The Challenges of New Scholarly Publication Paradigms

by Professor Bob Futrelle, NU CCIS (updated 5 May 2004, original 2/2004)

Talk at: "Clearing the Barriers to Scholarly Communication: new paths to publication and information access" - A Faculty Breakfast sponsored by Northeastern University Library and the Provost's Office, April 8, 2004

Update on how the talk went: It was well-attended, with over 100 present. Guédon gave an excellent talk; see his interesting web page which covers much of what he had to say. (local NU cache of the page)

Here are some of the best-know OpenAccess journals

The Public Library of Science (PLoS), their first journal is PLoS Biology.

Biomed Central publishes a wide range of journals in the Biological and Biomedical areas.

Here are some sites about the strengths and weaknesses of the Open Access movement for scholarly publication:

• Open Access Now contains ongoing discussions of the issues, taking the positive view.
• A directory of Open Access journals.
• Extensive resources from Stevan Harnad, U. Southampton
• The journal Nature has an ongoing discussion, the access debate, including ongoing discussions, white papers, etc.
• In June, 2003, U.S. Congressman Martin O. Sabo introduced a bill that would make research funded by the American government exempt from copyright protection. This stirred up a hornet's nest of controversy. The AAU (Assoc. American Universities) feels that his proposal is overly broad and encourages more careful studies. (AAU letter, PDF)
• The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing was the result of one-day meeting held on April 11, 2003 at the headquarters of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland.
• The Budapest Open Access Initiative was a major earlier initiative. The site includes some updates since its creation in 2001. The Forum there includes contributions as recent as 7 April 2004 (checked 7 April). Postings there seem to appear at the rate of one or two a week, which keeps it timely.
• This 80-page report (PDF format), "Journals Authors Survey, by Key Perspectives, Ltd., was published in early 2004 and surveyed two sets of authors: some who had published in Open Access journals and some who had not. Besides statistics and analysis of responses, it includes many verbatim responses to questions. An interesting and useful report.
• On March 22, 2004, Biomed Central released a document prefaced by, "In the evidence presented to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Inquiry into Scientific Publications, many dubious arguments have been used by traditional publishers to attack the new Open Access publishing model." Here is the BMC Press Release and here is the full document, "(Mis)Leading Open Access Myths", also, this PDF, local NU copy. In addition, here is an entire page, with a variety of links, about the House of Commons Science & Technology Committee Inquiry into Scientific Publications, which includes the "Myths" document, among many others. (Another meeting by the committee is being held 21 April 2004, so there will be further updates then and beyond.)

Data mining Data mining is the discovery, extraction and subsequent organization and use of content, in our context, the content of scholarly literature (also called text mining). I (Futrelle) have been involved in this area of research for over twenty years. For much of that time the research has been limited by the fact that all of the journals which have useful information have been unavailable in electronic form, or when available, restricted by copyright. Here is an article from Open Access Now on Data Mining, including comments by me. Here is a PDF version of the issue, including the article on data mining.

Here's a link to a page describing a free book Enrico Fermi-The Master Scientist by Jay Orear, Issued 27-Jan-2004 by the Internet-First University Press of Cornell University. They use the DSpace system from MIT and Hewlett-Packard.

Other free books include those from Ergito.com, and the on biology. NCBI (at NIH) has freely searchable books here. PubMed Central (at NIH) links to many journals of which most are copyrighted, but many of them offer free access after 6 months or a year of publication.

A page on a talk I gave to a student group here is a reasonable summary of my background and research. Another quite recent site explaining some of my work is here, a set of pages prepared for a talk to Honors freshman in the College of Computer and Information Science, February and March, 2004.

I will occasionally update this page, but make no promises. Google will continue to find much for you, using the quoted phrase "open access". -- RPF