Open
Access to GIScience Literature
Many scientists, researchers, authors, and
teachers have expressed the desire to make their intellectual works and
databases freely available to the rest of the world. Tens of thousands of
scientists in the medicine and life sciences have signed an open letter vowing
to publish in, edit or review for, and personally subscribe to only those
scholarly and scientific journals that have agreed to grant unrestricted free
distribution rights to any and all original research through online public
resources. These scientists believe "…that the permanent, archival record
of scientific research and ideas should neither be owned nor controlled by
publishers, but should belong to the public, and should be freely
available…."1 Under current copyright law, publishers control
the further distribution of your research works if you sign most of the current
copyright agreements that publishers attempt to impose on authors in the
geographic information science research community. This control extends for over
a hundred years typically.
One of the best ways for ensuring that your
works may be maintained in public archives now and in the future is for
"…authors and/or publishers to retain copyright in the work, but to
irrevocably license the work to the public domain subject to the condition that
proper attribution be given whenever the work is reproduced or redistributed.
This practice is analogous to the way in which open source software is produced.
By retaining copyright, authors and/or their representatives retain the right to
enforce the terms of the license, but not the right to dictate how or by whom
the work is used." 2
UCGIS supports this general approach to
maintaining open access to the scientific literature and recommends the
following actions.
1. Submitting Articles to Geographic
Information Science Journals
In submitting your work to a scientific
journal for peer review, we recommend that you place the following notice on
your work prior to submission.
Copyright [Insert Year] [Insert Name and Email address of Author(s)]. This work, entitled "[Insert Title of Work]," is distributed under the terms of the Public Library of Science Open Access License, a copy of which can be found at http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org.
[Optional
Additional Statement: Although this license is in effect immediately and
irrevocably, the author(s) agree to not make available to any publicly
accessible archive the article or any derivative article arising from the
editing or peer review process until the article or its derivative is first
published by the journal to which it has been submitted for publication, is
withdrawn from publication, or is rejected for publication.]
By placing the above notice on a submitted work,
you place the potential publisher on notice that prior rights to the public
exist in the article and the publisher will need to publish the article subject
to those rights. If the publisher eventually sends you a long copyright form to
sign, you typically may sign your name but will want to add the phrase "subject to
the prior indicated rights conveyed to the public."
2. Which GIScience Journals will publish
articles subject to prior rights to the public existing in the article? Please
report your experiences!
Scientific and scholarly journals across
numerous disciplines are following economic models that allow for immediate
release of published articles to electronic public archives (e.g. see the
copyright agreement of Science). However, risk adverse publishers are
unwilling typically to state publicly that they are willing to accept articles under the
above conditions. Regardless, we know from experience that many individual leading
authors have demanded and received from journal publishers control over the
future distribution of their specifically authored works. Consult the listing of primary
peer-reviewed geographic
information science journals to determine the official policy of a journal
or to determine whether other authors have been able to use the approach with a specific
journal.
If you are an
editor or publisher for one of the
named journals, please let us know whether your journal will publish articles
under the conditions outlined in section 1 above; conditions that are being advocated by thousands of
scientists.
If you are an author who has submitted an article to one of the named journals using the copyright statement recommended above, please let us know if the journal was willing to peer review and/or publish your article even though it contained the above copyright statement. If the journal rejected your article based solely on your use of the above copyright statement, please let us know that as well. Send to onsrud@spatial.maine.edu
3. Once published, how can I ensure that
my articles can be found by others through a widely accessible citation indexing
system?
Research Index (formerly known as CiteSeer) is an automatic citation indexing
system that uses Web search engines and heuristics to locate journal article
citations and full text copies of Web-posted articles. Additional similar but
alternative universal citation systems may become available in the future.
Research Index currently contains
over 5 million citations and provides links to over 400,000 documents. It is an
excellent resource for exploring the citing patterns among articles and linking
directly to Web hosted journal articles.
To ensure that the full text of your article
is able to be found and linked through Research Index, take the following steps:
1. Be certain that you have legal authority to place your published article on a server and make it available for widespread interlinking with other articles. If you followed the procedure in paragraph 1 above, you should have that authority.
2. Convert your
article to PDF format or save it as a Postscript file. Make the resulting pdf or
ps file available through a link on an html web page. (Note: If your journal
publisher does not provide unrestricted access to their electronic archives you
typically will need to place the article on an accessible server such as at a
university.)
3. Go to
Research Index at http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs
4. Follow the
link "Submit
Documents."
5. Provide the URLs
where your articles in pdf or ps format may be found.
That's it. Your submissions may take a few weeks to be added. For those electronic journals that "openly post" articles in pdf format, you need not go through this process typically since the article is likely to be picked up automatically.
You may be interested to know that a recent study
of the computer science literature covering ten years of publishing indicates
that articles freely available in full text online are cited 4.5 times more
often than offline articles.
Note: To develop a comprehensive citation index for the GIScience community would require establishment of a separate crawler capability. By explanation, when you submit a url to Research Index (CiteSeer) that contains a pdf or ps file, the Research Index crawler strips the text from the file and checks to see whether the file meets its algorithmic tests for a scholarly computer science article. Law review articles, for instance, would typically fail most of the tests for keyword combinations and the tests for citation formats. Thus, even though a law review article might be very germane to computer science scholarly issues it would not be picked up typically by the Research Index crawler. In a similar fashion, many GIScience articles are rejected as non-relevant to the computer science community by Research Index. You will find some non-CS articles in the database that were included prior to imposition of the current algorithmic tests.
4. How can I find GIScience research
articles that are available in the open access literature?
Simply consult Research
Index
or a comparable universal citation database to search for and link to any
articles that have been made available by posting of their pdf or ps files on
the web.
5. Once published, how can I ensure that
my article is maintained in a long-term public electronic archive in addition to
sitting on a server at my university or on the server of my publisher?
Currently there is no substantial
cross-journal open-access archive for the GIScience research literature. This is
true currently for most science domains. Further, long-term archives are
unlikely to emerge generally or within specific science domains unless
scientific authors (1) start maintaining the rights that would allow their
articles, reports, and research databases to be placed in such archives or (2)
start supporting those journals that allow such archiving. General initiatives to
develop and support Open Archives for
the preservation of scientific and technical literature and data are underway.
Please note that while libraries had a default right to archive works in the paper world as a result of the "first sale" doctrine under copyright law, that default doctrine no longer exists in an electronic publishing world controlled by licensing. If you wish to make your electronic articles capable of being publicly archived, you must take affirmative steps such as those recommended above to grant digital libraries the legal right to archive your work.
6. Frequently Asked Questions
See the Public
Library of Science FAQs. In addition, many of the questions that one might
ask about the ramifications of allowing open access to journal articles are very
similar to the questions recording artists might ask of why they might want to
make their audio recordings freely available over the net. Thus, for further
insights, see the EFF
Open Audio License FAQs.
If the Public Library of Science Open Access
License does not meet your specific needs, you might want to consult additional
open access licenses referenced at Alternatives
to the OAL or at OpenSource.Org.
FOOTNOTES:
1 http://ww.publiclibraryofscience.org/plosLetter.shtml