Category: Publishing

"Recent Developments in Open Access"

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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Sustainability of Open Access Services—Report Phase 3: The Collective Provision of Open Access Resources

SPARC has released Sustainability of Open Access Services—Report Phase 3: The Collective Provision of Open Access Resources.

Here's an excerpt:

This report is the third in a series which examines issues relating to the economic sustainability of critical infrastructure services that support the operation and growth of open-access dissemination of scholarly and scientific research. This report is intended to guide funders and project planners in constructing and coordinating collective funding models capable of supporting open-access infrastructure resources. The report:

  • reviews the fundamentals of robust sustainability modeling (Section 2);
  • outlines the economic and institutional issues that confront those seeking to sustain free infrastructure services and discusses the implications of free models for an initiative's ability to provide an optimal level of service (Section 3); and
  • identifies strategies for overcoming institutional free ridership in the design of funding models and describes practical mechanisms for coordinating the collective provision of infrastructure services (Section 4).

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"The Determinants of Open Access Publishing: Survey Evidence from Germany"

Thomas Eger, Marc Scheufen, and Daniel Meierrieks have self-archived "The Determinants of Open Access Publishing: Survey Evidence from Germany" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

We discuss the results of a survey conducted in fall 2012 and covering 2,151 researchers in Germany. We show that there are significant differences between the scientific disciplines with respect to researcher's awareness of and experience with both open access (OA) journals and self-archiving. Our results reveal that the relevance of OA within a discipline may explain why researchers from particular disciplines do (not) publish OA. Besides, several aspects like copyright law, age, profession or the inherent reward system of a discipline play a role. As a consequence, the paper emphasizes that a "one-size-fits-all" approach as promoted by most recent policy approaches is little promising for providing an effective framework for shaping the future of scholarly publishing.

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Open Monograph Press, Release 1.0

The Public Knowledge Project has released the Open Monograph Press, Release 1.0.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

OMP is designed to assist university presses, learned societies, and scholar-publishers interested in publishing scholarly books in print-on-demand and multiple electronic formats, whether on an open access or purchase basis. OMP is intended to:

  • Handle edited volumes, with different authors for each chapter;
  • Involve editors, authors, reviewers, designers, indexers, and others in book production;
  • See submission through multiple rounds of both internal and external reviews;
  • Utilize industry standard ONIX for bookseller metadata requirements (e.g., Amazon);
  • Create document libraries for submissions, recording contracts, permissions, etc.;
  • Handle thumbnail covers in Catalog, as well as Spotlight features; and
  • Enable Series Editors to see books through review to publication.

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Intersections of Scholarly Communication and Information Literacy: Creating Strategic Collaborations for a Changing Academic Environment

The the Association of College & Research Libraries has released Intersections of Scholarly Communication and Information Literacy: Creating Strategic Collaborations for a Changing Academic Environment.

Here's an excerpt:

In this paper, we identify three intersections between information literacy and scholarly communications that have developed as a result of the effects of the digital age on scholarly publishing and on teaching information research skills:

  1. ) economics of the distribution of scholarship (including access to scholarship, the changing nature of scholarly publishing, and the education of students to be knowledgeable content consumers and content creators);
  2. ) digital literacies (including teaching new technologies and rights issues, and the emergence of multiple types of non-textual content);
  3. ) our changing roles (including the imperative to contribute to the building of new infrastructures for scholarship, and deep involvement with creative approaches to teaching).

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University of Rhode Island Adopts Open Access Policy

The University of Rhode Island has adopted an open access policy.

This year, Amherst College, the College of Wooster, Connecticut College, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro Library Faculty, and Wellesley College have all adopted open access policies.

(See Peter Suber's Google+ announcements of these policies.)

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Entire Editorial Board of Journal of Library Administration Resigns

There have been several reports stating that the editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration has resigned. The Journal of Library Administration is published by Taylor & Francis, which publishes a number of library and information science journals.

Here's an excerpt from Brian Mathews's "So I'm Editing This Journal Issue and . . ." in which he quotes an e-mail from Damon Jaggars:

"The Board believes that the licensing terms in the Taylor & Francis author agreement are too restrictive and out-of-step with the expectations of authors in the LIS community."

"A large and growing number of current and potential authors to JLA have pushed back on the licensing terms included in the Taylor & Francis author agreement. Several authors have refused to publish with the journal under the current licensing terms."

"Authors find the author agreement unclear and too restrictive and have repeatedly requested some form of Creative Commons license in its place."

"After much discussion, the only alternative presented by Taylor & Francis tied a less restrictive license to a $2995 per article fee to be paid by the author. As you know, this is not a viable licensing option for authors from the LIS community who are generally not conducting research under large grants."

"Thus, the Board came to the conclusion that it is not possible to produce a quality journal under the current licensing terms offered by Taylor & Francis and chose to collectively resign."

The Editorial Board members are:

Damon Jaggars (Editor)
Kristin Antelman
Chris Bourg
Lisa German
Fred M. Heath
Paula T. Kaufman
Deanna B. Marcum
Sarah C. Michalak
James G. Neal
Ann J. Wolpert
Makoto Nakamoto
Stephen Town

Read more about it at "Editorial Board Resigns from T&F Journal to Protest Restrictive Licensing," "The Journal of Library Administration," and "My Short Stint on the JLA Editorial Board."

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"Beyond TEI: Returning the Text to the Reader"

Christian Wittern has published "Beyond TEI: Returning the Text to the Reader" in the latest issue of the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative.

Here's an excerpt:

Much research and effort has been invested in creating a versatile format for digital texts and the TEI is now widely used in many communities. Much less consolidated thought has been spend to publish and distribute digital texts in ways that are most useful to scholars. To remedy this situation, this paper proposes new, additional publication forms for digital texts through distributed version control systems. This will allow publication and maintainence of several different versions of a text. In some respects, this will be similar to publishing a college or paperback edition of the text established in a critical edition. In addition to this, the user of a text published through such a system can subscribe to later changes or corrections of an edition. The architectural model proposed in this paper tries to contribute to a fundamental protocol that could form the base for applications serving the long-term needs of research and scholarship.

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eBook Use and Acceptance in an Undergraduate Institution

Springer has released eBook Use and Acceptance in an Undergraduate Institution.

Here's an excerpt :

The survey finds high use of eBooks at Wellesley College, with 70% of the respondents indicating they have used eBooks. Other recent international surveys of eBook use have shown 52-64% of students or faculty responding that they have used eBooks (Figure 10). Within the general U.S. population 21% of adults reported having used eBooks in 2011. Some eBook use by Wellesley students and faculty may be non-academic, leisure reading, but half of Wellesley's eBook users report having used eBooks from the Wellesley College Library's collection.

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"F1000 Recommendations as a New Data Source for Research Evaluation: A Comparison with Citations"

Ludo Waltman and Rodrigo Costas have self-archived "F1000 Recommendations as a New Data Source for Research Evaluation: A Comparison with Citations" in arXiv.org.

Here's an excerpt:

F1000 is a post-publication peer review service for biological and medical research. F1000 aims to recommend important publications in the biomedical literature, and from this perspective F1000 could be an interesting tool for research evaluation. By linking the complete database of F1000 recommendations to the Web of Science bibliographic database, we are able to make a comprehensive comparison between F1000 recommendations and citations. We find that about 2% of the publications in the biomedical literature receive at least one F1000 recommendation. Recommended publications on average receive 1.30 recommendations, and over 90% of the recommendations are given within half a year after a publication has appeared. There turns out to be a clear correlation between F1000 recommendations and citations. However, the correlation is relatively weak, at least weaker than the correlation between journal impact and citations.

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"SSRN and Law Journals—Rivals or Allies?"

Ian Ramsay has self-archived "SSRN and Law Journals—Rivals or Allies?" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

The author identifies and evaluates the respective merits of publication in law journals and publication on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN)—the largest open access repository for legal scholarship. This evaluation leads to the conclusion that at this stage of the evolution of law journals and SSRN, there are advantages in authors publishing both in journals and on SSRN. However, publication on SSRN can have particular advantages for authors in smaller countries.

| Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications | Digital Scholarship |

De Gruyter Adopts Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND License for Open Access Content

De Gruyter has adopted the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license for its open access content.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Effective immediately De Gruyter and Versita will be publishing all Open Access content under the uniform application of Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. This means that publications may be copied, disseminated, and otherwise made public by users under the following conditions:

  • The name of the author/copyright owner must be mentioned in the manner requested by the author/copyright owner.
  • The publication and its content may not be used in its Open Access format for commercial purposes.
  • The publication and its content may not be edited, modified, or otherwise changed. . . .

In 2012 De Gruyter and Versita published over 10,000 Open Access articles in some 300 journals. Since 2009 a large number of books and book chapters have also been published under the Open Access standard.

| A Look Back at 22 Years as an Open Access Publisher | Digital Scholarship |

Open Access: Presentations from the Academy of Social Sciences’ Implementing Finch Conference Published

The Academy of Social Sciences has released a Professional Briefings issue that contains the presentations from its two-day Implementing Finch conference.

Here's an excerpt:

Moving to the recommendations, Dame Janet wished to correct some misunderstandings. The main recommendation was for a mixed economy including both the 'author pays' and subscription models of publishing. The report did not recommend a rapid move to Gold open access ('author pays') and anticipated a mixed economy for the foreseeable future. However the report did recommend that the policy direction should be set towards Gold open access and envisaged the balance between the two models of publishing would shift over time.

| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography (paperback, PDF file, and XHTML website; over 1,100 entries) | Digital Scholarship |

EFF and Public Knowlege’s Comments on Copyright Office’s Orphan Works Inquiry

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge have released their comments on the Notice of Inquiry by the Copyright Office for comments regarding orphan works, Docket No. 2012-12.

Here's an excerpt:

A range of options, none of them exclusive, can alleviate the problems created by the prevalence of orphan works. Even in the absence of more systemic change that can stem the growing number of works whose copyright information disappears into obscurity, the application of fair use and legislative work on damages reduction (both for orphan works specifically and for good faith fair uses generally) can allow a variety of users to bring a variety of works to the public. Mass digitization projects promise to be a part of that process, and should be able to proceed in many cases under current law. However, more ambitious plans for broader, publicly available MDPs could be incentivized to serve the public interest with additional damages limitations, attended by public interest conditions. We

| Google Books Bibliography (XHTML website; over 320 entries) | Digital Scholarship |

"Open Access, Library and Publisher Competition, and the Evolution of General Commerce"

Andrew Odlyzko has self-archived "Open Access, Library and Publisher Competition, and the Evolution of General Commerce."

Here's an excerpt:

Discussions of the economics of scholarly communication are usually devoted to Open Access, rising journal prices, publisher profits, and boycotts. That ignores what seems a much more important development in this market. Publishers, through the oft-reviled "Big Deal" packages, are providing much greater and more egalitarian access to the journal literature, an approximation to true Open Access. In the process they are also marginalizing libraries, and obtaining a greater share of the resources going into scholarly communication. This is enabling a continuation of publisher profits as well as of what for decades has been called "unsustainable journal price escalation." It is also inhibiting the spread of Open Access, and potentially leading to an oligopoly of publishers controlling distribution through large-scale licensing.

| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography (paperback, PDF file, and XHTML website; over 1,100 entries) | Digital Scholarship |

Recommended Practices for Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials

NISO has released Recommended Practices for Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the National Federation for Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) have published a new Recommended Practice on Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials (NISO RP-15-2013). Supplemental materials are increasingly being added to journal articles, but until now there has been no recognized set of practices to guide in the selection, delivery, discovery, and preservation of these materials. To address this gap, NISO and NFAIS jointly sponsored an initiative to establish best practices that would provide guidance to publishers and authors for management of supplemental materials and would address related problems for librarians, abstracting and indexing services, and repository administrators. The Supplemental Materials project involved two teams working in tandem: one to address business practices and one to focus on technical issues. This new publication is the combined outcome of the two groups' work.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 ( paperback and PDF file; over 3,800 entries) | Digital Scholarship |

"The Authors Guild v. Hathitrust: A Way Forward for Digital Access to Neglected Works in Libraries"

James Aaron has self-archived "The Authors Guild v. Hathitrust: A Way Forward for Digital Access to Neglected Works in Libraries" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

This Comment begins by describing the HathiTrust Orphan Works Project and what it renames the neglected works problem. Next, it examines the legality of the project under current copyright law, focusing mainly on fair use under section 107, and concludes that it is unclear whether the project violates copyright law. Finally it analyzes whether this result fits the policy goals of copyright, and because it does not, proposes both legislative and judicial changes to copyright law to make it clear that in the proper circumstances, nonprofit, educational uses of neglected works do not violate copyright law.

| Google Books Bibliography (XHTML website; over 320 entries) | Digital Scholarship |

"Open-Sourcing the Global Academy: Aaron Swartz’s Legacy"

Rebecca Gould has self-archived "Open-Sourcing the Global Academy: Aaron Swartz's Legacy" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

This essay examines Swartz's Open Access vision, and traces the challenges he faced in carrying out his dream. Arguing that Open Access is the future of scholarship in the digital age, I outline concrete strategies for bringing Swartz's dream to fruition.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog | Digital Scholarship |

EBook Business Models: A Scorecard for Public Libraries

ALA's Digital Content and Libraries Working Group has released EBook Business Models: A Scorecard for Public Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

The Digital Content & Libraries Working Group (DCWG) began documenting and describing attributes of various licensing arrangements libraries may have with publishers in the August 2012 report Ebook Business Models for Public Libraries. Now we are pleased to share The Ebook Business Model Scorecard, which more fully examines the variables often seen in ebook license agreements or contracts. At the same time, the variables, when considered as a whole, can help libraries conceptualize licenses holistically instead of fixating on one aspect of a contract in isolation.

| Google Books Bibliography (XHTML website; over 320 entries) | Digital Scholarship |

"The State of Large-Publisher Bundles in 2012"

ARL has released a pre-publication version of "The State of Large-Publisher Bundles in 2012."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

In this article, authors Karla Strieb and Julia Blixrud report on the results of a recent survey of journal licenses in ARL member libraries. The authors conclude that there are "ongoing strains in libraries' relationships with publishers and in their ability to maintain electronic journal bundles in difficult financial times." They found that journal collections have become smaller and more tailored, and that stronger licensing language is needed in the clauses that are most important to research libraries. The authors note that licenses need to allow libraries to: make new uses of the licensed content, share information with peers about licensing terms, and rest assured that licensed content will be available in the future.

| Digital Scholarship's Digital/Print Books | Digital Scholarship |

"Open Access Versus Traditional Journal Pricing: Using a Simple ‘Platform Market’ Model to Understand Which Will Win (and Which Should)"

Mark J. McCabe, Christopher M. Snyder, and Anna Fagin have self-archived "Open Access Versus Traditional Journal Pricing: Using a Simple 'Platform Market' Model to Understand Which Will Win (and Which Should)" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt :

Economists have built a theory to understand markets in which, rather than selling directly to buyers, suppliers sell through a platform, which controls prices on both sides. The theory has been applied to understand markets ranging from telephony, to credit cards, to media. In this paper, we apply the theory to the market for scholarly journals, with the journal functioning as the platform between submitting authors and subscribing readers. Our goal is to understand the conditions under which a journal would prefer open access to traditional pricing and under which open access would be better for the scholarly community. Our new model captures much of the richness of the existing economic literature on journal pricing, and indeed adds some fresh insights, yet is simple enough to be accessible to a broad audience.

| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography (XHTML version) | Digital Scholarship |

"Cost-Effectiveness of Open Access Publications"

Jevin West, Theodore Bergstrom, and Carl T. Bergstrom have self-archived "Cost-Effectiveness of Open Access Publications" at eigenfactor.org.

Here's an excerpt:

Open access publishing has been proposed as one possible solution to the serials crisis—the rapidly growing subscription prices in scholarly journal publishing. However, open access publishing can present economic pitfalls as well, such as excessive publication charges. We discuss the decision that an author faces when choosing to submit to an open access journal. We develop an interactive tool to help authors compare among alternative open access venues and thereby get the most for their publication fees.

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

Organization of Scholarly Communication Services, SPEC Kit 332

ARL has released the Organization of Scholarly Communication Services, SPEC Kit 332.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published Organization of Scholarly Communication Services, SPEC Kit 332, which explores how research institutions are currently organizing staff to support scholarly communication services, and whether their organizational structures have changed since 2007, when member libraries were surveyed about their scholarly communication education initiatives. This SPEC Kit covers who leads scholarly communication efforts inside and outside the library, the scholarly communication related services that are offered to researchers, and which staff support those services. The publication also looks at how the library measures the success of its scholarly communication services, including demonstrable outcomes of these services.

| Digital Scholarship's 2012 Publications | Digital Scholarship |

MedOANet Releases Open Access Tracker

MedOANet has released the Open Access Tracker.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

MedOANet (Mediterranean Open Access Network) is a two-year project funded under the Science in Society Programme of the EC 7th Framework Programme. The project enhances existing policies, strategies and structures for Open Access and contributes towards the implementation of new ones in six Mediterranean countries: Greece, Turkey, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal. . . .

The Open Access Tracker brings together information on journals, repositories, institutional policies, funder's policies and publishers' self-archiving policies, representing Open Access activities in the six countries.

Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals Cover

| Digital Scholarship |

Amherst College Establishes Open Access Press

Amherst College has established an open access press, the Amherst College Press.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Conceived by Amherst College Librarian Bryn Geffert, Amherst College Press will be housed in the college's Frost Library and will solicit manuscripts from scholars who may be especially receptive to new publishing paradigms at a time when traditional academic presses are reducing the number of titles they publish. . . .

At the outset, Amherst College Press will publish solely in liberal arts disciplines such as political science, literary studies, history, economics and anthropology—areas for which Amherst is well known. The press will produce books in formats that will be suitable for most e-readers; print-on-demand may be available. The press will not focus on print production or distribution. . . .

Funding for the press will come from the Frost Library and from an endowed position for which the college is currently raising money. The college also expects that the content of the Amherst College-affiliated literary magazine The Common will be freely available online under the open-access model governing the press, while The Common will continue to use its own resources to produce the publication's print version.

Read more about it at "Frequently Asked Questions."

Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography Cover

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