The n-Category Café

As part of this job, I automatically became a member of UCOLASC — the University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication. That’s a UC-wide committee that meets in Oakland a few times each year. I went to my first meeting on Friday. Much to my delight, the main item on the agenda was organizing the University of California’s push towards open access!

More about that push later. For now, here are a couple things I learned:

The University of California and Springer Verlag

The University of California has system-wide contracts with the ‘big three’ publishing houses:

• Elsevier — we pay these guys $8.2 million each year. They sell us 34% of all the journals we get, and 27% of all the electronic content.
• Wiley-Blackwell — we pay them $5 million each year.
• Springer — we pay them $3 million each year.

Last year the Max Planck Society boldly canceled their subscriptions to 1200 Springer journals. As part of a successful attempt to lure them back, Springer worked out an experimental deal where Max Planck authors can make their papers in
open–access, free of charge. It’s good for the Max Planck Society since more people can read their papers for free. And it’s good for Springer, since only a few papers in each journal issue will be open-access: libraries can’t drop their subscriptions; they’re still stuck paying high prices.

The UC system has almost concluded its 2008 negotiations with Springer. We’ll pay the same journal prices for 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. And starting in November, UC authors should be able to freely make their papers open-access in Springer journals. But: UC authors need to choose to do this: it’s not automatic! When we submit papers electronically to Springer journals, and say we’re from the University of California, an announcement should pop up that lets us opt in to open access.

Some fine print: this doesn’t apply to Springer Lecture Notes, just journals. They put a cap of 2000 articles per year on this plan; they expect 1500 per year.

Open Access for NSF-Funded Research

In science, most of the really big money lies in medicine. Medical journals are really expensive. But now all research funded by the US National Institute of Health must be openly accessible, free of charge, at PubMed Central. It’s mandated by law!

How did this happen? A Republican congressman from Oklahoma with a sick relative pushed orward a bill in May 2005 which pushed voluntary open-access to NIH-funded research. But this only led to 7% of papers being made open-access. Harold Varmus, the Nobel laureate who headed the NIH, was not satisfied. So, he pushed for more… and eventually got it.

On December 23rd 2007, President Bush signed a bill mandating open access, over the objection of publishers. The policy became effective this spring. But there’s a 12-month ‘embargo’: open access to a given paper only starts a year after it’s been published in a journal. So, we haven’t really seen the policy kick in yet.

Still: all this is very promising, and very sensible. If taxpayers are funding scientific research, should they also have to pay to see the results?

So now: what about the National Science Foundation? Shouldn’t they be moving along the same road? Just think how great it would be if all NSF-funded science research were publicly available.

Alas, people at the NSF seem to think open access is unimportant. It’s not on their agenda — even though ‘dissemination of results’ is one of their grant criteria.

This has got to change. It may take legislation. But if you know someone at the NSF, please talk to them about this.