ITK/Open Access Science

Links, sites and information about Open Access publishing.

NIH Policy on Open Access

• http://publicaccess.nih.gov/

Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research

• http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-05-022.html

Memo from NIH director Dr. Zerhouni regarding the adoption of open access policy. February 3 2005.

• http://www.itk.org/Wiki/images/e/ed/NIH_Director_Memo_On_Open_Access_Policy.pdf

• File:NIH Director Memo On Open Access Policy.pdf

Public Library of Science

• http://www.plos.org/

BioMed Central

BioMed Central is one of the pioneers of Open Access publications.

• http://www.biomedcentral.com/

BioMed Central is an independent publishing house

BioMed Central is committed to providing immediate open access to peer-reviewed biomedical research

All original research articles published by BioMed Central are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication. BioMed Central views open access to research as essential in order to ensure the rapid and efficient communication of research findings.

BioMed Central is committed to maintaining high standards through full and stringent peer review

All research articles in BioMed Central's journals receive rapid and thorough peer review. The detailed peer-review policy of each journal is the responsibility of the journal editor(s) concerned. Many journals operate traditional anonymous peer review. Others, including the medical BMC-series titles, operate 'open peer review', in which reviewers are asked to sign their reviews. For these titles, the pre-publication history of each paper (including submitted versions, reviewers' reports and authors' responses) is linked to from the published article.

BioMed Central offers a wide variety of journals and other services

BioMed Central's portfolio of over 130 journals includes general titles such as Journal of Biology alongside specialist journals (e.g. BMC Bioinformatics, Malaria Journal) that focus on particular disciplines . All the research published by BioMed Central's journals is open access, but BioMed Central also provides access to various additional products and services that require a subscription. For example, certain BioMed Central journals such as Genome Biology publish commissioned review content available only to subscribers. Other subscription-only products include the Current Reports series of review journals and Faculty of 1000, a literature evaluation service that covers both biology and medicine. BioMed Central also operates Open Repository, a hosted digital repository solution for institutions.

Directory of Open Access

Open Access Journals

• http://www.doaj.org/

The aim of the Directory of Open Access Journals is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals thereby promoting their increased usage and impact. The Directory aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content.

DOAJ defines open access journals as journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. From the BOAI definition [1] of "open access" we take the right of users to "read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles" as mandatory for a journal to be included in the directory.

Open Access Repositories

• http://www.opendoar.org/

The OpenDOAR service is being developed to support the rapidly emerging movement towards Open Access to research information. This will categorise and list the wide variety of Open Access research archives that have grown up around the world. Such repositories have mushroomed over the last 2 years in response to calls by scholars and researchers worldwide to provide open access to research information.

OpenDOAR is building a comprehensive and authoritative list of institutional and subject-based repositories, as well as archives set up by funding agencies - like the National Institutes for Health in the USA or the Wellcome Trust in the UK and Europe. Users of the service are able to analyse repositories by location, type, the material they hold and other measures. This can be of use both to users wishing to find original research papers and for third-party "service providers", like search engines or alert services, which need easy to use tools for developing tailored search services to suit specific user communities.

Study on the Impact of Open Acccess Journals

• http://www.isinet.com/media/presentrep/essayspdf/openaccesscitations2.pdf

Economic Viability and Business Models

Economics of Open Acccess Journals

Sound mathematical analysis of the variables involved in the economics of publishing

  http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~mm284/OA.pdf

Wellcome Trust

One of the first and now one of the strongest supporters of Open Access.

    http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/

• The Wellcome Trust is an independent charity funding research to improve human and animal health.
• Established in 1936 and with an endowment of around £11 billion, it is the UK's largest non-governmental source of funds for biomedical research.
• As a privately endowed charity, we are independent from governments, from industry and from donors.

The Wellcome Trust have produced the following reports related to Open Access.

An Economic Analysis of Scientific Research Publishing

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of an industry that generates some £22 billion annually

• http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/Publications/Books/Biomedical-science/wtd003181.htm
• http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/@policy_communications/documents/web_document/wtd003182.pdf

Costs and Business Models in Scientific Research Publishing

Costs and Business Models in Scientific Research Publishing

• http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/Publications/Books/Biomedical-science/WTD003185.htm
• http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/@policy_communications/documents/web_document/wtd003184.pdf

Position statement in support of open and unrestricted access to published research

Wellcome Trust position statement in support of open and unrestricted access to published research

http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTD002766.html

The Wellcome Trust therefore supports unrestricted access to the published output of research as a fundamental part of its charitable mission and a public benefit to be encouraged wherever possible.

Specifically, the Wellcome Trust:

   * Expects authors of research papers to maximise the opportunities to make their results available for free and, where possible, to retain their copyright.
   * Will provide grantholders with additional funding to cover the costs of page processing charges levied by publishers who support the open access model.
   * Requires electronic copies of any research papers that have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, and are supported in whole or in part by Wellcome Trust funding, to be deposited into PubMed Central (or UK PubMed Central once established). Note that this requirement will apply to all grants awarded after 1 October 2005, and from 1 October 2006 to all grants regardless of award date.
   * Affirms the principle that it is the intrinsic merit of the work, and not the title of the journal in which an author's work is published, that should be considered in making funding decisions and awarding grants.

Initiative World Wide

Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing

  http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm

The following statements of principle were drafted during a one-day meeting held on April 11, 2003 at the headquarters of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The purpose of this document is to stimulate discussion within the biomedical research community on how to proceed, as rapidly as possible, to the widely held goal of providing open access to the primary scientific literature. Our goal was to agree on significant, concrete steps that all relevant parties —the organizations that foster and support scientific research, the scientists that generate the research results, the publishers who facilitate the peer-review and distribution of results of the research, and the scientists, librarians and other who depend on access to this knowledge— can take to promote the rapid and efficient transition to open access publishing.

Budapest Open Access Initiative

  http://www.soros.org/openaccess/

  http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.

UK Parliament

Science and Technology - Tenth Report

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39902.htm

This Report recommends that all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online. It also recommends that Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way. The Government will need to appoint a central body to oversee the implementation of the repositories; to help with networking; and to ensure compliance with the technical standards needed to provide maximum functionality. Set-up and running costs are relatively low, making institutional repositories a cost-effective way of improving access to scientific publications.

Berlin Declaration

Signed at the Conference on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

  http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html

Follow-up Conference

  http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/

Agreed Recommendation (emphasis added):

In order to implement the Berlin Declaration institutions should:

1. implement a policy to require their researchers to deposit a copy of all their published articles in an open access repository

2. encourage their researchers to publish their research articles in open access journals where a suitable journal exists and provide the support to enable that to happen.

Policy Commitments

• CNRS (France, Centre national de la recherche scientifique) signs the Registry of OA Self-Archiving Policies to register its commitment to implementing the Berlin Declaration.
• Finnish Ministry of Education recommends OA.
• INRIA (the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control) is about to launch an Open Archive dedicated to its scientific publications.
• CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) signs the Registry of OA Self-Archiving Policies to register its commitment to implementing the Berlin Declaration.

Scotland Declaration

‘We believe that the interests of Scotland will be best served by the rapid adoption of open access to scientific and research literature.’

 http://scurl.ac.uk/WG/OATS/declaration.htm

List of Scotish Institutions supporting Open Access

 http://scurl.ac.uk/WG/OATS/institutionalsupport.htm

Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP)

• http://www.ehponline.org/

Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP), the peer-reviewed journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), has announced that it is to adopt an Open Access policy. From January 2004 all research articles and news content in the journal will be available online free of charge. "The rationale behind the open access philosophy - that science best benefits society when it's freely and immediately available to all - is just too compelling to ignore," said Kenneth Olden, Director of NIEHS. "As part of the United States government, we felt it important that we take a leadership role in this area. The web affords us a unique opportunity to enhance scientific discourse that we simply could not ignore.

• Announcement

Heal Central

• http://www.healcentral.org

Interesting Articles and Links

• Nature Open Access debate
• The Scientist, Volume 18, Issue 4, 10, Mar. 1, 2004
• Finland embraces Open Access publishing
• UK Parliament report supporting Open Access

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