Important new OA bill in Congress

A new bill has been introduced in both houses of Congress. It is called Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR).
The bill is similar to FRPAA, which was reintroduced in several Congressional sessions but never passed. It would strengthen the NIH public access mandate and extend it to other Federal agencies.

Comments from the bill's sponsors:

"This bill will give the American people greater access to the important scientific research results they’ve paid for,” Congressman Doyle said today.“Supporting greater collaboration among researchers in the sciences will accelerate scientific innovation and discovery, while giving the public a greater return on their scientific investment.”

“The scientific research community benefits when they are able to share important research and cooperate across scientific fields. Likewise, taxpayers should not be required to pay twice for federally-funded research,” said Congressman Yoder. “This legislation is common sense, and promotes more transparency, accountability, and cooperation within the scientific research community."

"Everyday American taxpayer dollars are supporting researchers and scientists hard at work, when this information is shared, it can be used as a building block for future discoveries," said Representative Lofgren.  "Greater public access can accelerate breakthroughs, where  robust collaborative research can lead to faster commercialization and immense benefits for the public and our economy."

Peter Suber analyzes the bill and compares it FRPAA. 
Full text of the bill.

Publisher Attitudes on ETDs and Prior Publication

Doctoral students frequently ask if making their dissertation/thesis open access can result in publishers, book and/or journal, refusing to consider their work for potential publication.  It’s an important question but also one that’s impossible to answer for all publishers. In the vast publishing community there are many different attitudes about prior publication and open access ETDs. Generally, the best advice for doctoral students is to become familiar with publisher policies in their disciplinary areas and inquire of potential publishers about their specific policies.

There are two articles that students might consult to ascertain some publisher views on this topic. The first is Gail McMillan et al. An Investigation of ETDs as Prior Publications: Findings From the 2011 NDLTD Publishers’ Survey (Sept. 2011).  This provides the very useful results of a 2011 survey of journal editors' and university press directors' attitudes toward online theses and dissertations. The data and the open-ended comments from the survey respondents indicate support for open access to ETDs. The second article is by Jane Morris, Scholarly Communication Librarian, Boston College. It’s entitled “Frequently asked: eTDs and Prior Publication” and it appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of the BC Library Newsletter. Jane goes over some of the issues students should be aware of if they are planning to publish a book and/or articles from their thesis or dissertation. She also provides the very useful observation that there are three often-repeated themes in university advice on this ETD and prior publication issue:

•         A book created from a dissertation is usually heavily revised and becomes a quite different work.

•         Publishers in different fields have different views on prior publication, and you should become familiar with the policies in your field.

•         If you are in doubt, select a reasonable embargo period for your dissertation, keeping it in the dark until you have had a chance to negotiate with potential publishers.

Which is More Cost-Effective: Gold OA or Green OA?

In the current issue of D-Lib Magazine John Houghton, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia and Alma Swan, Key Perspectives, Truro, United Kingdom, argue that disseminating scholarship through open access (OA) is clearly more cost-effective than traditional subscription or toll-access publishing. They also consider the relative merits of Gold OA versus Green OA. They conclude: "In an all-OA world, it seems likely that the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA, although Green OA would have a higher benefit/cost ratio. However, we are not in an all-OA world yet, nor anywhere near it. The most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA in the meantime is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at little cost. Moreover, Green OA may well be the most immediate and cost-effective way to support knowledge transfer and enable innovation across the economy."

Their article is entitled "Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on 'Going for Gold'."

New: Open Library of Humanities

From The Chronicle of Higher Education: Project Aims to Bring PLoS-Style Openness to the Humanities

Several recent publishing ventures and platforms, including the Open Humanities Press and Anvil Academic, are investigating how to bring more open-access journals and monographs online. A brand-spanking-new nonprofit organization, called the Open Library of Humanities, aims to create a humanities-and-social-sciences version of the successful Public Library of Science, or PLoS, which in the past decade has established itself as a major presence in open-access, peer-reviewed scientific publishing. Like PLoS, the Open Library of Humanities, or OLH, will be peer-reviewed.

Library Copyright Alliance Comments on Orphan Works

The Library Copyright Alliance, a group of three national library associations representing over 100,000 United States libraries, has filed comments on the Copyright Office notice of inquiry regarding Orphan Works and Mass Digitization.
In the past the LCA has supported legislation on the issue of orphan works -- works whose copyright owner cannot be readily determined or contacted for permission to digitize the work. The new comments take quite a different tack and indicate a new confidence in the strength of fair use:

LCA welcomes this opportunity to comment on the Copyright Office’s October 22, 2012, Notice of Inquiry concerning Orphan Works and Mass Digitization. LCA has a long history of involvement in this issue. It provided extensive comments to the Copyright Office during the course of the Office’s study that led to the Office’s 2006 Orphan Works Report. LCA also actively participated in the negotiations concerning the orphan works legislation introduced in the 109th and the 110th Congresses. Although LCA strongly supported enactment of these bills, significant changes in the copyright landscape over the past seven years convince us that libraries no longer need  legislative reform in order to make appropriate uses of orphan works. (emphasis added)

Open Access to Data for a New, Open Science

In their December 2012 article, "Open Access to data for a new, open science," in European Journal of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine (Europa Medicophysica) E. Giglia and A. Swan discuss the increasing importance that authors provide access to their data in their scholarly publications.

Excerpts: 

The Internet has dramatically changed both the way we do and share research and the way we access and preserve information. 

In a print-on-paper age all you could publish was a summary of a research or experiment, in the form of a scientific article. The web now allows us to make public the whole dataset of raw data which stand behind the research or the experiment: we are in the transition between “scientific articles” and “scientific records”, which contain more. New concepts like “nanopublications” or “enhanced publications” were born; more and more journals such as Nature Genetics require authors to publish data alongside the article; and open databases are more and more common. . . . 

Open data are the pillars of open science, which many scientists have long been campaigning for. This paper is aimed at presenting the benefits of open access to research data, for science itself, for researchers, for citizens, for enterprises, for society as a whole. . . .

Mandated Data Archiving Greatly Improves Access to Research Data

The article "Mandated data archiving greatly improves access to research data" by Tomothy H. Vines et al. in the current issue of The FASEB Journal makes a number of interesting points about the value of mandating.

Abstract:
The data underlying scientific papers should be accessible to researchers both now and in the future, but how best can we ensure that these data are available? Here we examine the effectiveness of four approaches to data archiving: no stated archiving policy, recommending (but not requiring) archiving, and two versions of mandating data deposition at acceptance. We control for differences between data types by trying to obtain data from papers that use a single, widespread population genetic analysis, STRUCTURE. At one extreme, we found that mandated data archiving policies that require the inclusion of a data availability statement in the manuscript improve the odds of finding the data online almost 1000- fold compared to having no policy. However, archiving rates at journals with less stringent policies were only very slightly higher than those with no policy at all. We also assessed the effectiveness of asking for data directly from authors and obtained over half of the requested datasets, albeit with ~8 d delay and some disagreement with authors. Given the long-term benefits of data accessibility to the academic community, we believe that journal-based mandatory data archiving policies and mandatory data availability statements should be more widely adopted