In the works as of November 2009

Here are a few of the things I'm up to at present and in the near future:

Major conferences (open access and scholarly communication):

OCULA Spotlight Speaker: February 25, 2010, Toronto Ontario at the Ontario Library Association Superconference

Keynote, LIBER conference, June 29, 2010, Aarhus, Denmark

Program Committee, ELPUB 2010, June 16-18, 2010, Helsinki, Finland

Webinar Series

Co-coordinating ACRL ARL Scholarly Communication Institute Webinar series, tentatively scheduled January - May 2010 (details to come soon)

Teaching

Wrapping up another LIBR 559L, Scholarly Communication. Another great class, I'll miss them!

Research

Open Access Journals Support research project - pan-Canadian survey of academic libraries and university presses, with team members Don Taylor & Brian Owen (SFU), Kumiko Vezina (Concordia), and Andrew Waller (University of Calgary)

Editing

Co-editing special issue of the Canadian Library Association's Feliciter, on Information Policy, with Kirsti Nilsen, for publication next April

Writing & co-writing

articles on open access policy & OA research project for special issue of Canadian Journal of Higher Education

Learning

PhD coursework, SFU School of Communication

Plus the usual - see right hand side of blog.

Will Google survive Google books? reflections from a friend

In all of the discussion around the Google books settlement, I'm not hearing anything about the implications of this fundamental change in direction on the basic business of Google.

Google's motto is "don't be evil". Ethically, this would be a good model for any of us; for a search engine, this is also the basis of, and reason for, the trust that most of us continue to have in Google.

What will the impact of licensing books be on this trust? Based on my experience, it would be very difficult indeed for any company to maintain the kind of trust that Google has built, with a licensing approach. Aside from the trust barrier that the toll barrier per se raises, there will inevitably be times when access is inappropriately denied. For example, the imperfections of any authentication system mean that at times, toll access will be denied even to those who have paid the tolls.

More importantly, by getting involved with Google Books, no doubt with the very best of intentions, Google has accidentally walked into a situation that creates many an unintended evil. There are many aspects of analysis, which I do not have time to write about in full, so perhaps an example will suffice for now.

With the current settlement, Canadian books are covered as our copyright laws are similar to those of the U.S.; however, this settlement does not extend beyond the U.S., so these books will only be accessible to Americans, not Canadians. A U.S. citizen will have access to a book where even the family of the author, or the group that the Canadian author wrote about, has no access.

If my own recently-published book, Scholarly Communication for Librarians, had been published just a few months earlier, it would be included in Google Books. This means that it would be readily available to U.S. citizens, but not to the people of my country whose taxes paid the lion's share of my public education, nor to the library school at the University of British Columbia that gave me the opportunity to teach scholarly communication, the course that was the basis for this book.

One obvious remedy is to remove all foreign-published books from Google Books; indeed, with the current settlement, most foreign books have already been eliminated. This may help to advance Google Books from a purely legalistic standpoint - but what does this do to the likelihood of Americans developing a more inclusive, global view? The easily accessible and usable digital library is very likely to replace the print collections for a great many students; if foreign books are removed, this means that the chances that American students will be exposed to ideas from outside the U.S. will greatly diminish. This short term advantage for the U.S. will likely create much greater disadvantages in the medium term. Americans will be less able to compete in global markets, for example, and less prepared to diagnose, address, and prevent security problems - including developing the broad-based cross-cultural perspective that all of us need to live in harmony in our globalized world.

To borrow a phrase from Freire: what to do? Here is some advice to Google, from a friend:

Plan to get out of the Google Books business at the soonest possible opportunity. How?

Put the books back where they belong. If they are from the public domain, put the electronic versions into the public domain, equally available to all - including competitors. "Scanned and made available by Google" on the book is appropriate. Print on demand would be a useful and not-evil service. If they are in copyright, give them back to the copyright owners - the publishers and author. By all means, negotiate compensation such as a share of profits to recoup the monies spent on digitization. But the sooner Google is out of the licensing business, the better for trust in Google. If the works are orphan works, leave this matter with the legislators; join with the Open Contact Alliance to find a solution that will work for everyone.

As a PhD student, I see the benefits of this approach and would love to have access to this great electronic library. What an advance this would be, over our current situation where every copy of an important book owned by any library that could provide a copy in reasonable time, may be on loan, and the chances that the book is available through a bookstore slim to none. Not to mention the research advantages of being able to search the texts of books, even the books that we own in print. Thank you to Google, and to the libraries involved, for pushing the envelope and showing all of us what can be achieved.

Scholarly Communication for Librarians: catalogued and in circulation!

My book Scholarly Communication for Librarians is now catalogued at SFU Library - and, even better, on loan!

Research Brief: Library savings from full flip to open access via article processing fees: about two-thirds savings

Based on data supplied by Mark Ware in the recently released report for the Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers Association (STM) An overview of scientific and scholarly journals publishing, I calculate that library savings from a full flip from subscriptions to open access via article processing fees, at the PLoS One rate of $1,350 would be at least 64%. For the avoidance of doubt, that's about a two-thirds discount. This is presented as an illustration that open access is a wise choice economically, and not just from an access perspective; it is not meant as an endorsement of PLoS One or the article processing fee approach. The majority of OA journals do not charge article processing fees.

In brief, Ware estimates annual STM revenue at $8 billion per year, and quotes Bjork et al on an estimated total peer-reviewed journal article production of 1.5 million articles per year. This is an average of $5,333 revenue for STM for each scholarly article produced in a year. Compare this with the PLoS One article processing fee of $1,350 per article. Factoring in about 70% of STM revenues coming from library sources, the resulting global savings for libraries are 64%. See here for figures.

Other ways of expressing this: PLoS One costs about a fourth of the average revenue per article for STM, or PLoS One is four times as efficient as the average traditional STM journal.

There are many limitations to this brief study. Most of these limitations are reasons why library savings would be greater than 64%. Examples of variables not taken into account:

STM revenue does not take into account non-STM revenue, for journals in the humanities and social sciences and smaller publishers that are not part of STM. The article count, however, is for all disciplines. A higher total revenue would result in a higher average per-article revenue with the current subscription system, which in turn would mean higher library savings with a flip to open access via article processing fees.

This scenario does not take into account non-library revenue for article processing fees, such as authors who can tap into research grant funds for this purpose.

This scenario assumes an average article processing fee of about $1,350 U.S. With an average of $1,535 (BMC standard article processing charge), library savings are still at least 60%. See here for figures.

These figures do not take into account publishers who would like to receive more revenue than standard PLoS One or BMC rates on a routine basis. While libraries would still see savings at article processing fee rates of $3,000 as some publishers are charging - the two-thirds savings scenario comes from supporting high-quality but affordable open access publishers - not just any article processing fee that any publisher might like to charge.

This post is an early sharing of data to be developed for a fuller study in the near future, and part of the Transitioning to Open Access series. Thanks to Andrew Waller for checking some of the math.

Dramatic Growth of Open Access: September 30, 2009

This issue of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access features a few key quotable numbers to illustrate the growth and current extent of open access: more than 4,000 fully open access, peer reviewed journals in DOAJ, growing by 2 titles per day; close to 1,500 open access repositories listed in OpenDOAR, adding a new repository every business day; over 30 million free publications through Scientific Commons, growing by more than 20 thousands items per day; more than 20% of the world's medical literature is freely available 2 years after publication, and close to 10% is freely available immediately on publication; 1 more journal decides to submit all or most content to PMC every business day, and growth of open access journals in PMC is one new journal every other business day. The number of open access mandate policies is well over a hundred, and growing rapidly - but also likely understated. If you have a policy, please be sure to register with ROARMAP. This quarter saw some minor setbacks. Most notable (but still small) is a decrease in free content through Highwire Press.

Dramatic Growth quotables

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

• Over 4,000 fully open access, peer reviewed scholarly journals

• Adding 2 titles per day

OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories)

• About 1,500 open access repositories worldwide

• Adding 1 new repository every business day

Scientific Commons

• 30 million scientific publications free online

• Added 8 million publications in the last year

• Growing by more than 20,000 publications per day

PubMedCentral

• 20% of world's medical literature freely available 2 years after publication

• Close to 10% of world's medical literature freely available immediately on publication

• 1 new journal chooses to submit all or most content to PMC every business day

• 1 more medical journal becomes fully open access in PMC every other business day

PLoS ONE may soon become the world's largest scholarly journal. As reported this quarter on IJPE, based on Peter Binfield's presentation at ELPUB 2009, PLoS ONE is already among the very largest of the world's academic journals, and, if current trends continue, will become THE world's largest journal sometime in 2010. PLoS ONE is one of the journals published by the high prestige, not-for-profit publisherPublic Library of Science.

Milestones this quarter

• Scientific Commons exceeds 30 million publications

• PubMedCentral internal researchers' self-archiving rates now exceed 50% (for publications within past 3 years, and overall)

Thanks, PMC Staff! Also thanks for the neat "Free full text" tab, no doubt very handy for searchers, which also makes it much easier to collect data for the dramatic growth of open access.

Selected Details


Directory of Open Access Journals

• 4,361 journals

• Strong year (added 693 journals), slow quarter (109 titles). Note that additions to DOAJ are not the same as the total number of open access journals, but rather likely to reflect staffing / workflow issues. For example, this quarter covers summer months and the first OASPA conference, which Lund University, home of DOAJ, helped to host. Slow growth this quarterly is very likely to reflect such variables as vacation schedules and possibly staff secondments to help with the conference.

• Strong growth in number of journals searchable at article level (32% annual increase, now 1,664 titles)

• Strong growth in articles searchable at article level (59% increase, now at 315,407)

PubMedCentral

• # journals actively participating in PMC 671

• # journals in PMC with immediate free access 517

• # journals in PMC with all articles open access 396

Open Access Mandate Policies (from ROARMAP)

• Departmental 14

• Funder 41

• Institutional 43

• Thesis 33

• Total 131

• Proposed Mandates 15

IF YOU HAVE AN OPEN ACCESS POLICY, please register with ROARMAP. The ROARMAP numbers are likely understated, for example many people have pointed out that the number of thesis deposit policies is likely much higher than what is reported in ROARMAP. Registering helps with the numbers, but more importantly, a link to your policy can be most helpful for others still developing their own policies.

Minor setbacks this quarter
PubMedCentral fully open access journals: despite strong annual growth, the number of fully OA journals participating in PMC dropped by 2 this quarter.
Highwire Free: the number of free articles has dropped since last year by over 4,000.
CARL Metadata Harvester: strong annual growth is offset by a loss of about 600 items this quarter (weeding project, perhaps?).

The Dramatic Growth of Open Access Dataverse (spreadsheets for download - thanks to Harvard)

Google docs for viewing (full)
Google docs for viewing (show growth)

Definitions:
Day = calendar day (total / 365 days per year)
Business day = calendar days - 104 (weekends), total / 261

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

PLoS article-level metrics: substantial value add for authors

Public Library of Science (PLoS) recently introduced article-level metrics.

The PLoS article-level metrics are a substantial value-add for authors, including a range of download statistics, citations and social bookmarking data, and more. As an author, I would love to see this kind of service!

It is interesting that a publisher with top-ranking journals on traditional metrics (impact factor) is also a publisher innovating in the area of metrics of far greater relevance, which say soon make impact factors irrelevant in the near future.

One service that I, as an author, would like to see for the future, is a means of combining statistics from institutional and disciplinary repositories with the publisher's statistics. This is a development that could be pursed either by publishers or by repositories.

The data available from PLoS (from the PLoS website) includes:
Article usage statistics - HTML pageviews, PDF downloads and XML downloads
Citations from the scholarly literature – currently from PubMed Central, Scopus and CrossRef
Social bookmarks - currently from CiteULike and Connotea
Comments – left by readers of each article
Notes – left by readers of each article
Blog posts – aggregated from Postgenomic, Nature Blogs, and Bloglines
Ratings – left by readers of each article

More information is available at:
http://article-level-metrics.plos.org/

Mass digitization of books: Open Content Alliance is the right approach

With the Google Books lawsuit settlement likely to be decided within days, here is my take on this topic.

Libraries in recent years have been undertaking mass digitization projects, following two different approaches: working with Google to digitize the whole library's collection, including copyrighted works, or working with the Open Content Alliance under OCA principles, which include respecting the rights of content owners, and widest possible access, such as full open access for works in the public domain.

The Open Content Alliance is the right approach. Despite laudable motivations of participating libraries and Google (to expand access to the written word and preserve these books), the Google Books approach of taking works that belong to others (whether content owners or, in the case of public domain works, all of us), is just plain wrong. The impact of the proposed Google Book Settlement would mean basically a monopoly on digital books for one company, and a significant loss to the public domain. Those involved in the class action lawsuit do not represent all authors and publishers, only themselves.

Here is hoping that the Court will reject the Google Book Settlement, and that the libraries involved will abandon this approach and join the Open Content Alliance instead.