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Identifying Nobel Class Scientists and the Vagaries of Research Assessment
Eugene Garfield, Founder & Chairman Emeritus Institute for Scientific Information - now Thomson Scientific, Philadelphia, USA

Open access in the bio-medical fields: why it is important for researchers, practising physicians and patients.
Jean Claude Gudon

Improving access to biomedical and clinical research literature: the work of UK organizations
Fredrick Friend JISC UK.

Journal Publishing: The Future of Science Publishing
Graham V Lees

Open Access, the Choice is Yours
Jan Velterop, Springer Verlag

Open access publishing and the Public Library of Science
Mark Patterson, Public Library of Science, PLoS, UK

Moving into the mainstream
Natasha Roshaw, BioMed Central Ltd

Authors and Open Access
Alma Swan Key Perspectives Ltd

Maximizing Research Impact Through Open-Access Self-Archiving
Stevan Harnad Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences, Universit du Qubec Montral. Adjunct Professor, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton
Research funding and Open Access,
Robert Terry, Wellcome Trust UK

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Identifying Nobel Class Scientists and the Vagaries of Research Assessment
Eugene Garfield, Founder & Chairman Emeritus Institute for Scientific Information - now Thomson Scientific, Philadelphia, USA
Out of about one million or so scientists who have published to date, 10,000 can be considered to be of Nobel Class. Approximately 750 of them have won Nobel Prizes. While there are exceptions due to the vagaries of the subjective (non-random) selection process, Nobel Laureates publish five times the average number of papers but their work is cited 30 to 50 times the average. Nobelists will invariably publish several Citation Classics. A few have published super methodology classics like the polymerase chain reaction of Kerry Mullis. Unlike the latter, most Nobel Prize winners have high H indexes. Many also appear on ISIs HighlyCited authors listings. Authors of hot papers may also be leading candidates for future awards. Following the Law of Concentration, Nobel class scientists publish in a small group of high impact journals. These journals also account for a large percentage of the papers published and an even larger percentage of citations. Scientists like Albert Einstein and James Watson have published relatively few highly cited papers, but their work is characterized by being cited by other super-cited Nobel class scientists. This can be visualized by historiographic analyses using HistCite for algorithmic historiography.

Open access in the bio-medical fields: why it is important for researchers, practising physicians and patients.
Jean Claude Gudon
Open access has often been described as a way to optimize the process of scientific communication. And so it is, but one should not neglect the fact that other categories of people may also be positively affected by open access. The field of health is obviously one area which can benefit from open access in a wider way, as was demonstrated by the identity of some of its supporters around the debate surrounding the OA policy the NIH should adopt in the United States. Practising doctors, particularly in remote areas, or in positions that are not necessarily connected to research hospitals, will benefit from open access; so will patients who can, through various modes of mentoring and with the power of distributed intelligence, play a much more active role in their own cure. All in all, open access signals a turning point where knowledge, while continuing to be rigorously validated, can be generated, diffused and received in ways that do not rely on a strict division between experts and the rest.

Improving access to biomedical and clinical research literature: the work of UK organizations
Fredrick Friend JISC UK.
This presentation will cover the following points: - why we need to improve access to biomedical and clinical research literature - the work of some key organizations, specifically Research Councils UK, the Wellcome Trust, and JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee) - the RCUK statement on research outputs (assuming that it is available) - the Wellcome Trust policies on open access - JISC funding of repository development, support for open access journals and specific projects in biomedical information - the project to develop a UK version of PubMed Central - how UK developments fit into the global picture.

Journal Publishing: The Future of Science Publishing
Graham V Lees
What is the nature of scientific discovery? How is it perceived by the public who pay for it, by the scientists who conduct it, and the publishers who scramble to publish it? The basic format of the scientific journal from when the Journal des Savans first hit the streets in 1665, has remained pretty much intact. Putting a journal online doesnt make it different. The intellectual interface is the same. What will change? The innovation that is widely cited as being pivotal in the information age is the advent of open access (OA). However, the journals being published under the OA banner are not particularly innovative and moreover the intellectual motives for the initiative are no longer so compelling. The real innovation is the Internet itself. How does and will that affect the future of scientific information? The profligacy of authors has meant that there are many more articles than would be strictly required to convey the same information. Authors make an incremental step, write an article and publish it. What if they stopped doing that; stopped writing as much? What if they gave themselves credit for the information (the data) rather than the packaging (the article)? Authors may very well switch to a system where they create datasets merely linked to descriptions of methodology and other attributes. The primary entry point the primary literature will be the data themselves. We took these factors into account when designing TheScientificWorldJOURNAL, a non-traditional Open Choice journal organised in a unique way (www.thescientificworld.com).

Open Access, the Choice is Yours
Jan Velterop, Springer Verlag
Researchers can at anytime communicate their research results to the world, with open access. They don't need journals or publishers for that. Deposition in a repository will suffice. Journals are for something else: validation, certification. Without that, the research results may not be seen to be worth all that much. That process costs money. Authors always 'pay' for it, in some way. Either by transferring or assigning copyright to the publisher, so that the publisher can recoup its costs by selling access to the article; or by paying article processing fees with actual money, allowing the publisher to make the official article freely available with open access. The choice is the author's. Publishers can only provide the options.

Open access publishing and the Public Library of Science
Mark Patterson, Public Library of Science, PLoS, UK
The Public Library of Science launched its open access publishing operation three years ago. The initial goals were to establish a portfolio of open access journals for the publication of high quality science, to raise awareness of the benefits of open access, and to drive the transition towards open access amongst the broader community of stakeholders in scientific publishing. The flagship journals PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine have already achieved a high standing, and have been joined in 2005 by three PLoS Community Journals run by academic editorial teams. The past three years has also seen some significant policy changes amongst funding agencies, research institutions and publishers that further support increased access to the literature. With this foundation, PLoS is now planning the next phase in its development, to expand the range of open access options for authors, and to move the organization towards long term sustainability.

Moving into the mainstream
Natasha Roshaw, BioMed Central Ltd
To be useful scientific research needs to be used, read and cited. The traditional print-derived publishing model doesnt allow optimal dissemination and usage. Only true open access will make published scientific results optimally useful. Open access deserves the whole-hearted support of the scientific community. BioMed Central is an independent publishing house committed to providing immediate free access to peer reviewed biomedical research. All the original research articles in journals published by BioMed Central are immediately and permanently available online without charge or any other barriers to access. This commitment is based on the view that open access to research is central to rapid and efficient progress in science and that subscription-based access to research is hindering rather than helping scientific communication.Since launch in 1999 BioMed Central has experienced incredible growth in many areas and now publishes more than 140 journals and is moving into subject areas other than biology and medicine including chemistry and physics. Support from societies in launching open access journals and becoming members of BioMed Central is prevalent. We now have over 500 organisations worldwide who are Members of BioMed Central and financially support authors and the cost of publishing in our open access journals. Numerous funding bodies such as The Wellcome Trust, RCUK and NIH have open access policies and recommend or mandate their funded investigators make their articles open access after publication. So with growing support and rapid growth BioMed Central and open access publishing are moving into the mainstream.

Authors and Open Access
Alma Swan Key Perspectives Ltd
Evidence is accumulating that Open Access increases not only the visibility but also the impact of an author's work. Yet even when providing Open Access is simple authors are not providing it effectively. There are several reasons for this, all of which amount to erroneous author perceptions rather than real difficulties or obstructions. I will describe these perceptions and the best ways to deal with them to achieve Open Access.

Maximizing Research Impact Through Open-Access Self-Archiving
Stevan Harnad Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences, Universit du Qubec Montral. Adjunct Professor, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton
There exist 24,000 peer-reviewed journals worldwide, publishing 2.5 million articles per year. No university can afford all or most of the journals its researchers may need. Hence all articles are losing some of their research impact (usage and citations). Articles whose authors supplement subscription-based access by self-archiving their own final drafts free for all on the web are downloaded and cited twice as much across all 12 disciplines analysed so far. Citation counts are robust indicators of research performance, so self-archived articles have a substantial competitive advantage in performance evaluations and funding. But only 15% of articles are being spontaneously self-archived today. The only institutions reliably approaching 100% self-archiving are those that not only create an Institutional Repository (IR) and provide library help for depositing, but also adopt a self-archiving mandate. What needs to be mandated: (1) immediately upon acceptance for publication (2) deposit in the Institutions OA Repository (3) the authors final accepted draft (not the publishers proprietary PDF) - (4) both its full-text and its bibliographic metadata (author, date, title, journal, etc.) Only the depositing itself needs to be mandated; setting the access privileges to the full-text can be left up to the author, with Open Access strongly encouraged, but not mandated. There is no need for any penalties for non-compliance. Two international, cross-disciplinary JISC surveys have found that 95% of authors will comply;the four institutions worldwide that have adopted a self-archiving mandate to date have confirmed this; and 93% of journals have already endorsed author self-archiving.

References: Brody, T., Harnad, S. and Carr, L. (2005) Earlier Web Usage Statistics as Predictors of Later Citation Impact. Journal of the American Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST).
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10713/

Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving.
ECS Technical Report. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Yves, G., Charles, O., Stamerjohanns, H. and Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Serials Review 30(4): 310-314.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.serrev.2004.09.013

Harnad, S. (2006) Publish or Perish - Self-Archive to Flourish: The Green Route to Open Access. ERCIM News.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11715/

Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Gingras, Y. (2005) Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 28(4) 39-47.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11688/

Open Access - a funder's perspective from the Wellcome Trust
The Wellcome Trust is a leading advocate for open access to the research literature. It was the first funder of research to introduce a grant condition requiring Trust-funded authors to deposit their research papers into an open repository - PubMed Central. This talk will summarise the background to the Trust's development of its open access policy including: the economics of open access publishing, the costs and mechanisms of supporting open access as part of the research budget, the benefits of a subject based repository, UK PubMed Central, and the long-term vision of integrating the research literature with research data.