UK to science publishers: don’t follow recording industry down the tubes

There's been a growing push to get more scientific research out from behind paywalls. The federal government, private funding bodies, and a number of research institutions have all adopted policies that either mandate or encourage placing papers where the public can view them. Now, it appears that the UK is considering following suit. In addition to planning to make its researchers' publications available, the country's science minister has asked Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales to advise it on how to make the underlying data accessible.

The announcements came in a speech by David Willetts, the UK's Minister of State for Universities and Science. Willets was pretty blunt about access to government-funded research, saying, "As taxpayers put their money towards intellectual inquiry, they cannot be barred from then accessing it."

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Harvard Library: subscriptions too costly, faculty should go open access

The problems with state funding may be hitting public schools hard, but even some parts of elite private institutions are feeling the sting of rising prices. That was the message sent by the Harvard Library's Faculty Advisory Council, which says the costs of subscriptions to major research journals "cannot be sustained." It says that the cost of these journals has gone up by 145 percent over the last six years and, if things continue at that pace, it'll be forced to cut back.

Just to put this in context, the total cost for subscriptions is $3.75 million a year. As of the end of the last fiscal year, Harvard's endowment was $32 billion. If it received a similar rate of return on its investments as it did last year, it would take it about five and a half hours for its endowment to cover this cost.

In any case, the Faculty Advisory Council is fed up with rising costs, forced bundling of low- and high-profile journals, and subscriptions that run into the tens of thousands of dollars. So, it's suggesting that the rest of the Harvard faculty focus on open access publishing. The statement calls on the faculty to "move prestige to open access" and to consider resigning if they're on the editorial board of a subscription journal.

None of this is binding, and there's a very good chance that if a researcher gets an opportunity to publish in Nature, they'll take it. But it's another sign of a general dissatisfaction with the current state of academic publishing, which was what spawned the open access movement originally, and has more recently given rise to a large boycott of the publisher Elsevier.

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Fake Elsevier’s complaints about academic publishing leads to fake takedown notice

Currently, any research funded by the NIH is made open access within a year of its publication. Many academic publishers have been pushing to have the policy reversed, and a bill introduced earlier this year would have done exactly that. This triggered a public backlash, including a boycott of medical and scientific publisher Elsevier. The publishers have since backed off, and the bill was withdrawn. That hasn't, however, stopped the boycott—its support of the bill was just one of a long list of issues academics have with Elsevier. And, in the intervening months, one researcher has turned to a bit of guerilla public relations, starting a Fake Elsevier blog and Twitter account.

Yesterday, however, the Fake Elsevier parody took a turn for the absurd. Via Twitter, the account received notification that it was violating Elsevier's trademark. Even as other users pointed out that the account was an obvious parody and was unlikely to be confused with the real thing (two relevant legal standards), Fake Elsevier stumbled across the account of the real version's company spokesman, Tom Reller.

Reller, for his part, seemed surprised to hear about the kerfuffle. In a series of tweets, he detailed his efforts to work his way through the company hierrarchy, trying to find out who had actually filed the complaint. After coming up blank, his most recent status report indicated "we're trying to tell Twitter the official trademark holder wants it withdrawn." The whole incident reveals how social media platforms can allow one grumpy academic to set the wheels of a large, for-profit institution moving, simply due to the threat of bad PR. At the same time, it points out the limitations of many of these platforms, which often feel compelled to act without first determining the facts behind a complaint.

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Etc: Elsevier, a major academic publisher, has backed away from legislation that would overturn the open access policy that governs research funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Elsevier, a major academic publisher, has backed away from legislation that would overturn the open access policy that governs research funded by the National Institutes of Health.

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WHO calls for publication of the full details of the new avian flu virus

When it infects humans, the avian flu is unusually lethal, killing over half the people who come down with symptoms. But, so far at least, the virus has only spread from birds to humans, and not between humans. Recently, some labs evolved a version of the avian flu that can be transmitted among ferrets while retaining its lethal nature. The researchers who did this work sequenced the flu genome, identified all the genetic changes, and sent publications in to Science and Nature.

That's where things got complicated, with the journals delaying publication and the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity stepping in. The end result was a moratorium on further research, with the journals discussing publishing a censored form of the original papers. During this pause, the World Health Organization convened its own panel of experts who released a statement on Friday, calling for the moratorium on new research to be extended, and saying that the papers should be published in full, even if that means an extensive delay.

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New bill would make open access to federal research mandatory

For the last several years, research funded by the National Institutes of Health has been subject to its public access policy, which ensures that resulting research publications are made open access within a year of their publication. For almost as long, some members of Congress have been trying to overturn that policy, which some publishers fear will cut into their revenues. The latest attempt, the Research Works Act, was introduced in January, and would allow any publisher to keep papers in its journals from being made open access.

Today, some members of Congress have introduced a bill that would not only support the NIH policy, but expand it. The Federal Research Public Access Act is being introduced in both the House and Senate, with a bipartisan group of sponsors in each body. The act would significantly shorten the waiting period between publication in a subscription journal and the point where a paper is made open access, dropping it from a year to six months. It would also expand the scope of the policy, applying it to any federal agency with a budget of $100 million or more.

The bill argues that "the research, if shared and effectively disseminated, will advance science and improve the lives and welfare of people of the United States and around the world." To that end, each agency will be required to ensure that publication doesn't interfere with their right to reproduce the paper, and create a online public repository that will house the works once they become open access. Preliminary data, such as lab notes and meeting presentations, are specifically excluded from this requirement.

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New bill would make open access to federal research mandatory

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Resignations, fallout from recent bizarre scientific publications

The strange paper that made its way from an obscure journal called Life to headlines at a number of ostensible news sites has continued to make waves this week. As we noted in our update to the story, Case Western Reserve University not only removed the press release from its site, but is now undertaking a review of how press releases are handled by that office. Presumably, they'll consider mechanisms that will allow a press officer to exercise some judgement before acceding to a request by a faculty member that wants to see his or her work promoted.

But that's not the only place where people are undertaking a bit of reevaluation. Science journalist Carl Zimmer noticed that a member of Life's editorial board had been a source for a recent story, so he got in touch to ask about its editorial practices. After looking into the matter, the scientist resigned from the board; Zimmer found that he wasn't the only one, as a number of other names have been removed from Life's webpages. LiveScience also heard of a number of resignations.

This wasn't the only recent paper that's causing a similar response. Nature News is reporting that at least one editor is resigning from the journal that published a paper that attempted to cast doubt on the well-established fact that HIV causes AIDS. In both cases, the editor who handled the papers have claimed that they went through the journals' standard review process.

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Researchers boycott publisher; will they embrace instant publishing?

Many scientists were miffed by the introduction of the Research Works Act, which would roll back the US government's open access policy for research it funds. Some of that annoyance was directed toward the commercial publishers that were supporting the bill. That, combined with a series of grievances about the pricing policies of one publisher, Elsevier, has now led a number of scientists to start a boycott—they won't publish in or review for journals from that publisher.

At the moment, the site where the academics are organizing the boycott is down, but the signatories were heavily biased towards math and the physical sciences.

This wasn't the only news from the publishing world, however. The Faculty of 1000 is a site that organizes what's been termed "post-publication peer review." Instead of reviewing publications prior to their being published, the Faculty of 1000 comments on papers in their areas of research after they've been published, adding an additional layer of quality and sanity checking (something that, unfortunately, is often needed).

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Here we go again: Congress considers blocking government’s open access policy

The federal government, and thus US taxpayers, provide more money for scientific research than any other single entity. In order to provide access to these paper to scientists and the public alike, the National Institutes of Health adopted a policy in which research it funded would be made open access one year after its publication in journals, even those that are normally subscription only. Many publishers were not amused, and have pushed Congress to reverse the policy. So far, those efforts have failed, but that hasn't stopped this year's Congress from trying again.

This year's version, entitled the Research Works Act, is remarkably simplified compared to previous versions. Its two clauses would require that everyone involved in the paper—all authors, the institutions they worked at, and, most significantly, the publisher—agree before a work can be made open access by the NIH or other federal agencies. As some journals have supported the policy, this would create chaos, because it would be impossible to tell which works would be made open access without a list of every publisher's policy.

This time, however, the attempt seems to have drawn more attention from both the mainstream press and scientific community; one scientist has even looked into the campaign donations given to one of the bill's supporters. Given that past bills never got very far, the additional resistance will probably be enough to keep this year's from passing.

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