Matthew Cockerill

Open by default: a proposed copyright license and waiver agreement for open access research and data in peer-reviewed journals.

Copyright and licensing of scientific data, internationally, are complex and present legal barriers to data sharing, integration and reuse, and therefore restrict the most efficient transfer and discovery of scientific knowledge. Much data are included within scientific journal articles, their published tables, additional files (supplementary material) and reference lists. However, these data are usually published under licenses which are not appropriate for data. Creative Commons CC0 is an appropriate and increasingly accepted method for dedicating data to the public domain, to enable data reuse with the minimum of restrictions. BioMed Central is committed to working towards implementation of open data-compliant licensing in its publications. Here we detail a protocol for implementing a combined Creative Commons Attribution license (for copyrightable material) and Creative Commons CC0 waiver (for data) agreement for content published in peer-reviewed open access journals. We explain the differences between legal requirements for attribution in copyright, and cultural requirements in scholarship for giving individuals credit for their work through citation. We argue that publishing data in scientific journals under CC0 will have numerous benefits for individuals and society, and yet will have minimal implications for authors and minimal impact on current publishing and research workflows. We provide practical examples and definitions of data types, such as XML and tabular data, and specific secondary use cases for published data, including text mining, reproducible research, and open bibliography. We believe this proposed change to the current copyright and licensing structure in science publishing will help clarify what users – people and machines – of the published literature can do, legally, with journal articles and make research using the published literature more efficient. We further believe this model could be adopted across multiple publishers, and invite comment on this article from all stakeholders in scientific research.

The economics of open access publishing

In terms of economic models for publishing, open access publishing means only one thing – the costs of publishing are not recovered by limiting access in any way, since that would conflict with open access. Since subscription revenue inherently depends on limiting access, an alternative to subscription revenue is needed in order to cover the cost of open access publication. There are several possible ways in which these costs might be covered, of which the most well known is the use of article processing charges, or APCs – which are not unlike the page charges levied by many subscription journals. A key benefit of the article processing charge model is that the revenue scales in proportion to the number of articles published, allowing open access journals to keep pace with the increasing number of research articles being published as research activity around the world gathers pace. Increasing numbers of articles create a problem for the traditional subscription model if library budgets fail to keep up with research funding and productivity. It is important to note that while article processing charges may sometimes be paid directly by authors (typically from their grant funding), in other cases APCs may be centrally paid, by the author’s institution or funder. In some cases, open access journals may receive direct support from a funding agency or other organization, as form of infrastructural provision to the scientific community. In such cases, journal can be free at point of use to both authors and reader, while still being economically viable. In fact, a surprisingly large fraction of open access journals (especially in developing countries) are directly supported in this way, so that authors do not face charges.

Licensing the future: report on BioMed Central’s public consultation on open data in peer-reviewed journals

We report the outcomes of BioMed Central’s public consultation on implementing open data-compliant licensing in peer-reviewed open access journals. Respondents (42) to the 2012 consultation were six to one in favor (29 in support; 5 against; 8 abstentions) of changing our authors’ default open access copyright license agreement, to introduce the Creative Commons CC0 public domain waiver for data published in BioMed Central’s journals. We summarize the different questions we received in response to the consultation and our responses to them – matters such as citation, plagiarism, patient privacy, and commercial use were raised. In light of the support for open data in our journals we outline our plans to implement, in September 2013, a combined Creative Commons Attribution license for published articles (papers) and Creative Commons CC0 waiver for published data.

Establishing a central open access fund

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide detailed information on how the University of Nottingham established a central fund to pay for open access publication of research coming out of the university in direct response to mandates from research funders.Design/methodology/approach – This case study looks into the steps taken by the University of Nottingham to establish a central, institutional fund for the payment of article processing charges (APC) for open access publications. It also examines the initialisation of processes to support investigators at the university in disseminating their research to a global community. The materials included in the case study were the result of interviews with key stakeholders and the review of policy documents from the university.Findings – The case study demonstrates that a great deal of cooperation among departments is needed in order to establish a central fund for open access publishing.Research limitations/implications – The University of Nottingham Cen...

BMC Bioinformatics comes of age

Almost exactly 5 years ago, in early June 2000, BMC Bioinformatics received its first submission. Five years on, it has received over a thousand submissions, and the journal is continuing to grow rapidly.

Obituary: Kuan-Teh Jeang

Dear colleaguesOur loyal friend Kuan-Teh Jeang, “Teh” to friends and colleagues, passed away unexpectedly at the age of 54 on the evening of January 27, 2013. Great shock and sorrow was apparent in the avalanche of email messages by the very many international colleagues with whom Teh interacted over the years. Many of us came to know Teh as an energetic and gifted scientist for whom we had much respect and affection.

What shall we do? Challenges and opportunities of the coming changes in science publishing

First of all let me say what this talk is not going to be about, I’m not trying to persuade anybody that Open Access is a good thing or that it is necessary or even that it is possible. What I’m going to ask you to do, for the purposes of this talk, is to simply assume that it is the future and that it is going to happen. That may be easier for some of you than for others but let’s see where it takes us as a thought experiment. What does this mean for science publishing? One of the things it means is that, in a way, it’s the end of the easy life. Selling academic research is a pretty easy thing to do because the academic community needs that research. Essentially it sells itself. But in the short term, in a world where research flows freely, publishers will need to demonstrate much more clearly that they are adding value in the services they offer if they are to survive. Looking to the future, it may still be tempting for publishers to defend the attractive and profitable model of selling access to research, but that carries the very big danger of preventing them from moving forward, and may lead them to fall behind in terms of developing the services that will add value in the long term. So what do publishers need to do if Open Access is going to happen? They must re-invent the role of the publisher. And I think it’s interesting to look at the analogy of the internet as a general principle. What is special about the internet is not just the electronic transfer of data. We have known for many, many years how to send data from place to place electronically. But the birth of the internet provided a set of neutral standards which allowed data to flow in packets completely freely, whatever kind of information that data carried. And several things have resulted from that. One of them is the growth in the business of sending packets around, providing hardware to manage those packets of data. Companies like Cisco who make routers have done very well, but their business has become a kind of commodity business where it’s all about offering the best priced performance. On the other hand, those open standards have also created entire new markets offering the opportunity to add value in lots of different ways by building on the foundation of the free-flowing data. So you have companies like Ebay and Skype; entirely different services taking as their starting point the fact that data can flow freely whatever it carries, and using it for trading things or for having fun conversations. And what we at Science Navigation Group see in the future for publishing is a need to look at some of those higher level services where publishers can offer ongoing value to the scientific community and the research communities.