Wellcome throws its weight behind Open Access

The Wellcome Trust, Britain's largest medical research charity, announces policy changes and plans to establish an Open Access archive.

Mark Walport

All researchers funded by the Wellcome Trust will be required to deposit electronic versions of their peer-reviewed research articles in a public-access archive within six months of publication, according to policy changes announced in November by the Trust's Director, Mark Walport. In a letter sent on November 1, 2004, to all UK university vice-chancellors Walport said that the Trust will provide grantees with additional funding to cover the publishing costs levied by Open Access publishers.

Walport also announced that the Trust is working in partnership with the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) to establish a European mirror site for PubMed Central, the free biomedical research electronic archive maintained by NLM. "We are determined to make the results of the research we fund freely available to anyone who wants them," said Walport. "We believe that central archives are the way to achieve this. The outcome of research is new knowledge about disease and health. Maximizing the value of research means maximizing the distribution of the results."

The Trust believes that that open archives will best serve the needs of the research community, research funders and the general public. Walport feels that research funders need a freely accessible central archive of research, based around subject areas. "This is an essential part of the assessment and evaluation of the research they fund - from grant submission right through to research output and dissemination," writes Walport.

The latest announcement from the Wellcome Trust follows two reports commissioned by the Trust that looked into the subject of scientific publishing. The first, in September 2003, concluded that the current system is failing science. A second study in April 2004 found that savings of up to 30% could be achieved by switching to an Open Access system. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has also proposed that the research that it funds be deposited by grantees in PubMed Central.

www.wellcome.ac.uk

NIH Director inundated with comments

The Director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been inundated with online comments about his proposal that all NIH-funded research be deposited in the organization's open archive.

Elias Zerhouni

The NIH Directorate invited the scientific community to comment on the recently proposed 'Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information' policy and offered a 60-day period to collect online comments. The proposed plan would oblige NIH-funded research to be deposited in PubMed Central, the free electronic archive run by NIH, within six months of being published.

The NIH plan has received overwhelming support from the Open Access community and harsh criticism from some traditional publishers and learned societies. "We admire your initiative and will support it in any way we can," wrote Jan Velterop, Publisher and Director of BioMed Central (which publishes Open Access Now), in a letter to NIH Director Elias Zerhouni. But the Association of American Publishers (AAP) urged members to oppose the plan, saying that "the NIH policy will harm societies, publishers, authors, and libraries, scientific discourse and scholarship."

By the November 16 deadline, an impressive 6,000 comments had been logged on the NIH website. Reports of a preliminary analysis of the comments suggested that as many as 65% of respondents had indicated that they agreed with the implementation plan of the access policy.

Zerhouni appeared encouraged by the response. He has accused some of the traditional publishers of releasing "misinformation" about the impact of the policy on subscriptions. Zerhouni, who is to submit a final version of the NIH policy to the US Congress at the beginning of December, reinforced his commitment to the proposed access policy and dismissed criticisms of the PubMed Central archive. "I'm willing to take the risk of seeing the decision made not by government but by the scientists themselves," he said. "If they don't wish to publish on the NIH website, that's their decision and the decision of their publishers, not mine."

http://www.nih.gov

Google gets scholarly

The Web search engine company Google Inc. has launched a new service dedicated to searching the scholarly literature.

Researchers have for some time been discovering that the Google search engine offers an effective way to hunt down scientific information. The process is made easier now with the launch of the Google Scholar service that only includes links to scholarly material. Google Scholar searches peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all areas of research. Google Scholar can find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, and other scholarly sources.

Google Scholar orders search results by how relevant they are to the query, so that the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. "This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature," explains the Google Scholar website. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online.

Google Scholar was warmly welcomed by Open Access publishers. "We, along with others in the scientific community, have been talking to Google about offering a service like this for some time," notes Jan Velterop, Publisher of BioMed Central (which publishes Open Access Now). "We are very pleased that they have taken this step. This will really increase the access to and visibility of research deposited in repositories - it's a huge boost to the drive to provide Open Access to research."

The Google Scholar website carries the invitation to "stand on the shoulders of giants." Users will quickly discover the powerful benefits of this new search service. But they may be disappointed when they realize that although it is relatively easy to search the scholarly literature, one will still need a subscription to read the full-text versions of many of the article links. Some Open Access advocates have suggested that the service would serve the community better if it were restricted to scanning only the Open Access literature. The Google Scholar website offers advice for those without journal subscriptions - "Check a nearby academic library, which will likely have a copy." Clearly, the more Open Access literature there is online the more this service will help all researchers to "stand on the shoulders of giants."

http://scholar.google.com

Open Access declarations in Messina and St Petersburg

A large number of academic institutions have signed Open Access declarations at meetings held in Messina, Italy and St Petersburg, Russia.

Representatives from almost half of the universities in Italy signed an Open Access declaration at a meeting held on November 4-5, 2004, at Messina on the island of Sicily. Signatories from 31 Italian universities and one research center expressed their support for the views outlined in the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. The signatories stated that "national and international academic communities feel the need to identify alternative models of scientific communication that can provide the largest dissemination and the highest impact of their research output."

The Italian meeting was attended by over 250 participants including researchers and librarians from across the country. "The impressive number of signatories (31 out of 77 Italian universities) will have a significant impact on the promotion of Open Access in Italy and probably also abroad," says Susanna Mornati, Project Leader of AEPIC (Academic E-Publishing Infrastructures Consortium). She is confident that the university administrators will involve the scholarly community and provide the necessary support to implement an Open Access policy.

A week earlier participants at an international conference in St Petersburg, Russia, added their support for information access initiatives. Over 120 participants from institutions in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzia, Moldova, Tajikistan, UK, USA and the Ukraine joined their Russian hosts to discuss library access provision and ways of implementing the Open Access recommendations formulated at the World Summit on Information Society meeting held in Geneva earlier this year. Participants at the St Petersburg meeting stated that "public authorities, as well as libraries, archives and various information providers, should assume a primary responsibility for the expansion of openness and management of information as public domain."

http://www.aepic.it