Open Access and Institutional Repositories, Scholarly Publishing

Staying out of boxes

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One of the observations that gradually dawned on me as I listened to the presentations made at the Berlin 8 Conference on Open Access was that there was a clear difference between those countries, like the US, where scientific publishing is dominated by commercial publishers and those where the majority of the publishing is still controlled by scholarly societies.  Where commercial publishers are the dominant force, open access almost always involves some form of “author pays” model where article processing fees are used to substitute for the perceived loss of subscription income.  In those countries, funding for open access is often difficult and controversial.

This model, however, is not the only option for supporting gold open access.  Two different speakers reminded the audience that 80% of open access journals do not, in fact, charge article processing fees.  Those journals seemed to be largely published by scholarly societies; that was certainly the case for the STM journals published in China, about which Mr. Chu Jingli of the Chinese Academy of Science reported.  The support mechanisms for open access journals proved to be much more various once we got away from the scenario where commercial publishers, with their constant need for greater profits, dominated.

Dieter Stein from the University of Dusseldorf gave one example of a suite of successful open access journals in the field of linguistics.  Stein is the editor of the e-Language portal for the Linguistics Society of America, which publishes six journals using the Open Journals System.  Stein emphasized that neither author nor reader pays for publication in these journals.  The society supports open access because it sees substantial benefits from publishing in that way.  Stein indicated that the Society had seen a substantial increase in attendance at its annual conference, resulting in increased income, which it attributed to the broader dialogue about linguistics fostered by its OA journals.  I was struck by the parallel with the music industry, where providing lower cost, and sometimes no cost, access to recordings has resulted in larger incomes for artists (if not for recording companies) from live appearances.

The clear message in all of this is that we need to think in new ways and realize that there are many alternative business models for scholarly publication.  When we are told, as we often are, that “somebody has to pay for open access” we should remember that the unspoken subtext of this comment is usually that “someone has to pay me!”  As we examine open access alternatives we must remember that the ultimate goal should be to facilitate the most efficient system of scholarly communications, not support any particular business or business model.  The clear message from Berlin 8 was that we need to think outside of traditional boxes, not just about publication as a whole but even about open access support itself.

Open Access and Institutional Repositories

A little justified bragging

It is delightful to be able to report on the impact made at the Berlin 8 Conference on Open Access by the presentation on Duke’s OA initiatives by Paolo Mangiafico, Duke’s Director of Digital Information Strategy.  Paolo told a packed room about all of the various ways in which Duke has pursued open access for quite a number of years, starting with a “proto-CC” license used for some of the Libraries’ earliest digital collections and culminating, most recently, in the faculty OA policy adopted in March and the COPE fund for OA publications announced last month.

Paolo Mangiafico at the Berlin 8 Open Access conference
Paolo Mangiafico at the Berlin 8 Open Access conference

The impact of Paolo’s presentation was not, I think, because Duke has done OA so much better than other institutions.  Other universities have made greater progress on specific initiatives.  But Paolo laid out a framework of what is possible that became a kind of touchstone for the rest of the conference.  The diversity of the efforts he outlined gave later presenters a way to relate what they were doing at their institutions to the overall universe of OA projects.  Since reports on institutional open access strategies and policies made up a significant portion of the sessions, this framework really helped others place their own efforts, and I heard many references back to Paolo’s talk as the conference progressed.

Since all of the presentations from Berlin 8 have now been uploaded to the Conference website, I recommend Paolo’s slides, which are the first ones in session four, as well as all of the diverse presentations that went in to this fascinating conference.

international IP, Open Access and Institutional Repositories, Scholarly Publishing

Berlin in Beijing – first impressions

Berlin 8 at the Chinese National Library of Science
Berlin 8 at the Chinese National Library of Science

The week that my colleague Paolo Mangiafico and I spent in Beijing for the Berlin 8 Conference on Open Access flew by, so my first impressions are actually being written after our return, based on notes I made during the conference.  This post is an attempt at a summary of the event, while later posts will address specific points that arose.

Towards the end of the Conference there was a brief debate between some panelists about whether progress on open access is too slow or “adequate.”  Perhaps it is merely indicative of my lack of awareness, but I spent much of the conference being amazed at how deeply the values of the open access movement have penetrated around the world.  As I listened to the debate, I was aware that progress on OA might indeed be called slow in the U.S., but that much of the rest of the world is moving forward quite quickly.

A telling sign of the growing influence of the open access movement was the overflowing venues for the meetings held at the Chinese National Library of Science.  In addition to the large number of Chinese researchers who attended the events, there were presentations by OA advocates from all over the world; I personally had in-depth conversations with librarians and researchers from Germany, Italy, Austria, Greece, Japan and Lebanon, as well as with a law professor working on open access issues in the Netherlands.

China was more than just a venue for this year’s Berlin Conference or even a symbol of the global reach of open access as a principle of scholarly communications, especially in the sciences.  The Conference was itself a significant step toward increasing the openness of scientific research in China, which is the fifth leading nation in its share of the world’s scientific publication.  As this blog post from InTech points out, OA is an important step towards increasing the impact of that high level of research.  In his closing remarks to the Conference, Dr. Zhang Xiaoling of the National Science Library reported on the significant attention that the Berlin 8 event was receiving in the Chinese press and also told us that a summary of the proceedings was being sent to officials in charge of the major research organizations and offices in the PRC.  Holding the Berlin Conference in China this year created an opportunity to make a much faster transition toward open access to scientific publications on the level of national policy then has occurred elsewhere.

The panel on which I participated, on legal issues and business models for open access, was indicative of the desire for detailed advice about how to do OA right that was a constant theme from our hosts.  We frequently heard that the thicket of licensing issues which can arise was a major obstacle for OA, and my own presentation provided, I hope, a framework for considering how to deal with multiple copyright interests.  Much greater detail, and more learned analysis, was provided by Wim van der Stelt of Springer and Lucie Guibault from the University of Amsterdam.

The most important impression that I came away from the Berlin 8 Conference with was about the depth of the conviction within the world-wide research community that open access is a major, and affordable, benefit for scholarship. For example, Wim van der Stelt reported on the SOAP project, a survey of attitudes toward open access among researchers.  The finding that 89% of the almost 40,000 researchers who responded to the survey expressed the opinion that open access would benefit their fields was startling to me.  Even more encouraging was that 62% said they had already published at least one article in an open access (“gold”) journal.  Finally, while 40% expressed the opinion that funding for open access publication was a problem, a larger percentage – 50% – said that OA did not need to cost the author anything.

On this point about costs, Alma Swan of Key Perspectives, Ltd in the UK reported on the economic analysis that she and John Houghton (Victoria University, Australia) have been doing regarding OA.  When the costs of OA are balanced against the savings it creates, including subscription savings, reduced transaction costs, and indirect economies based on saved time and effort for researchers, each scenario that was studied – self-archiving, “overlay” journals, and OA in parallel with subscription journals – showed substantial savings at a national level.  When the analysis is applied to specific universities it was found that all institutions would realize savings from “green” open access, which is self-archiving, while about half would also save money from gold OA.  These studies show the practical and localized value of open access that exists in addition to the large societal value, the dollar value of which is presumably also substantial.

international IP

ACTA and the embrace of big government

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On October 2 the U.S Trade Representative released what has been called the final, or “nearly-final,” text of the draft Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.  ACTA, as it is known, has been the subject of a good deal of controversy for several reasons.  First, because much of its negotiation has been in secret.  Second, because it seems like an end run around both the WIPO / WTO negotiation process for harmonized IP rights protection and around Congress, since it is billed as an “executive agreement” rather than a treaty and therefore does not need Congressional approval.  Finally, rumors have flown that ACTA would force substantive and draconian changes in US law (and the laws of other countries) that would greatly increase the scope of IP protection without legislative action on those topics.

It is clear that this last draft of ACTA is substantially weaker than previous versions that have been released, and a very great deal weaker than what rumor said was contained in the earlier undisclosed drafts.  Nevertheless, I still come away from a reading of this text thinking that its primary purpose is to shift lots of the costs of enforcing IP rights from the private industries that hold those rights to government agencies, funded by taxpayers.  It is odd (or maybe not odd at all) that large corporations, which generally complain about excessive regulation, seem to embrace “big government” when it serves their interests at lower cost (to them).

Because it is a trade agreement not subject to Congressional oversight, ACTA is not, technically, permitted to change US law.  It is billed as an agreement about enforcement of existing laws, not an attempt to enlarge the legal scope of IP rights.  That claim, however, is subject to lots of skepticism. Indeed, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon has asked the Congressional Research Service to study the current iteration of the agreement to see if and where ACTA requires commitments incompatible with US law.

One change that ACTA was rumored to contain – a “three strikes” provision that would require ISPs to disconnect users who were accused (by the content industries) of copyright infringement – is not found in this text.  According to this article from Bloomberg, pressure from Google is the reason we do not have to fight off that particular bad idea.  Nevertheless, there are several places, notably in the border security provisions, where this version of ACTA would appear to allow enforcement of IP regulations without judicial involvement, something that seems like a significant change in the way IP law currently works.  The whole issue of how the “remedies” sections of ACTA might alter the legal landscape for US citizens is detailed in this article on “Areas where the Oct. 2, 2010 ACTA text is inconsistent with U.S. law.”

Another place where this text is not as bad as it could be is on DRM.  The US did not succeed in getting its negotiating partners to agree to DMCA like provisions; no doubt the abject failure of those provisions to prevent piracy, could with their unfortunate impact on legitimate activities like teaching, contributed to this failure.  Nevertheless, legal protection for of some kind for DRM systems is encouraged in this text of ACTA and DRM systems, by definition, extend a content owners control beyond what is provided for in national copyright laws.

There are several definitional problems in this final draft of ACTA.  This post from TechDirt discusses one of them, the definition of “commercial scale,” the breadth of which seems to make lots of essentially private activities into criminal acts.  Also, the concept of piracy, which has usually referred to large-scale commercial infringement, is defined in this text as any copying that is not authorized by the rights holder and which would be infringing under the laws of the country involved.  In both these cases we see the ratcheting up of both rhetoric and actual enforcement to a level where all infringement is potentially criminal.  Thus more enforcement costs can be transferred from private industry to national governments.

It remains unclear how this “final” text of ACTA will be implemented.  Although no additional negotiations are scheduled, there are still significant areas of disagreement that are noted in the text.  One important such area is whether or not the provisions apply only to copyright protected goods or also to patented inventions.  The countries that were party to the negotiations have up to two years to “sign on” to ACTA but, in its current state, it is unclear what such signers would be agreeing to and how they could implement ACTA in the national laws.  Perhaps, after all, this long and expensive process of negotiation will result in nothing more than a bargaining chip for industries to use to move enforcement costs off of their books and on to taxpayers.

Authors' Rights, Scholarly Publishing

Getting picky about the new ACS agreement

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Yesterday I was part of a fascinating discussion between librarians and a faculty member who has just become head of the publications board of her scholarly scientific society.  She was anxious to learn from librarians about how we approaching bundling deals, pricing policies and open access.  Lots of this conversation was really interesting and important for both parties, but the biggest thing I took away from the discussion was the faculty editor’s desire to convince her large commercial publisher to make open access options more available and less costly for her authors.  She understood that open access would benefit those authors and increase the journals’ impact, thus helping to ensure their long-term viability.  She also saw through the publisher’s hype and grasped that they were really trying to inhibit open access with their policies, not facilitate it.

It was in the context of that discussion that I finally got around to reading the new Journal Publishing Agreement from the American Chemical Society.  The hype from ACS is that their new contract “expands author rights and clarifies author responsibilities.”  The reality is that ACS authors will continue to be behind the curve in scholarly communications under this agreement.

I have not compared the old and new agreement closely, so I am prepared to accept that this agreement is an improvement over the old one for authors.  It does outline quite clearly, in some cases, what authors can do with their own work once they cede copyright, gratis, to the ACS.

In this post on the Book of Trogool blog, Beth Brown does a nice job of explaining some of the problems with the new ACS agreement.  I will amplify some of her points here and also add one very picky and lawyerly note.

Most importantly, of course, the new agreement is a complete transfer of copyright to the publisher.  Sometimes authors think they might still hold copyright in earlier versions of their articles, written prior to what they submit.  This is probably incorrect as a legal matter, but the ACS is taking no chances.  The new agreement specifies that ACS will hold the copyright in all versions of a submitted article.  As Brown indicates in her post, and our conversation with our faculty editor also proved, this is moving against the trend in most other sciences and shows why chemists will continue to be disadvantaged by their scholarly society.

Of course, if authors retain sufficient rights to disseminate their work, this problem could be alleviated.  But in all three important ares, this is not the case.

First, for authors using their own work with students, that new JPA encourages use of a link to their “articles on request” service.  If authors use that, their students will have access to 50 free downloads of the article and, after that, will have to pay a per-use charge.  After one year the article on request link will provide free access.  So there is a pretty clear attempt to generate some new income by getting students to pay for articles outside of the publisher’s subscription income stream.  In fairness, however, this is the first listed method of using work with students but not the only one; authors are allowed to post their articles in secure systems for student access.

Next, distribution to colleagues is also limited, this time entirely, to the “articles on request” service described above.  Thus authors essentially get 50 free “offprints.”  After that someone, either the author herself or the colleague with whom she wants to share her work, must pay.  This pay wall is supposed to disappear after 12 months, but by then the window for productive sharing has probably closed.

Lastly, authors’ ability to put their work into an open access repository is severely limited.  It looks at first glance like authors have pretty broad permission to post their submitted version of their article, but there is a condition.  Authors must get written permission from the journal editor that posting of their submitted version does not violate the policies of the particular journal.  So this attempt to be clearer about author rights really hides behind the obscurity of potentially various journal demands.  When we get to posting the published version, this is allowed only if the author is subject to a mandate, either from a funder or the author’s institution.  These mandates can be complied with after a 12 month delay.  If the mandate requires quicker access, the author is told they must pay for open access through the ACS “Author’s Choice” program.

It is interesting that this new policy actually creates an incentive for open access mandates.  I’m not sure its authors were really thinking that one through; they just saw OA as a threat and moved to postpone it for 12 months, to the ultimate detriment, we can be sure, of chemistry authors and researchers.  Another place the JPA authors were not paying close attention — and this is the nitpicking I promised — was in the clause on “supporting information” that accompanies an article, for which, the agreement says, the copyright transfer is non-exclusive.  This is simply poor drafting, since a non-exclusive transfer is essentially an oxymoron.  The agreement goes on to clarify that both the ACS and the author have full rights to exercise copyright in such material, which is more or less a “joint authorship” situation.  I puzzled over this odd clause with another lawyer yesterday, and our conclusion was that the actual effect of this language, if a court had to interpret it, would probably be a transfer of copyright to the ACS and a license back to the author.  But whether that licenses is itself exclusive or non-exclusive and the exact scope of it is unclear.

This new ACS agreement clearly indicates a desire to stave off open access and to control it in a way that does not threaten the traditional thinking in scholarly publishing.  But as our faculty editor indicated yesterday, this traditional thinking is no longer good enough.  In her field, she told us, open access journals are arising that pose serious competition to the more traditional journals that she is responsible for.  She is already afraid that these OA journals will grow in success and that her journals, with their very limited OA options, will suffer.  The same fear ought to grip the ACS.  Sooner or later chemists will find new ways to disseminate their research, just as other scientists have already done, and ACS journals will, without further change, begin to decline.  OA is a proven benefit to scientific research, and this attempt by ACS to grasp and control it so tightly might just backfire.

Open Access topics

OA policies and future directions

As we wrap up our series of blog posts on open access topics — you can see the whole category here — I want to remind readers of three points about open access at Duke and open access in general.

First, the OA policy approved by the Duke faculty last spring was primarily a unanimous vote in favor of open access in principle.  By giving the university a license to make works available in an institutional repository, the policy changes the default for scholarship at Duke to openness.  Still, it was clear from the start of the process that participation in the repository program would depend on how easy the process of getting works into DukeSpace is made.  Implementation, in this regard, is everything; adding extra work for busy faculty is a unpromising way to get buy-in to a new program.  Thus while we hope to unveil a self-deposit portal for faculty during Duke’s OA Week observances, we remain committed to using automated processes (automated, at least, from the faculty perspective) as the primary way to get content into DukeSpace.  We hope many interested parties, especially amongst the Duke faculty, will join us for a discussion of these plans on Tuesday, Oct. 19.

I love the system in place at Harvard, where much of the work of gathering and verifying citations, then clearing rights for deposit, is done by OAFs — Open Access Fellows, who are student employees.  I hope the academic world will soon see lots of OAFs (what a great acronym!) working on many campuses.

Second, the OA policy at Duke is part of a larger and multifaceted commitment to open access.  That commitment ranges from support of national legislation to work on the local repository.  It stretches back over a decade, thanks to the leadership of the Law School that Melanie Dunshee described in our previous posting.  One new development in that long-standing commitment is the announcement made last week of a COPE fund at Duke.  This is a fund designed to help authors pay article processing fees that are changed by some open access journals as a way to replace subscription income.  The COPE movement, with a brief acknowledgment of Duke’s participation, is described in this article from Inside Higher Ed.  That the movement has been slow may be true, but part of the reason for the pace is that the goals of COPE funds are really long-term.  The point is not to subsidize a particular journal or even a particular set of authors.  Rather, the goal is to create a new incentive structure to encourage journals to consider open access business models and to remove barriers that might exist for authors who want to publish in OA journals.

Finally, I want to encourage readers to look back at this site over the next few weeks for news from the Berlin 8 Open Access conference.  My colleague Paolo Mangiafico and I will be traveling to Beijing, the site of the B8 conference this year, with lots of questions about how we can cooperate internationally on open access to scholarship and how our values, goals and methods around OA are similar or different from those in other countries.  We will be reporting what we learn  in this space, with, I hope, pictures.

Copyright Issues and Legislation, Scholarly Publishing

More follies from the permissions market

I have noticed before that a coincidence of events often drives me to focus on a particular topic in my postings.  Last week it was two very different things I read that drew me back to once again consider the inefficiencies of the permissions market for electronic course content.

The first item was an email exchange between our e-reserves staff and Professor Jehanne Gheith, director of the Duke program in International Comparative Studies.  Several readings that Dr. Gheith wanted available for her students exceeded our sense of the parameters of fair use, so we attempted to purchase permission for their use.  After a long delay from the Copyright Clearance Center, permission was denied and library staff informed Dr. Gheith that the readings would have to be shortened, replaced or removed.  Here is Dr. Gheith’s reply, which she gave me permission to quote:

I’m actually taking a lot of these down because of the ungenerous policies of the publishers. In the long run, I think that these policies will do the publishers damage: where students might have later bought the books, they are now angry that they are not allowed to use these selections (this seems particularly crazy to me in the case of the LeFanu book which is out of print and which very few people bought anyway!)

I want to make two points in regard to the Professor’s reaction.  First, the problem may not be a lack of generosity on the part of the publishers, at least in this case.  The books in question were full of artworks and illustrations, and it is possible that the publishers themselves do not hold sufficient rights to license reuse.   But this fact itself is one of the major reasons that academic institutions need a wider berth for fair use if education is not to be hogtied.  If the “thicket” of licenses and assignments results in students not having access to resources for their education, no one is winning.  Certainly artists whose works cannot be taught in classrooms around the country are as much the losers as are students.

Second, of course, is the fact that Dr. Gheith confirms what many of us have feared regarding the pressure from publishers to limit or eliminate fair use for course content in favor of a “pay per use” system.  That system will not work to get content to students or money to publishers.  The permissions system is too inefficient and the prices too high for it to function in the current educational climate.  Professors like Jehanne Gheith will opt to reduce the content available, not because they are willing to settle for less robust pedagogy (after all, she asked students to buy the LeFanu book when it was available), but simply because neither the money nor the time to navigate the serpentine permissions system is available.

If this were not enough to remind me of the sour taste left whenever I have to try to deal with the permissions market, worse news was waiting.  In a footnote to her otherwise encouraging ruling on the summary judgment motions in the publishers’ lawsuit against e-reserves at Georgia State, the judge noted that 50% of the plaintiff’s costs for the litigation were being paid by the Copyright Clearance Center (see fn 2 on page 10 of the ruling).  This means that hundreds of thousands of dollars that our institutions have paid for permission to use works (often written by our own faculty members) for teaching are being used against us to try to limit our pedagogical options or reach deeper into our already depleted budgets.  In spite of its claim that “CCC serves the interests of those who supply content as well as those who use it,” this little footnote should remind us that collective rights societies do not serve the interests of higher education.  The small amount of money that is sometimes returned to a few academic authors is never part of the incentive that motivates them to write.  And the push to get ever more fees, for which it appears the CCC will go to court if necessary, will continue to force more professors to make difficult decisions just like that made by Dr. Gheith.

Open Access topics

The movement for free access to law

By Melanie Dunshee, Assistant Dean for Library Services, Duke Law School

It is amazing to see how quickly the annual Open Access event has evolved from a one-day student event led by Students for Free Culture in 2007 to the global International Open Access Week organized by SPARC.   While the OA movement has its roots in the sciences, open access to legal materials is also a growing movement grounded on principles that open access to legal information promotes justice, transparency in government, and the rule of law.  Projects involving both primary legal materials and interpretative materials, particularly journals of legal scholarship, are growing all over the world.

Primary Legal Materials

Open access for legal materials often focuses on “primary” legal materials, such as legislation, regulations, court opinions, and treaties.  Governments have responded to advocates and interested groups to improve access to some of these materials in recent years, for example GPO’s Federal Digital System.  Open access advocates also argue for the right of non-governmental organizations, particularly non-profit groups, to have access to these materials so that they can develop systems to maximize discovery and distribution, and provide opportunities to use legal materials in new ways and across jurisdictional boundaries. Authentication and preservation of legal materials in electronic formats present critical and complex issues to solve in order that users of the information can rely on it.   Below are just a few examples of projects in this area.

– The World Legal Information Institute is an international leader in this area promoting free access to legal information and, more importantly, creating search and discovery systems to access materials made available by regional and national legal information institutes in a unified system.

– Law.Gov describes itself as “A Proposed Distributed Repository of All Primary Legal Materials of the United States” and has recently conducted workshops around the country to promote its ideas and examine the issues involved.

–Legal Information Institute (LII) housed at Cornell Law School has been providing access to legal information since the early 1990’s . “We are a not-for-profit organization that believes everyone should be able to read and understand the laws that govern them, without cost. We carry out this vision by:  Publishing law online, for free; Creating materials that help people understand law; Exploring new technologies that make it easier for people to find the law.”

–American Association of Law Libraries ELIACC This committee has been working on various projects particularly regarding state legal materials, and is currently drafting a uniform law that would serve as a model for adoption in all states, the Authentication and Preservation of State Electronic Legal Materials Act.

Legal Scholarship

Providing open access to interpretive materials about the law is in many ways similar to other disciplines, with scholarly articles as the predominant form of legal scholarship in the United States.  For instance, many law schools are using repositories to collect and provide open access to law school publications and faculty scholarship, including Duke Law Scholarship Repository launched in 2005.  However, the publication system for journals in law is quite different than other disciplines consisting primarily of student-edited journals published by law schools, making the incentives and barriers for OA somewhat different. You might think that law school published journals would be more likely to adopt OA models, but this has not yet generally been the case.

Duke Law School has been a leader in electronic publication of legal scholarship and active promotion of open access to legal information. In 1998, Duke Law made the full content of articles published in its student-edited journals freely available on the law school’s web site. The journal editorial boards were early adopters of the Open Access Law Journal Principles with a commitment to practices of free, neutral access, and requiring minimal licensing rights so that authors control further dissemination of their works.

The Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship calls for US law schools to stop publishing their journals in print format and to rely instead on electronic publication with a commitment to keep the electronic versions available in stable, open, digital formats. A workshop at Duke Law School exploring issues and best practices for law journals to consider as they move into electronic publishing entitled Implementing the Durham Statement: Best Practices for Open Access Law Journals is scheduled during Open Access Week on October 22.

Open Access topics

Where to be during OA week in the Research Triangle

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From Rick Peterson, Deputy Directory of Duke’s Medical Center Library, comes this calendar of the events held at Duke and at UNC Chapel Hill for Open Access Week 2010:

Tuesday, 10/19 2-3:30pm Duke Breedlove Room, Perkins Library

Open Access at Duke:  Why here, why now?

Learn more about open access and how you can get more reach for your research.  Join colleagues for a short presentation and discussion about the new open access policy and support for it at Duke, and how it will impact you.

Speakers:  Paolo Mangiafico, Tim Pyatt, Kevin L. Smith, James Tuttle

Thursday, 10/21 9-11am Duke  Perkins Library, Room 217

Open Access Publishing

A panel will talk about their experiences with open access publishing and its impact on scholarly communications.

Speakers:  Melanie Dunshee, Duke Law Library; Mohamed Noor, Professor, Department of Biology; Mira Waller, Project Euclid; Bora Zivkovic, Scientific American; and Kim Steinle, Duke University Press.

Friday, 10/22 9:30 a.m. -5 p.m.  Duke Law School, Room 4047 [registration required]

Implementing the Durham Statement:  Best Practices for Open Access Law Journals

Sponsored by the Duke Law School J. Michael Goodson Law Library and the Harvard Law Library:  A Workshop aimed at student law review editors, designed to present and discuss best practices for law journals as increasing numbers move into electronic publishing.  The workshop is also open to law librarians, law review advisors, and all others interested in open access and legal publishing.  It will be webcast and promoted to all ABA-accredited law schools.  For more information and to register, please see the conference Web site: http://www.law.duke.edu/libtech/openaccess/conference2010 Registration is free, but required.

Monday, 10/18 10:30 – 12:00 a.m. in Wilson Library Pleasant’s Family Assembly Room UNC

“Visualizing Copyright: Debunking Open Access and Copyright Myths about Film and Visual Media.”

Monday, 10/18 1-2:30 p.m. in Wilson Library Pleasant’s Family Assembly Room UNC

UNC “Carolina Digital Repository: A collaborative and flexible model for the preservation of scholarly output”

Speakers: Erin O’Meara, Electronic Records Archivist, UNC and Michele Hayslett, Data Services Librarian, UNC

Tuesday 10/19 1-2:30 p.m. in 205 Undergraduate Library, UNC (for Library staff)

ISC webinar and discussion on “Broader Library Involvement in Building Programs—Librarian Training and Development” is part of a series on “Reshaping Scholarly Communications – Strengthening Programs through Collaboration” from the ARL/ACRL Institute for Scholarly Communications.  Join Library colleagues for webinar and discussion. For more information, please visit

http://www.arl.org/sc/institute/iscwebseries/index.shtml

Open Access topics

Why Open Access is important to Duke

By Paolo Mangiafico

In the series of blog posts on open access over the past few weeks, leading up to international Open Access Week in late October, we’ve been writing about a number of different aspects of open access to scholarship, as a kind of introduction for those who may not be familiar with them. But why are we so interested in open access at Duke University? And what are we doing to promote open access here?

The key reason we’re interested in supporting more open access to scholarship is that it helps support the goals and values of universities, and Duke’s goals and values in particular. Duke’s strategic plan says that one of our key goals is to apply knowledge in the service of society. Currently, much of the knowledge produced by Duke faculty is published in venues with limited distribution and often very high subscription rates that preclude access by many who would benefit from reading it. Making the research freely available to anyone with Internet access helps to increase the potential number of readers, and opens up possibilities for more people to make use of and build on the research being done here.

We also expect to see benefits for the researchers themselves and the institution. Every author wants to be read, and hopes their work will be widely read and cited, and will be influential. Logically it makes sense, and there are a growing number of studies that indicate this, that research that is more broadly available is read more often and cited more often. So more openness helps increase the reach and impact of Duke scholarship, which not only helps contribute to the scholarly community and society overall, but also helps raise the profile of Duke scholars and Duke University.

We also recognize that the scholarly communications ecosystem is in transition, based partly on the wide availability of new technologies and partly on the changing methods and workflows of scholars, publishers, libraries, and the broader communities they serve. By supporting open access initiatives locally, we’re also contributing to more systemic changes in the scholarly communications ecosystem that may help it align better with the values of universities as noted above, and may also provide incentives for innovations that could enable new kinds of discoveries as well as help make the costs of supporting the ecosystem more sustainable. We recognize that these are things that Duke alone will not be able to change, but for broad change to happen many different actors will need to move in concert, take some risks, expend some resources, shift some incentives, realign some rewards.

We’re not just supporting open access at Duke, in other words – we’re also supporting the open access movement. At the same time we want to be cautious that any disruptions are not destructive to things that still have value, so the steps we’re taking are carefully considered, developed through discussions and collaborations with key stakeholders at Duke and our partners, and with an eye on the effects of our actions as they play out.

In an interview with opensource.com last spring (from which some of the above text is taken) I expanded on a number of these issues, and refer you to that for more discussion about why open access is important to Duke and to scholarship more broadly.

What are the things we’re doing now to help promote more open access at Duke?

A growing list with details is available at the Open Access at Duke web site but, in brief, here are the key initiatives:

– adoption of a policy that sets the default to open access for all peer-reviewed journal articles published by Duke faculty. Kevin Smith will be writing more about the policy in this space soon, and for now you can learn more from these articles from Duke Today around the time of the policy’s discussion and adoption in spring 2010.

– removing barriers to publication in open access journals by providing financial support to Duke authors through a fund aligned with the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE). More details about Duke’s COPE program are available via this news story from earlier this week about the launch of the fund and from the Duke COPE web site.

– providing open access to legal scholarship via the Duke Law School’s Scholarship Repository, and open access journals, and advocating for new access models via the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship and the work of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain.  An event titled “Implementing the Durham Statement: Best Practices for Open Access Law Journals” is scheduled for Open Access Week.

– support for open access awareness and participation by the Medical School’s library guides to Open Access and  NIH Public Access policy, as well as through their organization of Open Access Week activities.

– making open access the default for theses and dissertations by Duke graduate students, via the Graduate School’s ETD program and the DukeSpace repository.

And in development are a program to support open access journals published by members of the Duke community (using the Open Journal System platform) and explorations of more open educational resources (see the discussions from the spring Center for Instructional Technology Showcase and “edupunk” Jim Groom’s blog post about Duke) as well as broader accessibility to datasets produced in Duke research.

If you’re at Duke, we hope you’ll join us at the Open Access Week events being held on campus (see the sidebar of the Open Access at Duke web site page for details) to learn more and show your support for open access, and if you’re not at Duke, look for OA week events near you, many of which are listed on the Open Access Week site.

Discussions about the changing world of scholarly communications and copyright