2005 News

Highlights of 2005 news affecting scholarly communication, with emphasis on University of California-related news.

December 2005

The U.S. CURES Act is introduced by Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT) that would mandate open access to the bulk of federally-funded medical research. The primary goal of the CURES Act is creation of a new agency within the NIH, the American Center for Cures, whose primary mission would be to translate fundamental research into therapies. Section 499H, of the bill mandates open access to research results funded by the Department of Health and Human Services, including the NIH.
On December 14, the University of California's Academic Council approves five white papers and one policy proposal for Systemwide Academic Senate Review. The papers are the product of the Council's Special Committee on Scholarly Communication (SCSC) and, under the collective title Responding to the Challenges Facing Scholarly Communication, include:
- Evaluation of Publications in Academic Personnel Processes
- The Case of Journal Publishing
- The Case of Scholarly Book Publishing
- Scholarly Societies and Scholarly Communication
- The Case of Scholars' Management of Their Copyright
- Proposal for UC Faculty - Scholarly Work Copyright Rights Policy
On December 14th, Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT) introduces the American Center for CURES Act of 2005 (S.2104). The bi-partisan bill focuses on expediting the development of new therapies and cures for life-threatening diseases and includes a provision that would mandate open public access to most federally-funded medical research.

The Wellcome Trust, one of the largest research funders in the UK, starts implementing its new open-access mandate for Wellcome-funded research.

UC Press announces that its journal authors are free to archive pre-prints and post-prints. As a leading university publisher in the humanities and social sciences the revisions to its core- and partner-journal author agreements create additional flexibility for authors and result in a Green designation for the UC Press in the SHERPA/RoMEO Publisher Copyright and Self-Archiving classification system.

The UK Research Councils (RCUK) announce a draft policy on open access and invite public comment. The Research Councils are the first public funding agencies in any country to require open access to the results of agency-funded research. If implemented the policy takes effect on the October 1, 2005, includes provisions to pay article processing fees in Open Access journals, and, along with the parallel policy from a major UK private funding agency, the Wellcome Trust, makes the UK a leader in establishing open access.

The press reports that the American Chemical Society is calling on Congress to shut down the NIH's PubChem, a freely accessible database that connects chemical information with biomedical research and clinical information, organizing facts in numerous public databases into a unified whole. PubChem is a critical component of the NIH strategic "roadmap" to speed new medical treatments and improve healthcare. More information is available on our "ACS and PubChem" site.
The UC Santa Cruz Academic Senate passes four resolutions on scholarly publishing. They include calls for a specific mechanism to engage faculty support for library content negotiations, exploration of the challenges of academic evaluation, pursuit of a collective copyright to bolster faculty copyright management, and tying immediate scholarly communication issues to the larger question of stewardship of UCSC's scholarly assets.

In the wake of a heavily attended faculty conference on scholarly publishing, UC Berkeley's faculty senate adopt a Scholarly Publishing Statement of Principles. The statement has clauses covering faculty control of their intellectual property, advancement and promotion, incentives to establish and use alternative publishing forms, and support for the library in its efforts to curtail unsustainable pricing structures for scholarly materials.
A number of universities, including Columbia University, the University of Kansas, and the University of North Carolina, adopt resolutions regarding the challenges to scholarly communication. Peter Suber's Lists Related to the Open Access Movement documents all similar resolutions.

Saying that "a failure to respond [to scholarly communication issues] will jeopardize UC's pre-eminence, its contributions to scholarly inquiry and the progress of knowledge, its effectiveness in teaching and learning, and its service to the citizens of California," UC's Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee writes and endorses Resolution I: The University's Role in Fostering Positive Change in Scholarly Communication. Thhe resolution calls upon the university and its faculty to take a number of certain steps to "regain control of and strengthen scholarly communication processes."

The University of California's eScholarship Repository announces its new "postprint" service. UC faculty who have retained the appropriate copyrights or who obtain permission from their publishers can easily deposit previously published articles into this publicly accessible online repository. The postprints are fully searchable, available free of charge, and are persistently maintained in a centrally managed database. The established popularity of the repository, with more than one million full-text downloads of content since 2002, makes it an ideal venue for faculty to reach new audiences of researchers.
The NIH releases the final version of its policy on enhancing public access to archived publications resulting from NIH-funded research. Beginning May 2, 2005, NIH-funded investigators are requested to submit to the NIH National Library of Medicine's (NLM) PubMed Central (PMC) an electronic version of the author's final manuscript upon acceptance for publication, resulting from research supported, in whole or in part, with direct costs1 from NIH.

Leading open access publisher Public Library of Science, announces three new open-acces journals: PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, and PLoS Pathogens. As with all PLoS journals, access is open to the public at no charge while production costs are covered by a mixture of sources including publication fees and institutional memberships. PLoS describes the new publications as "community journals" and is partnering with the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) on the first of these.
A detailed study giving additional evidence for the strong correlation between number of readers and number of citations for journal articles joins the literature on the affect of open access on impact. (Kurtz, et al. The bibliometric properties of article readership information - preprint available at http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~kurtz/jasist2-abstract.html.)