Current OA Meeting News

• SPARC 2014 OA Meeting Program
• Innovation Fair Presenters - Monday, March 3rd 4:30-6pm
• Speaker Bios and Photos
• Preliminary Program for the SPARC 2014 OA Meeting
• 2014 SPARC OA Meeting Speakers Announced
• Sponsorship Options
• DEADLINE EXTENDED for Innovation Fair proposals - New deadline for submissions is January 17, 2014.
• Register for the 2014 SPARC Open Access Meeting - Early bird registration extended through January 17, 2014!
• Hotel reservations are now open - Book your hotel room by February 6, 2014 to receive the conference rate of $144/night
• To receive updates, join the SPARC Open Access Forum. Scroll down for news.

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One year ago today, Open Access advocates, researchers, librarians, technology leaders, patient advocates, entrepreneurs, students, and every-day Americans celebrated as the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a landmark directive requiring that the results of all publicly funded research be made freely available. SPARC was among those cheering the loudest.

The Directive was the result of a long effort by the Open Access movement, including a four-year campaign that began when then-Senator Obama was running his first campaign for president. It reflected on the results of extensive conversations with all stakeholder groups, including, extensive public feedback given during administration requests for public comments in 2009 and 2011; the consideration of feedback from an Open Access Interagency Working Group convened at the request of Congress (via the America COMPETES Act); and support from more than 65,000 Americans who signed an Administration “We the People” petition in 2012 calling for this action.

Needless-to-say, the Directive marked a major achievement for both open access and open government. It affirmed the principle that the public has a right to access and use the results of research their tax dollars funded and closely aligns with the FASTR Act, providing for the first time bipartisan, bicameral, and Executive Branch support.

As we look back at this past year, there is considerable progress to celebrate. Open Access policies gained momentum in Congress, in states, and internationally. The trend of higher education institutions actively working to maximize access to and sharing of research results is proceeding apace. And increasingly, professional societies - including notable organizations who were previously hesitant to embrace Open Access, including the AAAS and the Royal Society – are making moves, underscoring to people who have doubts that Open Access is the way the research community wants to proceed.

Amidst all of these positives, there’s one area where the progress has been a little slower.  As we mark the one-year anniversary of the Directive the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) have not publically released the agency plans. The White House Memorandum called on federal agencies and departments to submit a draft plan to the Office of Science and Technology Policy by August 22, 2013. However, to date, none have been publically released. Transparency is a vital component to meeting the objectives detailed in the Memorandum, and as the Directive clearly states, all stakeholders should and will have the opportunity to adequately evaluate the plans before they become final.

We hope we’ll have that opportunity before too long.

From February 24th to 28th to celebrate the first-ever Fair Use Week, sponsored by the Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication. We will be featuring guest blogs from experts on fair use, libraries, and the law; fair use videos; “How I used Fair Use” stories; and more!

Fair Use Week ends with a live Fair Use panel on Friday, February 28th, @2:30pm in the Lamont Library Forum Room. The panelists are:
Andy Sellars, Berkman Center
Ann Whiteside, Graduate School of Design
Laura Quilter, UMass Amherst
Ellen Duranceau, MIT
Live Tweets #FairUseWeek and @FairUseWeek

http://youtu.be/lfsZ7DwsMWc

Open Library Letter on “Journal Usage Half-Life” and Embargo Periods.

We are writing as representatives of research and academic libraries across the country. As such, we represent the majority of the customer base for academic journal subscriptions in the U.S.  We are writing in response to the recent “Journal Usage Half-Life” report, funded by the American Association of Publishers (AAP), which examines the time it takes for a group of articles to reach half their number of downloads across a variety of academic disciplines – the so-called usage half-life. The study concludes that this number varies both within and among research disciplines.

Recently, some in the publishing community have suggested that this “usage half-life” metric should be used by research funders to justify extending the length of embargo restrictions placed on articles reporting the results of publicly funded research beyond the 12 month period recommended in the February 22^nd White House Directive on “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research.”  This argument is based on the assumption that research and academic libraries – who buy the vast majority of scholarly publication subscriptions - make decisions on whether to continue subscriptions based on the median number of times each specific journal is downloaded over time.

As representatives of research and academic libraries across the country, we strongly believe it is important to rebut that assumption. While the usage half-life of articles is an interesting data point, it is not used by research or academic libraries in journal subscription cancellation decisions.  Moreover, this argument falsely assumes that journal publications are subscribed to separately, when in fact, in many cases libraries purchase journals as large bundles – especially from commercial journal publishers. Any metric based on false assumptions is destined to draw incorrect conclusions.

This is not the first time that subscription-based publishers have tried—and failed— to show evidence of a link between usage half-life and lost subscription revenue due to planned public access policies.  The U.S. National Institutes of Health has had a required public access policy with a maximum allowed embargo period of 12 months in place for nearly six years. Hundreds of thousands of articles in a wide variety of disciplines (including those that the Davis study indicates have quite long “Usage Half-Lives”) have been made publicly accessible during this time frame, yet no publisher has reported any loss of subscriptions due to this policy.

In fact, we are not aware of any evidence that the viability of any journal is put at risk by public access policies.  A recent (September 2013) review by the UK House of Commons Select Committee on Business, Innovation and Skills noted “the absence of evidence that short embargo periods harm subscription publishers,” and concluded that “there is no available evidence base to indicate that short (or even zero) embargoes cause cancellation of subscriptions.”[1]

The government invests taxpayer dollars in scientific research with the expectation that those results will be diffused and built upon as widely and as quickly as possible to accelerate discovery, speed innovation, and fuel economic growth. While usage half-life reports provide an interesting metric for comparing journal downloads across disciplines, this study fails to provide any evidence that journal subscription rates will decline as a result of public access policies. It should not be used as a rationale for longer embargo periods in implementing the White House Directive, or any other public access policy. 

[Download PDF]

On Monday, President Obama released his FY16 Budget, which lays out the administration’s policy and funding priorities for the coming year. We are pleased to note that key SPARC program priorities  - opening up access to federally funded research articles and data - continue to align with those of the administration, and are highlighted in the FY16 Budget.

Specifically, the President’s FY16 budget prioritizes open access to federally funded research outputs with the following language:

“The Budget continues to invest in efforts to open up Government-generated assets, including data and the results of federally funded research and development—such as intellectual property and scientific knowledge—to the public. Through these efforts, the Government can empower citizens and businesses to increase the return on investment with innovation, job creation and economic prosperity gained through their use of open Government data and research results. The use of this data and scientific knowledge has impacted the private sector, including fueling innovative start-up companies and creating American jobs, increasing the transparency of retirement plans, helping consumers uncover fraudulent charges on their credit card bills, assisting potential homebuyers in making informed housing decisions, and creating new life-changing technologies, such as leading-edge vaccines.” (pg. 74)

The Budget also includes other items specific to key SPARC priorities, including:

• The Budget includes initiatives to improve the service we provide to the American public; to leverage the Federal Government’s buying power to bring more value and efficiency to how we use taxpayer dollars; to open Government data and research to the private sector to drive innovation and economic growth; to promote smarter information technology; and, to attract and retain the best talent in the Federal workforce. (pg. 8)
• The Budget includes initiatives to improve the service we provide to the American public; to leverage the Federal Government’s buying power to bring more value and efficiency to how we use taxpayer dollars; to open Government data and research to the private sector to drive innovation and economic growth; to promote smarter information technology; and, to attract and retain the best talent in the Federal workforce (pg. 64)
• It also increases support for ongoing initiatives—such as the U.S. Digital Service (USDS), PortfolioStat, Freeze, the Footprint, and Open Data—that have already had an impact on improving Government operations (pg. 69)
• Through these efforts, the Government can empower citizens and businesses to increase the return on investment with innovation, job creation and economic prosperity gained through their use of open Government data and research results (pg. 74)
• Opening Data to Spark Innovation - The Administration places a high priority on opening Government data as fuel for private sector innovation and public use.  In demonstrating its commitment to open data, the Administration has developed performance metrics to measure agency progress in reaching open data goals, provided tools to make it easier for Federal agencies to publish data, and released guidance to agencies on how to engage with the community to identify priority data sets for release. The Administration continues to invest in and support efforts to unlock Federal data sets with a high potential for economic impact, including in the areas of health care, energy, education, employment, public safety, tourism, and agriculture. (pg. 74-75)

The release of the President’s budget marks just the first step in the federal budget process, which will now continue with the House and Senate presenting their own versions of the budget.  As the budget process moves forward, we will continue to provide you with details on how SPARC priorities are represented. As ever, we welcome any questions you might have - please don't hesitate to contact the SPARC office!

For Immediate Release
January 27, 2014

For more information, contact:
Andrea Higginbotham
(202) 296-2296
[email protected]

Innovator Developed Infrastructure that Enabled Open Access Journals to Flourish

Washington, DC – John Willinsky sees the free exchange of information as a matter of social justice.

When he recognized that the high cost of journals was keeping the public from having access to important research, Willinsky did more than just talk about the problem. He came up with a solution that helped to actively transform the scholarly communication world.

In the late 1990s, Willinsky founded the Public Knowledge Project and developed Open Journal Systems (OJS), a free, open source platform that allows journals to be more easily and affordably published online. The results speak for themselves - today, more than 1.5 million articles are published in journals using the OJS platform. In 2012 alone, over 5,000 journals published at least 10 articles using the software Willinsky and his team pioneered.

Because Willinsky is both a visionary and pragmatist who brings effective business teams together, SPARC honors Willinsky with its January 2014 Innovator Award.

“John understood the benefit of Open Access long before most people, and was able to build infrastructure that has been absolutely crucial to the successful advancement of Open Access journal publishing,” says Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. “We’re proud to honor his rich contributions to changing the face of scholarly communication by naming the latest SPARC Innovator.”

Willinsky is currently the Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University, and still is involved in the PKP operations and development of software. He served as an Associate Professor of Education at the University of Calgary in the 1980s, and Pacific Press Professor of Literacy and Technology on the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia in 1990.

Willinsky has traveled extensively to advocate for Open Access and help journals, especially in developing countries, make the switch to online publishing to save money. His goal was to create a viable alternative and to give people the tools to expand the reach of their work. “It seems so basic so me, in terms of a human right,” says Willinsky of access to knowledge. “But I have also come to believe over the years that the real value of learning is found in sharing what you’ve learned.”

The January 2014 SPARC Innovator Profile is online at http://www.sparc.arl.org/initiatives/innovator.

The SPARC Innovator program recognizes advances in scholarly communication propelled by an individual, institution, or group. Typically, these advances exemplify SPARC principles by challenging the status quo in scholarly communication for the benefit of researchers, libraries, universities, and the public. SPARC Innovators are featured on the SPARC Web site semi-annually and have included the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), Michael Nielsen, Health Research Alliance, The World Bank, R. Preston McAfee, Harvard University FAS, Ted and Carl Bergstrom, Melissa Hagemann, among others.

For further information or a list of previous SPARC Innovators, please see the SPARC website.

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SPARC

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international alliance of more than 800 academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. SPARC’s advocacy, educational, and publisher partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of research. SPARC is on the Web at http://www.sparc.arl.org.

Please join SPARC and ACRL for a joint forum on Saturday, January 25, 2014 from 3:30-5:00 pm on the topic: "Connecting Articles andData to Expand Open Access to Research." Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of CNI, will lead a discussion with experts from the library, publishing and data communities exploring this topic. The program will take place in the Pennsylvania Convention Center, in Room 201B.

While libraries have been managing open access repositories of articles for more than a decade, making research data openly accessible presents new challenges and opportunities.  Similarly, open access journal publishing is an established publishing model, while models for openly accessible data repositories are still emerging. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Memorandum has increased awareness of the interconnectedness of data and the resulting articles on increasing access to the results of federally funded scientific research.

Effectively connecting research data with the resulting articles is necessary to fully realize the benefits of open access articles and open data.  A panel of experts will examine emerging practices for libraries, potential new collaborations, considerations of how to fund the storage and preservation of data, and options for making the connections between articles and data to fully realize the potential to expand open access to research.

We are pleased to announce our featured speakers:

• Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information
• Todd Vision, Associate Professor, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
• Paul Bracke, Associate Dean for Research and Assessment, Purdue University Libraries
• Margaret Winker, Web Editor, Public Library of Science

The Forum will also include ample time for discussion with the audience - SPARC and ACRL look forward to seeing you there!