In Letter to Congress 41 Nobel Prize Winners Urge Open Access

On 6 November, 2009 forty one Nobel Prize-winning scientists in medicine, physics, and chemistry delivered an open letter to Congress urging open access to federally funded research and requesting support for the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009 (S.1373). Excerpts:

Dear Member of Congress:
As scientists and Nobel Laureates, we write to express our strong support for S. 1373, the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). This bi-partisan legislation, sponsored by Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John Cornyn (R-TX), would enhance access to federally funded, published research articles for scientists, physicians, health care workers, libraries, students, researchers, academic institutions, companies, and patients and consumers.

Broad dissemination of research results is fundamental to the advancement of knowledge. For America to obtain an optimal return on our investment in science, publicly funded research must be shared as broadly as possible. Yet, too often, research results are not available to researchers, scientists, or members of the public. We believe Congress can and must act to ensure that all potential users have free and timely access on the Internet to peer-reviewed federal research findings. This ultimately magnifies the public benefits of research by promoting progress, enhancing economic growth, and improving the public welfare. . . .

The open availability of federally funded research for broad public use in open online archives is a crucial building block in laying a strong national foundation to support accelerated discovery and innovation. It encourages broader participation in the scientific process by providing equitable access to high-quality research results to researchers at higher education institutions of all kinds – from research-intensive universities to community colleges alike. It can empower more members of the public to become engaged in citizen science efforts in areas that pique their imagination. It will equip entrepreneurs and small business owners with the very latest research developments, allowing them to more effectively compete in the development of new technologies and innovations. Open availability of this research will expand the worldwide visibility of the research conducted in the U.S. and increase the impact of our collective investment in research. . . .

The full text of the letter with the names of the forty-one US and foreign Nobel laureates is available here.

University Public-Access Mandates Are Good for Science

David Shulenburger in an article (10 November, 2009) in PLoS Biology argues that universities mandating open access to the scholarly research by their faculty is good for science. His conclusion :

. . . . As a careful observer of scholarly communications, I'm convinced that the public goods aspect of faculty research will ultimately compel public access to it. Public goods have the characteristic that use of them by one individual does not diminish their value to others. In fact, the knowledge presented through scholarship generally becomes more valuable as it is shared more widely and becomes a building block upon which further scientific advances may occur.

Faculty members can accelerate the process. We can persuade colleagues on our own campuses to pass public-access mandates like those at Harvard, MIT, and Kansas. We can speed up what otherwise might be a 20-year process and make it happen in three or four. We can urge Congress to expand the NIH mandate to all federal funding agencies . We can convince the less-enlightened scholarly societies that representing our disciplines means working for public access to scholarship rather than opposing it.

It is impossible to know how much more rapidly scientific progress will occur if all the scholarly literature becomes accessible. What we each know is the frustrations we've experienced in our own research because of access difficulties. It is within the power of the university faculty in this country to remove these roadblocks. Supporting adoption of a public-access deposit mandate on your campus is an effort most worthy of the involvement of dedicated scientists.

A Call for Copyright Rebellion

In Inside Higher Education (10/06/2009) Steve Kolowich reports on the 5th November talk given by Lawrence Lessig at the 2009 Educause Conference. Excerpts:

The manner in which copyright law is being applied to academe in the digital age is destructive to the advancement of human knowledge and culture, and higher education is doing nothing about it.

That is what Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard University law professor and renowned open-access advocate, told a theater of higher ed technologists Thursday at the 2009 Educause Conference here. In his talk, Lessig described how digital and Web technology has exploded the conditions under which copyright law had been written. . . .

Copyright law was originally intended to protect those who create for profit (Lessig used the example of recording artist Britney Spears). But academics also create original works, he said, and they are — or should be — motivated by a desire to advance human knowledge, not line their pockets. Therefore, sealing their work behind copyright barriers does no social good. . . .

Lessig cited several examples of how copyright law in academe has hampered the pursuit of knowledge: neurologists who were unable to aggregate data for a large-scale brain-mapping project due to copyright restrictions; filmmakers who faced staggering costs re-clearing copyrights on images they used in a civil-rights documentary series when they wanted to release it on DVD. He even recounted a recent incident in which he had been using a medical information Web site to try to diagnose his ill daughter, when he noticed a note that said portions of an article he was reading had been redacted under copyright law. . . .

Academics — presumably stakeholders in the effort to advance knowledge — have been uncharacteristically and disturbingly silent on the copyright “insanity” that has befallen the information trade, Lessig said. . . .

The video of Prof. Lessig's lecture is available at http://bit.ly/IyluS (one needs to download Silverlight Player: http://www.microsoft.com/SILVERLIGHT/). Thanks to Mark Caprio for alerting me about the video.

"Bibliotheca Alexandrina: A Digital Revival"

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is undertaking major interesting and important projects. See the article Bibliotheca Alexandrina: A Digital Revival in the Nov/Dec, 2009 issue of EDUCAUSE Review.

Latest SPARC Open Access Newsletter

The November issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter has just been posted.

Cornell University Library Publishes New Digitization Manual

Cornell University Library has just published the book "Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for Digitization for U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums.” From the 29th Oct., 2009 press release:

. . . . Based on a well-received Australian manual written by Emily Hudson and Andrew T. Kenyon of the University of Melbourne, the book has been developed by Cornell University Library’s senior policy advisor Peter B. Hirtle, along with Hudson and Kenyon, to conform to American law and practice.

The development of new digital technologies has led to fundamental changes in the ways that cultural institutions fulfill their public missions of access, preservation, research, and education. Many institutions are developing publicly accessible Web sites that allow users to visit online exhibitions, search collection databases, access images of collection items, and in some cases create their own digital content. Digitization, however, also raises the possibility of copyright infringement. It is imperative that staff in libraries, archives, and museums understand fundamental copyright principles and how institutional procedures can be affected by the law.

“Copyright and Cultural Institutions” was written to assist understanding and compliance with copyright law. It addresses the basics of copyright law and the exclusive rights of the copyright owner, the major exemptions used by cultural heritage institutions, and stresses the importance of “risk assessment” when conducting any digitization project. Case studies on digitizing oral histories and student work are also included. . . .

The work is available for free download at: <http://hdl.handle.net/1813/14142> and <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1495365>. One may also purchase a print copy for $39.95 at https://www.createspace.com/3405063 .

The Depot-- Repository for Those Without an Institutional Repository of their Own

International researchers at institutions lacking open access repositories can now use The Depot service to preserve open access to their scholarly papers, articles, and book chapters (e-prints). As part of the deposition process, researchers are alerted to the availability of local, more appropriate repositories, if they exist, by Depot's re-direct service, Repository Junction. As new, relevant repositories are created, Repository Junction will support the transfer of previously-deposited materials to the new repository. Created with initial funding by JISC, a major force in advancing open access data in the UK and worldwide, and hosted by EDINA, the JISC national academic data center based at the University of Edinburgh, The Depot was initially launched in 2007, and has now been re-launched in celebration of Open Access Week (Oct. 19 - 23, 2009). The Depot is OAI-compliant, allowing deposited e-prints to be 'harvested' by search engines, and other repositories, across the world. (Boston College researchers can use eScholarship@BC for open access deposition of their materials.)