SPARC introduces Open-access Journal Publishing Resource Index

New resource helps streamline launch and operation of open-access journals.

Washington, D.C. -- SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition) today released a free online Open Access
Journal Publishing Resource Index with information and documents
to support the launch and operation of an open-access journal.
Materials in the index will help libraries, presses, and other
academic units on campuses as they work together to make the work
of their researchers more widely available.

This new resource is launched in conjunction with the SPARC
Campus-based Publishing Resource Center
(http://www.arl.org/sparc/partnering), which delivers a guide to
critical issues in campus-based publishing partnerships, case
studies, a bibliography and resource list, an index of
collaborative initiatives (operated in partnership with Columbia
University Libraries), and access to the LIBPRESS online
discussion forum (operated by the University of California). The
Center is overseen by an editorial board representing library and
university press staff who are actively engaged in creating and
managing publishing partnerships.

The new index complements the rich existing resource center by
pointing to relevant sections in existing open-access journal
publishing guides and to sample journal proposals, policies,
bylaws, and other documentation to help with planning,
development, and collaboration issues. Topics covered include:

* New Journal Planning
* Journal Publishing Program Policies
* Governance
* Editorial
* Marketing & Promotion
* Technical Platforms
* Sustainability Planning

Relevant sections of existing open-access publishing guides,
including those by David Solomon, Carol Sutton, Kevin Stranack,
Jan Velterop, Howard Goldstein and Raym Crow, and others are
indicated under each topic area.

By highlighting samples and best practices, the index will help
give campuses the tools they need to develop and maintain
long-term, successful open-access publishing ventures. "As
campus-based publishing gets more ambitious in scope, it's
important to build on the successes and challenges of earlier
initiatives and adopt best practices," said Raym Crow, senior
consultant at SPARC. "Ultimately, campus-based publishing can
offer universities greater control over the intellectual products
they help create. SPARC is pleased to provide another tool to
support libraries and publishers in sustainable, professional,
open-access publishing."

Lee C. Van Orsdel, Dean of University Libraries at Grand Valley
State University, says faculty are beginning to consult
librarians for advice on journal publishing options, including
open-access models, and the SPARC site is a welcome resource.
"We're deepening our knowledge as quickly as possible, but it's a
whole new area of expertise for most of us," she said. "It will
save us time and increase the probability that we can get to the
right solution when advising our faculty on their best options."

The editorial board invites contributions from other campuses to
help build this resource and expand the bibliography --
especially with primary research papers on collaboration issues.
"SPARC hopes this will seed an effort where people will give
documents to share, making it a community hub," said Crow.
Members of the board and how to contact the managing editor with
suggestions are detailed on the Center home page.

The Open Access Journal Publishing Resource Index is available
online at http://www.arl.org/sparc/partnering.

Scholarly Communications @ Duke » ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety

Scholarly Communications @ Duke » ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety 

ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety January 21, 2010

Posted by Kevin Smith in : Authors' Rights, Copyright in the Classroom, Open Access and Institutional Repositories , trackback

I attended parts of the ScienceOnline 2010 conference, held here in the Research Triangle this weekend.  There was a fascinating array of topics discussed and an interesting crowd of 270+ that included many working scientists, librarians and even journalists.  It was a great opportunity to listen to scientists talk about how they want to communicate with one another and with the general public.

There are some excellent discussions of what went on at this year’s conference, especially here and here on Dorothea Salo’s blog.  Those with a real passion for more information can check out this growing list of blog posts about the conference.  I won’t try to compete with these comprehensive recaps, especially because my selection of events to attend was rather idiosyncratic, and perhaps even ill-advised.  But I do want to make three quick observations about what I personally learned from the conference.

First, I discovered one more argument for open science that had not occurred to me before, but has the potential to be very compelling for scientists on our faculties.  One reason academic research should be online is that “junk” science is already there.  If the general public — including the proportion thereof who vote or require health care — do not make good decisions in regard to matters involving scientific knowledge, we can only blame ourselves when the best research is not available to them, hidden behind pay walls.

Second, I was fascinated to discover that health science bloggers have developed a code of ethics to try and account for the many issues that arise when scientists put important and potentially life-altering information onto the open web.  The benefits of this openness are indisputable, but so are some of the risks.  This code of ethics represents an attempt to address some of those risks and minimize them (there is a somewhat different discussion of a similar issue from the conference here).  The criteria applied to evaluate health care blogs (see the text of the code itself) — clear representation of perspective, confidentiality, commercial disclosure, reliability of information and courtesy — encapsulate standards that all of us who try to share information and opinion online need to be aware of.

Third, I was amazed at how important, and problematic, copyright issues were to this group.  I attended seven sessions at the conference, and five of them dealt with copyright as a major (although often unannounced) topic of discussion.  Even recognizing my tendency to gravitate toward such sessions, this is a high percentage.  I asked a fellow attendee why so many sessions raised copyright and was told, albeit with tongue in cheek, that it is “ruining our lives.”  More seriously, one scientist described trying to put his classroom lecture slides online and being told by his university’s counsel that all material that he did not create had to be removed first.  Apparently there was no discussion of the applicability of fair use and how to decide what was and was not allowable; just a wholesale rule that would discourage most scientists interested in sharing.  This suggested to me that it really is very important to improve the quality of copyright education on campus — for faculty, librarians (who are often the ones asked for advice) and even legal counsel.  We cannot reasonably advocate more online open access unless we also give our scholars the resources to accomplish that goal.  In many ways the technological infrastructure is becoming trivial and it is the policy and legal questions that must be addressed directly if we really want encourage openness.

Scholarly Communications @ Duke » ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety

archy

archy 

Open access isn't the same as free access (#scio10)

There is one point from the discussion following our ScienceOnline2010 presentation that I want to elaborate on. This is the way in which credentialism excludes amateurs. This is a problem that I face.

The internet has made accessible vast amounts of literature for much wider audiences than ever before. Many of the original sources that I have been able to use in my research would not have been available to me just ten years ago. Many early journals existed for only a few years, in very small numbers. To read them, I would have had to travel to major libraries in Europe and the Eastern states, which would have been prohibitively expensive. Once at those libraries, I would have needed to get access to their rare book collections, which would have been very difficult since I lack an institutional affiliation. Because of Project Gutenberg, Google Books, and the efforts of many libraries I can now read these works online and, in may cases, view scans of the actual pages without traveling.

My point about lacking an institutional affiliation is very important. Most of the people at ScienceOnline2010 were associated with some kind of university or research institution. It was so taken for granted that they put it on the name tags, as if the affiliation was part of their name. I'm sure that it is standard practice at all professional conferences to assume the attendees are all in that profession. However, this was not a scientists' conference; it was a science communicators conference and communicators were defined as including bloggers who just happen to like science. Many attendees commented that it would have been useful to put peoples' blog aliases or online avatars on their tags along with their names. However, I didn't hear anyone suggest that these identities should have been put on the tags in place of their affiliations. Lacking an institutional affiliation, I put down Clever Wife's soap business, just to have something to fill in the blank.


The wonderful era of online access, which I mentioned above, is already facing counter-pressures to close it back up. The attendees were all familiar with the problems of modern scientific journals. They are ungodly expensive to purchase and many libraries don't have all of the relevant titles to their research. Many journals are beginning to address these problems by putting their content online, allowing institutions to purchase subscriptions that give access to the members of that institution wherever they are. That's great for them, but a barrier to everyone else. As an alumnus of the University of Washington, I'm supposed to have the same access privileges to library resources as do current students. The catch is that those privileges do not extend to internet access. To read journals, I have to go to the library. That's not a problem for people who work at the University, but, to someone who does not work there, it means making a special trip to read any given article. In those who do not work on or near a university library, the internet revolution has changed nothing.

Many of the journals who have put their content online do allow laypersons to access their articles, but we have to pay by the article. The prices range from ten to forty dollars per article with no consideration for length. Scientific research articles are usually quite short; one article I want is three pages long and will cost me forty dollars to view. For current research articles, I need to determine if it is relevant to my work without actually seeing it first.

The pay-per-view firewalls deprive an historical researcher of important context. The Proceedings of the Royal Philosophical Society are a perfect example of this. A few years ago they began posting online scanned images of the pages of their entire run. These were treasure to me. Whenever I went looking for an article, I browsed the entire issue to get an idea of the intellectual context of that one paper. This was not only useful, it was a lot of fun. In my presentation, I mentioned letters from landowners about natural oddities discovered on their land. As recently as the late 1700s, the Proceedings printed letters as trivial as someone finding a turnip in the shape of the Prime Minister's head. Priceless!

Last spring, with the scanning complete, the Society turned management of the digital archives over to JSTOR, a for-profit institution. Most of the attendees at our presentation were not even aware of the change. Because of their institutional affiliations, nothing had changed for them; they simply go online and read whatever they want. For me and people like me, it costs ten dollars for each article and letter unless we make a special trip to the University library.

As I mentioned in the presentation, the professionalization of the scientific world was a great thing in many ways, but, along with breaking down some barriers to the free exchange of ideas, it created new barriers. It divided the scientific world into two classes, active practitioners and passive spectators. Threats and barriers to the free and open access of ideas are not limited to censorship and social pressures; sometimes they are as simple as cost and distance.

archy

Today’s the Last Day: Make the Case for Open Access | Peer to Peer Review - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal

 Today’s the Last Day: Make the Case for Open Access | Peer to Peer Review - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal

Today’s the Last Day: Make the Case for Open Access | Peer to Peer Review

The time to send messages to the White House ended January 21

Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 1/21/2010

Go back to the
Academic Newswire
for more stories

 

Have you told the White House what you think about open access to publicly funded research? The Office of Science and Technology Policy has been accepting comments for weeks now, but the window of opportunity to add your thoughts closes today.

You haven’t commented yet? Do it now. Don’t worry. I’ll wait for you.

Okay, now that you’re back, I want to confess that there’s a lot involved that I don’t personally understand: the technical requirements, the need for uniformity, the way the deposits should work—I don’t have opinions on the fine points. What I do believe, though, is that the research funded by our tax dollars is important because it’s a public good. We wouldn’t be funding it with public dollars otherwise. It’s good for academic science, but it’s good for industry, too. (See also what ALA/ACRL and ARL have to say.)

Sharing science
My son is a physics postdoc at the Argonne National Laboratory. He does things with our tax dollars that I couldn’t begin to explain, but I do get that what he does may end up improving batteries that will be sold in products that we’ll be using—laptops, cars, you name it. It’s good for consumers. It’s good for business. And it’s especially good for pushing forward the frontiers of what we know about materials at a very fundamental level. (I mean, he fires photons at stuff to see what happens. That’s pretty basic.)

What if students or faculty at my college need to read up on the latest research published by the people whose synchrotron is funded by our taxes? Well, they’re probably in luck. Physicists are big on sharing. They’ve been doing it for years, through arXiv and by making their own society publications open access friendly. Not everything is available, of course, but quite a lot is. They still publish massive amounts of research, but somehow they feel their interest in supporting a quality publishing operation is not incompatible with fast and free dissemination of results. 

Not on the same page
Other science disciplines taught at my campus aren’t quite as open. In biology, there are myriad worthy societies that rely on earnings from library subscriptions, and there are even more commercially-published journals that rank high in importance. Neuroscience is an exciting concentration that is attracting a lot of students but, oy, it’s expensive. Like physics, chemistry has a major society that represents many branches of the field, but its journals are pricey and the logic of open access is not wired into the discipline as it is in physics.

We also pay a lot just to find out what we don’t have. Our most expensive specialized databases are those covering chemistry and mathematics literature. The vast majority of what these tools index is published in journals we can’t afford, but, if we expect our faculty to be active scholars (and we do), there’s really no alternative. We have to hope that the land grant university up the road whose library we depend on will have enough tax-supported funding to provide access to the fair-use articles we can obtain, and that we’ll be able to afford copyright fees for the rest. For this to work, somebody, somewhere, has to buy a subscription.

Many small colleges like mine are going straight to paying commercial publishers for articles at point of need, and they’re saving a lot of money on subscriptions. But this means that, by design, there is no public asset to explore, even on a licensed, temporary basis. Scientific research is thus a disposable unit purchased for individuals, a solution that still costs libraries thousands of dollars per year. That’s a savings that comes at a steep cost.

Whose crisis?
This situation, of course, is often mistakenly called “the serials crisis.” It might be more accurate to call it the humanities crisis, because both my library and the research university we count on have less money for books, which are the lifeblood of many humanities disciplines. We know we have to pay fees for journal articles, because the only way we share them is by copying. Thanks to the first sale doctrine, we can share a book until it falls apart—and it’s politically a lot easier to not buy a book than it is to cancel a journal or database subscription.

Here’s another thing: it has always seemed peculiar to me that the “5/5 rule” CONTU guideline for the interlibrary loan (ILL) of articles is a flat rate of five articles, published within the most recent five years, regardless of the size of a journal. We can get five articles from a science journal that publishes 1000 short articles a year—and five articles from a humanities journal that publishes 20 long articles a year. That doesn’t seem right, but such are the peculiar metrics of copyright compromises. It’s considered fair use to request by ILL some 20 percent of the humanities journal before paying copyright fees (which tend to be very affordable, anyway) but only one half of one percent of the big science journal, for which copyright fees typically cost the price of a scholarly trade paperback in the humanities. No wonder we’re buying fewer books.

Science in the public interest
We have a long way to go before we sort out the economics of publishing in a digital world. Book publishers are sweating over when to release ebooks, and the newspaper of record is poised to start charging frequent flyers.

But this one is a no-brainer. We believe science is valuable enough that we pour public funding into it. We need to make sure that the results of that funding helps advance our knowledge of the physical and natural world, and that won’t happen if libraries can no longer afford it. Let’s make sure our investment pays off—for the public good.

The White House wants to hear from us. Add your comments to the open forum today.

Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her next mystery, Through the Cracks, will be published by Minotaur Books this year.

Today’s the Last Day: Make the Case for Open Access | Peer to Peer Review - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal

At SPARC-ACRL Forum, Reality Check on Open Access Monographs - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal

At SPARC-ACRL Forum, Reality Check on Open Access Monographs - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal 

At SPARC-ACRL Forum, Reality Check on Open Access Monographs

Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 1/21/2010

Academic Newswire
for more stories

• Unprecedented dissemination opportunities, but difficulty for business models
• "Average" OA humanities monograph runs at a deficit
• Experiments under way to see what works

Open access (OA) publishing models, pricing concerns, and the cannibalization of print sales were the headline topics at the SPARC-ACRL forum session on Saturday at the ALA 2010 Midwinter Meeting in Boston, titled "The Ebook Transition: Collaboration and Innovations Behind Open Access Monographs."
The conclusion? Open access monographs are an unprecedented boon to the scholarly mission of dissemination, yet challenge the financial sustainability of an academic press.

Introducing the panelists, David Carlson, incoming chair of the SPARC steering committee and dean of library affairs at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, said that the scholarly market demands ebooks, regardless of the difficulties they pose for publishers and libraries. The three panelists then described their attempts to meet that demand.

Bearish outlook for OA monographs
Michael Jensen, director of strategic web communications for the National Academies Press (NAP), was the first to suggest the bad news/good news proposition: the press’s sales have actually declined, but NAP has fulfilled more of its mission of achieving maximal dissemination.

"There's an awful lot of reading going on," Jensen said of NAP's open content, which draws on average ten page views for each distinct visitor. However, only 0.3% of visitors purchase anything. The press has experimented with making the best non-optimal version (HTML page access) free, while offering the optimal version (PDF download) for a fee. The content is openly available, he said, but you can't easily read the free version on an airplane, for example, since pages must be requested individually online. This encourages users to buy the text as an ebook.

Aside from not worrying about royalties for the content it publishes on behalf of the National Academies, Jensen said NAP faces slightly less pressure since its support is guaranteed by the Academies. Similarly, the press functions under the umbrella of scientific funding rather than under a humanities mindset, where requests as small as staff computers can pose budget anxiety.

"I've never been more bearish on the future," Jensen concluded, adding that the near-term holds serious risks for monograph publishers, and that specialty markets for OA monographs likely won't function without explicit institutional support.

Taking stock of the "average" OA monograph
Patrick Alexander, director of the Penn State University Press, similarly cited tension between OA and “the practical goal of sustainability," then analyzed the press's open access Romance [language] Studies collection.

A 256 page "average monograph" has a list price of $57.88 for a cloth edition and $30.50 for paper (though many sales are at a significant discount). Meanwhile, it’s also made available at no cost to the end user in PDF sections. This press sells an average of just 95 copies in cloth and 279 copies in paper.
Thus, the "visible" first copy costs total about $5223, including editing and materials, as well as Cataloging in Publication filing and copyright registration. Beyond that are “invisible costs” for processes like validating metadata and software training for staff. Other overhead costs such as university support, facilities, personnel, and equipment add up to another $5,188, he said, bringing the total cost for the first digital and print copy to about $10,411.

In the end, each title runs a deficit of $9,898, Alexander said, with the obvious conclusion that the current model doesn't demonstrate financial sustainability. Still, the press has reached  most of its dissemination goals, with some titles still getting significant traffic online two years after publication, an unusual sign of interest for this specialized field.

Value of experimentation
Finally, Maria Bonn, newly appointed associate university librarian for publishing at the University of Michigan, described her institution's similar experiments with "calculated risk-taking" in the service of scholarly access.

She described three open access efforts, including an imprint called digitalculturebooks, the inclusion of retrospective press titles in the HathiTrust, and a partnership with the Open Humanities Press. As with the other OA efforts described at the panel, Bonn said that making the digitalculturebooks materials available online represented purely additive costs on top of regular cost of producing a print title.

The response to the imprint—which covers topics particularly suited to an online audience—has been generally good in terms of both sales and online visibility, but Bonn said it’s unclear whether this and other efforts would be viable over the long term.

Weak sales or not, "we think it's the right thing to do," she said. "It's the purpose of the press to support scholarly access."
For now, it seems, publishers support such experiments to generate valuable data about open publishing models, but it is also clear they can't continue forever.

At SPARC-ACRL Forum, Reality Check on Open Access Monographs - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal

UBC This Week « UBC Public Affairs

UBC This Week « UBC Public Affairs

"interesting idea -- will it be sustainable?"  HSM

UBC Library gives inaugural award for communicating research The UBC Library will be inaugurating the UBC Library Innovative Dissemination of Research Award, which will honour students, faculty and staff whose creative use of new tools and technologies are expanding the boundaries of research and enhancing the impact of research findings. Faculty, staff and students are eligible to apply to win the certificate of recognition and a $2,000 cash prize. The first winner will be selected by the University Librarian and members of the Librarys Scholarly Communications Committee, and announced during Celebrate Research Week in early March. Deadline for applications is Feb. 1, 2010. For information on submission criteria and procedures, visit http://scholcomm.ubc.ca/award or contact Joy Kirchner at 604-827-3644 or joy.kirchner@ubc.ca.

UBC This Week « UBC Public Affairs

White House Mulls Plan to Broaden Access to Published Papers -- Kaiser 327 (5963): 259 -- Science

White House Mulls Plan to Broaden Access to Published Papers -- Kaiser 327 (5963): 259 -- Science 

White House Mulls Plan to Broaden Access to Published Papers Jocelyn Kaiser Should all papers that result from U.S. taxpayerfunded research be made freely available? The White House science office likes the idea and has asked for input on whether many federal agencies should formally adopt it. So-called open access advocates are enthusiastic in comments submitted to a White House forum, but some scientific societies remain wary, fearing that a too-broad public-access policy could kill journal subscriptions. Both sides agree that the White House appears to be moving toward a plan. "They're focusing not on should we do this but how would we do this," says Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a librarian group and open-access proponent. The push for mandatory release of research papers started 2 years ago at the National Institutes of Health, which required that grantees send copies of their peer-reviewed, accepted papers to the agency. NIH posts the final manuscripts or published papers in its free PubMedCentral archive; release can be delayed on request up to 12 months after publication. The objective has been to give patients and the public broader access to research results. Despite grumbling from publishers, NIH says the policy is working smoothly. Last month, as part of President Barack Obama's "open government" activities, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) launched an online discussion about whether the NIH model should be expanded to other agencies. The OSTP forum asks nine questions, including how to ensure that authors comply. About 400 comments have been submitted so far from scores of individual scientists, librarians, publishers, and others. The majority support broadening public access, says OSTP Assistant Director of Life Sciences Diane DiEuliis, a neuroscientist on detail from NIH. "There was a fair consensus on the general issue," she told Science by e-mail, as well as on other questions, such as "embargo times": how long an author and journal can keep a paper under private control. Many suggested using the current NIH embargo12 monthsand preferred central repositories like PubMedCentral rather than university archives. But even a 12-month delay worries some nonprofit scientific publishers. For example, mineralogists and anthropologists argued that their papersunlike those in biomedical researchmay have a very long "half life" and that releasing the full text on the Internet could cause journals to lose subscribers. Katherine McCarter of the Ecological Society of America, which has not yet submitted comments, says that for ecology journals, "even a 1-year delay could be a real disincentive to buy a subscription." The cost of producing a single paper can run significantly higher in social sciences because papers need more space and require a "more robust peer-review process," argues William E. Davis III, executive director of the American Anthropological Association. His letter warns that mandatory release of such papers "could well result in the demise of the very journals that ... advocates seek to make more freely available." Despite such concerns, OSTP seems to be moving inexorably toward a general open-access policy. DiEuliis says OSTP will sort through all comments (the deadline has been extended until 21 January) and send suggestions to an interagency working group. This panel will also consider a report due this week from a group of publishers and other stakeholders that OSTP and the House Science Committee convened last June. One possibility, DiEuliis says, is that OSTP could draft an executive order or memo that would set out "minimum standards" but "give agencies flexibility to create custom plans.

White House Mulls Plan to Broaden Access to Published Papers -- Kaiser 327 (5963): 259 -- Science

Polymers - MDPI

Polymers - MDPI 

New Open access journal -- HSM

Polymers Polymers (ISSN 2073-4360), an Open Access journal of polymer science, is published by Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI) online quarterly. The first issue will be released in 2010.

Polymers - MDPI

Universities UK on Open Access, Metrics, Mandates and the Research Excellence Framework - Open Access Archivangelism

 Universities UK on Open Access, Metrics, Mandates and the Research Excellence Framework - Open Access Archivangelism

Universities UK on Open Access, Metrics, Mandates and the Research Excellence Framework Universities UK recommends making all the research outputs submitted to the UK's new Research Excellence Framework (REF) Open Access (OA). The UUK's recommendation is of course very welcome and timely. All research funded by the RCUK research councils is already covered by the fact that all the UK councils already mandate OA. It is this policy, already adopted by the UK, that the US is now also contemplating adopting, in the form of the proposed Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), as well as the discussion in President Obama's ongoing OSTP Public Access Policy Forum. But if HEFCE were to follow the UUK's recommendation, it would help to ensure Open Access to UK research funded by the EU (for which OA is only partially mandated thus far) and other funders, as well as to unfunded research -- for which OA is mandated by a still small but growing number of universities in the UK and worldwide. (The same UUK proposal could of course be taken up by UK's universities, for once they mandate OA for all their research output, all UK research, funded and unfunded, becomes OA!) There is an arbitrary constraint on REF submissions, however, which would greatly limit the scope of an OA requirement (as well as the scope of REF itself): Only four research outputs per researcher may be submitted, for a span covering at least four years, rather than all research output in that span. This limitation arises because the REF retains the costly and time-consuming process of re-reviewing, by the REF peer panels, of all the already peer-reviewed research outputssubmitted. This was precisely what it had earlier been proposed to replace by metrics, if they prove sufficiently correlated with -- and hence predictive of -- the peer panel ranklings. Now it will only be partially supplemented by a few metrics. This is a pity, and an opportunity lost, both for OA and for testing and validating a rich and diverse new battery of metrics and initializing their respective weights, discipline by discipline. Instead, UUK has endorsed a simplistic (and likewise untested and arbitrary) a-priori weighting ("60/20/20 for outputs, impact and environment"). Harnad, S. (2009) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. Scientometrics 79 (1) Also in Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics 11(1), pp. 27-33, Madrid, Spain. Torres-Salinas, D. and Moed, H. F., Eds. (2007)

Universities UK on Open Access, Metrics, Mandates and the Research Excellence Framework - Open Access Archivangelism

Impact of Open Access on Citation - Digital & Scholarly

 Impact of Open Access on Citation - Digital & Scholarly

Impact of Open Access on Citation By Adrian K. Ho on January 6, 2010 8:50 PM |

Yassine Gargouri, Chawki Hajjem, Vincent Lariviere, Yves Gingras, Les Carr, Tim Brody, and Stevan Harnad have archived their article, Self-selected or mandated, open access increases citation impact for higher quality research, in arXiv.

Here is the abstract: Articles whose authors make them Open Access (OA) by self-archiving them online are cited significantly more than articles accessible only to subscribers. Some have suggested that this "OA Advantage" may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002-2006 in 1,984 journals. The OA Advantage proved just as high for both. Logistic regression showed that the advantage is independent of other correlates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number of co-authors, references or pages; field; article type; or country) and greatest for the most highly cited articles.

The OA Advantage is real, independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles receive about 80% of all citations). The advantage is greater for the more citeable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage, from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only. BTW, the Open Citation Project has created a bibliography of studies on the effect of open access and downloads on citation impact.

Impact of Open Access on Citation - Digital & Scholarly

Association of Research Libraries :: ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication Webinar Series

Association of Research Libraries :: ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication Webinar Series 

ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication Webinar Series Strengthening Programs Through Collaboration This 8-part webinar series will assist libraries in taking their scholarly communication programs to the next level. Featured guest speakers will provide practical perspectives on emerging areas in scholarly communication. Throughout the series, participants will have opportunities to build and develop a network of colleagues and to review how local successes and activities can build towards a comprehensive program plan.

Audience: The series is designed to cover a broad range of topics geared toward graduates of the popular ARL/ACRL Scholarly Communication Institute, as well as others with responsibilities in the area of scholarly communication. Specific webinars may also appeal to a broader audience of librarians who feel they need to be better informed of scholarly communication issues. Organizations are welcome to participate as a group, or librarians can participate individually.

Format: Each webinar will be one hour in length, followed by an optional half-hour online breakout discussion session. Sessions will take place in an interactive, online classroom environment. They will be recorded and made available to registrants as an archive, so if you sign up for the full series but cannot attend a particular session, there will be an opportunity to catch up later. Optional pre-work assignments will be available in advance to enrich the experience or to provide the necessary background to bring participants up to speed in advance of the sessions.

Libraries may wish to collaborate on pre-work assignments with neighboring libraries (or more distant libraries virtually). A list of registrants will be available in advance to facilitate coordination of such collaboration.

Timing: The series will begin in March 2010 and conclude in November with one webinar per month, except for August.

Registration: Participants can choose to register for the whole series at a fee of $325.00 (paid in two installments), or for individual sessions at of fee of $50.00 each.

Believing that it is crucial for libraries to sustain commitment to building scholarly communication programs, the sponsors of the institute are underwriting the costs to bring this webinar series to you at a greatly reduced price. We are pleased to offer this opportunity to engage virtually as we know that your professional development dollars are limited. Webinars take place in an interactive, online classroom environment with one user/one login per group. If you wish to participate as a group, one person must register, login, and keyboard during the event. Your institution could project the webcast to participants in the same location. Class size is limited to X logins. Full refunds will be granted up to X days prior to the start of the seminar.

Association of Research Libraries :: ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication Webinar Series

Open Access - 148 Resources | EDUCAUSE

 Open Access - 148 Resources | EDUCAUSE

Open Access - 148 Resources * Overview * Publications (93) * Presentations (15) * Podcasts (18) * Blogs (22) Overview * Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 * Initiatives from the NSF's DataNet Program: DataONE and the Data Conservancy * The "Other" Sustainability Problem * Throwing Open the Doors: Strategies and Implications for Open Access * Where Is the Open Education Movement Going? Refers to access to databases, online learning environments, publications and other information systems that often are password-protected.

Open Access - 148 Resources | EDUCAUSE

The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics: Strong open access growth reported by Hindawi

The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics: Strong open access growth reported by Hindawi 

Strong open access growth reported by Hindawi Hindawi Publishing reports strong growth for 2009. Submissions more than doubled, from 7,600 in 2008 to more than 16,500 in 2009. The number of accepted manuscripts grew from 2,500 in 2008 to 4,400 in 2009. Note that the growth in accepted manuscripts is smaller than the growth in submitted manuscripts, indicating an increased rejection rate. This data and indication of strong growth at PLoS One is important in indicating that not only is growth rate of open access journals very strong (two per day based on DOAJ rates), the growth of articles published in open access journals is strong as well. Thanks and congratulations to Hindawi's Paul Peters and Ahmed Hindawi.

The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics: Strong open access growth reported by Hindawi

Highlights from International Open Access Week 2009 « ResourceShelf

Highlights from International Open Access Week 2009 « ResourceShelf 

Highlights from International Open Access Week 2009 From the Announcement: The first International Open Access Week (October 19 23) may have just come to a close, but the broad spectrum of initiatives that it showcased ensures that Open Access to research will play a central role in advancing the conduct of research and scholarship for years to come. Events took place on more than 300 higher education, research, and other sites worldwide, illustrating the dramatic growth of the global network that has emerged in support of Open Access. The post goes on to highlight five key events from International Open Access Week. Youll read about and find related links to: + The establishment of new access policies at agencies and research institutes. + The adoption of campus-based open-access policies. + The release of extensive research on the economic and social impact of Open Access. + The commitment of significant new funds to support open-access publication. + A groundswell of support by college and university students. Source: SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)

Highlights from International Open Access Week 2009 « ResourceShelf

Med students hoist P2P Jolly Roger to get access to papers - Ars Technica

Med students hoist P2P Jolly Roger to get access to papers - Ars Technica 

Med students hoist P2P Jolly Roger to get access to papers A study provides evidence that file sharing takes place with some very specialized media: the research papers published in scientific journals. By John Timmer | Last updated October 29, 2009 6:15 AM CT

The ease with which information can be spread through the Internet has exacerbated tensions among those who pay for, conduct, and publish scientific research. Many journals still require subscription or per-article payments for access to the research they publish, which often leaves the public, who funds a significant percentage of the research, on the wrong side of a pay wall. So far, however, there's been little evidence that the public has been interested enough in research to engage in the sort of widespread file-sharing that plague other content industries. But a new study suggests that may just be because nobody's looked very carefully.

The study, which was spotted by TechDirt, appears in an open-access journal, so anyone can read its entire contents. It describes the sharing of over 5,000 research papers on a site frequented by medical professionals, and the formal community rules that governed the exchange.

During the six months in 2008 that the author tracked the activity on the site, which was a discussion board focused on medical fields, it had over 125,000 registered users. Anyone could start an account, but many of the fora were focused on specific issues, such as those faced by nurses and residents. In addition to those, however, there was a section called the Electronic Library that contained a forum called "Databases & Journals—Requests and Enquiries."

Up to three times a day, users were allowed to submit a request for a published research article, accompanied by a link to the free abstract hosted at the journal's website. Other users would then download the full article and host it somewhere, providing a link in the discussion. If everything was set up properly, the site would track the number of downloads.

Over the course of six months, over 6,500 articles were requested, and over 80 percent of those requests were successfully filled. The articles received a mean of 4.47 views, with one attracting 177 downloads. The author found that the requests roughly paralleled the journal's impact factors, with Nature and Science coming out on top, followed by more specialized medical journals. Figuring an average cost of $30 a download (the price requested by many journals), the publishing industry was potentially losing $1.4 million a year due to the site, although it's unlikely that many of the downloaders would have actually exercised their option to buy an article.

According to the author, the site (which is never named) went inactive in early 2009, although its contents were indexed via Google prior to that point.

The author considers this behavior in the context of the Open Access debate, which has played out in Congress and research institutions. He also terms the file sharing behavior among people involved in the medical profession "ethically dubious," given it involves the distribution of copyrighted material.

There is, however, an alternate way of viewing this that the author doesn't discuss: at least some medical professionals are apparently unable to obtain the publications they feel are needed for their training or practice; given their job responsibilities, it seems unethical to withhold these materials.

In addition, it's worth noting that, although this sort of informal sharing would be obviated if all research was open access, it has a very different history from the formal open access movement. For many years, it was traditional for anyone publishing a paper to order a stack of what were termed "reprints"—essentially the journal article without the rest of the journal's contents—from the publisher, in order to share with colleagues or anyone who was interested, but did not have access to the journal. With the advent of digital publishing, this sort of service shifted to the emailing of PDFs—in a lot of ways, the file sharing seen here could be viewed as the next logical step in this publication sharing process.

In any case, the amount of sharing that goes on is undoubtedly much larger than the file exchanges observed in the study. Many authors are now choosing to simply place articles where anyone can find them, either ahead of print at places like the arXiv, or after, on their university's servers. Offers to share paywalled articles also occur in public forums that aren't dedicated to this exchange, at least based on some of the comments attached to Ars' science articles.

Many publishers are readily adapting to and, in some cases, embracing the increased demands for public access to research results. But there remain a number who are resisting the trend. The study suggests that publishers might do well to adopt some sort of formalized access system, or they may end up facing a growth in the sites that encourage the same sort of sharing that has caused the movie and film industries so much indigestion.

The Internet Journal of Medical Informatics, 2009. DOI unavailable.

Med students hoist P2P Jolly Roger to get access to papers - Ars Technica

SPIE Digital Library - Subscription Information and Support for Librarians

SPIE Digital Library - Subscription Information and Support for Librarians 

Open-access SPIE Reviews journal to launch in mid-2009 with focus on emerging topics in optics and photonics

December 12, 2008 -- SPIE announced today the launch in mid-2009 of the new open-access journal SPIE Reviews under the editorship of William T. Rhodes. The new journal will publish original, in-depth review articles on emerging and evolving fields in applied optics and photonics of use to researchers as well as industry innovators.

"Articles will serve both as valuable overviews of significant new technologies and as portals to the primary literature in those areas for practitioners, researchers, and students." Dr. Rhodes said. "The optics community has long needed a good journal of review articles. I am extremely pleased that SPIE is launching this new publication, and doubly pleased because it comes at no cost to readers or authors." Rhodes is a professor of electrical engineering and Associate Director of the Imaging Technology Center at Florida Atlantic University, and Emeritus Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology.

As editor, Rhodes will be assisted by a broadly interdisciplinary editorial board that will provide the expertise needed to ensure that SPIE Reviews covers the full range of topics important to SPIE constituents.

SPIE Reviews will be available as an open-access publication in the SPIE Digital Library, the world's largest collection of optics literature. Articles in the SPIE Digital Library incorporate features such as extensive CrossRef-linked bibliographies, multimedia, bookmarking tools, and RSS feeds. In addition to these features, SPIE Reviews will feature links to related resources such as book chapters.  SPIE Reviews joins the open-access SPIE Letters virtual journal as an additional open-access offering in the SPIE Digital Library, which also includes articles available by subscription or pay-per-view from SPIE's other six journals and the Proceedings of SPIE.

"SPIE Reviews will offer timely insights on emerging technologies of benefit to researchers and students, while also providing industry managers with overviews of developing fields and a front-view perspective on technology trends," said CEO Eugene Arthurs.

SPIE Reviews' open-access status will ensure its availability to researchers in developing countries and in schools with limited access to primary research journals, Arthurs noted. "This supports SPIE's mission to advance devierse new technologies throughout the world."

Articles will be invited by members of the editorial board and the editor. Proposals from prospective authors also will be considered by the editor. Proposals and inquiries may be sent to journals@spie.org. Additional information on SPIE Reviews is available at www.spie.org/reviews.

SPIE Digital Library - Subscription Information and Support for Librarians

Hardin News» Blog Archive » Open Access Publishing in the Health Sciences- The University of Iowa Libraries

Hardin News» Blog Archive » Open Access Publishing in the Health Sciences- The University of Iowa Libraries 

Editor’s Note: Throughout Open Access Week (Oct 19-23), the UI Libraries will be sharing the views of our UI colleagues on the topic of open access.

by Dr. William Sivitz, Professor of Internal Medicine

I recently published an article in PlosOne (Mitochondrial Targeted Coenzyme Q, Superoxide, and Fuel Selectivity in Endothelial Cells by Brian D. Fink, Yunxia O’Malley, Brian L. Dake, Nicolette C. Ross, Thomas E. Prisinzano, and William I. Sivitz). I found the process straightforward and faster than most other journals. The peer review was thorough but fair. I hope to see this used more frequently.

by Dr. Michael Knudson, Association Professor of Pathology

We published in Plos One and found it a very satisfying experience.  Quick, insightful reviews, no charge for color figures and no copyright forms to sign.

The journal allows readers to provide feedback and ratings of each article.  I would recommend Open Access to all.

Hardin News» Blog Archive » Open Access Publishing in the Health Sciences- The University of Iowa Libraries

About OA week — Open Access Week - October 19-23, 2009

About OA week — Open Access Week - October 19-23, 2009 

About OA week

October 19-23 will mark the first international Open Access Week.

Open Access Week is an opportunity to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access to research, including access policies from all types of research funders, within the international higher education community and the general public. The now-annual event has been expanded from a single day to accommodate widespread global interest in the movement toward open, public access to scholarly research results.

Open Access Week builds on the momentum started by the student-led national day of action in 2007 and carried by the 120 campuses in 27 countries that celebrated Open Access Day in 2008. 2008 organizers SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition), the PLoS (The Public Library of Science), and Students for FreeCulture welcome new key contributors for 2009: OASIS (the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook); Open Access Directory (OAD); and eIFL.net (Electronic Information for Libraries), which will again spearhead events in developing and transitional countries.

There are also partner organizations that are engaging their communities in every corner of the globe and these are listed on the main page of this site (SPARC Europe, SPARC Japan, DOAJ and BIREME). If you want join them and help get the word out please contact dokubo@plos.org.

This year, the organizers will highlight a growing suite of educational resources that local hosts can use to design their own programs on Open Access, for their respective audiences and time zones. The OASIS project features the resources for researchers, administrators, librarians, students, and the public — as well as different OA awareness levels — that will be the centerpiece of the 2009 Open Access Week program.

These audience-specific resource lists will be supplemented by the growing clearinghouse of educational materials available through the Open Access Directory, which will again serve as the key index for participating campuses and organizations on five continents. Through the collaborative functionality of the two initiatives, videos, briefing papers, podcasts, slideshows, posters and other educational tools will be drawn from all over the Web to be featured during Open Access Week 2009.

The organizers will also work with registered participants to develop a variety of sample program tracks, such as “Administrators’ introduction to campus open-access policies and funds,” “OA 101,” and “Complying with the NIH public access policy” that take full advantage of available tools.  Scholars, students, libraries, publishers, individuals, and campuses everywhere are invited to adapt these resources as needed and to mark Open Access Week by hosting an event, distributing literature, blogging, or wearing an Open Access t-shirt.

“After the success of last year’s Open Access Day, we’re delighted to be co-organizing the first ever Open Access Week with our fellow collaborators, again in conjunction with the anniversary of one of our flagship journals,” said Peter Jerram, CEO for the Public Library of Science. “We would ask our supporters to celebrate the fifth anniversary of PLoS Medicine by spreading the word about Open Access and getting involved in the week.”

“There’s no more certain sign of the momentum behind Open Access to research than an annual, global celebration of this scale,” added Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. “Occasions like this are the best possible way to attract attention from busy faculty members and administrators. It’s SPARC’s pleasure to be working with our partners to realize the event once again this year.”

Read a Press Release about Open Access Week 2009.

About OA week — Open Access Week - October 19-23, 2009

How do I make my research papers openly available without leaving out peer-review? « eResources at the University of Bradford

 How do I make my research papers openly available without leaving out peer-review? « eResources at the University of Bradford

How do I make my research papers openly available without leaving out peer-review?

A range of Open Access journals are now available in most subject areas. These titles number in their thousands and are usually peer-reviewed. Some of the more well-known titles include those of BioMed Central (199 peer-reviewed titles) and the Public Library of Science (seven peer-reviewed science and medicine titles). A number of directories exist to list Open Access journals. One of more extensive lists is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) which also facilitates searches across the journals. The multi-disciplinary and multi-lingual DOAJ covers over 4250 free, full-text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals.

In addition to Open Access journals the commercial publishers may offer paid open access options. this would allow authors to deposit their articles immediately in their institutional open access repositories upon payment of a fee. The same publishers may also permit authors to deposit after an embargo period without the payment of a fee. Where a publisher’s standard policy does not allow an author to comply with their funding agency’s open access mandate, paid open access options may enable an author to comply. Information about publishers’ paid options for open access are available at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/PaidOA.html. Guidance is also available from the Research Information Network (RIN) who have produced a briefing document called “Paying for open access publication charges”. This PDF is available from RIN web pages.

Authors are urged to consider the requirements set by their funding bodies (information about funder mandates are available directly from the funding organisation or e.g.  the JULIET database)  regarding open access to reseach outputs. In many cases researchers are expected to make research results available open on the web. This could be an Open Access journal or paid open access article in a commercial journal. Institutional repositories are a third option for releasing research materials to the free web.

Authors concerned about their rights to publish in traditional commercial journals need not worry. Making research available openly on the World Wide Web does not exclude the publication of articles in the author’s choice of journal. However, it worth noting that on occasion the publisher’s policy on self-archiving and placing published articles on the free web may clash with the funder’s mandate on open access. Bearing this in mind it is worth checking the prospective publisher’s copyright policy and the funder mandate prior to getting published.

More information on publisher policies are available via the RoMEO database or the Bradford Scholars web page at the University of Bradford. Alternatively,  you may choose to contact the repository team at Bradford for advise and assistance. Contact details are available at the Bradford Scholars homepage.

How do I make my research papers openly available without leaving out peer-review? « eResources at the University of Bradford

OASIS

OASIS 

OASIS aims to provide an authoritative ‘sourcebook’ on Open Access, covering the concept, principles, advantages, approaches and means to achieving it. The site highlights developments and initiatives from around the world, with links to diverse additional resources and case studies. As such, it is a community-building as much as a resource-building exercise. Users are encouraged to share and download the resources provided, and to modify and customize them for local use. Open Access is evolving, and we invite the growing world-wide community to take part in this exciting global movement

OASIS