Open Access Publishing - a report from 2007

Open access - the view from a research funder: Robert Kiley

A report on the CILIP in London meeting on Tuesday 10 July 2007.

Robert Kiley, Head of E-strategy at the Wellcome Library laid out the Wellcome Trust’s agenda on Open Access. This built very nicely on the issues raise by Ruth Rikowski  in her presentation on global trade agreements and intellectual property rights on 13 Feb 2007.

The Wellcome Trust (WT), which is the second largest medical charity in the world, invests some £500 million in medical research every year, the results of which are published in commercial medical journals. The increasing costs associated with scholarly journal publishing, and the high inflation rates of journal prices have restricted access both to the public and to the academic community, as have increasingly stringent applications of the law of intellectual property.  WT found that even where researchers had access to well-funded library services between 10% and 20% of WT funded research papers were inaccessible. Research by the British Medical Council showed that while 90% of NHS funded research is available online in full text, only 30% is immediately available to the public and only 40% available to NHS staff. Access to underlying data for combination and re-analysis between different research projects (“mashup” in Web 2.0-speak) is also of increasing importance as computer programs are developed to process the information and create new knowledge. One instance of this is the creation of a malaria atlas map from the various written reports on the prevalence of malaria mediated by the mapping of “Google Earth”. Such developments “derivative works” are not possible under what have been standard contracts of publication entered into by researchers.

In a co-operative scheme WT together with seven other funders of medical research set up UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) in January 2007. This aims to provide “a stable, permanent and free-to-access online digital archive of full-text, peer-reviewed research publications and access to the underlying datasets”. The eight organisations between them fund some 90% of biomedical research that is funded in the UK. UKPMC is based on, and mirrors the content of PubMed Central (PMC) - the  US National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, which was founded in Feb 2000.

The WT policy has been to write into grant agreements the obligation to deposit the research papers and the underlying data with UKPMC. This may be achieved either by publishing in a journal that has a policy to deposit papers (often for a fee) or else by the researcher archiving the final version of the report within six months. This would include any revisions that were made as a result of the peer review process undertaken as part of the commercial publication. The published article with all its apparatus of review and attribution remains the primary building block of knowledge creation.

There has been a movement in the research community away from the property based marketing of intellectual rights towards a licensing framework. Art galleries, museums and image libraries are all taking this route. The financial implications where medical research is concerned obviously make this complete revision of the business model a scary one for major scientific publishers. Nevertheless some 59% of biomedical publishers have complied with WT requirements on open access, 15% are in active discussion and while only 10% are non-compliant 16% have no policy at present. This represents fairly fast development in the course of six months. There are some high profile non-compliant publishers, and they maintain their power by their prestige within the medical profession. While it would be possible for WT to enter the field of journal publishing in competition the preferred route is by commercial negotiation with the journal publishers, The publishers still provide the services of peer review and of distribution in print form for which they expect a financial return.

While there may be dissatisfaction with way that capitalism organises and exploits knowledge, it does not need a very long memory to recall the results, in tangible goods rather than knowledge and ideas, of the planned and command economies that were so popular in the 1960s. These were equally as susceptible to grotesque distortion of the supply of everyday necessities as the capitalist system. It really does seem that the safest route is that of a healthy tension between both systems of production.

The Wellcome Trust and its partners have emerged as major players in the promotion of open access to medical information and its re-use. Their strategy has included the establishment UKPMC, and the introduction of contractual constraints in the disposition of Trust funded research grants. The future for the freer exploitation of medical information and the creation of medical knowledge must be brighter for these developments.

Find information fast – but where?

CILIP in London Meeting 13 September 2012
Guinness Book of World Records 2013 publication day
A talk by Gary Archer, Information Services Librarian, Solihull Central Library


Gary Archer presented an overview of information provision in reference libraries over the past 30 years, during his working life in public reference services and in research.

“Are public libraries finished?” is a popular starting point for debate. Cheap books and comprehensive schooling have ended the culture of the autodidact, previously our most reliable customer. How does the librarian find a purpose?

Looking back to 1981 there was a plethora of printed standard sources. The published output was also growing, with such things as the DK Eyewitness and Chronicle series, and newspaper Notes and Queries columns. Many libraries had specialist staff and maintained their own information files, and Whitaker's Almanac published an interleaved version for libraries to add their own notes. Complex enquiries were often handled by phoning up likely experts or writing them letters. This fuelled a lively publishing scene, watched over by Charles Toase with his regular column “Reference books you may have missed”, and was the basis of the library service. The image of the library was very positive and even made it onto US sitcoms like Seinfeld.

The first generation of text-based electronic information services arrived in the 1970s and survived (Minitel in France) until June 2012. The real impact of IT began with CD-ROMS replacing print sources for directories and business information, but the data was no more current than in the print version, although Dunn and Bradstreet issued more frequent updates.

The introduction of graphical interfaces in the 1980s made the internet more accessible, and it was the launch of Hotmail in 1996 that brought major public interaction with the web. Suddenly e-mail became the communication medium of choice. EARL (the Consortium for Public Library Networking) launched in November 1997. The People's Network was available in libraries from 2004, when most home connections were still dial-up. In the USA “Stumpers” started in 1992 as an e-mail list for co-operating on enquiries. Wikipedia (for better or worse) was founded in 2001.

Still there has been a growing public interest in esoteric facts, reflected in the popularity of quiz shows, and the books, TV and web presence of QI. There has been a migration between formats, from print (or T shirt) to electronic services and back.

But the decade also marked a decline in traditional reference books. Guinness pruned its list, and the significance of its records has declined. TSO (HMSO that was), rail timetables, Chemical Abstracts have all abandoned print. The telephone directories and yellow pages are but shadows. This is “dinosaur publishing” and publishers are questioning their role too.

What effect has this had on libraries? Internet sources are available at libraries, but the expectations of users have changed. If there is a queue at the reference desk, then people will walk away. People expect to be their own reference librarians, they expect an instant response and they expect it to come from a computer. Librarians have become the public face of Google. Online services have helped us here, especially where libraries have been forced into reducing opening hours. Commercial phone services cost around £1.00, and often their researchers use a library. Why aren't we cutting out the middle man? There is now no clear agreement on what is general knowledge. There is an age divide in responses to media, as there is in the use of smart phones.

The unreliability of online sources is common knowledge to librarians. Wikipedia has had to revisit its hands-off approach to editing, for instance locking down the entry on George W. Bush. One of our members highlighted her practice of making her school pupils edit a Wikipedia entry, just to show how easily it could be done and why a critical approach was needed.

Librarians can show how to exercise “information discretion”. Often users don't question what's out there, and what are appropriate sources, and the importance of domain – .com, .co.uk, .edu, .ac.uk – for assessing the trustworthiness of information. Information and misinformation can appear very quickly and portable devices accelerate this trend. Twitter has killed off quite a number of still-living celebrities.

Enquire on the People's Network by MLA has 72 current local authority library subscribers, and this means that a reference interview can be carried on by chat. This is our unique selling point, tailoring the detail and level (PhD or crossword puzzle) needed in an answer.

Interactivity is the great bonus of online information, but paper sources which remain available after subscriptions have lapsed, and which can be archived relatively simply (unlike the huge mass of rapidly changing online sources) have their own advantages. The British Library does harvest websites by permission, but the harvesting of commercial websites will remain a problem even after imminent legislation comes into force.

Bibliographic Forensics

Unlocking the Universe: bibliographic forensics applied to important scientific papers. A presentation to CILIP in London by Julian Wilson of Christie's at the Square Tavern, Tolmers Square, NW1 on Thursday 12th April 2012

In the New Elizabethan age of the 1950s science was often presented as sprung Minerva like, complete and beautiful from the cloven head of the Second World War. But an interest in the history of science had been growing. In 1936 the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History was founded, mainly to elucidate first published names for species of animals and plants. In 1938 Robert K. Merton published the influential  Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England.

From the 1960s onwards the history of science became a growth industry. The proliferation of scientific journals, and their embodiment in digital form today have raised all the questions of increasing costs and freedom of access, but such information is now available more widely and more simply than ever before. 

One of the services offered to authors from the end of the eighteenth to the present day is the provision of a set of offprints that may be distributed to colleagues to publicise the author's work. In the days of hot letter press the type would be set up specifically to produce these offprints, and so the typography and design of the page would usually differ from the first page of the article as printed in the journal itself, and can be identified by those differences.

The production and distribution of these offprints is important both for the history of scientific thought, and in giving value to the objects themselves as collectors items. In the case of James Hutton's “Theory of the earth”, which was presented in two papers to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1875, an abstract was required to be prepared in advance and circulated to members before the paper was actually read. The paper itself was not published until 1788 and in book form not until 1795. When the book was published the language was so opaque that its ideas were generally ignored, until they were re-presented in more comprehensibe language by John Playfair in 1802.

 The usual state of affairs was for the author to be sent a limited number of copies for distribution, further copies being available on payment. Charles Darwin, apparently, was noted for never buying additional copies of his articles, so if an offprint turns up, it is pretty certain to be one of fifteen; a limited edition which increases its collectability.

 The separates can be inscribed by the sender and annotated by the recipient. And these manuscript annotations can vary from the terse to the fulsome. If we consider the networks of scientists, for instance the informal Lunar Society, with members such as Josiah Wedgewood, Matthew Boulton, James Watt and Erasmus Darwin, an inscription from one member to another not only illuminates the processes of scientific communication, but adds a degree of uniqueness to the item, making it more desirable for a collector. The speaker had examples to offer, some resulting in auction prices that far exceeded the estimates in the auction catalogue, because a specific personal connection had been missed. Even standard issues of Nature were selling at high prices where they contained a classic article.

 The most recent example to be given by Julian Wilson was that of the Newman collection of papers by Alan Turing. Max Newman was a teacher and later a colleague of Alan Turing, he was the first to read the manuscript of Turing's essay “On computable numbers” a solution to (or perhaps a bypassing of) the “Entscheidungsproblem“ which launched Turing's mathematical career, and which, with all due regard to Charles Babbage, is the origin of modern computing. Turing sent his close friend Newman inscribed copies of his offprints, and after Turing's tragic death (after what can only be regarded as a state witch hunt) Newman collected further Turing items. In 2010 private donations, and the Heritage Lottery Fund stepping in at the last moment were able to secure the collection for Bletchley Park.

 We were sent on our way with the recommendation to scrutinise our pamphlet collections carefully for these value adding associations, and make sure that such items were discretely, but securely, marked with institutional ownership!