BioMed Central Blog
Welcoming SpringerOpen – a new series of open access journals
Springer
Science+Business Media, BioMed Central's parent company and one of the world's largest
Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) publishers, today announced
a significant expansion of its open access publishing activity with the launch
of SpringerOpen (www.springeropen.com),
a new series of open access journals that will span all STM disciplines. Articles
published in SpringerOpen journals will be freely and immediately
accessible online, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
BioMed Central became part of Springer in 2008, and BioMed Central’s open access publishing expertise and technology is helping Springer to launch this new series of titles, which will extend the benefits of open access publishing to authors and readers across all disciplines. BioMed Central’s Open Access Membership scheme, offered to institutions, societies, funders and corporations, will be extended to include the SpringerOpen titles. Articles published in SpringerOpen journals will also be sent automatically to participating institutional repositories via BioMed Central's automated SWORD deposit mechanism.
The SpringerOpen journals will complement Springer's existing titles and BioMed Central’s growing portfolio of 200+ open access journals in medicine and life science. The first SpringerOpen journals, which will open for submissions shortly, are:
- Planetary Science
- Global Energy
- Journal of Mathematical Neuroscience
- Health Economics Review
- Journal of Mathematics in Industry
- Journal of Remanufacturing
- Environmental Sciences Europe
- Security and Intelligence Informatics
- Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology Express
- Bulletin of Mathematical Sciences
- Gold Bulletin
- Psychology and Well-Being Research
It was also announced today that Springer has become a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publisher's Association (OASPA).
For the latest news about SpringerOpen, sign up for email updates via the SpringerOpen website or follow @SpringerOpen on Twitter.
BioMed Central is hugely excited by this collaboration with our Springer colleagues, which has potential to greatly extend the success of the open access publishing model, and we look forward to supporting the ongoing development of the SpringerOpen portfolio with continued evolution and improvement of our open access publishing platform, which is rapidly becoming the preferred choice for a wide range of scholarly and society journals.
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 20:20 Comments (1)
Planning financing for open access
Last week, Universities UK and JISC held a conference to educate senior university managers about the importance of open access to institutions, how to develop policies and plan financing.
A report presented at the conference demonstrates that a single large university could contribute around £3 million each year to the UK research community as a whole simply by sharing knowledge through a more open route.
Indeed, many UK universities and higher education colleges are already exploring open access, but the report suggests more could and should be done in the next five years to make open access the preferred route for publishing research. In turn, it is expected this will increase the competitiveness and creativity of the UK.
However the costs and benefits of an open access policy may well fall unequally across individual institutions. There may also be implications for institutional repository use, open access publication funds and open access policies.
To this end the Research Communications Strategy (University of Nottingham) is hosting a series of free workshops this summer. The series, led by consultant Alma Swan, is aimed at institutions' research support officers, financial modellers and repository managers or administrators. These events will take place in Glasgow, London, Birmingham and Leeds from 15-29 July.
More information about open access and central funds can be found on our website. We have also published case studies of institutions which have successfully implemented central funds, including the University of Nottingham.
Posted by Charlotte Webber at 10:35 Comments (0)
Macha online - a guest post from Computer Aid
Computer Aid International's Stephen Campbell visited the community of Macha to see the impact of the Internet and the research it enables, on an African community.
You won't find the community of Macha on many maps. It's 50 miles from the nearest road in the Southern Province of Zambia, itself a land-locked southern African country - it's pretty much the last place you'd expect to find a community logged on to the Internet.
Taking advantage of a satellite link installed by John Hopkins University Malaria Research Institute, the LinkNet Cooperative (formed three years ago by the community and staffed by talented self-taught local youngsters, none of whom have graduated beyond grade 12) has established the largest wireless Mesh Network in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Wireless routers, similar to those used in homes in the UK, are used to spread a single internet connection across a wide area. This lowers costs enough to make internet connectivity affordable for homes, small businesses, schools and the local hospital and nurse training college.
By researching crop types, local farmers have already diversified - many have substituted part of their maize crop (a staple subsistence crop) with sunflower oil which generates vital cash in the local market. A small cash income for a family there sends children to school and can cover medical expenses for ill family members.
Doctors and nurses at the local hospital can seek advice on treating patients from specialists in the capital. Screening for malaria has improved thanks to the John Hopkins link and rates of malaria have dropped by 90%. Local people are using the internet for research to establish businesses whilst transaction costs for basic goods have reduced considerably.
The community has moved from net migration to cities, to net immigration from surrounding areas as income, healthcare, employment and small enterprise opportunities have increased beyond all recognition. Perhaps the biggest development, again driven by Internet-based research is the development of a bio-fuel, Jatropha, from scrub land on the edge of town. A fully-grown Jatropha tree can generate 1.5 kilos of fruit per year in this climate and, crucially, the crop times are compatible with the maize growing season - providing 400 farmers with a cash income initially and, longer term, a ready supply of fuel. The community expects to be self-sufficient in fuel inside three years.
There are thousands of communities like Macha across sub-Saharan Africa. Macha proves that access to information is the critical first ingredient in helping local communities to help themselves. We're proud to have the support of BioMed Central to help more and more projects like this.
Posted by Charlotte Webber at 13:03 Comments (0)
The UK government has in recent years made significant amounts of government data openly available for reuse. They Work for You is an example of a website which creatively reuses data on UK parliamentary activity, and its parent organization, MySociety, has played an important role in encouraging the UK government towards opening up more data.
The latest development in UK government open data sharing is the launch of data.gov.uk, launched in beta test form last month , which “provides a single access point to over 2,500 central government datasets that have been made available for free re-use”.
Buried in the small print of this announcement is an important change, with significant implications for open access publishing in the UK. This change is the adoption of Creative Commons-compatible licensing for UK government open content.
Up until now, open data from the UK government was licensed via the Office of Public Sector Information’s ‘Click Use’ license scheme. The Click Use model required any potential users or distrubutors of the data to first request their own ‘Click Use’ license from the UK government website, in order to gain permission to reuse the data.
In contrast musicians, artists and other creators around the world who wish to share content openly while reserving some rights have increasingly standardized on the use of Creative Commons licenses, which do not require any such license request to be made.
BioMed Central, like many other open access publishers, uses the Creative Commons Attribution License, which requires only that the original version of the work should be correctly attributed when the work or any part of it is reused.
Until now, because work carried out by researchers at UK government agencies is often covered by ‘Crown Copyright’, and because Crown Copyright is legally distinct from the normal Copyright law, the applicability of Creative Commons licenses to such work has been in question. As a result, special license wording has in some cases been necessary for such articles published in BioMed Central journals, in order to indicate that they can be reused only under the ‘Click use’ scheme. This had the potential to cause delays for authors and confusion for readers.
The good news is that the announced intention of OPSI to move away from ‘Click Use’ licensing towards Creative Commons-compatible licensing over the coming months should entirely solve this problem, making life easier for all concerned.
It also provides an important precedent for dealing with similar challenges in other (rather arcane) areas of copyright law. For example, the World Health Organization and other supra-national bodies do not recognize national jurisdictions, which causes similar challenges for Creative Commons licensing to those caused by Crown Copyright, and requires similar workarounds via special-case license wording. BioMed Central is hopeful that a Creative Commons-compatible licensing scheme specifically designed for such supra-national bodies will soon resolve this and we are working with WHO and Creative Commons towards such a solution.
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 16:26 Comments (0)
How to publish raw clinical data: guidelines from Trials and the BMJ
An increasing number of peer-reviewed journals and research funding
agencies require authors to make available the raw, unprocessed data
supporting the findings reported in their research articles (click here for
information on why this is important). Just this month, for example, The
American Naturalist announced
that its authors must make their data publicly available as a condition of
publication and the UK Government has also recently launched an open data website.
But there is little practical guidance available on how data should be shared, particularly in clinical research where sharing information about individuals without their consent presents risks to privacy - both from a legal and ethical perspective.
Recognizing this problem, in March 2009 the editors of the journal Trials made a committment to produce guidance on preparing raw clinical data for publication.
"Preparing raw
clinical data for publication: guidance for journal editors, authors,
and peer reviewers" - co-published today in Trials and in the BMJ - represents that guidance. It proposes a minimum
standard for anonymizing (or "de-identifying") datasets to protect
patient privacy whilst allowing clinical data to be shared.
Research article 
Preparing raw clinical data for publication: guidance
for journal editors, authors, and peer reviewers
Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Melissa L Norton, Andrew J
Vickers, Douglas G Altman
Trials 2010, 11:9
(29 January 2010)
[Abstract]
[PDF]
The guidance lists 28 items
of personal and clinical information that can make patients identifiable
and recommends that any direct identifiers, such as patients' names and
addresses, should be removed from datasets before publication. Unless patients have consented to the sharing of their data, datasets
containing three or more indirect identifiers, such as age or sex, should be
reviewed by an independent researcher or ethics committee to determine any risks to privacy, before data are submitted for publication. If
the independent review finds privacy could be at risk, alternatives to fully
open access sharing of data must be considered.
Making raw
clinical data available will benefit future research - and to that end,
human health - and all researchers should obtain consent for sharing of
supporting data when recruiting human subjects. Until this becomes a
routine practice, however, concerns about patient privacy remain a common barrier
to the sharing of information. This practical guidance aims to help
remove this obstacle and enable other scientists and patients to
benefit from full and transparent reporting of research data.
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 12:14 Comments (0)
BioMed Central has today submitted the following contribution to the US Office of Science and Technology Policy's Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research:
(see also OASPA's contribution, also submitted today)
BioMed Central operates a commercially viable business as an open access publisher. Under our publishing model, the costs associated with research publication are covered by open access publication fees rather than by subscription revenue. We now publish over 200 online journals operating on this model. These journals go from strength to strength, and are highly ranked by journal citation metrics such as Impact Factor. Open access journals such as Genome Biology, Malaria Journal and BMC Systems Biology, to name just a few, are among the most highly-ranked journals in their respective fields.
The success of BioMed Central’s open access journals provides important evidence that immediate open access to the official and authoritative version of published research results is not only desirable but is also achievable and sustainable.
The success of the open access model is especially notable given that, until recently, in contrast to the substantial library budgets devoted to subscriptions to serials, there has been little funding explicitly allocated by academic institutions to cover open access publication fees. Authors have therefore had to make direct use of their research grant funding in order to publish in open access journals. The Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity is an important recent initiative, involving Harvard and other leading research universities, which seeks to address this disparity by providing central institutional funding support for open access journals. This can be expected to add to the already considerable momentum driving the growth of the open access publishing model.
BioMed Central supports both the goal of open access and the goal of ensuring that the value added by publishers is properly recompensed. In contrast to some of the contributors, we do not feel there is a need to ‘balance’ these two goals as we do not feel that they are in opposition.
As noted by other participants in this debate, the benefits resulting to the scientific community from open access to research are substantial. What may be less obvious is that open access need not threaten the role of STM publishers. The open access publishing model, in which publishers are paid directly for the service of publication, is proving in practice to be just as viable a business model than as the traditional model whereby publishers recover the costs associated with publication by taking exclusive rights and then selling access via subscriptions.
Given that there is a viable business model for publishing scholarly research that does not depend on restricting access, we do not feel that the US government needs to arbitrarily limit the extent and reach of its open access deposit requirements attached to its research funding. We therefore recommend that the mandatory Public Access Policy which has operated successfully with respect to National Institutes of Health funding since 2008, be extended to cover all federally funded research. We also recommend that consideration is given, over time, to reducing or eliminating the 12 month embargo period, because this embargo period covers the very period during which the results of research are most timely and valuable. Gradual reduction of the embargo period would provide a natural mechanism to encourage publishers to adopt business models compatible with open access, while avoiding disruptive upheaval.
About BioMed Central
BioMed Central (www.biomedcentral.com) is the world’s largest open access scientific, technical, and medical (STM) publisher. All research articles published by BioMed Central are peer reviewed and are made freely and permanently accessible online upon acceptance. In 2009, biomedical scientists from across the globe submitted over 29,000 research papers to BioMed Central’s 205 journals, a 30% increase over 2008.
Research articles published in BioMed Central’s journals are universally and freely accessible via the Internet without charge or any other barrier to access; articles are immediately deposited and permanently archived in multiple international archives (including PubMed Central) and authors retain copyright of their article, which can be freely distributed and reused under a Creative Commons as long as correct attribution is given.
Like many other open access publishers, BioMed Central’s business model is based on charging for the service that we provide. An article processing charge, levied at publication, covers the cost of publishing the article, including providing editorial tools, administering the peer review process, preparing the article for publication and developing and maintaining the journal website. As can be seen from the increase of submissions to open access journals year on year, a growing number of researchers are taking advantage of the funds available from funding bodies and institutions which are set aside to pay article processing charges. BioMed Central also operates a waiver policy to ensure that article processing charges are not an obstacle to publication for authors without sufficient funding. BioMed Central is a founding member of OASPA, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, which seeks to represent the growing number of open access publishers, and to encourage best practices amongst open access publishers.
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 17:59 Comments (0)
Presentation from Online Information 2009: Latest Developments in Open Access
Posted by Dane Brookes at 12:15 Comments (0)
Support solidifies for the U.S. Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPPA)
41 Nobel Laureates and scientists collaborated to show their support for FRPPA, by lobbying Congress thorough an open letter. The legislation seeks to enhance access to federally funded published research articles, ensuring they are made available in an online repository no later than 6 months after publication.
The bill will broaden the reach of scientific data for the benefit of researchers, companies and consumers alike. It is also hoped that the legislation will fuel innovation and entrepreneurship through increased dissemination of ideas, as well as raising the international profile of U.S. originated research.
The bill will bring the U.S. in line with many global research councils' public access policies as well as complementing the NIH public access policy. Furthermore the legislation would increase the accessibility of research for all higher education institutions regardless of size, propagating research to students who might not habitually have access.
Read the full letter to Congress here for a more detailed view.
Posted by Charlotte Webber at 15:33 Comments (0)
National advocacy portals help spread the word about Open Access
The recently announced Open Access for Hong Kong portal, created by the Hong Kong Open Access Committee, is the latest in a series of such national OA advocacy portals which bring together information about the benefits of Open Access scholarly communication, focusing on the needs of academic researchers in a particular country.
These national Open Access portals now include:
- http://open-access.net (Germany)
- http://openaccess.hk (Hong Kong)
- http://openaccessjapan.com (Japan)
- http://openaccess.nl (Netherlands)
- http://openaccess.no (Norway)
- http://openaccess.se (Sweden)
Know of any more? Please let us know...
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 19:45 Comments (0)
Free Open Access Week webinar - 5 Open Access publishers in the spotlight for live Q&A session
There is still time to register for the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association's free Open Access Week Webinar, which is taking place at 5pm UK time, on Tuesday October 20th.
The panel session includes representatives from BioMed Central and Public Library of Science, AOSIS (an African open access publisher), Igitur (a Dutch university press), and Nature Publishing Group (which has recently announced several open access initiatives). There will be live Q&A, so this is an excellent chance for researchers, authors, editors, librarians and other interested parties to find out more about what open access publishers are planning, and to seek answers to any burning questions about open access journals.
To register for the webcast and reserve a place, just email info@oaspa.org with the subject line: OASPA Webinar.
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 16:21 Comments (0)
Get involved with Open Access Week 19th – 23rd October 2009
Building on the success of last year's Open Access Day, October 19th-23rd will see the first international Week. The aim of Open Access Week is to help spread the word and broaden awareness of open access around the world. Last year 120 organisations in 27 countries promoted open access through a range of events, this year closer to 200 organisations will be taking part.
BioMed Central will be participating in the following events during the week:
OASPA Webinar: Live Q&A Sessions with five types of OA Publishers
Featuring representatives from five very different publishers, the webinarill discuss how open access publishing works in practice. Attendance is free, but advance registration is required as the number of participants is limited.
Date: Tuesday 20th October 17:00 - 18:30 BST
The 5th SPARC Japan Seminar
This event will include presentations from Charlotte Hubbard of BioMed Central concerning open access and Prof. Shin Tochinai of Hokkaido University regarding researcher's attitudes to open access.
Date: Tuesday, 20th October, 13:30 - 17.00 JST
Location: National Institute of Informatics, Japan
Conference: Open Access Cambridge
The event will explore different perspectives on open access, bringing together representatives from the research community, the publishing sector and from a learned society.
Date: Wednesday, 21st October, 14:00 - 17:00 GMT
Location: University of Cambridge, UK
To see what is planned for your region or for further information on how to participate in Open Access Week visit the Open Access Directory wiki. Additional resources are also available on the Open Access Week website including handouts of what Faculty, Librarians, Universities and Administrators and Research Funders can do to promote open access.
We hope to see you at one of the above events, and feel free to share your ideas and photos of open access activities on the BioMed Central Facebook site
Don't forget that BioMed Central also has a range of downloadable advocacy materials on our website to assist with promotion of open access such as posters, website buttons and ideas for hosting an open access seminar.
Posted by Charlotte Webber at 11:44 Comments (0)
SPARC profiles open access funds at Berkeley and Calgary
In a further indication of the increasing interest in central funding of open access publications fees, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition has published a profile of open access funds at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Calgary.
BioMed Central's journal Breast Cancer Research features prominently in the profile:
Dr. Carrie Shemanko, Assistant Professor at the Southern Alberta Cancer Research Institute, Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary was pleased to learn that the library would be providing funds to cover the cost of publication in open-access journals. She led a team that produced an article about how prolactin, a hormone partly responsible for breast development and function, contributes to breast cancer.
The research was funded by the Alberta Cancer Foundation, the Alberta Cancer Board and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the article highlighted was published in Breast Cancer Research. Shemanko received $1,500 Canadian dollars to publish in the open-access journal, which is very visible in her field and has a high impact factor.
“The article was accessed very rapidly after it became available online, by a large number of users that continues to grow. I have also granted requests from other researchers for the reagents that we used in our work, so that they can further develop related projects,” says Shemanko. “My experience increased my awareness of the need to increase funding for library resources to match the growing need of research and development.”
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 13:42 Comments (0)
Five US universities to provide central funding for open access publication fees
In a major step forward for the open access movement, on September 15th 2009, Berkeley, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced a joint commitment to provide their researchers with central financial assistance to cover open access publication fees, and encouraged other academic institutions to join them. The aim of the Compact for Open Access Publication Equity (COPE) is to create a level playing field between subscription-based journals (which institutions support centrally via library budgets) and open access journals (which often depend on publication fees).
The Compact commits each university "the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds".
BioMed Central has long noted the asymmetry between the central support given by institutions to subscription journals via library budgets, in contrast to the relative lack of such central support for open access publishing models at most academic institutions, even where those institutions have strong policies in favour of increasing access to scholarly research.
Central institutional open access funds are a natural approach to dealing with this problem, but the practical challenges involved in reshaping the flow of funds that support scholarly communication should not be underestimated, especially given the challenging economic circumstances. This makes the achievement of Harvard and its partners in realizing the Open Access Compact all the more impressive.
The two-pronged approach pioneered by Harvard - mandating deposit of faculty publications into the university's Open Access repository while also providing explicit support for fully open publishing models - looks set to be an extremely influential model and has the potential to dramatically accelerate the already rapid growth of open access journals.
Three of the five institutions listed as signatories of the Compact already have open access funds in place:
- Berkeley fund (launched January 2008)
- Cornell fund (launched September 2009)
- Harvard fund (launched September 2009)
Dartmouth and MIT have yet to announce what form their own funding arrangements for open access publishing will take, but are commited, via the Compact, to putting such funding in place in a timely manner.
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 04:01 Comments (1)
Many learned societies are considering the publishing strategies for
their journals in the face of the squeeze on library subscriptions.
Open access is an increasingly attractive option for many societies,
providing a sustainable financial model for their journal, while
helping to maximize the visibility of research in the field they
support. BioMed Central currently has publishing partnerships with more
than 30 societies which either started new open access journals or
converted their previously subscription-based journals.
To
ensure that societies have the facts to hand when making their
decisions, BioMed Central recently hosted a workshop for a group of
consultants who advise societies. The presentations from the day are
now available, covering the history and current workings of open access
at BioMed Central, with a focus on how we work with societies and the
scenarios in which an open access business model is working well.
We plan to repeat this workshop in various formats over the coming months, so please do contact us if you are interested in attending, or pass on the details to those who might be interested.
Sarah Cooney, Director of Journal and Portfolio Development
Deborah Kahn, Publishing Director
Posted by Stefan Busch at 16:31 Comments (1)
Wikipedia and open access journals - now more compatible than ever
A couple of years ago, I posted a blog noting the complementarity between Wikipedia (which excludes original research from its scope, but strongly encourages citation of original sources), and open access journals which publish original research which Wikipedia authors can easily cite, and which Wikipedia readers can reliably follow links to gain access to.
So I was especially happy to hear the new complementarity just got even better, with the announcement last month that Wikipedia's content will soon be switching from its current licensing scheme (the GNU Free Documentation License) to a Creative Commons license – specifically the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA).
This new license chosen by Wikipedia is a variant of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY), which is used by BioMed Central and many other open access publishers. The difference between the two is that the version used by Wikipedia requires that any derived work that includes the material must be similarly licensed.
What this means in practice is that it is now straightforward, from a licensing perspective, for any organization whether commercial or non-commercial to create derivative works incorporating both open access research articles and Wikipedia content, and to distribute these combined works under the CC-BY-SA license. The Creative Commons website even includes a handy license compatibility wizard to work out what can be combined and how it can be relicensed.
As Wikipedia and open access journals continue to grow, the academic, educational and indeed commercial possibilities opened up by this rapidly expanding resource of freely licensable content are truly exciting.
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 17:59 Comments (1)