The bipartisan Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) was introduced in Congress on February 14, 2013. Co-sponsored in the Senate by Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) and in the House of Representatives by Reps. Mike Doyle (D-PA), Kevin Yoder (R-KS), and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), FASTR will accelerate scientific discovery and fuel innovation by making articles reporting on publicly funded scientific research freely accessible online for anyone to read and build upon.

Notice Number: NOT-OD-13-042

Key Dates
Release Date: February 14, 2013

Related Notices

NOT-OD-13-035 NIH Requires Use of RPPR for All SNAP and Fellowship Progress Reports, and Expands RPPR Functionality

NOT-OD-12-160 Upcoming Changes to Public Access Policy Reporting Requirements and Related NIH Efforts to Enhance Compliance

Issued by
National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Purpose

For non-competing continuation grant awards with a start date of July 1, 2013 or beyond:

1) NIH will delay processing of an award if publications arising from it are not in compliance with the NIH public access policy.

2) Investigators will need to use My NCBI to enter papers onto progress reports. Papers can be associated electronically using the RPPR, or included in the PHS 2590 using the My NCBI generated PDF report.

Please see NOT-OD-12-160 for more details.

Inquiries
Please direct all inquiries to:

Office of Extramural Research
National Institutes of Health
1 Center Drive, Room 144
Bethesda, MD 20892-0152
Email: PublicAccess@nih.gov
Website: http://publicaccess.nih.gov

The Max Planck Society and the academic publishing house De Gruyter have signed a groundbreaking agreement to cooperate in the publication of Open Access books. The agreement covers texts intended for publication by scholars at the more than 80 individual Max Planck institutes working around the world today. It encompass the full range of disciplines in which the Max Planck Society is active, including the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and applies to both monographs and anthologies.

"Our collaboration with De Gruyter will enable us to offer our scholars a unified platform - both from a legal and an organizational perspective - for publishing books in Open Access," explains Ralf Schimmer, Director of the Department of Scientific Information Provision at the Max Planck Digital Library. "In this way, we're responding to an increasing number of requests from the Max Planck institutes, and are extending the support we give for Open Access publishing from journal articles to the arena of books."

Mathematicians plan to launch a series of free open-access journals that will host their peer-reviewed articles on the preprint server arXiv. The project was publicly revealed yesterday in a blog post by Tim Gowers, a Fields Medal winner and mathematician at the University of Cambridge, UK.

The initiative, called the Episciences Project, hopes to show that researchers can organize the peer review and publication of their work at minimal cost, without involving commercial publishers.

"It's a global vision of how the research community should work: we want to offer an alternative to traditional mathematics journals," says Jean-Pierre Demailly, a mathematician at the University of Grenoble, France, who is a leader in the effort. Backed by funding from the French government, the initiative may launch as early as April, he says.

[...]

For the Episciences Project, the CCSD plans to create a publishing platform that will support online peer-reviewed journals. Each journal, or 'epijournal', would have its own editor and editorial board, and authors could submit their arXiv-posted papers to their journal of choice. The journal would then organize peer review, perhaps using workflow software provided by the CCSD. Peer-reviewed papers would be posted on arXiv alongside their un-reviewed versions. A central committee (led by Demailly) would manage new journal candidates and make recommendations on paper formatting, but each journal would be free to set its own policies (including whether to charge for publication).

[...]

Demailly says that he expects to adjust the concept with feedback from the mathematics community. "If people want larger reviews linked to papers, or the possibility of online comments and blogs, we can offer this with only minor changes to the platform," he says. At the moment, the model's success or failure hinges on buy-in from mathematicians -- but the involvement of Gowers and other prominent mathematicians, such as Terence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles, may help to build support.

Notice

Amendments were made to the CIHR Open Access Policy, formerly known as the Policy on Access to Research Outputs. As of January 1, 2013, CIHR-funded researchers will be required to make their peer-reviewed publications accessible at no cost within 12 months of publication - at the latest. While the revised Policy provides researchers with clear guidance on CIHR's minimum expectation, in the spirit of public benefits of research, CIHR continues to encourage researchers to make their publications accessible for free as soon as possible after publication. Compliance with the Open Access Policy will continue to be monitored through end of grant reporting.

The journal Pharmacological Reviews (ISSN 1521-0081) has moved to continuous publication: articles are being published in their final form as soon as they are ready instead of waiting for complete issues. This allows articles to be published up to three months sooner than in the past. Several articles in the January 2013 issue are already online. See http://pharmrev.aspetjournals.org/content/current.

The January 2013 issue will be published in a small number of batches within the next two to three weeks. Future issues will close on or about the first business day of each calendar quarter (April 1, July 1, October 1).

[...]

Readers have the option of being notified when new articles are published and/or when an issue is complete. Pharmacological Reviews generally publishes 8 to 10 articles per issue. Articles may be published singularly or in small groups. The number of continuous publication alerts will average less than one per week.

Pharmacological Reviews articles will continue to be paginated sequentially, and each will be assigned to a volume and to a quarterly issue for clear citation. The journal is published as one volume per calendar year.

2012 was yet another awesome year for open access growth. To illustrate just how far we've come: a BASE search of over 2,400 repositories now searches over 40 million documents. The DOAJ article search is inching up to the 1 million article mark, demonstrating that the growth in gold OA is not just in OA journals, but more importantly, in articles published in open access journals.

Internet Archive
1,110,878 movies
110,448 concerts
1,474,756 recordings
3,781,142 texts
(new in 2012)

For more information, see: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2012/12/december-31-2012-dramatic-growth-of.html

Are you a science graduate student worried that making your thesis or dissertation available online will hurt your chances of getting it published? Gail McMillan, director of the digital library and archives at Virginia Tech, has good news for you. In a recent survey of science-journal editors, 87 percent indicated they would consider articles drawn from openly accessible electronic theses and dissertations, or ETD's.

Ms. McMillan helped run the survey under the auspices of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, a group that promotes the use and preservation of ETD's. She presented the survey results here this week at the fall meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information.

The 2012 survey is a companion to one last year that polled journal editors in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. According to the 2011 results, more than 82 percent of the journal editors would consider manuscripts revised from openly accessible ETD's.

[...]

Many students and their faculty advisers, however, cling to the idea that publishers will balk at publishing work if it's already freely available online. Ms. McMillan has found that those fears cut across disciplinary lines. Decisions about whether to restrict access to electronic work tend to be driven by anecdote, she said, and faculty members tend to play it safe when dispensing career advice.

"I think faculty want to err on the side of caution," she said. "I wish they would look at the data."

When we put the [open access] policy into place in 2008 it was an adjustment for all of us. Since that time, NIH has focused much of our attention on outreach. We've helped you understand your obligations and provided reminders when we found papers that were out of compliance. This strategy, along with the research community's shared commitment to making the results of NIH-supported research public, has resulted in a high level of compliance with the policy. But our work is not done as there are still publications -- and as a consequence, NIH awards -- that are not in compliance. Thus, as of spring 2013 at the earliest, we will begin to hold processing of non-competing continuation awards if publications arising from grant awards are not in compliance with the public access policy. Once publications are in compliance, awards will go forward. For more details, see NIH Guide notice NOT-OD-12-160.

[...]

We are giving funded organizations at least five months to prepare for our new process, and we hope you use this time to assure that publications are in compliance with the policy long before this change in process begins.

The challenge is that publication occurs throughout the year, and progress reporting occurs once a year. So I encourage principal investigators to start thinking about public access compliance when papers are planned. Discuss with your co-authors how the paper will be submitted to PubMed Central, and who will do so, along with all the other tasks of paper writing. The easiest thing to do, perhaps even today, is to take a couple of minutes to enter the NIH-supported papers you have published in the last year into My NCBI to ensure you meet the requirements of the policy regardless of when your non-competing continuation is due. This will help you avoid a last minute scramble that could delay your funding.

Solomon DJ, Björk B-C. A study of open access journals using article processing charges. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 2012;63(8):1485-95.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.22673/full

Abstract:
Article processing charges (APCs) are a central mechanism for funding open access (OA) scholarly publishing. We studied the APCs charged and article volumes of journals that were listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals as charging APCs. These included 1,370 journals that published 100,697 articles in 2010. The average APC was $906 U.S. dollars (USD) calculated over journals and $904 USD calculated over articles. The price range varied between $8 and $3,900 USD, with the lowest prices charged by journals published in developing countries and the highest by journals with high-impact factors from major international publishers. Journals in biomedicine represent 59% of the sample and 58% of the total article volume. They also had the highest APCs of any discipline. Professionally published journals, both for profit and nonprofit, had substantially higher APCs than journals published by societies, universities, or scholars/researchers. These price estimates are lower than some previous studies of OA publishing and much lower than is generally charged by subscription publishers making individual articles OA in what are termed hybrid journals.

A team of researchers led by Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom of the University of Washington released today the results of an 18-month long study of gender inequality among authors of academic papers. The study is based on an analysis of the authors of more than 1.8 million published research articles available through the not-for-profit digital library, JSTOR.

[...]

Fast forward to 2008 when JSTOR launched its self-service Data for Research website enabling anyone in the world to explore its holdings and to freely create datasets for use in their research. Today the site sees about 700 datasets created and downloaded annually. Larger scale projects like the one undertaken by West, Bergstrom and their co-authors: Jennifer Jacquet, Molly King, Shelley Correll, and Theodore Bergstrom are handled upon request and in close collaboration with JSTOR's Advanced Technologies Research team.

[...]

While the research itself is ground-breaking, the benefits of projects like the one just released by the West-Bergstrom team can reach beyond the findings themselves. The West-Bergstrom team also created an interactive tool that allows others to explore the underlying content based on the work they have done. This demonstrates how sharing large corpora of data can also lead to the creation of new ways of exploring and discovery scholarship - effectively giving researchers another lens through which to view the published literature.

The Author's Guild sued Hathi Trust, a collaborative organization of several major research libraries, claiming that the access Hathi was providing to scanned materials (both scanned via the Google Books project and via other projects) was in violation of their members' copyrights.

Today the District Court issued its opinion (full text) in the case, finding that:

• The fact that libraries have specific enumerated rights to make certain kinds of copies does not mean that they can't call on fair use to make other kinds of copies. (Section 108 does not limit libraries' section 107 rights.)
• Providing access for users with disabilities is a valued purpose under fair use.
• Providing digital copies to make analog works accessible to users with disabilities is transformative use.
• Making copies of an entire work can be transformative fair use when it is for a transformative purpose, such as making the work searchable.
• Hathi's activities are fair use.

"The enhanced search capabilities that reveal no in-copyright material, the protection of Defendants' fragile books, and, perhaps most importantly, the unprecedented ability of print-disabled individuals to have an equal opportunity to compete with their sighted peers in the ways imagined by the ADA protect the copies made by Defendants as fair use." (p. 21)

My overall initial take: This is really great. Well reasoned, well written, and a great win for libraries, innovation, and accessibility. Judge Baer is, at least with respect to this case, extremely awesome.

The rest of Nancy's post clearly and engagingly explains why the judge's ruling is "A Win for Copyright's Public Interest Purpose."

In incidents involving four scientists--the latest case coming to light two weeks ago--journal editors say authors got to critique their own papers by suggesting reviewers with contact e-mails that actually went to themselves.

The glowing endorsements got the work into Experimental Parasitology, Pharmaceutical Biology, and several other journals. Fake reviews even got a pair of mathematics articles into journals published by Elsevier, the academic publishing giant, which has a system in place intended to thwart such misconduct. The frauds have produced retractions of about 30 papers to date.

[...]

Anyone can open a Gmail or similar account under a name that isn't his or her own, as long as that name hasn't been taken by another user. For instance, Haroldvarmus@gmail.com was available last week, but e-mail sent there will not reach Mr. Varmus, the Nobel Prize-winning virologist and director of the National Cancer Institute.

[...]

The medicinal-chemistry journal has now changed its policy to require that every paper have two reviewers not suggested by an author.

[...]

On the journal side, editors are handling more submissions than ever--Mr. Supuran said he and three other editors work on 500 to 600 papers each year, about 20 percent more than when he started--and due diligence can be a casualty. When swamped, said Lance W. Small, a member of the ethics committee and a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of California at San Diego, "editors may cut corners."

• In 2011, PLoS provided $2.5 million in waiver funding for authors unable to pay all or part of their publication fees.
• They have 130 institutional members.
• They have 1.5 million article views a month.

More info on particular PLoS journals is also available.

SUNY Potsdam will not be subscribing to an American Chemical Society online journal package for 2013. We will instead be using a combination of the Royal Society of Chemistry content, ACS single title subscriptions, the ACS backfile, and ScienceDirect from Elsevier** to meet our chemical information needs. We're doing this because the ACS pricing model is unsustainable for our institution and we were unable to find common ground with the sales team from the ACS. Instead, we explored other options and exercised them.

[...]

In May 2012, after much internal discussion and debate, three SUNY library directors from the comprehensive colleges (myself included) and the university centers, along with two SUNY Office of LIbrary and Information Services staff met with three representatives from the ACS at SUNY Plaza in Albany, NY, and discussed their pricing model. The ACS folks were very clear: they are dedicated to moving all customers to a consistent pricing model, the pricing steps in that model are based on a tiered system, and there is a base price underneath all of that. In principle, I absolutely support this kind of move: too many libraryland vendors obscure their pricing models, negotiate great deals with one institution while charging double to someone else, or "have to ask the manager" to approve any offer. In our discussions, the librarian stakeholders noted our support for this approach, but argued that while their tiers are reasonable and based on arguably sound criteria, the base price underlying those steps is unsustainable and inappropriate. (In the case of SUNY Potsdam, the ACS package would have consumed more than 10% of my total acquisitions budget, just for journals for this one department.) We also learned that their base price and pricing model, when applied to much larger institutions, did not produce the same unsustainable pricing.

[...]

Based on our discussion, I think that some of our faculty were surprised, some seemed resigned, some were horrified, and they were all frustrated by what seemed to be a plate full of bad options. However, after two meetings and much discussion of how to reconfigure our ACS subscriptions to meet our budgetary constraints, I believe that we all agreed that this goes beyond having a tight campus or library budget: this is simply not appropriate pricing for an institution like ours. The result of our first meeting was that the chemistry faculty agreed to take their concerns to the ACS based on their individual professional involvements with the organization, talking with sales and the Chemical Information Division about their concerns, and we agreed that we'd look into other library solutions to their chemical information needs.

[...]

Librarians and faculty raised the valid concern that we might not be able to meet ACS approval of undergraduate programs without our ACS package. The ACS is in the unique position of both approving programs and selling the content necessary for approval, which I will leave to someone else to debate the ethics of. Throughout our discussions we agreed that any library solution we proposed would have the ability to meet the approval requirements in concert with our subscription to ScienceDirect. It can be done.

[...]

Librarians are often disinclined to be first to try something - we'd often rather be second, after someone else has found the hidden pitfalls. So here I am, saying that we were willing to be the first to be loud, and to provide you with a public example of what is possible. Our chemistry faculty were willing to follow that lead, and I'm grateful to them for it.