JISC has released E-Journal Archiving for UK HE Libraries—White Paper (Final).

Here's an excerpt:

The aim of this white paper is to help universities and libraries implement policies and procedures in relation to e-journal archiving which can help support the move towards e-only provision of scholarly journals across the HE sector. The white paper is also contributing to complementary work JISC and other funders are commissioning on moving towards e-only provision of Journals.

| Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 | Institutional Repository Bibliography | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 |

Mark J. McCabe and Christopher M. Snyder have self-archived "Did Online Access to Journals Change the Economics Literature?" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

Does online access boost citations? The answer has implications for issues ranging from the value of a citation to the sustainability of open-access journals. Using panel data on citations to economics and business journals, we show that the enormous effects found in previous studies were an artifact of their failure to control for article quality, disappearing once we add fixed effects as controls. The absence of an aggregate effect masks heterogeneity across platforms: JSTOR boosts citations around 10%; ScienceDirect has no effect. We examine other sources of heterogeneity including whether JSTOR benefits "long-tail" or "superstar" articles more.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview |

The Research Information Network has released E-journals: Their Use, Value and Impact—Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

The objectives for this second phase of the study were:

1. to establish a deeper understanding of what lies behind the patterns of use and information-seeking behaviour portrayed in the logs to answer questions such as:
   • why do users spend so little time on each visit?
   • why do researchers use gateway sites?
   • why do few researchers use advanced searching?
   • do high levels of use imply high levels of user satisfaction?
2. to investigate reasons for the diversity in information-seeking behaviour and usage shown in the logs, especially with regard to research status and seniority, institutional size and research strength, and subject or discipline.
3. to determine how online searching and use of e-journals relates to researchers' general behaviour in seeking and using information, and to scholarly and research workflows.
4. to investigate further the relationships between levels of expenditure on journals, levels of use, and research outcomes (e.g., does good e-journal provision drive research outcomes, or do libraries benefit from the additional revenue that research success creates?).
5. to analyse any trends in author referencing behaviour over a long period, and to investigate whether these have changed alongside the development of easier access to scholarly literature.

| Digital Scholarship |

The Research Information Network has released E-Only Scholarly Journals: Overcoming the Barriers.

Here's an excerpt:

This study is prompted by a concern from publishers and librarians that the retention of both printed and e-journal formats adds unnecessary costs throughout the supply chain from publisher to library to user. In view of the many advantages of electronic journals, this report sets out to understand the barriers to a move to e-only provision of scholarly journals in the UK, and to investigate what various players within the scholarly communications system could do in order to encourage such a move.

This study involved a thorough literature review, gathering and analysing information provided by publishers and librarians, and interviews with a range of publishers, librarians and academics. The results are presented in this report, along with some recommendations for action.

| Digital Scholarship |

JISC has released E-Journal Archiving for UK HE Libraries: A Draft White Paper for comment.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Libraries are facing increasing space pressures and funding constraints. There is a growing interest in wherever possible moving more rapidly to e-only provision to help alleviate these pressures as well as to provide new electronic services to users. One of the most cited barriers and concerns both from library and faculty staff to moving to e-only has been sustaining and assuring long-term access to electronic content.

The aim of this white paper is to help universities and libraries implement policies and procedures in relation to e-journal archiving which can help support the move towards e-only provision of scholarly journals across the HE sector. The white paper is also contributing to complementary work JISC and other funders are commissioning on moving towards e-only provision of Journals.

JISC has released User Behaviour Observational Study: Scholarly Digital Use and Information-Seeking Behaviour in Business and Economics.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The report covers the digital usage and information seeking behaviour of tens of thousands of business/economics/management students, researchers and academic staff. The intention was to inform and provide a context for the small-scale but detailed observational and interview studies undertaken by Middlesex University researchers for a JISC funded User Behaviour Observational Study (Business and Economics). Much of the data were mined from CIBER’s Virtual Scholar research programme and has not been previously published in this form. New data was also obtained from the studies CIBER are currently conducting, especially from the JISC national E-book Observatory project and the RIN funded E-journals study. Log data, the main source of information on usage and information seeking, covers a period of more than five years and the questionnaire data represents more than 5000 people so this probably represents the biggest and most comprehensive usage data set ever assembled on the subject. E-books and e-journals are covered and usage at the three JISC User Behaviour Observational Study case study institutions—LSE, Middlesex and Cranfield, are highlighted A whole variety of analyses are featured including: volume and, patterns of use (in terms of visits and page views), dwell time (session and page times), type of content viewed (PDF, abstracts etc), number of pages viewed in a session, methods of navigating towards content, age of material viewed, and number of searches conducted, names of titles used, user’s organization, age and gender, hardcopy v digital preferences, viewing/reading behaviour.

The Directory of Open Access Journals now contains records for more than 5,000 journals.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Directory of Open Access Journals reaches new milestones—now 7 years of operation, now more than 5,000 journals, now more than 2,000 journals searchable on article level, very soon more than 400,000 articles searchable! . . .

• Developing Open Access Journals by means of promoting open re-use policies—the SPARC Europe SEAL!
• Working for long term archiving of Open Access Journals in cooperation with the National Library of the Netherlands—project sponsored by the Swedish Library Association!
• During the years sponsored by Open Society Institute, SPARC, SPARC Europe, EBSCO, INASP, Axiell, National Library of Sweden & Swedish Library Association. . . .
• Supported by the community via the DOAJ membership program.

JISC has released Ensuring That 'E' Doesn't Mean Ephemeral: A Practical Guide to E-Journal Archiving Solutions, which discusses CLOCKSS, Portico, and the UK LOCKSS Alliance.

Here's an excerpt:

This booklet provides a starting point for institutions interested in investigating e-archiving options. It gives a practical guide to the solutions offered by three of the main long-term preservation schemes and provides an overview of the distinguishing features of each solution.

Brian D. Edgar and John Willinsky have self-archived "A Survey of the Scholarly Journals Using Open Journal Systems" on the Public Knowledge Project website.

Here's an excerpt:

A survey of 998 scholarly journals that use Open Journal Systems (OJS), an open source journal software platform, captures the characteristics of an emerging class of scholar-publisher open access journals (with some representation from more traditional scholarly society and print-based titles). The journals in the sample follow traditional norms for peer-reviewing, acceptance rates, and disciplinary focus, but are distinguished by the number that offer open access to their content, the growth rates in new titles, the participation rates from developing countries, and the extremely low operating budgets. The survey also documents the limited degree to which open source software can alter a field of communication, as OJS appears to have created a third path, dedicated to maximizing access to research and scholarship, as an alternative to traditional scholarly society and commercial publishing routes.

Co-Action Publishing and Lund University Libraries have released The Online Guide to Open Access Journals Publishing.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The online guide is directed to small independent teams and provides practical information on planning, setting up, launching, publishing and managing an open access scholarly journal. Users can take advantage of additional resources in the form of links to related information, samples of applied practices and downloadable tools that can be adapted. The guide seeks to be interactive, allowing users to share their own best practices, tips and suggestions through a comment field. Although the guide contains some information that is specific to the Nordic region, most of its content can be applied internationally.

Peter Suber has published "Ten Challenges for Open-Access Journals" in the latest issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.

Here's an excerpt:

I start with three disparities:  the gap between journal performance and what prevailing metrics say about journal performance (#1); the gap between the vision of OA embodied in the Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin statements and the access policies at 85% of OA journals (#2); and the gap between a journal's quality and its prestige, even when the quality is high (#3).  Then I move on to seven kinds of doubt:  doubts about quality (#4), preservation (#5), honesty (#6), publication fees (#7), sustainability (#8), redirection (#9), and strategy (#10).

The Nature Publishing Group has announced that it will publish a new open access journal, Nature Communications, starting in April 2010.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Nature Communications will publish high-quality peer-reviewed research across the biological, chemical and physical sciences, and will be the first online-only Nature-branded journal.

"As a born-digital publication, Nature Communications will provide readers and authors with the benefits of enhanced web technologies alongside a rapid, yet rigorous, peer-review process." says Sarah Greaves, Publisher of Nature Communications. "Nature Communications will offer authors high visibility for their papers on the nature.com platform, access to a broad readership and efficient peer review with fast publication. For readers, the journal will offer functionality including interactive browsing and enhanced metadata to enable sorting by keywords."

Nature Communications will publish research papers in all areas of the biological, chemical and physical sciences, encouraging papers that provide a multidisciplinary approach. The research will be of the highest quality, without necessarily having the scientific reach of papers published in Nature and the Nature research journals, and as such will represent advances of significant interest to specialists within each field. A team of independent editors, supported by an external editorial advisory panel, will make rapid and fair publication decisions based on peer review, with all the rigour expected of a Nature-branded journal.

To ensure Nature Communications responds to changes in journal publishing, authors will be able to publish their work either via the traditional subscription route, or as open access through payment of an article processing charge (APC).

Authors who choose the open-access option will be able to license their work under a Creative Commons license, including the option to allow derivative works. Authors who do not choose the open-access option will still enjoy all of the benefits of NPG's self-archiving policy and manuscript deposition service.

"Developments in publishing and web technologies, coupled with increasing commitment by research funders to cover the costs of open access, mean the time is right for a journal that offers editorial excellence and real choice for authors." said David Hoole, Head of Content Licensing at NPG.