DigitalKoans

Based on data from the OpenDOAR Charts service, here is snapshot of the open access repository software that is in use in the top five countries that offer such repositories.

The countries are abbreviated in the table header column as follows: US = United States, DK = Germany, UK = United Kingdom, AU = Australia, and NL = Netherlands. The number in parentheses is the reported number of repositories in that country.

Read the country percentages downward in each column (they do not total to 100% across the rows).

Excluding "unknown" or "other" systems, the highest in-country percentage is shown in boldface.

OpenDOAR has introduced OpenDOAR Charts, a nifty new service that allows users to create and view charts that summarize data from its database of open access repositories.

Here’s what a selection of the default charts show today. Only double-digit percentage results are discussed.

• Repositories by continent: Europe is the leader with 49% of repositories. North America places second with 33%.
• Repositories by country: In light of the above, it is interesting that the US leads the pack with 29% of repositories. Germany (13%) and the UK follow (11%).
• Repository software: After the 28% of unknown software, EPrints takes the number two slot (21%), followed by DSpace (19%).
• Repository types: By far, institutional repositories are the leader at 79%. Disciplinary repositories follow (13%).
• Content types: ETDs lead (53%), followed by unpublished reports/working papers (48%), preprints/postprints (37%), conference/workshop papers (35%), books/chapters/sections (31%), multimedia/av (20%), postprints only (17%), bibliographic references (16%), special items (15%), and learning objects (13%).

This is a great service; however, I’d suggest that University of Nottingham consider licensing it under a Creative Commons license so that snapshot charts could be freely used (at least for noncommercial purposes).

The Electronic Publishing Working Group of the Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformation (DINI) has released an English draft of its DINI-Certificate Document and Publication Services 2007.

It outlines criteria for repository author support; indexing; legal aspects; long-term availability; logs and statistics; policies; security, authenticity and data integrity; and service visibility. It also provides examples.

The MOIMS-Repository Audit and Certification BOF mailing list (Moims-rac) has been established to foster the development of an ISO standard for the audit and certification of digital information repositories.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog is now searchable using a Google Custom Search Engine. The new search box is near the bottom of the Weblog’s home page.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is also now searchable using a Google Custom Search Engine. This will be incorporated into a future version of SEPB. Only the bibliography sections of the document are searchable using this method (e.g., SEPW and SEPR are excluded).

Keep in mind when you search that you will retrieve bibliography section file or Weblog archive file titles with a single representative search result shown from that file. To see all hits, click on the cached page, which shows the retrieved search term(s) in the file highlighted in yellow.

For those who might be interested in including these Google Custom Search Engines in their Web pages, see "Code for Bailey’s Google Search Engines"

The Open Archives Initiative has announced its Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) initiative:

Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) will develop specifications that allow distributed repositories to exchange information about their constituent digital objects. These specifications will include approaches for representing digital objects and repository services that facilitate access and ingest of these representations. The specifications will enable a new generation of cross-repository services that leverage the intrinsic value of digital objects beyond the borders of hosting repositories. . . . its real importance lies in the potential for these distributed repositories and their contained objects to act as the foundation of a new digitally-based scholarly communication framework. Such a framework would permit fluid reuse, refactoring, and aggregation of scholarly digital objects and their constituent parts—including text, images, data, and software. This framework would include new forms of citation, allow the creation of virtual collections of objects regardless of their location, and facilitate new workflows that add value to scholarly objects by distributed registration, certification, peer review, and preservation services. Although scholarly communication is the motivating application, we imagine that the specifications developed by ORE may extend to other domains.

OAI-ORE is being funded my the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a two-year period.

Presentations from the Augmenting Interoperability across Scholarly Repositories meeting are a good source of further information about the thinking behind the initiative as is the "Pathways: Augmenting Interoperability across Scholarly Repositories" preprint.

Peter Suber has made the following comment on Open Access News about "How Can Scholars Retain Copyright Rights?":

This is a good introduction to the options. I’d only make two additions.

1. Authors needn’t retain full copyright in order to provide OA to their own work. They only need to retain the right of OA archiving—which, BTW, about 70% of journals already give to authors in the copyright transfer agreement.
2. Charles mentions the author addenda from SPARC and Science Commons, but there’s also one from MIT.

Peter is right on both points; however, my document has a broader rights retention focus than providing OA to scholars’ work, although that is an important aspect of it.

For example, there is a difference between simply making an article available on the Internet and making it available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. The former allows the user to freely read, download, and print the article for personal use. The latter allows user to make any noncommercial use of the article without permission as long as proper attribution is made, including creating derivative works. So professor X could print professor Y’s article and distribute in class without permission and without worrying about fair use considerations. (Peter, of course, understands these distinctions, and he is just trying to make sure that authors understand that they don’t have to do anything but sign agreements that grant them appropriate self-archiving rights in order to provide OA access to their articles.)

I considered the MIT addenda, but thought it might be too institution-specific. On closer reading, it could be used without alteration.

Scholars are often exhorted to retain the copyright rights to their journal articles to ensure that they can freely use their own work and to permit others to freely read and use it as well. The question for scholars who are convinced to do so is: "How do I do that?"

The first thing to understand is that copyright is not one right. Rather, it is a bundle of rights that can be individually granted or withheld. The second thing to understand is that rights can either be granted exclusively to one party or nonexclusively to multiple parties.

What are these rights? Here’s what the U.S. Copyright Office says:

• To reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords;

• To prepare derivative works based upon the work;

• To distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;

• To perform the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works;

• To display the copyrighted work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual
  images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work; and

• In the case of sound recordings, to perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.

A legal document, typically called a copyright transfer agreement, governs the copyright arrangements between you and the publisher and determines what rights you retain and what rights you transfer or grant to the publisher. The publisher may offer a single standard agreement or may have more than one agreement.

Whereas the publisher has had its agreement(s) written by copyright lawyers, you are not likely to be a copyright lawyer. This puts you at a disadvantage in terms or understanding, modifying, or replacing the publisher’s agreement. Therefore, it is very helpful to have documents written by copyright lawyers that you can use to modify or replace the publisher’s agreement with, even if the organization providing such documents does so under a disclaimer that it is not providing "legal advice."

Ordered by increasing level of difficulty in getting publisher acceptance, here are the basic strategies for dealing with copyright transfer agreements:

• If the publisher has multiple agreements, choose the one that has the author assigning and/or granting specific rights to the publisher (e.g., ALA Copyright License Agreement). Don’t choose the agreement where the author assigns, conveys, grants, or transfers all rights, copyright interest, copyright ownership, and/or title exclusively to the publisher (e.g., ALA Copyright Assignment Agreement).
• If the publisher has a single agreement that assigns, conveys, grants, or transfers all rights, copyright interest, copyright ownership, and/or title exclusively to the publisher:
  • Amend it with one of the Science Commons Author Addenda. (See the FAQ for more details.)
    • OpenAccess-Delay 1.0 Addendum: "Reserves the right for the author to post the author’s final
      manuscript version immediately and the published version six months
      after publication."
    • OpenAccess-Publish 1.0 Addendum: "Reserves the right for the author to post the published version immediately upon publication."
    • OpenAccess-CreativeCommons 1.0 Addendum: "Reserves the right for the author to post the published version (for example, as a .pdf file) immediately and to grant others a Creative Commons ‘Attribution NonCommercial‘ license to use the article."
  • Amend it with the SPARC Author’s Addendum, which was written by Michael Carroll of the Villanova University School of Law. The Addendum allows you to retain key rights, but not all rights to your article. See the Author’s Addendum page for more details.
  • Retain copyright ownership and replace the publisher’s agreement with the Science Commons Publication Agreement and Copyright License. In addition to retaining copyright, you will specify which Creative Commons License the article will be under. See Creative Commons Licenses for a description of these licenses.

Of course, other strategies are possible. For example, you could use another type of open content license instead of the Science Commons Publication Agreement and Copyright License. However, you might want to keep it simple to start.

For more information on copyright transfer agreements, see Copyright Resources for Authors and Scholars Have Lost Control of the Process.

For a directory of publisher copyright and self-archiving policies, see Publisher Copyright Policies & Self-Archiving.

By the way, DigitalKoans doesn’t provide legal advice and the author is not a lawyer.