The latest in the series of podcasts on scholarly publication and copyright is an interview with Dr. Gari Clifford, Principal Research Scientist and Instructor in Biomedical Engineering in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology, and Engineering Manager for the Laboratory for Computational Physiology at MIT.
In the podcast, Dr. Clifford explores themes related to author rights and open access that have emerged in his experience with scholarly publishing. In particular, he explains why he prefers to publish in open access journals, what problems he sees with the journal publishing system, and his view that the choice of journal is “as important as the research itself.”
To subscribe to the MIT Libraries’ Podcasts on Scholarly Publishing, paste this link into iTunes or another podcast reader: http://feeds.rapidfeeds.com/6772/
We encourage and welcome your feedback, which you may direct to: Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / efinnie@mit.edu
Today two of the largest providers of open source software for managing and providing access to digital content, the DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons, announced plans to combine strengths to work on joint initiatives that will more closely align their organizations’ goals and better serve both open source repository communities in the coming months.
This advance comes as institutions such as universities, libraries, museums and research laboratories worldwide are focused on utilizing open source software solutions for the dissemination and preservation of scholarly, scientific, and cultural heritage digital content into the future. Making books, articles, films, music, large and small data sets, scholarly works, multi-media, learning objects and mash-ups from all parts of the globe discoverable and accessible is at the core of the DSpace and Fedora collaboration.
The collaboration is expected to benefit over 500 organizations from around the world who are currently using either DSpace (examples include MIT, Rice University, Texas Digital Library and University of Toronto) or Fedora (examples include the National Library of France, New York Public Library, Encyclopedia of Chicago and eSciDoc) open source software to create repositories for a wide variety of purposes. Read more…
The latest in the series of podcasts on scholarly publication and copyright is an interview with Dan Ariely, who was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics here at MIT, until very recently, when he moved to Duke University, where he is now James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics.
Professor Ariely recently published the best-selling book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions, in which he undermines any notion we might have that humans make “rational” decisions. His book reports on his research showing that emotions, context, social norms, and related factors drive our decisions – and that we are irrational in predictable ways.
In the podcast, Professor Ariely speaks with us about how market and social norms intersect with authors’ decision-making in an evolving system of scholarly communication and publishing. He discusses reward systems, the importance of building an accessible community of knowledge, and the need to lower barriers for information sharing.
To subscribe to the MIT Libraries’ Podcasts on Scholarly Publishing, paste this link into iTunes or another podcast reader: http://feeds.rapidfeeds.com/6772/
We encourage and welcome your feedback, which you may direct to: Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / efinnie@mit.edu
Geared for graduate students, this workshop addresses what copyright means to you as an author, how you can assess a publisher’s copyright policies, and how you can use web-based tools that assess journal quality. Open access publishing models and the use of the MIT amendment to alter standard publisher agreements will also be discussed.
Feel free to bring your lunch! Drinks and dessert will be provided.
The faculty of the Stanford University School of Education voted unanimously “in support of greater openness in scholarly and educational endeavors,” by adopting a policy June 10 that will require all of the faculty’s scholarly articles to be available openly on the web.
The policy will give Stanford University a license to post the Education School faculty’s articles online at no cost to readers; as with the Harvard policies, waivers may be requested and will be granted.
The policy emerges “in recognition of [Stanford University School of Education's] responsibility to make its research and scholarship as widely and publicly available as possible” and commits the faculty to “taking advantage of new technologies to increase access to its work among scholars worldwide, educators, policymakers, and the public.”
The faculty of the Harvard Law School has voted unanimously to make articles authored by faculty members available in an open online repository. This is the first law school to commit to open access for its authors’ work.
As reported in the Harvard Law School news, Dean of the Law School Elena Kagan explains the motivation of the vote as a “decision to embrace ‘open access’” that “means that people everywhere can benefit from the ideas generated here at the Law School.”
“The acceptance of open access ensures that our faculty’s world-class scholarship is accessible today and into the future,” reports John Palfrey, the Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and Vice Dean of library and information resources, in the same news story.
This vote follows that of the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences, which adopted a similar mandate in February 2008, also by a unanimous vote.
The latest in the series of podcasts on scholarly publication and copyright is an interview with George Stiny, Professor of Computation in the Department of Architecture at MIT.
Professor Stiny explains the significance of copying in the design process from his unusual perspective - a perspective that blends art and design with calculating. Professor Stiny invented shape grammars - the idea of identifying and quantifying a set of rules that can generate an infinite range of designs, much the way rules of grammar in language can generate an infinite range of sentences. His work uses mathematics to capture the creative, generative language of shapes and design.
We encourage and welcome your feedback, which you may direct to: Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / efinnie@mit.edu
The Second Annual Sparky Awards, a contest that recognizes the best new short videos on the value of information sharing, were announced today.
The 2008 contest theme is “MindMashup: The Value of Information Sharing.” Videos of two minutes or less that “imaginatively portray the benefits of the open, legal exchange of information” are due by November 30, 2008. The winner receives a $1000 cash award.
The Sparky Awards are sponsored by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) with additional co- sponsorship by the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, Penn Libraries (at the University of Pennsylvania), Students for Free Culture, and The Student PIRGs.
The new NIH Public Access Policy of 2008 requires all NIH-funded investigators to submit their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts to the NIH’s PubMed Central (PMC) database (the digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature) upon acceptance for journal publication.
This policy, created to conform with a new law passed by Congress, applies to all peer-reviewed articles accepted for publication on or after April 7, 2008, if they arise, in whole or in part, from direct costs funded by NIH.
The MIT Libraries have developed a step-by-step guide for MIT authors who need to comply with this policy. In addition, the MIT Libraries’ Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant is available to assist MIT authors in complying with it.
The latest in the series of podcasts on scholarly publication and copyright is an interview with Hal Abelson, Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.
Professor Abelson has played key roles in fostering educational technology initiatives such MIT’s OpenCourseWare and DSpace. He has a broad interest in information technology and policy, and developed and teaches the course “Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier.” He was a founding director of Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, and the Free Software Foundation, organizations that are devoted to strengthening our intellectual commons.
In the podcast, Professor Abelson reflects on the origins and impacts of these efforts, his reasons for remaining committed to more open access to research, and the concerns he has about the future.
We encourage and welcome your feedback, which you may direct to: Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / efinnie@mit.edu
MIT faculty, students, and staff have access to the Society of Automotive Engineer’s technical papers over the web again, because the SAE listened to MIT and other universities when they spoke out against the imposition of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology.
Last spring, the MIT Libraries cancelled their web access to the (SAE) technical papers, because the society was imposing a DRM plug-in called FileOpen that seriously impeded normal scholarly use.
Professor of Mechanical Engineering and SAE fellow Wai Cheng presented MIT’s concerns at the SAE’s Publication Board meeting in April 2007, which resulted in an immediate stay of DRM implementation on university campuses, and ultimately (November 2007) in a changed policy: FileOpen would not be required for university access to the SAE Digital Library.
While the MIT Libraries have not been able to get all the assurances we would like regarding SAE’s plans for implementing other DRM tools in the future, after consulting with faculty we have decided, as Professor Cheng put it, to “work with SAE in good faith,” reentering what we hope will be a productive partnership.
In 1999, the Gutenberg-e program made a big splash as one of the first experiments in online scholarly monograph publication. Co-sponsored by the American Historical Association and the Columbia University Press, Gutenberg-e offered a space for new scholars to take advantage of the power of digital media to present their research in innovative ways. Since the project’s debut, 36 historians have won the Gutenberg-e competition and had their revised dissertations published as digital monographs, which have been available to libraries through subscription. The authors were able to enhance their texts with vivid images, primary source material, pop-up glossaries, web links, and other features.
Columbia University Press has recently made Gutenberg-e open-access, making these books freely available to the general public. Visit http://www.gutenberg-e.org/ to see titles such as Sarah Lowengard’s The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe; Maria Rentetzi’s Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices: Radium Research in Early 20th Century Vienna; and Sherry Fields’ Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico.
In the new episode in the series of podcasts on scholarly publication and copyright, we hear from Professor John H. Lienhard V, Professor of Mechanical Engineering here at MIT.
Professor Lienhard’s research interests include Heat and Mass Transfer and Fluid Mechanics, among other areas. He is the recipient of several teaching awards at MIT as well as research awards from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
He speaks about making his text book — the 3rd edition of A Heat Transfer Textbook — openly available on the web, with no charge to readers. This text was coauthored with Professor Lienhard’s father, John Lienhard IV, who is a professor at the University of Houston. It was published by Prentice Hall in two print editions in the 1980s, and remained in print until the mid 1990s.
In the podcast, Professor Lienhard, whose goal was to “explore the impact that free textbooks could have on higher education,” reflects on how the project came about and what it has meant to those who have downloaded the text, as well as to him.
Beyond the podcast: More about A Heat Transfer Textbook
Professor Lienhard’s experiment was a remarkable innovation at the time. Certainly its astounding success could not have been foreseen back in 2001, when he and his father launched the open access version. That was before ebooks were widespread, before OpenCourseWare had made the idea of freely accessible educational materials a hot topic, and when internet connections were still slow enough that it took quite a commitment to download the 8 - 10 MB book. Yet the downloads built quickly and the rate has not let up.
One of the unexpected outcomes of this experiment with open textbook publishing was that the freely downloadable 3rd edition reached a completely different and much larger audience than the first two print editions had. The Prentice Hall editions were not marketed internationally, and the buyers were largely American college students, and American college professors. Professor Lienhard estimates that the sales were perhaps 10,000 for each of the first two print editions, a very respectable number for a printed textbook.
In contrast, the open access version has been downloaded more than 150,000 times from more than 150 countries — so the scale of the audience has increased by an order of magnitude. The recipients of the open access version are not primarily American students or professors; they are practicing engineers in the U.S. and elsewhere, and, to an overwhelming extent, students in the developing world who have little to no access to quality textbooks in engineering and science. Professor Lienhard discusses the moving testimonials he’s received from these students in the podcast.
The other episodes in the podcast series are available on the scholarly publication website.To subscribe to the MIT Libraries’ Podcasts on Scholarly Publishing, paste this link into iTunes or another podcast reader:http://feeds.rapidfeeds.com/6772/We encourage and welcome your feedback, which you may direct to:Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / efinnie@mit.edu
In an effort to share faculty research and scholarship more broadly, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted unanimously on February 12 to give the University a license to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles openly available. According to Peter Suber, chronicler of trends in open access, the new policy makes Harvard the first university in the United States to mandate open access to its faculty members’ research publications.
Wider Dissemination of Research
Harvard Provost Steven E. Hyman reflected in the Harvard Gazette that “The goal of university research is the creation, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge. At Harvard, where so much of our research is of global significance, we have an essential responsibility to distribute the fruits of our scholarship as widely as possible….Today’s action in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences will promote free and open access to significant, ongoing research. It is a first step in the creation of an open-access environment for current research that may one day provide the widest possible dissemination of Harvard’s distinguished Faculties’ work.”
Faculty members may request a waiver of the license; otherwise it applies to all articles completed after the adoption of the policy. Articles will be made available through an open access repository, run by Harvard College Libraries, using DSpace, repository software developed at MIT .
More information is available in the Boston Globe.
Related Discussions at MIT
As previously reported in this blog, MIT Professor of Geophysics Brian Evans has drafted a resolution under the auspices of the Faculty Committee on the Library System that addresses the same desire for open access to research that underlies the Harvard motion. The draft resolution states that “Broad dissemination and rapid, free flow of information is essential to insuring vigorous intellectual debate and efficient progress in any academic field” and it calls for MIT faculty to “support the general concept of open access… and recommend the use of the least restrictive copyright agreements.”
Those interested in more information may contact the Libraries’ Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant:
In the latest in the series of podcasts on topics related to scholarly publication and copyright, the Executive Director of Science Commons, John Wilbanks, discusses how and why Science Commons is working to improve the flow of scientific knowledge so that complex scientific, technical, and medical problems can be solved more quickly.
Following the recorded interview, Wilbanks agreed to answer just one more question, which we did not have time to include in the recording:Ellen Duranceau: I understand you majored in Philosophy as an undergrad. Is there is particular philosopher’s work that you draw upon to support his efforts with ScienceCommons?
Wilbanks responds: “Philosophy has turned out to be directly relevant to our work at Science Commons - the principles behind the Semantic Web are essentially the same as those investigated for centuries by philosophers from Hume to Plantinga. In terms of influence, I could list a dozen philosophers that have influenced one element or another of our work. I know that Thinh Nguyen, our counsel, is deeply influenced by the work of Daniel Dennett (and everyone involved in science should read Dennett’s “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea“). But I’m probably most influenced overall by Thomas Kuhn, who wrote “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” and introduced the idea of the paradigm shift.
Now, paradigm shift is a devalued phrase today. It is justly mocked in commercials and cartoons (the Simpsons do it justice above all) as a catch phrase for managers without a clue. And “Structure” is not a thrilling read. But the core arguments about how ideas emerge in science, are beaten down by the establishment, and have to force general changes in the overall knowledge structure of science - those arguments resonate deeply with me. And a huge part of what we’re trying to do at Science Commons is enable the overall acceleration of the cycles Kuhn describes, to make it faster and faster and faster for ideas that deserve to emerge to emerge, and to let as many people into the process as want to be there.
This mix of accelerating research cycles and increasing participation in science through lowered barriers means that we get more revolutions, faster. It’s one of the only non-miraculous approaches available to us. We need theoretical breakthroughs in fields across the sciences, we need more revolutions, and Science Commons is trying to deploy the infrastructure of knowledge and that can make those revolutions easier to achieve.”
The other episodes in the podcast series are available on the scholarly publication website.To subscribe to the MIT Libraries’ Podcasts on Scholarly Publishing, paste this link into iTunes or another podcast reader:http://feeds.rapidfeeds.com/6772/.
We encourage and welcome your feedback, which you may direct to: Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / efinnie@mit.edu
In the new episode in the series of podcasts on scholarly publication and copyright, Tracy Gabridge, Associate Head of the Barker Engineering Library (as well as a graduate of MIT), speaks about a project she is leading in which a group of librarians is determining which conferences MIT Engineering faculty publish in, whether the MIT Libraries have access to the proceedings from these conferences, and whether the digital access appears to be vulnerable.
This is the first series of podcasts created by the Libraries specifically for this format. We encourage and welcome your feedback, which you may direct to:
Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / efinnie@mit.edu Nicole Hennig / Web Manager / hennig@mit.edu
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), as previously reported, was directed by new legislation to mandate open access to all peer-reviewed journal articles published as a result of NIH grant funds, through PubMed Central, the digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. NIH has now revised its home page, FAQ, and Public Access Policy, describing the new mandatory submission process.
Details that may be of interest to the MIT community:
Timing: The policy applies to all peer-reviewed articles that are accepted for publication on or after April 7, 2008.
Publisher Agreements and Copyright: From the FAQ: “Authors should work with the publisher before any rights are transferred to ensure that all conditions of the NIH Public Access Policy can be met. Authors should avoid signing any agreements with publishers that do not allow the author to comply with the NIH Public Access Policy.”
Amending Agreements: Authors should be aware that if a journal presents them with a copyright transfer agreement, they need not use the form as presented. They should attach a revision to the transfer agreement that makes the contract compliant with NIH requirements. MIT offers authors such an amendment to publisher agreements whose language allows MIT authors to comply with the new NIH policy. Authors simply indicate that the agreement is subject to the amendment, and sign and attach the amendment.
While NIH suggests some possible language that can be used to modify a publisher’s agreement, this language is provided simply as an example. Use of either the MIT amendment or one of the other addendum options included in the drop-down list on the MIT amendment page offers a complete, convenient, and sound means of complying with the policy.
The new policy does not change the author’s copyrights’ status. The author can still “assign [copyrights] to journals, subject to the limited right that must be retained…to post the works in accordance with the Policy” in PubMed Central.
Submitting to PubMed Central: Submitting to PMC is required even if you publish in an open access journal, or if the article is freely accessible on the publisher’s website. Principal Investigators (PIs) and authors can check a list of participating journals that will submit manuscripts to PubMedCentral on their behalf, and should not accept publishers promises to submit if the journal title is not on this list. If a title is not on the list, the author should be sure to reserve the rights to deposit directly. In all cases, authors should retain a copy of their final peer-reviewed manuscript and all supplemental material. Even if a journal is on the list, authors will need to review the article as submitted by the journal to PubMed Central, and sign off on its accuracy and completeness. This will be required before a PubMed Central reference number is issued, and that number will be needed for progress reports and applications.
PubMedCentral Reference Numbers: Authors and PIs should be begin collecting PubMedCentral reference numbers as well as NIH Manuscript Submission System reference numbers as proof of deposit, as these will be required for all future progress reports, and grant applications.
Publication Costs: NIH will allow PIs to pay open access publication costs from grant funds, though NIH is not budgeting additional funds for this purpose.
For further information about the new NIH policy, or using the MIT amendment, please consult the Scholarly Publication website, or contact:
Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant / MIT Libraries / x38483 / efinnie@mit.edu
Geared for graduate students, addresses what copyright means to you as an author, how you can assess a publisher’s copyright policies, and how you can use web-based tools that assess journal quality. Open access publishing models and the use of the MIT amendment to alter standard publisher agreements will also be discussed.
“The next big experiment in particle physics won’t need an accelerator, detector, or other big machine,” says Glennda Chui in the latest issue of Symmetry: Dimensions of Particle Physics. “It doesn’t even involve subatomic particles…instead, it will test a new way to circulate the theories, methods, and experimental results that are the lifeblood of science.”
She’s referring to the SCOAP3project, an innovative new model for funding high energy physics journals. SCOAP3, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics, has proposed a mechanism for particle physics to pay for its own publishing costs and make articles in the field openly available to the world without cost to the reader. Rather than rely on typical journal subscriptions, which allow access only to individuals and institutions who pay, in the SCOAP3 model, universities, labs, and funding agencies involved in producing the literature of particle physics pay into a consortium (SCOAP3). The consortium then pays publishers to publish their journals openly on the web.
The heart of the model involves converting the payment structure for the key journals in particle physics, which together publish 83 percent of the particle physics articles that are posted to arXiv, the popular and successful preprint server. These include Physical Review D, Physics Letters B, Nuclear Physics B, Journal of High Energy Physics, and European Physical Journal C, as well as the articles in Physical Review Letters that pertain to high energy physics.
As SCOAP3 explains it, “SCOAP3 will, for the first time, link quality and price, stimulating competition and enabling considerable medium- and long-term savings.” They envision that “each SCOAP3 partner will finance its contribution by canceling journal subscriptions” and that “each country will contribute according to its share of high energy physics publishing.”
SCOAP3 is a consortium made up of high energy physics funding agencies, high energy physics laboratories, and national and international libraries and library consortia.The consortium includes, among many other organizations: CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research; France’s Institut national de physique nucléaire et de physique des particules; Germany’s Max-Planck-Gesellschaft; Greece’s Assembly of Greek universities, and the Swedish National Library. As of this writing, two universities in the United States (through their libraries) have pledged their willingness to support open access through the SCOAP3 consortium: University of California, Berkeley, and Northwestern University.
More information about the goals and methods of SCOAP3 is available at their website.
If you would like to share your thoughts about this funding model, please contact the Libraries’ liaison for Physics, Mat Willmott (willmott@mit.edu), or Ellen Finnie Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant (efinnie@mit.edu).
Today two of the largest providers of open source software for managing and providing access to digital content, the 
In 1999, the Gutenberg-e program made a big splash as one of the first experiments in online scholarly monograph publication. Co-sponsored by the 
