Keiko Kurata, Tomoko Morioka, Keiko Yokoi, and Mamiko Matsubayash have published the "Remarkable Growth of Open Access in the Biomedical Field: Analysis of PubMed Articles from 2006 to 2010" in PLOS One.

Here's an excerpt:

This study clarifies the trends observed in open access (OA) in the biomedical field between 2006 and 2010, and explores the possible explanations for the differences in OA rates revealed in recent surveys. . . .

OA articles in the biomedical field have more than a 50% share. OA has been achieved through OAJs. The reason why the OA rates in our surveys are different from those in recent surveys seems to be the difference in sampling methods and verification procedures.

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David Solomon has published "Types of Open Access Publishers in Scopus" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

This study assessed characteristics of publishers who published 2010 open access (OA) journals indexed in Scopus. Publishers were categorized into six types; professional, society, university, scholar/researcher, government, and other organizations. Type of publisher was broken down by number of journals/articles published in 2010, funding model, location, discipline and whether the journal was born or converted to OA. Universities and societies accounted for 50% of the journals and 43% of the articles published. Professional publisher accounted for a third of the journals and 42% of the articles. With the exception of professional and scholar/researcher publishers, most journals were originally subscription journals that made at least their digital version freely available. Arts, humanities and social science journals are largely published by societies and universities outside the major publishing countries. Professional OA publishing is most common in biomedicine, mathematics, the sciences and engineering. Approximately a quarter of the journals are hosted on national/international platforms, in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia largely published by universities and societies without the need for publishing fees. This type of collaboration between governments, universities and/or societies may be an effective means of expanding open access publications.

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The University of Michigan Press has launched Maize Books, which will offer an open access publishing option.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The University of Michigan Press, a unit of Michigan Publishing, is committed to producing and disseminating high-quality scholarship. As part of that commitment, we're proud to announce Maize Books, a new Michigan Publishing imprint. This imprint represents a lean, responsive model for publishing scholarly and creative works. We understand that scholarship can take many forms, and that traditional academic publishers arena't always interested in items that don't fit the typical categories of a "monograph" or a "journal article." . . .

The University of Michigan Press has the tools and the expertise to help you distribute your scholarship, regardless of its form, and we offer methods to make your work discoverable, accessible, and preservable for the long term. In keeping with our mission to explore new forms of scholarly publishing, Maize Books titles will be evaluated by the acquiring editors and Editorial Director of the University of Michigan Press. They will undergo peer review when desirable, including experimental forms of peer review designed to suit the requirements of individual publications.

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The Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health has adopted an open access policy.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

In accordance with their open access resolution, Mailman School researchers commit to having their published scholarly articles included in Columbia's digital repository, Academic Commons, where content is freely available to the public, or in another repository, such as the National Institutes of Health's PubMed Central, that makes the research publicly available. . . .

The resolution covers all scholarly journal articles as of May 1. There is an opt-out feature built into the resolution, permitting the researcher to request that an article that appears in a journal that insists on exclusivity not have that piece included in the repository.

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Walt Crawford has published "Hot Times for Open Access" in the latest issue of Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large.

Here's an excerpt:

These are hot times for open access. Maybe not a tipping point, certainly not where everything will be in a couple of years, but more action—and even more progress—than I'd seen in a while.

What we have here is a hybrid: part catching up with three vibrant months in the development of OA, part supplemental material for my OA precon-ference in Vancouver, Washington. This issue ap-pears slightly after that preconference—but attendees got early access to it. That hybrid nature may affect the organization, always sketchy in any case. It also means a few things are noted that wouldn't qualify as new material.

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Science Europe has released "Science Europe Position Statement: Principles on the Transition to Open Access to Research Publications." Science Europe is an "association of 51 European national research organisations."

Here's an excerpt:

Therefore the Science Europe Member Organisations:

• will continue to support any valid approaches to achieve Open Access, including those commonly referred to as the "green" and "gold" routes; . . . .
• stress that research publications should either be published in an Open Access journal or be deposited as soon as possible in a repository, and made available in Open Access in all cases no later than six months following first publication. In Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, the delay may need to be longer than six months but must be no more than 12 months; . . .
• require that funding of Open Access publication fees is part of a transparent cost structure, incorporating a clear picture of publishers' service costs;. . . .
• stress that the hybrid model, as currently defined and implemented by publishers, is not a working and viable pathway to Open Access. Any model for transition to Open Access supported by Science Europe Member Organisations must prevent "double dipping" and increase cost transparency;

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The UK Parliament has released an uncorrected transcript of "House of Commons Oral Evidence Taken before the Business, Innovation And Skills Committee Open Access."

Here's an excerpt (below comments by Alicia Wise, Director of Universal Access, Reed Elsevier):

With the Government's policy that we are all implementing, we will see an increase in the amount of hybrid open-access publishing done at scale. For the open-access components of that hybrid publishing, it is clear that the costs are sustainable through the article-publishing charges. For the subscription part of those titles, the costs continue to need to be covered through the subscription model. If the content is freely available too quickly, there will be no need for libraries to continue to pay those subscription costs. While we have not seen clear evidence of an undermining or cancellation of subscriptions at this point, there is evidence, such as that Audrey referred to, that librarians are watching this space very closely and are very mindful of it. We have also seen that where content is deposited at scale, there can be an erosion of transactional revenues-the pay-per-view business model. Those are very modest components of most of our revenue streams, but again it is a potential early-warning sign.

See also the video of the session.

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The Association of American Universities, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, and the Association of Research Libraries have released "Expanded Public Access: A New Era with New Challenges."

Here's an excerpt:

During a short six-month period, agencies will develop draft plans for how this long-term preservation and access will occur ["Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research"]. Research universities have a significant stake in the plans the Director ultimately approves—universities are responsible to federal research funding agencies for compliance with the regulations attendant to the grants received by their researchers. If we are faced with different deposit requirements for manuscripts and data by each of the 15 and possibly more agencies subject to the directive, the compliance bill could be very expensive and might not reflect the interests of the academy. Given that PubMed Central has established a useful model for deposit of and access to research manuscripts, we can hope that the example of good practice established by them will be drawn upon by other funding agencies as they establish their own public access policies, and that the resultant products interconnect across and between agencies and external stakeholders that promote effective, seamless public access.

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Bo-Christer Björk has published "Open Access—Are the Barriers to Change Receding?" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

The move from subscription only publishing of scholarly articles to open access has been much slower than previously anticipated by many Open Access (OA) advocates. Despite the many advantages that OA offers, this particular branch of E-commerce imposes several formidable barriers to change. A framework conceptualizing these barriers that was developed over a decade ago was revisited to see if the significance of these barriers has changed. Nowadays, building the IT infrastructure, support from indexing services and finding a sustainable business model are no longer important barriers. For gold OA publishing the academic reward system is still a major obstacle, whereas more marketing and critical mass is needed for both gold OA and green OA. Green OA self-archiving is still also strongly affected by what subscription publishers allow. In the overall balance the situation has nevertheless improved significantly.

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ACRL has made the entire College & Research Libraries archive freely available.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

"Digitizing the archives of the premier research journal for academic librarianship provides a tremendous new asset for our profession," said ACRL President Steven J. Bell of Temple University. "Creating and sharing this rich resource demonstrates ACRL's ongoing commitment to promote and deliver on the promise of open access. It is a treasure trove of content where the academic librarians of today and tomorrow will delve into our history, understand how we evolved and make new discoveries that could stimulate groundbreaking research and innovation of real benefit to academic librarianship."

C&RL archival contents from 1939 through 1996 were digitized through the generous volunteer efforts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library. The library's Digital Content Creation department performed scanning and metadata creation for the approximately 340 back file issues of the journal in 2011 and 2012. The digitized files were added to the journal's online presence with the financial assistance of the ACRL Friends Fund.

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ACRL has released "Keep the Change: Clusters of Faculty Opinion on Open Access" as part of the ACRL 2013 Proceedings.

Here's an excerpt:

In this Q study, factor analysis revealed three distinct factors that outlined clusters of faculty opinions about open access. The authors described these factors as "Evangelists," "Pragmatists," and"Traditionalists." Each of these factors represents a group of faculty on Miami University's Oxford campus who hold specific attitudes and opinions regarding open access. Implications for future library initiatives implementing open access programs, services, and policies are discussed, as are directions for additional research.

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Arthur Sale has self-archived "Recent Developments in Open Access" in UTAS ePrints.

Here's an excerpt:

Open Access to the world's research literature has been an obvious development since the emergence of the Internet. To everyone, it appears clear that the costs of disseminating research could drop dramatically. Yet, progress in achieving it is strangely slow. This paper explores recent developments in open access, including:

• The recent Australian NH&MRC and ARC mandates for open access deposit in university repositories, and how universities are responding to them
• The UK&'s Finch Report, and Lord Krebs&' Committee Report
• Recent USA and German developments
• Gradual growth in open access journals, and the challenge for universities and their libraries of transferring reader-side fees (subscriptions) to author-side fees (publication charges)
• The emergence of submission fees so that highly selective journals need not transfer all the costs of rejections onto successful articles
• Fake conferences and journals which exist only to extract attendance or publication fees
• Newer publishing models
• The recent emergence of a third route to open access based on social networking.

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