An attempt to block OA distribution of US published research findings - the RWA

The EPT has written to a number of publishers/organisations that are signed up members of the American Association of Publishers, which supports the recently presented Research Works Act (RWA) submitted to Congress as HR3699. This Act seeks to undermine the existing open access distribution of published research, via such outlets as the NIH, and is clearly a move by the publishing industry to undermine the great advances already made towards the free and fair distribution of publicly funded research findings. The EPT has written to publishers that have existing OA policies, pointing out that the RWA act is in conflict with these policies and requesting clarification and preferably dissociation from the stance taken by the AAP.

Fur further information on the RWA, follow Peter Suber’s blog on https://plus.google.com/u/0/109377556796183035206/posts/QYAH1jSJG6L

and read other comments here (http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/867-guid.html).

Below is an example of the letters we have sent:

"We write from the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, a long-established UK-based registered charity which works to support access to current research by the vast majority of the world’s researchers who live in low-economy countries.

The US Research Works Act currently proposed totally undermines this effort. This Act has been introduced by Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), both of whom appear to have received substantial sums of money from the publishing industry over the past few years. The Act would prevent open dissemination of publicly-funded research, undoing all the good done by the NIH open access policy and preventing the world’s disadvantaged researchers from accessing the findings from US research.

The American Association of Publishers has openly welcomed and supported the Act. Your company/organisation is a member of the AAP.  As a publisher with a mission to disseminate research as widely as possible, we would expect you to dissociate yourselves, clearly and loudly, from this proposal. Support for the RWA is clearly in direct conflict with your stated policy in support of Open Access.

Open Access has been a life-line to the researchers in developing and emerging countries, their institutes and ultimately to their national economies, providing the potential for building on past research to the benefit of the global community (think infectious diseases, all public health issues, climate change, agricultural problems, energy provision, water conservation, engineering developments . . .).

The economic returns to countries from freedom of access to global research and the developments that follow from it are vastly greater than those from the small service provided by the publishing industry. The former is almost immeasurable in comparison. This Act has been driven by those that are putting commercial gain before the health and indeed survival of many of the world’s populations. This is not the purpose of public investment in research.

Yours sincerely,

The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development

Web site:http://www.epublishingtrust.org

Blog:http://www.epublishisngtrust.blogspot.com"

EPT OA AWARD 2011- announcing the winner!

Press Release January 1^st 2012

INAUGURAL EPT AWARD for OPEN ACCESS

The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development is pleased to announce the winners of a new annual award to be made to individuals working in developing countries who have made a significant personal contribution to advancing the cause of open access and the free exchange of research findings.

We received 30 proposals from organisations in 17 developing countries on four continents, naming individuals who have worked hard to promote Open Access and who have achieved substantial progress. The selection of a single winner was extremely difficult as we received nominations for so many individuals who have made impressive strides by any or all of the following means:- 

• establishing OA institutional repositories;

• setting up or encouraging conversion to OA journals;
• achieving establishment of OA mandates requiring research to be OA on  publication, or other policy developments;
• advocating OA via seminars, publications, workshops, videos;
• training others in the technology of setting up IRs;
•  preparing and establishing e-learning projects;
• working towards the acceptance of Creative Commons licensing arrangements for research publications;
• developing software for use in OA practices.

Because of the high standard of the applicants, we have decided to name a single winner, but also to recognise three other individuals who were very close runners-up. All will receive a certificate and the winner will receive in addition an engraved plaque in the next few weeks.

We are very happy to announce that the winner of the inaugural award is Dr Francis Jayakanth of the National Centre for Scientific Information, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India.  Dr Jayakanth played a significant role in the establishment of India’s first institutional repository (IR) (http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in). He now manages the IR and has provided technical support for establishing IRs in many other universities and institutes in India. He has been the key resource person at many events to train people in setting up IRs and OA journals. He has delivered presentations on IRs, OA journals, the OAI protocol, OAI compliance, the benefits of OA to authors and institutions and the role of libraries. He has developed a free and open source software tool (CDSOAI), which is widely used. 

The Indian Institute of Science is the most prestigious institute in India and its IR now holds >31,400 records, making the century-old institute's research far more globally visible than before. The University Grants Commission in India has been impressed by the IISC’s IR and has directed all universities in India to replicate this effort.

Francis Jayakanth can indeed be considered an OA ‘renaissance man’, an advocate and technical expert in all aspect of Open Access development and an inspiration to all, both at the research and policy level.

The EPT is proud to congratulate Dr Jayakanth as our first Award winner. We believe this Award and the example of our first winner will inspire many others and lead to similarly impressive nominations  in 2012.

The runners-up for this award were (in alphabetical order): 

  - Ina Smith, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa;

  - Tatyana Zayseva, Khazar University, Azerbaijan;
  - Xiaolin Zhang, National Science Library, Chinese Academy of  Science.

The EPT wishes to congratulate them and all who have been proposed, since without exception they have made a significant personal contribution to the sharing of research findings across the world.  We will be sharing some of their stories and successes on our blog over the next few weeks.

Electronic Publishing Trust for Development

Web site http://www.epublishingtrust.org

Ept Blog http://www.epublishingtrust.blogspot.com

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MANY CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR INAUGURAL WINNER!

Dr Francis Jayakinth 
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We wish to stress once more that the selection of a single winner was exceedingly difficult since all nominees were very worthy and their work of such a high standard. Nominees ranged from those working on long-established developments to those setting up new ‘starter’ efforts, making progress in one or all of the aspects of Open Access, listed above. We were very encouraged to learn how much impressive work is underway around the world to achieve equitable access to research findings and hope that this Award will encourage further developments in the years ahead.


While established efforts in the ‘North’ now debate the finer points of Open Access and are frustrated at the too-slow speed of adoption, the developing world is marching ahead with establishing essential infrastructure, recognising the great benefits that OA can bring to authors, their institutes and indeed to the progress of research in their regions.


We will be posting further details of the excellent work of some of our nominees in the weeks ahead. 

The Impact Factor as a measure of research quality is no longer appropriate - OA has the answer

Leslie Chan, Director of Bioline International and EPT Trustee, argues that the continuing use of the Impact Factor as a measurement of research quality is no longer appropriate and excludes much valuable research carried out in the developing world. Researchers from developing countries feel the need to publish in journals with high impact levels as measured by the Thomon Reuter's IF and their research agenda is consequently often dictated by this, rather than by  national and regional needs for research effort. Other metrics are more inclusive and should replace the IF in this open networked climate. Click on SciDevNet to read his opinion piece.

JISC offer to promote OA activities - forwarded

From: Internal announcement list for JISC Advance [JISC-ADVANCE-STAFF@JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of Daniel McCaffrey [danmccaffrey@RSC-SOUTH-WEST.AC.UK]
Sent: 16 November 2011 15:16
To: JISC-ADVANCE-STAFF@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: JISC Open Campaign Steering Group-Request

Dear Colleagues,

I'm one of the JISC Advance representatives on the steering group orchestrating JISC's national "Open" campaign.

The group are engaged in planning promotional activities for JISC to push the "open" agenda to supported Institutions.  Can any RSC/JISC Advance colleagues avail me of any Open-related comms activity coming up in the new year that would benefit from being promoted on a corporate level, as JISC aim to  create a calendar of relevant activities to push throughout the campaign.

If you have anything of interest, please let me know.

Best Wishes, Dan McCaffrey

Beyond Open Access - new technology provides appropriate methodologies for sharing research knowledge in the developing world

Beyond Open Access

– new opportunities for scholarly communication in developing countries

Leslie Chan, Trustee of EPT and Director of Bioline International, presented the following video at the recent BioMedCentral Open Access Africa Conference held at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wJXcm-xTfU&feature=youtu.be. As well as outlining the aims and the resources available from Bioline International and the usage that is made globally of developing country research from this platform, he discussed the need for a rethink on the evaluation of research articles and journals, based on their relevance to development in emerging countries of the world. He emphasised that the goal of Bioline International is not solely a means of increasing the Impact Factor of journals based on Northern values and suggested that the future of sharing research globally will be met in additional ways than by traditional journals. He introduced the concepts of networked knowledge, open science and a new invisible college, and explains how these new technologies are more appropriate for the advancement of research in the developing world.

Just 19 days left to send nominations for the EPT OA Award

Colleagues, this is a reminder that if you wish to make a nomination for the EPT open access award for individuals in developing countries that have made a significant contribution to the progress of Open Access, there are only 21 days left before nominations close. Click here to get all details. We look forward to hearing from you.

Two studies of the use of OA journals in India

Two publications on the use of OA journals by researchers in India have been published recently in Current Science. Below are the conclusions and a link to the full texts. Between them they provide a comprehensive picture of the status of OA in India.

  

[1]  Subbiah Gunasekaran and Subbiah Arunachalam: Use of open access journals by Indian researchers: CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 101, NO. 10,  25 NOVEMBER  2011, Page 1287-1295. For the full text (which includes many tables and graphs) see http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/forthcoming/GA2282.pdf

Conclusion:

OA to research findings can be provided by two ways: by publishing the papers in OA journals (the gold route) and or by placing the full text of the papers along with metadata in interoperable OA archives (the green route). At least three leading publishers of S&T journals in India have opted to go the OA way. MedKnow publishes more than 150 OA journals. The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, adopted OA for all its journals more than ten years ago. Indeed, Pramana, its physics journal, was made open access in July 1998. More recently, CSIR made all 16 research journals published by the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources OA. A few years ago the Indian Council of Medical Research made the Indian Journal of Medical Research OA. While these moves are certainly welcome, we believe that the OA archives route is the ideal solution, especially for developing countries. No matter whether they publish their papers in OA or toll-access journals, Indian researchers will do well to place the full text of their papers in institutional repositories. Stevan Harnad, founder of Psycoloquy stopped publishing the journal in 2001, as it became clear to him by then that author self-archiving in interoperable institutional repositories was the best route to ensure 100% OA to the world’s scholarly literature.

In November 2009, 41 Nobel laureates wrote an open letter to the US Congress expressing their support to OA to research. They believed that the open availability of research ‘will make it easier for scientists worldwide to better and more swiftly address the complex scientific challenges that we face today and expand shared knowledge across disciplines to accelerate breakthrough and spur innovation’. P. Balaram told SciDev.Net; ‘I think every institution should be encouraged to set up a repository. This is a problem-free model I want to promote. There may be a few glitches at the start, but the next generation of scientists will be comfortable with it’. In a recent blog posting, Giridhar said, ‘The best way to make the work open access in India is not necessarily by publishing it in open access journals but by depositing the article in an institutional repository’. The Indian Academy of Sciences has recently set up a repository for papers by all its Fellows, both living and deceased. As of 7 October 2011, more than 60,500 paper/documents were deposited, but a vast majority of them do not provide access to the full text. One has to be content with metadata and abstracts. CSIR has decided to set up repositories in each one of its more than 35 laboratories.

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[2] Subbiah Arunachalam and Muthu Madhan, Use made of open access journals by Indian researchers to publish their findings, CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 100, NO. 9, 10  MAY 2011, Page 1297-1306. For the full text, see http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/10may2011/1297.pdf

Conclusion

Indian researchers publish a large number of papers in OA journals, not necessarily because more than 360 Indian journals are OA. Their contribution to high-impact international biomedical OA journals is modest at best. However, India’s contribution to Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports is substantial. There are two reasons for this: India has a strong and vibrant community of inorganic crystallographers and the journal charges only $ 150 for processing a paper. A similar study on India’s participation in international OA journals in other fields, such as physics, chemistry, earth sciences and engineering will be interesting. Ideally though, Indian researchers and funding agencies should prefer the institutional archiving route recommended by both Harnad1,18 and Balaram. One hundred per cent OA through archiving should be the national goal. As pointed out by Joshi and as has been demonstrated most recently by the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, Kochi, starting and filling an institutional EPrints archive is easy, inexpensive, and immensely beneficial to all. However, six years after the first workshop on setting up OA repositories was held in May 2004, we have not more than 40 active repositories in the country. We believe that such repositories would come up in most, if not all, higher educational and research institutions in the country if the Ministers in charge of both higher education and science and technology send out a note stating that from now on all publicly-funded research should be available through OA channels.