by Susan Veldsman, eIFL, South Africa,
email: susan.veldsman@eifl.net

Over the last year electronic Information For Libraries (eIFL) has been working hard to create a database and record all aspects of Institutional Repositories that have been developed in all our member countries. After a lot of correspondence and updating with countries, we can now report that 17 member eIFL countries currently have:

- 27 repositories in progress
- 69 active repositories,
- Total of 96 institutional repositories

This gave us the opportunity to look for international co-operation with other projects. Being so closely associated with SURF, the Netherlands, eIFL were quite aware of the DRIVER project and its follow up DRIVER II sister project. (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research:DRIVER) that they were involved in. One of the objectives of DRIVER is to organize and build a virtual, European scale network (portal) of existing institutional repositories from the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Germany, France and Belgium.

eIFL saw the challenge and decided to piggy back on the expertise and technology infrastructure that the SURF/DRIVER project already had in place. Talks began with all parties involved and during June/July 2007 a similar portal(network) was created and can currently be viewed at http://eifl.cq2.org.

As a result, eIFL has organized and built a virtual eIFL member country scale network (portal) of existing institutional repositories.

This is only the beginning of a long journey. eIFL's ultimate goal is to develop these repositories to reach an international standard. This will be done by training e.g metadata, other standards, linking, setting up repositories, etc These repositories should be at such a level that they could easily feed or be included into, for example, a DRIVER project.

This has brought a very much higher profile to eIFL and we have received enthusiastic and excited feedback.

This is not the only activitiy we are envisaging, we are also busy to "mass register" eIFL repositories in IR registers and harvesters (OAIster and OpenDOAR) We are also looking at additional training that could be given to countries to "move" their repositories from an inactive to active status, as well as to start up new repositories.

OA in Brazil

Pushing out the BOAT (Brazilian OA Task Force) – an impressive catalogue of progress toward OA, provided by Professor Sely Costa, IBICT, Brazil. Watch this space for the latest outcome to develop policies and mandates, and to establish a national OA service for institutional repositories and OA journals in Brazil.

The Open Access Movement in Brazil
Sely Costa, IBICT, Brazil

The open access movement in Brazil, as everywhere else, has constituted a challenging cause to embrace. Both IBICT and SciELO have been involved with the movement, taking the lead in most of the initiatives in the country.

Declarations to support OA

From 2005, a number of declarations have been issued in Brazil, undersigned by either individuals or civil society entities, by means of their representatives. There are, so far, at least four major declarations issued in Brazil, following the Berlim Declaration. One has been issued by IBICT at the 57th Annual Meeting of SBPC (http://www.ibict.br/openaccess/arquivos/manifesto.htm). The other three have been issued by a Psychology Learned Society (http://www.bvs-psi.org.br/DeclFlor.pdf), the participants of an international conference in health sciences (http://www.icml9.org/public/documents/pdf/pt/Dcl-Salvador-AcessoAberto-pt.pdf) and a group of researchers from the state of São Paulo (http://www.acessoaberto.org/).

Events to promote OA

A number of events that have taken place in Brazil include OA in their programmes. The last three annual meetings of the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science (SBPC) had a special session on OA (see http://www.sbpcnet.org.br/livro/57ra/programas/CONF_SIMP/simposios/1.htm and http://www.sbpcnet.org.br/livro/58ra/atividades/ENCONTROS/listagem.html). Proceedings of the 59th meeting, when Stevan Harnad and Brazilians leaders of the movement participated in a special session, will be available soon. OA has also featured in annual meetings of learned societies (eg in information science (http://portal.cid.unb.br/cipeccbr), health sciences (http://www.icml9.org/), communication science (http://www.portcom.intercom.org.br/www_antigo2/index.php?secao=projetos/endocom) and psychology (http://www.anpepp.org.br/index-grupoXI.htm).

In April 2006, the First Cipecc - Ibero American Conference in Electronic Publishing in the context of Scholarly Communication (http://portal.cid.unb.br/cipeccbr), Brasilia, was very successful, with participants from 6 countries (Mexico, Chile, Portugal, Spain, Brazil and Canada), and 13 Brazilian states. It offered a unique opportunity to make open access, institutional repositories and other topics known and discussed by people from Ibero-America as a whole and Brazil in particular. The conference website contains all papers and presentations. In November 2006, a group of researchers from Brazil, along with researchers and librarians from Portugal, as well as a librarian from Mozambique held a meeting at the University of Minho, in Portugal, to discuss the open access movement in Portuguese speaking countries (see (http://www.sdum.uminho.pt/confOA/programa.htm). From this meeting, the Minho Commitment resulted as an important document to this community (see http://www.ibict.br/openaccess/arquivos/compromisso.pdf). As a follow-up to this, on November 13th 2007, a seminar, ‘Open Access Seminar to the Scientific Knowledge in Portuguese Speaking Countries’ (http://www.intgovforum.org/Rio_Schedule_final.html) is taking place in Rio de Janeiro, as part of a Brazil/United Nations meeting (http://www.intgovforum.org/). Representatives of 8 Portuguese speaking countries are expected to sign up the Rio de Janeiro Protocol, which establishes the aims of the commitment. Notices of this event will be delivered soon after the meeting at Dr. Kuramoto’s blog (http://blogdokura.blogspot.com/) and at the Open Access in Portuguese Speaking Countries web page (http://www.ibict.br/alemplus), a site dedicated to the topic for this community.

Steps to implement OA initiatives

One of the most promising recent Brazilian initiatives was the meeting held at the University of Brasilia (UnB), as a joint event by IBICT and the university. The purpose of the meeting was to establish the foundations of a Brazilian movement for Open Access to scientific and scholarly publications: the Brazilian Open Access Task Force (BOAT Force). This initiative aims to establish, at the universities and research institutions in Brazil, institutional repositories, mandate policies and the OASIS.Br (http://www.ibict.br/oasis.br/), a central service to both repositories and e-journals published in the country. The University of Brasilia is positioning itself as a pioneer, with the unprecedented support of its rector, Professor Timothy Martin Mulholland. Clearly, much of this movement is now considered the way of the future for scientific publication and the ambition is to spread this message across Brazil.

Publications to disseminate OA

A growing number of articles have been published on open access and the open archives initiatives in Brazilian scholarly journals. Early articles mostly describe open archives initiatives. A special issue of Ciência da Informação, published by IBICT in 2006 (http://www.ibict.br/cionline/viewissue.php?id=40#Acesso_Livre_à_Informação:_aspectos_socioculturais ), is entirely dedicated to the subject, with articles from Kuramoto, Southwick, Sinay; Michelson, and Rosales, Bauste, Guzmán and Bianco reporting ongoing projects in Latin America countries. A new ‘open philosophy’ and a new model for scholarly publishing was the subject of Costa. Mueller discusses the degree of acceptance related to the level of legitimacy in which open access publications are held. Finally, Schirmbacher, from the Humboldt University at Berlin, describes some actual changes that are taking place in communication processes, in services department held by research institutions, libraries and computer centers. Another recent article from Baptista, Costa, Kuramoto and Rodrigues was published in a special issue of Encontros Bibli, published by the Post-Graduate Programme in Information Science at the University of Santa Catarina and also dedicated to OA (http://www.encontros-bibli.ufsc.br/especial.html).

Courses to teach OA

In a very recent activity, OA is being taught in a special seminar (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/acessoaberto/), as part of the Post-Graduate Programme in Information Science at the University of Brasilia. The seminar is part of the activities of the research group in electronic publications, named moitarah and lead by professor Sely Costa (http://moitarah.wordpress.com). The seminar includes collaboration of specialists like Stevan Harnad, Peter Suber, Leslie Chan and John Willinsky, who have provided suggestions on both the content of the seminar and readings for the students. Besides studying the topic, students are working on a book to be published. The specialists are also expected to contribute with a chapter to the book, and some of them should participate in the next event n OA, to be held at the University of Brasilia, in April 9-11, 2008. The OA Brazilian book will be launched during the event, and openly distributed on the Internet. News about April’s meeting will be available soon at moitarah blog and, later on its own web page.

Note: a number of the URL’s in this piece are from sites or blogs still under construction, and many in Portuguese.

The OA roller-coaster

Bad news – Good news – Bad news – Good news

Yesterday, the bad news. It seems that the publishers’ lobby has inserted amendments to the US Appropriations Bill, effectively killing the changes to the proposed NIH OA policy that would enhance access and scientific progress.

Those of us working in development are increasingly appalled that the opportunities afforded by OA for the resolution of the planet’s major problems are continually blocked by the publishing lobby. Those of us working in the poorest regions of the world where the major health and environment difficulties daily lead to unnecessary deaths, loss of livelihoods, unimaginably low quality of life, cannot understand how a handful of publishers can continue to put barriers in the way of the free and immediate exchange of research findings that are essential for strengthening the economies and the science base of developing countries. Someone has said that the only event that would open eyes to the enormity of their actions would be the threat of a major pandemic that affected the developed world.

The lucrative business of publishing material for which the scientific community freely provides the content and carries out the peer review is no longer acceptable in its present form, and I am fully in tune with the tone of the letter from the Knowledge Ecology International to the US Senate, http://www.keionline.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=155&Itemid=1. In truth, publishers are increasingly minor players in the distribution of scientific knowledge, both in terms of financial expenditure in the creation, execution and application of scientific knowledge, and of scholarly effort.

Today, the good news

But today we learned of the brilliant EurOpenScholar initiative by EU university rectors to encourage all EU universities and institutes to adopt and mandate OA. See: http://www.ulg.ac.be/relationsexterieures/RecteursOA/. Congratulations Europe!

Also, from South Africa we learned of the great progress in establishing institutional repositories (IRs) in the region. With the support of eIFL, the number of IRs has increased in a year from 68 to nearly 100, and a collaborative development with SURF, Netherlands, has established a federated IR network (cf DRIVER) that has harvested 80,500 items from partner countries in Africa. Details of this impressive development will hopefully be posted here by Susan Voldsman of eIFL, within the next few weeks. Congratulations South Africa (and also for the rugby World Cup Final)!

And today again there is news of the cancellation of Springer journals by the prestigious Max Plank Institute on the basis of excessive cost . . .

STOP PRESS FOR VERY GOOD NEWS!!! From Peter Suber’s blog: ‘Tonight the Senate passed the Labor-HHS appropriations bill containing the provision to mandate OA at the NIH. More, the vote was a veto-proof 75-19.‘ this, in spite of strong publisher lobbying. So congratulations to US colleagues who ensured this noble outcome! Not the end of the story, but a major step forward for OA.

Submitted by Barbara Kirsop

Berlin 5: Open Access from practice to impact
Padua September 19-21, 2007

Report by Barbara Kirsop, EPT

The fifth follow-up meeting from the Berlin Declaration’s arrival was held in the tranquil and historic town of Padua. Speakers were probably standing on the same spot as that of Galileo Galilei, centuries ago, and the ancient building reflected this distinguished past. The conference reported OA activities – both regards policy and technical implementation – that had taken place since Berlin 4.

I was there to participate in a session devoted to the impact of OA on developing country science. Organised and chaired by EPT Trustee Subbiah Arunachalam, Chennai, India, the speakers included D K Sahu (MedKnow Publications, Mumbai, India), Stefka Kalavanova (FAO, Rome) and myself. The session was held in parallel with one on ‘Open Issues on Open Access’. Unfortunately, this attracted the bulk of the ~300 participants, and we spoke only to ~ 23 people. This was particularly disappointing as the presentations contained highly significant statistical evidence of the impact of OA on access to research knowledge in the 80% of the world where the main problems exist. Presentations showed that usage of OA articles by developing country researchers is remarkably high and at the same time, the emergence of the ‘invisible’ research findings from these regions into the international scene is quite dazzling, with usage, submissions, impact and even subscriptions growing significantly. I urge people to view the ppt presentations that will shortly be available from http://www.aepic.it/conf/program.php?cf=10, and take particular note of the usage figures that are included (for example, 2.5 million requests in 2006 for full text articles from ~60 OA journals published in developing countries and distributed by Bioline International, and similar statiustics from MedKnow, India and SciELO, Latin America). Although there is a long way to go, OA is already making a measurable difference.

What were the take-home messages for scientific research in the developing world? Well, the establishment of institutional repositories and OA journals continues to grow and is now a fixture in the academic world, but there was growing interest in the parallel sharing of research data (OpenData) and the inevitable benefits that will arise from this in all scientific disciplines – particularly for the resolution of the global problems of infectious diseases, climate stability, HIV AIDS etc.

Which presentations stood out? Of course, we heard encouraging OA reports from the European Science Foundation, universities, foundations, institutes, OA organisations and the EU Commission, all of which continue to support and encourage OA developments in different ways, and you can read the abstracts and ppt's from the web site (soon). But I shall remember the following in particular:

- Ilaria Capula, a veterinary virologist disturbed us all with her description of the consequences of avian influenza, she described the development by her laboratory of valuable sequence data to aid its containment, and shocked us by the fact that she had to struggle to make this information OA by deposit in Genbank, being required initially to deposit the data in a WHO database with ID/Pwd control .She was applauded for her integrity and persistence.

- Peter Murray-Rust stimulated the audience with online (no ppt for Peter!) demonstrations of the inadequacy of past publishing technologies to advance chemistry through static mechanisms and demonstrated the way research benefits immeasurably through web-based Open Data developments.

- The Conference ended with an up-beat presentation by Alma Swan encouraging everyone to adopt a ‘can-do’ approach to OA (as all Italians do when parking cars, she showed), to forge ahead with scientific integrity, and to remember the words of Gandhi that with radical new concepts, ‘first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win’.

In the corridors: I was particularly concerned to learn that as the quality of the developing country journals improve through the work of local publishing initiatives - as visibility, impact, submissions and even subscriptions grow - a few large commercial publishers are approaching publishers of the most successful local journals with attractive offers to take them over and ‘help’ their development further. Publishers, authors and editors from hard-pressed countries may find it difficult to remember that by retaining their journals in-country they strengthen their own research base. Understandably, they may be tempted to break faith with those that have put years of effort into helping their journals reach a standard considered worthy of take over, but this practice should be publicised and local publishers encouraged to retain their journals in-country.

It reminds me of the situation with the UN publishing donor programmes, in which, as the economy of a country becomes stronger, it moves out of the eligible range for access to donated publications. Sometimes, in developing countries, the harder you work and the greater progress you make, the more you may be exploited. OA is clearly the only long-term solution to unequal access to essential research findings.

Submitted by Barbara Kirsop

Africa: scholarly publishing study

Eve Gray, University of Cape Town, South Africa, has prepared a report on the status of research publications in the country, and made recommendations for a policy review. The study formed part of the Open Society Institute International Policy Fellowship, Programme 2006-7. The full report can be found at: http://www.policy.hu/gray/IPF_Policy_paper_final.pdf

She describes the present situation that leads to African knowledge being seriously marginalized and poorly represented in the global scholarly output. She makes a number of recommendations that could be appropriate for other African countries and concludes that Open Access and collaborative approaches could bring substantially increased impact for African research, with marked cost-benefit advantages.

Editorial success

We are delighted to announce the recent certification of Daisy Ouya as an Editor in the Life Sciences (BELS, http://www.bels.org/). Daisy is the first science editor from the developing world to receive this certification, and we send her our warmest congratulations!

Berlin 5 Conference

Submitted by Subbiah Arunachalam

The series of follow-up meetings to the Berlin Declaration on open access (http://oa.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html) reaches Berlin-5 at Padua, Italy, on September 19-21st. The theme of the meeting is 'From Practice to Impact: Consequences of Knowledge Dissemination'. At this meeting I was invited to organise a session titled, 'Open access in developing countries'. I will chair the session and the panellists include Barbara Kirsop (EPT, UK), D K Sahu (MedKnow, Mumbai), Stephen Katz (FAO, Rome). Summaries of the presentations and ppt files will be available from http://www.aepic.it/conf/program.php?cf=10.
This session will give us the opportunity to present the great benefits that open access to research findings offers developing country science.
In addition, I am also requested to speak on open access developments in India.
There will be another major event later this year: GK3 (the Third Global knowledge Conference organised by GKP at Kuala Lumpur, 11-13 December 2007) where Leslie Chan and I are organizing a panel discussion on "Open for Business: The Emerging Collaboration Economy" and I am organizing another session on "Accelerating inclusion through knowledge sharing". Speakers in these panels include Marjorie Whalen of IDRC, Mr Hindawi, Dr V Balji of ICRISAT, Dr Peter Ballantyne of IAALD and possibly Arthur Sale from Tasmania, Australia.

ARIADNE article now published

The article, 'Access to Scientific Knowledge for Sustainable Development: Options for Developing Countries', mentioned in the previous message is now published.

See: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue52/kirsop-et-al/

Open Access and Sustainable Development publication

A new publication has been submitted to the online journal ARIADNE and will appear in the August issue. The title is, 'Access to Scientific Knowledge for Sustainable Development: Options for Developing Countries', by Barbara Kirsop, Subbiah Arunachalam and Leslie Chan. The URL for the publication will be posted here as soon as it has been published.