2004 News

Highlights of 2004 news affecting scholarly communication, with emphasis on University of California-related news.

December 2004

• The University of Southampton in the UK commits itself to providing open access to the research output of the university. According to the press release: "The University of Southampton is to make all its academic and scientific research output freely available. A decision by the University to provide core funding for its Institutional Repository establishes it as a central part of its research infrastructure, marking a new era for Open Access to academic research in the UK."

November 2004

• UC forwards its comments on the NIH proposal. Responding to the September 2004 call for public comments, UC Vice Provost for Research Lawrence B. Coleman submits the university's response. Confirming that UC "strongly supports efforts to make the results of federally funded research widely available," the response also provides analysis and perspectives on the opportunities and challenges inherent in the proposed policy.
• The Wellcome Trust announces plans to mandate open access to all Wellcome-funded research. While announcing plans with the U.S. National Library of Medicine to open the "European PubMed Central," leading UK research funder teh Welcome Trust also announces that it will require open access deposit and archiving for journal articles based on research which it funds.
• Google announces the beta release of Google Scholar. The Google Scholar FAQ promises the ability "to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research ... from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web." For each article it indexes the service also displays a count of citations of which it is aware.

October 2004

• Open access journal publisher Public Library of Science launches PLoS Medicine, its second journal.
• SAGE Publications announces that it will allow authors to make available open access postprints without case-by-case requests for permission. Sage thus joins a growing list of like-minded publishers (see, for example, the Sherpa list of publisher copyright policies).

September 2004

• Following the July directive from the House Appropriations Committee, the NIH releases a draft policy of its open access plan for a 60 day period of public comment.

August 2004

• The publisher of the open-access edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) announces that it will include an "institutional membership" automatically with every institutional site license to the journal (the announcement mentions that PNAS is a "break-even operation and relies about equally on author fees and on subscription fees to cover its operating costs"). The memberships gives authors from those institutions a 25% discount on the $1,000 processing fee PNAS charges to publish an accepted article. Under these terms UC is a member and UC authors will recieve the discount. This website maintains a list of UC open access memberships and related discounts.

July 2004

• The U.S. House Appropriations Committee recommends that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) put a condition on its research grants requiring that articles based on NIH-funded research be deposited in PubMed Central (PMC), the NIH's open-access digital repository. The articles would become openly available through PMC within six months after publication in a journal, or, if NIH paid any part of their publication costs, they would become openly available immediately. The related language and associated analysis is available from the August 2004 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Among many others, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports on this and the more far-reaching development from the British House of Commons Science and Technology Committee.
• In the report "Scientific Publications: Free for All?" the British House of Commons Science and Technology Committee calls for a national commitment to open access. Among its 82 recommendations, the report calls on the U.K. government to provide funds for all U.K. universities to launch open-access institutional repositories and recommends that government funding agencies require faculty receiving research grants to deposit copies of their articles in their institutional repositories. It also calls for further experimentation of the "author pays" funding model for publishing open access journals.
• Springer announces its "Open Choice" program, which provides free online access to individual articles at the author's choice. To exercise the option, authors or their funding agencies must pay a processing fee of $3,000 (compared to $500 for BioMEd Central and $1,500 for Public Library of Science fees in their completely open access journals). Receiving the same peer review, production, and indexing as non-open articles, open choice articles will appear in both the print and online editions of the journal. Springer will hold the copyright but will permit authors to put their own versions of the post prints in institutional repositories. Springer declares that it will decrease its journal prices if enough authors take advantage of this option. See the August 2004 SPARC Open Access Newsletter for an analysis of this development.

May 2004

• The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) introduces an open access option for authors. The option, which is to be evaluated after an experimental period, allows authors to pay a $1,000 surcharge to make their articles available for free via PNAS Online and PubMed Central immediately upon publication. In a survey informing the decision, nearly half of the respondents were in favor of an open access option. According to Nicholas R. Cozzarelli, PNAS Editor-in-Chief and Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at UC Berkeley, "PNAS is starting by experimenting with an open access option for authors. It is a compromise between open access for all articles and doing business as usual." See the press release.
• The American Physical Society (APS) announces that it will decrease prices in 2005 on all of its journals. With the announcement, the APS continues its reputation as a model society committed to creating sustainable publications whose revenues support only the publications themselves. A letter from publisher Thomas J. McIlrath provides details on how the price reduction was accomplished.

April 2004

• UC's California Digital Library establishes an Office of Scholarly Communication in response to:
  • the continuing economic crises in scholarly communication and the growing concern about the impacts;
  • the broadening desire to assist scholars in the use of sustainable means of scholarly communication;
  • the need to support the UC libraries as they implement collaborative strategies to address these crises and opportunities.
• The office will house the eScholarship program, supplementing it with broader planning, research, and outreach capacity. The office is led by co-directors Catherine Candee and John Ober and will benefit from extensive collaboration with library staff, faculty, and administrators throughout UC.
• UC joins the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a non-profit open-access publisher committed to "making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource." Membership entitles UC researchers to a 20 percent waiver of the article publication fee for publishing in PLoS journals. See the press release: [PDF]

February 2004

• The University of Connecticut Faculty Senate adopts a resolution that "calls on all faculty, staff, and students of the University of Connecticut to become familiar with the business practices of journals and journal publishers in their specialty. It especially encourages senior tenured faculty to reduce their support of journals or publishers whose practices are inconsistent with the health of scholarly communication by submitting fewer papers to such journals, by refereeing fewer papers submitted to such journals, or by resigning from editorial posts associated with such journals. It encourages them to increase their support of existing journals and publishers whose practices are consistent with the health of scholarly communication." See the resolution: [DOC]

January 2004

• The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy adopts a declaration on access to research data from public funding. Delegates from 34 countries, including the U.S., declare their commitment to work towards the establishment of access regimes for digital research data from public funding in accordance with a set of principles that include openness, transparency, and protection of intellectual property, among others.
• The editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms (published by Reed-Elsevier) that had resigned in December 2003 to protest the journal’s high price launches a new journal this month. The journal, Transactions on Algorithms, is published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).