Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei, co-director of open access punctum books, shares his thoughts about global information privilege. As American universities and schools, educators and administrators, support staff and families, scramble to meet students' educational needs and institutional performance indicators, our gratitude to publishers and others freeing up access must be understood within a broader context.

Viral Open Access in Times of Global Pandemic 

by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

This post was originally published on March 19, 2020 and is available at https://punctumbooks.pubpub.org/pub/viral-open-access-global-pandemic-covid-19-corona.

In recent weeks, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to numerous calls for scientific research concerning the virus and the disease to be made open access and freely available to the public. These calls stand in a tense relationship not only with the profit-driven approach to medical research by pharmaceutical companies,¹ but also with the business models of the for-profit academic publishing oligopoly, dominated by a few companies making excessive profit margins that are essentially subsidized by public funds.² The current pandemic makes abundantly clear that the public availability of public knowledge indeed saves lives – but it doesn’t do so only now, it always does.

Let’s recap.

The initial report of the WHO on an outbreak of pneumonia in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, dates to December 31, 2019. The first articles in medical journals appear in mid-January, for example in the open-access International Journal for Infectious Diseases. Rather than wait for publishers to release publicly funded knowledge to the public, a massive online archiving project publicly released more than 5,000 unpaywalled articles on coronaviruses on Sci-Hub in the same month.³ On January 30, 2020 the WHO declared a global health emergency.

On January 31, a statement was published on the website of the Wellcome Trust, in which a number of publishers and journals, including publishing oligopolists Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Taylor and Francis, agreed that

all peer-reviewed research publications relevant to the outbreak are made immediately open access, or freely available at least for the duration of the outbreak

The term “COVID-19” was announced on February 11, and on March 11 the WHO declared the COVID-19 public health crisis a “pandemic.” Two days later, on March 13, chief science advisors from twelve countries released a statement, relayed by the Office of Science and Technology Policy of the White House, urging “publishers to voluntarily agree to make their COVID-19 and coronavirus-related publications, and the available data supporting them, immediately accessible in PubMed Central⁴ and other appropriate public repositories.”

In response, several of the signatories of the January 31 declaration, including the oligopolists, agreed to further make “all of their COVID-19 and coronavirus-related publications, and the available data supporting them, immediately accessible in PubMed Central (PMC) and other public repositories.”

The Wellcome Trust statement raises the fascinating question concerning what type of research is exactly “relevant” to the outbreak. As the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic is not only tied to the DNA of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, its protein structures, and the way interacts with the human body, but also the field of medicine, and therefore also healthcare, and healthcare funding, and health education, and thus also much broader questions of state organization, economic structures, educational resources – in brief, all the ways in which humans have ordered the world. If we want to come to a full understanding of the outbreak, all peer-reviewed research in medical, STEM, social science, and the humanities is potentially “relevant” and should therefore be made open. But that is certainly not how Elsevier c.s. see it.

Then there is also the question of what “duration” means here. The outbreak started officially when the WHO declared it a public health concern on January 30, and for-profit publishers acted a day later. But when will that end? When is all this research that is not temporarily released to the public going back behind lock and key? If predictions that COVID-19 may become endemic to the human population and circulate on an annual basis like the flu becomes reality, its duration is indefinite, but the free access to medical research most certainly won’t be. As HIV/AIDS researchers have long known, even though a pandemic may claim millions of victims, the paywall remains shut as long as the spotlight isn’t on.

The criminal hypocrisy of the publishing industry’s current professions of minimal decency becomes clear once you check the archive of the Wellcome Trust and find similar calls for open access concerning the Ebola epidemic of 2018 and the Zika outbreak in 2016. In neither case do we find the compassionate and understanding signatures of Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, or many others. One gets the impression that only now that a disease affects the Global North, suddenly open access is something of a moral obligation, an obligation that was not so urgently felt when tens of thousands died in Africa. The position of academic for-profit publishers is therefore clear: the deaths of some are more problematic (for their bottom line and “reputation”) than others.

Pilfered from Ernesto Priego.

Opening access went properly viral when schools and universities closed down in the Global North. Suddenly, also non-medical research was made freely accessible. Cambridge University Press opened up its textbooks “until the end of May 2020”; more than 75 publishers made their publications freely accessible to any institution with a ProQuest account “through mid-June”; Harvard University Press made its Loeb Classical Library freely available to school and libraries “until June 30”; and several university presses made their books freely available on Project MUSE until May 31 or June 30, 2020.⁵ Again, only now that school children and students in the Global North are confronted with a limited access to physical learning materials – a daily problem for millions of students around the globe – it appears possible to open up those precious digital files.

As with the temporary opening of access to COVID-19-related articles, the academic presses offering “discretionary” unpaywalling – to a random subset of their catalogs with unknown or poorly argued relevance for the catastrophe that has hit our education systems – are doing nothing but engaging in last-minute, haphazard PR, hoping that the realization that publicly funded knowledge is inaccessible to most of us will not dawn too soon on the anxious tax payer, confronted with their restless child at home or scrambling to assemble an impromptu online “learning experience.”

It is not only in times of crisis that publicly available knowledge can save lives. It always has this potential, and it’s our choice.

---

Endnotes

1. The attempts of the Trump government to buy the exclusive rights to a potential German vaccine are a case in point.
2. Enough for RELX, the parent company of Elsevier to buy back 1 billion GBP in stock during 2019 and 2020. Its CEO, Erik Engstrom, earned £80.3 million in the last decade.
3. This is a good example of “pirate care.”
4. PubMed Central is a freely accessible database for medical papers managed by the NIH.
5. So apparently publishers think that this is all going to be over (in the Global North) by June or July.

You may cite the original work as

van Gerven Oei, V. W. J. (2020). Viral Open Access in Times of Global Pandemic. Punctum Books. Retrieved from https://punctumbooks.pubpub.org/pub/viral-open-access-global-pandemic-covid-19-corona

License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)

Use Stuff from the Smithsonian

Doing a presentation? Creating art? Writing a blog post? Need an image?

On February 25, the Smithsonian launched Smithsonian Open Access. From the Smithsonian Magazine:

For the first time in its 174-year history, the Smithsonian has released 2.8 million high-resolution two- and three-dimensional images from across its collections onto an open access online platform for patrons to peruse and download free of charge. Featuring data and material from all 19 Smithsonian museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives and the National Zoo, the new digital depot encourages the public to not just view its contents, but use, reuse and transform them into just about anything they choose—be it a postcard, a beer koozie or a pair of bootie shorts.

And this gargantuan data dump is just the beginning. Throughout the rest of 2020, the Smithsonian will be rolling out another 200,000 or so images, with more to come as the Institution continues to digitize its collection of 155 million items and counting.

This means that anyone with an internet connection can (legally) download this content and use it (e.g., post it to social media, add it to that scholarly article you're writing, add it to an open educational resource, and more) without needing to ask for permission--which was a requirement in the past. Got questions? Check out their FAQ.

What will you create?

Staying home? Keep on exploring with Armacost Library!

Armacost Library wishes you and your family the best as you cope with rapidly changing developments related to the coronavirus outbreak, including updates from the University of Redlands and from Armacost Library.

It looks like we will all be spending more time at home in the weeks to come. There are many great resources for art, entertainment and learning in the Armacost Library collection and beyond that can help you find inspiration and take needed mental health breaks from planning and preparing. Here are some ideas:

• Check out Armacost Library's electronic collections. We have electronic books, streaming films and documentaries, and streaming classical music and jazz databases available 24/7 with your MyRedlands login. 
• Take a virtual tour of a place you've never visited before.  
• The MCN has compiled a list of museums and archives offering free online exhibits.
• Yosemite National Park has an amazing virtual tour. 
• Tap into the public domain.
• Project Gutenberg is a volunteer-run digital library of over 60,000 free ebooks in Kindle and PDF format.
• Librivox offers free public domain audiobooks read by an army of volunteers.
• The Internet Archive has a great list of things to do if you can't leave the house (including classic cinema, old-time radio and vintage computer games!)
• Enjoy an online concert. 
• The School of Music is streaming the senior recitals of our talented students to a virtual (rather than physical) audience (here's a list of upcoming events). 
• Armacost Library's medici.tv subscription brings you concerts, recitals and master classes from around the world. 
• Music librarians have compiled a list of upcoming live-streamed, free concerts around the world.    
• Learn something new. 
•  Southern California PBS stations are joining forces to offer at home learning for kids ages Pre-K to 12th grade. PBS also has a library of educational media aligned to curricular standards. 
• Armacost Library has many of the Great Courses videos as part of our Kanopy streaming video database. 
• The Smithsonian Museum has an online Learning Lab filled with open access resources (more on these in a future blog post!) 
• Step back in time. 
• The Digital Public Library of America offers many digitized special and archival collctions documenting American and local history.
• The Library of Congress offers many historical collections in its American Memory series.
• Your local library is online, too.
• If you're already a cardholder at your local public library, don't forget to check their audiobook collection. For example, Redlands' A.K. Smiley Public Library offers a database of ebooks and audiobooks through Overdrive.   

Unlock Research Now!

Imagine a world where research on COVID-19 were only available to an exclusive club.

Imagine a world where all medical research and breakthroughs were only available to the rich.

Imagine a world where you lost access to most of the globe's research the moment you graduate from the University of Redlands.

Actually you don't need to imagine this because that's the world we currently live in. If we weren't facing a potential pandemic, research on COVID-19 would be locked behind paywalls. You know, paywalls, those pesky things that tell you to pay around $35 to access an article or chapter.

If you think everyone should be able to freely-access research, let OSTP know.

Our federal Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is considering making federally-funded research freely available and needs to hear from you by April 6! (The original deadline was extended.) They basically want to know three things. They're listed below with a few suggestions to consider in your responses.

1. When doing research, what barriers do you face, and what can be done about it? 

• How does this affect you, your learning and research? What's your story?
• What do you think about the government spending $billions of taxpayer money on research that gets locked behind paywalls?
• Are you okay with the fact that once you graduate, you lose all the access to research that you had as a student?

2. What can federal agencies do to make taxpayer-funded research freely and publicly available?

• Currently there's a one-year delay before making such research available. How would it help you to remove this delay?
• Increasingly authors and publishers are using open licenses to communicate to users of information, what can and can't be done with that information. Including an open license can enable others to do text mining.

3. How would America benefit, lead, and compete scientifically by making research freely and publicly available?

• Other countries (in Latin America, Europe, Africa) are opening up their research to boost the visibility of their research and engage in economic competition.
• Open access would help small businesses and start-ups who have fewer resources, compete in existing markets.
• Innovation doesn't happen in a vacuum; opening up access to research helps potential partners find each other.

When responding, be sure to thank the OSTP and follow their directions: "Submission must not exceed 5 pages in 12 point or larger font, with a page number provided on each page. Responses should include the name of the person(s) or organization(s) filing the comment."

Thank you!
Paige Mann (on behalf of Armacost Library)
STEM Librarian | Scholarly Communications Librarian

Elsevier and the University of California

Our University of California (UC) colleagues (and their students) are shouldering a tremendous burden on our behalf as they stand up to Elsevier. What may be less apparent is why their opposition is so important. In recent decades through mergers, acquisitions, and a rebranding of their business strategies, Elsevier has increased their control over scholarship by offering products, services, and data to governments, funders, higher ed institutions, learned societies, libraries, multilateral agencies, and ranking agencies. This has resulted in substantial dependence on Elsevier to extract and analyze data, and to determine what counts as prestigious and of high-quality. This is the domain of scholars (who provide our time, labor, and monies) yet Elsevier (and other publishers) are often seen as authorities of quality. Elsevier’s recent profit margins rest comfortably at or above 30% which come at the expense of library book budgets and learned societies. Scholars must work collectively to limit corporate authority (in prestige and pricing) given the damage to research integrity and financial sustainability for universities, libraries, and students (e.g., textbooks). (See the Armacost Library Manifesto; additional citations available upon request.) 

As responsible stewards, Library faculty have resisted Big Deals, defended patron privacy, developed an open-access repository, and begun to discuss how to challenge this emerging model of business. (See the Armacost Library Manifesto.) With the support of our new Associate Provost and Director, we ask that you join us in support of our UC colleagues to rebalance power in the circulation of our own scholarly communications. 

• Share your publications when scholars reach out to you with requests. 
• Locate open access scholarship with Open Access Button and Unpaywall, both academic-led and nonprofit plug-ins. 
• Retain, regain, and exercise your rights as authors of articles, books, and textbooks. 

• Upload your scholarship and creative work to Our House in InSPIRe, as permitted by your contracts.  
• Support libraries as they negotiate fair contracts; back them up when negotiations fail. 
• Support mission-driven, academic-led publishers with your content 
• Support mission-driven, academic-led publishing with your labor. 
• Support mission-driven, academic-led initiatives by committing funds. 
• 
  

Best, 

Les Canterbury 

Lua Gregory 

Shana Higgins 

Bill Kennedy 

Janelle Julagay 

Paige Mann 

Sanjeet Mann 

Open Access Week

Open Access Week

October 19-25, 2015

“’Open Access’ to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.

Open Access (OA) has the potential to... ...increase the exposure and use of published research, facilitate the ability to conduct research across available literature, and enhance the overall advancement of scholarship. Research funding agencies, academic institutions, researchers and scientists, teachers, students, and members of the general public are supporting a move towards Open Access in increasing numbers every year.”

Open Access resources available to all, and linked from the Armacost Library website:

arXiv.org

“Open access to 1,084,095 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics.”

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE)

“BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic open access web resources. BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.”

Approximately 70% of the 75,000,000+ documents indexed in BASE are open access, full-text.

Digital Commons Network

“The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, the Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.”

UR’s InSPIRe is a part of the Digital Commons Network.

Digital Public Library of America

“The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science.”

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

“DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.”

Set the Default to Open Access

The tagline for this sixth year of International Open Access Week is "Set the default to open access."

The goal of International Open Access Week is to promote Open Access as an alternative norm to research and scholarly publishing and distribution.

Open Access advocates for free, online, immediate, and unobstructed access to research and scholarly works.

Armacost Library is taking part in promoting Open Access in 2012 by speaking to University of Redlands faculty members during the October 25 Faculty Forum. Armacost Library Director Gabriela Sonntag and Outreach/Behavioral Sciences Librarian Melissa Cardenas-Dow will hold a presentation entitled Making Student Excellence Visible. The presentation proposes the use of a digital repository to provide Internet access to the research, scholarship, and intellectual work done at University of Redlands.

Open Access Week is part of the Armacost Library Intellectual Freedom (ALIF) celebration. International Open Access Week 2012 is slated for October 22-28.