Springer will offer new open access science, technology, and medicine (STM) journals.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Springer is expanding its open access offering to all disciplines. SpringerOpen will cover all disciplines within the science, technology and medicine (STM) fields and will be offered in cooperation with BioMed Central. The entire content of SpringerOpen journals—including research articles, reviews, and editorials—are fully and immediately open access, and are accessible to anyone with an internet connection. No subscription is needed.

"We are seeing an increasing interest from our authors and from funders in all areas for open access publishing options and have responded to a need in the current market," said Wim van der Stelt, EVP Business Development, Springer. "We are happy to serve our authors and editorial boards with the publishing options they want and are also pleased to supply universities, research institutions and our other patrons with the ability to use this content online freely and conveniently."

SpringerOpen journals are e-only journals. Springer is committed to delivering high-quality articles and ensuring rapid publication as with its traditional journals, from online submission systems and in-depth peer review to an efficient, author-friendly production process. The final articles are not only published in a timely manner on Springer's online information platform SpringerLink, but are also distributed to archives such as PubMed Central and to institutional repositories as requested.

SpringerOpen journals are published under the Creative Commons Attribution license, which facilitates the open distribution of copyrighted work. According to this license, Springer will not reserve any exclusive commercial rights. The journals ask the authors to pay an article-processing charge, in accordance with market standards.

Bo-Christer Björk et al. have published "Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009" in PLoS ONE.

Here's an excerpt:

Methodology/Principal Findings

The proportion of peer reviewed scholarly journal articles, which are available openly in full text on the web, was studied using a random sample of 1837 titles and a web search engine. Of articles published in 2008, 8.5% were freely available at the publishers' sites. For an additional 11.9% free manuscript versions could be found using search engines, making the overall OA percentage 20.4%. Chemistry (13%) had the lowest overall share of OA, Earth Sciences (33%) the highest. In medicine, biochemistry and chemistry publishing in OA journals was more common. In all other fields author-posted manuscript copies dominated the picture.

Conclusions/Significance

The results show that OA already has a significant positive impact on the availability of the scientific journal literature and that there are big differences between scientific disciplines in the uptake. Due to the lack of awareness of OA-publishing among scientists in most fields outside physics, the results should be of general interest to all scholars. The results should also interest academic publishers, who need to take into account OA in their business strategies and copyright policies, as well as research funders, who like the NIH are starting to require OA availability of results from research projects they fund. The method and search tools developed also offer a good basis for more in-depth studies as well as longitudinal studies.

Dan S. Wallach, Associate Professor at Rice University's Department of Computer Science, has made an eprint of "Rebooting the CS Publication Process" available.

Here's an excerpt:

Many computer science academics have been grousing about failures in our publication process. This paper catalogs many of the specific complaints that are raised and proposes some radical new solutions based on the assumption that, by eliminating physical paper entirely and going with a centralized system to manage papers, we can rethink the entire process: paper submission, revision and publication. Furthermore, having all of the metadata standardized and easily available, ranking algorithms can be easily conceived to aid in tenure cases and departmental rankings.

The International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) has updated and reissued its "Statement on the Global Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Consortial Licenses."

Here's an excerpt:

The ICOLC is reissuing its Statement on the Global Economic Crisis to update information providers on the state of library and library consortia budgets in 2010. The updates below reinforce the ICOLC Statement in three substantial ways.

1. ICOLC did not overestimate the severity of cuts to library and library consortia funding levels in its original Statement. Furthermore, we believe the worst may still be before us, as US state governments suffer the loss of stimulus funds and continued weak regional economies. All parts of the world are facing negative economic repercussions from the European debt crisis. The need for pricing restraint and options remains paramount.
2. Fifty ICOLC member groups from around the world have participated in an anonymous survey to measure 2009 to 2010 price changes from over 30 major vendors and publishers of electronic databases and journals. This survey reveals that 38% of the price changes provided price control in the form of 1% increases or less. Seven percent (7%) of the price changes provided price reductions. We wish to commend those suppliers who have worked with libraries and consortia to contain prices. However, significant room for improvement remains. Some suppliers have done a much better job of containing prices than others. We call upon the full range of suppliers to show price restraint in 2010-2011 to enable customers to sustain as many information resource licenses as possible.
3. We take this opportunity to highlight the added potential negative impact of exclusivity on prices, as well as access. A new Principle 3 on page 3 of this document expresses the strongly held belief of ICOLC members that, over the long-term, multiple distribution channels for licensed content provide the most affordable and suitable options for access across diverse library communities.

The Nature Publishing Group has added open access options for 7 more journals.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is pleased to announce open access options for seven further journals. Twenty-five journals published by NPG now offer authors an open access option, including all 15 academic journals owned by NPG.

American Journal of Gastroenterology, Bone Marrow Transplantation, Gene Therapy, International Journal of Obesity, Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, Oncogene, and Leukemia have all recently introduced open access options. Authors publishing in these journals can now choose to make their article open access on payment of an article processing charge (APC). . . .

Including the American Journal of Gastroenterology and Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, seven journals published by NPG on behalf of societies offer open access options. Other journals in this portfolio with an open access are: British Journal of Cancer, The EMBO Journal, EMBO reports, European Journal of Human Genetics and Molecular Therapy. . . .

Launched in April 2010, Nature Communications is the first Nature-branded online-only journal with an open access option. In 2009, NPG introduced open access options on twelve of its academic journals.

NPG also publishes two fully open access journals: Cell Death and Disease and Molecular Systems Biology. Cell Death & Disease, launched in January 2010, is the open access sister title to Cell Death & Differentiation. Launched in 2005, Molecular Systems Biology is published in association with the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and has a 2008 Impact Factor of 12.243.

NPG's self-archiving policy ensures that authors of original research papers can comply with funder mandates for public access, regardless of which NPG journal they publish in. In addition, NPG offers a free Manuscript Deposition Service into PubMed Central and UK PubMed Central on 43 of its titles.

The Directory of Open Access Journals now contains records for more than 5,000 journals.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Directory of Open Access Journals reaches new milestones—now 7 years of operation, now more than 5,000 journals, now more than 2,000 journals searchable on article level, very soon more than 400,000 articles searchable! . . .

• Developing Open Access Journals by means of promoting open re-use policies—the SPARC Europe SEAL!
• Working for long term archiving of Open Access Journals in cooperation with the National Library of the Netherlands—project sponsored by the Swedish Library Association!
• During the years sponsored by Open Society Institute, SPARC, SPARC Europe, EBSCO, INASP, Axiell, National Library of Sweden & Swedish Library Association. . . .
• Supported by the community via the DOAJ membership program.

JISC has released Ensuring That 'E' Doesn't Mean Ephemeral: A Practical Guide to E-Journal Archiving Solutions, which discusses CLOCKSS, Portico, and the UK LOCKSS Alliance.

Here's an excerpt:

This booklet provides a starting point for institutions interested in investigating e-archiving options. It gives a practical guide to the solutions offered by three of the main long-term preservation schemes and provides an overview of the distinguishing features of each solution.

Kittie S. Henderson & Stephen Bosch have published "Seeking the New Normal: Periodicals Price Survey 2010" in Library Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

A number of publishers upped prices for 2010. Springer announced a five percent increase. Elsevier price increases are also in the five percent range, with the notable exception of The Lancet. The 2010 price for The Lancet jumped nine percent over 2009 levels; that increase was still smaller than in previous years. In October, the library world reeled as Nature Publishing Group (NPG) announced a 640 percent price increase (from $39.95 in 2009 to $299 in 2010) for a print subscription to Scientific American. The cost for the digital site license also rose substantially, and a number of consortia, like the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and the Oberlin Group, refused to renew. The announcement came only weeks after NPG bought the magazine.

Sarah Cooney-Mcquat, Stefan Busch and Deborah Kahn have published "Open Access Publishing: A Viable Solution for Society Publishers" in the latest issue of Learned Publishing. The paper is open access.

Here's an excerpt:

The open access (OA) business model has established itself as a viable alternative to traditional subscription-based publishing and is an option that societies should now realistically consider for their journals. This paper outlines how the OA model can work for societies, and presents a number of case studies that demonstrate how it is already working in practice.

portal: Libraries and the Academy will make copy-edited e-prints of articles in forthcoming issues available.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Johns Hopkins University Press and portal: Libraries and the Academy have announced an agreement that will provide increased access to research about the role of academic libraries and librarianship.

Beginning with the April 2010 issue, copy-edited versions of all accepted articles will be available in an open-access web environment. Six articles for the upcoming issue have already been posted online. The final, published version of the journal will still appear in Project MUSE®, a subscription-based online database of scholarly journals based at the JHU Press.

"As we move into our next decade, we want to advance past the traditional ways of presenting information and take advantage of new forms of scholarly communication," says Sarah Pritchard, the Charles Deering McCormick University Librarian at Northwestern University and editor of portal, currently in its 10th year of publication. "We appreciate the support of the Johns Hopkins University Press, which has been a good partner and good publishing venue for the journal."

The agreement, which will be re-evaluated after 18 months, allows for manuscripts to appear online after the copy-editing process is complete, but prior to the publication of the print version of the journal. The files will have a watermark to identifying its status in the publishing process.

Benjamin J. Keele has self-archived "Copyright Provisions in Law Journal Publication Agreements" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

This study examined copyright provisions of law journal publication agreements and found that a minority of journals ask authors to transfer copyright. Most journals also permit authors to self-archive articles. It recommends journals make their agreements publicly available and use licenses instead of copyright transfers.

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?.