The complexity of sharing scientific databases

Creative Commons is a clever use of the copyright system intended to make it easier for people who want to, to share their work with others. Jonathan Coulton has used Creative Commons to enable an army of remixers and videomakers to produce promotional materials for his songs and albums. Authors like Dan Gillmor and Cory Doctorow have used Creative Commons to let people download, translate and make audio versions of their books. And Global Voices uses Creative Commons so that blogs and news sites can use our content without asking us for permission.

What about scientists?

That’s the research interest of my colleague Melanie Dulong de Rosnay. She’s using her time as a Berkman fellow to study alternative copyright systems and their usage and relavence within academic and library communities. Yesterday, Melanie presented research on the licensing of scientific databases and the obstacles such licensing presents to collaboration between scientists around the world.

Under US law, pretty much anything you write down is copyrighted. Scrawl an original note on a napkin and it’s protected until 70 years after your death. Facts, however, are another matter - they can’t be copyrighted. So while trivial but creative scribblings are copyrighted, unless you choose to release them into the public domain, the information painstakingly discovered about the human genome - DNA sequences, for instance - aren’t. But the containers they’re stored in - the databases they’re held in - can be copyrighted.

If I sound confused about this stuff, that’s because I am. And so were the folks at Science Commons, the project that spun off from Creative Commons to focus on open publishing of scientific information. For a couple of years, they offered a wonderfully complex FAQ on applying Creative Commons licenses to databases - the first question read “Can a Creative Commons license be applied to a database?” After a six paragraph answer to that question, the third question read, “So, a Creative Commons license can be applied to a database?”

The approach Science Commons is taking now is a different one - they’re now recommending use of a protocol that specifies how data can be made Open Access - the FAQ on that protocol explains that the complexities of asking scientists to release their data under Creative Commons licenses was so severe that Science Commons has ended up advocating for data to be released public domain, under the auspices of their protocol, instead.

Source: My heart’s in Accra (Ethan Zuckerman’s blog)

Research Publications Online: Too Much of A Good Thing?

The Internet gives scientists and researchers instant access to an astonishing number of academic journals. So what is the impact of having such a wealth of information at their fingertips? The answer, according to new research released today in the journal Science, is surprising–scholars are actually citing fewer papers in their own work, and the papers they do cite tend to be more recent publications. This trend may be limiting the creation of new ideas and theories.

Source: National Science Foundation

DigitalPreservationEurope have released their European Quarterly Preservation Digest that provides an overview of the current activities of European funded projects in the area of digital preservation.

Direct to New Issue
PDF.

Source: DCC

From the iwr article:

Nearly £10 million has been awarded to preserve low use journals for those in UK Higher Education. The new initiative, UK Research Reserve (UKRR) aims to improve access to the journal information for researchers as well as better preserve the body of work.

The partnership between the British Library and higher education libraries, led by Imperial College London will see the low-use research journals being stored at the British Library, with the scheme managed between the two institutions. The multi-million pound resource was awarded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) following an initial 18 month pilot scheme.

Source: Information World Review

From the DSpace site:
July 15, 2008

The U.S. National Library of Medicine has recently preformed scalability tests on the DSpace platform, ingesting 1 million items. The test was successful and concluded that DSpace “shows acceptable ingest performance for a million-item archive.” Read NLM white paper, “Testing the Scalability of a DSpace-based Archive” or reveiw the presentation of results from the DLF conference, “Experiment to Investigate the Scalability of a DSpace-based Archive” .

Source: DSpace

+ Journal Rankings in Molecular Biology and Genetics, 1997-2007

+ Science in Italy, 2003-07

+ Law: Most Prolific U.S. Institutions, 2003-07

+ Science in Medicine

+ Institution Rankings in Engineering 1997-2007

+ Journals Ranked by Impact: Sociology

+ Plant Science: High-Impact U.S. Institutions, 2003-07

+ Hot Paper in Physics

Source: ISI

From the article:

The American Psychological Association appears to be retreating from a new policy on open-access archiving that drew sharp criticism after it was described on Tuesday by The Chronicle.

From the news release:

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is pleased to announce the initiation of a free service, launching in 2008, to help authors fulfill funder and institutional mandates.

NPG has encouraged self-archiving, including in PubMed Central, since 2005. Later in 2008, NPG will begin depositing authors’ accepted manuscripts with PubMed Central (PMC) and UK PubMed Central (UKPMC), meeting the requirements for authors funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), The Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council and a number of other major funders in the US, the UK and Canada who mandate deposition in either PMC or UKPMC. NPG hopes to extend the service to other archives and repositories in future.

Source: Nature Publishing Group

Article: An Overview of the Development of Repositories and Open Access in Mexico
by Isabel Galina and Joaquin Gimenez
4 pages; PDF.

The paper presents an overview of the current landscape of repositories in Mexico and focuses on the work being done at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Finally, we offer specific recommendations for the further development of repositories and Open Access, with particular focus on the needs and possibilities of developing countries.

Repositories have become increasingly important in the academic world (Crow 2002; Lynch 2003; Kircz 2005). However, global coverage is patchy, with a small number of countries leading the way with the majority of their academic organizations developing institutional repositories, plus a number of subject or national repositories (Lynch and Lippincott 2005; Westrienen van and Lynch 2005; Markey, St Jean et al. 2006) Other countries will have none or only a few.

Source: E-LIS

+ Output in Science: Top Ten Countries, 1998-2008

+ Hot Papers In Agricultural & Food Sciences

+ Science in Canada, 2003-07

+ Hot Paper in Medicine

+ Scientist Rankings in Plant Sciences by Total Citations 1997-2007

+ Journals Ranked by Impact: Energy & Fuels

+ Education: High-Impact U.S. Institutions, 2002-06

+ Hot Paper in Biology

+ Institution Rankings In Chemistry, 1997-2007

+ Health Care Science & Services: High-Impact U.S. Institutions, 2002-06

+ Journals Ranked by Impact: Infectious Diseases

+ Hot Paper in Physics

Source: ISI

by Johnson, Richard K. and Luther, Judy (2008)

Abstract: Some 15 years after the Web first captured the popular imagination most journals are published in dual print and electronic formats and many are still published in print only. The digital metamorphosis of established journals seems stuck in the transition zone. Publishers are reluctant to turn their backs on existing revenue streams from print subscriptions, even if they are declining. Library subscriptions are not the only piece of the puzzle for many journals, such as those that largely rely on print advertising revenue. For society publishers, membership-related factors further complicate the situation.

Source: E-LIS // ARL: A Bimonthly Report on Research Library Issues and Actions(257): pp. 1-6.

Journal Prices, Book Acquisitions, and Sustainable College Library Collections (PDF; 489 KB)

Library collections are economically sustainable only if the rate of increase in costs is no greater than the rate of increase in the library acquisitions budget. Because book prices increase at a much lower rate than journal prices, undergraduate libraries can achieve economic sustainability through a renewed emphasis on books rather than journals. Book?centered collections are consistent with the goals of many undergraduate colleges, and books rather than journals may provide the best teaching resources even in those fields that rely heavily on journals for the communication of original research results.

Source: College & Research Libraries, forthcoming (William H. Walters)

From the news release:

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) have released a new series of bookmarks in the Create Change campaign, which targets scholars in different disciplines with messages about the benefits of wider research sharing. Librarians can use these freely available files to enhance their efforts to engage faculty interest in changing the way scholarly information is shared.

+ Version 72, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography Now Available

+ IST Researcher Examines Search Engine Branding
This research is being funded by Google.

+ A First Taxonomy of Search Log Junk (via SearchTools.com)

+ Hakia Beta Update

Some science journals are messed up

I’m providing a detailed examination of an online journey I took this morning that demonstrates how the Internet has altered the landscape for publishing of articles in scientific journals. Online access certainly changes how we search for and how we read articles. It is also changing where we chose to publish.

So I see this interesting name for an article - Why snakes don’t have legs - in my newsfeed. I click on thru (why it is on 2collab I do not know?) and get this page. Great. ScienceDirect which usually charges for journal access. But this is an article from 1999. Surely it will be open by now?

Nope. They want $31.50 for a nine year old article. With no abstract or any other way to determine whether this article is worth the price. $31.50! First off, few articles in science today that are nine years old are worth $5, much less $31.50. Secondly, with no abstract how am I to even figure out if it is worth the price?
…
Online archives by the authors are becoming more common and are a basic aspect of many Open Access initiatives. Paying a small premium for access to a current article is a reasonable price, especially if it is convenient. But any business plan that wants to charge a huge premium for decade old work needs serious rethinking.

Source: A Man With A PhD (blog)

Hat tip: Peter Suber’s Open Access News