Elsevier Launching Rival To Wikipedia By Extracting Scientific Definitions Automatically From Authors' Texts

from the don't-do-as-we-do,-do-as-we-say dept

Elsevier is at it again. It has launched a new (free) service that is likely to undermine open access alternatives by providing Wikipedia-like definitions generated automatically from texts it publishes. As an article on the Times Higher Education site explains, the aim is to stop users of the publishing giant's ScienceDirect platform from leaving Elsevier's walled garden and visiting sites like Wikipedia in order to look up definitions of key terms:

Elsevier is hoping to keep researchers on its platform with the launch of a free layer of content called ScienceDirect Topics, offering an initial 80,000 pages of material relating to the life sciences, biomedical sciences and neuroscience. Each offers a quick definition of a key term or topic, details of related terms and relevant excerpts from Elsevier books.

Significantly, this content is not written to order but is extracted from Elsevier's books, in a process that Sumita Singh, managing director of Elsevier Reference Solutions, described as "completely automated, algorithmically generated and machine-learning based".

It's typical of Elsevier's unbridled ambition that instead of supporting a digital commons like Wikipedia, it wants to compete with it by creating its own redundant versions of the same information, which are proprietary. Even worse, it is drawing that information from books written by academics who have given Elsevier a license -- perhaps unwittingly -- that allows it to do that. The fact that a commercial outfit mines what are often publicly-funded texts in this way is deeply hypocritical, since Elsevier's own policy on text and data mining forbids other companies from doing the same. It's another example of how Elsevier uses its near-monopolistic stranglehold over academic publishing for further competitive advantage. Maybe it's time anti-trust authorities around the world took a look at what is going on here.

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Filed Under: definitions, knowledge, open access
Companies: elsevier

Free Software, Open Access, And Open Science Groups Join Fight Against EU Copyright Directive's Terrible Ideas

from the how-to-destroy-Europe's-science-and-tech-future-in-one-easy-move dept

Techdirt has been covering the EU's plans to "modernize" copyright law for years now, and noted how things seem to be getting worse. Two ideas -- the so-called link tax and the upload filter -- are particularly one-sided, offering no benefits for the public, but providing the copyright industry with yet more monopolies and powers to censor. That much we knew. But two new initiatives reveal that the harmful effects are much, much broader than first thought.

The first, dubbed "Save Code Share", comes from the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), and the open source organization OpenForum Europe (disclosure: I am an unpaid Fellow of the associated OpenForum Academy, but have no involvement with the new project). The two groups are concerned about the impact of Article 13 of the draft text (pdf) -- the upload filter -- on coding in Europe, as they explain in a white paper:

large businesses, SMEs and individuals relying on current tools to develop software, especially in FOSS [free and open source software] or collaboratively, could be faced with automated filtering which could engender 'false positive' identifications of infringing software, which in turn could cause developers' dependencies randomly to disappear and so literally "break" their builds, resulting in lost business, lost productivity, less reliable software, and less resilient infrastructure.

The problem they identified is that widely-used version control systems (VCS) like GitHub seem to meet the definition of "information society services" laid down by the proposed EU Copyright Directive, and as such would be required to filter all uploads to block copyright infringements. Moreover, as the white paper points out, developer Web sites would not only be held responsible for any material uploaded by users without permission of the copyright holders, but would also seem liable for illegitimate distributions of derivative works in violation of the applicable license.

GitHub and other similar services could also be required to sign licensing deals with other copyright holders, although what kind and with whom is totally unclear. That's because the ill-thought-out Article 13 was designed to catch unauthorized uploads of music and videos, not of software; but its current wording is such that it would seem to apply to VCS platforms as much as to YouTube -- a ridiculous situation. Destroying the indigenous software industry in Europe is presumably not the EU's intention here, and so the FSFE and OpenForum Europe call for Article 13 to be deleted completely.

The other new initiative, an open letter from a coalition of European academic, library, education, research and digital rights organizations, agrees, and wants Article 11 -- the link tax -- thrown out too. Here's why:

The extension of this controversial proposal [the link tax] to academic publications, as proposed by the [European Parliament's Industry, Research and Energy] Committee, significantly worsens an already bad situation. It would provide academic publishers additional legal tools to restrict access, going against the increasingly widely accepted practice of sharing research. This will limit the sharing of open access publications and data which currently are freely available for use and reuse in further scientific advances. If the proposed ancillary right is extended to academic publications, researchers, students and other users of scientific and scholarly journal articles could be forced to ask permission or pay fees to the publisher for including short quotations from a research paper in other scientific publications. This will seriously hamper the spread of knowledge.

Similarly, the coalition believes that the upload filter required by Article 13 of the current Copyright Directive draft will have a major, negative impact on the world of open access and open science:

The provisions of Article 13 threaten the accessibility of scientific articles, publications and research data made available through over 1250 repositories managed by European non-profit institutions and academic communities. These repositories, which are essential for Open Access and Science in Europe, are likely to face significant additional operational costs associated with implementing new filtering technology and the legal costs of managing the risks of intermediary liability. The additional administrative burdens of policing this content would add to these costs. Such repositories, run on a not-for-profit basis, are not equipped to take on such responsibilities, and may face closure. This would be a significant blow, creating new risks for implementing funder, research council and other EU Open Access policies.

These latest interventions are important because they show that the reach of the Copyright Directive's worst elements is much wider than originally thought. They emphasize that, by lobbying for these extreme measures, the copyright industry seems not to care what collateral damage it causes in the EU, whether to the public at large, to the local software industry, or to the entire process of scientific research. The white paper and open letter provide additional, compelling reasons why both Article 11 and Article 13 should be dropped from the final legislation. If they aren't, the danger is that the full potential of the huge and rapidly-growing high-tech ecosystem in Europe will be sacrificed in order to prop up the relatively small and sclerotic copyright industries that refuse to adapt to today's digital environment.

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Filed Under: copyright, copyright directive, eu, open access

Danish University And Industry Work Together On Open Science Platform Whose Results Will All Be Patent-Free

from the they-said-it-couldn't-be-done dept

Here on Techdirt, we write a lot about patents. Mostly, it's about their huge downsides -- the stupid patents that should never have been awarded, or the parasitic patent trolls that feed off companies doing innovative work. The obvious solution is to get rid of patents, but the idea is always met with howls of derision, as if the entire system of today's research and development would collapse, and a new dark age would be upon us. It's hard to refute that claim with evidence to the contrary because most people -- other than a few brave souls like Elon Musk -- are reluctant to find out what happens if they don't cling to patents. Against that background, it's great to see Aarhus University in Denmark announce a new open science initiative that will eschew patents on researchers' work completely:

The platform has been established with funds from the Danish Industry Foundation and it combines basic research with industrial innovation in a completely new way, ensuring that industry and the universities get greater benefit from each other's knowledge and technology.

University researchers and companies collaborate across the board to create fundamental new knowledge that is constantly made available to everyone -- and which nobody may patent. On the contrary, everyone is subsequently freely able to use the knowledge to develop and patent their own unique products.

According to Aarhus University, Danish industry loves it:

The idea of collaborating in such a patent-free zone has aroused enormous interest in industry and among companies that otherwise use considerable resources on protecting their intellectual property rights.

The attraction seems to be that an open platform will make it easier for companies -- particularly smaller ones -- to gain access to innovative technologies at an early stage, without needing to worry about patents and licensing. Aarhus University hopes that the approach will also allow researchers to take greater risks with their work, rather than sticking with safer, less ambitious projects, as has happened in the past. The first example is already up and running. It is called SPOMAN (Smart Polymer Materials and Nano-Composites), and has a project page hosted on the Open Science Framework site:

In this project, you will find minutes from the Open Science meetings, current status of the initiative, general presentations etc. More importantly, this project has links to the individual activities and research projects under Open Science. In these projects, the research progress, lab journals and more are found.

Combined with the no-patent promise, you don't get much more open than that.

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Filed Under: denmark, open access, open science, patent free, research
Companies: aarhus university, danish industry foundation

Elsevier Continues To Build Its Monopoly Solution For All Aspects Of Scholarly Communication

from the but-can-people-be-bothered-to-support-open-alternatives? dept

Techdirt has just written about the amazing achievements of Sci-Hub, and how it now offers the vast majority of academic papers free online. One implication may be that traditional publishing, with high-cost journals hidden behind paywalls, is no longer viable. But as we noted, that doesn't mean that traditional publishers will disappear. For one thing, many are embracing open access, and finding it pretty profitable (some would say too profitable thanks to things like "double dipping".) But there's another way that academic publishers, particularly the biggest ones with deep pockets, can head off the threat to their profits from developments like Sci-Hub and open access: by diversifying.

Mike wrote about one example last year, when Elsevier bought the preprint service Social Science Research Network (SSRN), arguably the most popular repository of research in the fields of economics, law and the social sciences. Since SSRN deals in preprints, which can be freely downloaded, sites like Sci-Hub are no threat. Similarly, preprints are generally posted before submission to journals, and therefore can flourish whether or not those journals are open access. Now we have yet another significant move by Elsevier, reported here on the Scholarly Kitchen blog:

Elsevier announces its acquisition of bepress. In a move entirely consistent with its strategy to pivot beyond content licensing to preprints, analytics, workflow, and decision-support, Elsevier is now a major if not the foremost single player in the institutional repository landscape. If successful, and there are some risks, this acquisition will position Elsevier as an increasingly dominant player in preprints, continuing its march to adopt and coopt open access.

As that post explains, Bepress is not a publishing company, but seeks to provide key elements of the general infrastructure needed for scholarly communications. That includes things like repositories -- the stores of articles produced by researchers at an institution, or covering a specific field -- and "showcases". Bepress's product in this field is called Digital Commons. It claims to be:

the only comprehensive showcase that lets institutions publish, manage, and increase recognition for everything produced on campus -- and the only institutional repository and publishing platform that integrates with a full faculty research and impact suite.

It's a shrewd acquisition by Elsevier. It continues to move the company beyond the role of a traditional publisher into one that can offer a complete solution for the academic world, with products and services handling every aspect of scholarly work. By acquiring more and more parts of this solution, Elsevier can integrate them ever-more tightly, which will encourage users of one element to adopt others. If this process of integration can be carried out successfully, it will leave Elsevier with almost total control of the sector, beyond even today's already profitable position.

That may be great for Elsevier shareholders, but it limits choices for the academic community. Fortunately, there are ways to counter Elsevier's rise to monopoly power. Techdirt wrote about one of them last year, when a new open preprint repository for the social sciences, SocArXiv, was created soon after Elsevier bought SSRN. There are already a number of open source alternatives to Bepress products, and supporting those rather than moving to Elsevier-owned services is an obvious move for those in the academic community who wish to preserve their independence. The problem is that doing so is likely to require a certain amount of effort, and it may be that institutions, libraries and academics don't have the time or energy to do that, and they will simply sign up to Elsevier's monoculture without worrying too much about the long-term consequences.

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Filed Under: academic journals, open access
Companies: bepress, elsevier

Latest EU Parliament Votes On Copyright: Fuck The Public, Give Big Corporations More Copyright

from the that's-not-good dept

The weird and persistently silly copyright reform process in the EU Parliament continues to get more and more bizarre and stupid. Last month, we told you about the first committee vote, which we feared would be terrible, but turned out to be only marginally stupid, as the worst parts of the proposal were rejected. Now, two more committees -- the Culture and Education (CULT) and Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) Committees -- have voted on their own reform proposals and the results are really, really bad if you support things like culture, education, research and the public. And, yes, I get the irony of the fact that the Culture and Education Committee in the EU just declared a giant "fuck you" to culture and education with its vote.

Among the many problematic aspects approved by these committees is a filter requirement that would block users from uploading legally obtained media into the cloud. This makes no sense -- especially given that the EU already has additional "you must be a pirate" taxes on situations where individuals are making copies of their legally acquired works.

And then there's the whole "snippet tax" which legacy newspapers are demanding because they've failed to adapt to the digital age, and they want Google News to send them money for daring to send them traffic without monetary compensation. The whole concept is backwards... and here, it's been expanded. As Copybuzz explains:

The press publishers’ right went from applying to ‘digital’ uses of press to all uses, including print. Aside from the fact that this seems a violation of Article 10(1) of the Bern Convention (which establishes a mandatory exception for ‘press summaries’), the impact of such a massive extension is unfathomable.

The definition of press publications has become so broad that infringements to article 11 are impossible to predict and hence prevent. The ‘exceptions’ to the applications of this new right just add to the potential legal uncertainty, as the CULT text states ‘The [publisher] rights granted under this Directive should be without prejudice to the authors’ rights and should not apply to the legitimate uses of press publications by individual users acting in a private and non-commercial capacity. The protection granted to press publications under this Directive should apply to content automatically generated by an act of hyperlinking related to a press publication without prejudice to the legitimate use of quotations.’ This paragraph alone opens such a Pandora Box of unanswered questions, such as:

• What is a legitimate use of press publications? And who’s the judge of the legitimacy?
• When are you acting in your private and non-commercial capacity?
• Content automatically generated by an act of hyperlinking related to a press publication: so that mean that when you share a link on social media and that triggers automatically the appearance of a snippet, you are now officially in trouble?
• When are you ‘legitimately’ quoting? Is that a new criteria imposed on top of the only mandatory exception globally? And if so, who judges if you comply?

None of that sounds good or well thought out. It sounds like the kind of thing that someone not very knowledgeable about the subject would put together after just hearing one side from a bunch of whining newspaper execs.

And then there's this nonsense, as summarized by Parliament Member Julia Reda:

Incredibly, the ITRE committee – responsible for research and usually a staunch defender of open access – even voted to extend the extra copyright to academic publications, which would make open access publishing virtually impossible. It would stop people from linking to academic content, despite the content itself being free. This would apply to both online publications and print journals. The chilling effects on the spread of academic works and information would be substantial.

Yes, linking to academic content will now require payment -- even if it's open access. That's... nuts.

And, finally, on the "text and data mining" issue -- which is one of the key points that the EU has been fighting over with this new copyright reform effort, ITRE again severely limited who can do data mining to tiny startups. Again from Copybuzz:

The ITRE Committee for example has in its extreme generosity decided to leave the benefit of the Text and Data Mining exception limited to research organisations and ‘start-up companies’, defined as ‘any company with fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover or balance sheet below €2 million and which was established not earlier than three years before benefiting from the exception’. The message for European start-ups is clear: don’t dare scale up your first three years of business if you want to mine content and if you do, move away from the EU (and move anyway after 3 years)! Never mind jobs and growth, the EU mantra we keep on hearing. Oh, and please do not be innovative any longer once you are an established player: we would not want our economy to be competitive on the international scene.

This is really a killer for innovation. There's a massive industry now being built up around machine learning and AI and autonomous machines -- and an awful lot of it actually relies on the ability to do text and data mining on the internet. With this proposal, the (of all things) "Industry & Research" committee is basically saying there shall be no such industry or research in Europe. It's pushing one of the most promising up and coming industries out of the EU entirely. Incredible.

It's almost stunning how bad these decisions were. But, of course, some of the legacy copyright industry folks decided to celebrate, claiming that the votes showed that the EU Parliament "would not tolerate free-riding platforms." That's complete nonsense and an insult. Again: things like news aggregators and search engines have been enormously helpful in creating new markets and expanding attention and traffic to sites. If anything, legacy content producers have been "free riding" on those platforms.

Hopefully saner heads will prevail as this process moves forward, but the EU seems to be going down a dark and dangerous road on copyright policy.

Filed Under: copyright, cult, data mining, education, eu, eu parliament, filters, itre, open access, research, snippet tax

After Bill Gates Backs Open Access, Steve Ballmer Discovers The Joys Of Open Data

from the who's-up-for-some-open-source,now? dept

A few months ago, we noted that the Gates Foundation has emerged as one of the leaders in requiring the research that it funds to be released as open access and open data -- an interesting application of the money that Bill Gates made from closed-source software. Now it seems that his successor as Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, has had a similar epiphany about openness. Back in 2001, Ballmer famously called GNU/Linux "a cancer". Although he later softened his views on software somewhat, that was largely because he optimistically claimed that the threat to Microsoft from free software was "in the rearview mirror". Not really: today, the Linux-based Android has almost two orders of magnitude more market share than Windows Phone. However, there's one area of openness that Ballmer seems to have embraced whole-heartedly for his new project USAFacts, which launched this week -- open data:

USAFacts is a new data-driven portrait of the American population, our government's finances, and government's impact on society. We are a non-partisan, not-for-profit civic initiative and have no political agenda or commercial motive. We provide this information as a free public service and are committed to maintaining and expanding it in the future.

We rely exclusively on publicly available government data sources. We don’t make judgments or prescribe specific policies. Whether government money is spent wisely or not, whether our quality of life is improving or getting worse -- that's for you to decide. We hope to spur serious, reasoned, and informed debate on the purpose and functions of government. Such debate is vital to our democracy. We hope that USAFacts will make a modest contribution toward building consensus and finding solutions.

In addition to allowing a wide range of public data sets to be queried using a site-specific search engine, USAFacts also offers synoptic views:

an annual report, a summary report, and a "10-K" modeled on the document public companies submit annually to the SEC for transparency and accountability to their investors.

In an age where "fake news," AKA lies, are common currency, and where the Trump administration is making government more, not less, opaque, Ballmer's philanthropic, fact-based endeavor is particularly welcome. It's also nice to see him following Gates and implicitly acknowledging that open is more powerful than closed.

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Filed Under: bill gates, open access, open data, steve ballmer
Companies: usafacts

Initiative for Open Citations Takes Alternative Approach To Freeing Up Knowledge

from the structured,-separable,-and-open dept

We've just written about widespread frustration at the slow pace of the shift to open access publishing of academic papers, and about how some major funding organizations are trying to address that. Open access aims to make entire publications publicly available, and that is meeting considerable resistance from traditional publishers who derive their healthy profits from charging for subscriptions. Rather than continue to tackle publishers head-on, an interesting new project seeks instead to liberate only a particular part of each article, albeit an important one. The new Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) seeks to promote the unrestricted availability of the list of citations that form a key part of most academic articles:

Citations are the links that knit together our scientific and cultural knowledge. They are primary data that provide both provenance and an explanation for how we know facts. They allow us to attribute and credit scientific contributions, and they enable the evaluation of research and its impacts. In sum, citations are the most important vehicle for the discovery, dissemination, and evaluation of all scholarly knowledge.

As the number of scholarly publications is estimated to double every nine years, citations -- and the computational systems that track them -- enable researchers and the public to keep abreast of significant developments in any given field. For this to be possible, it is essential to have unrestricted access to bibliographic and citation data in machine-readable form.

The present scholarly communication system inadequately exposes the knowledge networks that already exist within our literature. Citation data are not usually freely available to access, they are often subject to inconsistent, hard-to-parse licenses, and they are usually not machine-readable.

The I4OC aims to address those problems by encouraging all publishers, whether open access or otherwise, to provide the data on citations found in their journals in a form that is structured, separable, and open. "Structured" here means that it is held in a common data form that is machine readable. "Separable" refers to the fact that even for non-open access materials, the citation data is nonetheless freely available. And "open" means that it is released as raw facts, and thus without a license, or uses a CC0 public domain dedication that makes it quite clear that the citation data can be used for any purpose without needing permission.

As the I4OC home page explains, a key benefit from this new approach is increased discoverability of published articles, since even if they are not freely available, their citation data will be out in the open. Another is citation data can be analyzed in new and complex ways thanks to its machine-readable nature. Finally, it may be possible to create new services and even new businesses based around the new data resource.

All of that is highly welcome, but the fact that a separate initiative was required to make it happen underlines that fact that too much of humanity's knowledge remains locked up behind paywalls, where its full potential is hard to realize. The correct solution to that is not making one element available, but liberating the full texts as open access. And that means real open access, not the subverted kind that Richard Poynder analyzed in his compelling and troubling post "Copyright: the immoveable barrier that open access advocates underestimated".

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Filed Under: knowledge, open access, open citations

European Commission May Join Gates Foundation And Wellcome Trust In Becoming An Open Access Publisher

from the if-you-want-a-job-done-properly,-do-it-yourself dept

Open access isn't a new idea -- the term was first defined back in 2002, and arguably the first examples go back even further to the founding of arXiv.org in 1991 (pdf). And yet progress towards making all academic knowledge freely available has been frustratingly slow, largely because hugely-profitable publishers have been fighting it every inch of the way. In response to that intransigence, academics have come up with a variety of approaches, including boycotts, mass cancellation of subscriptions, new kinds of overlay journals and simply making everything available with or without permission. Here's another interesting move to open up publishing, reported by the journal Science:

One of Europe's biggest science spenders could soon branch out into publishing. The European Commission, which spends more than €10 billion annually on research, may follow two other big league funders, the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and set up a "publishing platform" for the scientists it funds, in an attempt to accelerate the transition to open-access publishing in Europe.

It was quite surprising to see the Wellcome Trust start its own rapid-publishing unit, called Wellcome Open Research, a move that seems to have encouraged the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to follow suit with the similar Gates Open Research platform, due to start publishing later this year. For the EU's main executive body to do the same is even more extraordinary. It's true that there has been no official announcement about the European Commission's publishing move, but the Science article suggests that it is likely:

A commission spokesperson says the two charities [Wellcome and Gates Foundation], which opted for a system in which papers are reviewed after publication, are "models," but that the commission is only "considering" the idea. But last week in Berlin, at a closed meeting of the Open Science Policy Platform (OSPP), European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation Carlos Moedas suggested a "decision" to create the platform had already been made, says Michael Mabe, CEO of the London-based International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM). OSPP member Sabina Leonelli of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, who tweeted from the meeting, confirms Mabe’s assessment.

For three giant funding organizations -- the Wellcome Trust, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the European Commission -- to be driven to take this step shows just how frustrated they all are with the academic publishing world's unhelpful response to two decades of calls for open access. It also underlines that they now seem determined to open up the research they fund by bypassing completely the traditional publishers who are proving so obstructive.

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Filed Under: european commission, open access, research
Companies: gates foundation, wellcome trust

Unpaywall: The Browser Add-on That Finds (Legal) Free Copies Of Academic Papers You See As You Browse The Web

from the another-way-to-liberate-knowledge dept

Techdirt has just written about ResearchGate, which claims to offer access to 100 million academic papers. However, as we wrote, there's an issue about whether a significant proportion of those articles are in fact unauthorized copies, for example uploaded by the authors but in contravention of the agreement they signed with publishers. The same legal issues plague the well-known Sci-Hub site, which may deter some from using it. But as further evidence of how the demand for access to millions of academic papers still locked away is driving technical innovation, there's a new option, called Unpaywall, which is available as a pre-release add-on for Chrome (Firefox is promised later), and is free. It aims to provide access to every paper that's freely available to read in an authorized version. Here's how it works:

Millions of researchers are currently uploading their own fulltext PDFs to preprint servers and institutional repositories worldwide, making them free for anyone to read. But there was no easy way to find them as we browsed. So we made one! Eventually, we hope tools like Unpaywall will nurture the transition to fully open access scholarly publishing, by closing the gap between readers and freely-available fulltext.

…

We gather content from thousands of open-access repositories worldwide. To help us, we rely on some fantastic open data services, especially PubMed Central, the DOAJ, Crossref (particulary their license info), DataCite, and BASE. After we put all this data together, we in turn make it open for reuse via the oaDOI API: a free, fast, and very scalable way to leverage our data and infrastructure to support your own projects.

Once the add-on has been installed, it is easy to use. When you come across an academic paper of interest as you browse the Web, you go to its home page, usually on a publisher's site. A small icon on the right-hand side of the browser indicates whether the full text is freely available somewhere in an authorized version. If it is, you just click on the icon, and it appears in your browser. The team behind Unpaywall claims that its system manages to find free authorized versions of articles for about half the requests made to it. Unpaywall does the right things when it comes to privacy -- it doesn't ask for, track or store any personal information -- and it's also open source, so you can inspect its code and adapt it for your own projects.

In that and other respects, Unpaywall is like the Open Access Button, which has been around since 2013. The Open Access Button offers some other important features. For example, if the service is unable to locate a freely-available, authorized, full-text version of an article, it will contact the author on your behalf, and ask for a copy (obviously, you need to provide your email address for this):

We're tired of requests for research, especially data, going unanswered. Instead we're designing a transparent and effective request system to help make more research accessible. If we are unable to get you access, you can create a request quickly with the Open Access Button. We'll contact the author on your behalf and others can support your request. By holding researchers accountable for sharing their research articles and data, and providing them pathways to share their research, we will make more research legally and freely available.

You can also access the underlying data, when it exists, and request it if it has not been released. That's an increasingly important aspect, since it allows researchers to verify results and to build on existing work.

Projects like Unpaywall and the Open Access Button are good examples of continuing efforts to liberate all the knowledge contained in academic research papers, much of which is still locked away behind paywalls charging outrageously expensive fees. Until everything is released as open access, they will remain valuable and necessary tools.

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Filed Under: academic papers, open access, paywall, unpaywall

The Gates Foundation Emerges As A Leader In The Fight For Full Open Access And Open Data

from the great,-so-how-about-open-source-too? dept

As Techdirt readers know, the battle to provide open access to the world's research has been going on for many years now. Despite the clear benefits of sharing information freely, the top academic publishers are still resisting, which probably has something to do with the 35% profit margins they currently enjoy. There have been various attempts to force their hand, notably through boycotts, but these have been disappointingly ineffective so far. Funding organizations have helped by requiring that any work they fund should be published as some kind of open access, but often they have been rather timid in their demands and enforcement. Against that background, the following is noteworthy:

One of the world's most influential global health charities says that the research it funds cannot currently be published in several leading journals, because the journals do not comply with its open-access policy.

Scientists who do research funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are not -- for the moment -- allowed to publish papers about that work in journals that include Nature, Science, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

That comes from a news story published in Nature, one of the leading titles that falls foul of the new rules. These were first announced in November 2014, when Nature called them the "world's strongest policy on open access research." After a two-year grace period, the new rules have come fully into force, no exceptions allowed. There are five so-called "elements" to the new policy, including the following:

Publication Will Be On "Open Access" Terms. All publications shall be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Generic License (CC BY 4.0) or an equivalent license. This will permit all users of the publication to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and transform and build upon the material, including for any purpose (including commercial) without further permission or fees being required.

As that points out, the CC-BY license allows anyone to use material with attribution, including for commercial purposes. This is something academic publishers are very unwilling to allow, since it means that rivals can reprint the content immediately, and without payment.

Publications Will Be Accessible and Open Immediately. All publications shall be available immediately upon their publication, without any embargo period. An embargo period is the period during which the publisher will require a subscription or the payment of a fee to gain access to the publication.

This is also an unusually strong demand. In the past, major funders have meekly allowed an extended period of exclusivity to publishers in the form of an embargo before research is available under open access terms. The new requirement by the Gates Foundation is therefore a bold move, and again something that publishers have always fought hard against.

Data Underlying Published Research Results Will Be Accessible and Open Immediately. The foundation will require that data underlying the published research results be immediately accessible and open.

A separate requirement for open data recognizes that the underlying results are just as important as the main findings, and that they should be available under an open license for other researchers to use freely.

The Nature story says that the new rules will only affect a few hundred research papers, since 92% of the 2,000-2,500 papers published each year with funding from the Gates Foundation are in journals that already comply with the stringent open access policy. However, the ones that currently don't meet them are big names in the world of scientific publishing, which sets up an interesting battle of wills. It's one that Peter Suber, a key figure in the open access movement, thinks that the Gates Foundation is likely to win:

"I predict that the Gates Foundation won't compromise. The journals ought to compromise, and in due time, I predict that they will," says Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project and the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Suber recalls that in 2008, many journals were unwilling to accommodate a US National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy, which, at the time, mandated that papers be made freely available no later than 12 months after publication. "Essentially, the NIH forced publishers to choose between accommodating the new policy and refusing to publish the large volume of high-quality research by NIH-funded authors," he says. In the end, publishers accommodated the policy, Suber notes. He expects that the Gates policy will draw the same concessions from publishers.

If Suber is right -- and he usually is on these matters -- this will represent a serious defeat for the old-style, dog-in-the-manger publishers, who have hitherto regarded themselves as indispensable and thus able to dictate terms to the open access movement and their funders. It might encourage other organizations to impose similar terms, and to usher in finally the long-awaited open access revolution.

The Gates Foundation is therefore to be congratulated on making this stand for both open access and open data. However, there is a certain irony here that an organization fighting so hard for openness should be funded by a man whose huge fortune is based on selling software that is resolutely closed source.

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Filed Under: open access, open data
Companies: gates foundation