Marnix van Berchum and Annemiek van der Kuil have released Results of the SOAP Survey: A First Overview of the Dutch Situation.

Here's an excerpt:

Based on the results above, the following conclusions can be made on the "Dutch situation"

• A high number of researchers thinks the publishing of Open Access articles is beneficial to their discipline (90%)
• Main reasons why Open Access publishing is beneficial are the scientific community benefit and benefit for outside the scientific community ("public good")
• Quality, impact and prestige are still very important in making choices on Open Access publishing in journals
• Publication fees for Open Access articles are for a large part covered by the institutions (40%)
• There is no strong feeling on how easy or difficult it is to obtain funding

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EIFL has released Results of the SOAP Survey: A Preliminary Overview of the Situation in EIFL Partner Countries.

Here's an excerpt:

The SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) project has run a large-scale survey of the attitudes of researchers on, and the experiences with, open access publishing. In the SOAP Symposium on 13 January 2011 in Berlin, the results of the SOAP Survey were made publicly available. "Highlights from the SOAP project survey. What Scientists Think about Open Access Publishing" article is available in arXiv:1101.5260v2 presenting preliminary analysis of the survey responses. To allow a maximal re-use of the information collected by this survey, the data were released under a CC0 waiver, so to allow libraries, publishers, funding agencies and academics to further analyse risks and opportunities, drivers and barriers, in the transition to open access publishing. . . .

We followed the approach of the SURFfoundation and made the first overview of the SOAP survey results, tailored to the situation in 11 EIFL partner countries: Bulgaria, China, Egypt, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, Thailand and Ukraine.

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Authors who publish in many Physical Review journals now have the option to pay an article-processing fee in order to have their articles published as open access articles under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-By License). Two Physical Review journals (Physical Review Special Topics—Accelerators and Beams and Physical Review Special Topics—Physics Education Research) have been fully converted to open access under the CC-By License. The APS announced a new open access journal in January, Physical Review X.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The new article-processing charges, which will cover all costs and provide a sustainable funding model, have been set at $1700 for papers in the Physical Review and $2700 for those in Physical Review Letters. The resulting open access articles will appear alongside and mixed in with subscription-funded articles, converting these journals into "hybrid" open access journals.

"The most selective of our journals must have higher article-processing charges for their open access articles," said Gene Sprouse, APS Editor in Chief. "Physical Review accepts about 60% of articles submitted and Physical Review Letters roughly 25%, so the costs are higher than in less selective journals."

Revenue from the article-processing charges will decrease the need for subscription income and help to keep the APS subscription price-per-article among the lowest of any physics journals. "We'd like to reduce the pressure on library subscriptions, while opening access more widely. Article-processing charges are a means to accomplish both," said Joseph Serene, APS Treasurer/Publisher.

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Richard A. Danner, Kelly Leong, and Wayne V. Miller have published "The Durham Statement Two Years Later: Open Access in the Law School Journal Environment" in the latest issue of the Law Library Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

The Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship, drafted by a group of academic law library directors, was promulgated in February 2009. It calls for two things: (1) open access publication of law school–published journals; and (2) an end to print publication of law journals, coupled with a commitment to keeping the electronic versions available in "stable, open, digital formats." The two years since the Statement was issued have seen increased publication of law journals in openly available electronic formats, but little movement toward all-electronic publication. This article discusses the issues raised by the Durham Statement, the current state of law journal publishing, and directions forward.

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The European Public Sector Information (PSI) Platform has released Creative Commons and Public Sector Information: Flexible Tools to Support PSI Creators and Re-Users.

Here's an excerpt:

Public sector information (PSI) is meant for wide re-use, but this information will only achieve maximum possible impact if users understand how they may use it. Creative Commons tools, which signify availability for re-use to users and require attribution to the releasing authority, are ideal tools for the sharing of public sector information. There is also increasing interest in open licenses and other tools to share publicly funded information, data, and content, including various kinds of cultural resources, educational materials, and research findings; Creative Commons tools are applicable here and recommended for these purposes too.

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The Higher Education Funding Council for England has released the HEFCE Review of JISC.

Here's an excerpt from the recommendations:

• JISC activity should be focused on achieving a large impact:

• Activities need to be clearly linked to the sectors’ priorities
• JISC should offer sector leadership through "routes to best practice," wherever such practice resides
• Research and development activity should focus on horizon-scanning and thought leadership
• Services and projects should be rationalised, with a view to significantly reducing their number

• JISC should be funded through a combination of grants and subscriptions/user charges

• It should become a separate legal entity and the implications of this for the four companies should be reviewed

• Governance arrangements should be clarified, to ensure that the Board takes clear overall strategic control

• The internal structure should be clarified and simplified, to improve efficiency and control

• A plan for the proposed internal structure and operations should estimate the savings to be achieved

• There should be discussions between JISC, the funders, sector representatives and other bodies, to determine an overall funding strategy for ICT in the HE and FE sectors.

Read more about it at "Questions and Answers—HEFCE's Review of JISC."

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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.

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Europeana has launched the Europeana Libraries Project.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Work begins this week to add over 5 million digital objects, ranging from Spanish civil war photographs and handwritten letters from philosopher Immanuel Kant, to Europeana from 19 of Europe's leading research and university libraries.

The project is called Europeana Libraries and it will put many of these treasures online for the first time. It will also add extensive collections from Google Books, theses, dissertations and open-access journal articles to the 15 million items amassed in Europeana to date. Providers include some of Europe's most prestigious universities and research institutes, including the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library, Trinity College Dublin and Lund University.

The assembled objects span centuries of European history. Manuscripts from Serbia date back as far as 1206 and relate to the Ottoman Empire's European territories. Written in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and Persian, they are being digitised by the University Library of Belgrade. There will also be significant film additions. Footage of talks from 10 Nobel prize winners will be contributed by the University of Vienna and the Wellcome Trust Library in London will add 900 clips from medical science films produced over the past 100 years.

Europeana Libraries is notable not only for the content it will make available online but also because this project brings together national, research and university libraries under one umbrella, to make their materials available via Europeana.

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The EIFL-OA advocacy program has released Report on the Implementation of Open Content Licenses in Developing and Transition Countries.

Here's an excerpt:

The survey attempted to gather information from a broad spectrum of research institutions in developing and transition countries in order to get a better understanding of the current state of the implementation of open content licenses. We looked at the web sites of 2,489 open access journals and 357 open access repositories from EIFL network countries. And this report highlights the best practices in using open content licenses by open access journals and open access repositories in developing and transition countries.

Some general findings of the survey:

Using open content licenses by open access journals:

• We identified 556 open access journals that are licensed under open content licenses.
• There are four types of Creative Commons licenses, which are used – the most liberal Creative Commons Attribution license, Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial license, Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike license and the most restrictive Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivative Works license.
• 94% of the access journals we surveyed are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution license (524 open access journals in Armenia, Bulgaria, China, Egypt, Lithuania, Macedonia, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, South Africa and Thailand).
• Nine open access journals in China, Russia and South Africa are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial license.
• Three open access journals in Ghana, Nigeria and Ukraine are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike license.
• And twenty open access journals in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Estonia, Serbia, South Africa, Thailand and Ukraine are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivative Works license.

Using open content licenses by open access repositories:

• We identified nine open access repositories that are licensed under open content licenses.
• A repository of open educational materials in South Africa is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution license
• A repository of open educational materials in Kenya is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
• One repository in China, two repositories in Poland and two repositories in Thailand are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share Alike license.
• A repository in South Africa is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
• A repository hosted in Argentina is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works license.
• Some repositories in Botswana, Poland and South Africa recommend the depositors to use Creative Commons licenses. As a result a number of publications in these repositories are licensed under Creative Commons licenses.

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Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory has adopted an open access resolution.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Columbia University is joining a growing movement among universities and research institutions to make scholarly research available free to the public online. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is the first program at the university to adopt an open access resolution, which calls for faculty and other researchers to post their scientific papers in online repositories such as Columbia's Academic Commons.

The resolution was adopted by a unanimous vote of Lamont-Doherty's Executive Committee on Dec. 22, 2010, and will be effective on March 1. Similar resolutions have been adopted at Harvard, MIT, Duke, Stanford, and many other universities in the U.S. and several foreign countries.

Lamont-Doherty researchers typically publish scores of articles annually in many of the leading scientific journals. One of the challenges for scientific research, however, is that articles are often available only to researchers at universities and other organizations that pay substantial subscription fees. By posting articles in an open-access repository, authors are able to make their works freely and widely accessible to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. . . .

In addition to increasing the availability of research, the resolution has implications for agreements between authors and publishers regarding the copyrights of the individual articles. According to Dr. Kenneth Crews, director of Columbia's Copyright Advisory Office, the resolution underscores the connection between publication agreements and the ability to use and share one's own scholarly works. "While nothing in the resolution will upend publication conventions, the movement toward open access is raising awareness of the need to draft better agreements and for authors to be good stewards of their own copyrights," he observed. . . .

Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is a key component of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and is one of the world's leading research centers seeking fundamental knowledge about the origin, evolution and future of the natural world. More than 300 research scientists and students study the planet from its deepest interior to the outer reaches of its atmosphere, on every continent and in every ocean. From global climate change to earthquakes, volcanoes, nonrenewable resources, environmental hazards and beyond, observatory scientists provide a rational basis for the difficult choices facing humankind. For more on Lamont's research, visit the web site at http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/.

John Wiley & Sons has launched Wiley Open Access.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Wiley Open Access will provide authors wishing to publish their research outcomes in an open access journal with a range of new high quality publications which meet the requirements of funding organizations and institutions where these apply. . . .

The new journals are being launched in collaboration with a group of international professional and scholarly societies with which Wiley currently partners.  Each journal will appoint an Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Board responsible for ensuring that all articles are rigorously peer-reviewed, and each journal will be offered with the full functionality of Wiley Online Library.

The new Wiley Open Access journal Brain and Behavior will publish open access research across neurology, neuroscience, psychiatry and psychology.  Brain and Behavior’s newly appointed Editor-in-Chief, Andrei V. Alexandrov, Professor of Neurology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, comments:

"With the launch of Brain and Behavior, the Editorial Board and I, along with the support of many international societies, will offer the research community a high quality peer-reviewed journal that meets the needs of those authors who wish to publish their work in an open access environment. I am delighted to be working with Wiley to deliver this important new service."

Professor Allen Moore, University of Exeter and newly appointed Editor-in-Chief of Ecology and Evolution comments:

"I am excited to be involved with this new open access journals initiative.  Ecology and Evolution will deliver rapid decisions and fast publication of research in all areas of ecology, evolution and conservation science.  By working in collaboration with leading societies to deliver open access to all, this new journal offers authors an ideal place to publish their work quickly to the broadest possible audience." . . .

Wiley Open Access journals will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.  A publication fee will be payable by authors on acceptance of their articles.  Wiley will introduce a range of new payment schemes to enable academic and research institutions, funders, societies, and corporations to actively support their researchers and members who wish to publish in Wiley Open Access journals. 

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Suenje Dallmeier-Tiessen et al. have self-archived "Highlights from the SOAP Project Survey. What Scientists Think about Open Access Publishing" in arXiv.org.

Here's an excerpt:

The SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) project has run a large-scale survey of the attitudes of researchers on, and the experiences with, open access publishing. Around forty thousands answers were collected across disciplines and around the world, showing an overwhelming support for the idea of open access, while highlighting funding and (perceived) quality as the main barriers to publishing in open access journals. This article serves as an introduction to the survey and presents this and other highlights from a preliminary analysis of the survey responses. To allow a maximal re-use of the information collected by this survey, the data are hereby released under a CC0 waiver, so to allow libraries, publishers, funding agencies and academics to further analyse risks and opportunities, drivers and barriers, in the transition to open access publishing.

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