The National Institutes of Health has announced the resignation of its Director, Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., from that post effective at the end of October 2008. Zerhouni has been a strong open access advocate (Peter Suber has commented on the potential effect of his resignation on the NIH Public Access Policy.)
For further information, see "Federal Health Official to Step Down," "National Institutes of Health Director Zerhouni Stepping Down," and "NIH Director Departs."
SHERPA/RoMEO has announced the availability of a new list of Publishers with Paid Options for Open Access. The initial version of the list has 414 entries.
SHERPA's RoMEO service has made available "Publishers Allowing the Deposition of Their Published Version/PDF in Institutional Repositories."
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
SHERPA has analysed its records to determine which of the 414 publishers listed allow authors to deposit the publishers' version or publishers' PDF of a journal article into the author's institutional repository. 50 publishers allow immediate, un-embargoed deposit into repositories—even more allow use in restricted circumstances. This means that there is a large volume of work which can be deposited directly into repositories even if the author has not retained their own final draft. . . .
We have separated the publishers into sub-sets, indicating any restrictions that are imposed by the publishers on the use of their versions. The sub-sets are: no restrictions, embargos, fee required and embargo & fee required.
Hindawi Publishing Corporation, which publishes more than 125 open access journals, has launched an Open Access Institutional Membership program that allows institutions to subsidize Hindawi's article processing charges for their authors.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Hindawi's membership program is based on a flat rate payment that covers all accepted articles that are submitted by an author from a member institute during the period of the membership. The cost of the membership depends on the level of research output of the institute and their historical publishing pattern in Hindawi journals. . . .
In addition to the 125+ open access journals that Hindawi currently publishes, this membership will include any journal that is added to Hindawi's collection during the term of the membership.
The University of Tennessee Libraries' "Newfound Press Business Plan, 2008-2011" is available.
Here's an excerpt:
The University of Tennessee Libraries launched its digital imprint, Newfound Press (www.newfoundpress.utk.edu), in 2005 to develop a framework for making peer-reviewed scholarly and specialized works available worldwide. Building on local digitization investments, Newfound Press has published two monographs, with two more in production and a third in the referee process. The Press currently hosts one born-digital journal and is considering a proposal for a second. To experiment with digital multimedia publication, the Press has compiled text, recordings, and ephemera from two scholarly conferences for public access. Through Newfound Press, the University of Tennessee demonstrates an open access publishing model that explores issues such as creating a process for peer review “on the fly,” exploring new channels for the discovery of research results, and establishing credibility as a viable scholarly publications venue.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has released its 2007 annual report, and the "Scholarly Publishing Initiatives" section by Donald J. Waters and Joseph S. Meisel is of particular interest. The complete report is available as a PDF file.
Read more about it at "Mellon Foundation Assesses the State of Scholarly Publishing" (Chronicle of Higher Education subscribers only).
The October issue of Esquire will have an E Ink cover powered by a small battery.
Here's an excerpt from the press release.
Esquire, one of America’s iconic magazines, is turning 75 this year. As part of the celebration of this milestone, the October issue will be the first magazine ever to embed a revolutionary digital technology—electronic paper—into a mass-produced print product.
In partnership with the all-new Ford Flex Crossover and in collaboration with E Ink Corporation, the world's leading supplier of electronic paper display (EPD) technologies, Esquire’s groundbreaking cover will make a profound statement about how the print medium can expand its capabilities while continuing to exploit its own unique strengths. Ford will prominently feature its highly-anticipated Ford Flex on the inside cover, utilizing the same E Ink VizplexTM flexible display technology, in a double-page advertisement.
"This cover is both a breakthrough for magazines and an expression of the theme of our anniversary issue," said David Granger, editor-in-chief, Esquire. "We’ve spent 16 months making this happen as one of the ways we’re demonstrating that the 21st century begins this fall. The entire issue is devoted to exploring the ideas, people and issues that will be the foundation of the 21st century. . . ."
Esquire will distribute 100,000 issues with the special cover on newsstands. They will be available at Borders, Barnes & Noble and select newsstand vendors.
Read more about it at "News Flash From the Cover of Esquire: Paper Magazines Can Be High Tech, Too."
SHERPA's RoMEO service now contains over 400 publisher self-archiving policies.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
The RoMEO service, provided by the award winning SHERPA Partnership, uses a simple colour-code to classify policies and inform authors of what can be done with their articles, and offers users the ability to:
- View summaries of publishers' copyright policies in relation to self-archiving
- View if publisher policies comply with funding regulations, as some publishers are too restrictive and cannot be used to publish funded research
- To search journal and publisher information by Journal Title, Publisher Name and ISSN
RoMEO is seen as an essential resource by many in the Open Access community. RoMEO is funded by JISC and the Wellcome Trust. Journal information is kindly provided by the British Library's Zetoc service hosted by MIMAS
According to a 7/22/08 message by Michael R. Blake on liblicense-l ("American Astronomical Society Subscription Change"), digital distribution will be the default format for the Astrophysical Journal Letters starting in 2009. Customers who want a print version will need to request it. Print will be available at no extra cost in 2009; however, it is anticipated that there will be a charge at some future point.
The latest revision of the American Psychological Association's "Document Deposit Policy and Procedures for APA Journals" permits authors to self-archive final peer-reviewed copies of NIH-funded articles in institutional repositories and on personal Web sites.
Here's an excerpt from the policy:
Authors of manuscripts to be published in APA journals may post a copy of the final peer-reviewed manuscript, as a word processing, PDF, or other type file, on their personal Web site or on their employer's server after the manuscript is accepted for publication. The following conditions would prevail: The posted article must carry an APA copyright notice and include a link to the APA journal home page, and the posted article must include the following statement: "This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.” APA does not provide electronic copies of the APA published version for this purpose, and authors are not permitted to scan in the APA published version.
The revised policy also indicates that the final published article may be deposited by the APA in PubMed Central if required by a funding agency other than the NIH (for NIH-funded research "the final 'Word' version of the author-generated manuscript with all changes based on peer-review editorial feedback and found acceptable by the editor" will be deposited by the APA without charging the author's institution).
Peter Suber has commented on this revised policy in his "New Interim Policy from the APA" posting.
A proposed Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association is developing by-laws.
The latest draft is dated 5/27/08. Gunther Eysenbach, publisher of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, has critiqued it in his "Creating an Organization for Open Access Publishers—But Should We Let Big Publishers Dominate?" posting. David Solomon, co-editor of Medical Education Online, has replied to these concerns in an extensive comment to Eysenbach's posting.
The Texas Digital Library is hosting the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. The first issue is now available.
Articles in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research are freely available in the PDF format, and they are under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
The journal is edited by Jeremiah Spence, a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin's College of Communication.
The Texas Digital Library also hosts the Journal of Digital Information. Articles in the Journal of Digital Information are freely available in the PDF or HTML formats, and authors retain the copyright to them. Supported by the Texas A&M University Libraries, it is edited by Cliff McKnight, Professor of Information Studies at Loughborough University, and Scott Phillips, Research and Development Coordinator at the Texas A&M University Libraries' Digital Initiatives department.
The American Psychological Association is reconsidering its previously announced $2,500-per-article PubMed Central deposit fee. (See the updated Open Access News "APA Will Charge Authors for Green OA" posting.")
Here's an excerpt from the APA's just revised "Document Deposit Policy and Procedures for APA Journals":
A new document deposit policy of the American Psychological Association (APA) requiring a publication fee to deposit manuscripts in PubMed Central based on research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is currently being re-examined and will not be implemented at this time. . . . APA will soon be releasing more detailed information about the complex issues involved in the implementation of the new NIH Public Access Policy.
The Open Access Directory has released a new Wiki page on OA Journal Business Models.
The page currently discusses 11 models, often providing helpful examples:
The American Psychological Association's "Document Deposit Policy and Procedures for APA Journals" outlines its policies and procedures regarding the requirements of the NIH Public Access Policy. It indicates that authors are not to deposit accepted articles in PubMed Central. Rather, the APA will do so, billing the author's institution a $2,500-per-article fee. Upon acceptance, the APA will deposit the author's Word file "with all changes based on peer-review editorial feedback and found acceptable by the editor." The APA will retain the article copyright, and authors are not allowed to deposit the final peer-reviewed manuscript in any other repository. A deposit form must be submitted for each article.
This policy also addresses Wellcome Trust deposit procedures and fees.
The Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University has launched ETC-Press, which will publish books and other works under either the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivativeWorks-NonCommercial or the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.
Here's an excerpt from the About ETC Press page:
We publish books, but we’re also interested in the participatory future of content creation across multiple media. We are an academic, open source, multimedia, publishing imprint affiliated with the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and in partnership with Lulu.com. ETC Press has an affiliation with the Institute for the Future of the Book, sharing in the exploration of the evolution of discourse. ETC Press also has an agreement with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to place ETC Press publications in the ACM Digital Library. . . .
We are looking to develop a range of texts and media that are innovative and insightful. We are interested in creating projects with Sophie, and we will accept submissions and publish work in a variety of media (textual, electronic, digital, etc.).
The National Information Standards Organization and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers have published Recommended Practice Journal Article Versions (JAV): Recommendations of the NISO/ALPSP JAV Technical Working Group.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
The publication is designed to provide a simple, practical way of describing the versions of scholarly journal articles that typically appear online before, during, and after formal journal publication. . . .
"Static, single copies of research papers that are essentially facsimiles of a single, unambiguously identified printed document are a thing of the past," stated Bernard Rous, Deputy Director of Publications at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Co-Chair of the JAV Working Group. "Changes in the way we create, produce, and store articles lead to multiple versions that are often all discovered together through web searches. Our working group addressed the consequent problem: how to identify the versions retrieved and clarify the relationships among them." . . .
Several variables were considered as possible dimensions to identify a particular article version:
- Time: from first draft to latest version
- Added Value: from rough draft to polished publication
- Manifestation/Rendition: different document formats and layouts
- Siblings: multiple mappings between technical reports, conference papers, lectures, journal articles, review articles, etc.
- Stakeholders: author, editor, referee, publisher, librarian, reader, funding organization
Components of the JAV Recommended Practice include a narrative that explains the project background and rationale for recommended terms and definitions, and appendices that cover "Graphical Representation of Journal Article Versions and Relationships with Formal and Grey Literature; Assumptions, Primary Challenges, and Best Practices," use cases, and comments from JAV Review Group on recommendations received on an earlier draft document.
On July 2nd, Nature published "PLoS Stays Afloat with Bulk Publishing," which asserts in its first sentence that PLoS is "relying on bulk, cheap publishing of lower quality papers to subsidize its handful of high-quality flagship journals."
Needless to say, there was swift reaction to the article. Bora Zivkovic, PLoS ONE Online Community Manager, called it a "hatchet-job article" and gathered comments about the article from the blogosphere in his "On the Nature of PLoS. . . ." posting. At the article itself (which is restricted access), readers, PLoS editors, and Nature staff have made a number of comments.
The article makes several main points: (1) 2007 expenditures of $6.68 million were significantly greater than the $2.86 million revenue for that year; (2) PLoS has "four lower-cost journals that are run by volunteer academic editorial teams rather than in-house staff" with author fees ($2,100) nearly as high as for PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine ($2,750); (3) half of PLoS' revenue in 2007 is estimated to have come from PLoS One, which the article says has "a system of 'light' peer-review" because "referees only check for serious methodological flaws, and not the importance of the result"; (4) PLoS One publishes a relatively high volume of papers (1,230 articles in 2007), and it has a relatively low author fee ($1,250; the current fee is $1300); and (5) PLoS has been sustained by $17.3 million in grants since 2002. The article does include several quotes from Peter Jerram, Chief Executive Officer of PLoS, including one in which he says that it is "is on track to be self-sustaining within two years."
In toto, the Nature article seems to suggest that PLoS has intentionally developed an open access journal publishing system that subsidizes a few selective high-quality journals by publishing many more papers in low-quality journals and that relies so heavily on grants it is unclear whether it will collapse without them. Since it contributes so much to the bottom line and publishes so many papers, PLoS One is the poster child for this strategy.
PLoS describes the PLoS One editorial procedures in PLoS ONE Guidelines for Authors. It notes that:
The peer review of each article concentrates on objective and technical concerns to determine whether the research has been sufficiently well conceived, well executed, and well described to justify inclusion in the scientific record. Then, after publication, all papers are opened up for interactive discussions and assessment in which the whole scientific community can be involved.
Unlike many journals which attempt to use the peer review process to determine whether or not an article reaches the level of 'importance' required by a given journal, PLoS ONE uses peer review to determine whether a paper is technically sound and worthy of inclusion in the published scientific record. Once the work is published in PLoS ONE, the broader community is then able to discuss and evaluate the significance of the article.
What the Nature article misses is that the scholarly evaluation of PLoS ONE articles does not end with the initial screening review for compliance with the stated Criteria for Publication. Rather, it begins there. PLoS ONE is using a radically different model of peer review than traditional journals. Whether it is a success or failure is not primarily determined by how many articles it publishes, but by the effectiveness of its post-publication review system in assessing the value of those papers.
If PLoS can reduce costs in what the article terms its "second-tier community journals" by using larger academic editorial staffs, there does not appear to be anything intrinsically wrong with that. To the contrary. The issue is not the editorial strategy, rather it's whether the author fees are unjustifiably high in relation to journal costs and whether the excess profit is being siphoned off to support other publications. Although comparative author fee data is given in the article, there is not enough economic evidence presented in the article to make any informed judgment on the matter.
Regarding grant support, I presume that Jerram understands the issue better than outsiders, and, if he believes that PLos can become self-sustaining in a few years, then there is no reason to doubt it, barring unforeseen circumstances.
Elsevier has made public a letter to librarians stating that it is targeting "a global average list price increase of not more than six percent" for its journals in 2009. It notes that "the 2008 average list price increase across all STM publishers was 8.70% in Europe and 10.10% in the U.S."
Elsevier is taking author publication fees into account for pricing a subset of its journals: "For individual journals, we are realigning prices to reflect a number of factors, including differences in the number of articles made available, quality, and usage, as well as new factors such as Sponsored Articles." (The Sponsored Articles program allows authors publishing articles in over 40 journals to pay a $3,000 fee to make them open access.)
The letter also states that there were over 386 million articles downloaded from ScienceDirect in 2007, with over 460 million downloaded articles being anticipated in 2008.
Inside Higher Ed has published "Digital Daze," in which Scott McLemee reports on the 2008 Association of American University Presses Annual Meeting.
Sue Havlish's (Vanderbilt University Press) comment on University Publishing In A Digital Age seemed to sum up the tone of the meeting regarding new publishing models:
The report's proposal of a comprehensive new publishing platform "is the 800 pound gorilla in the room," she said. "Nobody wants to look at the gorilla because we’re all scared of it. Some librarians think that putting a text in a repository is 'publishing' it. There’s a fear of our role as publishers being subsumed by the libraries. But I still want—and I think most people still want—a book that been edited, that’s been shaped into something and marketed to me by a publisher that I’ve heard of already."
Georgia State University's filing in copyright infringement suit the e-reserves copyright infringement suit brought against key GSU officials by three publishers is now available. It presents eighteen defenses, including sovereign immunity and fair use.
Read more about it at "Georgia State University Strongly Answers Publishers’ E-Reserve Lawsuit."
The Chronicle of Higher Education has published an overview of the 2008 Association of American University Presses Annual Meeting by Jennifer Howard ("Scholarly Publishers Discuss How They're Adapting to Changing Realities"; restricted access).
An interesting revelation from the conference was that the University of Minnesota Press has found that its "sales figures through Amazon were 26 percent greater than its combined sales to libraries." Also, rumor had it that Amazon was pressing university presses hard to move any print-on-demand publishing to its BookSurge service (university presses aren't the only ones affected; Booklocker.com has filed a class action suit against Amazon over its POD distribution policy).
Another interesting disclosure was that, with six exceptions, university presses have embraced Google Book Search.
In another CHE article ("Thunderstorms and Open Access"), Stan Katz of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at Princeton recounted his trip to the conference, and, reacting to a speech by Stevan Harnad, said that "I fear that the obligation to 'publish' by mounting articles on free Web sites will make it impossible for nonprofit presses (such as the university presses I was addressing in Montreal) and learned societies to sustain themselves." Harnad has replied in "Exchange with Stan Katz at Association of American University Press Meeting in Montreal."
It's possible that there was more conference coverage on the AAUP Blog, but we'll never know, since access to that Weblog is restricted to AAUP members.
Prior to print publication, Princeton University Press will release The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do About It as an e-book for the Kindle, Amazon's e-book reader. The press currently sells e-books in the Adobe Acrobat Reader and Microsoft Reader formats.
Yesterday, Indiana University Press announced that it would sell e-books for the Kindle.
Read more about it at "University Presses Start to Sell Via Kindle."
Will Amazon sell $2.5 billion worth of e-books in 2012? Steve Weinstein, Vice President and Senior Research Analyst Interactive Commerce & Media at Pacific Crest, thinks it possible.
Read more about it at "Amazon E-Book Sales to Hit $2.5 Billion in 2012; Will Add $330 Million to Op Income: Analyst."
Blackwell will install Espresso Book Machines in its chain of bookstores, which will allow about a million books to the printed on demand at these locations.
Read more about it at "Blackwell Brews Up Espresso" and The EBM: FAQ.
