American Psychological Association develops Wellcome-compliant OA option

The American Psychological Association (APA) - publisher of titles such as Journal of Abnormal Psychology and Psychological Bulletin - have developed a Wellcome-Trust compliant author-pays model.

In return for paying an OA fee ($4000) APA will deposit on behalf of the author, the final, published version directly into PMC, where it will be mirrored to UKPMC.

Such papers will be licenced such that anyone may "access, download, copy, display, and redistribute this article or manuscript as well as adapt, translate, or data and text mine the content contained in this document", as long as this is done for non-commercial purposes, and proper attribution is given.

Upon submission to an APA journal, Wellcome-funded authors will be asked to identify their manuscript as being Wellcome Trust funded. If the papers is accepted for publication, Wellcome funded authors should complete this form (pdf) to ensure that APA journals will deposit the manuscript in PMC.

As of April 2009, this author-pays option is only available to Wellcome-funded researchers.

RCUK - further support for open access

Research Councils UK (RCUK) have published an independent study commissioned by the Research Councils into open access to research outputs.

The purpose of the study was to identify the effects and impacts of open access on publishing models and institutional repositories in light of national and international trends. This included the impact of open access on the quality and efficiency of scholarly outputs, specifically journal articles. The report presents options for the Research Councils to consider, such as maintaining the current variation in Research Councils’ mandates, or moving towards increased open access, eventually leading to Gold Standard.

Welcoming the study, Professor Ian Diamond, Chair of the RCUK Executive Group said: "This excellent study sets out a way forward for the UK Research Councils in relation to open access, building on the extensive activities already supported through repositories such as UK PubMed Central and ESRC Society Today. The Research Councils look forward to working with their partners across the research community to consider the options."

In response to the study, the Chief Executives of the Research Councils have agreed that over time the UK Research Councils will support increased open access, by:

• building on their mandates on grant-holders to deposit research papers in suitable repositories within an agreed time period, and;
  
  
• extending their support for publishing in open access journals, including through the pay-to-publish model.

Resources for researchers now on UK PubMed Central website

There is now a ' Resources and Media ' section on the UK PubMed Central website. So far this includes:

Focus group highlights - 2 minute streaming video
In late February members of the UK PubMed Central project team ran a focus group at the University of Oxford. 18 PubMed Central users attended, including researchers, technologists and librarians working within the biomedical and health communities. You can view a short two minute video which provides a quick insight into how we conducted the focus group and favourable comments from those that attended. Get in touch (email ukpmc-engagement@bl.uk ) if you would like information about future events, workshops and focus groups - at this stage we particularly want to engage with researchers - the views and comments of this target audience is vital to help feed into our development activities.

Vital information for biomedical or health researchers
Are you a researcher with a grant awarded by any of the UK PubMed Central funding organisations? If so, download and scrutinise the latest UK PubMed Central promotional leaflet. As well as containing vital information for you, it also includes a very brief overview of our development activities.

Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) [update]

Following a previous posting on the topic of JoVE, I am pleased to report that the publisher has developed a Wellcome Trust /UKPMC Funders Group-compliant, open access option.

"For articles published under Open Access, JoVE applies the Creative Common Attribution-Noncommercial license . Under this license, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their article, but authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, distribute, and/or copy articles for non-commercial purposes, so long as the original authors and source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or the publishers. "

The OA option at JoVE costs $2000 per video (if it is made without the help of the JoVE video-production services) and $3000 per video, if JoVE video production services are required.

The Open Access articles are made freely available in PubMed Central and UK PubMed Central immediately after publication.

Further details are available at the JoVE site.

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Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE)

The announcement that the Journal of Visualized Experiments - JoVE - has moved from an open access model, to a subscription-based model, has attracted much comment in the blogosphere, as can be seen from the postings at the Nature Network, and the Scholarly Kitchen blogs.

As a consequence of moving to a subscription service, content from JoVE at PMC and UKPMC is now embargoed for two years.

Conscious that this change in policy means that no researcher funded by any of the UKPMC Funders can seek publication in this journal - the maximum permissible embargo set by these funders is 6 months - the Wellcome Trust has spoken with JoVE's Editor-in-Chief to determine whether any alternative publishing options are available.

Though the details have not yet been fully worked out, it seems likely that JoVE will offer a "Wellcome-compliant" author-pays, open access option.

A Wellcome-compliant, author-pays, OA option, is one where the publisher deposits the final version of the paper (or video in this case) directly in PMC, and attaches a licence to the paper (video) which allows others to re-use this content. Publishers may impose conditions on users in relation to attribution (i.e. users must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor) and commercial use (i.e. specify that the work must not be used for commercial purposes).

When the details of the OA, author-pays option have been determined, this blog post will be updated.

UKPMC Twitter feed available

UK PubMed Central is on Twitter at http://twitter.com/UKPubMedCentral - for now just tweeting blog posts and links to UKPMC Funders' Group-funded articles as they become available in UKPMC.

Open access licence: researcher opinion sought

A learned society has offered the Wellcome Trust an open access, author pays option for researchers who seek publication in their journal. However, the licence they wish to attach to these articles is more restrictive than the Trust would normally require when paying an OA fee.

The purpose of this posting is to seek opinion from the research community on whether these restrictions will, in any way, limit a researchers ability to re-use this content.

Summary of relevant licence conditions

The relevant section of the licence is shown below, in italics

PMC or UKPMC mirror site users may access, download, copy, display and redistribute articles, as well as text and data mine content in articles for non-commercial purposes only, subject to the following conditions:

• In the case of text-mining, User may incorporate individual words, concepts and quotes up to 100 words per matching sentence, whereas longer paragraphs of text and images cannot be used.
  


• Users may not create derivative works (as defined in the U.S. Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. §101 et seq.) based upon the documents.

The Wellcome Trust is seeking input from the research community to help determine:

A) Whether such a licence would impact on your ability to re-use and re-purpose this open access content.

B) If so, please give some examples of research activities that would be limited by this licence.

If you would like to respond to this issue, please use the comment function below or send an email to r dot kiley at wellcome dot ac dot uk.