On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 2:36 PM, Matthew Cockerill
<matt_at_biomedcentral.com> wrote:
>
> Stevan,
>
> You suggest that the announcement text:
>
> "The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) now requires
authors to publish research results into open access journals and
also encourages dual submission into an institutional repository,"
>
> represents, in your words "self-serving spin by a commercial
journal publisher".
>
> It is perhaps helpful to clarify that this specific wording was
drafted not by BioMed Central but by Wilfrid Laurier University
themselves, to describe their reasons for setting up an institutional
repository. There may be room to improve the wording to better
capture the nuances of the CIHR's two-pronged mandate - but it is
hard to see how this announcement can be portrayed as devious
commercial spin!
Matt,
The Press Release did come from BMC, not WLU, but as you assure me
that the wording was not BMC's, I withdraw the imputation of spin and
just suggest that BMC might vet its Press Releases more closely...
But it is hardly a "nuance" that what CIHR requires is to make
articles OA, and that this requirement can be fulfilled either by
(Option #1) publishing in an OA journal (Gold OA) or by (option #2)
self-archiving it in an OA Repository (Green OA). It is definitely
both incorrect and misleading to state that CIHR requires publishing
in a Gold OA journal and "encourages" Green OA self-archiving.
Logically speaking, "REQUIRE(X or Y)" definitely does not mean
"REQUIRE(X) and ENCOURAGE(Y)"
And, as I said, the difference there is the difference between night
and day.
If Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU) has such a foggy understanding of
the CIHR mandate it is a unlikely that WLU will be able to help its
researchers to comply with it. Does BMC's Open Repository Service
give them a clearer idea?
>
> More generally:
>
> As far as I can tell, Wilfrid Laurier, the CIHR, the NIH, Wellcome,
RCUK, JISC, BioMed Central and pretty much all other organizations
seeking to encourage openness in scholarly communication see open
digital repositories and open access journals as complementary
partners, not the antagonistic opponents which they appear to be from
your perspective.
The fundamental underlying issue of Green/Gold complementarity vs.
competition requires a somewhat deeper, hence lengthier analysis, I
am afraid, if there is to be productive partnership. What follows is
a "functional anatomy" of the complementary between Green and Gold,
with careful attention to the dynamics of their causal interaction,
interdependency and timing, in place of just a vague notion of
independent parallel progress.
It is not Green and Gold OA per se that are in conflict but some of
the ways some proponents have portrayed and promoted them. Green and
Gold OA themselves are indeed complementary, if their respective
roles in providing OA itself are described and implemented in a
clear, sensible and transparent way, serving the interests of OA
itself.
First of all, there is no mandate, anywhere, by funders or
institutions, to publish in Gold OA journals.
Authors must be allowed to choose where they publish. There can only
be a mandate to make all articles OA -- and, as CIHR and RCUK have
indicated, either way of making articles OA is OK with them.
But insofar as IRs are concerned, it should be obvious that it would
be both arbitrary and absurd for institutions to mandate that only
articles published in non-OA journals need to be deposited in their
IRs! Moreover, insofar as WLU is concerned, CIHR is not their only
funder, and their research is not only biomedical (nor is it all
funded).
So from an institution's point of view -- if they actually take the
time to think it through, and if they are given sound guidance by
their Repository Service Provider, free of conflict of interest --
all their articles should be deposited in their IR, regardless of
what journal they are published in.
And that, once one thinks it through, can only be described as a
blanket Green OA policy for all institutional research article
output. (I say policy, because WLU does not yet have a mandate, as
far as I know.)
Institutions, being the universal providers of all research output,
in all disciplines, funded and unfunded, will want all of their
research to be deposited in their IRs and they will also want it all
to be OA.
So far -- without any conflict or complementarity -- this is all just
basic Green OA: "Deposit all articles in your institution's IR."
Now we come to the complementarity. One way to make absolutely sure
that the articles you deposit in your IR are OA immediately upon
acceptance for publication is to publish them in either (1) a Green
(c. 63%) or (2) a Gold (c. 20%) journal. (This is CIHR's "option #2"
and "option #1," respectively, but re-ordered in terms of percentage
scope.)
For the rest of your articles, the option is (3) immediate deposit
and Closed Access during the embargo period (though the IR's email
eprint request Button will provide "Almost OA" during the embargo for
all Closed Access deposits, and the preprint-plus-corrigenda can also
be made immediately OA for a further 32% of journals).
That is basically all there is to the Green/Gold complementarity --
apart from one other thing:
The very existence of Gold OA journals (as Peter Suber and Stuart
Shieber have frequently pointed out in promoting OA) is a valuable
"proof of principle" that there does exist a viable alternative model
for publishing, should subscriptions ever become unsustainable (e.g.,
if universal Green OA mandates eventually lead to cancellations that
make subscriptions unsustainable). This Gold OA proof-of-principle
helps allay the common worry that OA and OA mandates might make
publishing itself unsustainable.
This proof of principle, however, comes at a price, because Gold OA
itself (despite the oft-repeated -- and true -- datum that the
majority of today's Gold OA journals do not charge a fee for
publication) comes at a price, especially for the high-end Gold OA
journals (such as the BMC and PLoS journals).
(Perhaps the Gold OA journals that are still making ends meet via
subscriptions, without charging a publication fee, are also a proof
of some sort of principle, but I don't think that most worriers about
the future of publishing after universal Green OA mandates would find
that principle very reassuring as a universal principle -- and even
less so in the case of the subsidized Gold OA journals.)
Hence it is the publication-fee-based Gold OA journals like BMC and
PLoS that are providing this helpful proof of principle today -- but
at the price of also introducing a deterrent, today: the publication
fee, which many don't want to pay today and many more cannot even
afford.
I know both BMC and PLoS have exemptions for authors who are unable
to pay, but that, like the self-sustaining subscription-based Gold OA
journals, as well as the subsidized ones, is not reassuring enough to
allay these counter-worries about whether Gold OA could successfully,
affordably and sustainably scale to all journals if Green OA mandates
make subscriptions unsustainable:
So the paid-Gold OA proof-of-principle to allay worries about how to
recover publication costs if subscriptions become unsustainable is
somewhat offset by counter-worries about affordability -- today. Most
important -- and here we get to the point where some Green/Gold
conflict does arise -- the straightforward and transparent way to
describe this reality today is the following:
There is no need whatsoever to publish in a paid-Gold OA journal
today -- if there is no suitable one, or one does not wish to, or one
cannot afford to -- because OA can be provided for free, via Green OA
(or Almost-OA) in all cases, without exception. (Then, if and when
Green OA ever makes subscriptions unsustainable, subscription
journals will convert to Gold OA, cutting obsolete costs by
downsizing to just providing peer review, and the institutional
windfall savings from the subscription cancellations will be more
than enough to cover the costs of peer review via Gold OA fees.)
That is what Gold OA publishers -- even those that promote Repository
Services -- cannot quite bring themselves to say, in describing the
complementarity between Green and Gold OA, and I think this BMC Press
Release is an example of that. The substantive relation between the
Green and Gold aspects of all OA mandates is that each article must
be deposited (i.e., Green) and the article may be Gold (when a
suitable Gold journal exists, the author wishes to publish in it, and
-- if the journal is paid-Gold OA -- the funds are available).
And the transition from subscription-based publishing to Gold OA is
not a matter of adding more and more new Gold OA journals now, when
what is needed is more OA, not more journals, when the money is still
tied up in subscriptions, and when the asking price is still far too
high. It is the release of the subscription funds by the conversion
of the existing journals to Gold OA under "competition" from
universal Green OA that will make the conversion to Gold OA possible,
not direct competition to subscription journals from new rival Gold
OA journals
today, when Green OA can be had for free, and mandated, without having
to switch journals or pay extra for Gold OA
It is precisely this all-important essence of the causal and temporal
dynamics of the complementarity between Green and Gold OA that was
turned upside down in this BMC Press Release. And such reversals of
both fact and logic are antagonistic not only to the growth and
understanding of OA itself (and not just Green OA) but to the logic
and pragmatics of OA mandates.
One last point: As WLU does not yet have its own institutional
mandate, we are talking only about the CIHR mandate. The CIHR mandate
-- which, like most funder mandates, has not yet looked carefully
enough at the broader OA picture, and is focused exclusively on the
fate of the articles it has itself funded -- has indeed improved on
the NIH mandate by stipulating that the mandated deposit can be made
in any OA Repository, not necessarily in a specific central
repository like PubMed Central, as NIH currently stipulates.
This is an improvement on the current NIH mandate, but it is not
enough. And that is why it would be helpful if CIHR were to be still
more specific, and stipulate that the fundee's own IR is to be the
default locus of deposit. The reason is to converge with and
reinforce institutional OA mandates, rather than to compete with or
complicate them. The overarching idea is to make all research OA, not
just the research a particular funder funds; and for that, funder
mandates need to facilitate mandates by the universal providers of
all research: the institutions (the "still-slumbering giant" of OA).
It is because the CIHR mandate is still vague about this
all-important constraint that CIHR leaves it ambiguous as to whether,
in the case of fulfilling its OA mandate by publishing in a Gold OA
journal, it is sufficient simply to do that, and not deposit it in an
IR at all -- because it is already OA on the publisher's website.
This is just as bad, because if makes institutional and funder OA
mandates diverge and complicate mandate implementation and
fulfillment, rather than converge and synergize, just as mandating
central deposit instead of IR deposit does.
Failing to stipulate that there must be convergent IR deposit in both
cases also encourages the notion that it's a matter of either Green
OA self-archiving or Gold OA publishing, rather than self-archiving
in the IR in both cases. Again, this is what the BMC Open Repository
Service should be clarifying for WLU, if the common objective is full
IRs and universal OA rather than just the promotion of Gold OA. This
too is where a bland and blind invocation of "complementarity" will
not do, and the devil is in the details.
[Alma Swan has just done a posting, and I've done a follow-up, about
a related implementation problem with some of the current funder
mandates such as Wellcome's: It is fundees who are being mandated,
and whose compliance is being monitored, not publishers. Hence it
enormously (and needlessly) complicates the monitoring of
mandate-compliance if it is publishers (whether pure-Gold,
hybrid-Gold "Open Choice," or subscription-based) who are expected to
do the depositing (or merely the hosting) of the OA article, rather
than the fundee. This becomes even more obvious in the case of
institutional mandates: The complementary, convergent policy would be
a uniform requirement -- expressed by both funder mandates and
institutional mandates -- to deposit in the author's IR, with the
author (or the author's institutional assigns) responsible for making
the deposit, rather than a divergent policy in which compliance
depends on third parties, in some repository or other.]
>
> BioMed Central is engaged in multiple collaborations with the
academic community to develop efficient and manageable ways to
automatically populate instutional repositories with authoritative
final versions of articles immediately upon publication, and this
seems to us (and to our institutional partners) to offer an extremely
productive way forwards.
"Authoritative final versions"? This too sounds like a
counterproductive criterion (possibly motivated by Gold-OA thinking):
The reason the vast majority of OA mandates -- both funder mandates
and institutional mandates -- specify that it is the author's
refereed final draft that must be deposited, and not necessarily the
publisher's authoritative version, is that most of the 63% of
journals that are fully Green endorse making the author's final
refereed draft immediately OA, but not the publisher's proprietary
version. This makes OA mandates much easier to adopt and comply with
than if they insisted on the publisher's version.
Nor is there any need for the publisher's proprietary version to be
deposited, in order to provide 100% OA. The author's refereed,
accepted final draft is enough; it is available immediately upon
acceptance, and it is hence the natural default draft to stipulate in
mandates as well as pre-mandate policies. The publisher's
authoritative version is of course welcome too, just as publishing in
a Gold OA journal is welcome -- but they are not only not necessary,
but focusing instead on them is antagonistic to the rapid and smooth
adoption and implementation of OA policies and mandates. If BMC's
Open Repository Service is targeting the publisher's version instead,
then it is giving institutions unsound advice, at odds with what will
generate the most OA, the most quickly and efficiently.
>
> By developing 'Gold' open access journals alongside institutional
repositories, a smooth path to a fully open access future for
scholarly research communication is created.
The smooth path that OA needs to take is it to 100% OA itself. The
"future for scholarly communication" is another matter, a longer
story. If the future of scholarly communication is (among other
things) to be Gold OA (and I do think it is) then the smoothness of
even that longer path will be paved and accelerated by Green OA
mandates (the only kind of OA that can be mandated). In other words,
the path to Gold OA is via Green OA.
>
> In contrast, your suggestion:
>
> "Green OA will no longer be in competition with Gold OA once Green
OA mandates have prevailed globally, and if and when the resulting
universal Green OA eventually induces a universal transition to Gold
OA by making subscriptions unsustainable."
>
> implies that you hope (optimistically) that Gold OA journals would
appear instantaneously out of nowhere, as soon as the level of uptake
of Green OA reaches a level at which it causes a dramatic collapse of
subscriptions.
Not at all, and it is extremely important that we understand one
another on this point, for it is crucial to understanding the causal
and temporal dynamic of the Green/Gold complementarity:
No, new Gold OA journals need not appear instantaneously out of
nowhere: it is existing journals that will be forced to convert to
Gold OA if and when Green OA makes subscriptions unsustainable.
If and when universally mandated Green OA begins to cause
cancellation pressure on subscriptions, there is no reason whatsoever
to suppose that the effect will be an immediate dramatic collapse.
Nor does it require any new journals to replace the existing ones.
Cancellation pressure will cause cost-cutting and the phasing out of
inessential products and services by the existing journals. The first
of these cuts will of course be the print edition itself. But it will
not stop there, for cancellations are predicated on the fact that
users are ready to rely on the Green version -- the refereed final
draft, self-archived in the distributed network of IRs. That means
the next thing to be phased out will be access-provision and
archiving. That will leave peer review as the sole remaining service
that a journal needs to provide.
This is definitely not the case with Gold OA publishing today: Some
or all of these extra products/services and their expenses are
bundled into the current asking price for Gold OA. That -- together
with the fact that the potential institutional money to pay for Gold
OA is still tied up in institutional subscriptions -- is what makes
Gold OA a deterrent for OA mandate growth today. And it is precisely
the gradual increase of cancellation pressure as Green OA grows that
will force the downsizing and cost-cutting that will in
turn make Gold OA affordable, while also releasing the subscription
funds to pay for it.
Moreover, a conversion to universal Gold OA does not at all mean
adding 25,000 new Gold OA journals to replace the 25,000 existing
subscription journals, as some seem to imagine (again without really
trying to think it through). It is a matter of converting the
existing journals to Gold, as they phase out their now-obsolete
products and services (because of Green OA IRs) and downsize to peer
review (and its far lower cost) alone, under cancellation pressure on
their own journals. And of course the journal titles, refereeships,
authorships and track-records of the journals currently published by
any publishers who may no longer be interested in staying in the
business if they need to downsize to just peer review on the Gold OA
model will simply migrate to other publishers that are interested,
just as journal titles migrate today, for many different reasons.
What is also likely to shrink or even disappear alongside this
downsizing and conversion to Gold OA under cancellation pressure
generated by Green OA is fleet publishing of multiple journals: The
current mounting complaints about Gold-OA journal-fleet start-ups
that spam authors and referees, with ill-matched and unqualified
referees -- and similar shoddy refereeing practices among
subscription-based journal-fleet publishers -- are likely to put an
end to the practice of fleet publishing altogether in the Gold OA
era. All a journal needs, once all it is providing is peer review, is
a qualified editor selecting qualified referees and competently
adjudicating the reports and revisions. A part-time editorial
assistant and powerful online software can handle the mechanics of
submission and revision flow. And all of that is what the Gold OA
peer-review charges will pay for. There is no real need to be part of
a fleet of unrelated journals in order to provide that service.
>
> Surely the progressive, side-by-side development of Green OA
repositories, and the Gold OA journals needed (by your own
acknowledgement) to make a fully open model of peer-reviewed
scholarly communication long-term sustainable in the absence of
subscriptions, is preferable for all concerned to the dramatic
crisis-driven transition which you envision?
On the contrary. The gradual cost-cutting and conversion of the
existing, established journals to peer-review alone, under
cancellation pressure from the new reality of universal Green OA, is
precisely what is needed to get us from here to there. Neither
today's Gold OA journals' products nor their prices reflect what
post-Green-OA publishing will be like; nor can today's Gold OA
journals do just performing peer review alone until the network of
Green OA repositories is sufficiently widespread to be able to take
over all access-provision and archiving. Nor will today's
subscription journals downsize and convert spontaneously, without the
cancellation pressure.
So whether one's goal is just immediate universal Green OA or an
eventual transition to sustainable, affordable universal Gold OA, the
path to it is via Green OA mandates, not the creation of more and
more new Gold OA journals trying to compete with established
subscription journals at current prices with today's co-bundled
products and services. If that were the only hope of reaching
universal OA, we'd still have a long, long wait ahead of us.
Fortunately, it is beginning to look as if all that's needed is to
straighten out a few persistent misunderstanding about how to
implement OA mandates effectively -- which includes gaining a much
clearer understanding of the causal and temporal dynamics of the
complementarity between Green and Gold OA -- and the wait (for both
universal Green OA and the subsequent transition to universal Gold
OA) will not be that long.
Best regards,
Stevan
>
> Best regards,
>
> Matt
> ==
> Matthew Cockerill, Ph.D.
> Managing Director
> BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com/ )
> 6th Floor, 236 Grays Inn Road
> London
> WC1X 8HL
>
> ________________________________
> From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
[mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG]
On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
> Sent: 24 June 2009 12:17
> To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
> Subject: BioMed Central Press Release
>
> ** Apologies for Cross-Posting **
> On 24-Jun-09, at 5:01 AM, Charlotte Webber (BioMed Central) wrote
in the press release appended in full after this posting):
>
> The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) now requires
authors to publish research results into open access journals and
also encourages dual submission into an institutional repository.
>
> I invite readers to review the CIHR policy below and judge whether
the above is an accurate description of the policy or self-serving
spin by a commercial journal publisher (and IR service-provider)
promoting its product:
> CIHR Policy on Access to Research Outputs:
http://www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/34846.html
>
> -- Grant recipients are now required to make every effort to ensure
that their peer-reviewed publications are freely accessible through
the Publisher's website (Option #1) or an online repository as soon
as possible and in any event within six months of publication (Option
#2).
>
> -- Under the second option, grant recipients must archive the final
peer-reviewed full-text manuscripts immediately upon publication in a
digital archive, such as PubMed Central or the grantees institutional
repository.
>
> -- Publications must be freely accessible within six months of
publication, where allowable and in accordance with publisher
policies...
>
> -- Grant recipients may also wish to submit their manuscripts to a
journal that provides immediate open access to published articles (if
a suitable journal exists). CIHR considers the cost of publishing in
open access journals to be an eligible expense under the Use of Grant
Funds.
>
> Yes, the difference between the reality and the spin makes a
difference: a considerable difference. The underlying issue is always
the same: Should priority be given to requiring Green OA
self-archiving of all journal articles to make them OA, or to
publishing articles in Gold OA journals to make them OA?
> No institution or funder on the planet "requires authors to publish
research results into open access journals"!
> This is wishful thinking on the part of the publishers of open
access journals. And when put in the way it is put in this BMC Press
Release, it generates confusion at a time when OA mandates are still
few and what is needed is clarity, not self-serving spin by
commercial publishers promoting their Gold OA journals.
> Of lesser consequence, but worthy of note, are two further points
related to the BMC press release:
> (1) "[T]he University's Supporter Membership with BioMed Central"
is an incoherent (and self-serving) subscription-like notion that (if
anyone gives it just a moment's careful thought) cannot scale to the
day when many, most or all journals and publishers are Gold OA
(10,000 universities "joining" the publishers of 25,000 journals with
individual annual memberships). "Membership" only gives the illusion
of making any sense at all today, when a few Gold-OA journal-fleet
publishers like BMC (now part of Springer) are promoting it to
short-sighted and serials-stressed librarians:
http://bit.ly/g62wK
> (2) Re: "BioMed Central's "Open Repository" system... using BioMed
Central's extensive open access knowledge and technology experience":
I am of course all for promoting Institutional Repositories (IRs);
but one cannot but feel a touch sceptical about the notion of a
commercial Gold OA publisher "promoting" IRs when IRs are -- and let
us state this quite openly -- fundamentally in conflict with their
primary commercial mission, which is to promote their Gold OA
product. Green OA simply means author self-archiving of articles
published in any journal at all -- and most journals are non-OA
journals, let alone BMC journals. Hence it is inescapable that Green
OA self-archiving is in competition with Gold OA publishing at this
time.
> (Green OA will no longer be in competition with Gold OA once Green
OA mandates have prevailed globally, and if and when the resulting
universal Green OA eventually induces a universal transition to Gold
OA by making subscriptions unsustainable. But today, for Gold OA
publishers, promoting Green OA means promoting a rival means of
providing OA itself, and, especially for commercial Gold OA
publishers, that would be a bad business strategy. "Don't buy my
product, because you can get it elsewhere for free." Hence the spin
you see above.)
> Full Disclosure: I promote and very strongly endorse University of
Southampton's "rival" IR system (Eprints); but Eprints is
noncommercial, free, and has, and always has had, only one agenda,
which is to promote universal Green OA, as quickly and as effectively
as possible. "Eprints Services," fee-based, is only offered,
reluctantly, as an option for those institutions who insist that they
do not wish to set up Eprints on their own, for free; and Eprints
Services revenues are used solely to sustain and promote the use of
the free software, and Green OA itself:
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/ Moreover, I would welcome BMC's
Open Repository Service as an ally, not a rival, if BMC ORS, too,
could dedicate itself to the straightforward promotion of universal
Green OA, without the obvious strains of conflict-of-interest evident
in this press release.
> Stevan Harnad
>
> News release from BioMed Central
> 24 June 2009
>
> "Canadian Excellence" strengthened by extensive adoption of open
access
> * Wilfrid Laurier University adopts Open Repository and BioMed
Central Membership
> * Open access movement gains ground in North America
>
> BioMed Central and Wilfrid Laurier University today announce the
launch of Laurier IR, an institutional repository that provides a
visible point of open access archiving of intellectual output for all
members of the University community.
>
> Built on BioMed Central's "Open Repository" system and using BioMed
Central's extensive open access knowledge and technology experience,
Laurier IR is a personalized in-house repository that will
significantly increase access to the university's scholarly
information and also highlight the talent of the Universities
researchers and students.
>
> Laurier University is just one many organizations globally that
have adopted Open Repository since its inception. Open Repository is
built upon DSpace, an open-source solution for accessing, managing
and preserving scholarly material.
>
> In addition, the University's Supporter Membership with BioMed
Central reduces the barriers for Laurier researchers publishing in
BioMed Central's open-access journals by providing researchers with a
15 percent discount on the article processing charges.
>
> The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) now requires
authors to publish research results into open access journals and
also encourages dual submission into an institutional repository.
Complying with this mandate and also heeding wider position
statements from bodies such as the Canadian Library Association (CLA)
necessitated Wilfrid Laurier University to establish Laurier IR.
>
> Laurier IR embraces the 'open access' movement by allowing authors
to submit their original research directly to the repository.
Electronic documents, including articles, pre-prints, monographs,
reports, movies and databases can all be archived in the repository.
>
> The service ensures that Laurier's scholarly communication output
is consolidated, thus enabling researchers to broaden their knowledge
base through greater collaboration and also providing a central point
to store teaching support materials across the Laurier community.
>
> Laurier University aims to build a full community structure for
their repository within the next 12 months which will include
customized designs and collections for particular groups of
researchers. They also hope to implement a 'content recruitment
strategy' to ensure that as much scholarly output from the university
as possible is held with the repository.
>
> Speaking of the continued development of Laurier IR said "Laurier
is excited to be developing an institutional repository" said Dr.
Deborah MacLatchy, Vice-President: Academic and Provost at Laurier.
"It will be an excellent way for other scholars, as well as students
and professionals, to access scholarly and creative works and theses
published by Laurier faculty and students. It increases Laurier's
presence internationally and extends our scholarly output to a much
wider audience, such as researchers in the developing world."
>
>
>
> -ENDS-
> Media Contact
> Matt McKay
> Head of PR
> BioMed Central
>
> Tel: +44 (0) 203 1922 2216
> Mob: +44 (0) 7825 257 423
> Email: matthew.mckay_at_biomedcentral.com
>
> Notes to Editors:
>
> 1. BioMed Central (www.biomedcentral.com) is an STM (Science,
Technology and Medicine) publisher which has pioneered the open
access publishing model. All peer-reviewed research articles
published by BioMed Central are made immediately and freely
accessible online, and are licensed to allow redistribution and
reuse. BioMed Central is part of Springer Science+Business Media, a
leading global publisher in the STM sector.
>
> 2. For more information on the Laurier Open Research Archive,
contact project manager Debbie Chaves at dchaves_at_wlu.ca
>
> 3. Open Repository (http://www.openrepository.com/) is a service
from BioMed Central to build, launch, host and maintain institutional
repositories for organisations. Built upon the latest DSpace
repository software the service has been designed to be flexible and
cost-effective. BioMed Central's economy of scale makes it possible
for organisations that could not otherwise afford to, or lack the
infrastructure or technical capacity in-house to run their own
repositories.
>
Received on Fri Jun 26 2009 - 12:33:46 BST