The Open Access Directory has released "OA by the Numbers."

Here's an excerpt:

OA journals (Gold OA)

• 7,311. November 28, 2011. The number of peer-reviewed OA journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
• 1,728. November 28, 2011. The number of CC-licensed journals in the DOAJ.
• 830. November 28, 2011. The number of SPARC Europe seal journals in the DOAJ. (The SPARC Europe seal requires a CC-BY license.)
• 4.4. November 28, 2011. Average number of new journals added each day in 2010 to the DOAJ. . . .

OA repositories (Green OA)

• 2,145. November 28, 2011. Number of OA, OAI-compliant repositories listed by OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories).
• 2,584. November 28, 2011. Number of OA, OAI-compliant repositories listed by ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories).
• 3,946. November 28, 2011. Number of OA, OAI-compliant repositories listed by OpenArchive.edu

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

The Research Information Network, the Institute of Physics, Institute of Physics Publishing, and the Royal Astronomical Society have released Collaborative Yet Independent: Information Practices in the Physical Sciences.

Here's an excerpt:

In many ways, the physical sciences are at the forefront of using digital tools and methods to work with information and data. However, the fields and disciplines that make up the physical sciences are by no means uniform, and physical scientists find, use, and disseminate information in a variety of ways. This report examines information practices in the physical sciences across seven cases, and demonstrates the richly varied ways in which physical scientists work, collaborate, and share information and data.

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The California Digital Library and the Public Knowledge Project have formed a partnership to advance open access publishing through the development of open source publishing tools.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

As a result of this agreement, the CDL will assist with PKP’s ongoing development and support of its open source software suite&,dash;Open Journal Systems (OJS), Open Conference Systems (OCS), and Open Harvester System (OHS), with Open Monograph Press (OMP) due for release in the coming year.

The California Digital Library, in partnership with the University of California campus libraries, supports and encourages open access publishing initiatives within the UC system through its eScholarship publishing and institutional repository platform. eScholarship provides a suite of open access, scholarly publishing services and research tools that enable departments, research units, publishing programs, and individual scholars associated with the University of California to have direct control over the creation and dissemination of the full range of their scholarship. Home to 45 peer-reviewed journals (http://escholarship.org/uc/search?smode=browse;browse-journal=aa), eScholarship has recently transitioned to OJS as its journal management and submission system and has integrated OJS with its pre/post-print, books and working papers repository, which contains more than 45,000 UC-affiliated publications. . . .

PKP is dedicated to improving the scholarly and public quality of research. With more than 11,500 installations of Open Journal Systems (OJS); Open Conference Systems (OCS); and Open Harvester Systems (OHS) around the world, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) has proven that open source software can be a game changer in scholarly publishing.

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Nancy Pontika has released her doctoral dissertation, "The Influence of the National Institutes of Health Public-Access Policy on the Publishing Habits of Principal Investigators."

Here's an excerpt:

The NIH public-access policy did not cause either an increase in the PIs' open-access awareness or a change in their publishing habits. The open-access advocates were supporters of the immediate free access to scientific information before the policy and provided their manuscripts free-of-cost before the policy’s mandate. The non-open-access advocates choose their publications based on quality criteria such as the journal’s prestige, impact factor, speed of publication and the attracted audience, while the article’s open-access availability is considered to be a plus. Furthermore, since a large number of journals comply with the NIH-policy, the participants did not have to change their publishing habits.

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

The Research Information Network has released Access to Scholarly Content: Gaps and Barriers.

Here's an excerpt:

The overall aim of this study is to investigate and quantify the extent to which members of different communities in the UK can gain ready access to formally-published scholarly literature, in particular journal articles and conference proceedings. . . .

Much of the information presented here is based on an online survey of researchers and knowledge workers from UK universities and colleges, medical schools and health providers, industry and commerce, and research institutes. . . .

Other information in this report comes from a detailed analysis of the literature and secondary data analysis of the Labour Force Survey in an attempt to quantify the size of the UK professional knowledge worker sector.

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

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has released public comments to the "Request for Information: Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting from Federally Funded Research."

Here is a selection of comments:

Publishers

• ACS Publications
• American Psychiatric Publishing
• Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
• Elsevier
• John Wiley & Sons
• Oxford University Press
• The Publishers Association
• SAGE Publishing
• Springer Science + Business Media
• Taylor & Francis
• Wolters Kluwer Health Ltd (UK)

Scholarly Professional Associations

• Acoustical Society of America
• American Anthropological Association
• American Association for Cancer Research
• American Association for Dental Research
• American Association for the Advancement of Science
• The American Association of Immunologists
• American Association of Petroleum Geologists
• American Association of Physicists in Medicine
• American Astronomical Society
• American Educational Research Association
• American Geophysical Union
• American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
• American Institute of Biological Sciences
• American Institute of Physics
• American Mathematical Society
• American Physical Society
• American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
• The American Society for Cell Biology
• American Society for Investigative Pathology
• American Society for Nutrition
• American Society of Plant Biologists
• American Society for Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics
• American Society of Hematology
• The American Society of Human Genetics
• American Physiological Society
• American Psychological Association
• American Sociological Association
• Archaeological Institute of America
• The Association for Research in Vision and Ophtamology
• Botanical Society of America
• Ecological Society of America
• Genetics Society of America
• The Linnean Society of London
• The Optical Society of America
• Phycological Society of America
• Poultry Science Association
• Protein Society
• SEPM Society for Sedimentary Geology
• Society for Conservation Biology
• Zoological Society of London

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

The European Commission has released the Online Survey on Scientific Information in the Digital Age.

Here's an excerpt:

Respondents were asked if there is no access problem to scientific publications in Europe: 84 % disagreed or disagreed strongly with the statement. The high prices of journals/subscriptions (89%) and limited library budgets (85%) were signalled as the most important barriers to accessing scientific publications. More than 1,000 respondents (90%) supported the idea that publications resulting from publicly funded research should, as a matter of principle, be in open access (OA) mode. An even higher number of respondents (91%) agreed or agreed strongly that OA increased access to and dissemination of scientific publications. Self-archiving ("green OA") or a combination of self-archiving and OA publishing ("gold OA") were identified as the preferred ways that public research policy should facilitate in order to increase the number and share of scientific publications available in OA. Respondents were asked, in the case of self-archiving ("green OA"), what the desirable embargo period is (period of time during which publication is not yet open access): a six-month period was favoured by 56% of respondents (although 25% disagree with this option).

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

The Faculty of 1000 has announced that it will launch its F1000 Research open access publishing program later this year.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement :

F1000 Research will diverge from traditional journal publishing as follows:

1. Immediate publication (beyond an initial sanity check) upon submitting to the repository. . . .
2. Open, post-publication peer review. . . .
3. Revisioning of work. . . .
4. Raw data repository. . . .
5. "Article" format is not predefined. . . .
6. "Article" content is not predefined. . . .

Many questions remain as F1000 Research is fine-tuned to break new ground in scholarly publishing.

• How much formal refereeing is required?
• What is an article amendment versus an update?
• What incentives are required to encourage post-publication refereeing, author response and revisions, and sharing of raw but template data?
• What author fees are appropriate for the different types of content?

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

A petition for the Obama administration to oppose the Research Works Act (H.R. 3699) is up at the White House's We the People website.

Here's an excerpt:

HR 3699, the Research Works Act will be detrimental to the free flow of scientific information that was created using Federal funds. It is an attempt to put federally funded scientific information behind pay-walls, and confer the ownership of the information to a private entity. This is an affront to open government and open access to information created using public funds.

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

Ten library, publishing, and advocacy organizations have opposed the Research Works Act in a letter sent to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Here's an excerpt:

We fully respect copyright law and the protection it affords content creators, owners, and users. The NIH Public Access Policy operates fully within current U.S. Copyright law as articles reporting on NIH funded research are copyrightable, and the copyright belongs to the author. The NIH Policy requires only the grant of a non-exclusive license to NIH, fully consistent with federal policies such as Circular A-110 and Circular A-102. The author is free to transfer some or all of the exclusive rights under copyright to a journal publisher or to assign these anywhere they so choose—a freedom crucial to the authors of scientific articles, who rightly want to determine where and how their work is distributed.

Under H.R. 3699, authors of articles reporting on federally funded research would face a new restriction. The proposed bill requires authors to seek the permission of a publisher before their work can be distributed through an online, networked government channel such as NIH’s PubMed Central, even if they themselves—as the author of the work and the relevant rights holder—have already consented to do so, potentially limiting the authors ability to distribute their work as widely as they may wish.

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

The European Commission has released Survey on Open Access in FP7

Here's an excerpt:

In May 2011, the Commission identified the 811 projects designated at the time with Special Clause 39 in their grant agreement and sent a questionnaire to all project coordinators in order to collect feedback on experiences of both the implementation of the pilot and the reimbursement of open access publishing costs. The objective was to provide input for the future of the open access policy and practices in Horizon 2020, which is the future EU framework programme for research and innovation, and for the preparation of a communication from the Commission and a recommendation to Member States on scientific publications in the digital age.

The online questionnaire was open between 29 June and 26 August 2011 and enabled the collection of a total of 194 responses (success rate: 24 %). Many respondents used the possibility to answer ‘no opinion’ to some questions, but this constitutes valuable information. The final report was prepared in October/November 2011. Annexes include tables of statistical results in each FP7 research area.

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Heather Morrison has released a draft of her doctoral thesis Freedom for Scholarship in the Internet Age.

Here's an excerpt:

The purpose of this thesis is to further the work of transitioning to an open access scholarly communication system designed to support and prioritize scholarship and the public good rather than profit. The method will involve analysis of key underlying historical trends in society and how they impact scholarly communication, as well as original empirical work on the growth of open access, economic analysis to inform economic aspects of transition, and a case study of scholarly communication in the discipline of communication.

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