Do Nature's Publishers Even Read Their Own Articles About Open Access?

from the funny-that dept

Just a few weeks ago we wrote about scientific publishing giant Nature's somewhat abhorrent open access policy, where it's telling researchers at universities that require open access publishing that they need to get a waiver from that policy. So it seems rather strange to see that very same Nature, just days later, publishing an article about open access, in which it talks about how two of the largest funders of scientific research today, Wellcome Trust in the UK and the National Institute for Health (NIH) in the US, are starting to punish grant recipients who don't follow through on open access obligations. Both of those organizations require certain open access standards, but apparently have mostly just trusted researchers to follow through. Not any more:

Now they are done with just dangling carrots. Both institutions are bringing out the sticks: cautiously and discreetly cracking down on researchers who do not make their papers publicly available.

Neither agency would name those who have been sanctioned. But the London-based Wellcome Trust says that it has withheld grant payments on 63 occasions in the past year because papers resulting from the funding were not open access. And the NIH, in Bethesda, Maryland, says that it has delayed some continuing grant awards since July 2013 because of non-compliance with open-access policies, although the agency does not know the exact numbers.

The report notes that this has resulted in a "noticeable jump in researchers following the rules." That makes sense.

Of course, nowhere in the Nature article does reporter Richard Van Noorden ever bother to mention that his own publication is fighting against those requirements. In fact, the article reads as if it's a strong supporter of open access rules:

Some scientists are not even aware that they could be penalized. Nature's news team contacted Sheila MacNeil, a tissue engineer at the University of Sheffield, UK, who has published hundreds of articles, including a March 2013 paper on making stem-cell lattices for corneal repair that was funded by the Wellcome Trust (I. Ortega et al. Acta Biomater. 9, 5511–5520; 2013). Nature pointed out that the article should be open access but is not. "This is new to me," responds MacNeil, who plans to make the paper available. "Agreeing with open access is easy — making it happen, less so," she says.

Perhaps the Nature "news team" should take a look at how their own publisher is forcing researchers to ignore their open access obligations.

Filed Under: nih, open access, publishing
Companies: nature, wellcome trust

Shame On Nature: Academic Journal Demanding Researchers Waive Their Own Open Access Policy

from the shameful dept

We've been talking a lot about the power and importance of open access for academic (and especially government funded) research. More and more universities have agreed, with some even having general open access policies for their academics, requiring them to release research under open access policies. This makes sense, because one of the key aspects of education and knowledge is the ability to share it freely and to build on the work of others. Without open access, this is made much more difficult. So it's immensely troubling to discover that one of the biggest science publishers out there, Nature Publishing Group, has started telling academics that they need to get a "waiver" from their university's open access policies. The issue was raised by Duke's Scholarly Communications Officer, Kevin Smith, though it's likely happening at other universities as well:

A new thing started happening here at Duke this week; we began getting inquiries from some faculty authors about how to obtain a formal waiver of our faculty open access policy. We have had that policy in place for over three years, but for the first time a single publisher — the Nature Publishing Group — is telling all authors at Duke that they must obtain a waiver of the policy before their accepted articles can be published. It is not clear why NPG suddenly requires these waivers after publishing many articles in the past three years by Duke authors, while the policy was in force and without waivers.

Indeed, the waivers are essentially meaningless because of the way Duke has implemented its open access policy. When the policy was adopted unanimously by our Academic Council in March 2010, the statement in favor of openness was pretty clear, but so was the instruction that implementing the policy not become a burden to our faculty authors. So throughout the ensuing years we have tried to ensure that all archiving of published work in our repository be done in compliance with any publisher policies to which our authors have agreed. NPG allows authors to archive final submitted manuscripts after a six month delay, so that is what we would do, whether or not the author sought a policy waiver. But suddenly that is not good enough; Nature wants a formal waiver even though it will have no practical effect. The demand seems to be an effort to punish authors at institutions that adopt open access policies.

As noted above, there seems to be no need for such a waiver in the first place, given current policies, but it's still quite troubling that Nature would push for such a thing. Smith notes that the effort in many ways backfires, since it's really only served to remind Duke's faculty that Duke has this open access policy -- perhaps leading more of them to remember to "self-archive" papers they've gotten published in Nature. But, still, the request from Nature is quite troubling, as Smith again details:

This effort to punish faculty who have voted for an internal and perfectly legal open access policy is nothing less than an attack on one of the core principles of academic freedom, faculty governance. NPG thinks it has the right to tell faculties what policies are good for them and which are not, and to punish those who disagree.

As my sense of outrage grew, I began to explore the NPG website.  Initially I was looking to see if authors were told about the waiver requirement upfront.  As far as I can tell, they are not, in spite of rhetoric about transparency in the “information for authors” page.  The need for a waiver is not even mentioned on the checklist that is supposed to guide authors through the publication process.  It seems that this requirement is communicated to authors only after their papers have been accepted.  I suspect that NPG is ashamed of their stratagem, and in my opinion they should be.

Smith also notes that as he explored Nature's terms more carefully, he realized that they also play some other questionable games, including getting anyone having a paper published in Nature to waive their moral rights. As he notes, moral rights (except in a few specific instances) are not recognized in the US, but they are common elsewhere. And he wonders why Nature could possibly want authors to waive the attribution right that is embedded within moral rights:

But my point here is to wonder why NPG requires all of its authors to waive their right of attribution. This is not an incidental matter; the clause is carefully structured to attempt to get authors even from the countries that do not allow the waiver of moral rights — they are considered that important – still to promise not to assert those rights (whether or not that would be enforceable in those countries). Nature actively does not want its authors to be able to insist that their names always be associated with their work. Why? Does NPG imagine reusing articles it is given to publish in other ways, without providing proper attribution? If this seems like a remote possibility, it remains the only conceivable reason that NPG would insert this bizarre clause.

All of this leads Smith to point out that Nature seems to be attacking two separate, but fundamental values in academic publishing: both attribution and open access to knowledge. It should make many academics think twice about whether or not they wish to have their articles published in such an enterprise.

Filed Under: copyright, duke, moral rights, nature, open access, waiver
Companies: duke university, nature publishing group

Elsevier Still Charging For Open Access Copies, Two Years After It Was Told Of The Problem

from the work-in-progress dept

For some reason, Elsevier seems to take delight in being hated by the academic world. Its support for the awful Research Works Act back in 2012 led to a massive boycott of the company by researchers. More recently, it has cracked down on academics posting PDFs of their own research. Now Peter Murray-Rust, one of the leading campaigners for open access, has caught Elsevier at it again. Here's a good summary of what happened from Mike Taylor, whose post "If Harry Potter Was An Academic Work" appeared on Techdirt recently:

1. Two years ago, I wrote about how you have to pay to download Elsevier’s "open access" articles. I showed how their open-access articles claimed "all rights reserved", and how when you use the site's facilities to ask about giving one electronic copy to a student, the price is £10.88. As I summarised at the time: "Free" means "we take the author's copyright, all rights are reserved, but you can buy downloads at a 45% discount from what they would otherwise cost." No-one from Elsevier commented.

2. Eight months ago, Peter Murray-Rust explained that Elsevier charges to read #openaccess articles. He showed how all three of the randomly selected open-access articles he looked at had download fees of $31.50. No-one from Elsevier commented (although see below).

3. A couple of days ago, Peter revisited this issue, and found that Elsevier are still charging THOUSANDS of pounds for CC-BY articles. IMMORAL, UNETHICAL , maybe even ILLEGAL. This time he picked another Elsevier OA article at random, and was quoted £8000 for permission to print 100 copies.

Stung by Murray-Rust's outraged post, the Director of Access and Policy at Elsevier, Alicia Wise, replied as follows:

As noted in the comment thread to your blog back in August we are improving the clarity of our OA license labelling (eg on ScienceDirect) and metadata feeds (eg to Rightslink). This is work in progress and should be completed by summer. I am working with the internal team to get a more clear understanding of the detailed plan and key milestones, and will tweet about these in due course.

Although that sounds superficially reasonable, it's not, as Taylor points out:

First of all, either this is deliberate fraud on Elsevier's part -- charging for the use of something that is free to use -- or it's a bug. Following Hanlon’s razor, I prefer the latter explanation. But assuming it's a bug, why has it taken two years to address? And why is it still not fixed?

To put things in context:

Elsevier, remember, are a company with an annual revenue exceeding £2bn. That’s £2,000,000,000... Is it unreasonable to expect that two years should be long enough for them to fix a trivial bug?

All that's necessary is to change the "All rights reserved" message and the "Get rights and content" link to say "This is an open-access article, and is free to re-use". We know that the necessary metadata is there because of the "Open Access" caption at the top of the article. So speaking from my perspective as a professional software developer of more than thirty years' standing, this seems like a ten-line fix that should take maybe a man-hour; at most a man-day. A man-day of programmer time would cost Elsevier maybe £500

Once more, Elsevier does not come out of this well. It was told two years ago that there was a problem with the way it presented open access articles, since the impression was given -- for whatever reason -- that you had to pay for things that were actually freely available. As Taylor points out, even under the most generous interpretation, it is simply not acceptable for a multi-billion dollar publishing company to ignore this problem for so long. Until it fixes this throughout its portfolio of journals -- and maybe offers some refunds for the fees it has taken without any justification -- the academic community is bound to feel that despite the boycott and bad publicity surrounding its aggressive actions against scholars, Elsevier has learnt nothing and cares less.

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Filed Under: academic journals, open access
Companies: elsevier

Mosaic: The Publishing Of Science, And The Science Of Publishing

from the moral-rights dept

The UK-based Wellcome Trust is the second-largest non-governmental funder of medical research after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It was one of the main backers of the Human Genome Project, which pioneered the idea of open data by placing all its results in the public domain, and of open access. Recently, it began a new project exploring openness:

First there was open source software, given away for anybody to download, use and share without charge. Then there was open access publishing, the movement to make the results of scientific research freely available to read without paying journal subscription fees. Today, the Wellcome Trust is launching a fresh experiment in open information, this time in science journalism.

Mosaic, our new digital publication devoted to long-form features about the science of life, is not only free for anybody to read. Its content is also freely available for anybody else to republish or share through their own publications and platforms.

Of course, "freely available" can mean many things. Here's more about the license Mosaic will be published under:

when we were starting out on the development of Mosaic, one of the first principles we put in place was that the features we published should have a Creative Commons (CC) licence. We want as many people to be able to read our stories as possible, and so we’ll be publishing features on the Mosaic site and making it simple for others to take our content and re-use it.

While Creative Commons is well established in scholarly circles, its use in journalism is still relatively sparse. The investigative journalism newsroom Propublica, and The Conversation, which brings together professional editors and university experts, both publish under CC licences (do let us know if you know of other examples).

The license we’ve chosen for Mosaic is Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY), which is the most open of the licences.

Well, arguably CC0 is more open -- it's akin to placing something in the public domain, with no restrictions whatsoever. Still, CC-BY is certainly an extremely generous license, allowing almost anything to be done with the articles, provided authorship is acknowledged. Of course, that could be problematic, as the Wellcome Trust recognizes:

Might adaptation, if done poorly, damage our reputation for quality and depth, or the author’s reputation? Might some adaptations distort the story? In the former case, the original, crafted version will always be on the Mosaic site, the licence allows us to insist that attribution requires a link back and and that the edited nature of an adapted or abridged piece must be signposted. In the latter case, the licence protects the author’s 'moral rights', which include the right not to have the work distorted, mutilated, modified or subjected to derogatory action which would be prejudicial to the author’s honour or reputation.

Although such "moral rights" are rarely invoked in the US, in Europe they are more important. However, as the Wellcome Trust itself points out, this is more of a theoretical problem than a real one:

it appears such cases [of distortion] are very few and far between and problems that do arise are usually due to miscommunication or misunderstanding. What is more, it is the nature of the internet that work published even under the most restrictive licences is often taken and adapted by others without any consent -- while often illegal, this is extremely difficult to police. So while it was good to think through potential issues, our conclusion was that we should offer our work in good faith. We trust others' editorial judgment.

That's both a good summary of the situation, and an eminently pragmatic solution. If only more publishers adopted it, instead of trying to stamp out every kind of unauthorized online use, however minor, and however disproportionate the effort required.

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Filed Under: knowledge, mosaic, open access, publishing, science
Companies: wellcome trust

Copyright, Invented To Combat Commercial Abuse, Has Become A Means Of Commercial Abuse

from the say-that-again dept

This post is from Jan Velterop, a long-time science publisher, who is one of earliest proponents of "open access" publishing. The following is actually a message he posted to an open access mailing list, which Mike Taylor republished. We asked if we, too, could republish it, and Velterop told us (as we tell people who ask us) that the work should be considered in the public domain, and to do what we want with it.

I've been following this discussion with increasing bemusement. Frankly, it's getting ridiculous, at least in my humble opinion. A discussion such as this one about licensing and copyright only serves to demonstrate that copyright, once conceived as a way to stimulate and enable science and the arts, has degenerated into a way to frustrate, derange and debilitate knowledge exchange.

I'm not the first one to point out that absolutely anything, under any copyright license or none, could be abused for evil purposes or, in more mild circumstances, lead to misunderstandings and accidental abuse. I agree with all those who said it.

The issue here is what science and scientific results stand for. Their purpose is emphatically not "to be copyrightable items." Copyright, invented to combat commercial abuse, has become a means of commercial abuse. The purpose of science and scientific results is to enrich the world's knowledge. Any commercial advantage – appropriate for industrially funded research – can be had by 1) keeping results secret (i.e. not publishing them), or 2) getting a patent. Science, particularly modern science, is nothing without a liberal exchange of ideas and information.

Ideally, scientific publications are not copyrightable at all, and community standards take care of proper acknowledgement. We don't live in an ideal world, so we have to get as close as we can to that ideal, and that is by ameliorating the insidious pernicious effects of copyright with CC-Zero and CC-BY licences.

The existence of the NC rider or stipulation for CC licences is unfortunate and quite damaging. Mainly because of the vagueness and ambiguity of what "commercial use" means. Ideas in published articles can be freely used for commercial purposes of any kind, as ideas are not copyrightable. Only "the way the ideas have been formulated" is covered by copyright, and thus by the NC clause in copyright licenses. In my interpretation, that means that most usage of published material that is not a straightforward selling of text or images can be freely done. But that's my interpretation. And that's exactly where it rubs, because all the NC clause does is introduce hypothetical difficulties and liabilities. As a result of which, NC practically means: "stay away from using this material, because you never know with all those predatory legal eagles around." In other words, it's virtually useless for modern, sophisticated scientific knowledge discovery, which doesn't just consist of reading papers any longer, but increasingly relies on the ability to machine-process large amounts of relevant information, as human ocular reading of even a fraction of the information is not possible anymore. At least not in most fast-moving areas of the sciences. Read this article, or similar ones, if you want to be convinced: "On the impossibility of being expert" BMJ 2010; 341 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.c6815 (Published 14 December 2010 – unfortunately behind a paywall).

The taxpayer angle ("must be open because the taxpayer paid for it"), leading to Kent Andersonian notions of knowledge protectionism ("results of research paid by US taxpayers should not be available to non-US citizens unless they pay for it"), is a most unfortunate, visceral and primitive reaction and a complete red herring. For many reasons, not least because the taxpayer, or vicariously the taxman, isn't the party that pockets any money paid for paywalled information. Besides, how far do you go? Americans not being allowed to stay alive due to a cure that was developed with public money in Switzerland unless they pay through the nose for it to the Swiss tax authorities? The "as-long-as-I-am-well-the-rest-of-you-can-go-to-hell" personality disorder. The whole idea is so against the ethos of science that those even thinking in that direction must be taken to be utterly and entirely unsuitable to any role in the scientific community.

Access control and restriction via copyright was at best a necessary evil in the print era; the "necessary," though, has disappeared in the web environment.

Filed Under: copyright, creative commons, knowledge, licensing, open access, science

Microsoft Goes Open Access; When Will It Go Open Source?

from the just-a-matter-of-time dept

Even though Microsoft is no longer the dominant player or pacesetter in the computer industry -- those roles are shared by Google and Apple these days -- it still does interesting work through its Microsoft Research arm. Here's some welcome news from the latter: it's moving to open access for its researchers' publications.

In a recent interview with Scientific American, Peter Lee, head of Microsoft Research, discussed three main motivations for basic research at Microsoft. The first relates to an aspiration to advance human knowledge, the second derives from a culture that relies deeply on the ambitions of individual researchers, and the last concerns "promoting open publication of all research results and encouraging deep collaborations with academic researchers." It is in keeping with this third motivation that Microsoft Research recently committed to an Open Access policy for our researchers' publications.

The new open access policy provides some background for the move:

Microsoft Research is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible because we recognize the benefits that accrue to scholarly enterprises from such wide dissemination, including more thorough review, consideration and critique, and general increase in scientific, scholarly and critical knowledge.

Of course, that's hardly an original insight. It's been known for many years that opening up in order to allow others to review, critique and build upon your work is far more efficient for everyone than locking it up and preventing all those things. It's the basis of all science, for example. And closer to home for Microsoft, the benefits of opening up software have been evident for decades -- ever since Richard Stallman launched his GNU's Not Unix project, based on sharing and collaboration.

Given the fact that Microsoft Research evidently gets this, the interesting question is whether the main Microsoft management ever will. After all, the longer it holds out against releasing its main products as open source, the longer it deprives itself of all the advantages that Microsoft Research is now embracing.

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Filed Under: microsoft research, open access, open source, research
Companies: microsoft

Copyright Week: Open Access As The Antidote To Privatizing Knowledge And Learning

from the locking-up-science dept

The very first copyright law in the US was officially called "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning." Indeed, that was the actual stated purpose of copyright law at the time. It wasn't supposed to be a system for protecting the revenue of artistic folks. In fact, it didn't even cover most artistic works at the time. It was limited to "maps, charts and books." Music? Not protected. Paintings? Not protected. Sculpture? Not protected. That's because it wasn't about artwork, but about the spread of knowledge through learning. Yes, the idea was to provide a limited monopoly to incentivize the initial creation, and the exchange was that it would then be given into the public domain soon after, such that everyone could learn from it. Yesterday, we covered the importance of the public domain, and today's topic for Copyright Week goes hand in hand with it: the idea of open access.

Copyright law was supposed to encourage greater access to knowledge to have a better educated populace. But the current setup of the law appears to do the exact opposite of that much of the time. When it comes to newly discovered knowledge, our copyright law (and the way it's used by some giant companies) seems almost entirely focused on making knowledge more expensive and less open thereby massively hindering the ability to share knowledge and better educate the public.

This has been seen most recently in the publishing giant Reed Elsevier's effective war on access to knowledge, using copyright law as a sort of weapon to block researchers from sharing their own research. However, as we've discussed for many years, the whole system is rigged against knowledge access and sharing, and in favor of giant publishers locking up knowledge -- often including research that was funded almost entirely by your tax dollars.

Here's how the privitization of knowledge works, thanks to copyright:

1. Professor wants to do some research, and files for some grants (usually from the government) to pay for that research. If that professor works for a state school, at least part of their salary is already partially paid for by public funds.
2. Government agrees to grant, provides taxpayer money to the researcher to conduct important research.
3. Research is completed, and the professor and some grad students/assistants write up the results in a paper.
4. Because academics are still (stupidly) judged on how often they "publish" in "prestigious" journals, the professor submits the paper to a few well known journals. In some (though not all) fields, the journals make the professor pay a submission fee.
5. The journals send the paper out to two peer reviewers, who do not get paid. They basically provide an editorial function to the publisher for free.
6. The journal "accepts" the paper, and demands that the professor hand over every possible copyright on the work and related research. I even know some academics who had to recreate their own research for later research, because they felt they were barred from using a chart they had created in a previous work without violating the copyright.
7. The publisher then sells the journal to academic libraries at absolutely insane prices. A freedom of information request at one university a few years ago showed that the university paid £688,093 -- or $1.1 million -- over a five year period for just three products from Elsevier, and only one of those products included full access to all of the published papers. The other two were merely for "abstracts and statistics." For just the popular 'Science Direct,' this one university paid between $150,000 to about $200,000 per year, for a subscription to just one journal.
8. Even when, as with the National Institute of Health, there's a requirement for "open access" publishing after one year, many journals will try to charge a very high fee (often thousands of dollars) to pay for "submitting" the paper to an open access repository.

In short, we have taxpayer funded research for which the publisher pays nothing, but gets the entire copyright, and then they sell the journals back to academic institutions for subscriptions often well over $100,000 per year -- and the research is completely locked up. Even more insulting in all of this, copyright was never the reason that the research was done in the first place. Remember, the purpose of original copyright law was to create an incentive for these individuals to do the research and publish the results -- but here, researchers are academics who are getting paid via grants, so the copyright is not the incentive at all.

It can be argued that copyright was at one point part of the incentive for the publishers to set up the peer review process, and then to help publish and distribute the works, but is that a process that is needed any more? It's difficult to see how. The things that publishers do (peer review, distribution) can be done much more effectively and efficiently these days, without the gatekeeper status or the insanely high prices. Oh yeah, and without locking up the knowledge.

Learning and scientific knowledge increases when we share knowledge, data and information widely and freely, allowing others to learn from it, to build on it and to continue to educate others and themselves. Today's copyright law does the opposite in almost every way. That's why radically changing how open access works and when it's expected is so important if we're to bring copyright law back anywhere near its initial intended purpose.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright week, knowledge, open access, privateering, privitizing, research, science
Companies: elsevier, reed elsevier

Elsevier Ramps Up Its War On Access To Knowledge

from the shameful-behavior-from-a-shameful-company dept

We just recently wrote about the terrible anti-science/anti-knowledge/anti-learning decision by publishing giant Elsevier to demand that Academia.edu take down copies of journal articles that were submitted directly by the authors, as Elsevier wished to lock all that knowledge (much of it taxpayer funded) in its ridiculously expensive journals. Mike Taylor now alerts us that Elsevier is actually going even further in its war on access to knowledge. Some might argue that Elsevier was okay in going after a "central repository" like Academia.edu, but at least it wasn't going directly after academics who were posting pdfs of their own research on their own websites. While some more enlightened publishers explicitly allow this, many (including Elsevier) technically do not allow it, but have always looked the other way when authors post their own papers.

That's now changed. As Taylor highlights, the University of Calgary sent a letter to its staff saying that a company "representing" Elsevier, was demanding that they take down all such articles on the University's network.

The University of Calgary has been contacted by a company representing the publisher, Elsevier Reed, regarding certain Elsevier journal articles posted on our publicly accessible university web pages. We have been provided with examples of these articles and reviewed the situation. Elsevier has put the University of Calgary on notice that these publicly posted Elsevier journal articles are an infringement of Elsevier Reed’s copyright and must be taken down.

Taylor's analysis of this is worth reading. He basically notes that any shred of a chance for Elsevier to fix their reputation is now gone. In the past, he'd suggested ways that the company could better interact with academics and librarians to rebuild its reputation -- but this basically crosses the point of no return.

Because this is, obviously, a very short-term move. Whatever feeble facade Elsevier have till now maintained of being partners in the ongoing process of research is gone forever. They’ve just tossed it away, instead desperately trying to cling onto short-term profit. In going after the University of Calgary (and I imagine other universities as well, unless this is a pilot harassment), Elsevier have declared their position as unrepentant enemies of science.

In essence, this move is an admission of defeat. It’s a classic last-throw-of-the-dice manoeuvre. It signals a recognition from Elsevier that they simply aren’t going to be able to compete with actual publishers in the 21st century. They’re burning the house down on their way out. They’re asset-stripping academia.

Elsevier are finished as a credible publisher. I can’t believe any researcher who knows what they’re doing is going to sign away their rights to Elsevier journals after this.

Of course, there's a legal-geek part of me that hopes that Elsevier takes that last step off the ledge of insanity and actually files a lawsuit against a University (or, even more ridiculous, an academic author), and we get to see the mother of all copyright battles concerning fair use. Remember, in the US, among the key areas where fair use is likely to be found are "teaching, scholarship or research." That's in the statute itself. So, go ahead, Elsevier, bring it on.

The University of Calgary is up in Canada and it has somewhat different rules, including fair dealing, rather than fair use. But the Supreme Court there appears to be quite supportive of fair dealing, especially in academic settings. Other reports note that the company has been similar notices to US-based colleges as well.

Why Elsevier has decided to declare such a war on access is anyone's guess, but it's not going to end well.

Filed Under: access to information, copyright, dmca, education, journals, knowledge, open access, research, takedowns, universities, war on access
Companies: elsevier

CERN Announces Nearly All High-Energy Physics Articles Will Switch To Open Access -- The Largest-Ever OA Initiative

from the well,-flip dept

One of the key insights driving open access is that if all the money currently paid by libraries and other institutions for subscriptions to academic journals was instead used to pay processing charges -- effectively, the cost of publishing -- all articles could be made freely available online to everyone. Unfortunately, getting from one system to the other has proved hard, since it requires many libraries to drop subscriptions and pool their resources so that enough top-quality journals can be published on an open-access basis. That's what makes this news from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, such a milestone:

After intense preparations and consensus building, CERN has today confirmed that the SCOAP3 Open Access publishing initiative will start on 1 January 2014. With the support of partners in 24 countries, a vast fraction of scientific articles in the field of High-Energy Physics will become Open Access at no cost for any author: everyone will be able to read them; authors will retain copyright; and generous licenses will enable wide re-use of this information.

Making the transition from conventional subscriptions to open access was possible because of CERN's clout in the high-energy physics community, which meant that it was able to persuade a large number of funders to pool their money:

Convened at CERN this is the largest scale global Open Access initiative ever built, involving an international collaboration of over one thousand libraries, library consortia and research organizations. SCOAP3 enjoys the support of funding agencies and has been established in co-operation with leading publishers.

That, in its turn, meant that all the top publishers were willing to participate -- even Elsevier:

Eleven publishers of high quality international journals are participating in SCOAP3. Elsevier, IOP Publishing and Springer, together with their publishing partners, have been working with the network of SCOAP3 national contact points. Reductions in subscription fees for thousands of participating libraries worldwide have been arranged, making funds available for libraries to support SCOAP3.

The importance of this move is not only that practically all high-energy physics papers will soon be available in their final, edited form -- not preprints -- to everyone for no cost, and under a liberal CC-BY licence that allows all kinds of re-use as well as text and data mining, but also that CERN has demonstrated that the flip from old to new academic publishing models is no mere theoretical possibility, but can actually be achieved. Now we need funders in other disciplines to follow suit by banding together and getting publishers to sign up to similar large-scale projects.

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Filed Under: cern, open access, physics

Norway To Digitize All Norwegian Books, Allowing Domestic IP Addresses To Read All Of Them, Irrespective Of Copyright Status

from the futuristic-thinking dept

Here's a pretty amazing story from Norway:

The National Library of Norway is planning to digitize all the books by the mid 2020s. Yes. All. The. Books. In Norwegian, at least. Hundreds of thousands of them. Every book in the library's holdings.

Now, in any normal country -- where "normal" means one in which copyright has reached the heights of monopolistic insanity -- if those books were still under copyright, the digitized versions (assuming publishers even allowed them to be made in the first place) would probably only be available in a specially constructed room deep in the basement of the National Library on a (small) screen, and with guards stationed either side of it to ensure that no unauthorized copies were made. Here, by contrast, is what's happening with the National Library of Norway's digital collection:

If you happen to be in Norway, as measured by your IP address, you will be able to access all 20th-century works, even those still under copyright. Non-copyrighted works from all time periods will be available for download.

As Alexis C. Madrigal points out in his entertaining article for The Atlantic, there's a rather interesting consequence of the different approaches to book digitization taken by Norway and the US, say:

Imagine digital archaeologists coming across the remains of early 21st century civilization in an old data center on the warming tundra. They look around, find some scraps of Buzzfeed and The Atlantic, maybe some Encyclopaedia Britannicas, and then, gleaming in the data: a complete set of Norwegian literature.

Suddenly, the Norwegians become to 27th-century humans what the Greeks were to the Renaissance. Everyone names the children of the space colonies Per and Henrik, Amalie and Sigrid. The capital of our new home planet will be christened Oslo.

This is what excessive copyright does to countries that impose it. It not only prevents today's artists from building on the work of their recent forebears -- something that occurred routinely until intellectual monopolies were introduced in recent centuries -- but it even jeopardizes the preservation and transmission of entire cultures because of publishers' refusal to allow copyright to move with the times by permitting large-scale digitization and distribution of the kind envisaged in Norway.

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Filed Under: archives, books, digitization, knowledge, libraries, norway, open access, sharing