Academics are — slowly — adopting the view that publicly funded research should be made freely available. But data released yesterday suggest that, given the choice, even researchers who publish in open-access journals want to place restrictions on how their papers can be re-used — for example, sold by others for commercial profit.

That stance is directly opposed to the views of major funding agencies, such as the seven UK research councils and the Wellcome Trust in London, one of the world’s wealthiest biomedical charities. Advocates of open access say this shows that researchers don’t understand how publishing licences affect ‘open’ research papers, and that more work needs to be done to explain why licences matter. But some publishers argue that restrictions are needed.

» via Nature

ANY list of the leading novelists of the 19th century, writing in English, would almost surely include Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain.

But they do not appear at the top of a list of the most influential writers of their time. Instead, a recent study has found, Jane Austen, author of “Pride and Prejudice, “ and Sir Walter Scott, the creator of “Ivanhoe,” had the greatest effect on other authors, in terms of writing style and themes.

These two were “the literary equivalent of Homo erectus, or, if you prefer, Adam and Eve,” Matthew L. Jockers wrote in research published last year. He based his conclusion on an analysis of 3,592 works published from 1780 to 1900. It was a lot of digging, and a computer did it.

» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)

First came voluntary. Then came mandatory. And now, four years after the National Institutes of Health required that all research papers be made freely available within a year of publication, comes enforcement.

The NIH, in a statement issued on Friday, said that beginning in about five months, it would block the renewal of grant awards in cases where journal publications arising from the award do not comply with its open-access rule.

“We are committed to doing all we can to help our grantees ensure they comply with the policy,” Sally J. Rockey, the NIH’s deputy director in charge of extramural research, said in announcing the enforcement plan on the NIH’s Web site.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

Libraries used to be the main stewards of the cultural and scientific record. But in the era of digital storage “cloud computing,” the institutions best-positioned to manage vast quantities of data are often companies such as Google and Elsevier.

That is a big problem, said James Hilton, the chief information officer at the University of Virginia, in a talk on Thursday here at Educause.   

For all their current stability and rhetorical commitments to preserving their records, Google and Elsevier cannot be trusted with the task of digital preservation in the long term, said Hilton.

The Virginia CIO recalled meeting with representatives from Elsevier back when he was an interim library director at the University of Michigan. “We were talking about this problem of digital preservation,” he said. “And Elsevier’s response was, ‘We got it, don’t worry about it; we were Galileo’s publisher, we’ve been around for hundreds of years, we got it.’ ”

But Elsevier’s stewardship of its archive thus far is no guarantee that the contents of that archive will be safe if the company does not pull off the rare feat of surviving hundreds more years, Hilton said. The safety of those hundreds of years’ worth of research literature, he said, should not depend on the fortune of any single entity, let alone one whose priorities are oriented to its bottom line.

» via Inside Higher Ed

In one of Dr. Seuss’s better-known tales of jealousy and prejudice, the Sneetches with stars on their bellies are considered superior to those without.

Now there’s more evidence that journals’ impact factors are similarly misleading.

A study published by three Canadian researchers has identified a two-decade-long trend in which the world’s top-ranked scientific journals are slowly losing their share of the most-cited articles.

The study, published in the November issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, found that in 1990, 45 percent of the top 5 percent of the most cited articles were published in journals whose impact factor was in the top 5 percent—publications like Cell, Nature, Science, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. By 2009, that rate had fallen to 36 percent, the authors found.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

Scientists appear to have figured out a new way to avoid any bad prepublication reviews that dissuade journals from publishing their articles: Write positive reviews themselves, under other people’s names.

In incidents involving four scientists—the latest case coming to light two weeks ago—journal editors say authors got to critique their own papers by suggesting reviewers with contact e-mails that actually went to themselves.

The glowing endorsements got the work into Experimental Parasitology, Pharmaceutical Biology, and several other journals. Fake reviews even got a pair of mathematics articles into journals published by Elsevier, the academic publishing giant, which has a system in place intended to thwart such misconduct. The frauds have produced retractions of about 30 papers to date.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)