Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography Updated

Version 69 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing
Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship.
This selective bibliography presents over 3,120 articles,
books, and other printed and electronic sources that are
useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing
efforts on the Internet.

http://www.digital-scholarship.org/sepb/sepb.html

Transitions: scholarly communications news for the UI community | September 2007

Transitions: scholarly communications news for the UI community | September 2007

Welcome to the September issue of Transitions.
Table of Contents:

*Campaign against Open Access and Public Access to Federally Funded Research
*Scholarly Publishing Out of Step with the Academy
*Scholarly Publishers Issue Position Paper on Author/Publisher Rights
*U.S College Book Price Study
*Economic Stability of Open Access
*Faculty Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding Scholarly Communication
*Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) Joins Google’s Library Project
*Do Open Access Articles Have Greater Citation Impact?
*Flattening of the U.S. Output of Scientific Articles: 1988–2003
*Amazon Will Digitize Universities’ Books and Sell Print-on-Demand Copies
*L.A. Times Editorial: Accessing NIH research
*Yale Libraries Pull Out of BioMed Central Over Cost of Publication

How Involved Should the U.S. Government Be in the Scholarly Journal Publishing Business?

How Involved Should the U.S. Government Be in the Scholarly Journal Publishing Business? By Dennis D. McDonald Wired News on March 14, 2007 posted a story about U.S. Senators John Cornyn's and Joseph Liebermann's announced decision to re-introduce last year's Federal Research Public Access Act (S.2695, also called "FRPAA"). If passed, this Act will require federally funded research to become publicly available online within six months of being published. Last year's bill is described here by the Congressional Research Service. This bill raises the perennial debate topic about how peer reviewed journals should be funded and whether "free access" should be provided to Federally-funded research. Many of the research articles published in peer-reviewed journals originate through Government funding. Many -- but not all -- of peer reviewed journals are published by for-profit commercial publishers. Other types of publishers include university presses, professional associations, and government agencies. Federally funded research is disseminated both through for profit and through not-for-profit publication channels. As I've discussed here and here, peer reviewed journals are only the "tip of the iceberg" when it comes to disseminating research and scholarly information. Key roles are also played by conference presentations and proceedings, seminars, blogs, email and internet distribution, listservs, telephone, etc. etc. Yet the peer reviewed journal article -- and its sponsoring journal -- continues to play a key role in the formal social and communications systems of research and scholarship. Funding for peer reviewed journals has traditionally been provided through some mix of: Front end "page charges" paid by authors, their institutions, or their funding agencies when an article is accepted for publication from among the many that are submitted for publication. Advertising. Subsidies provided by the journal's sponsoring organization (e.g., from professional association membership dues). Individual and institutional subscription fees. Complaints about constantly rising subscription fees have been voiced by librarians and others for many years. Recent programs to move journal reviewing and distribution online (e.g., see Public Library of Science) are an attempt to change the overall technology and economics of the system while maintaining the quality control function of peer review. Other changes to the overall economics of the journal system include the increasing use of "free" commercial tools such as Google in the indexing and retrieval of scholarly information. T. Scott provided one of the more balanced reviews of the Senate bill last year; it is located here with a current discussion (and comments) here. An example of organized support for FRPPA is described here (The Alliance for Taxpayer Access). Organized opposition is represented by The Association of American Publishers (AAP). In my opinion, the fundamental question is the title of this article, i.e., "How Involved Should the U.S. Government Be in the Scholarly Journal Publishing Business?" Since the Federal government is already providing so much input to the process -- funding the research and the institutions where research takes place, helping to pay for front end page charges and for library subscriptions, assisting in payment of the salaries of the researchers and scholars who perform voluntary editorial and review roles, etc. etc. -- doesn't it makes perfect sense for the Government to take the logical next step and require that processes be established to publish the information that is generated through funded research? The devil is on the details though, especially when we start to define "free access" and the following types of questions are raised: Who will be responsible for paying for the typesetting, page composition, printing, page editing, and other costs associated with the physical part of the publishing process? (Think about the costs of editing and quality control associated with complex formulas and equations.) Who should pay for indexing and abstracting the articles that are thus published? Will A&I services be responsible for publishing "embargo dates" after which original articles are freely available? Should non-U.S. citizens be allowed to obtain "free access" to the research that is published as a result of U.S. Federal Government funding? What about students at academic institutions that do not restrict enrollment by children of undocumented workers? What happens when a U.S. Senator complains that the U.S. government is distributing research that is based on a "controversial" topic (e.g., cloning, stem cell research, evolution, genetics and homosexuality, etc.)? Will volunteer article reviewers care whether or not their efforts are subsidizing both free and commercial access systems? Will copyright and intellectual property laws need to be modified? What will happen to low circulation specialized journals that are already subsidized by professional association membership dues if they begin losing submissions? Who will pay for the cost of systems and processes that must be instituted to ensure that articles are submitted to the official reporting or publishing agency as required? Will a "two-tier" system evolve where minimally reviewed and edited articles are distributed through the Federally mandated system, then a higher level of editing and reviewing is applied, perhaps mixed with more sophisticated database and communication services? Will the new system just be a formalization of the processes that already exist outside the peer review journal system (e.g., conferences, seminars, emailed files, etc.)? What will happen to the supplementary data that accompany some articles? After all is said and done, will the hours and dollars devoted to moving to the new system end up being the same, just distributed differently? And how will we really know if the new "free access" system is really better than the old, creaky, unfair system? I don't know the answers to these questions. I do know that many publishers are already wrestling with the question of how much to give away for free and how much to require payment for. For an example, see this presentation Free Is Good by Stephen Rhind-Tutt of Alexander Street Press. I am also concerned about the effect that increasing involvement by the Federal government in publishing will have a negative impact on experimentation with new business and publishing models. For example, in Are Social Networking and Social Media Threats or Opportunities for Professional Associations? I suggested that professional societies -- many of which publish scholarly peer reviewed journals -- may need to adopt social networking and collaborative social media as a way to "compete" with the growth in low cost professional networking and collaboration systems on the web. Will a Federally mandated publishing vehicle help -- or hinder -- such experimentation? Since these questions are so difficult to answer with certainty, the logical place to work out these issues will be in the realm of politics. Here's hoping the debate will generate more light than heat.

Documentary videos on OA

Documentary videos on OA By Peter Suber A collection of documentary videos on OA is a giant step closer to a screen near you, thanks to a grant from the Open Society Institute. See the September 17 announcement from Intelligent Television and BioMed Central: The Open Society Institute has awarded a grant to support the production and distribution of the Open Access Documentary Project, a collection of online videos celebrating the benefits of open access to scientific and medical research. Intelligent Television and BioMed Central are co-producers of the Project. The Open Access Documentary Project will facilitate the ongoing work of BioMed Central and Intelligent Television in promoting open access to science and medicine in fields as diverse as malaria research and particle physics. The producers are now assembling an international editorial board and contacting institutions that hold archival and production resources that will be vital to the project. Principal production has begun in London, New York, and at CERN in Geneva, featuring video interviews with publishers and consumers of scientific and medical information in the developed and developing world —and with other stakeholders in open access including foundations, government agencies, and the media....

Use PRISM To Start A Dialogue On Open Access

Use PRISM To Start A Dialogue On Open Access By Marc Meola on Scholarly Communications In a previous post I argued that developing free and open source library systems should be an ethical issue for academic librarians. Promoting open access to scholarly literature is another ethical issue we face. PRISM, an anti-open access group of the Association of American Publishers, has launched a nasty PR campaign that attempts to demonize open access publishing by using simple slogans to equate open access with lack of peer review, government censorship, and theft of intellectual property. (I know, it's funny, but they are actually saying this stuff. Good thing librarians know how to evaluate information, right?) As noted in the SPARC letter to members, the launch of this initiative provides a timely opportunity for engaging faculty members, researchers, students and administrators in dialogue on important issues in scholarly communications. Exactly. This is the perfect time to initiate or re-initiate a campus-wide committee on scholarly communication on your campus, start a committee at your local ACRL chapter or statewide consortium, or host a lecture or forum on open access. Most encouragingly, the Association of Research Libraries has produced an excellent issue brief with talking points that effectively counter the PRISM propaganda. ARL points out: On peer review- The peer review system, based almost completely on the voluntary free labor of the research community, is independent of a particular mode of publishing or business model. On intellectual property- Researchers themselves write and peer review the articles without receiving any payment from publishers. The federal government provides substantial public funding for scientific research. Existing and proposed policies concerning public access to federally funded research attempt to create balance between the contributions made and benefits received by publishers and allow them to continue to profit tremendously from the pool of content this funded research generates. In addition, academic bloggers have not been shy taking on PRISM's distortions. And if you need more ammo or a broader overview of the issue, Open Access and the Progress of Science is a well-written argument for open access to science literature in general and proposes the simple solution that scientists just deposit their papers in repositories as soon as they are peer reviewed. Peter Suber, of course, is always a good source for debunking anti-open access arguments. One of the anti-open access claims is that open access will result in journal cancellations by libraries and collapse of the whole scholarly publishing system. (Well, how about the collapse of the exorbitant profiteering barrier access scholarly publishing system?) Suber points out, however, that open access in physics has not led to journal cancellations by libraries, and that this is in fact slowing the move from toll access to open access. The question for librarians, higher ed administrators and scholars then, is why hasn't open access in physics led to journal cancellations? Do we really want to set up two systems, an open access repository system while maintaining the old system with publisher embargoes so that libraries will have to maintain subscriptions? Do we really want to "partner" with the kind of companies that have launched such a deceptive and distorted PR campaign? With PRISM, commercial publishers are acting like cornered rats. Maybe this shows that open access is at a tipping point. Let's make sure it tips the right way. Comments

PERSEE: French Open Access Portal to Scholarly Human and Social Sciences Journals

PERSEE is the French Open Access Portal to the archives of scholarly journals in the fields of Human and Social Sciences. It was initiated by the Ministry for National Education, Higher Education and Research and is maintained by a consortium of public research institutions led by the University Lumière - Lyon 2 in partnership with the Higher Education National Informatics Center (/Centre Informatique National de l'Enseignement Supérieur/ - CINES).

Based on an open-source policy, PERSEE developed new tools for the production and publication of digitized contents, following international norms in the fields of digital libraries and open access to scientific information.

Since its opening in January 2005, the PERSEE portal (www.persee.fr) offers a free and immediate online access to constantly growing collections of scientific journals, along with services specifically developed for the best use of these digitized contents.

Journal List [ http://www.persee.fr/listRevues.do ]

GWLA & CRL - Digitization of government technical reports

The Greater Western Library Alliance has launched a pilot project to digitize, archive, and provide persistent and unrestricted access to federal technical reports issued prior to 1975. The pilot database currently contains the National Bureau of Standards Monograph Series and reports of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

Digitization, metadata production and hosting are being undertaken under the auspices of GWLA. CRL's role in this pilot will be to ensure that the project is designed to result in persistent and sustainable resources. To that end we at CRL will work with GWLA to ensure that selection of the reports for digitization avoids duplication of, and to the extent possible is coordinated with, other widely supported efforts, such as those of Google, ARL, Open Content Alliance, the Government Printing Office, and the government agencies themselves. We will work with GWLA, moreover, to help identify viable platforms for hosting and providing access to the materials digitized and to develop a funding plan that will sustain the effort for the long term.