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.

For more information, see stories in:

Harvard Law School news

Peter Suber’s Open Access News

And, for summaries of what MIT faculty are saying and doing in relation to open access, see:

Podcasts with MIT Faculty on Scholarly Publishing and Open Access

MIT Faculty taking action for open access

–Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant / MIT Libraries / efinnie@mit.edu / x8483

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.

Download the audio file. (14:42 minutes; 13.5 MB)

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.

For more information see:

Details about this year’s contest.

Last year’s winning entries.

–Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant / MIT Libraries / x38483 / efinnie@mit.edu

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. 

For more information, please contact:

Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant / efinnie@mit.edu / 617.253.8483

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.

Download the audio file. (22:53 minutes; 21 MB)

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.

Access to SAE technical papers (requires MIT certificates on and off campus).

Details about access to SAE technical papers

If you have comments or questions, please contact:

Tracy Gabridge, Co-Head, Engineering & Science Libraries, tag@mit.edu

Ellen Finnie Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant, MIT Libraries, efinnie@mit.edu

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.

The IAP session “Publishing Smart” is now available on video. (MIT on-campus use only)

The 51-minute video captures a session for graduate students that covers:

• use of web-based tools that assess journal quality;
• copyright and its relation to the publication process;
• assessing a publisher’s copyright policies;
• open access publishing models and channels, and impact on citation rate;
• use of the MIT amendment to alter standard publisher agreements.

The video is linked from the student page on the scholarly publishing website .

If you have any feedback or questions, please direct to

Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant / MIT Libraries / efinnie@mit.edu / x38483

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.

Download the audio file. (15:10 minutes; 11.1 MB)

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.

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:

Ellen Finnie Duranceau (efinnie@mit.edu)

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.

Download the audio file (14:35 minutes; 13.9MB)

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.”

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.

Download the audio file. (14:35 minutes; 10.2MB)

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/

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.

WHEN: Friday, January 18, 2 - 3 pm

WHERE: 14N-132, DIRC

Contact Ellen Finnie Duranceau with any questions.

“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 SCOAP³ project, 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).

On December 26, 2007, President Bush signed a spending bill that requires the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to mandate open online access to all research it funds.

This is the first mandate for a major public funding agency in the US that requires research to be openly available; it changes the 2005 NIH Public Access Policy, which requested, but did not require, open access to NIH-funded research.  

The new language stipulates that investigators funded by the NIH submit their peer-reviewed manuscripts to the National Library of Medicine’s open access repository PubMed Central when the manuscript is accepted for publication.  The manuscript would then become openly available via PubMed Central within 12 months of publication in a journal.  The policy will be implemented “in a manner consistent with copyright law.”

The mandate will apply to a vast amount of research. Aside from classified military research, the NIH is the world’s largest funder of scientific research, with a 2007 budget of $28 billion. According to open access commentator Peter Suber, NIH research funds ”65,000 peer-reviewed articles every year or 178 every day.”  At MIT, NIH funds account for about one-third of the research dollars awarded annually.

More information on the mandate is available from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access and from Peter Suber.

If MIT authors have questions, please contact:Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant / MIT Libraries/ efinnie@mit.edu /x38483

The fourth episode in a new series of podcasts on various aspects of scholarly publishing & copyright is now available.

In this episode, we hear from Professor Kai von Fintel, Professor of Linguistics at MIT, whose research areas are in semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, and the intersections among them.

Professor von Fintel discusses the launch of a new open access journal, Semantics and Pragmatics, with co-editor David Beaver of the University of Texas at Austin. The podcast was recorded at a critical moment in the journal’s history, a few weeks after its website was launched and opened for submissions, and a few months before the first papers are expected to appear there, in early 2008.

Download the Audio File (11:11 minutes; 10.3MB)

More information about Professor von Fintel’s open access journal is available at the Semantic and Pragmatics website, which includes a blog by the editors. A previous MIT Libraries’ blog story also contains more information.

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/

This is the first series of podcasts created by the Libraries specifically for this format. We encourage and welcome your feedback as the series evolves. If you have any feedback, please direct it to:
Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / efinnie@mit.edu
Nicole Hennig / Web Manager / hennig@mit.edu

Professor Wai Cheng writes about “The Pitfalls of Digital Rights Management” in the November/December issue of the MIT Faculty Newsletter.

Professor Cheng, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and a fellow of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), spoke out last spring against the limitations of digital rights management (DRM) technology being imposed on access to research published by the SAE through a web-based database of technical papers accessed at MIT through an MIT Libraries’ subscription.

He felt strongly enough about the implications of DRM that he delivered a presentation to the SAE’s Publication Board meeting in April 2007, making a case that the SAE should revoke the new DRM requirement. His presentation resulted in SAE’s immediate stay in implementation of DRM for universities, followed by the appointment of a task force to more fully examine the issue.

The outcome, as announced in an SAE press release this month, is that “As recommended by a special task force, the SAE International Publications Board voted Oct. 31 to eliminate the use of the ‘FileOpen’ plug-in on digital library products for … colleges, universities and other academic institutions.” This means that “In 2008 students and faculty will be able to use SAE International’s Digital Library of Technical Papers in academic settings without the former restrictions.”

Many thanks to Professor Cheng for his efforts to secure flexible access rights to SAE’s papers for MIT and other universities.

Please note that the MIT Libraries canceled web access to the SAE papers last year in response to the imposition of DRM. Information on current access to the papers is available at the Barker Library’s web site.

For more information on MIT faculty who are taking action to improve access to research, see the scholarly publication website.

–Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant / MIT Libraries / x38483 / efinnie@mit.edu

This hands-on workshop will help graduate students learn tools that measure journal quality, publisher copyright policies, and their significance to you as an author. Includes concise overviews of:

• Measures of journal quality, including ISI impact factor and other indicators
• Copyright law as related to journal publishing (transferring copyright)
• Publisher copyright policies, including rights for posting your work on the web
• Publishing options: open access channels, in both new and traditional journals, and other types of publishing

When: Friday November 16, 2007, 11am-12pm
Where: 14N-132
Presented by: Ellen Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing  & Licensing Consultant, MIT Libraries, efinnie@mit.edu
Sponsored by: The GSC-ARC and the MIT Libraries

MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the MIT Libraries, and the nonprofit organization ScienceCommons are co-sponsoring a discussion of open access and the progress of science:

WHEN: Tuesday, November 13; 3:15 pm - 5:00 pm

WHERE: Kiva (Room 449) — Stata Center

With presentations by:
John Wilbanks (Vice President, Science Commons)

Anna Gold (Head, Engineering and Science Libraries, MIT)

and Moderated by Professor Hal Abelson (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT)

More on ScienceCommons

More on Open Access

If you have any questions about the event, please contact:

Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant / MIT Libraries / x38483

The third episode in a new series of podcasts on various aspects of scholarly publishing & copyright is now available.

In the new episode, we hear from Professor Eric von Hippel, T Wilson Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT. He specializes in research related to the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation.

Professor von Hippel speaks about his experiment with making two of his books openly available on his website at no cost to the reader, and about the broader issue of how the economics of innovation are increasingly favoring open, unrestricted internet access, including in scholarly publishing.

Download the Audio File (8:33 minutes)

More information about Professor von Hippel’s experiment with making his books openly available on the web was offered in a previous story.

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/

This is the first series of podcasts created by the Libraries specifically for this format. We encourage and welcome your feedback as the series evolves. If you have any feedback, please direct it to:
Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / efinnie@mit.edu
Nicole Hennig / Web Manager / hennig@mit.edu

Last night the US Senate approved the Appropriations Bill that strengthens the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Public Access Policy,  requiring NIH-sponsored research to be made openly available on the internet without barriers to access.

The new language requires NIH-funded researchers to deposit copies of manuscripts into PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine’s openly accessible archive, where they will be made available within 12 months of publication in a peer-reviewed journal.   (Existing language requests, rather than requires, this posting in PubMed Central, and has resulted in a deposit rate of less than 5% by investigators.)

The Senate’s action represents another key hurdle in the process of making publicly funded research publicly accessible.   Next, the language of the Senate bill (S.1710) has to be reconciled with similar language in a House Appropriations Bill.  This is expected to be worked out this fall.   The final consolidated bill will then have to pass the House and Senate before it goes to the President at the end of the year.

The Treasurer of the American Society for Cell Biology, Gary Ward, has responded to this Senate vote by saying that “We welcome the NIH policy being made mandatory, and thank Congress for backing this important step.  Free and timely public access to scientific literature is necessary to ensure that new discoveries are made as quickly as feasible. It’s the right thing to do, given that taxpayers funds this research.”  (The Alliance for Taxpayer Access’ press release offers the full context of this quote.)

More about the NIH Public Access Policy may be found on the Open Access Initiatives page of the Scholarly Publication Website.

Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant / MIT Libraries / efinnie@mit.edu / x38483

Stuart Shieber, Harvard professor of computer science, introduced a motion to the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences on October 16 that would have the faculty uniformly grant a non-exclusive, limited license to Harvard to post their scholarly and research articles openly on the web.   

The final version of the motion has not been completed, but if passed, research articles authored by members of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences would be made freely available on the web, without permission or payment barriers to the reader, effectively making Harvard faculty work “open access.” 

While this proposal is not university-wide (it does not, for example, cover the professional schools such as the medical, law, or business schools), it would apply to the entire Harvard College faculty, including every discipline studied by undergraduates, as well as the graduate school of arts & sciences, and the school of engineering and applied sciences. 

Professor Shieber has been working on this issue for at least two years.  He’s convinced that university-level action is needed to enhance open access to research, for while individual faculty can make a difference in negotiating their own publication contracts, institutional policies will simplify the copyright and pragmatic issues faced when each individual is responsible for making his or her work openly accessible. 

To take effect, the motion will need to be discussed further by the faculty and voted upon by the full faculty.  Final details of the policy are not yet available, since it is still under discussion. 

Related Efforts at MIT

Here at 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, humanistic, engineering or scientific; is a key ingredient in providing for informed public debate of critical social problems; and is an obligation for researchers receiving public funding” and it calls for MIT faculty to “support the general concept of open access, especially for publicly funded research, and recommend the use of the least restrictive copyright agreements, consistent with the academic and commercial intent under which the research was undertaken.” 

Professor Evans spoke about the resolution at an IAP event in January 2007.   More information on open access is available on the scholarly publishing web site or by contacting the Libraries’ Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant, Ellen Finnie Duranceau (efinnie@mit.edu).

A new MIT Libraries’ tutorial “Scholarly Publication and Copyright: Retaining Rights & Increasing the Impact of Research” is now available online.

• Part 1 focuses on how copyright law intersects with the publication process.

Download part 1 (5:38 min.)

• Part 2 reviews why you might want to retain rights when you publish and how you can do so.

Download Part 2 (9:47 min.)

• Part 3 provides information on increasing the impact of your research by making it available through open access channels.

Download Part 3 (8:55 min.)

Together, these three parts are intended to explain how copyright relates to publication agreements for research articles, and how authors can increase the impact of their work by negotiating to retain rights to post their articles on the web or reuse them in other ways.

This 3-part tutorial is also linked from the scholarly publishing website, where these themes are developed in more depth.

We welcome your comments and feedback, which can be directed to:

Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / efinnie@mit.edu / 617.253.8483

The MIT Libraries are offering a new podcast series on scholarly publishing and copyright. Two episodes are available:

In “Transforming Scientific Communication,” Steve Gass, Head of Public Services, describes some problems with the existing model for scholarly publishing and offers his vision of positive changes that could be made.

Download the audio file. (6:27 minutes, 6 Mb)

In “Making a Difference: Pushing Back on DRM at MIT,” Anna Gold, Head of the Engineering and Science Libraries, tells the story of MIT’s rejection of Digital Rights Management technology when it was being imposed by a scholarly society for use of its technical papers here at MIT.

Download the audio file. (8:18 minutes, 7.7 Mb)

To subscribe to the MIT Libraries’ Podcasts on Scholarly Publishing, paste this link into iTunes or another podcast reader:

http://feeds.rapidfeeds.com/6772/

This is the first series of podcasts created by the Libraries specifically for this format. We encourage and welcome your feedback as the series evolves.

Please direct your comments to:
Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / efinnie@mit.edu
Nicole Hennig / Web Manager / hennig@mit.edu

For more information on scholarly publishing & copyright, please visit the Libraries’ Scholarly Publication website.

Two new tools make finding key information about journals easier, providing authors with support for decisions about where to publish and offering information about what they can do with their work once they publish. Both tools were announced this month and are open for testing and comment.

Journal Info

The first tool, Journal Info, includes access, cost, and quality information for 18,000 journals. Journal Info is intended to support researchers in their choice of journal for publication. It offers access, cost, and quality information, and also indicates if there is an open access alternative to a given title.

Some of the data points offered for each journal are:

• Allowance of self-archiving [by author] of reviewed manuscript
• Subscription price per article and per citation
• Profit or not-for-profit status
• Publication fees
• Quality measures, including where the journal is indexed, the ISI Impact Factor, and a new impact factor measure called the Journal eigenfactor, which is sponsored by the Bergstrom lab in the University of Washington’s Biology Department.

Journal Info was created by Lund University Libraries (with financial support from the National Library of Sweden). Lund also created the Directory of Open Access Journals, a resource that identifies scientific and scholarly journals that make their content accessible to readers without legal or subscription barriers.

HHMI Journal Publishing Policy Database

The second tool was built by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to support their authors in meeting the terms of the new HHMI open access mandate. This tool was developed by HHMI “as a convenience to HHMI scientists and their collaborators around the world” and offers “a searchable resource with information about the policies and author responsibilities for 50 high-impact journals,” principally in biomedicine.

Some of the data points offered for each title are:

• Full Text Access [how, when & where articles are made openly available]
• Author Role/Responsibility [in relation to the HHMI policy]
• Publisher Role [in relation to the HHMI policy]
• Journal Publishing Policy [a link to copyright, posting, and related policies]

The HHMI public access policy summary database was created and is maintained by the library staff at the HHMI library.

More on Choosing Journals

For