Anthropology.net

I’m cross-posting this from everyone, the community blog of PLoS ONE, who are asking all those with an interest to involve themselves in this initiative from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, (OSTP), who state the following:

Yesterday we announced the launch of the Public Access Forum, sponsored by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.  Beginning with today’s post, we look forward to a productive online discussion.

One of our nation’s most important assets is the trove of data produced by federally funded scientists and published in scholarly journals. The question that this Forum will address is: To what extent and under what circumstances should such research articles—funded by taxpayers but with value added by scholarly publishers—be made freely available on the Internet?

The Forum is set to run through Jan. 7, 2010, during which time we will focus sequentially on three broad themes (you can access the full schedule here). In the first phase of this forum (Dec. 10th-20th) we want to focus on the topic of Implementation.

You’ll need to read the rest of the linked page for further clarification – the first stage, Implementation, ends on December 20th, 2009, and here’s what PLoS ONE are advising:

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has invited comment on broadening public access to publicly funded research and they want to hear from you. Please post your contributions to this blog.

Their Request for Information (RFI) lasts for just 30 days and expires on 7 January 2010, so we’d like to encourage you to get involved sooner rather than later. This is an opportunity for us to shape a broader public access policy – how it should be implemented, what type of technology and features are needed, and how to manage the process.

Adding your thoughts to the blog will help ensure that the administration form a balanced (the comment thread is moderated) view of stakeholders’ interest. E-mail comments will also be accepted and will be posted to the blog by the moderators.

There are 3 main topics where the administration would appreciate your input (they also welcome general comments) and each one is open for a set period of time:

1. Implementation – expires 20 December 2009. Which Federal agencies are good candidates to adopt Public Access policies? What variables (field of science, proportion of research funded by public or private entities, etc.) should affect how public access is implemented at various agencies, including the maximum length of time between publication and public release?

2. Features and Technology – 21-31 December 2009. In what format should the data be submitted in order to make it easy to search and retrieve information, and to make it easy for others to link to it? Are there existing digital standards for archiving and interoperability to maximize public benefit? How are these anticipated to change?

3. Management – 1-7 January 2010. What are the best mechanisms to ensure compliance? What would be the best metrics of success? What are the best examples of usability in the private sector (both domestic and international)? Should those who access papers be given the opportunity to comment or provide feedback?

Thanks for supporting this initiative.

I’m not sure whether this is a project in which only those with US citizenship can participate, bearing in mind that this concerns the question of whether US taxpayers should be entitled to free Web access to published material which they have funded, but I imagine that whatever measures are eventually put in place, their influence on the rest of the world will be soon be apparent. In any case, I daresay input of opinion (via the OSTP comments section) from a global audience can only help to more clearly define the way ahead.

The Times Higher Education supplement, as mentioned by PLoS, has an interesting and informative article on the current state of play regarding open access, peer review, copyright and  funding, amongst other items for consideration. As will be apparent, there are deep divides between the publishing companies, universities, academics and libraries as to what degree of open accessibility to peer reviewed work can be offered, with two main models, green access and gold access being the most prominent in ongoing discussions. As we see:

There are two main open-access routes – the “gold” and the “green” (names invented by an open-access advocate purely to aid differentiation). In the “gold” or “author-pays” route – as used by Rainger – authors (supported by their funders) pay the costs of publishing in an open-access journal so that peer-reviewed articles then appear online and can be accessed immediately by users for free.

The “green” route – as used by Hicks – sees researchers “self-archive” the final peer-reviewed versions of their articles in institutional or subject repositories, where they are available for anyone to view. The versions deposited are generally not the final PDFs produced by the publishers (which own the copyright on this “version of record”), but rather the “post-print” or final versions that scholars send to journals after the work has gone through the refereeing process and the authors have made any corrections (the “pre-print” is the article before it has been peer reviewed). They are not formatted in the journals’ style and do not have the in-house edits, but having been peer reviewed they have a stamp of quality and will do the job for those who need to access them.

Much to the chagrin of the subscription journals (see box, right), since open-access advocacy began in about 2001 on the back of the web’s growing reach, it has come a long way. Although an evangelical group of academics may have led the charge, the movement has rapidly gained converts, including enlightened funders and cash-strapped libraries.

Interesting to note that there is much greater availability of academic research papers in fields such as physics, where new discoveries are said to overwrite previous research quite rapidly, whereas the humanities journals tend to keep much more material behind paywalls as the research is more often to be held as valid years after publication as when the authors submitted their research.

I’m fairly busy as of late and so I regularly set aside some weekend reading, such as Sergey Gavrilets‘ new paper on investigating the impact of egalitarianism on human evolution during the Pleistocene. The paper was published the other day in the open access journal PLoS One. Yesterday, I bookmarked the paper’s DOI (10.1371/journal.pone.0003293), in hopes that I can read it today.

Fast forward to this afternoon… I sit down to download the PDF, print it out, and read it. I know that DOI’s have several layers of resolution and PLoS’ DOIs resolve to plos.org. I click my bookmark and much to my surprise am presented with this on my screen:

Ahh, the ever familiar landing page of shame, a billboard to the public pointing out those who forgot to renew their domain name with their registrar. For those that don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll simplify it. In the land of the internet, there are special servers, called nameservers which handle the association of a domain name to a computer’s [IP] address. Without them, we’d have to memorize numbers like 72.14.207.99 to access Google. To use these servers, those of us that own domains have to pay a regular annual fee. If we don’t, the service will put up this landing page. After some time, the name will released into the market and other’s can grab it.

I don’t know how long this problem will last for plos.org, but even if it lasts just for today or this weekend, it is an embarrassing problem for the Public Library of Science. It also raises my eyebrows and makes me question the responsibility of the individuals who run the joint. The Public Library of Science is completely web-run operation. If they can’t stay on top of renewing their domain names, how long can they be the premiere open access publication? We can’t visit their homepage, thousands of DOIs aren’t resolving today and I wonder if emails addressed to *@plos.org have been bouncing back?

There could be obvious explanations, though. Maybe the guy who’s in charge of managing the domains is vacationing? Or maybe they actually switched some settings, such as the IP address the domains point to. That could definately be the case. Come to think of it, since their other services that live on subdomains, such as PLoS Biology is working fine, I hope that’s why. But, I honestly couldn’t access the journal via DOI all day long. When IP addresses change, it doesn’t take that long to propagate across the whole world. So I decided to do a quick WHOIS search on plos.org, and in fact, the domain name did expire on October 2nd, 2008 and was not renewed.

Anyways, no hard feelings for the PLoS guys… It is hard running a nonprofit organization. I know, I used to work for one. In my experience, there never seemed to be enough people and everyone wore different hats. I really love their journals too. They’ve done some amazing things, such as the comments and trackbacks in PLoS One let alone the open access initiative. But I really would like them to show a little bit more professionalism, especially with handling their flagship domain, plos.org. Oh yeah, let me remind you that PLoS had performance problems with their content management system that handled all their journals earlier this year. The problem would slow their site to a crawl, driving readers away in frustration over wasted time. It is fixed now, but it took months!

P.S. I ended up finding that article the ‘hard way’ via clicking around plosone.org.

Kerim over at Savage Minds as well as Lorenz of Anthropologi.info and Jason Baird Jackson of Museum Anthropology have all broke the news that the American Museum of Natural History has digitalized 100 years of anthropology papers and put them online. The best part of this news is that all the papers are open access! This is great news for anthropology and will be an excellent, easily accessible resource of top notch anthropology publications.

Hope on over to this link if you’re interested in seeing what they have in their repository.