67 posts found.
November 11, 2015
Northern lights over Tromsø I'll be visiting Tromsø, Norway to attend the Tenth Annual Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing, which is being held November 30 to December 1. I'm looking forward to the talks, including keynotes from Randy Schekman and Sabine Hossenfelder and an interview by Caroline Sutton of my...
May 07, 2015
…“blockhead” argument… "Blockhead by Paul McCarthy @ Tate Modern" image from flickr user Matt Hobbs. Used by permission. Alan Turing proposed what is the best known criterion for attributing intelligence, the capacity for thinking, to a computer. We call it the Turing Test, and it involves comparing the computer’s verbal...
September 29, 2014
My colleague Steven Pinker has a nice piece up at the Chronicle of Higher Education on “Why Academics Stink at Writing”, accompanying the recent release of his new book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, which I’m awaiting my pre-ordered copy of....
June 04, 2014
To university administrators and librarians: ...enablement becomes transformation... "Shelf of journals" image from Flickr user University of Illinois Library. Used by permission. As a university administrator or librarian, you may see the future in open-access journal publishing and may be motivated to help bring that future about.1 I would urge...
April 04, 2014
…a social contract… Title page of the first octavo edition of Rousseau's Social Contract [This post is based loosely on my comments on a panel on 2 April 2014 for Terry Fisher's CopyrightX course. Thanks to Terry for inviting me to participate and provoking this piece, and to my Berkman colleagues for...
March 28, 2014
…provide a transition path… "The Temple of Transition, Burning Man 2011" photo by flickr user Michael Holden, used by permission David Willetts, the UK Minister for Universities and Research, has written a letter to Janet Finch responding to her committee’s “A Review of Progress in Implementing the Recommendations of the...
February 19, 2014
…decided to write my own… In a previous post, I proposed that open-access journals use the CC-BY license for their scholar-contributed articles: As long as you’re founding a new journal, its contents should be as open as possible consistent with appropriate attribution. That exactly characterizes the CC-BY license. It’s also a...
November 21, 2013
… altogether too much concern with the contents of the journal’s spine text… “reference” image by flickr user Sara S. used by permission. Precipitated by a recent request to review some proposals for new open-access journals, I spent some time gathering my own admittedly idiosyncratic thoughts on some of the...
October 15, 2013
…what 419 scams are to banking… …what 419 scams are to banking… “scams upon scammers” image by flickr user Daniel Mogford used by permission. Investigative science journalist John Bohannon[1] has a news piece in Science earlier this month about the scourge of faux open-access journals. I call them faux journals (rather than...
July 10, 2013
...myopic... "myopic" image by flickr user haglundc used by permission. I was invited by the British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences to write a piece on last year's report "Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: How to expand access to research publications" by the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research...
May 15, 2013
...going after plagiarists on legal grounds... "Judge Coco Declares Ang Out of Line!" image by flickr user Coco Mault used by permission. One of the services that journal publishers claim to provide on behalf of authors is legal support in the case that their work has been plagiarized, and they...
February 28, 2013
...White House... "White House" image by flickr user Trevor McGoldrick. As has been widely reported, this past Friday the White House directed essentially all federal funding agencies to develop open access policies over the next few months. I wrote the letter below to be forwarded to faculty at the Harvard...
January 29, 2013
[This is a heavily edited transcript of a talk that I gave on January 3, 2013, at a panel on open access at the 87th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA, the main scholarly society for linguistics, and publisher of the journal Language), co-sponsored by the Modern...
January 13, 2013
Government zealotry in prosecuting brilliant people is a repeating theme. It gave rise to one of the great intellectual tragedies of the 20th century, the death of Alan Turing after his appalling treatment by the British government. Sadly, we have just been presented with another case. Aaron Swartz committed suicide...
November 06, 2012
...There's a "tree" in it... "Fall New England" image by flickr user BrtinBoston. Used by permission. I received the attached email, inviting a contribution to a journal called Advances in Forestry Letter. Yes, that's "Letter" in the singular, which is even still optimistic given the number of papers they've published so...
October 17, 2012
I'm pleased to forward on the announcement that the Harvard Open Access Project has just released an initial version of a guide on "good practices for university open-access policies". It was put together by Peter Suber and myself with help from many, including Ellen Finnie Duranceau, Ada Emmett, Heather Joseph,...
October 09, 2012
...set the default... Here's what's on deck at Harvard for Open Access Week 2012 (reproduced from the OSC announcement). From October 22 through October 28, Harvard University is joining hundreds of other institutions of higher learning to celebrate Open Access Week, a global event for the promotion of free, immediate online access...
September 17, 2012
...evidenced by a written instrument... "To Sign a Contract 3" image by shho. Used by permission. The idea behind rights-retention open-access policies is, as this year’s OA Week slogan goes, to “set the default to open access”. Traditionally, authors retained rights to their scholarly articles only if they expressly negotiated...
June 28, 2012
...wave of the future... "Nonantum Wave" photo by flickr user mjsawyer. Used by permission (CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0). I get the sense that we've moved into a new phase in discussions of open access. There seems to be a consensus that open access is an inevitability. We're hearing this not only from...
May 21, 2012
I just sent the email below to my friends and family. Feel free to send a similar letter to yours. You know me. I don't send around chain letters, much less start them. So you know that if I'm sending you an email and asking you to tell your friends,...
April 27, 2012
“Old Books” photo by flickr user Iguana Joe, used by permission (CC-by-nc) Earlier this week, the Harvard Library announced its new open metadata policy, which was approved by the Library Board earlier this year, along with an initial two metadata releases. The policy is straightforward: The Harvard Library provides open access...
March 30, 2012
“Majesty of Law” Statue in front of the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C., photo by flickr user NCinDC, used by permission (CC-by-nd) Here is my written testimony filed in association with my appearance yesterday at the hearing on "Federally Funded Research: Examining Public Access and Scholarly Publication Interests" before...
March 06, 2012
“You seem to believe in fairies.” Photo of the Cottingley Fairies, 1917, by Elsie Wright via Wikipedia. Aficionados of open access should know about the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), an open-access journal in my own research field of artificial intelligence, a subfield of computer science concerned with the...
January 05, 2012
“...time to switch...” A very old light switch (2008) by RayBanBro66 via flickr. Used by permission (CC by-nc-nd) The journal Research in Learning Technology has switched its approach from closed to open access as of New Year's 2012. Congratulations to the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) and its Central Executive...
December 02, 2011
My friend and ex-colleague Matt Welsh has an interesting post supporting the Research Without Walls pledge, in which he talks about the Harvard open-access policies. He says: Another way to fight back is for your home institution to require all of your work be made open. Harvard was one of the...
November 16, 2011
“...a drop in the bucket.”Drop I (2007) by Delox - Martin Deák via flickr. Used by permission (CC by-nc-nd) At the recent Berlin 9 conference, there was much talk about the role of funding agencies in open-access publication, both through funding-agency-operated journals like the new eLife journal and through direct reimbursement...
September 11, 2011
Stamps to mark "restricted data" (modified from "atomic stamps 1" by flickr user donovanbeeson, used by permission under CC by-nc-sa) Ten years ago today was the largest terrorist action in United States history, an event that highlighted the importance of intelligence, and its reliance on information classification and control, for...
September 08, 2011
Cover of the first issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, dated March 6, 1665. Available from JSTOR's Early Journal Content collection. JSTOR, the non-profit online journal distributor, announced yesterday that they would be making pre-1923 US articles and pre-1870 non-US articles available for free in a program...
July 28, 2011
William G. Bowen, founder of JSTOR [Update January 13, 2013: See my post following Aaron Swartz's tragic suicide.] Aaron Swartz has been indicted for wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. The alleged activities that led to this indictment were...
June 07, 2011
Front steps of National Library of Medicine, 2008, photo courtesy of NIH Image Bank Imagine my surprise when I actually received a response to my letters in recognition of the NIH public access policy, a form letter undoubtedly, but nonetheless gratefully received. And as a side effect, it allows us...
June 04, 2011
Dictionary and red pencil, photo by novii, on Flickr Sanford Thatcher has written a valuable, if anecdotal, analysis of some papers residing on Harvard’s DASH repository (Copyediting’s Role in an Open-Access World, Against the Grain, volume 23, number 2, April 2011, pages 30-34), in an effort to get at the differences...
April 13, 2011
In recognition of the third anniversary of the establishment of the NIH Public Access Policy on April 7, 2008, I've sent letters to John Holdren, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy; Francis Collins., Director of the National Institutes of Health; and Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services....
March 12, 2011
Hubble's Dark Matter Map from flickr user NASA Goddard Photo and Video, used by permission The Harvard repository, DASH, comprises several thousand articles in all fields of scholarship. These articles are stored and advertised through an item page providing metadata — such as title, author, citation, abstract, and link to...
March 02, 2011
Some open-access publishers offer institutional memberships, whereby a fixed annual fee, often based on the size of faculty or expected number of submitted articles, covers all or a percentage of article-processing fees for the institution for the year. The issue of OA publisher memberships is interesting and fraught. Harvard University...
February 15, 2011
I spoke at a panel last month at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association devoted to the question of electronic dissertations and intellectual property rights entitled "When Universities Put Dissertations on the Internet: New Practice; New Problem?" My co-panelists included Edward Fox, professor of computer science at Virginia Tech...
February 02, 2011
Phil Davis's recent post over at The Scholarly Kitchen on whether open access might save the academic world some money misses the point of the COPE initiative and Harvard's open-access fund (HOPE). Davis speculates that for the case of one set of journals that happened to be mentioned in my...
January 19, 2011
I had an interesting discussion over coffee at the recent SOAP Symposium about the question of whether the article processing fee revenue model for open-access journals disenfranchises authors with fewer financial resources. It prompted me to write up a fuller explanation of why this worry is misplaced. Opportunity for full participation in research...
January 15, 2011
Used by permission of PLoS I'm flying back from Berlin, where I gave talks at the Academic Publishing in Europe (APE) Conference and the Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) Symposium. Karmically, the SOAP Symposium was held in the very room, in Harnack Haus of the Max Planck Society, where...
December 20, 2010
University of Chicago Library, from Carlos Jimenez via flickr, used by permission Who knew? The Chicago Manual of Style's current edition (the 16th) includes for the first time a stance on open-access (Section 4.62), and on Harvard-style OA policies in particular (Section 4.63). Written by copyright lawyer William S. Strong...
September 07, 2010
Here's a clever way for a journal to efficiently and cost-effectively provide open access to its articles (at least in the life sciences): Use PubMed Central as the journal's article repository. This expedient has all kinds of advantages: You have to allow for PMC distribution anyway, in fields where much...
August 06, 2010
Tightrope walker, sculpture, Berlin, 2008. Photo from beezerella at flickr.com. Used by permission. The short answer? Almost nothing. The Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity is a statement of commitment to "the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which...
July 31, 2010
I recently had a conversation with someone (I'll call him D) whose opinion I greatly respect, a staunch supporter of broadening access to the scholarly literature, who expressed a view I was quite surprised about. D is of the opinion that the publication fee business model for open access journals...
June 10, 2010
"In High Places", statue by Gerald Balciar, University of North Texas - Denton campus, installed 1990. Image via Wikipedia. The University of North Texas is engaged in a laudable process of designing an open-access policy for their community. Draft language for their policy is now available at their site on...
May 27, 2010
Sandy Thatcher feels "very uneasy about the massive postings of Green OA articles at sites like Harvard’s, which given that university’s great prestige may well lead to the widespread appropriation of those versions by scholars who find it easier to access them OA than to hunt down (and perhaps pay...
April 27, 2010
Twenty-seven university presidents and provosts have posted an open letter in support of FRPAA. The list of institutions includes Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton, Cornell, Duke, Stanford, Tulane, Rutgers, Indiana, two campuses of the University of Texas, and the University of California system and two of its individual campuses. The letter echoes...
April 16, 2010
Image via Wikipedia The FRPAA bill -- S.1373 in the Senate -- has just been introduced into the House as HR.5037. The bill calls for federal agencies to "develop public access policies relating to research conducted by employees of that agency or from funds administered by that agency." You can...
February 28, 2010
Two years to the day after the Faculty of Arts and Sciences became the first school at Harvard to vote an open-access policy, the Harvard Business School enacted their own policy on February 12, 2010, becoming the fifth Harvard school with a similar policy. Under the HBS policy, Like the...
January 22, 2010
Harvard's provost Steven Hyman has submitted a response on behalf of the university to the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy's RFI on public access policies. It should appear on the OSTP blog within a day or so, and is duplicated here as well. I am in strong...
December 21, 2009
Several publisher representatives have recently asked about why the Harvard open-access fund does not cover hybrid fees. I thought I'd explain my thinking on this issue, though I am certainly not doctrinaire when it comes to institutional underwriting of hybrid fees, and am perfectly in accord with institutions coming to...
October 16, 2009
Pride does not wish to owe and vanity does not wish to pay. —Francois De La Rochefoucauld Open-access journal publishing has been criticized on a whole range of grounds as being unsustainable, unfair, or ineffective. Perhaps the starkest criticism is that open-access journals amount to a vanity publishing industry, and...
September 15, 2009
Harvard's participation in the open-access compact is being managed by the Office for Scholarly Communication, which has set up an open-access fund—the Harvard Open-Access Publishing Equity (HOPE) fund—consistent with the compact. Through HOPE, Harvard will reimburse eligible authors for open-access processing fees. Initially, members of the four Harvard faculties—Arts and...
September 14, 2009
Five universities—Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley—have now expressly stated their commitment to the importance of supporting the processing-fee business model for open-access journals just as the subscription-fee business model used by closed-access journals has traditionally been supported. These universities are the initial signatories of a "compact for open-access...
August 31, 2009
In response to my last post, Kent Anderson says: August 24th, 2009 at 2:04 pm I think you missed Phil’s point, Stuart. What Phil was saying is that libraries can’t control the disbursement of open access fees precisely because of academic freedom, which makes these fees more susceptible to unchecked...
August 24, 2009
Just as I posted a response to Philip Davis's item on why open-access funds are putatively overly favorable to commercial publishers, out came another post by Mr. Davis, this time arguing that open access funds putatively violate academic freedom. This new post, however, is so transparently spurious that it makes...
August 05, 2009
My paper on the "open-access compact" is now available from PLoS Biology and at my web site. An excerpt: Scholars write articles to be read—the more access to their articles the better—so one might think that the open-access approach to publishing, in which articles are freely available online to all...
July 29, 2009
One of the advantages of the Harvard open-access policies is that the university's cumulation of rights allows it to negotiate directly with publishers on behalf of covered authors. Such discussions can lead to win-win agreements in which Harvard authors can more simply comply with the open-access policies they have voted...
July 22, 2009
Philip Davis brings up the issue of whether underwriting open-access publication charges, so as to "level the playing field" (as I've recommended elsewhere) disadvantages "a third team". By focusing on the author-pays and the reader-pays teams, we ignore a third team: publishers who rely on page charges from authors. This...
July 06, 2009
Jonathan Eisen at The Tree of Life writes If you need any more incentive to publish a paper in an Open Access manner if you have a choice - here is one. If you publish in a closed access journal of some kind, it is likely fewer and fewer colleagues...
June 30, 2009
"You can always tell a Harvard man... but you can't tell him much." — Source unknown In the abecedary Harvard A to Z, in the entry under "Deans", the story is told that "a president of the University of Virginia once received a letter requesting a university speaker for an...
June 24, 2009
I haven't seen it discussed anywhere, but it seems that the Institute of Education Sciences in the Department of Education is now requiring its funded research be made openly available through the ERIC repository. The policy looks analogous to that of the NIH. The pertinent clause from the current IES...
June 18, 2009
A strange social contract has arisen in the scholarly publishing field, a kind of "don't ask, don't tell" approach to online distribution of articles by authors. Publishers officially forbid online distribution, authors do it anyway without telling the publishers, and publishers don't ask them to stop even though it violates...
June 16, 2009
The Harvard Graduate School of Education has just released its official announcement of their June 1 enactment of an open-access policy, following the approach of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Law School, and Kennedy School of Government, as well as the Stanford University School of Education. Four down, six(ish)...
June 11, 2009
Are green and gold open access independent of each other? In particular, is worry about gold OA a waste of time, and are expenditures on it a waste of money? Stevan Harnad has brought up this issue in response to a recent talk I gave at Cal Tech, and in...
June 09, 2009
Recently, the representative of a major scientific journal publisher expressed to me the sentiment that the position that Harvard faculty have taken through our open-access policies — setting the default for rights retention to retain rights by default rather than to eschew rights by default — is in some sense...
June 08, 2009
One of the frequent worries I hear expressed about open-access policies such as the ones at Harvard is that they will lead to the death of journals (or of scholarly societies, or of peer review). When we first began addressing Harvard faculty on these issues, I heard this worry expressed...
May 28, 2009
I very occasionally hear expressed a concern about the Harvard open-access policy that it violates some aspect of academic freedom. The argument seems to be that by granting a prior license to Harvard, faculty may be forced to forgo publication in certain venues. Our rights as scholars to determine the...
May 27, 2009
I assume that readers of the open access discussions on this blog are familiar with the state of play in the area, but just in case, here's some background.
