The Crisis in Scholarly Communication

Links to further information

Open Access News and Background
  1. Association of College and Research Libraries Scholarly Communication Toolkit
    http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlissues/scholarlycomm/scholarlycommunicationtoolkit/toolkit.htm
    The single best introduction to the crisis in scholarly communication. Serves as a comprehensive introduction to all of the relevant issues, with separate sections addressing specific concerns of university faculty, administrators, and librarians. The toolkit aims to give each of these groups the information they need to advocate fundamental change in the current system of scholarly publishing. The explanations are clear and the links to further reading are invaluable.
     
  2. Create Change
    http://www.createchange.org
    Another excellent introduction to the crisis in scholarly communications. Gives concise, clear, accurate overviews of the major issues and events, as well as links to further resources. Sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and SPARC.


  3. Guide to the Open Access Movement, by Peter Suber
    http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/guide.htm
    An extremely comprehensive encyclopedia of terms and jargon associated with the open access movement and the crisis in scholarly publishing. Want to know what metadata means? Wonder what the Digital Libraries Initiative is? Don’t know what a cite-base search is? These and hundreds of other terms are concisely defined, with links to relevant information elsewhere on the web.


  4. Open Access News Blog, by Peter Suber
    http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
    Absolutely indispensable source of news on the open access movement, updated daily with an endless river of extraordinarily valuable information. All the news from every conceivable angle is here in one convenient location. Do not miss it.


  5. Cites and Insights: Crawford at Large
    http://citesandinsights.info
    Newsletter maintained by Walt Crawford of Research Libraries Group, Inc., a non-profit organization helping universities, libraries, and archives cooperate on information technology initiatives. Crawford’s newsletter supplies an extraordinary, detailed examination of information technology issues affecting libraries and researchers. Much of it is devoted to the scholarly publishing crisis and the open access movement.  Along with Peter Suber’s Open Access News Blog, cited above, Cites and Insights is the best source for current news from the world of scholarly communication.


  6. American Scientist Eprint forum
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/
    Web archive of a bulletin board discussion on open access issues, sponsored by the magazine American Scientist. This is a good place to find out what kinds of arguments people are making about issues related to open access. For example, what are the pros and cons of the economic viability of an open access business model? You can find people arguing both sides of the issue here.


  7. Issues in Scholarly Communication: Open Access (Association of Research Libraries)
    http://www.arl.org/scomm/open_access/
    A good basic overview of the open access movement and the conditions that gave rise to it. Also a useful collection of links to further information and to the movement’s major players.


  8. Reshaping Scholarly Communication (U.C. Library system)
    http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/scholarly/
    The University of California libraries have put together this fine overview of the scholarly publishing crisis and possible responses. Emphasizes how the crisis has affected UC campuses in particular, but still a useful case study of how a large academic institution is trying to encourage new, more sustainable publishing models.


  9. ARL Newsletter archives (Association of Research Libraries)
    http://www.arl.org/newsltr/osc.html
    Extremely useful collection of articles on various aspects of the scholarly publishing crisis. The articles are good introductions to both the problems and their solutions. Each article is well researched and covers its topic in detail, allowing the reader to develop a much greater understanding of the topic in question. One important article found in this collection is Clifford A. Lynch, “Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age,” found at http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html. This piece provides an excellent introduction to institutional depositories, describing what they are and problems that can be encountered in implementing them. Also of note is Peter Suber’s valuable summation of recent trends in the open access movement, “Open Access Builds Momentum,” at http://www.arl.org/newsltr/232/openaccess.html.


  10. Information Access Alliance
    http://www.informationaccess.org
    A joint project of several library professional associations, this organization works to raise awareness regarding the impact of economic trends on scholarly communication. They produce research showing how corporate consolidation in the publishing industry is contributing to escalating prices for scientific, technical, and medical journals. Papers on the site argue for increased oversight by state and federal antitrust enforcement agencies as a solution. Of special note on this topic is “Publisher Mergers: A Consumer-Based Approach to Antitrust Analysis.” (Information Access Alliance), available at http://www.informationaccess.org/whitepaperv2final.pdf. This report is superbly researched and documented, offering an excellent place to start in understanding the effect of mergers on scholarly publishing.


  11. Open Access Trade Page
    http://www.geocities.com/sxm418/oa.htm
    A massive collection of links to print and electronic resources concerned with open access issues. The site separates resources into many different categories, including databases, newsletters, blogs, organizations, individual home pages, etc.


  12. Wikipedia entry on “Open Access Publishing.”
     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_publishing
    A good overview of the basic tenets of open access, with lots of links to other Wikipedia entries explaining more specific sub-topics.


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Scholarly Communication Initiatives and Support Groups
  1. SPARC – Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
    http://www.arl.org/sparc
    Organization founded by the Association of Research Libraries to provide technological and financial support to alternative academic publishing models, as well as to raise public awareness of dysfunctions in the scholarly publishing industry. SPARC counts almost 300 research institutions and libraries among its members. Publishers who receive financial or technical aid from SPARC develop new methods of scholarly communication that make information widely available at the lowest possible price. SPARC’s web site is an especially useful source of detailed model business plans and “how to” guides for anyone wishing to pursue alternative publishing ventures such as open access journals or institutional repositories.

  2. Budapest Open Access Initiative (Open Society Institute)
    http://www.soros.org/openaccess
    An initiative of the Open Society Institute, founded by philanthropist George Soros. The BOAI, like SPARC, provides financial and technical assistance to organizations that want to start open access journals or open access archives (such as institutional or discipline-based repositories). The web site contains a number of useful, detailed documents on how to start such ventures. It also allows organizations and individuals to formally sign a declaration calling on governments, educational institutions, and publishers to support the open access movement.

  3. Open Archives Initiative
    http://www.openarchives.org
    An effort supported by numerous organizations, including the National Science Foundation, the Digital Library Federation, the Library of Congress, and a number of universities. OAI’s goal is to create uniform technical standards allowing easy electronic searching of electronic scholarly literature stored in open access depositories. The end result will be to convert the world’s electronic open access archives into a vast, universal, searchable database. The OAI web site contains extensive, highly technical information about the informatics and networking issues involved in this undertaking.

  4. Berlin Declaration on Open Access
    http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html
    Statement by the Max Planck Society and several other major European research organizations pledging support for the open access movement. Under this agreement, all major French and German universities and research institutions (together with a number in Hungary, Italy, and Norway) will encourage scholars to make their work available in open access venues. For example, they pledge to reform tenure and promotion processes to provide greater incentives for open access publishing. Web site specifies the signatories to the agreement, as well as details of the steps they intend to take.

  5. Eprints.org
    http://www.eprints.org/
    Organization funded by NSF, the Higher Education Funding Councils, and other bodies to support electronic open archiving projects. It offers a software package that, like DSpace, implements institutional repositories. This software, known as GNU Eprints, adheres to the protocols of the Open Archives Initiative. Other Eprints.org projects seek to create navigational tools and bibliographic aids for open access archives.

  6. Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing
    http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm
    Text of an April 2003 statement from a group of prominent biomedical researchers, publishers, and librarians calling for a rapid transition to open access models in scientific communication. The individuals issued the statement on behalf of themselves only. However, they have pledged to work for official endorsements from the major funding agencies, research institutions, and scientific societies around the world.

  7. Creative Commons
    http://www.creativecommons.org
    Nonprofit corporation founded by advocates of less restrictive intellectual property laws, including Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig. Creative Commons offers creative artists a variety of copyright licenses that allow them to specify the conditions under which their work may be used for free. The aim is to create a more flexible system than current practice, in which copyright restrictions are assumed to ban any use of a creative work without the explicit prior consent of the author. The organization isn’t directly involved in Open Access issues, but its web site is a good place to learn about copyright issues and innovations. In January 2005, Creative Commons launched a project to apply its principles specifically to scientific publishing. Known as Science Commons, this project is described at http://science.creativecommons.org/.

  8. Medical Library Association Scholarly Publishing Resources
    http://www.mlanet.org/resources/publish/pub_resources.html
    Useful collection of links on open access, electronic licensing, and copyright issues as they relate specifically to academic publishing in the health sciences.

  9. Wellcome Trust Position Statement In Support of Open Access Publishing
    http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTD002766.html
    Pro-Open Access declaration by one of the leading private funding organizations for biomedical research in the United Kingdom. The page cited here links to two thorough economic analyses of the crisis in scholarly communication. They illustrate how market strategies of commercial publishers led to the crisis. They also present evidence that Open Access publishing can be, and is, an economically viable alternative to subscription based business models.

  10. UK House of Commons Committee on Science and Technology, Tenth Report, July 2004
    http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39902.htm
    Report by a committee of the British Parliament recommending that the UK government support the Open Access model of scholarly publishing. The government of Prime Minister Tony Blair declined to endorse the report.

  11. National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy
    http://www.nih.gov/about/publicaccess/index.htm
    As of May 2, 2005, the National Institutes of Health have adopted a new policy on access to NIH-funded research. NIH background information on the policy can be found at the above link. This policy requests that all recipients of NIH research funding to make any journal articles based on that research available free of charge to the public within twelve months of publication. NIH failed to issue a proposal, favored by some in Congress that would require – as opposed to request – free access.

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Information Industry Responses to Open Access

As the Open Access philosophy draws increasing support from researchers, administrators, and librarians around the world, publishers and other information or media providers have begun to respond. They have either provided critiques of the Open Access movement, or launched initiatives intended to address issues that the movement has raised. The following links provide examples of some of these responses.

  1. Scirus
    http://www.scirus.com
    Billed as “the web search engine dedicated to science,” provided by academic publishing giant Reed-Elsevier. Locates both print and electronic sources, with filters designed to eliminate non-scientific material. Some of the electronic sources are Open Access, such as PubMed Central and arXiv.org. Other sources are from subscription-based services like Elsevier’s Science Direct. Access to the search engine is free of charge. It covers mainly scientific, technical, and medical disciplines, with minimal coverage of the social sciences and humanities.


  2. Google Scholar
    http://scholar.google.com
    This specialized sub-domain of the famed internet search engine indexes millions of scholarly journals and web sites. As with Elsevier’s Scirus, the indexing is comprehensive in scope, immense in quantity, and free of charge. Unlike Scirus, Google Scholar goes beyond scientific, technical, and medical fields to include sources in the humanities and social sciences. The sources located by a search include both fee for access journals and cost-free sources, such as Open Access journals, self-archiving repositories, and general access web sites. Bear in mind that Google Scholar is up to a year behind in its indexing of Medline citations. Thus, it is not currently a reliable tool for searches of the biomedical literature. See http://www.workingfaster.com/sitelines/archives/2005_02.html#000282. On a separate note, Google recently announced plans to fully digitize print collections of several major academic libraries over the next several years. For more information on this initiative, see http://books.google.com/googleprint/library.html.


  3. Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science
    http://www.dcprinciples.org/
    Statement by a coalition of non-profit academic publishers calling for the widest possible access, free of charge, to scientific information. The nonprofit publishers behind the Washington DC Principles distinguish themselves from the Open Access movement, favoring a traditional subscription-based publishing model rather than the author fees characteristic of Open Access (OA) journals. In support of this stance, the nonprofits argue that the revenue they derive from journal subscriptions helps them stage conferences and provide grants scientists. OA, by moving away from subscriptions, might threaten their main revenue source. Nevertheless, SPARC and other Open Access groups have praised the Washington DC Principles as an important contribution to the principle of broader access to scientific publications. See, for example: https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/613.html.


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  4. Elsevier Open Access Self-Archiving Policy
    http://authors.elsevier.com/
    The largest scientific publishing company, Elsevier, now allows authors to post the final peer-reviewed version of an article on their personal or institutional web site. Elsevier retains copyright to the article. Full information can be found at the company’s guidelines for authors, linked above.


  5. Nature Self-Archiving Policy
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4311.html
    The Nature Publishing Group recently announced what appeared to be a policy of allowing authors to self-archive their articles at institutional repositories or subject archives. The above link, from a discussion forum on Open Access issues, describes the policy and uncertainty about whether it truly constitutes a contribution to Open Access in scholarly communication.


  6. patientINFORM
    http://www.patientinform.org 
    A free online guide to understanding and interpreting research in the health sciences, aimed exclusively at the layperson. Includes FAQs on how to understand medical terminology and the scientific method, as well as summaries of research articles in plain English. The premise behind patientINFORM is that the typical healthcare consumer often lacks the training and background to make sense of peer-reviewed research such as that contained in major journals like JAMA or the New England Journal of Medicine. Universal access to such journals, free of charge, is a central goal of the Open Access movement. A number of traditional publishers who question Open Access publishing have backed patientINFORM. Some Open Access proponents see this move as an effort to address OA concerns without endorsing OA itself.

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Open Access Journal Publishers
  1. Directory of Open Access Journals
    http://www.doaj.org/
    Not a publisher per se, but a portal leading to the web sites of more than 1100 open access journals. Every academic subject area is represented, from agricultural science to engineering to literature, philosophy, and history. Scholars looking for an open access venue in which to publish their research can find a wide range of options here. The listed journals use varying types of editorial systems, not all of which constitute “peer review” in the hard-sciences sense of that phrase.  Currently, users can search article content by key word for about 270 of the journals indexed.

  2. Biomed Central
    http://www.biomedcentral.com
    Biomed Central (BMC) is a for-profit publisher of biomedical research journals, based in the UK. The BMC business model envisions making a profit while still making all peer reviewed research articles available free of charge to anyone with access to the Internet. The company currently publishes more than 55 journals. The University of New Mexico is a sponsoring institution of BMC.

  3. Public Library of Science (PLoS)
    http://www.plos.org
    A non-profit organization founded by Harold Varmus, former head of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, along with other prominent science and information professionals. PLos is dedicated to demonstrating the viability of open access business models by publishing open access scientific journals. PLoS Biology, the organization’s first journal, is intended to offer cutting-edge, peer reviewed research articles on a par with those found in Science, Nature, and Cell. The launching of PLoS Biology in October 2003 garnered worldwide media coverage.


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Institutional Repositories
  1. DSpaceUNM
    https://repository.unm.edu/ 
    The official institutional repository for the University of New Mexico. ”DSpace” is the name for an open source software package developed to allow universities to create open access institutional repositories. Originally developed at MIT, DSpace allows UNM faculty and staff to deposit their research, educational, and creative works in digital form for worldwide use and dissemination. The repository is still in its formative stages and is expected to grow with the passage of time.
     
  2. DSpace at MIT
    http://www.dspace.org/
    ”DSpace” is the name for an open source software package developed to allow universities to create open access institutional repositories. DSpace adheres to the protocols of the Open Archives Initiative. MIT developed this software and is now using it to build what is intended to be an electronic archive of all scholarly output by MIT researchers and faculty. The DSpace website links to information about the software, how to download it, its implementation, and how MIT is using DSpace for its own institutional repository.


  3. Institutional Archives Registry
    http://archives.eprints.org/ 
    Comprehensive guide to most of the major institutional repositories in existence. More useful as a list of links to browse than as a search engine, but it does give a good idea of the pace at which organizations are creating these repositories. Created and run by Tim Brody at the University of Southampton, UK.

  4. Ohio State University Knowledge Bank
    https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/
    Preliminary version of Ohio State’s online institutional repository. Offers much detailed information on factors to be considered in such an effort, including planning, funding, organization, and so on. Also provides access to a pilot version of an institutional repository based implemented via DSpace.

  5. University of California eScholarship Repository
    http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/
    An electronic institutional repository serving the entire University of California system, sponsored b y the California Digital Library. U.C.’s project uses the Open Archives Initiative metadata protocol.

  6. Australian National University Eprints Repository
    http://eprints.anu.edu.au/
    Institutional repository built using the Eprints.org open source software package. Contains a monumentally gigantic list of links to institutional repositories and subject archives at http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/viewcolls.html. Complies with protocols of the Open Archives Initiative.

  7. SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access)
    http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/
    A joint project of a number of major universities in the United Kingdom to create OAI-compliant institutional repositories at each of them. Contains useful documents on the technical and organizational aspects of such a project, including long term preservation of digital information.

  8. OAI Registered Service Providers
    http://www.openarchives.org/service/listproviders.html 
    A listing of online resources that allow searching of institutional repositories and subject archives or provide lists of open access archives. Provided by the Open Archives Initiative, indexed above. This is a good source for finding out what kinds of open access archives are available and what kinds of material are stored there. One of the resources listed here is especially good: a search engine called OAIster, available from the University of Michigan. OAIster is a search engine that indexes several hundred institutional repositories and other online, open access data sources.

  9. SPARC Institutional Repositories Resources
    http://www.arl.org/sparc/repos/index.html
    Extremely useful collection of resources on what institutional repositories are and how to create them, provided by a leading Open Access advocacy organization (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). Includes a collection of links to major institutional repositories around the world, as well as to major sources of repository software like DSpace, GNU Eprints, and OCLC.

  10. Core Meta-List of Open Access Eprint Archives
    http://opcit.eprints.org/explorearchives.shtml
    Extensive list of both institutional repositories and open access subject archives around the world.


  11. EDUCAUSE Resource Page on Institutional Repositories
    http://www.educause.edu/Browse/645?PARENT_ID=671
    Excellent collection of links to documents on the theory and practice of institutional repositories. Particularly useful for articles on how to overcome problems typically encountered in the implementation of these repositories. This site is provided by EDUCAUSE, a non-profit focused on assisting educational institutions in the use of information technology.


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Subject Archives
  1. arXiv
    http://arxiv.org/
    Open access archive of “preprint” articles in physics, mathematics, nonlinear science, quantitative biology, and computer science. “Preprint” refers to the version of a scientific article as it exists prior to submission for peer review by a professional journal. Thus, the articles in Xarchiv have not been peer reviewed. The advantage lies in the fact that much critical research in these fields, especially in physics, is available for worldwide dissemination long before the peer reviewed article appears in print many months later.


  2. Cogprints
    http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
    Open access archive of peer reviewed research in the cognitive sciences, including papers from neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, computer science, biology, and linguistics. Cogprints is implemented through Eprints.org software. Unlike Xarchiv, Cogprints includes both preprint and peer-reviewed works.

  3. PubMed Central
    http://www.pubmedcentral.gov
    Open access archive of journal articles in the life sciences, administered by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Individual journal publishers reach agreements with NLM regarding specific terms for deposit of their journal articles in PubMed Central. Coverage of back issues is more extensive for some journals than others. Currently, more than 120 journals are represented, including all of the peer-reviewed research journals published by Biomed Central. Many of these journals will eventually deposit the entire contents of all their back issues in electronic form in PubMed Central. NLM works continuously to expand the number of titles in PubMed Central as well as the chronological scope of coverage. In June 2004, for example, NLM announced a cooperative venture with the Wellcome Trust and the Joint Information Systems Committee to digitize completely up to 125 years of back issues from a number of critical biomedical journals, such as Annals of Surgery, Biochemical Journal, Journal of Physiology, and Medical History. The NLM announcement of this project is available at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/news/press_releases/intlpubmed04.html.

  4. Social Science Research Network
    http://www.ssrn.com
    Depository of abstracts and full text articles, both pre-print and published, in the fields of economics, accounting, legal research, and business.

  5. BioOne
    http://www.bioone.org
    Web site offering reduced cost access to electronic versions of several dozen peer-reviewed journals published by nonprofit academic societies in the biological sciences. Access to BioOne is not free of charge, and thus does not fit the usual definition of “open access.” A true open access publisher makes all peer reviewed research available free of charge while still remaining economically viable. Nevertheless, BioOne does offer access to a large package of journals at prices substantially below what commercial publishers offer. As such, it illustrates how scholars are seeking new forms of communication in response to escalating journal prices. Also, most of the journals available through BioOne were not previously available in electronic form. BioOne is supported by a coalition of academic and library organizations, including SPARC.

  6. Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and On-Line Teaching (MERLOT)
    http://www.merlot.org 
    Online collection of multimedia materials for use as teaching aids by college and university instructors. Examples of materials include slide shows, visual animation, and web-based tutorials, all intended to serve as course material in the full range of academic disciplines.


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Open Access Textbooks
  1. Cleveland Clinic textbook of Medicine
    http://www.clevelandclinicmeded.com/diseasemanagement/medicineindex.htm
    A 100% free textbook describing strategies for diagnosis and management of diseases affecting every system in the human body. Produced by the Cleveland Clinic, one of the leading hospitals in the United States.


  2. Medical Approaches
    http://www.medicalapproaches.com
    An online textbook of clinical diagnosis and decision-making, targeted specifically at physicians just starting their careers. It aims to help relatively inexperienced doctors become more effective at distinguishing among different symptoms, signs, and clinical states. The authors see their approach as more effective than traditional textbooks of differential diagnosis. As they say in their introduction: “List books of differential diagnosis suffer from the problem that they can disorientate more than they steer. Learning the 16th cause of a clinical feature is unhelpful if one has no sense of their relative likelihood's and therapeutic importance or of the effective strategies for reliably discriminating between them.”


  3. Wikibooks
    http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
    A collection of more than 500 free textbooks, in subjects ranging from cooking to cell biology. Some of the textbooks are incomplete, but all are free of charge. The site is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, the people who brought you Wikipedia. Like that resource, the books at Wikibooks are created and edited by the entire online community. The section on the health sciences is here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Health_science_bookshelf.


  4. Textbook Revolution
    http://www.textbookrevolution.org
    An online portal linking to a variety of free digital academic texts around the web. Covers the full spectrum of academic disciplines.