In 2010, new versions of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography will be released in June and December. The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog will be updated monthly.

JISC has released Modelling Scholarly Communication Options: Costs and Benefits for Universities.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement (announcement includes podcast):

The key findings from the report show

• The annual savings in research and library costs of a university repository model combined with subscription publishing could range from £100,000 to £1,320,000
• Moving from Open Access journals and subscription-funding to per-article Open Access journal funding has the potential to achieve savings for universities between £620,000 per year and £1,700,000 per year if the article-processing charge is set at £500 or less
• Savings from a change away from subscription-funding to per-article Open Access journal funding were estimated to be between £170,000 and £1,365,000 per year for three out of the four universities studied when the article-processing charge is £1000 per article or less
• For the remaining university in the study a move from subscription-funding to the per-article Open Access journal funding saw the university having to pay £1.86m more in this scenario

See also the related documents: How to Build a Case for University Policies and Practices in Support of Open Access and Publishing Research Papers Which Policy Will Deliver Best Value for Your University?.

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available. It provides information about new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, e-prints, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.

The paperback version of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2008 Annual Edition is now $25 and the Kindle version is $9.99. The paperback version is now available via Amazon's expanded distribution channel for libraries and academic institutions.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2008 Annual Edition presents over 3,350 references to selected English-language articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet. Most sources have been published between 1990 and 2008; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 1990 are also included. Peter Jacso said in ONLINE (vol. 27, no. 3 2003, pp. 73-76): "SEP is compiled with utter professionalism. It reminds me of the work of the best artisans who know not only every item that leaves their workshops, but each component used to create them-providing the ideal quality control. . . . The selection of items is impeccable. I have yet to find journal articles irrelevant to the scope of the bibliography. SEP could be used as a benchmark in evaluating abstracting/indexing databases that proudly claim to have coverage of electronic publishing, but do not come close to SEP."

CNI has released a digital video of the Robert Sanderson's "Interoperable Annotation: Perspectives from the Open Annotation Collaboration" presentation at the CNI Fall 2009 Task Force Meeting.

Here's an excerpt from the project briefing abstract:

The Open Annotation Collaboration project (OAC), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is making progress towards the establishment of an interoperable annotation environment for scholarly artifacts. This environment will allow heterogeneous annotation clients to annotate distributed scholarly collections, and then share these annotations across clients and collections. While OAC's focus is on scholarly artifacts, the envisioned interoperability framework will be usable for a broad range of Web content, and is therefore based on Web architecture and concepts from the Semantic Web and Linked Data efforts. This presentation will give an overview of the core guiding principles followed, indicating why and how these differ from prior attempts. It will also introduce and motivate the evolving data model for interoperable annotation. An early draft of an interoperability specification, including a preliminary data model, will be released for public comment at the time of the CNI member meeting.

Here's the Open Annotation Collaboration website.

Adrian K. Ho and Daniel R. Lee have published "Recognizing Opportunities: Conversational Openings to Promote Positive Scholarly Communication Change" in College & Research Libraries News.

Here's an excerpt:

Librarians in the midst of conversations with members of the campus community are often hesitant to bring up scholarly communication issues. Numerous online resources have been created in the past few years to help campuses address these issues, but some of us, whether or not we are familiar with these resources and are comfortable with the relevant concepts, aren't quite ready to talk about the resources and translate the concepts into practices. This article aims to provide scenarios of how such resources can come in handy during day-to-day interaction with faculty and students to help our campuses manage change and achieve an information sharing environment that benefits everyone.

The Center for Studies in Higher Education has released Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines.

Here's an excerpt:

We describe here the results of our research conducted between 2007 and 2010. In the interest of developing a deeper understanding of how and why scholars do what they do to advance their academic fields, as well as their careers, our approach focused on finegrained analyses of faculty values and behaviors throughout the scholarly communication lifecycle, including career advancement, sharing, collaborating, informal and formal publishing, resource generation, and engaging with the public. The report is based on the responses of 160 interviewees across 45, mostly elite, research institutions in seven selected academic fields: archaeology, astrophysics, biology, economics, history, music, and political science. We concentrated on assessing scholars’ attitudes and needs as both producers and users of research results. The report is divided into eight chapters, which include a document synthesizing our research results plus seven detailed disciplinary case studies.

David H. Carlson, Dean of Library Affairs at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, has been elected Chair of the SPARC Steering Committee. Carlson has been a committee member since 2008.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Carlson brings to the Chair position a rich and deep perspective informed by working with a variety of libraries and institutions in his career, including a teaching college, large research-intensive university, and a library consortium. He has served extensively with the board of directors at the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI), and currently serves on the boards of directors for the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) and BioOne.

Carlson has been an active participant in industry-level scholarly communication activities, especially those related to library-vendor relations. He led the library community in successfully securing a reversal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science's (AAAS) decision to stop supplying new Science content to JSTOR. He has spearheaded Open Access activities at SIUC, and was responsible for launching the campus's open-access repository. Carlson has also been active supporter of national public access policies and has been a vocal advocate of the NIH Public Access Policy as well as the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA).

"David Carlson is a committed advocate who sees things through to their conclusion," said Heather Joseph, SPARC's Executive Director. "His experience with institutions of all types, and his commitment to deepening the impact of research through expanding access will help SPARC make important new strides in the coming years. The committee and I look forward to having David's leadership to help us address the challenges and opportunities before us."

"The matters facing SPARC are vital to not just libraries but the academy," said Carlson. "Indeed, as technology provides greater access to tools and platforms that permit creative contributions, the issues are becoming increasingly important to society as a whole. It is a critical time to show the detrimental effects of restrictive laws and regulations, and to advance requirements for public access to research sponsored by government agencies." He added, "I look forward to working as Chair of SPARC to pursue key avenues toward change at this crucial juncture."

SPARC's voting membership, which includes representatives from over 150 academic libraries in the U.S. and Canada, also elected the following individuals to serve on the SPARC Steering Committee for three-year terms beginning January 1:

• Maggie Farrell, University of Wyoming (non-ARL director)
• Rick Luce, Emory University (ARL director)
• Lorraine Harricombe, University of Kansas (ARL director)

Steering Committee members whose terms concluded in December include outgoing Chair (2005 through 2009) Ray English (Oberlin College), Larry Alford (Temple University), Sherrie Bergman (Bowdoin College), Diane Graves (Trinity University), and Randy Olsen (Brigham Young University).

The full SPARC Steering Committee represents ARL and non-ARL libraries in the U.S. and Canada as well as SPARC Europe, SPARC Japan, CARL, and AASHL. The full list is available at http://www.arl.org/sparc/about.

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available. It provides information about new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, e-prints, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.

Especially interesting are: "Copyright Renewal for Libraries: Seven Steps toward a User-Friendly Law"; "Data Curation Program Development in U.S. Universities: The Georgia Institute of Technology Example"; "D-Lib Magazine: Its First 13 Years"; "Open Access: Advice on Working with Faculty Senates"; "A Metadata Best Practice for a Scientific Data Repository"; "Metadata Decisions for Digital Libraries: A Survey Report"; "Metadata for Special Collections in CONTENTdm: How to Improve Interoperability of Unique Fields through OAI-PMH"; "Open Access in 2009"; " Paying for Open Access? Institutional Funding Streams and OA Publication Charges"; "Preservation in the Age of Google: Digitization, Digital Preservation, and Dilemmas"; "Technologies Employed to Control Access to or Use of Digital Cultural Collections: Controlled Online Collections"; and "Sticker Shock and Looming Tsunami."

The Scholarly Publishing Roundtable has released the Report and Recommendations from the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

An expert panel of librarians, library scientists, publishers, and university academic leaders today called on federal agencies that fund research to develop and implement policies that ensure free public access to the results of the research they fund "as soon as possible after those results have been published in a peer-reviewed journal."

The Scholarly Publishing Roundtable was convened last summer by the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology, in collaboration with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Policymakers asked the group to examine the current state of scholarly publishing and seek consensus recommendations for expanding public access to scholarly journal articles.

The various communities represented in the Roundtable have been working to develop recommendations that would improve public access without curtailing the ability of the scientific publishing industry to publish peer- reviewed scientific articles.

The Roundtable’s recommendations, endorsed in full by the overwhelming majority of the panel (12 out of 14 members), "seek to balance the need for and potential of increased access to scholarly articles with the need to preserve the essential functions of the scholarly publishing enterprise," according to the report. . . .

The Roundtable identified a set of principles viewed as essential to a robust scholarly publishing system, including the need to preserve peer review, the necessity of adaptable publishing business models, the benefits of broader public access, the importance of archiving, and the interoperability of online content.

In addition, the group affirmed the high value of the "version of record" for published articles and of all stakeholders' contributions to sustaining the best possible system of scholarly publishing during a time of tremendous change and innovation.

To implement its core recommendation for public access, the Roundtable recommended the following:

1. Agencies should work in full and open consultation with all stakeholders, as well as with OSTP, to develop their public access policies. Agencies should establish specific embargo periods between publication and public access.
2. Policies should be guided by the need to foster interoperability.
3. Every effort should be made to have the Version of Record as the version to which free access is provided.
4. Government agencies should extend the reach of their public access policies through voluntary collaborations with non-governmental stakeholders.
5. Policies should foster innovation in the research and educational use of scholarly publications.
6. Government public access policies should address the need to resolve the challenges of long-term digital preservation.
7. OSTP should establish a public access advisory committee to facilitate communication among government and nongovernment stakeholders.

Read more about it at "Scholarly Publishing Roundtable Releases Report and Recommendations" and "Scholarly Publishing Roundtable Releases Report to Congress."