Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This new report investigates the drivers, costs and benefits of potential ways to increase access to scholarly journals. It identifies five different routes for achieving that end over the next five years, and compares and evaluates the benefits as well as the costs and risks for the UK.

The report suggests that policymakers who are seeking to promote increases in access should encourage the use of existing subject and institutional repositories, but avoid pushing for reductions in embargo periods, which might put at risk the sustainability of the underlying scholarly publishing system. They should also promote and facilitate a transition to open access publishing (Gold open access) while seeking to ensure that the average level of charges for publication does not exceed c.£2000; that the rate in the UK of open access publication is broadly in step with the rate in the rest of the world; and that total payments to journal publishers from UK universities and their funders do not rise as a consequence.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography |

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Beginning July 12, 2010, we will post preprints of forthcoming articles at the ITAL Web site. Preprints will be added when available and will be removed upon publication.

Here's an excerpt:

Contemporary scholarly discourse follows many alternative routes in addition to the three-century old tradition of publication in peer-reviewed journals. The field of High- Energy Physics (HEP) has explored alternative communication strategies for decades, initially via the mass mailing of paper copies of preliminary manuscripts, then via the inception of the first online repositories and digital libraries.

This field is uniquely placed to answer recurrent questions raised by the current trends in scholarly communication: is there an advantage for scientists to make their work available through repositories, often in preliminary form? Is there an advantage to publishing in Open Access journals? Do scientists still read journals or do they use digital repositories?

The analysis of citation data demonstrates that free and immediate online dissemination of preprints creates an immense citation advantage in HEP, whereas publication in Open Access journals presents no discernible advantage. In addition, the analysis of clickstreams in the leading digital library of the field shows that HEP scientists seldom read journals, preferring preprints instead.

Here's an excerpt:

arXiv.org mediates contact with the literature for entire scholarly communities, both through provision of archival access and through daily email and web announcements of new materials, potentially many screenlengths long. We confirm and extend a surprising correlation between article position in these initial announcements, ordered by submission time, and later citation impact, due primarily to intentional "self-promotion" on the part of authors. A pure "visibility" effect was also present: the subset of articles accidentally in early positions fared measurably better in the long-term citation record than those lower down. Astrophysics articles announced in position 1, for example, overall received a median number of citations 83% higher, while those there accidentally had a 44% visibility boost. For two large subcommunities of theoretical high energy physics, hep-th and hep-ph articles announced in position 1 had median numbers of citations 50% and 100% larger than for positions 5-15, and the subsets there accidentally had visibility boosts of 38% and 71%.

We also consider the positional effects on early readership. The median numbers of early full text downloads for astro-ph, hep-th, and hep-ph articles announced in position 1 were 82%, 61%, and 58% higher than for lower positions, respectively, and those there accidentally had medians visibility-boosted by 53%, 44%, and 46%. Finally, we correlate a variety of readership features with long-term citations, using machine learning methods, thereby extending previous results on the predictive power of early readership in a broader context. We conclude with some observations on impact metrics and dangers of recommender mechanisms.

Here's an excerpt:

The Overlay Journal Infrastructure for Meteorological Sciences (OJIMS) project developed the mechanisms that could support both a new on-line Journal of Meteorological Data and an Open-Access Repository for documents related to the meteorological sciences. The project had three fundamental aims:

• Creation of overlay journal mechanics.
• Creation of an open access subject based repository for Meteorology and atmospheric sciences.
• Construction and evaluation of business models for potential overlay journals. . . .

• The proposal for the Journal of Meteorological Data is that it would be an on-line, peer-reviewed data journal. It would extend the scientific discipline of peer review to data, providing recognition for the work of creating data. The rigorous, but manageable, standards for metadata and documentation prescribed will facilitate re-use of the data, encourage appropriate application of the data to scientific problems and enable experiments to be repeated. A review process was proposed which encompasses three elements: a data description document, metadata and the data themselves. All three elements would be reviewed, but citation would be of the text article

  .

Here's an excerpt:

Contemporary scholarly discourse follows many alternative routes in addition to the three-century old tradition of publication in peer-reviewed journals. The field of High- Energy Physics (HEP) has explored alternative communication strategies for decades, initially via the mass mailing of paper copies of preliminary manuscripts, then via the inception of the first online repositories and digital libraries.

This field is uniquely placed to answer recurrent questions raised by the current trends in scholarly communication: is there an advantage for scientists to make their work available through repositories, often in preliminary form? Is there an advantage to publishing in Open Access journals? Do scientists still read journals or do they use digital repositories?

The analysis of citation data demonstrates that free and immediate online dissemination of preprints creates an immense citation advantage in HEP, whereas publication in Open Access journals presents no discernible advantage. In addition, the analysis of clickstreams in the leading digital library of the field shows that HEP scientists seldom read journals, preferring preprints instead.

Here's the abstract:

Carnegie Mellon faculty Web pages and publisher policies were examined to understand self-archiving practice. The breadth of adoption and depth of commitment are not directly correlated within the disciplines. Determining when self-archiving has become a habit is difficult. The opportunity to self-archive far exceeds the practice, and much of what is self-archived is not aligned with publisher policy. Policy appears to influence neither the decision to self-archive nor the article version that is self-archived. Because of the potential legal ramifications, faculty must be convinced that copyright law and publisher policy are important and persuaded to act on that conviction.

Covey previously self-archived "Faculty Self-Archiving Practices: A Case Study" in Carnegie Mellon's Research Showcase.

Here's the abstract:

Faculty web pages were examined to learn about self-archiving practice at Carnegie Mellon. More faculty are self-archiving their work and more work is being self-archived than expected. However, the distribution of self-archiving activity across the disciplines is not as expected. More faculty self-archive journal articles than other publications, but more conference papers are self-archived than journal articles. Many faculty who self-archive have self-archived fewer than ten publications. A small number of faculty has self-archived most of the work that is available open access from faculty web pages. Significant differences in faculty behavior within departments cannot be explained by disciplinary culture.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

PEER is a pioneering collaboration between publishers, repositories and the research community, which aims to investigate the effects of the large-scale deposit (so called Green Open Access) on user access, author visibility, journal viability and the broader European research environment.

The project will run until 2011, during which time over 50,000 European stage two (accepted) manuscripts from up to 300 journals will become available for archiving.

The PEER website will serve the three key stakeholder groups of publishers, repository/library community and researchers (both as authors and readers), and will also provide information accessible to the general public.

Content will include news updates, as well as reports on various aspects of the project as PEER progresses.

• "Handling Version Information"
• "Repository Deposit: SWORD"
• "Specifying Repository Requirements"

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

In the spring of 2008, ARL engaged Ithaka’s Strategic Services Group to conduct an investigation into the range of online resources valued by scholars, paying special attention to those projects that are pushing beyond the boundaries of traditional formats and are considered innovative by the faculty who use them. The networked digital environment has enabled the creation of many new kinds of works, and many of these resources have become essential tools for scholars conducting research, building scholarly networks, and disseminating their ideas and work, but the decentralized distribution of these new-model works has made it difficult to fully appreciate their scope and number.

Ithaka’s findings are based on a collection of resources identified by a volunteer field team of over 300 librarians at 46 academic institutions in the US and Canada. Field librarians talked with faculty members on their campuses about the digital scholarly resources they find most useful and reported the works they identified. The authors evaluated each resource gathered by the field team and conducted interviews of project leaders of 11 representative resources. Ultimately, 206 unique digital resources spanning eight formats were identified that met the study’s criteria.

The study’s innovative qualitative approach yielded a rich cross-section of today’s state of the art in digital scholarly resources. The report profiles each of the eight genres of resources, including discussion of how and why the faculty members reported using the resources for their work, how content is selected for the site, and what financial sustainability strategies the resources are employing. Each section draws from the in-depth interviews to provide illustrative anecdotes and representative examples.

Highlights from the study’s findings include:

• While some disciplines seem to lend themselves to certain formats of digital resource more than others, examples of innovative resources can be found across the humanities, social sciences, and scientific/technical/medical subject areas.

• Of all the resources suggested by faculty, almost every one that contained an original scholarly work operates under some form of peer review or editorial oversight.

• Some of the resources with greatest impact are those that have been around a long while.

• While some resources serve very large audiences, many digital publications—capable of running on relatively small budgets—are tailored to small, niche audiences.

• Innovations relating to multimedia content and Web 2.0 functionality appear in some cases to blur the lines between resource types.

• Projects of all sizes—especially open-access sites and publications—employ a range of support strategies in the search for financial sustainability.

Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

Unprecedented technological advancements have radically changed the way we communicate and, at the same time, are effectively transforming science into e-Science. In turn, this transformation calls for an evolution in scholarly communication. This review describes several innovations, spanning the last decades of scholarly communication in High Energy Physics: the first repositories, their interaction with peer-reviewed journals, a proposed model for Open Access publishing and a next-generation repository for the field.

Of particular interest is his description of the INSPIRE Project, "a fully integrated HEP information platform for the future," that will have "text- and data-mining applications, citation analysis and other tools, and Web 2.0 features."

For further information about INSPIRE, see "Information Systems in HEP get INSPIREd" and the INSPIRE Wiki.

Read more about it at "PubMed Central Submissions Jump Sharply Under New NIH Policy."

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The publication is designed to provide a simple, practical way of describing the versions of scholarly journal articles that typically appear online before, during, and after formal journal publication. . . .

"Static, single copies of research papers that are essentially facsimiles of a single, unambiguously identified printed document are a thing of the past," stated Bernard Rous, Deputy Director of Publications at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Co-Chair of the JAV Working Group. "Changes in the way we create, produce, and store articles lead to multiple versions that are often all discovered together through web searches. Our working group addressed the consequent problem: how to identify the versions retrieved and clarify the relationships among them." . . .

Several variables were considered as possible dimensions to identify a particular article version:

• Time: from first draft to latest version
• Added Value: from rough draft to polished publication
• Manifestation/Rendition: different document formats and layouts
• Siblings: multiple mappings between technical reports, conference papers, lectures, journal articles, review articles, etc.
• Stakeholders: author, editor, referee, publisher, librarian, reader, funding organization

Components of the JAV Recommended Practice include a narrative that explains the project background and rationale for recommended terms and definitions, and appendices that cover "Graphical Representation of Journal Article Versions and Relationships with Formal and Grey Literature; Assumptions, Primary Challenges, and Best Practices," use cases, and comments from JAV Review Group on recommendations received on an earlier draft document.

Such self-archiving can occur for both preprints and postprints. The author cannot "update the submission version [version submitted for consideration that has not undergone peer review] or replace it with the published Contribution." However, the author can "update the preprint [accepted version that has undergone peer review] with any corrections."

JASIST is the research journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, which "counts among its membership some 4,000 information specialists from such fields as computer science, linguistics, management, librarianship, engineering, law, medicine, chemistry, and education; individuals who share a common interest in improving the ways society stores, retrieves, analyzes, manages, archives and disseminates information, coming together for mutual benefit."

Here's an excerpt from the product's home page:

Beta 1 of Word add-in to enhance the authoring of scientific and technical articles, including support for the National Library of Medicine XML format This Beta 1 release enables reading and writing of XML-based documents in the format used by the National Library of Medicine for archiving scientific articles.