California passes bills to create open-source digital library for college textbooks

On 31 August, 2012, reports Jennifer Van Grove, the California State Senate passed bills that aim to provide students with free access to college textbooks. After Governor Jerry Brown signs them the bills will become law.

The state of California is on the verge of enacting legislation that would make college educations a bit more affordable for students and their parents.

The California State Senate today passed two bills, SB 1052 and SB 1053, designed to provide students at public postsecondary institutions with access to free digital textbooks for popular lower-division courses and to open source the curriculum to facility members.

The bills are said to create the nation’s first free open source digital library for college students and faculty. California Governor Jerry Brown’s signature is required before the bills are enacted into law.

“This is the first time government has come in with substantial dollars that match philanthropic efforts to create a library where students can access free textbooks and faculty can utilize their skills to remix, revise and repurpose these textbooks for their students,” said Dean Florez in a statement. Florez is president of the 20 Million Minds foundation, a nonprofit that works to reduce textbook costs for students.

Digital textbooks have been around for years, with companies ranging from Apple to Chegg providing students with digital alternatives to their hard-bound books. Under SB 1052, California, however, would establish a faculty-run council called the California Open Education Resources Council (COERC) to select and develop the free digital textbooks for students at state universities and community colleges. Companion bill SB 1053 would create an open source library to house the digital textbooks.

The 1052 bill passed the California Senate with 32-3, according to the state legislator’s website. The 1053 companion bill passed by the same margin.

A Push Grows Abroad for Open Access to Publicly Financed Research

Jennifer Howard in a 13 August article in the Chronicle of Higher Education reviews some recent US and international developments in the Open Access movement. Though mentioning some criticism of the British Government's endorsement of most of the recommendations of the June Finch Report, notably by Peter Suber, she is quite sanguine about the future of Open Access:

We're seeing heightened awareness at every level of the scholarly communication ecosystem, from governments on down to researchers and private entrepreneurs. . . . The process of sorting out all the[se] experiments will continue to be messy, and we'll see a lot more fights over the details. At this point, though, it looks to me like the betting money's not on whether open access becomes the norm, but when.

UK plan for open access to research is a golden opportunity, not a cost

Stephen Curry recently wrote in the Guardian about the Finch Report on open access to publicly funded research and how such OA will be implemented by the UK Research Councils (RCUK). He considers some of the very broad range of reactions, from the very positive to the distinctly negative. Curry himself, clearly thinking OA to be a benefit, tends to a more positive stance.

Extracts

. . . . this business is still playing out. If the research community can act in concert, there is scope for using open access to ensure that the taxpayer gets better value for money from its research spend on publishing. This is new territory, but with control of the funds, research institutions should seize this opportunity to push for open access at the cheapest possible price.

I would not wish to diminish the difficulties faced by UK research institutions in the shift to open access, but it is time for them to be as bold as the government. They can start by breaking their addiction to top-tier journals, which are likely to charge the highest APCs because publishers know that researchers and university managers continue to mis-apply journal reputations (quantified as impact factors) as a measure of the quality of individual researchers or their work. . . .
Arguably, the government's courageous stance on this issue serves national interest by marking the UK as a visionary place to do research. We are now seen as a leading voice in international moves towards open access. The UK may be taking a risk in jumping first but, given recent moves in the US and elsewhere in Europe, the chances of success look good.

Brought to Book: Academic Journals Face a Radical Shake-Up

The Economist, a journal that often takes a more conservative stance, has published an article, "Brought to book: Academic journals face a radical shake-up", that strongly advocates Open Access to scientific publishing.


Extracts:

If there is any endeavour whose fruits should be freely available, that endeavour is surely publicly financed science. Morally, taxpayers who wish to should be able to read about it without further expense. And science advances through cross-fertilisation between projects. Barriers to that exchange slow it down.

There is a widespread feeling that the journal publishers who have mediated this exchange for the past century or more are becoming an impediment to it. One of the latest converts is the British government. On July 16th it announced that, from 2013, the results of taxpayer-financed research would be available, free and online, for anyone to read and redistribute.

Britain’s government is not alone. On July 17th the European Union followed suit. It proposes making research paid for by its next scientific-spending round—which runs from 2014 to 2020, and will hand out about €80 billion, or $100 billion, in grants—similarly easy to get hold of. In America, the National Institutes of Health (NIH, the single-biggest source of civil research funds in the world) has required open-access publishing since 2008. And the Wellcome Trust, a British foundation that is the world’s second-biggest charitable source of scientific money, after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, also insists that those who take its shilling make their work available free.

Criticism of journal publishers usually boils down to two things. One is that their processes take months, when the internet could allow them to take days. The other is that because each paper is like a mini-monopoly, which workers in the field have to read if they are to advance their own research, there is no incentive to keep the price down. The publishers thus have scientists—or, more accurately, their universities, which pay the subscriptions—in an armlock. That, combined with the fact that the raw material (manuscripts of papers) is free, leads to generous returns. In 2011 Elsevier, a large Dutch publisher, made a profit of £768m on revenues of £2.06 billion—a margin of 37%. Indeed, Elsevier’s profits are thought so egregious by many people that 12,000 researchers have signed up to a boycott of the company’s journals. . . .

A revolution, then, has begun. Technology permits it; researchers and politicians want it. If scientific publishers are not trembling in their boots, they should be.

UK to open up publicly funded research

The UK and the OA advocacy community around the world have been in an uproar for several weeks over the Finch Report. It is still difficult to sort out what it all means, but it is clear that, in whatever form and with whatever funding, OA for publicly funded research is becoming inevitable in the UK.

 This post from the department of Business Innovation and Skills sheds some light on the plan -- links at the bottom of the post lead to the Finch Report and other commentary.

Academics, businesses and the public will get easier access to publicly funded research, Universities and Science Minister David Willetts will announce today.

The Government will widely accept the recommendations in a report on open access by Dame Janet Finch, a move which is likely to see a major increase in the number of taxpayer funded research papers freely available to the public.
Currently most formally published research is only available behind restricted paywalls. Reforms will see publications opened up to a greater audience, providing more opportunities for research and development across a range of sectors. They will also support the commercial exploitation of research, contributing to the Government’s economic growth agenda.
Universities and Science Minister David Willetts said: “Removing paywalls that surround taxpayer funded research will have real economic and social benefits. It will allow academics and businesses to develop and commercialise their research more easily and herald a new era of academic discovery. This development will provide exciting new opportunities and keep the UK at the forefront of global research to drive innovation and growth.”

Among the recommendations that have been accepted by the Government are:
Moving to deliver open access through a ‘gold’ model, where article processing charges are paid upfront to cover the cost of publication.

The Accessibility Quotient: A New Measure of Open Access

Mathew A. Willmott, Katharine H. Dunn, and Ellen Finnie Duranceau (all from Massachusetts Institute of Technology) have just published "The Accessibility Quotient: A New Measure of Open Access" in Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. They discuss the potentially very useful results of an examination of a measure that assessed the accessibility to publications by MIT faculty.

Abstract:

INTRODUCTION The Accessibility Quotient (AQ), a new measure for assisting authors and librarians in assessing and characterizing the degree of accessibility for a group of papers, is proposed and described. The AQ offers a concise measure that assesses the accessibility of peer-reviewed research produced by an individual or group, by incorporating data on open availability to readers worldwide, the degree of financial barrier to access, and journal quality. The paper reports on the context for developing this measure, how the AQ is calculated, how it can be used in faculty outreach, and why it is a useful lens to use in assessing progress towards more open access to research. METHODS Journal articles published in 2009 and 2010 by faculty members from one department in each of MIT’s five schools were examined. The AQ was calculated using economist Ted Bergstrom’s Relative Price Index to assess affordability and quality, and data from SHERPA/RoMEO to assess the right to share the peer-reviewed version of an article. RESULTS The results show that 2009 and 2010 publications by the Media Lab and Physics have the potential to be more open than those of Sloan (Management), Mechanical Engineering, and Linguistics & Philosophy. DISCUSSION Appropriate interpretation and applications of the AQ are discussed and some limitations of the measure are examined, with suggestions for future studies which may improve the accuracy and relevance of the AQ. CONCLUSION The AQ offers a concise assessment of accessibility for authors, departments, disciplines, or universities who wish to characterize or understand the degree of access to their research output, capturing additional dimensions of accessibility that matter to faculty.

David Nicholas, Ian Rowlands, Anthony Watkinson, David Brown and Hamid Jamali have published "Digital repositories ten years on: what do scientific researchers think of them and how do they use them?" in Learned Publishing (July 2012, Vol. 25: 195-206).

Abstract:

Digital repositories have been with us for more than a decade, and despite the considerable media and conference attention they engender, we know very little about their use by academics. This paper sets out to address this by reporting on how well they are used, what they are used for, what researchers’ think of them, and where they thought they were going. Nearly 1,700 scientific researchers, mostly physical scientists, responded to an international survey of digital repositories, making it the largest survey of its kind. High deposit rates were found and mandates appear to be working, especially with younger researchers. Repositories have made significant inroads in terms of impact and use despite, in the case of institutional repositories, the very limited resources deployed. Subject repositories, like arXiv and PubMed Central, have certainly come of age but institutional repositories probably have not come of age yet although there are drivers in place which, in theory anyway, are moving them towards early adulthood.