Category — Student Activism

The Student Statement on The Right to Research, which we wrote about earlier, has been getting attention!

See stories about the Student Statement in:

• Inside Higher Ed
• Research Information
• Library Journal

See also Nick Shockey’s op-ed in Research Information.

Plus see the announcements posted by statement endorsers Students for Free Culture and Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, and the news as tweeted by Prof. Lawrence Lessig!

A coalition of national and campus student organizations has released the Student Statement on The Right to Research:

… Learning and inquiry are impeded when scholars lack access to fellow researchers’ work, and when students lack access to the work of scholars before them.

At the same time, digital technologies have opened new opportunities for research. New tools facilitate faster discoveries, speed the development of new technologies, and accelerate the progress of science. Patients could have access to the latest medical research, citizens could evaluate scientific information on environmental impacts, and developing countries could apply the most recent scholarship to public health and development efforts. But access barriers leave these opportunities under-explored. …

The statement ends with a call to action:

… We hereby:

Call upon universities to support Open Access

• We believe universities should adopt policies that ensure Open Access to their faculty’s research, such as the policies adopted at Harvard University and Stanford University.

Call upon governments and research funders to support Open Access

• We believe research agencies should adopt policies that ensure Open Access to publicly funded research, such as that of the National Institutes of Health and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
• We believe charitable funders likewise should adopt policies that ensure Open Access to their funded research, such as that of Autism Speaks and the Canadian Cancer Society.

Call upon researchers to support Open Access

• We believe researchers should publish in Open Access journals, and/or deposit their peer-reviewed manuscripts in Open Access repositories.

Commit to support Open Access in our activities

• We will undertake activities, in our membership and on our campuses, to educate students about Open Access and to engage them in efforts supporting Open Access.

The statement is endorsed by the American Medical Student Association, the Student PIRGs, Students for Free Culture, and Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, as well as the California Institute of Technology Graduate Student Council and the Trinity University Association of Student Representatives. Your organization can join, too!

• University of Michigan librarian Molly Kleinman writes that undergraduates have an important role to play in advocating for open access.
• An op-ed in a University of California, Berkeley student newspaper calls for students to use Creative Commons licenses for their theses and dissertations.
• A blog at Georgetown University profiles Kevin Donovan of Students for Free Culture and the chapter’s hopes to support open access and open educational resources at the school.
• Students at the University of New Mexico are criticizing traditional textbooks and calling for open textbooks.
• Uwe Thomas Müller’s dissertation at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin examines peer-review processes at open access journals.
• Martin Boosen’s master’s thesis at the University of Applied Sciences Cologne looks at institutional repositories in Germany.
• Claudio Marconi’s undergraduate thesis at the Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” looks at open access as a new method of diffusion for scientific literature.

• An op-ed in Georgetown University’s student newspaper criticizes Rep. John Conyers’ bill to overturn the NIH Public Access Policy and calls for open access to publicly-funded research.
• The Göttingen Journal of International Law is a new student-edited open access journal published by the University of Göttingen.
• Two students at the University of California, Berkeley used Creative Commons licenses for their dissertations. See the story in the Daily Californian and blog posts by Creative Commons and one of the authors.
• An op-ed in the University of Maryland’s student newspaper calls for open textbooks.

After a bit of hiatus, here’s some recent news on students and open access:

• The winners of the Sparky Awards contest for videos on information sharing have been announced. The contest, sponsored by SPARC (which also sponsors Open Students), invited students to create a short video on the value of sharing information. The grand prize winner was created by a group of students from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Check out the winners here!
• Benjamin J. Keele, a law student at Indiana University - Bloomington and editor in chief of the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, published an op-ed in Student Lawyer magazine calling for open access to student-edited law journals. The student newspaper at Virginia Tech editorialized in favor of open access, medical students at the University of Michigan published an op-ed supporting open access, and a Ph.D student at Queensland University of Technology published a letter to the editor extolling the school’s open access repository.
• Instructors at several colleges, including Michigan State University, University of Toronto, San Jose State University, had their students produce an open access journal as a class assignment. We previously posted a similar assignment for students at the University of British Columbia.
• Several new open access journals published by students launched: Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics (by students at Erasmus University Rotterdam), New Social Inquiry ( Carleton University), PLATFORM: Journal of Media and Communication (University of Melbourne), Amsterdam Law Forum (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), aspeers (University of Leipzig), and Public Knowledge (Virginia Tech).
• Temple University adopted a requirement that its doctoral students’ dissertations be made open access. Meanwhile, at Lund University students may choose to make dissertation open access, and 43% of them do. A survey of open access repository managers found that they expect theses and dissertations to be a top trend for repositories in 2009.
• Mary Anne Kennan, a student at the University of New South Wales, wrote her dissertation on Reassembling scholarly publishing: open access, institutional repositories and the process of change. The dissertation is available open access.
• A collection of papers by students at the University of British Columbia on libraries and publishing, including on open access, was published (and is itself open access).
• Concern about unauthorized downloading of textbooks by students continued to grow: see e.g. articles in the Toronto Star and Times Higher Education. But Flat World Knowledge, a company dedicated to publishing open textbooks, released its first books. Nature also launched an open access educational site, Scitable, focused on genetics. Finals Club is a new open access, Creative Commons-licensed site for students to share lecture notes and discuss class topics.
• The UK Serials Group announced the winners of its essay contest for library and publishing students, on the topic of accessing academic information in the Google Era.

Are you fired up by Open Access Day and ready to get involved to support Open Access? Check out the ideas on the Right to Research site, sign up to get updates, and if you’re really ready to roll up your sleeves and get to work, email me at gavin@arl.org to find out about joining the student Open Access leaders squad!

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Chris Boulton. Mr. Boulton is a PhD student in communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst specializing in advertising, visual culture, and media literacy.

Opinions are solely those of the author.

Last year, my masters thesis served as a “guinea pig” for the new electronic submission process at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The monograph was a critical analysis of children’s fashion and included several examples of clothing advertisements. Despite lengthy efforts to secure permission to reproduce these copyrighted images, I was denied at every turn by corporations eager to protect the image of their brand. Therefore, according to rule number 88 of the UMass Graduate School’s Guidelines for Master’s Theses and Doctoral Dissertations, I was required to excise the ads from the text and “include a note in the List of Figures that directs readers to the set of illustrations on file in your department.”

As you can imagine, this was a disheartening prospect. The ads were, in short, the very basis of my analysis. Rule 88 means that any reader who wanted to view the ads would be forced to travel all the way to the UMass campus, trudge up to the fourth floor of Machmer Hall, and then request that a secretary pull out a dusty manila folder “on file in my department.” I wouldn’t go to such trouble, particularly if I had accessed the thesis online, so how could I expect anyone else?

As you can see, rule 88 put me in a terrible position. To comply would mean stripping the data from my analysis. If I ignored the rule and printed the ads, I risked rejection of my thesis, or worse. Clearly, this rule presented a serious hindrance to my intellectual freedom. Furthermore, I did not believe that it correctly reflects current copyright law as specified in section 107 of the United States Copyright Act of 1976. For example, the guidelines from the Graduate School do not even mention the right to use copyrighted images for educational and non-commercial purposes. Commonly known as “fair use,” this mechanism allows scholars and journalists to quote from copyrighted material in order to comment on it.

But of course, copyright goes both ways. For instance, I have recently been inspired by SPARC to retain the copyright of my own scholarly journal articles. There are many reasons to do this, but the most compelling for me was preserving the option to make my academic work freely available to the general public immediately following its date of publication. The 9 minute video below takes a look at both sides of the copyright coin by telling my two stories of open access in the emerging digital commons.

Fair Game: Open Access in the Emerging Digital Commons from Chris Boulton on Vimeo.

For scholars who study media, the internet has broadened research horizons and expanded the reach of teaching and publications. But powerful gatekeepers remain. From academic journals seeking to control our intellectual property to lawyers crying foul when we quote from copyrighted material, we are bombarded with a myriad of confusing and dubious restrictions. In short, the implied threat of legal action creates a chilling effect that impacts us all. Some have pushed back, arguing that our educational activities are protected under the “fair use” statute. But this is a risky game to play. The rules aren’t always clear. And when it comes to fair use, we either use it, or lose it.

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Nelson Pavlosky. Mr. Pavlosky is a law student at George Mason University in Arlington, Va. As co-founder of both Students for Free Culture and its first campus chapter, Free Culture Swarthmore, Nelson has been a leader in the student free culture movement. He made headlines in 2003 as a plaintiff in OPG v. Diebold, a case which set an important precedent protecting freedom of speech from abuse of copyright law. This summer he is interning at SPARC and advocating for open access to research.

Opinions are solely those of the author.

At the end of 2007 open access advocates won an important victory when President Bush signed into law a public access mandate for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), directing the agency to provide open access to findings from its funded research. Unfortunately, a number of publishers who benefit from high journal prices — and from charging the public for access to publicly funded research — have banded together to try to undermine or repeal the NIH public access mandate. It is essential that students become informed about this issue and join open access advocates in defending the NIH public access policy, and so I would like to explain what is at stake and how students can help.

What is the NIH?

The National Institutes of Health is a United States government agency which funds biomedical and health-related research. It is the largest funder of medical research in the world, and the largest funder of non-classified research in the US federal government. It has a $29 million budget and its funding is responsible for roughly 80,000 articles in scholarly journals every year. The impact of the NIH and similar government agencies on scholarly research is dramatic, since about half of all university research funding comes from the federal government. [See the Provosts' 2006 letter supporting FRPAA]

It seems like a no-brainer that publicly funded research should be freely available to the taxpayers who fund it, and people are always surprised when I tell them that until recently it was not. Yes — until the NIH public access mandate was passed by Congress, about 96% of the NIH’s research was only available in expensive, restricted-access journals. In order to read the results of the research that your taxes paid for, you had to belong to an institution that could afford the increasingly absurd prices of academic journals. The comments of publishing industry analysts at Credit Suisse First Boston explain the dire situation well:

[W]e would expect governments (and taxpayers) to examine the fact that they are essentially funding the same purchase three times: governments and taxpayers fund most academic research, pay the salaries of the academics who undertake the peer review process and fund the libraries that buy the output, without receiving a penny in exchange from the publishers for producing and reviewing the content….We do not see this as sustainable in the long term, given pressure on university and government budgets. [From SPARC's comment, page 4]

Happily, the NIH public access mandate will do a great deal to lighten this burden on the public.

What is the NIH public access mandate?

The NIH public access mandate provides free online access to full-text, peer-reviewed journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research. The NIH requires every scientist who receives an NIH research grant, and who publishes the results in a peer-reviewed journal, to post a digital copy of the article in PubMed Central, the online digital library maintained by the NIH. This free digital copy must be publicly available no later than 12 months after publication in the peer-reviewed journal. (As the Canadian Library Association recently pointed out, this kind of delay — designed to accommodate publisher concerns about loss of subscription revenues — should be seen as a temporary measure to help publishers adapt, as we eventually move to a world where access is open immediately upon publication.)

Why is the public access mandate important?

Innumerable people before me have made the case for why open access in general is important, and I highly recommend reading SPARC’s The Right To Research site for information on why open access is important to students. It is important to note that the NIH public access policy does not actually require the articles to be open access according to the BBB definition, i.e. released under a free license such as a Creative Commons license which explicitly allows for e.g. redistribution. Most of the articles that will be made available on PubMed Central will be covered by ordinary copyright. However, making all of these NIH-funded articles available for free online will have many of the same effects and benefits as open access publishing, and facilitate the transition to full open access.

The benefits of the NIH mandate in particular have also been exhaustively covered in documents such as SPARC’s response to NIH during the public comment period. Given the focus of NIH on medical research, the NIH mandate will have a huge impact on people who are ill or at risk of disease, as well as the people who care for them or who are researching treatments for their ailments. I found the comments of one mother to be particularly compelling:

My children have a genetic disease. It is rare, not well understood, and there is no treatment or cure. However, the most disturbing obstacle we face is the wall around published scientific research. Information critical to health and biomedical research is held hostage by questionable and arcane publishing practices. It is time for publishers, both private and academic, to redesign their business models in response to a new age of information sharing and a stronger sense of the scientific commons.

The research that is funded by the NIH has great potential to improve or even save lives, and it’s vital that it be made available to as many people as possible.

How are the publishers trying to get the NIH mandate overturned?

The publishers are trying to derail the NIH public access policy in a number of ways — mostly behind closed doors, since they have lost quite publicly several times. One method is publicly revealed in a comment by the Association of American Publishers which can be found on the NIH site. The publishers are making bogus claims that the NIH policy constitutes a change in copyright law, which requires further review by various executive and legislative bodies. This is silly because all that is happening here is that the people paying for the research — the US government through the NIH — are requiring a non-exclusive license to publish the research that they paid for. The NIH policy is a perfectly normal case of contract law and does not impact copyright in any way.
Nevertheless, we can expect the publishers to use this bogus interpretation of copyright law to try to overturn or undermine the NIH mandate, whether through legislative action, lawsuits, or executive action.

What can you do to support the NIH policy?

The NIH has just completed a public comment period, and the publishers have not yet made any overt moves which can be opposed by the public. However, you can be certain that your help will be needed in the future, especially if the publishers start pushing to repeal or weaken the NIH public access mandate.

To stay informed and be ready to respond if the publishers make their move, you can subscribe to the SPARC mailing list or to SPARC’s RSS feed. Check the websites for the Alliance for Taxpayer Access and SPARC now and then to catch up on the latest news. And to support open access in general, check out SPARC’s page on what students can do to support open access.

Via Michael Geist:

The Canadian Federation of Students, representing a half million students from coast to coast, just released its position paper on copyright reform. The CFS position includes support for a more flexible fair dealing provision, rejection of the AUCC/CMEC educational exemption, calling for balanced TPM measures, implementation of a notice-and-notice approach, elimination of crown copyright, and limits on statutory damages.

The statement doesn’t include issues such as open access to research, but it’s still great to see the student community getting involved with information policy issues.

Bita M. Assad, Web Site Provides Theses Online, The Harvard Crimson, April 7, 2008.

As the final round of seniors turn in their theses, a fledgling open-access initiative is encouraging students to make their work accessible to the world.

The Free Thesis Project, a Web site run by Harvard College Free Culture, currently allows seniors to upload their theses to an online repository. But while the Web site was launched in April 2007, only 20 students so far have submitted their theses for free and open access. …

The primary arguments in favor of open access for scholarly literature written by faculty and students are both pragmatic and ideological, according to Grant W. Dasher ’09, one of the leaders of the Free Thesis Project. He added that there is a need to drive down the cost of scholarly journals, which would eliminate the high subscription rates for universities.

Even as the University shifts to open access, the Free Thesis Project has yet to pick up momentum among Harvard’s senior thesis writers.

Jason E. Neal ’08, the only senior to have submitted his thesis so far this year, said seniors are often too preoccupied to think about how they would like their thesis to be distributed for future readers.

“Seniors are busy finishing their theses, and are so relieved to be done, that they don’t ever want to think about it again,” said Neal, who is a government concentrator.

Dasher acknowledged that although the shortage in submissions is partially due to limited awareness, departments have been receptive to the idea of encouraging the initiative. …

According to Dasher, the Free Thesis Project plans to expand its depository to include PhD theses and eventually to integrate the archive with faculty publications.