The Finch Report and its implications for the developing world

There are two routes to Open Access. With gold OA, publishers cease to charge readers to access scholarly journals (in the form of subscriptions), but instead charge authors, or their funders or institutions, to publish their papers (by means of an article-processing charge, or APC). This allows publishers to make research papers freely available on the Internet.

With green OA, researchers continue to publish in subscription journals (without payment), but then self-archive their papers in their institutional repository, usually after an embargo period. In this way, researchers can make their papers freely available themselves.

Over the years there has been much debate as to which is the better method for achieving OA, but no consensus has ever been reached. In the past month, however, a number of developments have served to focus minds on the respective merits of green and gold as never before.

It began with the publication on 18th June of the Finch Report. Chaired by Dame Janet Finch, a sociologist at the University of Manchester, the Finch Committee was formed last year by the UK Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts, and asked to consider how access to research could be expanded.

Clear policy direction

After giving the matter due consideration, the Finch Committee concluded that a clear policy direction should be set towards supporting publication in open access or hybrid journals, funded by APCs, as the main vehicle for the publication of research, especially where the research has been publicly funded.

In other words, Finch recommended that gold OA should be viewed as the norm for publishing research papers.

By contrast, Finch recommended that the institutional repository (i.e. green OA) should be relegated to the role of bit player, merely “providing access to research data and to grey literature” and assisting in digital preservation. Where self-archiving does take place, Finch suggested, it would be unreasonable to allow papers to be deposited before an embargo period of at least 12 months had passed (except where publishers do not offer a mechanism to pay for OA gold).

The Finch report ignited a firestorm of protest, not least because it estimated that its recommendations would cost the UK research community an additional £50-60 million a year. Since it was clear that there would be no additional funding from the UK government, this meant that universities would have to find the additional money from existing budgets.

University College London (UCL) Vice-Provost (Research) David Price concluded, “The result of the Finch recommendations would be to cripple university systems with extra expense. Finch is certainly a cure to the problem of access, but is it not a cure which is actually worse than the disease?”

Serving to spur on the complaints, a few weeks later a report commissioned by the UK Open Access Implementation Group (OAIG) concluded that green OA offered a much more cost-effective route. Specifically, OAIG said, where a unilateral move to gold OA in the UK would cost large research intensive institutions about £1.7 million a year, a unilateral move to green OA would cost only around £100,000 a year.

In this light, it is perhaps unsurprising that when on July 16th Research Councils UK (RCUK) announced its new OA policy, it reinstated green OA as an equal partner to gold, and insisted on no more than a 6-month embargo (except for humanities and social science papers), apparently ignoring many of the Finch recommendations.

RCUK’s new policy, we should note, was published just hours before David Willetts announced that he was accepting all the Finch proposals, bar one on VAT rates for e-journals.

The very next day (yesterday) the EC issued a Communication on providing better access to scientific information in which it proposed an OA policy that mimics the RCUK policy.

No easy task

Where this leaves the Finch recommendations remains unclear. What is clear, however, is that adopting a national OA policy in a research environment that is truly global is no easy task — particularly where gold OA is viewed as the main vehicle for achieving OA.

As Graham Taylor of the UK Publishers Association pointed out to me recently, “6% of global research outputs derive from the UK, but if that is funded by APCs then the UK alone must cover that cost, which was previously spread over global subscriptions.”

However, there is perhaps a more important issue at stake here. In assuming that OA could or should be approached in a purely national way, the Finch Report failed to see (or simply ignored) the implications of establishing a model for OA that would inevitably have serious negative implications for researchers in more financially constrained parts of the world.

For years now scientists in the developing world have been locked out of much of the world’s research, simply because the very high costs of journal subscriptions means that their institutions are unable to afford to buy access to most science journals.

To replace that with an author-pays OA model would simply replace one problem with another, and possibly a more serious problem at that.

Thus where today researchers in the developing world are unable to read much published research, gold OA will surely prevent many of them from being able to publish their own research — threatening to turn them into passive witnesses to the development of science, not active players. After all, if UCL is wondering how it can afford to pay for gold OA, how on earth could impoverished research institutions in the developing world hope to pay the necessary charges for their researchers to publish their papers were gold OA to become the norm?

In this light, Finch’s one-dimensional approach to OA appears most unfortunate. And it is no surprise that many OA advocates have welcomed the more balanced approach adopted by RCUK and the EC.

Who better to explain the problems that Finch poses for the developing world than the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (EPT) — a charity whose mission it is to support the electronic publication of reviewed bioscience journals from countries experiencing difficulties with traditional publication, and which promotes open access initiatives in the developing world.

Below I republish EPT’s formal response to the Finch report, which was signed by EPT chairman Professor Derek Law.

The OA Interviews: Jeffrey Beall, University of Colorado Denver

In 2004 the scholarly publisher Elsevier made a written submission to the UK House of Commons Science & Technology Committee. Elsevier asserted that the traditional model used to publish research papers — where readers, and institutions like libraries, pay the costs of producing scholarly journals through subscriptions — “ensures high quality, independent peer review and prevents commercial interests from influencing decisions to publish.”

Jeffrey Beall

Elsevier added that moving to the Open Access (OA) publishing model — where authors, or their sponsoring institutions, paid to publish research papers by means of an article-processing charge (APC) — would remove “this critical control measure” from scholarly publishing.

The problem with adopting the gold OA model, explained Elsevier, is that publishers' revenues would then be driven entirely by the number of articles published. As such, OA publishers would be “under continual pressure to increase output, potentially at the expense of quality.”

This is no longer a viewpoint that Elsevier promulgates. Speaking to me earlier this year, for instance, Elsevier’s Director of Universal Access Alicia Wise said, “Today open access journals do generally contain high-quality peer reviewed content, but in 2004 this was unfortunately not always the case.”

She added, “Good work in this area by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) has helped to establish quality standards for open access publications. For several years now Elsevier has taken a positive test-and-learn approach to open access and believes that open access publishing can be both of a high quality and sustainable.”

Prescient

While many OA publishers today are undeniably as committed to the production of high-quality papers as subscription publishers ever were, Elsevier’s 2004 warning was nevertheless prescient.

No one knows this better than Jeffrey Beall, a metadata librarian at the University of Colorado Denver. Beall maintains a list of what he calls “predatory publishers”. That is, publishers who, as Beall puts it, “unprofessionally exploit the gold open-access model for their own profit.” Amongst other things, this can mean that papers are subjected to little or no peer review before they are published.

Currently, Beall’s blog list of “predatory publishers” lists over 100 separate companies, and 38 independent journals. And the list is growing by 3 to 4 new publishers each week.

Beall’s opening salvo against predatory publishers came in 2009, when he published a review of the OA publisher Bentham Open for The CharlestonAdvisor. Since then, he has written further articles on the topic (e.g. here), and has been featured twice in The Chronicle of Higher Education (here and here).

His work on predatory publishers has caused Beall to become seriously concerned about the risks attached to gold OA. And he is surprised at how little attention these risks get from the research community. As he puts it, “I am dismayed that most discussions of gold open-access fail to include the quality problems I have documented. Too many OA commenters look only at the theory and ignore the practice. We must ‘maintain the integrity of the academic record’, and I am doubtful that gold open-access is the best long-term way to accomplish that.”

When presented with evidence of predatory publishing, OA advocates often respond by saying that most OA journals do not actually charge a processing fee. 

But as commercial subscription publishers increasingly enter the OA market it would be naïve to think that the number of journals that charge APCs will not grow exponentially in the coming years.

Whether this will lead to an overall increase in quality remains to be seen. It must be hoped that as more and more traditional journals embrace OA, so quality levels will rise, and predatory publishers will begin to be squeezed out. 

However, if Beall’s growing list is anything to go by, the omens are not currently very good. Moreover, if it turns out that there is indeed an inherent flaw in the gold OA model — as Elsevier once claimed — then the research community would appear to have a long-term problem.

The OA Interviews: Audrey McCulloch, ALPSP Chief Executive

On 1^st June, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), along with the Publishers Association (PA), distributed a press release advertising the results of a survey that had recently been commissioned. 

Audrey McCulloch

The objective of the survey had been to estimate the likely impact of making journals freely available after a six-month embargo — as many advocates of Green Open Access (OA) have been proposing.

The results of the survey, the press release said, suggest that a six-month embargo would cause  research libraries to cancel 65% of their Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences journals and 44% of their Scientific, Technical and Medical journal subscriptions. “ALPSP is very concerned about the effect this may have on non-profit publishers, many of whom may not survive,” commented ALPSP’s Chief Executive Audrey McCulloch.

The press release indicated that the report had been prepared by Linda Bennett of Gold Leaf. 

Below is an email Q&A I had with McCulloch about the survey, and the report.

Survey

RP: I have a number of questions about the ALPSP survey undertaken in May 2012. I understand this was done by someone called Linda Bennett of Gold Leaf.

AM: Please let me have your questions. I’d be happy to help you where I am able.

RP: Can you say who or what Gold Leaf is, who Linda Bennett is, and why she was commissioned to do the 2012 survey? Was the work put out to competitive tender and she submitted the best proposal, or what?

AM: Goldleaf is the name of Linda Bennett’s consultancy. The survey started life as a question I wanted to know the answer to and wished to speak to a small number of librarians about. Linda works regularly with librarian groups so I contacted her to ask a UK sample of librarians the simple question you see in the full survey. 

The responses that Linda received were concerning and I then wondered if this was peculiar to a small UK subset or if they were reflected in the wider library community.

RP: I believe the survey was jointly commissioned by the ALPSP and the Publishers Association? Was the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC) involved in any way?

AM: ALPSP and the PA together decided to extend the scope of the limited survey. PRC was aware but was not involved.

In order to ensure that we could compare the results of the wider survey with the responses from the original survey, the PA and ALPSP asked Linda to send out the same question as before but to a global sample of librarians.

RP: Bennett is herself Chair of the ALPSP research committee is she not?

AM: In both the original and wider survey, Linda clearly declared her position as Chair of the ALPSP research committee.

RP: To those she contacted yes. I believe Bennett is also the ALPSP representative on the steering group of the PRC, a publishers’ organisation. And she describes herself on the Book Fair web site as a field reporter for the PA. I am wondering whether — given the sensitivity of the issues surrounding self-archiving and Green OA, and the way the results of the survey have been used to promote the cause of the publishing industry — it might not have been better to hand the initial work that Linda had done over to an independent consultant, and to have commissioned them to do the follow-up study?

AM: The responses to the survey speak for themselves and are presented as an opinion piece. Linda was not commissioned to interpret the responses, only to report the answers to the question. The PA pays Linda as a field reporter for selected events, but this does not make her an employee of the PA and as an independent consultant she works for many other organisations. 

We commissioned Linda because she has practical experience in conducting surveys. But the nature of the survey makes the contractor irrelevant. Using someone else would not have influenced the result.

I have also mentioned in our exchanges several times that I represent ALPSP on the PRC Steering Committee. Linda is an invited attendee.

The OA Interviews: Keith Jeffery, UK Science & Technology Facilities Council

Keith Jeffery has been developing ICT solutions to “support, enhance and assist in research and the management of research” since the 1960s. It is this mission that lies at the heart of his current post as Director of IT and International Strategy at the UK Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC).

Keith Jeffery

Jeffery’s extensive knowledge and experience of how IT systems can be used to assist in the research process has also earned him a place at the table of the research outputs committee of Research Councils UK (RCUK), the umbrella body for the seven UK research councils. There he serves as a special “expert” member of the committee.

In light of his professional interests, it is no surprise that Jeffery is a keen advocate for Open Access (OA). OA, after all, assumes a world in which research is made freely and immediately available on the Web, not locked behind a paywall — and thus available only to those who can afford access.

But Jeffery is not an undiscriminating advocate for OA. He has firm views not just on its benefits, but also on how it can best be realised. Specifically, he is convinced that Gold OA — where authors pay to publish their papers in OA journals — risks taking the research community down a very expensive, unproductive and risky cul-de-sac.

A far more fruitful and rational approach, he suggests, is to push for Green OA, where researchers continue to publish in subscription journals and then self-archive copies of their papers in their institutional repositories.

As he puts it, “I am firmly pro-Green Libre, anti-Gold and very anti-Hybrid … My arguments against Gold relate predominantly to its cost, coverage, access, and the way it encourages vanity publishing.” 

Next logical stage

Only Green OA, he adds, can usher in the next logical stage in the development of scholarly communication, which Jeffery characterises as “hyperlinked multimedia and Web 2.0”.

Importantly, he says, by exploiting institutional repositories, research organisations can ensure that their intellectual property is “in a place where it is surrounded by additional relevant information”.  Moreover, when it is located directly in the institution, the information can be “managed and curated more appropriately, and within the research business processes of the organisation.”

With exactly this vision in mind, Jeffery has devoted a lot of time and effort (as lead architect) to developing a new information format able to implement his vision — an information standard known as the Common European Research Information Format, or CERIF.

CERIF, an EU Recommendation to member states now used in 42 countries, allows the use of rich metadata. This provides greatly improved retrieval capabilities, and enables institutions to create linkages between all relevant data — not just research papers, but information about the authors, research datasets and software, funding information, project information, experiments, and even data on the facilities and equipment used by researchers.

Given his belief that Green OA based on a network of sophisticated institutional repositories offers the most cost-effective and rapid migration path from print to electronic for scholarly communication, we should not be surprised that Jeffery is disappointed with the recommendations made in the recently published Finch Report.

Headed up by Dame Janet Finch, the Finch Committee was set up last year by UK Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts, and tasked with establishing how access to research can be expanded. 

Retrograde step

When it published its Report in June, the Finch Committee recommended that the research community single-mindedly pursue the gold route to OA, with institutional repositories consigned to bit players as access providers for data and grey literature, and as preservation tools.

Jeffery believes the RCUK will now be obliged to follow the Finch recommendations. This would be a retrograde step: earlier this year RCUK — which has had an OA policy since 2006 — released the draft text of a new, stronger OA policy. Amongst other things, this made a commitment to Libre OA and proposed that the Research Councils stipulate an embargo period of no more than 6 months (except in the case of humanities and social sciences).

By contrast, the Finch Report argues that it would be “unreasonable” to require embargo periods of less than twelve months.

And while Finch encourages non-commercial re-use, there is no similarly explicit support for full CC-BY licencing. As such, it will not facilitate the unrestricted re-use of articles, including text mining, which Jeffery believes to be an essential component of OA.

“[A]s an employee of a Research Council, I am obliged to support Finch, although privately I have grave misgivings,” he says.

Jeffery expands on his work, and his disappointment with the Finch Report, in more detail below. 

The UK Publishers Association comments on the Finch Report

The eagerly awaited Finch Report was published on 18^th June. The Finch Committee, headed up by Dame Janet Finch, a sociologist at the University of Manchester, was set up last year by UK Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts, and tasked with establishing how access to research could be expanded.

Grayam Taylor of the Publishers Association

After due deliberation, the Committee concluded that all publicly funded research should be made freely available on an Open Access (OA) basis, and that the traditional journal model — which currently sees most research locked behind a subscription paywall — should be gradually discontinued.

The Finch Report has been welcomed by publishers and their trade associations (e.g. here, here and here), and by research funders (e.g. here and here). 

However, it has been received with a mixture of frustration, disbelief, and anger by some UK research universities, and by many OA advocates (e.g. here, here and here).

What has dismayed critics is that in recommending the so-called gold route to OA (where researchers pay to publish in OA journals), rather than the green route (where they continue to publish in subscription journals at no cost, and then self-archive their papers in an institutional repository) the Finch Report appears to have condemned the research community to having to find an additional £50-60 million a year to publish its research, at a time when university budgets are under severe pressure.

Since much of this additional money is expected to go into the pockets of publishers, some have charged the Finch Committee with succumbing to lobbying.

Others maintain that if the Finch recommendations are implemented the number of research papers published will have to be rationed.

What do publishers make of the criticisms? To find out, I contacted Graham Taylor, Director of Educational, Academic and Professional Publishing at the UK-based Publishers Association. Our email Q&A is below.

On lobbying

RP: The Finch Report recommends that all publicly funded research be made freely available on an Open Access basis, and that the traditional subscription model be phased out. The Publishers Association has welcomed the Report, describing it as a “’balanced package’ of recommendations for extending access to research outputs within the UK”.

By contrast, many in the OA movement have greeted the Report with dismay. Stevan Harnad, for instance, has described it as a product of “strong and palpable influence from the publishing lobby”, and a “fiasco”. Meanwhile, David Price, Vice-Provost (Research) at UCL, commented to me that, “The result of the Finch recommendations would be to cripple university systems with extra expense”. He added, “Finch is certainly a cure to the problem of access, but is it not a cure which is actually worse than the disease?”

What is it that critics of the Report like this are not seeing that publishers do see?

GT: In fact the report recommends that “a clear policy direction should be set towards support for publication in open access or hybrid journals, funded by APCs, as the main vehicle for the publication of research, especially when it is publicly funded”. In proposing that the UK “should embrace the transition to open access”, the report recognises that “the process itself will be complicated” and that “no single channel can on its own maximise research publications for the greatest number of people”.

The Finch Report in a global Open Access landscape

Last week I published an interview with David Price, Vice-Provost (Research) at University College London (UCL).  

Commenting on the interview on the Liblicense mailing list Anthony Watkinson said, “My impression is those pressing for OA, at least among the library sector and even within UCL, have moved on. A roadmap has been produced by the information officers of the League of European Research Universities (LERU). This organisation is chaired by none other than Paul Ayris of UCL, an Open Access advocate.”

Watkinson is a former Wiley-Blackwell publisher, a consultant to the Publishers Association, and now a part-time senior lecturer in the Department of Information Studies at UCL.

Paul Ayris, Direct of UCL Library Services

My curiosity piqued I contacted Paul Ayris, Director of UCL Library Services, and asked him if he thought the LERU Roadmap was at variance with what Price had said to me in the interview?

Ayris replied, “UCL’s position, as outlined in your interview with Professor Price, is to my mind in line with the LERU Roadmap, whose composition I co-ordinated. True, the Roadmap does not mention National Licensing approaches, but it does show the benefits and challenges of the Gold and Green routes to Open Access and the requirements that both lay on Universities.”

Ayris offered to write a guest post aligning the Finch Report with the LERU Roadmap. I agreed, and publish it below. 

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The Finch Report in a global Open Access landscape

By Paul Ayris 

The Finch Report, which was  recently published in the UK, has caused a storm of comment, even controversy. Responses have been lined up behind the barricades of either Green or Gold Open Access (OA), and predictions have been made about the destruction of the UK publishing industry. 

Universities and research funders rightly worry about the implications of the funding burden that full implementation of the Finch recommendations would lay on them. There is much heat, but where is the light?

The Finch Report is, in many ways, an academic study of what the authors feel is the future trajectory of scholarly publishing to support research, teaching and learning, public engagement and enterprise. It’s a laudable and important attempt to establish a leadership role for the UK in Open Access — a country that produces around 6% of the global research output. 

The Finch vision is for a fully Gold OA world, where Green OA repositories take on a role as a supporting player for grey literature and to support University marketing. National licences to commercial content are suggested as a short term win, to bring about equality of access across UK HE, and to embrace new sectors such as the NHS and SMEs.

Where does the Finch view sit in a global OA world? A new report by John Houghton and Alma Swan, financed by the JISC and to be published imminently, takes a different look at the OA debate. 

Houghton and Swan have undertaken detailed economic modelling, something missing from Finch, to compare the costs of Green and Gold Open Access if a university unilaterally opted for either of these routes, or if the whole world changed to either Green or Gold. 

Their analysis tells us a lot about the difficulties of transition to a fully OA environment. Their conclusion is that, for universities, at the present time the most cost effective route is for a University to opt for Green OA. Should the whole world turn OA, then their modelling supports Finch, in that the biggest saving for a University would come from Gold (Chart 23 in the forthcoming Report).

This is an important recognition of the difficulties of transition. One of the weaknesses in Finch is that it does not adequately model the transition to OA or the time it might take to achieve. 

Another recent publication, which also acknowledges the difficulties of transition, is the LERU Roadmap Towards Open Access. This document was published in June 2011 by the League of European Research Universities as an Advice paper for its members, and indeed for all European Universities. 

The Roadmap was well received in Germany, with a glowing tribute in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The document identifies signs and pathways for both the Green and Gold routes to OA, and the benefits and challenges of all approaches. 

A survey of European research universities found that Green approaches were more deeply embedded there than Gold. The Roadmap therefore paints a realistic picture of what faces a European research university in their attempts to embrace OA.

In this context, what is the significance of the Finch Report? It is visionary, bold and well-intentioned. But there are gaps. It fails to appreciate the difficulties of transition to OA here and now. 

Taken with the Houghton and Swan, and the LERU work, a different trajectory for the future of OA can be said to emerge. This is more nuanced than Finch suggests. 

In the short term, a scaled up version of Green OA, linked to extended national licencing, would help solve the problems of access to content that Finch quite rightly is trying to address. 

In the longer term, the Gold OA vision of Finch (the Goldfinch) may well become the predominant model. But for this to work, the whole of the world needs to turn OA, and that is not going to happen tomorrow, nor any time soon.

The Finch Report is therefore an important marker on the road to OA, but in itself it is not the whole story.

The Finch Report: UCL’s David Price Responds

The much-awaited report from the Finch Committee was published today. The Committee, headed up by Dame Janet Finch, a sociologist at the University of Manchester, was set up last year by UK Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts, and tasked with establishing how access to research could be expanded.

David Price, UCL Vice-Provost (Research)

The good news: the Report recommends that all publicly funded research should be made freely available on an Open Access (OA) basis, and that the traditional model — which currently sees much research locked behind a subscription paywall — should be phased out.

The bad news: the Report estimates that this will require the higher education sector to find an extra £50-60 million a year to disseminate its research.  

The bulk of this extra money will be needed in order to pay for researchers to publish in so-called Gold OA and Hybrid OA journals. Instead of billing readers for access to research papers, as subscription journals do, OA journals bill authors, or their funders or institutions, for publishing papers — by means of article-processing charges (APCs).

These charges range from $305 to $3,930 per article, and are the price publishers demand for making research papers freely available on the Internet.

Some have greeted the Report with enthusiasm. Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, the world's second largest private funder, commented. “We are delighted that the Finch Report encourages the UK to embrace open access, something that we at the Wellcome Trust feel very strongly about. There is a real groundswell of opinion in support of open access in the UK, the USA, Europe and beyond and this is a real opportunity for the UK to lead the way.”

Others are far less enthusiastic, arguing that by failing to support and promote Green OA (aka self-archiving), the Committee missed an important opportunity to push for a more cost-effective solution.

With Green OA, authors continue to publish in subscription journals (without payment), but make their papers freely available on the Internet by self-archiving them in an institutional repository — usually after an embargo period intended to allow the publisher to recoup the publication costs through the subscription.

Many OA advocates believe that Green OA is a much less costly route to OA. Publishers dislike it intensely.

A hard place

“The Finch Report is a successful case of lobbying by publishers to protect the interests of publishing at the expense of the interests of research and the public that funds research,” argues University of Southampton cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad. “The Finch Report proposes doing precisely what the US Research Works Act (RWA) — since discredited and withdrawn — failed to do: to push ‘Green’ OA self-archiving (by authors, and Green OA self-archiving mandates by authors’ funders and institutions) off the UK policy agenda as inadequate and ineffective and, to boot, likely to destroy both publishing and peer review — and to replace them instead with a vague, slow evolution toward ‘Gold’ OA publishing, at the publishers’ pace and price.”

Whatever one’s views about the conclusions reached by the Finch Committee, and whatever one feels about the relative merits of Green and Gold OA (see here for instance), if the Report’s recommendations are implemented it will put UK universities in a hard place. For it is they who will have to find much of the extra money needed, at a time when their budgets are already under huge pressure.

Unsurprisingly, therefore the Vice-Provost (Research) at University College London (UCL) David Price is not best pleased. “The result of the Finch recommendations would be to cripple university systems with extra expense,” he told me. “Finch is certainly a cure to the problem of access, but is it not a cure which is actually worse than the disease?”

Price’s message to David Willetts is simple: more work needs to be done to find an adequate solution. “Listen to UCL’s response to Finch and carry on talking to get the best transitional model from where we are now to a fully OA world,” he suggests. “The Finch recommendations are only part of the answer.”

For more of Price’s views read on.

A New Declaration of Rights: Open Content Mining

In a recent investment report, analyst Claudio Aspesi concluded that a new front had opened up in the Open Access (OA) debate. Writing in April, Aspesi noted that academics are “increasingly protesting the limitations to the usage of the information and data contained in the articles published through subscription models, and — in particular — to the practice of text mining articles.” Aspesi is right, and a central figure in this battleground is University of Cambridge chemist Peter Murray-Rust. A long-time advocate for open data, Murray-Rust is now spearheading an initiative to draft a “Content Mining Declaration”. What is the background to this?

Peter Murray-Rust

When I interviewed Peter Murray-Rust in 2008, he expressed considerable frustration at the difficulties he was experiencing in trying to extract and reuse the data published in scholarly journals — even where his university had paid an electronic licence to access the content. 

What Murray-Rust wanted to do, he explained, was to capture the “embedded data” contained in the tables, charts, and images published in science papers, along with the “supplemental information” that often accompanies papers. To do this, he had developed a variety of software tools to mine large quantities of digital text. Having extracted the data he then wanted to aggregate them, compare them, input them into programs, use them to create predictive models, and reuse them in a variety of other ways.

However, he was having huge problems achieving this, not because of any technical issue, but because of uncertainty over copyright and publishers’ insistence that a licence to read journals does not encompass the right to mine them with software.

To add to Murray-Rust’s frustration, many of his colleagues were either unsympathetic or uncomprehending. Even more galling, the Open Access movement — which should have been a natural ally — was more interested in making papers freely available to eyeballs, than to software. Even papers published in OA journals, he noted, are often released under licences that do not come with reuse rights.

In pursuit of his dream, Murray-Rust became a formative voice in the creation of the open data movement. Open data, Murray-Rust explained to me in 2008, is data “free of any restraint on access and on reuse.”  Recently, however, governments have tended to lead the way in urging for open data, spawning a generation of data wranglers; open scientific information has often lagged behind, but is now beginning to be seen as a central issue.

Four years later Murray-Rust is still frustrated. He is not, however, a man to give up, and he continues his advocacy today under the rubric of “open content mining”. Essentially, this is text mining plus. As Murray-Rust explains today, he views the mining of scholarly journals as a hierarchical activity, with content mining encompassing not just the mining of text and data, but other types of content too, including images, tables, graphs, audio, and video.

Simply using the term “text mining”, he adds, “might imply that anything other than text should be protected by the ‘content provider’. However, I and others can extract factual information from a wide range of material.”

The good news is that the research community is finally beginning to understand what Murray-Rust has been “banging on about” for all these years, as are research funders and governments, and Murray-Rust believes the door to what he wants is finally beginning to open.

However, he says, it is imperative that text mining advocates push hard at that open door if they want to achieve their objectives. To this end, Murray-Rust recently convened an ad hoc group of interested parties to draft what he calls a “Content Mining Declaration” (disclosure: I am a member of the group).

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If you wish to read the rest of the article, and a short Q&A with Murray-Rust, please click on the link below. 

I am publishing the interview under a Creative Commons licence, so you are free to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use it for any commercial purpose. 

To read the rest of the text (as a PDF file) click HERE.

Open Access: The People’s Petition

(There is a short Q&A with OA advocate John Wilbanks below. Scroll down if you wish to skip this introduction)

**This petition reached the threshold 25,000 signatures on 3rd June 2012**

Earlier this month a group of Open Access (OA) advocates flew to Washington to attend a meeting with the US Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP). Their objective was to convince OSTP that it is vital the US government ensures that all publicly-funded research is made freely available on the Internet.

The omens seemed good: at the end of last year the OSTP had issued an RFI on Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting from Federally Funded Research, and the Obama Administration has been making positive noises about OA for a while now (although without introducing any new policies as yet).

Moreover, in February the OA movement had defeated a piece of publisher-backed legislation called the Research Works Act (RWA) that, if it had passed, would have slain the poster child of the OA movement — the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy. This policy requires that all NIH-funded papers are made freely available on the Web within 12 months of publication.

The same month a piece of bipartisan legislation — the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) — had been introduced in both US houses that would have the reverse effect of the RWA. If passed, it would  propagate the NIH policy to a dozen or so other US federal agencies, and reduce the current NIH embargo from 12 months to six.

Yes, the omens were good. To cap it all, says John Wilbanks, a senior fellow in entrepreneurship at the Ewing Kauffman Foundation, and one of the group that travelled to Washington, the meeting appeared to go well. “They listened to us, they clearly had studied the issues.”  

Nagging feeling

Flying home to the West Coast on a redeye, however, Wilbanks began to experience a nagging feeling that their job was not complete. After all, he thought, the OSTP had made no promises; and it would inevitably be talking to publishers as well. And publishers tell a very different story about OA.

“And it hit me — us, because I was with Mike Carroll, Mike Rossner, and Heather Joseph — that the redeyes and the meetings and the arguing were not carrying the day,” Wilbanks explained on this blog. “We needed to do something else.”

That something else became an initiative called Access2Research. The objective was to engage the public in the discussions about OA. As Wilbanks wrote on his blog, “The only thing missing from the open access debate is the public.”

The best way of engaging the people, it was decided, was to launch a petition on the “We the People” site — which was introduced on whitehouse.gov by the US government last September — and invite the public to sign it.

The petition — which went live on the night of 20^th May — reads: “Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.”

It ends by urging President Obama “to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.”

In order to receive a response from the US government the petition must attract 25,000 signatures within 30 days (i.e. 19^th June). But here too the omens are good: within the first two and a half days the petition had attracted half the number of signatures necessary, with roughly 200 being added every hour.

At the time of writing the number stands at 16,443, two thirds of the way there, yet with 24 days still to run.