Digital Library Center Blog | UF

International Publishers and Librarians Agree to Enhance The Debate on Open Access

Geneva/The Hague 20 May 2009 - For immediate release

A joint statement released today by the International Publishers Association, the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical (STM) Publishers, and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) calls for a more rational, evidence based debate on open access. It encourages experimentation and piloting of new concepts and ideas, whilst acknowledging that the differences in the different academic disciplines and publishing traditions may lead to differentiated approaches and business models in support of authors.

The joint statement is intended to move the oftentimes heated and polarised debate about open access as a model for scholarly communication towards a more measured and nuanced discourse.

Says IPA President Herman P. Spruijt “The debate about open access is important and publishers welcome it. Publishing is never at a standstill and we should not fear change. Now that more experience has been gained with open access publishing and now that data is available on its success, the open access debate should be able to move away from emotional accusations and oversimplification. Our discussions with IFLA on this topic are always spirited, but have become more insightful and less polarised as we moved towards facts, evidence and differentiated arguments. There is a lesson here to be learned for the public debate on this issue.”

Says IFLA Working Group co-chairman Ingrid Parent: “IFLA is pleased to announce the joint declaration on open access with IPA. This statement shows that both our associations share the important objective of providing the broadest possible access to information. IFLA and IPA believe publishers and librarians have a lot to gain by supporting innovation, experimentation and pilot projects in developing open access to scholarly publications.”

Notes for Editors:
The full text of the statement is available here.

More about IPA:
The International Publishers Association (IPA) is an international industry federation representing all aspects of book and journal publishing. Established in 1896, IPA’s mission is to promote and protect publishing and to raise awareness for publishing as a force for economic, cultural and political development. Around the world IPA actively fights against censorship and promotes copyright, literacy and freedom to publish.

More about IFLA:
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) is the leading international body representing the interests of library and information services and their users. It is the global voice of the library and information profession. IFLA promotes the principles of freedom of access to information, ideas and works of imagination and freedom of expression. The delivery of high quality and equitable library and information services helps guarantee that access and improve the social, educational, cultural, democratic and economic well-being of those communities and organizations libraries serve. IFLA has 1600 Members in approximately 150 countries around the world.

President Barack Obama has already begun implementing important changes, including restoring public access to presidential records by revoking the Bush administration’s Executive Order 13233. The text for President Obama’s executive order is available on the Whitehouse website.

Before the Internet made information access faster and easier (and it continues to improve), libraries were already mass-sharing information through interlibrary loan. Interlibrary loan is such a simple concept–libraries share books with other libraries–but it was and continues to be carefully planned and implemented to ensure availability and access through cooperative collection plans, lists of records and methods for disseminating them (National Union Catalog, publishing bibliographies of what books were where), and agreements to make sure users know about the materials in order to request them.

Thanks to interlibrary loan systems everywhere for making information available and accessible. Making information findable, available, and usable is always something to celebrate, especially when they’ve been doing it for so very long. The original interlibrary groups have expanded, merged, and reformed, but some carry on under the same names like Florida’s interlibrary loan network, FLIN (The Florida Library Information Network) which turns 40 this year. Over those years FLIN has shared 6.6 million items, or 167,000 items a year! Congratulations to FLIN! And, congratulations to all of the interlibrary loan networks celebrating another year or another decade of service!

The Internet is now the main information source for many, but making the Internet really work (with information on where to find information, the information wanted) begins with the infrastructure for information access. Information architectures, systems for finding and accessing information, and making sure that information is in the best form possible has been a long tradition within interlibrary loan and with the subsequent technologies it employed, including facsimiles, microfilm (or microphotography), electronic, and digital. Without the systems for interlibrary loan, we wouldn’t be able to access many books in print and our digital-only systems wouldn’t have had the benefit of the painstaking work done through postal/train/car/horse/shoe/sneaker/net of interlibrary loan.

As this year comes to a close, thanks to all of the interlibrary loan services who have shared so much!

UF’s Florida Free Culture student group will be having it’s first meeting of the semester on Monday, October 13, at 7:00 pm in Reitz Union 288. FFC is an organization that advocates for copyright law reform, the use of open source software, and fights for your rights online. Free food will be provided! For more information about FFC, see their website: http://uf.freeculture.org/.

While I can’t make this meeting, I’d recommend it to anyone who can. FFC is a great advocacy group to promote awareness and as a ways for finding the means to do needed work. Copyright law reform is desperately needed, as is a greater awareness of copyright (many academic authors have their rights returned to them for published books and they often aren’t even aware of it; academic authors often have the right to put their pre-prints on their website or in their institutional repository), and greater awareness of the costs of free culture (”free as in freedom, not free beer”) and greater advocacy is also needed to develop support for the much cheaper and more beneficial free culture as opposed to proprietary, closed, and expensive systems that hold too much information right now.

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The Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library is pleased to announce the availability of a new open access monograph, Economics and Usage of Digital Libraries: Byting the Bullet, edited by Wendy Pradt Lougee (University Librarian, University of Minnesota) and Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason (Arthur W. Burks Collegiate Professor of Information and Computer Science, School of Information, University of Michigan). In the late 1990’s, researchers and digital  library production staff at the University of Michigan collaborated on deploying the Pricing Economic Access to Knowledge project (PEAK), a full-scale production-quality digital access system to enable usage of content  from all of Elsevier’s (then about 1200) scholarly journals, and at the same  time to conduct a field experiment to answer various questions about the  interplay between pricing models and usage. The experiment culminated in a lively conference that engaged scholars, library practitioners and publishers. This volume captures some of the most interesting and provocative discussions to come out of that conference. PEAK was a ground-breaking effort in its day, and references to the project have continued over time. It raised important questions about the potential for highly functional journal content and new economic models of publishing. In today’s context of socially-enabled systems and open-access publishing, the motivating questions of PEAK remain relevant.

This monograph is part of the SPO Scholarly Monograph Series, an interdisciplinary collection of original, open-access scholarly monographs and essays. The University of Michigan Library, through its Scholarly Publishing Office, provides academic publishing services that are responsive to the needs of both producers and users, that foster a sustainable economic model for academic  publishing, and that support institutional control of intellectual assets.

Washington, DC - August 28, 2008 - SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and Students for FreeCulture have jointly announced the first international Open Access Day. Building on the worldwide momentum toward Open Access to publicly funded research, Open Access Day will create a key opportunity for the higher education community and the general public to understand more clearly the opportunities of wider access and use of content.

Open Access Day will invite researchers, educators, librarians, students, and the public to participate in live, worldwide broadcasts of events. In North America, events will be held at 7:00 PM (Eastern) and 7:00 PM (Pacific) and feature appearances from:

Sir Richard Roberts, Ph.D., F.R.S. Joint winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1993 for discovering split genes and RNA splicing, one of 26 Nobel Prize-winners to sign the Open Letter to U.S. Congress in support of taxpayer access to publicly funded research, and currently at New England Biolabs, USA. [7PM Eastern]

Philip E. Bourne, Ph.D., is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Computational Biology and the author of the popular PLoS Computational Biology Ten Simple Rules Series. He is Professor in the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego, Associate Director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank, Senior Advisor to the San Diego Supercomputer Center, an Adjunct Professor at the Burnham Institute, and Co-Founder of SciVee. [7PM Pacific]

Librarians and student organizers are invited to host meetings around the broadcast. To see a list of participating campuses and to sign up, visit the Open Access Day Web site. Additional international events will be announced shortly.

The event will also mark the launch of the new “Voices of Open Access Video Series.” Key members of the research community, including a teacher, librarian, researcher, student, patient advocate, and a funder, will speak on why they are committed to Open Access.

“The momentum behind Open Access to research has been accelerating for some time now, even before the mandates at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Harvard University,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. “Events beyond the U.S. especially underscore the higher education community’s commitment to having the access they need. Open Access Day will provide a perfect way for folks to come together, consider, and celebrate the ramifications of the global shift we’re experiencing.”

“Open Access Day is a great opportunity to inform everyone on campus about the nature and importance of Open Access,” added Nelson Pavlosky, Co-Founder of Students for FreeCulture. “It’s really an issue that impacts everyone in the university, whether they are professors who
publish, students who research, or librarians who purchase journal subscriptions. Students for FreeCulture looks forward to working with SPARC and PLoS to inform our peers, as well as faculty, staff and administration, about how Open Access can help bring publishing into the
21st Century.”

“Making full use of the Internet to share and reuse content without restriction is pushing scientific communication into the future,” said Peter Jerram, CEO of PLoS. “Open Access Day acknowledges the enormous progress that’s been made towards comprehensive access to research. We are pleased to be partnering with the community on this special day. We
would ask our supporters to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the commencement of our publishing activities in October by participating.”

Open Access Day was inspired by the National Day of Action on February 15, 2007, led by Students for FreeCulture with support from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. This year, the same partners have joined forces with PLoS, the Open Access scientific and medical Web publisher. Open Access-supporting organizations are also invited to take part. For details, contact the organizers.

For details and to participate, visit http://www.openaccessday.org/

The First Executive Director of the Open Content Alliance has been appointed and CIDE (Data Intensive Cyber Environments group) has joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science. These are two recent news releases that show the expanding happenings and possibilities for digital libraries, collections, and collaboration!

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Maura Marx Named First Executive Director of the Open Content Alliance

The Internet Archive and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced today the appointment of Maura Marx as the first Executive Director of the Open Content Alliance (OCA). A search committee representing OCA member institutions made the appointment after an intensive search process. Ms. Marx will move to the OCA from the Boston Public Library, where she most recently founded the Digital Library Program and was instrumental in evolving the Library’s philosophy toward Open Content principles.

The Open Content Alliance is an international alliance of leading academic and cultural heritage institutions working to build joint digital collections for free public access.  Ms. Marx has been appointed to the new position of Executive Director in order to expand its activities as the preeminent center in the world for promoting the creation and open sharing of digital content.

“Maura’s background in working both inside and outside the library system will help her communicate with a broad public audience the shape of the new public library services in this digital age.” said Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive.  “Her dynamic style, deep-seated commitment to open principles, and demonstrated success at implementing partnerships and initiatives in the digital space will be a powerful combination in taking the OCA to the next level.”

“We are delighted that Maura will take on this leadership role at such an important juncture for the organization.  The Open Content Alliance represents the largest group of libraries, universities and cultural heritage institutions in the world supporting a universal digital library that is truly open, non-profit, and non-exclusive” said Doron Weber, Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “Maura will help to turn the OCA into a stand-alone membership organization that will play a leadership role on the national and global stage. ”

“Over the past three years members of the OCA have made incredibly important strides toward building a truly open digital information commons and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to lead the organization to new levels of growth and collaboration.” Marx said.

Among Ms. Marx’s first actions will be incorporation of the OCA in the State of Massachusetts and creation of a Board of Directors. She will focus on building collaborations across institutional boundaries, expanding the OCA community and becoming involved in public policy advocacy efforts.

Ms. Marx began her career in Europe in development for the arts with organizations including the Guggenheim Museum (Salzburg) and Warner Brothers.  She then worked as an executive in the U.S. technology sector before coming to the library world.  Her accomplishments have included strategic planning, fundraising, technology planning and public relations for organizations at varying stages of growth. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Digital Commonwealth, the Massachusetts statewide digital library, and holds degrees from the University of Notre Dame, Middlebury College and Simmons College.

About the Open Content Alliance

The Open Content Alliance is an association of approximately 100 cultural and academic institutions, working to engage in activities that support the open sharing of information, including building joint online collections. It was founded by Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive in 2005 with 12 initial member institutions, and has grown to over 100 today.  The OCA and has collectively provided over 400,000 books for digitization and contributed them to the Internet Archive’s shared public collections. Information on member institutions and open content principles can be found on the OCA web site.

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UNC News Release

For immediate use: Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2008

Carolina attracts world-renowned large-scale data research team; DICE group joins School of Information and Library Science

CHAPEL HILL - The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is now home to the world-renowned Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) group (formerly known as Data Intensive Computing Environments group), long of the University of California, San Diego’s  Supercomputer Center.

The research team will hold appointments in Carolina’s nationally recognized School of Information and Library Science with research space in Chapel Hill’s Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). The award-winning research group brings expertise in development of digital data technologies, including open source software that enables sharing of data in collaborative research, publication of data in digital libraries, and preservation of data in persistent archives for use by future generations, along with a research portfolio exceeding $10 million.

“The opportunity to recruit an entire group of active researchers with an international reputation for vision, innovation and accomplishment is rare, perhaps even unprecedented in information and library science,” said Chancellor Holden Thorp. “Their work is closely aligned with the school’s efforts in the areas of digital libraries and archives, databases,
institutional repositories, information retrieval and information management. Our students and many others across campus will have an extraordinary opportunity to learn from and collaborate with this world-class research team.”

Research team leaders Reagan Moore, Ph.D.; Richard Marciano, Ph.D.; and Arcot Rajasekar, Ph.D.; are in the process of being appointed as full professors in the School of Information and Library Science (SILS), recognized by U.S. News and World Report magazine as the top school of its kind in the nation. Other members of the DICE group will move to Carolina in the next few months.

“The DICE group will function as a magnet for students and collaborators,” said José-Marie Griffiths, school dean. “The group will help us further extend the research computing infrastructure at UNC that will benefit us all, improve our capacity and capability to conduct larger-scale research projects, while inspiring new generations of students to understand that considerable attention and deliberate effort are needed to ensure both effective and long-term access to information.”

Group members will interact with colleagues in the school and other campus units on academic digital library and preservation research efforts, initially focusing on current collaborations such as the National Archives and Records Administration Transcontinental Persistent Archive Prototype and the National Science Foundation Software Development for Cyberinfrastructure project, along with others such as the Library of Congress Video Archiving project.

“A major challenge for the next several decades will be managing the enormous amount of digital data we create in science and research,” said Alan Blatecky, RENCI’s interim director. “The DICE group has years of experience and an international reputation for developing innovative systems for managing distributed digital data. This will be a huge
advantage for Carolina as the wave of new data rapidly becomes a tsunami. We will have the opportunity to extend our leadership nationally and internationally in managing, sharing, publishing and archiving research data.”

Other potential areas for collaboration include biomedical and health data management, grid computing and cyberinfrastructure with Carolina’s Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute and its recently announced National Institute of Health Clinical and Translational Science Award, visualization of large-scale data sets with the College of Arts and Sciences’ department of computer science and with RENCI, as well as shared institutional repositories and digital library systems with RENCI and the Triangle Research Libraries Network. Additional collaborations in the sciences, social sciences and humanities are expected.

“The DICE group, in collaboration with SILS, will pursue development of undergraduate, master’s and doctoral level courses on data grids and preservation environments,” Moore said. “The opportunity to teach academic courses strongly influenced the decision to move to SILS and UNC. We are also interested in pursuing collaborations for the creation of campus cyberinfrastructure and participating on data management projects in support of education, patient medical records and emergency preparedness.”

For more than 10 years the group’s Storage Research Broker (SRB) data grid has been used by research teams worldwide to automate all aspects of manipulation of large, distributed data files, including discovery, access, retrieval, management, replication, archiving and analysis. DICE most recently developed iRODS, the open source Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System, which introduced user-settable rules that automate complex
management policies, helping users tame today’s mushrooming collections of digital data.

The team has worked on national and international projects, providing data management systems for major grid and distributed research projects, including the Southern California Earthquake Center, the TeraGrid, the Worldwide University Network, California Digital Library-Digital Preservation Repository, the Laboratory for the Ocean Observatory Knowledge Integration Grid, the Biomedical Informatics Research Network and the
Geoscience network.

On Thursday (Aug. 29), the DICE group will receive the 2008 J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award from the Society of American Archivists during the group’s annual meeting in San Francisco. A society news release said the award honors “an individual, institution or organization that promotes greater public awareness, appreciation or support of archives. The DICE group was selected for its long-time support of and involvement in the archives profession’s work to address the challenges of managing, preserving, and providing access to electronic records.”

School of Information and Library Science Web site: http://sils.unc.edu/
RENCI Web site: http://www.renci.org/
DICE Web site: http://diceresearch.org
iRODS Web site: http://www.irods.org

I just saw this announcement and it’s great news, so I’m sharing! Open Access has done so much and has so much to, so more support is always wonderful.

Open Access Directory: A wiki to organize information about the open access movement

Boston, April 30, 2008. Peter Suber and Robin Peek have launched the Open Access Directory (OAD), a wiki where the open access community can create and maintain simple factual lists about open access to science and scholarship. Suber, a Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and Peek, an Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, conceived the project in order to collect OA-related lists for one-stop reference and searching.

The wiki will start operating with about half a dozen lists –for example, conferences devoted to open access, discussion forums devoted to open access, and journal “declarations of independence”– and add more over time.

The goal is to harness the knowledge and energy of the open access community itself to enlarge and correct the lists. A list on a wiki, revised continuously by its users, can be more comprehensive and up to date than the same list maintained by an individual. By bringing many OA-related lists together in one place, OAD will make it easier for users, especially newcomers, to discover them and use them for reference. The easier they are to maintain and discover, the more effectively they can spread useful, accurate information about open access.

The URL for the Open Access Directory is http://oad.simmons.edu

To contact us, email Athanasia Pontika, the Assistant Editor (OAD.contact@gmail.com), or the Editorial Board (OAD.editors@gmail.com).

The wiki is represented by an editorial board consisting of prominent figures in the open access movement. The Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at Simmons College hosts and provides technical support to the OAD. http://www.simmons.edu/gslis/

Washington, DC & CHICAGO ­ April 22, 2008 ­ SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) announce that the SPARC-ACRL Forum during the 2008 American Library Annual Conference in Anaheim, Calif., will provide a timely look at Campus Open Access Policies: The Harvard Experience and How to Get There. Co-sponsored by the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services up-close look at the recent vote by Harvard¹s Faculty of Arts and Sciences enabling open access to their scholarly articles in an institutional repository.The Harvard vote grants the university the rights necessary to archive and make freely available on the Internet articles written by Arts and Sciences faculty members. It is the first time the faculty of a U.S. university has voted for an open access directive and the first time a faculty has granted permission to the university to make its articles available through open access.

The forum will offer an exploration of the motivations behind the Harvard policy, the groundwork invested in its creation, reactions and outcomes to date, and the broader implications of this historic step. Headlining the event will be Stuart M. Shieber, professor of computer science at Harvard, director of the Center for Research on Computation and Society, faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and the key architect of the policy.

Shieber will be joined by Catherine Candee, executive director, Strategic Publishing and Broadcast Initiatives, from the office of the president of the University of California, who will relate similar activity in the UC system; and by Kevin L. Smith, JD, scholarly communications officer at Duke University, who will suggest legal considerations for institutions following the open access policy path.

The 17th biennial SPARC-ACRL Forum will be held from 4 ­ 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 28, in room 210 A-C of the Anaheim Convention Center. The ACRL Scholarly Communications Discussion Group will additionally host an open conversation about issues that surface at the Forum from 4 ­ 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, June 29, in room 203 B. Please consult the final program to verify room assignments.

The Forum will be available via SPARC podcast at a later date. For more information, visit the SPARC Web site.

In working on other projects, I stumbled across this poster on the Digital Library of the Caribbean from last year. The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. All materials in dLOC are Open Access for everyone to see, but any rights remain with the owners or with the contributing partners. This is a great example of collaboration creating materials for all to use, while supporting the creators and their communities and nations. The digitized materials include Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections.

The poster describes this all more fully, but I’m most impressed with the rights management and with the centralized technical infrastructure, which provides a scaffolding for new projects to begin digitization as well as an umbrella collection online to ensure that even new collections contribute to the growing critical mass of resources in a single space, allowing the searching across collections, while also allowing for individual collections to be searched on their own once ready. The poster says more though, so check it out (in Google Presentation Mode and the slide alone).