Germany plans enquiry into the digital society

On 14^th January the Christian Democratic Union and its Union partner in the German government the Christian Social Union of Bavaria (CDU/CSU) proposed setting up an Enquete Commission to examine the implications of the Internet on society. Amongst other things, the Commission will be asked to look at initiatives for providing free access to publicly-funded research. Could this announcement be connected with the e-petition in support of Open Access (OA) launched in Germany last November? Does it herald a change of heart about OA on the part of the German government?

When governments are at a loss over how to tackle an issue, find themselves confronted by demands from citizens that they would rather not address, or face growing public conflict over an important question, they tend to launch an enquiry, produce a white paper, or appoint a commission to make recommendations.

With many governments now more than ever in doubt about the best way to respond to the host of issues raised by the Internet — including copyright, file-sharing, pornography, network neutrality, digital governance, OA etc. — we've seen a lot of enquiries, commissions and reports in recent years, all of which have proved to be controversial in one way or another.

Last year, for instance, saw the publication of a UK report called Digital Britain. This was immediately attacked by web companies like Facebook, Google, and Yahoo — on the grounds that it could give the UK government "unprecedented and sweeping powers" to amend copyright laws.

Last month a French report proposed a "Google tax" on online advertising revenues. Designed to subsidise musicians and newspapers struggling to adapt to the digital era, the idea was criticised for proposing that taxpayers fund "out-of-date businesses".

And in the US the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been struggling to realise the principles of "network neutrality" that it outlined back in 2005 with its Internet Policy Statement. Amongst other things, the FCC's proposals have been criticised on the grounds that they would stifle innovation and open the door to government control of the Internet.

Free unfettered access to the Internet

Now, it seems, it is the turn of Germany, with the CDU/CSU proposing the establishment of an Enquete Commission on The Internet and the Digital Society. To operate under the aegis of the German Parliament (Bundestag), the Commission will consist of 13 members of parliament from the different German political parties and 13 external experts proposed by the political parties.

The CDU/CSU outlined its plans in a press release published on 14^th January. "The Internet is no longer just a technical platform," it said, "but has become an integral part of the life of many people."

For that reason, it added, it is up to governments to "set the framework to protect the Internet as a liberal medium, and to ensure its integrity and operability ... [such that] ... citizens, businesses and academia have free, unfettered access to the Internet."

On 19^th January Germany's Free Democratic Party (FDP) — the third coalition partner in the German Government — announced its support for the Commission.

Amongst the many issues the Commission will be asked to examine, writes German OA advocate Eberhard Hilf on his blog, is the need to increase awareness of intellectual property; how to ensure that the Internet operates as a competitive market; how to ensure free access to the results of publicly-funded research; and how to develop strategies to ensure free access to government information.

On OA the draft resolution proposes that the Commission consider: "Initiativen zum freien Zugang zu den Ergebnissen staatlich finanzierter Forschung (Open Access)" ["Initiatives for free access to the results of publicly funded research (Open Access)"].

That the question of access to publicly-funded research should be included in a shopping list of hot topics related to the digital society is striking, and surely demonstrates how successful the OA movement has been in getting what many might consider to be an esoteric topic on to the national political agenda. As Hilf puts it, "It demonstrates that the topic of Open Access is now receiving serious evaluation at the level of the German Bundestag."

The Internet Question

On the other hand, maybe it is not so surprising: last year OA emerged as a key battle zone in Germany in discussions about what one might call the "Internet Question". As Hilf points out on his blog, OA was the topic of considerable public discussion during 2009, after it became entangled in a smorgasbord of Internet-related issues — issues like copyright, file-sharing, censorship, and growing fears that German culture is in danger of being appropriated by American companies like Google and YouTube.

Matters came to a head last April with the so-called Heidelberg Appeal, an open letter entitled "The Freedom to Publish and the Protection of Copyright" that was sent to German President Horst Köhler, Chancellor Angela Merkel and the heads of Germany's 16 federal states. The initiative was spearheaded by the academic Roland Reuss, a science historian and researcher (e.g. on the work of the writer Franz Kafka).

The Heidelberg Appeal was an emotional and confused attack on Google Books, on YouTube and on OA, and was in part triggered by growing support for OA from the Alliance of German Scientific Organisations — a coalition whose membership includes The German Council of Science and Humanities (WR), The German Research Foundation (DFG), Leibniz-Gesellschaft, and the Max Planck Society.

Outlining its concerns, the Appeal said that authors' freedoms in Germany are currently under serious threat, both at an international level ("[I]ntellectual property is being stolen from its producers to an unimagined degree and without criminalisation through the illegal publication of works protected by German copyright law on platforms such as Google Books and YouTube."), and at a national level. ("The so-called 'Alliance of German Scientific Organisations' wants to obligate authors to use a specified mode of publication [i.e. OA]. This is not conducive to the improvement of scientific information").

Not only was the Appeal based on a misunderstanding of the aims and objectives of OA (OA advocates, for instance, have never suggested that researchers be compelled to publish in OA journals), but it conflated OA with other issues (Google Books, YouTube etc.) that OA advocates argue have little to do with it.

This misunderstanding too is perhaps not surprising — for all these issues do share at least one important thing in common: they all arise from the fact that the Internet fundamentally changes the way in which information can be copied, distributed and consumed.

As the Enquete Commission proposal acknowledges, this offers many opportunities, but also poses threats.

However, due to proactive lobbying by multinational corporations in the mid 1990s, governments have until now tended to focus mainly on the threats and, in the belief that in a knowledge society IP maximalism and increasingly draconian copyright laws are essential, embarked on a wide-ranging review and updating of copyright laws — both nationally, and internationally via organisations like the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO).

Amongst other things, this led to the introduction of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US, and the 2001 European Copyright Directive.

But as the collateral damage that such laws can inflict on innovation, competition, and civil rights etc., governments have come under increasing fire from a raft of new pressure groups and new-style political parties.

So, for instance, after industry groups like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) persuaded governments to strengthen copyright laws, and sanction wide-ranging use of digital rights management (DRM) technologies in order to lock up content (even at the expense of traditional fair use rights), there has been growing criticism from organisations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Save the Internet.

What has emerged as the key issue is how companies and governments ought to respond to the challenges that the Internet poses, both the challenges to traditional business models, and the challenges to society at large.

Media companies, for instance, have consistently maintained that new laws need to be introduced to protect their legitimate business interests. Opponents counter that they would be far better adapting their business models to the new realities of the Internet rather than seeking to bend the new environment to the steam age models that they are accustomed to. Instead of focusing on the threats the Internet poses to their historical way of doing things, critics argue, large corporations should exploit the many new opportunities it opens up.

As criticism (and civil disobedience) has grown, so governments have faced growing pressure to rethink their approach, particularly as it has become increasingly clear that IP maximalism may do more harm than good, and may any case prove unsuccessful, even when large multinational companies are prepared to sue thousands of private citizens, including hapless mothers.

The Internet has also raised questions about control more generally, with growing concern about privacy, about censorship, about governance and governmental transparency, and about the principle of universal access.

Heated debate

How did OA become entangled in this troublesome net? Because copyright is as central to any discussion of OA as it is to many of these other issues. As for traditional media companies, for instance, copyright is the cornerstone on which the business of scholarly publishing is built.

Confronted by growing calls for (and even mandates requiring) researchers to maximise access to the papers they publish in scholarly journals — by self-archiving them — scholarly publishers have echoed large media companies: If the information that they sell is made freely available on the Internet by others (and in ways not previously possible prior to the Internet), it will destroy their businesses.

What is different about scholarly publishing, of course, is that the information in question (research) is created with public funds. Researchers give it to publishers without charge, and conduct peer review of colleagues' research without charge. Publishers then sell that information back to the research community in the form of journal subscriptions.

Effectively, therefore, the research community gives publishers a publicly-funded good; publishers then package it up in journals and sell it back. In a print world this packaging is expensive. In a world in which information is produced, distributed and read electronically, the costs fall away to zero, argue OA advocates. Consequently, they say, the research community should be paying considerably less for the now minimal service provided by publishers. Instead they are paying more.

At heart the argument for OA is that in a networked world publicly-funded research can and should be made freely available, not held captive behind toll gates that deny access to those who cannot afford the toll. Scholarly publishers should adapt to the new reality, or get out of the way, not seek to impose outdated models in the new environment.

The problem is that scholarly publishers are accustomed to making large profits from publishing research. OA threatens these profits, and even those publishers who have migrated to an OA publishing model still expect to charge unjustifiably high fees. Rather than adapt, in other words, publishers want governments to help them maintain their profit levels, even if doing so prevents researchers taking advantage of the Web's distributive power.

Since publishers appear to be unwilling to play ball, argue OA advocates, it is up to researchers to ensure that their papers are freed from the pay walls — by self-archiving.

The inevitable tensions arising from this conflict of interest became all too apparent in Germany during the process of enacting the European Copyright Directive into German law. The so-called "First Basket" of the new law was passed in 2003. Shortly afterwards, however, discussions about a "Second Basket" led to a heated debate, with the research community becoming increasingly resistant to the government's proposals.

The German Rectors' Conference, the Science Council, the Max Planck Society and other German education and research organisations, for instance, voiced strong opposition, and joined forces with an initiative co-founded by Hilf called the Coalition for Action: Copyright for Education and Research. (AB).

On 5^th July 2004 the AB issued the Goettingen Declaration on Copyright for Education and Research, which argued that "In a digitised and networked information society, access to information worldwide for the purpose of education and science must be guaranteed at all times and from any place."

By now the research community had concluded that, whatever similarities the case for OA may appear to share with the case being made by media companies, and whatever the merits or demerits of the arguments used by media companies in pressing for stronger copyright laws, publicly-funded research should be treated as a special case.

From the ensuing debate emerged a proposal for a "Third Basket" — known as "The Education and Science Basket". At the centre of the discussion about the Third Basked was the issue of OA. As we saw, scholarly publishers disagree and the research community disagree over this. And the German Government appears still inclined to support the publishers' case.

Moreover, to the frustration of the OA movement, some researchers also appear not to get it yet. It was the distribution last year of a questionnaire to science organisations about the Third Basket by the German Federal Ministry of Justice, for instance, that sparked the Heidelberg Appeal. (AB's response to the questionnaire can be read here)

Petition

In its turn, The Heidelberg Appeal spurred a 31-year-old former chemist and now science journalist from Heidelberg, Lars Fischer, to launch an e-petition. Introduced on the Bundestag server last November, this proposed an amendment to the pending changes in German copyright law to require all scientific publications resulting from public funding to be made "openly accessible."

Speaking to me at the time, Fischer said that he had been offended by the Heidelberg Appeal. He added: "I learned that many scientists were as outraged as I was about the falsehoods in that document."

Did Fischer's e-petition play a role in the decision to propose a Commission? "I can only speculate," says Johannes Fournier of the German Research Foundation (DFG). But he adds that it "could be one reason for establishing the Enquete Commission right now."

Fischer also suspects there may be a connection. "I don't know for sure," he emailed me, "but when the petition was posted I contacted several local and federal politicians in all major parties and got a number of very encouraging responses, especially from within the CDU (thanks to science blogger Christian Reinboth, who is a local politician there). Moreover, the wording of the Commission proposal seems to relate the key argument of my petition. So I think it is likely that there is a connection."

Clearly, however, the Commission also has to be seen in the context of the wider debate about copyright. As Fournier points out, the proposal comes in the wake of the government's promise to "do further work on improving German copyright law."

Fournier adds: "Last year the Federal Ministry of Justice asked stakeholders for their suggestions on copyright improvement. Their responses had to be in by mid-June 2009, so at least some of the topics for the Enquete Commission have probably resulted from that enquiry."

Confused and conflated

As we've said, the Heidelberg Appeal was an oddly confused document. It is, however, a good example of the way in which quite different issues are often conflated — either through ignorance or, frequently, as part of a deliberate attempt to throw sand in the eyes of opponents by means of "FUD".

In their attempts to derail the OA movement, Scholarly publishers have been as guilty of FUD as anyone. They have argued, for instance, that OA will lead to "socialised science"; that "public access equals government censorship"; and that OA will cause the financial collapse of the scholarly publishing industry, and so the destruction of peer review.

Interestingly, recent events in Germany provide a striking example of how vested interests are happy to confuse a debate, or hijack it for their own purposes — an example that also demonstrates the way in which the Internet Question has become a Pandora's Box of complex issues whose relationship to one other is not always obvious. And like an ecosystem, tweaking one part of the system can have unexpected consequences for other — apparently unconnected — parts.

When last year the German Government set about introducing an amendment to a piece of key Internet legislation (Das Telemediengesetz), for instance, interest groups were quick to exploit public concern over child pornography for their own ends.

The original amendment — the Zugangserschwerungsgesetz — was intended to prevent child pornography from being distributed over the Internet. During the legislative process, however, the bill was broadened to also encompass the blocking of gambling sites, "killergames", copyright protected material, political hate pages, defamatory material etc. etc.

This attracted considerable criticism. "People did not object to the blocking of child pornography," explains Hilf, "but members of parliament began calling for the regulation to be extended. Lobbyists wanted new DRM rules added, for instance, and to allow web pages to be blocked in cases of copyright infringement."

Last May, with the debate in full swing, activist Franziska Heine launched an e-petition under the rubric: "No indexing and blocking of internet pages". This quickly attracted 134,000 votes, making it the most widely supported e-petition ever in Germany.

In the process the Internet Question turned into a political hot potato, thrusting a previously obscure political party called the Piratenpartei [The Pirate Party Germany] into mainstream German politics. Modelled on the Swedish Pirate Party, the Piratenpartei calls, amongst other things, for liberalisation of copyright laws, information privacy rights, support for the Zugangserschwerungsgesetz, and "open source governance".

Ordinary Germans, it turned out, had by now become sufficiently alienated by their government's approach to Internet-related matters that the Piratenpartei succeeded in getting over 2% of the votes in last September's federal elections.

The incident provides further evidence that the German Government may need to rethink its approach. Moreover, while the Zugangserschwerungsgesetz was passed by the German Parliament, in November President Köhler rejected it. "The attempts to extend the law led the President to refuse to sign it in its present form," explains Hilf. "This is an extremely rare event that happens maybe once in every 10 years. But people do not want Chinese web filters in Germany."

Germany's Social Democratic Party (SPD) does at least appear to have got it: Having voted for the Bill in June, it subsequently changed its mind.

It appears that we have to conclude that Fischer's petition can only have been one of a number of factors that led the CDU/CSU to propose an Enquete commission. It may however have been the final straw. "It added to the headaches of the conservative politicians of the CDU/CSU," explains Hilf. "Their election campaign for the German Bundestag last September rested on DRM, on Internet censorship, and on choking copyright laws. And it was for this reason that many normally liberal, or even conservative, people ended up voting for the Piratenpartei."

But does the Commission herald a change of heart on the part of the German Government about the Internet Question, or indeed of OA?

Canny political move?

Fournier hopes so."The establishment of the Enquete Commission indicates that the importance of the Internet and internet-related matters for all citizens, as well as for the economy, has at last been seen, and that politicians are willing to address the questions more thoroughly than ever before."

Hilf, however, fears that it is more likely to be a canny political move by the German Government than a genuine desire to re-examine the issues. "In a typical Mrs. Merkel strategy it was decided to appear to soothe the public by coming up with the idea of the Enquete Commission," says Hilf. "It will work away for some years but have little direct influence on politics."

It certainly won't produce any quick answers: The Commission is not expected to start its deliberations until the summer, and these will then last for two years.

Is there at least hope that in the meantime the aspirations articulated in the Fischer petition may be heeded? "The e-petition committee will consider it, formulate an answer and a recommendation to Parliament, but that does not mean that Parliament will necessarily do anything," cautions Hilf.

It is more likely, he adds, that while the Commission sits talking, the German Government will finalise its planned changes to Germany copyright law; and in a way that will please neither its critics, nor the OA movement. "The CDU/CSU and the FDP (liberals) are moving to introduce the Third Basket, and this will undoubtedly contain DRM and further restrictions, and it will try to curb OA."

He adds: "I expect the Government to declare OA mandates to be illegal, and to raise the bar on self-archiving — by, for instance, only permitting the author's copy to be archived."

Fellow German OA advocate Klaus Graf is equally sceptical. "I have little hope that there will be a support for OA," he says.

But Fischer has not given up. "Currently I'm thinking of ways to get my message to members of the Commission," he says pugnaciously. "I'm not done yet."

For his part, Hartmut Simon, a multimedia specialist at the University of Siegen and co-founder (with Hilf) of the AB, believes that the science and education community should be setting its sights higher than free access to research papers alone. "In my opinion there should be a much wider discussion about better (free) access to all digital information and works for educational and scientific purposes — as a general principle — equalling (and broadening) the fair use concept available in the USA."

Meanwhile, suggests Fournier, the challenge the Commission will face is nothing less than that of trying to square the circle. "If you look at the Coalition Treaty between the CDU and the FDP, and scan the sections that address the Internet, you will find a number of references to the need for data protection, privacy, and for the Internet to be viewed as an important tool for citizens," he says. "But these references are somehow in contradiction with those that propose better protection of intellectual property, and support for the commercial sector in its attempts to make money in the online world."

In other words, there is as yet little consensus on how to resolve the conundrum that lies at the heart of the Internet Question: Is it wise, or even possible, for governments to continue supporting the attempts of commercial organisations to impose their traditional business models on the fundamentally different landscape of the Internet, particularly when doing so threatens to stifle innovation, erode civil rights, and alienate the public, civil society and non-commercial interest groups like the science and education sector?

But for the moment it appears that no government is prepared to think the unthinkable, and prioritise the rights of ordinary citizens over the interests of business.

It seems, therefore, that the Enquete Commission will prove no less controversial than all the other enquiries, commissions and reports that have tried to square the circle.

May not be a bad thing

However, even if it is true that the Enquete Commission is a ploy by the German Government to soothe the public while carrying on as before, Hilf believes there are reasons to be optimistic — since it will inevitably spark further public debate, not just about issues like Google Books, censorship, file sharing and online privacy, but about OA.

"I fear that the Commission will be manned with too many lobbyists, but the public discussion that it will inevitably stimulate, and growing anger over the Third Basket, will raise public awareness of the issues," he says.

At the same time, he says, growing anger at the failure of the Government to support OA will spur the academic community to start introducing quasi-mandates. "Mandates like the one introduced at Harvard, which says in effect that faculty are expected to deposit their papers in the institutional repository, but individual authors are free to opt out."

All of which suggests that it may not be a bad thing that OA has become conflated with a host of other Internet-related issues in Germany. While this clearly leads to the kind of confusion we saw in the Heidelberg Appeal, it has at least put an esoteric subject before the public eye, and made it a topic of heated public discussion. And right now the OA movement's best hope lies in gaining wider public support.

As it happens, that was exactly what Fischer hoped when he introduced his e-petition. As he put it to me last year, his aim was "to demonstrate that there is broad public support for Open Access and to promote open debate about intellectual property laws in science. As far as I see it, Open Access has always been treated — even by its supporters — as a niche topic for experts. But that is wrong. It is an issue that in the long run concerns everyone, and many people understand that."

And indeed the signs are encouraging: While Fisher's petition attracted over 23,000 signatures by its December deadline, the Heidelberg Appeal still has only 2,676 signatories ("mostly from journalists and authors, not researchers", says Hilf).

But the real benefit of greater public debate says Hilf, could be that it will force politicians to look beyond the self-serving arguments of lobbyists, and examine the issues for themselves. "Currently we face a situation in which politicians are still too 'technically ignorant' about OA, and too eager to listen only to lobbyists paid by commercial publishers."

Hilf hopes therefore that a public debate will convince politicians that in a networked society it is essential that information is able to flow freely, and not be constantly hampered by toll gates, even if it means standing up to commercial interests to achieve it. Politicians, after all, have a responsibility to the whole of society, not just the more powerful, or the more vocal.

Moreover, as cyber activist Cory Doctorow points out, "An 'information economy' can't be based on selling information. Information technology makes copying information easier and easier. The more IT you have, the less control you have over the bits you send out into the world. It will never, ever, EVER get any harder to copy information. The information economy is about selling everything except information."

No better time

And there could be no better time for politicians to educate themselves in these matters: As a result of leaked documents, news emerged last year that the closed-door negotiations taking place in connection with the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) — a proposed plurilateral trade agreement for establishing international standards on intellectual property rights enforcement throughout the participating countries — are in the process of agreeing a catch–all IP solution that could be very bad news indeed.

Such an agreement, some fear, would not only put the future of web-based services like Flickr, YouTube and Blogger at risk, but threaten ordinary citizens with the withdrawal of their Internet service if a member of their household is even suspected of copyright infringement. Here is proof, were it needed, that more public discussion is vital.

Public discussion, after all, involves all the stakeholders, and so ensures that all the issues are aired. That is the way to achieve democratic consensus, not through secret negotiations between industry groups and legislators behind closed doors. While it is possible that the case for OA could get lost in such a wide-ranging debate, it does at least hold out the promise of raising its profile, and so achieving its ends.

That is why Hilf remains upbeat. "I expect to see a hardening of the legislation process, but growing public awareness of OA, self-archiving etc. The petitions, the Pirate voters, and the Enquete Commission, will all help to influence the public discussion in the long run. And it will surely become an issue in the next Parliamentary election."

And there is no better way of focusing politicians' minds than the prospect of elections. With the Piratenpartei waiting in the wings, German politicians have every reason to begin the hard task of rethinking their approach to the Internet, and the information economy.

Open Access: Counting Gold

Is Gold Open Access growing? If so, how quickly? More importantly, how accurately is the Open Access (OA) movement able to measure its growth?

At the end of last year I posted a list of what I believed were the main OA developments in 2009, which I prefaced with some commentary. In that commentary I argued that the rate of progress of both Gold OA and Green OA had accelerated during 2009.

To support my statement about Gold OA I said that over the year 100 more journals had been added to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

Gavin Baker quite rightly challenged my claim about Gold OA, pointing out that in reality "fewer journals were added to DOAJ in 2009 than in 2008 — about 100 fewer, it looks to be."

More detailed figures were later published by Peter Suber in the January SPARC Open Access Newsletter. In 2009, said Suber, DOAJ "added 723 peer-reviewed OA journals, representing 19% growth over the previous year. Last year it grew by 812 journals or 27%. In 2008, it added 2.2 titles per day, but in 2009 the rate was closer to 1.99 titles per day. It now lists a total of 4,535 peer-reviewed OA journals."

In confirming Baker's claim that 2009 had seen a fall in the growth of Gold OA, Suber added that while the DOAJ grew significantly last year, "it grew more slowly in 2009 than in 2008. So far we don't know why. There could have been fewer new launches, which the recession makes likely."

As such, Baker appears to have been right to challenge my assertion about Gold OA. It would have been more accurate, it seems, to have said that Gold OA continued to grow in 2009, rather than that growth had accelerated.

In his newsletter, however, Suber did offer another possible explanation for the decrease in the number of journals added to DOAJ in 2009. It could be, he said, that "some number of new launches might have gone unnoticed or still be working their way through the DOAJ's indexing backlog."

Nevertheless, Baker's challenge stimulated me to give some thought to how the OA movement measures the growth of Gold OA. As a result I have had to conclude that I made a more fundamental error than Baker charged me with. For it turns out that seeking to measure the growth of Gold OA by counting the number of journals in the DOAJ is a deeply flawed approach.

For instance, as Suber suggests — and publishing consultant Alma Swan confirms — the DOAJ registry (in Swan's words) "merely reflects the pace at which the Lund people add them."

In other words, the team that manages DOAJ (which is based at Lund University Libraries) may be struggling to keep pace with the growth of new journals. As Swan puts it, "100 journals fewer could just mean that someone in the Lund team had swine flu for two months and didn't do as much work as last year".

My own experience suggests this is likely: In the last few months I have had my attention drawn to a number of OA journals that I could not find listed in the DOAJ, including Current Issues in Molecular Biology, Microbiology Research, Virulence, African Journal of Mathematics and Computer Science Research, Agricultural Journal, and Genetics Today.

Of course some of these journals may not meet the criteria for inclusion in the DOAJ, but for several of them at least this seems an unlikely explanation.

Huge backlog

When I contacted the Lund team they confirmed that they have been struggling to keep up, not least because over the past twelve months they have had fewer people assigned to adding journals to the database. There is therefore, I was told, currently a "huge backlog" of journals waiting to be added.

It is perhaps no surprise then that fewer journals were added to the database in 2009. Nor does the situation look set to improve in the near future: Staff shortages aside, the task of adding new journals to the DOAJ is a time-consuming process, one that generally requires a series of interchanges with the editor or owner of the journal.

And in order to keep the directory current a constant weeding process has to take place, a process that saw around 100 journals removed from the DOAJ during 2009. And the larger the database becomes the more time-consuming managing it will surely become.

All of which would appear to suggest that the number of Gold OA journals is growing at a faster rate than is evident if one simply counts those listed in DOAJ.

On the other hand, there are reasons for arguing that counting the number of journals added to the DOAJ might actually overstate, rather than understate, growth. How come? Because the date a journal is added to the DOAJ is not necessarily the date that it comes into existence.

As Swan also points out, "Just because a Gold OA journal was added in 2009 does not mean that it is a new OA journal. They may be new ones, but not necessarily so. They may be pre-existing Gold OAJs, or pre-existing journals that turn Gold."

Swan adds: "When I helped Sally Morris work through DOAJ years ago, checking when journals were launched and how much they published there was a huge variation, and some of them were relatively old journals — mostly humanities ones that had always published for free from university departments of research groups; the fact that DOAJ catalogued them in, say, 2005, means nothing if they were actually launched in 1989."

But whether it understates or overstates growth, counting the number of journals added to the DOAJ would appear to be a highly inaccurate way of trying to measure the growth of Gold OA.

An alternative approach

So how do we measure it? Bo-Christer Björk, who is based at the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland, has been doing some work on this. He agrees with Swan's second point: "A lot of journals have joined DOAJ much later than they were started, so the growth might be overstated."

Consequently Björk has adopted an alternative approach. Instead of using DOAJ he has been using Ullrich's Periodicals Directory for his IT-barometer study. As he explains: "We undertook a search for peer reviewed, scholarly journals, with a particular start year, and then searched for all journals versus Open Access journals."

Below is a graph Björk created using that data, which plots the growth of new OA journals as a percentage of all new journals.

The graph suggests that the percentage of new journals created as OA journals in 2007 was 32%. In terms of growth, says Björk, "The share has been quite stable since 2000."

However while Björk was able to avoid the time-lag issues associated with using DOAJ, he experienced the same problem with regard to journals converting to OA. As he puts it, "It is very difficult to trace the development of Gold OA backwards. The information is as accurate as the background data in Ullrich's. It also doesn't tell you when a journal may have become OA, so some of these may have swapped model."

Nevertheless he adds, "Since the rate of renewal of the stock of existing journals is around 2% per annum this indicates that Gold OA might be increasing its overall share by perhaps 0.5% per annum."

While not directly comparable with Suber's figures, this gives a somewhat different picture of the growth of Gold OA.

Unsatisfactory methodology

In fact, adds Björk, if one looks at article numbers rather than journal numbers, growth appears even more modest. As he puts it: "Calculated over the number of articles the increase is likely to be even lower [than 0.5%], since the yearly article volume of newly-founded journals is low (with the exception of the PLoS journals)."

As such, Björk's work highlights a further problem: Not only does counting the number of journals listed in the DOAJ produce a very inaccurate picture of the growth of Gold OA, it is also unlikely to reveal Gold OA's true share of the market, since the number of papers published in OA journals tends to be lower than in subscription journals. As Swan puts it, "Some Gold journals publish one article per century; others publish hundreds per year."

Explains Swan: "It is easier to launch a non-OA journal in terms of gathering articles, because there is no charge to the authors for publishing in a non-OA journal." By contrast, she adds, "OA journals may struggle a bit for authors, especially before they have built a reputation."

Moreover, the difference between OA journals themselves can be quite stark. Contrast, for instance, a typical OA journal publishing a handful of articles a year with PLoS ONE.

For a number of reasons, not least its multidisciplinary approach, PLoS ONE has experienced explosive growth since its launch on 20^th December 2006. During the few days that remained of 2006 PLoS ONE published 138 papers. In 2007 it published 1,231 articles, and in 2008 2,726 articles — a 120% increase on the year.

By the end of last year, says PLoS ONE publications manager Rebecca Walton, PLoS ONE had published 4,400 papers (a 65% increase on 2008), taking the total since launch to 8,495.

Anticipating that PLoS ONE will publish 6,600 papers in 2010 (a further 50% increase), Walton expects that this year it will become the largest scholarly journal in the world by volume of published research articles. She explains: "We believe we are the third largest scholarly journal in the world, behind Physical Review B and Applied Physics Letters, and in 2010 we will become the largest."

As such, PLoS ONE could now be publishing the same number of papers as 100 regular OA journals.

The truth of the matter, concludes Swan, is that — whatever source one uses — trying to measure the growth of Gold OA by counting journals "is an unsatisfactory methodology".

With the growth of Hybrid OA (where an author can continue to publish in a subscription journal but opt to pay to have individual papers made OA) the pointlessness of counting Gold OA journals becomes even more pronounced. In such an environment, the only meaningful way of sizing Gold OA is to count articles, not the number of Gold journals.

In short, the OA movement really needs to abandon its fixation on counting journals and concentrate on papers. "The best way to measure growth would be by number of Gold articles published each year," says Swan.

However, she adds: "No-one is monitoring that. Bo-Christer Björk's people have a methodology for assessing the proportion of all the literature that is OA, but I don't know if they differentiate between Green and Gold that way."

Considerable frustration

Actually, says Björk, he does differentiate between Green and Gold OA, and his figures suggest that the overall percentage of articles published as Gold OA in 2008 was 9.3% (With around 11.8% available as Green OA, giving an overall OA percentage of around 21%).

Björk's figures, we should note, also include papers published as Hybrid OA (24% of his Gold OA total).

"The method we have is based on googling with a sample of journal articles," he explains, adding that a similar method has been used in a very thorough study by a group of Japanese researchers in the biomedical field. "Their results are slightly higher than ours and we have yet to analyse from where the difference stems."

(The Japanese study, published in January last year, estimated that, at the time of the study, 27% of articles published in biomedicine were available on an OA basis).

Nevertheless, since Björk's main focus is on taking a snapshot of the current situation, rather than measuring the growth of Gold OA, his figures don't take us much further forward if our aim is to track growth over time.

So we are left with the question we began with: Is Gold OA growing? If so, how quickly, and is that growth accelerating? "I have no evidence to show any acceleration in growth, " says Björk. "On the contrary it seems that growth has been relatively stable, after a short expansive period when BioMed Central and PLoS were founded"

In short, we simply don't know how fast Gold OA is growing, or even if it is growing. We assume that it is, but no one seems able to demonstrate this in a convincing way.

All in all, while Baker appears to have been right to challenge my claim that the growth of Gold OA accelerated in 2009, he should perhaps have gone on to point out that counting Gold journals is not the way to track the growth of OA anyway.

Meanwhile, for some OA advocates the absence of reliable data here is a source of considerable frustration. Leo Waaijers, manager of the SURF Platform ICT and Research, for instance, would dearly like to see some accurate figures on the growth of Gold OA.

When I asked Waaijers if he knew whether this information was available he replied: "I have been thinking about this and looking around over the last few days but I could not find any reliable source. All in all it is a strange thought: in a period of information overload we seem not to be able to produce a more or less accurate record of an important development in scientific and scholarly communication."

There is scope here, it would seem, for someone to provide a useful service!

Open Access in 2009: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

As 2009 draws to a close advocates of Open Access (OA) will doubtless be looking back and weighing up the year's events. So what has been achieved, and what have been the main OA developments in 2009? Has it been a good year or a bad year for OA? Let's consider these questions.

Green OA/Self-archiving

First, what has 2009 been like for Green OA?

There are now 137 self-archiving mandates. OA advocate Stevan Harnad has estimated that 10,000 will be needed before OA is achieved. (Although he later added that a tipping point would be reached if the top 750 to 1,500 institutions introduced mandates).

The good news

So what's the good news? Mandates are currently accelerating at a fast rate (See Alma Swan's graph). They are also beginning to arrive in bunches: during the second week of December, for instance, 26 Finnish mandates were announced in one go.

Meanwhile, in the US legislators appear to be coming around to the idea that they have a responsibility to ensure that federally-funded researchers are compelled to make their scholarly papers freely available on the Internet. In June, for instance, the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) was reintroduced to the US Senate with this end in mind.

And then in December the Obama Administration announced that it was launching a public consultation process preparatory to requiring US federal science and technology funding agencies to introduce "public access" policies.

What about repositories? OpenDOAR currently lists over 1,500 repositories, and Scientific Commons — the repository aggregator service — has over 32 million items listed in its database.

Importantly, more and more researchers are now aware of the OA movement and increasingly inclined to embrace it. (Although many remain confused as to what exactly they should be doing, and fearful that OA could damage their careers).

The bad news

And the bad news? There remains some doubt as to the efficacy of the mandates being introduced. Indeed, it is not even clear that many of the claimed mandates amount to much more than pious declarations.

Certainly many mandates appear not to be what it says on the packet. Even the much lauded Harvard mandate has not borne close scrutiny, and in the wake of criticism its architect Stuart Shieber conceded on his blog: "[T]he Harvard open-access policy could not be, should not be, and is not a mandate. I've tried to be very careful never to refer to it as a mandate (though I can’t promise I've never slipped up)."

This clearly has implications for compliance, and indeed another area of concern relates to the failure of both researchers and publishers to abide by mandates. Canadian OA advocate Heather Morrison, for instance, recently published some figures on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandate. Compliance levels for some Springer and Elsevier journals, she reports, are as low as 9% to 37%.

Overall, says Morrison, "NIH-funded research that is freely available after 2 years is 41% for external researchers and 50% for internal researchers. This is definitely growing; but the figure should be 100% at 1 year."

There are also worries about the nature and quality of some of the content being deposited in repositories, much of which appears not to be OA's target content (peer-reviewed papers). Certainly a search on Scientific Commons reveals broken links, non-target content, abstracts rather than full text, and some links merely point to items locked behind toll walls.

Finally, there are signs that increasing take-up of Gold OA could be being achieved at the expense of Green OA. This could slow down adoption of self-archiving mandates, and thus of OA progress overall. (Assuming, like Harnad, one believes that Green OA offers a faster route to OA than Gold OA does).

Gold OA/Publishing

What about Gold OA?

There are now over 4,500 Gold journals. As there are estimated to be roughly around 25,000 peer-reviewed journals in total, this suggests that one fifth of all scholarly journals are now OA.

The good news

What has been the good news for Gold OA? Again, the rate of progress of Gold OA is clearly accelerating. The Directory of Open Access Journals added 700 journals to its database in 2009. This, points out Morrison, is equivalent to two journals a day.

In addition, most subscription journals now offer a Hybrid OA option for some or all their journals, enabling authors to pay to have individual papers made OA even when publishing in a subscription journal. And a growing number of funders and research institutions are creating Gold OA funds to support authors who wish to pay the article processing charges (APCs) needed to make their papers OA.

Finally, in January the Houghton Report (Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the costs and benefits) concluded that the research community could make considerable cost savings if all scholarly journals converted to OA.

The bad news

The bad news? Today's 4,500 Gold OA journals are not the best fifth. Harnad explains: "A high proportion of Gold OA journals are lesser journals. I don't want to make it sound elitist, but they are not the journals that contain the research that everybody wants and needs the most. If you look at the top journals, the ones that are likely to capture 80% of citations, most of those are not Gold OA. (I'm not talking about the hybrid Gold option, which is a cheap option for publishers, but a pricey one for authors.) So if you are talking about a tipping point for Gold OA, it will be necessary to capture the top journals."

The problem, however, may be that high-impact subscription journals are the least likely to convert to Gold OA.

What has clearly not helped Gold OA is the fact that a growing number of start-up OA publishers have attracted criticism from the research community for their poor business practices — including bombarding researchers with spam invitations to submit papers, and providing an inadequate peer review process. This, it seems, is the ugly side of OA — a product perhaps of what Harnad calls "gold fever".

But perhaps the most serious long-term problem is that it is looking increasingly possible that OA publishing may fail to solve the affordability problem — as many had hoped, particularly those librarians suffering the pain of the serials crisis.

In other words, despite the predictions made in the Houghton Report, the research community may discover that OA delivers no cost savings, and simply replaces the serials crisis with an author crisis. (We should note that the APC rates levied by some OA publishers — and most Hybrid publishers — are already higher than the Houghton estimates, and rising).

The growing trend for publishers to offer institutional membership schemes to allow institutions to convert from a subscription model to an OA model has also raised concerns about pricing. (See, for instance, the experience of the Health Sciences Library at Columbia University, and criticism of the SCOAP³ and Springer experiments).

OA broadens

There was, however, some unexpected good news in 2009: where OA has historically been seen as something of relevance only to scientific and medical (STM) journals this year has seen growing interest in OA for the humanities, and for books.

"I think there will be an increasing movement to scholarly open access monographs," says Australian OA advocate Colin Steele. "In Australia we have recently seen the establishment of the Adelaide University E-Press (with a stirring speech on their website from John Coetzee, the Nobel Prize winner). A worldwide movement in this context, reflected in developments in the US (see for example the upcoming SPARC-ACRL conference) and Bloomsbury Academic in the UK, seems likely for the transformation of the scholarly monograph situation. We must remember books and that OA is not simply STM articles."

Publishing consultant Alma Swan agrees. "OA monographs are finding their feet now, with experiments by presses (even commercial ones), establishment of viable business propositions (e.g. Open Humanities Press) and a number of formal studies going on including OAPEN, which I think may produce some useful pointers as it works through to its conclusion. It's never been nice to have to keep waving humanities to one side for another day, but now the day is here, it seems, and that is a real step forward."

Whether overall 2009 will turn out to have been good or bad for the OA movement doubtless rests on what happens in 2010 and beyond. Will current momentum be maintained for instance? Will the Obama Administration come up with the right formula for the public access policies it wants to see, or will those that emerge simply ape the NIH mandate (which has its detractors). Will more governments realise what needs to be done, and do it? Will OA continue to spread behind STM journals? Will OA find a way of resolving the affordability problem? For now these are necessarily matters for speculation alone.

Key developments

Below is a list of 17 notable developments that took place during 2009 (in date order). Thanks to Leo Waaijers, Gavin Baker, Alma Swan, Colin Steele, David Prosser, Peter Suber, and Heather Joseph for their input to the list:

January 21^st: University of California libraries join the Springer experiment to support open access publishing. As the press release put it, "Under the terms of the agreement, articles by UC-affiliated authors accepted for publication in a Springer journal beginning in 2009 will be published using Springer Open Choice with full and immediate open access. There will be no separate per-article charges, since costs have been factored into the overall license."

Essentially this is an agreement designed to convert UC from a subscription to an OA world. Whether it will prove successful will depend not just on how it develops, but how one judges success.

January 27^th: The Houghton Report — Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the costs and benefits — is published. This concludes that the UK higher education sector could save around £80 million a year by shifting from toll access to open access publishing. It also estimates that £115 million could be saved by moving from toll access to open access self-archiving. If one projects these figures internationally it would appear that, in theory at least, OA offers the research community significant savings.

February 25^th: SciELO South Africa is launched, with the objective of providing free and open access to a range of top South African science journals in order to boost the international profile of South African scientific research.

In other words, South Africa has joined the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) initiative, which was pioneered in 1997 by the São Paulo Science Foundation (FAPESP) and the Latin America and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information (BIREME) in Brazil.

SciELO provides "a common methodology for the preparation, storage, dissemination and evaluation of scientific literature in electronic format" and it does so on an entirely OA basis. Currently SciELO hosts over 600 journals published in the developing world.

April 1^st: The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and e-Depot of KB Netherlands sign an agreement to ensure the long term preservation of DOAJ journals. The press release explains: "[L]ong term archiving of the journals listed in the DOAJ at KB’s e-Depot will become an integral part of the service provided by the DOAJ."

June 10^th: Cornell postgraduate student Phil Davis reports on The Scholarly Kitchen blog that The Open Information Science Journal (published by Bentham Open) accepted a nonsense paper he had generated using a computer program. Davis had submitted the paper after being bombarded with spam messages from Bentham inviting him to publish a paper, at a cost of $800. The editor-in-chief of TOISJ Bambang Parmanto resigns as a result — announcing that he had not even seen the paper before it was accepted.

June 10^th: US National student organisations call for Open Access to research, and release a statement on OA. Comments Open Access News' Gavin Baker: "This is the first broad-scale support for OA from student organisations."

June 12^th: The Open Access Source Book (OASIS) is launched. OASIS is a new portal for educational materials on the "concept, principles, advantages, approaches and means to achieving Open Access". In particular, OASIS hopes to provide valuable information on OA to those in the developing world.

June 25^th: The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA, S.1373) is reintroduced in the US Senate. Commenting on the news de facto leader of the OA movement Peter Suber said: "This is an important development. FRPAA would essentially extend the NIH open-access policy across the federal government. Most federally-funded researchers would be required to deposit their peer reviewed manuscripts in a suitable open access repository at the time of acceptance for publication, and the repositories would be required to release the open access copies no later than six months after publication."

August 7^th: The Open Humanities Press announces that it is partnering with the University of Michigan Library's Scholarly Publishing Office to produce Open Access books. Coupled with last year's launch of Bloomsbury Academic, many view this as a clear sign that OA is broadening beyond STM journals to encompass books, and the humanities too.

August 21^st: PLoS Currents is launched. The goal of PLoS Currents is to provide a service where researchers can submit raw preprints, datasets and preliminary analyses. These are then made freely available online without first being subjected to in-depth peer review, allowing for the much more rapid dissemination of research.

Introducing the service PLoS co-founder and chairman Harold Varmus commented: "The successful development of open access publishing by organisations including the Public Library of Science (PLoS) in recent years is a dramatic illustration of how the Internet is revolutionising scientific communication. Today, after several months of work, I'm delighted to announce that PLoS is launching PLoS Currents (Beta) – a new and experimental website for the rapid communication of research results and ideas. In response to the recent worldwide H1N1 influenza outbreak, the first PLoS Currents research theme is influenza."

In many ways, it is suggested, this is the realisation of a dream Varmus first had when he was NIH director: In 1999 Varmus attempted to create a biomedical preprint server modelled on the physics preprint server arXiv. (Following intense criticism from publishers the project was significantly scaled back, the preprint component jettisoned, and the service launched in 2000 as PubMed Central).

September 15^th: The Compact for Open Access Publishing (COPE) is launched. The brainchild of Harvard's Stuart Shieber, COPE founder members include Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Berkeley, who jointly make a commitment to a "compact for open-access publication". Subsequently The University of Ottawa and Columbia University join COPE.

Commenting on the launch of COPE Shieber said: "Universities and funding agencies ought to provide equitable support for open-access publishing by subsidising the processing fees that faculty incur when contributing to open-access publications. Right now, these fees are relatively rare. But if the research community supports open-access publishing and it gains in importance as we believe that it will, those fees could aggregate substantially over time. The compact ensures that support is available to eliminate these processing fees as a disincentive to open-access publishing."

Essentially COPE members are asked to commit to create a Gold OA fund for their researchers in order to help pay APCs to publish in OA journals.

September 23^rd: Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS) is launched. Headed up by Bernard Rentier, the Rector of the University of Liège in Belgium, EOS is an information service and a forum committed to the "opening up of scholarship and research" in line with "the growing open access, open education, open science and open innovation movements."

Commented EOS Chairman Professor Rentier: "The world of research is changing and universities and other research-based institutions must drive the change, not sit back and let it happen. Having embarked upon implementing changes in thinking and practice at my own university, I want to encourage others in my position to join the discussion and help lead the way to a better future. We will be reaching out to universities and research institutes across the world to invite them to play an active role in building better systems of scholarship for the future. EOS will provide the forum and the voice for the research community on open scholarship issues and represents a very valuable resource for those who want to join in this endeavour."

EOS appears primarily focused on Green rather than Gold OA. As such, it may offer a valuable counterweight to the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), which has been criticised for being more interested in promoting the interests of publishers than OA.

October 19^th: The Wellcome Trust announces that it is committing an additional £2 million to its Gold OA fund. The announcement is made during Open Access Week.

October 21^st: The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) is launched. Emerging from the European project DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research), which was funded by the EU Commission, the objective of COAR is to network "over 1,000 global scientific repositories comprising peer reviewed publications under the principle of Open Access."

November 9^th: A petition is launched in Germany calling on the German National Parliament (Bundestag) to mandate OA for publicly-funded research. The initiative of a former chemist and now science journalist from Heidelberg called Lars Fischer, the petition catches the OA movement by surprise, and Fischer is criticised for the vague wording of the petition.

Speaking to me in November Fischer responded by saying that he had had difficulty obtaining help from OA advocates. He added that he had launched the petition "to demonstrate that there is broad public support for Open Access and to promote open debate about intellectual property laws in science. As far as I see it, Open Access has always been treated — even by its supporters — as a niche topic for experts. But that is wrong. It is an issue that in the long run concerns everyone, and many people understand that."

November 17^th: It is reported that the Dutch science foundation has created a €5 million Gold OA fund.

December 9^th: Last but far from least, as part of its Open Government Directive the Obama Administration launches a public consultation process preparatory to developing public access policies for science and technology funding agencies across the US Federal Government. Comments can be posted on the OSTP Blog, and must be received by 7^th January.

This is undeniably potentially very big. But where does it fit with FRPAA? Does it perhaps make the FRPAA moot?

No, says Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). "If the Obama Administration takes action on the executive level, FRPAA would play an important role in codifying that action into law. FRPAA would be complementary to any executive order or letter that the Administration might issue."

Suber agrees: "The Obama policies could cover much the same territory as FRPAA, depending on what the public comments recommend and how the administration decides to interpret them and act. The policies could fall short of FRPAA or surpass it. But at best they still won't make FRPAA moot. The main reason is that Obama could only implement OA mandates by executive order, which could be reversed by the next president. We'd still want legislation to make the policies permanent. But whether the Obama policies exceed or fall short of FRPAA, they can be implemented immediately, while FRPAA waits its turn for legislative attention behind healthcare reform, financial regulation, and climate change."

The above list is in date order, but I wonder what OA advocates might feel to be the top five in order of importance? Have any important events been omitted? All comments welcomed.

Open Access: Who pays? How much?

Last month the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) launched a new guide called Who pays for Open Access? The guide, says SPARC, is intended to provide, "an overview of income models currently in use to support open-access journals, including a description of each model along with examples of journals currently employing it."

The guide is a useful and informative document penned by the well-regarded publishing consultant Raym Crow. On reading it, however, I found myself wondering whether it might not signal a change in SPARC's mission, or at least its priorities — one of several issues I raised with SPARC Executive Director Heather Joseph.

While Joseph emphatically denies that the mission of SPARC has changed, she concedes that the guide could give the impression that it no longer expects Open Access (OA) to reduce the costs of scholarly publishing. Since SPARC was created to try and resolve the so-called serials crisis, this is perhaps unfortunate.

Joseph's answers to my questions also left me wondering about the likely outcome of the transition to OA, and whether the OA movement is in danger of losing sight of the need not only to solve the access problem, but to also resolve the financial conundrum at the heart of the current crisis in scholarly communication: That is, how does one create a cost-effective system for disseminating research in a networked world. The promise of the OA movement was that it would lower the costs of scholarly communication. But will it?

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Chaos, Solitons & Fractals: Alive but quiescent

A year ago Elsevier told me that M. S. El Naschie, the founding Editor-in-Chief of its non-linear science journal Chaos, Solitons & Fractals (CSF), was retiring as editor.

The next day Nature published an article in which a number of allegations were made about El Naschie, and the manner in which he had been editing CSF.

These allegations were evidently refuted by M. S. El Naschie, and on 12^th November The Press Gazette reported that he is suing Nature for libel in the English courts.

As The Press Gazette put it, "According to a writ filed with the High Court by legal firm Collyer Bristow, El Naschie claims the story alleges he used his editorial privilege to self-publish numerous papers he'd written, which would not have been published elsewhere as they were of poor quality and had received no peer review."

When I contacted Nature by email they said that at the moment they were unable to offer any comment on the matter.

But what about the journal at the heart of the dispute: what is its current status and what does the future hold for it?

After El Naschie's retirement Elsevier continued to publish around 1,000 papers that had been accepted under his editorship. Then in June the publisher announced that the journal was no longer accepting papers. Commentators were quick to conclude that this was a signal that the journal was "closing shop".

But Elsevier's Shira Tabachnikoff tells me that this is inaccurate and the journal is not closing. Below is the brief email exchange I had with her recently.

Clearly, re-establishing the journal in the wake of El Naschie's retirement is proving a slow process.

RP: Can you give me an update on the status of the journal Chaos, Solitons & Fractals?

ST: We are currently working with the editorial board and other advisors to identify a new editorial structure, as well as reviewing the aims and scope of the journal, the editorial policies and submission arrangements.

RP: The journal is not closing then?

ST: Elsevier does not have the intention to stop the publication of the journal. We are working on renewing the aims and scope, editorial structure and ensuring a transparent online submission system is in place.

RP: But you have yet to recruit a new editor?

ST: Currently there is not a new Editor-in-Chief in place for the journal.

RP: And in the meantime, submissions to the journal have been closed?

ST: All the papers handled by Dr. El Naschie have now been published and nothing further will be published until the new editorial structure is in place. We are therefore not currently accepting any new submissions to the journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals.

Once we have a new editorial structure in place, we will open the journal up to new submissions.

Update 16th March 2010: CS&F has been relaunched with two new co-editors-in-chief, a new editorial board and refined aims and scope.

German petition takes Open Access movement by surprise

The Open Access movement was taken by surprise this week when a petition suddenly appeared on the server of the German National Parliament (Bundestag) proposing an amendment to the pending changes in German copyright law that would require all scientific publications resulting from public funding to be made "openly accessible."

In effect, the petition is asking the German government to mandate all publicly-funded researchers to make their papers freely available on the Web.

The petition, drafted by Lars Fischer, a 31-year-old former chemist and now science journalist from Heidelberg, appeared from nowhere and sent the old guard of the OA movement into a bit of spin. It was, says German OA advocate Eberhard Hilf, "an audacious move by a young man".

Hilf immediately posted details on his blog and the German Coalition for Action "Copyright for Education and Research" rapidly put together a press release (English version here) in support of Fischer's initiative.

The petition has, however, attracted some criticism from OA advocates, who argue that it is vague and imprecise, and does not state exactly what the German government should do.

Nevertheless OA advocates have been flocking to sign it, and the number of signatures has been growing at a rate of 150 an hour. The petition can be viewed in German (and signed) here.

Intrigued by events, I contacted Fischer to find out more. He told me that he had tried to get help and advice from the OA movement when drafting the petition, but although some had shown initial interest they had subsequently "dropped the ball", leaving him to produce the final text.

No doubt it did not help that there is still no OA Foundation, or central organisation, to whom people with good ideas can turn for support — a point I made three years ago.

Below I publish my email conversation with Fischer.

Lars Fischer

RP: Who are you, what is your occupation, and why did you start the petition?

LF: I am a chemist working as a science journalist. I'm also editor at the German-language science blog portal scilogs.de, which is operated by Spektrum der Wissenschaft, the sister magazine of Scientific American.

The petition began with something called the Heidelberg Appeal, which was effectively a smear against Open Access. I learned that many scientists were as outraged as I was about the falsehoods in that document.

Because of that I prepared a draft that began a lively discussion in my blog. A few months later, during "Open Access Week" I submitted my text to the Bundestag server, where it was published last Monday.

RP: Last time I looked there were over 8,600 signatures. How quickly is the number growing?

LF: At one point there were about 150 new signatures being added each hour. Currently the rate has dropped somewhat, to about one per minute. I expect it to pick up a bit after the weekend.

RP: How does the petition process work: As I understand it if you get 50,000 signatures by December 22^nd it gets debated in the German Parliament? Is that right?

LF: The goal is to get as many signatures as possible. The Bundestag FAQ says that if 50,000 signatures are reached within three weeks, the petition will be discussed publicly in the Bundestag Petition Committee, in a session where I'm entitled to take part. But even if fewer people sign, every accepted petition will be reviewed by two members of the Committee, so every vote counts.

Actually, other petitions have been accepted with far less than 50,000 votes, notably a dark sky petition this year, which had about 8,000 signatures. As far as I understand it, a hearing in the committee may lead to a legislative initiative, which will then be voted on by the Bundestag.

RP: Can the petition be signed by anyone in the world, only German nationals, or what?

LF: Signatures can be from anywhere in the world, but as far as I know only German nationals are counted. There are already signatures from Great Britain, France, USA, Australia and others, as well as from the German-language European countries.

RP: Do you think your proposal would succeed if it was debated?

LF: I don't know. I think it depends not only on the number of signatures, but also on the support of major scientific organisations and political parties.

RP: What is the purpose of the petition?

LF: The purpose is to demonstrate that there is broad public support for Open Access and to promote open debate about intellectual property laws in science. As far as I see it, Open Access has always been treated — even by its supporters — as a niche topic for experts. But that is wrong. It is an issue that in the long run concerns everyone, and many people understand that.

RP: As you say, your petition calls for Open Access. How would you define Open Access?

LF: There are two kinds of Open Access. My petition is about the so-called "green road to open access". This means that scientists always retain the right to make their publications freely available to the public, e.g. on their website or in some kind of repository. And they would be required by law to do so, too.

This doesn't change anything about the way scientific journals operate. Many publishers already offer such agreements to scientists.

The other option is the "golden road to open access", which means that the journals themselves offer their publications free of charge. This is not the goal of my petition.

RP: What exactly are you proposing?

LF: My proposal would require publications that came out of taxpayer-funded research to be available to the public. I also propose establishing a central digital repository that is searchable in a number of different ways. This would be to make the work of German scientists more accessible, since experience shows that papers that are publicly available and easy to find get cited more often.

That is another idea behind the petition: to help German scientists to stay competitive internationally.

RP: Is your proposal just meant to apply to government research-grant-funded research, or also for government-funded institutions?

LF: The petition only deals with research that is funded with taxpayer's money. I don't think it would be helpful, or indeed possible, to force such a policy on academic institutions — at least right now.

RP: How do you envisage your proposal being achieved in practice?

LF: I will need the help of experts and members of parliament to create the exact legislative proposal. That is the purpose of the hearing in the Petition Committee, I guess.

RP: Would I be right in thinking you are proposing that Germany introduce a scheme similar to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandate (which includes a 12-month embargo on authors making their papers freely available), or something different?

LF: This is the basic idea. I think it is best to stick to what is known to be working. There may be some differences due to the different structure of research funding. Personally I’m no fan of an embargo, though.

RP: You talk of creating a central digital repository. You don't think researchers should make their papers available in institutional repositories then?

LF: In principle institutional repositories would probably be sufficient, but a central archive would certainly be in the best interests of German scientists.

RP: Why is Open Access necessary? Do you think that the issue is about a) researchers getting access to research papers; b) members of the public getting access; or c) both groups?

LF: Currently the publishing system requires scientists to give away their research to publishers, who sell it back to universities and libraries in the form of journal subscriptions. These subscriptions have become so expensive that even major libraries can't afford all of them anymore, thereby considerably reducing access, even for researchers at well-funded research institutions.

Open Access offers a way around this problem. I don't think there is much of a choice in this matter anyway. The Internet is changing the way the world works, and the increased importance of Open Access is part of this change. Science depends on openness and exchange of information, between researchers as well as between science and society. Thus, Open Access in some form comes natural to science.

RP: What does the petition mean when it says, "The general structure of the scientific publication system is not affected by this petition."

LF: It means that there is nothing entirely new in the proposal. Many scientists, publishers and institutions already practise "green" Open Access to a certain extent. The petition aims at expanding already available options.

RP: By, as you say, making it compulsory. I.e. a government mandate on researchers to self-archive their papers. Do you believe this would offer any threat to science publishers? Does that matter?

LF: Open access offers a fundamental challenge to scientific publishers. But the current trend toward Open Access is driven by technical innovation and economic realities, not by petitions. I recently did an interview with Bora Zivkovic of PLoS ONE, in which he discusses the matter at length.

The petition only acknowledges those realities and proposes a way to deal with them. Scientific publishers will have to deal with those changes, too, one way or another. The fate of the petition doesn't matter in this bigger picture.

RP: While the leaders of the international Open Access movement support your petition, there has been some criticism of it. For instance, Stevan Harnad has said, "Lars Fischer's statement is vague and thereby poses some risk of having no practical effect unless it is made clear exactly what the Bundestag is being asked to do, why, and how."

And the de facto leader of the OA movement Peter Suber commented to me: "While the petition points in the right direction, it's a missed opportunity to be more specific and useful. It doesn't help OA supporters in parliament understand what steps would most help the cause. This matters, unfortunately, because experience has taught us that some of the steps that occur to people first don't help and could hurt (for example, mandating green OA with a loophole for resisting publishers or mandating gold OA). Moreover, it does less than a more focused statement could to answer the many misunderstandings about OA circulating in Germany as a result — but also as a cause — of the Heidelberg Appeal. I've signed the petition and support the strategy to sign it and add clarifying statements. But I wish the original language had been stronger from the start."

Do you, in hindsight, wish that you had consulted with the leaders of the international OA movement before drafting the petition? Might you not have had a better chance of achieving your objective if you had done?

LF: In fact I tried to get the attention of a number of German Open Access initiatives. I mailed several organisations about this, none of which responded. The petition was also open for discussion in my blog for several weeks and after that in a wiki. The issue came up several times on Twitter and was re-tweeted several times.

I completely agree that there could have been a better petition with expert help. But there was none, and not for lack of trying on my side. With hindsight I could have contacted the international movement, but that didn't occur to me at the time.

Nevertheless I'd like to express my thanks to the German Open Access Community and especially the Coalition for Action "Copyright for Education and Research" for the support they are giving now that the petition has gone public. I think, with the movement now behind the petition, we will make an impact and demonstrate that Open Access has considerable public support.

RP: Thank you for your time. And good luck!