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!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
January 16, 2014

Contact:
Ranit Schmelzer
202-538-1065
[email protected]

PUBLIC ACCESS TO SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH ADVANCES

Omnibus Appropriations Bill Codifies White House Directive

Washington, DC – Progress toward making taxpayer-funded scientific research freely accessible in a digital environment was reached today with Congressional passage of the FY 2014 Omnibus Appropriations Bill.  The bill requires federal agencies under the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education portion of the Omnibus bill with research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to articles reporting on federally funded research no later than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

“This is an important step toward making federally funded scientific research available for everyone to use online at no cost,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).  “We are indebted to the members of Congress who champion open access issues and worked tirelessly to ensure that this language was included in the Omnibus.  Without the strong leadership of the White House, Senator Harkin, Senator Cornyn, and others, this would not have been possible.”

The additional agencies covered would ensure that more than $31 billion of the total $60 billion annual U.S. investment in taxpayer-funded research is now openly accessible.

SPARC strongly supports the language in the Omnibus bill, which affirms the strong precedent set by the landmark NIH Public Access Policy, and more recently by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Directive on Public Access.  At the same time, SPARC is pressing for additional provisions to strengthen the language – many of which are contained in the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act – including requiring that articles are:

• Available no later than six months after publication;
• Available through a central repository similar to the National Institutes for Health’s (NIH) highly successful PubMed Central, a 2008 model that opened the gateway to the Human Genome Project and more recently the Brain Mapping Initiative.  These landmark programs demonstrate quite clearly how opening up access to taxpayer funded research can accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, lead to both innovative new treatments and technologies, and generate new jobs in key sectors of the economy; and
• Provided in formats and under terms that ensure researchers have the ability to freely apply cutting-edge analysis tools and technologies to the full collection of digital articles resulting from public funding.

“SPARC is working toward codifying the principles in FASTR and is working with the Administration to use PubMed Central (PMC) as the basis for the implementation model for the President’s directive,” said Joseph.  “Only with an effective repository like PMC  and the ability to fully mine and reuse data will we have the access we need to really spur innovation and job creation in broad sections of the economy.”

Background

Every year, the federal government uses taxpayer dollars to fund tens of billions of dollars of scientific research that results in thousands upon thousands of articles published in scientific journals.  The government funds this research with the understanding that it will advance science, spur the economy, accelerate innovation, and improve the lives of our citizens.  Yet most taxpayers – including academics, students, and patients – are shut out of accessing and using the results of the research that their tax dollars fund, because it is only available through expensive and often hard-to-access scientific journals.

By any measure, 2013 was a watershed year for the Open Access movement: in February, the White House issued the landmark Directive; a major bill, FASTR, was introduced in Congress; a growing number of higher education institutions – ranging from the University of California System, Harvard University, MIT, the University of Kansas, and Oberlin College – actively worked to maximize access to and sharing of research results; and, for the first time, state legislatures around the nation have begun debating open access policies supported by SPARC.

Details of the Omnibus Language

The Omnibus language codifies a section of the White House Directive requirements into law for the Department of Labor, Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and the Department of Education, among other smaller agencies.

Additional report language was included throughout the bill directing agencies and OSTP to keep moving on the Directive policies, including the US Department of Agriculture, Department of the Interior, and Department of Commerce.

President Obama is expected to sign the bill in the coming days.

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SPARC®, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system.  Developed by the Association of Research Libraries, SPARC has become a catalyst for change.  Its pragmatic focus is to stimulate the emergence of new scholarly communication models that expand the dissemination of scholarly research and reduce financial pressures on libraries.  More information can be found at www.sparc.arl.org and on Twitter @SPARC_NA.

For immediate release
January 16, 2014

For more information, contact:
Stacie Lemick
stacie [at] arl [dot] org

Dr. Philip Bourne to keynote; meeting will explore intersection of “open” movements.

Washington, DC – SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) is pleased to announce a strong slate of speakers for its upcoming Open Access Meeting, to be held March 3 and 4 in Kansas City, MO. Dr. Philip Bourne, the newly-appointed Associate Director for Data Science at the National Institutes of Health, will deliver the opening keynote address.

There is growing momentum on many fronts of the burgeoning movement towards "open." Advances in the areas of open access to articles, data, and educational resources have grown exponentially since the last SPARC Open Access Meeting was convened in 2012.  As this push for greater openness continues, these three fronts are intersecting in interesting and potentially transformative ways.  The 2014 SPARC Open Access Meeting will delve into this theme of "convergence”.

The opening keynote will tie together what is happening in these "open" movements from a practical and policy standpoint; how this will directly impact academia, the research community, and society-at-large; and examine where the larger “open movement” might be headed.  Dr. Bourne is uniquely qualified to lead this discussion.  Prior to joining the NIH earlier this year, he was the Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Industry Alliances of the Office of Research Affairs at the University of California San Diego.  Dr. Bourne also served as Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at UCSD. He has also been the Associate Director of the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB) Protein Data Bank (PDB).

Dr. Bourne has worked on open access, open data and open educational resources from the perspective of an administrator, a researcher, and now in his role at NIH, as a research funder.  He has long been committed to furthering the free dissemination of science through new models of publishing and better integration and subsequent dissemination of data and results.

The Program Committee is also pleased to announce our full roster of speakers for our program:

Advocacy & Policy

• Donna Arnett, Chair, Department of Epidemiology, University of Alabama-Birmingham School of Public Health
• José Cotta, Head of Unit for Digital Science, European Commission Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content & Technology
• Nick Shockey, Director of Student Advocacy, SPARC
• Timothy Vollmer, Public Policy Manager, Creative Commons

Blue Sky & The Big Picture

• Brett Bobley, Director, Office of Digital Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities
• Kelvin Droegemeier, Vice President for Research, University of Oklahoma
• Dave Ernst, Executive Director, Open Academics Textbook Initiative
• David Wiley, Co-Founder and Chief Academic Officer, Lumen Learning

Practical Implementation

• Richard Baraniuk, Founder and Director, Connexions and OpenStax College, Rice University
• Cameron Neylon, Advocacy Director, Public Library of Science
• Terri Shelton, Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development University of North Carolina at Greensboro
• Herbert Van de Sompel, Digital Library Research & Prototyping, Los Alamos National Library

Professional Development

• Connie Broughton, Director of eLearning and Open Education, Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges
• Jill Emery, Collection Development Librarian, Portland State University
• Erin McKiernan, Researcher in Medical Sciences, National Institute of Public Health, Mexico
• Jeffrey Vitter, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor, The University of Kansas

Full biographies and photos for each of our speakers will be available shortly.

SPARC is also accepting proposals for our 2014 Innovation Fair through January 17, 2014.  Please visit the submission page.

The SPARC Open Access Meeting is generously supported by: @mire, bepress, Co-action Publishing, Public Library of Science (PLOS), Symplectic and University of Kansas. For more information on sponsorship opportunities please contact Stacie Lemick at [email protected]

Register now! Early bird rates expire January 17, 2014.

Hotel reservations are available for the conference rate of $144 per night and must be made by February 6, 2014.

For more information, visit the meeting website.

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SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) is a library membership organization that promotes expanded sharing of scholarship. SPARC believes that faster and wider sharing of outputs of the research process increases the impact of research, fuels the advancement of knowledge, and increases the return on research investments. SPARC is supported by a membership of over 800 academic and research libraries worldwide. SPARC is on the Web at http://www.sparc.arl.org

As SPARC joins many of our friends and partner organizations in marking Copyright Week, we’re watching with interest as the U.S. Congress once again appears to be poised to take positive action to ensure that members of the public have ready access to articles that report on research that their tax dollars support.

After reaching bipartisan agreement on spending levels in December, the U.S. Congress this week released the final language for the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2014.  Of deep interest to our community, the bill contains language that directs the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and Education to make articles reporting on their funded research freely available online to the public in machine readable form no later than 12 months after publication in a peer reviewed journal.

Section 527 of the proposed legislation reads: “Each Federal agency, or in the case of an agency with multiple bureaus, each bureau (or operating division) funded under this Act that has research and development expenditures in excess of $100,000,000 per year shall develop a Federal research public access policy that provides for:

• The submission to the agency, agency bureau, or designated entity acting on behalf of the agency, a machine-readable version of the author’s final peer-reviewed manuscripts that have been accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals describing research supported, in whole or in part, from funding by the Federal Government;

• Free online public access to such final peer-reviewed manuscripts no later than 12 months after the official date of publication and

• Compliance with all relevant copyright laws.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted to approve on this measure earlier today, with the U.S. Senate slated to follow with a vote by the end of this week.

It’s particularly fitting that this news is surfacing today. Each day of Copyright Week is devoted to discussion, education and action on a specific principle, and today has been designated as the day to support the principle that “the results of publicly funded research should be made freely available to the public online, to be fully used by anyone, anywhere, anytime.”

If this measure passes, it will build on the momentum towards this principle first established by the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy, and more recently advanced by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Directive on Public Access to Publicly Funded Research Results.  We’ll be watching the progress of this legislation closely, and hope to be able to report its successful passage before the close of the week.

Another free SPARC online event
Tuesday, January 14th, 2014
12:00 - 1:00PM EDT use helpful time converter
Registration is free, but required. Please RSVP by January 10th.
This webcast requires both a phone dial-in and an Internet connection.

Open Access Week events showcased the many ways people across the globe informed staff, faculty, and students to the benefits of Open Access. While there have been many advancements made here in the U.S. and the U.K., developing countries have utilized new publishing models to capitalize on opening up research results and data. Latin America, in particular has seen unprecedented surge in advocacy for public access –Argentina now has legislation that requires all publicly funded research be available in open access interoperable institutional repositories.

Using an Open Access peer-review model for their repository, the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) has gained a positive reputation across the globe –now has on average over one million articles downloaded from the their site each day and their journals currently boast almost 10 million citations.

Our guest speaker, Nicholas Cop, is the Founder and President of Nicholas Cop Consulting, LLC and consultant on the SciELO program. SciELO began in 1998 as an e-journal initiative funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation. SciELO publishes over 1000 journal titles mainly from Latin America and Caribbean but also including Portugal, Spain and South Africa.

Nicholas will provide background and updates on Open Access in Latin America and the many developments SciELO is undertaking.

To accommodate interest in every time zone, this 1-hour event will be recorded and available on our website shortly afterwards.

Please join us for a lively and interactive discussion. SPARC’s Executive Director, Heather Joseph, will be moderating questions during the webcast. Feel free to post preliminary comments and questions for Nicholas right here.

For additional information, contact SPARC’s Communication’s Manager, Andrea Higginbotham at andrea [at] arl [dot] org.

Related: SPARC feature article on Open Access in Latin America.

Saturday marked the one-year anniversary of the tragic death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet icon, web activist, and computer genius, who fought tirelessly for open access to information and the free diffusion of knowledge. Aaron believed that knowledge should be freely available to everyone across the globe, and although we have by no means reached this lofty goal, by any measure, 2013 was a watershed year for the Open Access movement.

In February, the White House announced a landmark policy Directive, a major achievement for both open access and open government, which calls on federal agencies with annual research and development budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with free and unlimited online access to the results of that research no more than 12 months after publication in a peer reviewed journal.

A major bill was introduced in Congress, the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act, which would require federal agencies with research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to articles reporting on federally funded research no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The bipartisan, bicameral bill builds upon the success of the NIH public access policy model – a 2008 model that opened the gateway to the human genome project and more recently the brain mapping initiative. These landmark programs demonstrate quite clearly how opening up access to taxpayer funded research can accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and lead to innovative new treatments and technologies.

We saw a growing trend of higher education institutions actively working to maximize access to and sharing of research results. In California, a huge victory was reached with the passage of an Open Access Policy ensuring that future research authored by faculty at all ten University of California campuses will be made available to the public free of charge. UC is the first major U.S. system to pass a system-wide Open Access policy, building on the example set by dozens of individual schools, ranging from Harvard University to MIT, the University of Kansas to Oberlin College who now explicitly make their research available to the public online, at no cost.

For the first time, we saw policy action around Open Access on the state level as well. Strong Open Access legislation was introduced in California and New York, and Open Access also moved forward in Illinois with the passage of legislation in August – with more on the horizon for 2014.

Internationally, the European Commission affirmed the principle of Open Access to the results of publicly funded research across the European Union. Horizon 2020, the EU’s largest-ever research and innovation program, requires that articles reporting on the results of the more than 80 billion Euros in scientific research it funds be made openly accessible to the public no later than six months after publication in the life and physical sciences, and 12 months in humanities and social sciences. New Open Access legislation also passed in Argentina and Peru, with proposed legislation on the books in numerous countries around the world.

As we look to 2014, there’s still a great deal of work to be done. The White House Memorandum called on federal agencies and departments to submit a draft plan to the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) by August 22, 2013; however, none have been publically released. Transparency is a necessary 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.

There are also attempts to roll back the progress made in the Directive. For example, one section of the FIRST Act circulating in Congress must be stopped. It would slow the pace of science by restricting public access to articles reporting on federally funded research for up to three years after initial publication. This stands in stark contrast to the policies in use around the world, which call for maximum embargo periods of no more than six to 12 months.

Instead of imposing roadblocks such as this language in FIRST and other initiatives that limit public access, we must actively support federal agencies’ effective implementation of the White House Directive and legislation such as FASTR.

Today, we honor Aaron Swartz’s memory and commend other activists whose commitment never waivers and who keep pushing us toward better and more modern policy.