Richard Poynder is an independent journalist and blogger specialising in information technology,
scholarly communication, professional
online database services,
open science,
e-Science, and
intellectual property. Richard takes a particular in interest in the
Open Access movement, whose development he has been following for more than a decade. More information is available here.
Recent Articles and Interviews
Interview with Carlos Rossel, Publisher at the World Bank
(Open & Shut?, April 2012)
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| Carlos Rossel |
“The Bank is committed to sharing our data, knowledge and analysis with others in the search for development solutions. By making Bank research and knowledge products published by the Bank available libre OA, third parties are free to use, reuse, and build upon the Bank’s work in ways that can lead to innovative solutions to local development problems.”
When Jim Yong Kim takes office as the new president of the World Bank on 1st July, he will be the first development professional to head the Bank. That is new. But it is not all that is new at the World Bank. The new president will inherit an organisation that has undergone a lot of navel gazing over the past few years. Its conclusion: the Bank needs to rethink the way it operates.
The outgoing president of the Bank Robert Zoellick gave some insight into the Bank’s internal deliberations in a speech at Georgetown University in September 2010. Significantly, Zoellick acknowledged that pushing top-down economic solutions that were baked in the West on developing countries can no longer be viewed as adequate. Read more »
World Bank to Introduce Open Access Policy
(Open & Shut?, April 2012)
 The World Bank has announced today that it is introducing an Open Access (OA) policy. This will mandate that World Bank research outputs and knowledge products are deposited in a newly-created institutional repository called the Open Knowledge Repository (OKR), which will be freely accessible on the Internet.
In addition, the Bank will become the first major international organisation to make much of its research output available under Creative Commons licensing. As a result, any user in the world will be able to read, download, save, copy, print, reuse and link to the full text of the World Bank’s work, free of charge. Read more »
RUP’s Mike Rossner: Doing what’s right
(Open & Shut?, March 2012)
Scholarly publishing is going through some hectic times. At the beginning of the year it was engulfed in the controversy over the Research Works Act (RWA), which would have rolled back the Public Access Policy introduced by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2005, and forbidden other federal agencies from introducing similar policies.
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| Mike Rossner |
Confronted by an outcry from the research community, publishers began to distance themselves from the act, or they dithered, and the saga ended in a big win for the Open Access (OA) movement.
Hot on the heels of the RWA comes the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). This would achieve the very opposite of the RWA: It would strengthen the NIH Policy by reducing the embargo period before research papers must be made freely available online, from 12 months to six months; and it would require that all the major agencies of the federal government introduce the new strengthened policy.
Right now the FRPAA is still alive and kicking, but under attack from publishers, who have described it as “little more than an attempt at intellectual eminent domain, but without fair compensation to authors and publishers.” Read more »
Open Access, brick by brick
(Open & Shut?, March 2012)
Last month Elsevier withdrew its support for the controversial Research Works Act (RWA). Had it become law, the RWA would have rolled back the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy requiring that funded researchers make their papers freely available on the Web within 12 months of publication. It would also have outlawed other US federal agencies from introducing similar policies. As such, the bill was a direct assault on Green Open Access. But while Elsevier’s retreat was a big win for supporters of Open Access (OA), OA will continue to be a brick-by-brick process — as evidenced by recent events in Australia.
 In stepping away from the RWA, Elsevier acknowledged that it had made a strategic mistake. It clearly also made a serious PR gaffe. Whether the company has done lasting damage to its relationship with the research community remains uncertain, but the fact that researchers are continuing to sign up to the boycott Elsevier web site — created in protest at the publisher’s support for the bill — must clearly be a cause for concern. Read more »
Interview with Claudio Aspesi: Where is Plan B?
(Open & Shut?, March 2012)
To the intense joy of Open Access (OA) advocates, Elsevier announced Monday that it has withdrawn its support for the controversial US Research Works Act (RWA). Shortly afterwards, it was reported that the two sponsors of the bill — Representatives Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) — would not be “taking legislative action” on the RWA. In short, the bill is now dead on its feet.
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| Claudio Aspesi |
One person who took particular note of the news was Claudio Aspesi, a senior research analyst at the sell-side research firm Sanford Bernstein. Aspesi tracks Elsevier for investors, so on Tuesday he published a new report on the company. While welcoming Elsevier's decision, Aspesi concluded, “Consensus is still treating Elsevier’s problems as cyclical, in spite of the rising evidence the issues are deeper”. So when I received a copy of the report I took it as a sign that it was time to re-interview Aspesi. The interview follows my own thoughts on the current situation below.
The RWA was introduced into the House of Representatives at the end of last year. Had it become law, the bill would have reversed the 2005 National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy requiring that taxpayer-funded research is made freely accessible online within 12 months of publication. It would also have prevented other federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on their funded researchers. Read more »
The OA Interviews: Michael Eisen, Public Library of Science
(Open & Shut?, February 2012)
Michael Eisen is an
evolutionary biologist at University of California Berkeley and an
Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
He is also co-founder of the Open Access (OA)
publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS).
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| Michael Eisen |
Founded in
2000, PLoS was conceived as an advocacy group
for what only later became known as Open
Access. PLoS’ first initiative was to publish
an Open Letter and
invite scientists around the world to sign on
to it.
Those signing
pledged that henceforth they would “publish
in, edit or review for, and personally
subscribe to only those scholarly and
scientific journals that have agreed to grant
unrestricted free distribution rights to any
and all original research reports that they
have published, through PubMed Central and
similar online public resources, within 6
months of their initial publication date.”
Nearly 34,000
scientists from 180 countries signed the
pledge; but while a small handful of
publishers complied with the demands outlined
in the letter, most blithely ignored it.
Worse, most of the scientist signatories
proved happy to forswear their own pledge, and
continue publishing in the very journals that
had turned a deaf ear to them.
Disappointed
but undeterred, Eisen and the other two PLoS
co-founders — biochemist Patrick Brown,
and Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus — reinvented the organisation as a non-profit
publisher, and in 2003 they launched an OA
journal called PLoS Biology. PLoS Medicine followed
a year later. Read more »
Interview with Elsevier's Alicia Wise
(Open & Shut?, February 2012)
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| Alicia
Wise |
In recent years I have noticed that it is pretty
difficult for journalists not attached to big
media to obtain interviews with Elsevier
executives — except where the purpose of the
interview is to talk about a new product, or the
company’s latest financial results. Certainly,
Elsevier has appeared very reluctant to talk about
Open Access (OA).
This led me to conclude that the company believes it
only needs to talk to two groups of people: its
shareholders and its customers — where customer
implies not the researchers whose papers provide the
content published in its journals, but the
librarians who purchase those journals, invariably
by means of the controversial Big Deal (aka “bundling”). Read more »
The
OA Interviews: Jan Velterop
(Open & Shut?, February 2012)
In the world of scholarly publishing,
Jan Velterop is a
well-regarded “old hand”. But an old hand who has
shown himself to be very receptive to new ways of
doing things.
 He began his publishing career at
Elsevier in the mid-1970s, and subsequently
worked for a number of other leading publishers,
including
Academic Press,
Nature, and
Springer. Unlike many of his colleagues,
however, Velterop has always been willing to embrace new
ideas, and new models, particularly those made possible
by the Internet.
While at Academic Press in the
mid-1990s, Velterop was one of the architects of what
was to become known as the
Big Deal — an arrangement by which large
bundles of electronic journals are sold on multi-year
“all you can eat” contracts. While the Big Deal has now
fallen into disfavour, it was a revolutionary
development in the world of scholarly publishing, and
remains a very significant part of the landscape.
In 2000, Velterop joined
BioMed Central, the first commercial
open-access science publisher, and in 2001 he was one of
a small group of people who gathered together in
Budapest to
discuss, “the international effort to make
research articles in all academic fields freely
available on the internet.”
It was at that meeting that the Open Access movement was
born, along with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), and the BOAI statement — “the
clearest and most generic of what Open Access means and
should mean”, suggests Velterop.
Read more »
The OA Interviews: Francis Jayakanth
(Open & Shut? January 2012)
Like members of all movements, OA advocates come in all shapes and sizes, and they are driven by a variety of different motives. Some have embraced
OA, for instance, because they see it as a good business
opportunity, some because they want their research to be more accessible, and
so have greater impact, some because they expect it will save their institution large sums of money, and some simply because they believe that OA holds out the promise of providing
considerable common good.
 |
| Francis Jayakanth |
What is
distinctive
about the Open Access (OA)
movement, however, is that it is a leaderless
revolution. There is no formal
organisation or foundation to represent it, and there is no official leader. For all that, OA is
generally associated with a small group of high-profile
Western-based individuals and organisations that are
extremely vocal in their support of OA, and who have shown themselves to be very successful at attracting
attention.
Since
all movements have to promote themselves effectively this is clearly a good
thing.
However, it does mean that the contribution of the many “foot soldiers” of the movement can too easily be overlooked. These are people who do not shout about their activities, but simply go about the business of facilitating
OA quietly and modestly.
And it is the foot soldiers based in the developing world that tend to be least visible — people
like Francis Jayakanth, a library-trained
scientific assistant based at the National Centre for Science Information (NCSI), the information centre of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore. Read more »
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