Here's an excerpt from "Miami University Librarians Pass Open Access Policy":

On Monday, the librarians at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio affirmed their commitment to the principles of Open Access by voting in favor of an Open Access policy. The policy, based on Harvard University's Model Policy, will increase access to librarians' scholarly articles. Librarians will begin depositing their scholarly output in the Scholarly Commons, Miami's institutional repository. Miami University Libraries is the first department on Miami's campus to successfully pass an open access policy. "I am so proud to work at Miami today," said Jen Waller, Interdisciplinary Research Librarian and Chair of the Libraries' Scholarly Communication Working Group. "My colleagues' vote in favor of an open access policy allows the Miami University Libraries to be a leader in Open Access on the Miami campus. Additionally, the adoption of this policy will allow librarians here to gain first hand knowledge of how facets of open access work, which will greatly improve our outreach efforts to faculty on campus."

| Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals | Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt:

We have learned in this study that the voluntary and charitable sector has an appetite and need for scholarly research that it cannot currently satisfy. The organisations contributing to the study have described the importance of research to the voluntary and charitable sector's commitment to playing its very distinctive role in the most effective way it can. In scoping interviews, case studies and survey responses, VCOs have identified a consistent set of barriers to accessing research. They have shown too that they are creative and resourceful, finding ways to overcome these barriers some of which might place them on or over the border of copyright infringement. We do not think that VCOs should be put in the position of having to choose between what is legally permitted and what they feel is ethically required of them in order to fulfil their charitable objectives. We think too that if the VCS is being asked to expand its role and play an increasing part in delivering public services, then access to research is essential. In this final chapter, we provide some recommendations which, we hope, will go some way to widening the voluntary and charitable sector's access to scholarly research outputs.

| Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals: This is an excellent resource for its extensive background documentation of the open access arguments and issues. — Ann Jensen, Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, no. 43 (2005) | Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt:

The total cost to the public sector of accessing journal papers is around £135 million per annum. The savings that accrue from the availability of Open Access articles (using both Green and Gold routes) amount to £28.6 million (£26 million in access fees and £2.6 million in time savings).

Extending the number or articles available through Open Access further increases the potential for savings. Each extra 5% of journal papers accessed via Open Access would save the public sector £1.7 million, even if no subscription fees were to be saved. Increasing the number of journal papers accessed through Open Access to 25% would save the public sector an extra £29 million.

| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography: "This work gives an outstanding overview of scholarship relating to the growing Open Access movement." — George Machovec, The Charleston Advisor 12, no. 2 (2010): 3. | Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt from the "New Open Access Working Group Formed: Formulating Response to Elsevier's Policy Change":

The wording [of the Elsevier posting policy] is very unclear; no one is quite sure what a "systematic posting mandate" is. Duke, for one, who has an open access policy very much like ours, has concluded that such policies aren't "mandates" since they allow people to opt out, and hence that they are not covered by the new Elsevier posting policy. But it is clear that Elsevier is trying to do what it can to undermine such policies, and to confuse faculty about what they are and are not allowed to do. Certainly that is the interpretation of the Coalition for Open Access Repositories, who, in their response, "strongly oppose the changes made by Elsevier to its article posting policies" and "join the research community in condemning Elsevier for its recent business practices and lobbying that undermine policies and activities promoting open access to scholarly literature."

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

Here are the documents that have been released for this hearing:

• Hearing Charter [overview]
• Opening Statement by Andy Harris (R-MD), Chairman, Subcommittee on Investigations & Oversight
• Testimony by H. Frederick Dylla, Executive Director and CEO American Institute of Physics
• Testimony by Elliot Maxwell, Project Director for the Digital Connections Council, Committee on Economic Development
• Testimony by Crispin Taylor, Executive Director, American Society of Plant Biologists
• Testimony by Stuart Shieber, Director, Office for Scholarly Communications, Harvard University
• Testimony by Scott Plutchak, Director, Lister Hill Library at University of Alabama at Birmingham

| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography: "This work gives an outstanding overview of scholarship relating to the growing Open Access movement." — George Machovec, The Charleston Advisor 12, no. 2 (2010): 3. | Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt:

Plans for a new IR project within the law school, however, can quickly find such worthy motives swept aside as faculty members invariably voice some version of the following comments: "Won't posting my articles elsewhere steal downloads away from SSRN? That would lower my rankings in SSRN and perhaps reduce my professional stature."

One can regret that law academics today reflexively cower at the thought of appearing to perform poorly on any new ranking system that crosses their path, no matter how dubious. Even so, there can be no denying that SSRN, or the Social Science Research Network, has earned a respectable cachet among the professoriate.

| Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 | Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt:

There is evidence that institutional mandates do have effects on institutional repositories in different ways, e.g. on content deposited and service provision. The effects vary according to the characteristics of repositories and the approach taken by institutions. The research results also indicate that the experiences of institutions with a mandate and the expectations of institutions without one are almost identical across both the UK and Germany, although the developmental context of institutional repositories and institutional mandates in these two countries are very different.

| Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 | Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The 81 signatories' main points of opposition to FRPAA are:

• It requires that final manuscripts of researchers' journal articles that explain, interpret and extensively report the results of federally-funded research—manuscripts which have undergone publishers' validation, digital enhancement, production, interoperability and distribution processes—be publicly available online, worldwide, no more than six months after publication.
• The one-size-fits-all six-month deadline for every federal agency that funds research ignores well-known significant differences in how each research discipline discovers and uses individual articles, periods that can last several years before costs are recovered.
• It limits where government-funded researchers may publish their work.
• It undermines publishers' investments in new business models that currently provide unprecedented access for the public to such works for free or at modest cost.
• At a time when Congress is looking to cut unnecessary expenses in federal government and focus budgets on priorities, FRPAA imposes additional costs on all federal agencies by requiring them to divert critical research funding to the creation and management of new databases, archives and infrastructure to handle dissemination of these articles—functions already being performed by private-sector publishers.

The signatories are:

• AACC International
• Acoustical Society of America
• American Association for Cancer Research
• American Association for Clinical Chemistry
• American Association of Anatomists
• American Association of Immunologists
• American Association of Physicists in Medicine
• American Association of Physics Teachers
• American Astronomical Society
• The American Ceramic Society
• American Chemical Society
• American College of Chest Physicians
• American College of Physicians
• American Dental Association
• American Fisheries Society
• American Geophysical Union
• American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
• American Institute of Biological Sciences
• American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE)
• American Institute of Physics Publishing
• American Mathematical Society
• American Meteorological Society
• American Physiological Society
• American Phytopathological Society
• American Psychiatric Publishing
• American Psychological Association
• American Public Health Association
• American Roentgen Ray Society
• American Society for Investigative Pathology
• American Society for Nutrition
• American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers
• American Society of Agronomy
• American Society of Animal Science
• American Society of Clinical Oncology
• American Society of Hematology
• American Society of Plant Biologists
• APMI International
• ARVO—Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology
• ASQ—American Society for Quality
• Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP)
• AVS: Science and Technology of Materials, Interfaces, and Processing
• Biophysical Society
• Cambridge University Press
• Crop Science Society of America
• Ecological Society of America
• Elsevier
• The Endocrine Society
• Entomological Society of America
• F.A. Davis Company
• GeoScienceWorld
• Gival Press LLC
• The Histochemical Society
• Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
• IEEE
• Institute of Food Technologists
• International and American Associations for Dental Research
• International Association for the Study of Pain
• John Wiley & Sons
• Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.
• The McGraw-Hill Companies
• Mycological Society of America
• National Ground Water Association
• The Optical Society
• The Ornithological Council
• The Physiological Society
• Poultry Science Association
• The Professional Animal Scientist
• The Radiological Society of North America (RSNA)
• SAE International
• Seismological Society of America
• SEPM Society for Sedimentary Geology
• Silverchair Science+Communications, Inc.
• Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine
• Society for the Study of Reproduction
• Society of Economic Geologists, Inc.
• Soil Science Society of America
• Springer Publishing Company
• Taylor & Francis
• Thieme Publishers
• University of the Basque Country Press
• Walters Kluwer

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

Here's an excerpt:

(1) Author's Rights

The University recognizes the importance of copyright and urges faculty members to retain rights to their own scholarly articles. Therefore, if a publisher's standard contract requires the transfer of copyright and/or does not allow deposit in the University's open access repository, the University expects faculty authors to negotiate the terms of the publisher's contract by attaching an addendum to the contract asserting the author's right to retain the copyright and/or the right to deposit the published version or pre-print version of the scholarly article in the University's open access repository. Should a publisher insist on the transfer of copyright as a condition of publication or refuse to permit the deposition of the published version or preprint version of the scholarly article in the University's open access repository, it is at the faculty author's discretion whether or not to continue with the publication, which will invoke an automatic waiver to this policy (see 5.2(2)).

(2) Deposit in the University's Open Access Repository

Each faculty member grants permission to the University to post in the University's open access repository all of his or her scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles published while employed by the University. In legal terms each faculty member grants to the University a nonexclusive license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for profit, and to authorize others to do the same. This license in no way interferes with the rights of a faculty author as the copyright holder of the work but instead promotes a wide distribution and increased impact of the author's work. If a faculty author's attempt to retain full rights is unsuccessful, the author may proceed with publication, thereby invoking an automatic waiver for that particular article. While it is not necessary in these situations to formally request a waiver, it is recommended that the author send the bibliographic citation to the Library, alerting librarians that a waiver is being invoked and that the publication may not be posted in the University's open access repository.

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

Here's an excerpt:

(1) The Research Works Act (RWA)

The RWA is now dead, withdrawn by its Congressional sponsors and chief lobbyist-supporter. But here's a biography and obituary. . . .

(2) The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)

(2.1) FRPAA would strengthen the OA mandate at the NIH, by reducing the maximum embargo to six months, and then extend the strengthened policy to all the major agencies of the federal government. In that sense, it's the opposite of the RWA. . . .

(2.2) FRPAA uses the term "free online public access" without definition. But for convenience I'll say here that FRPAA requires "OA".

It requires agencies to come up with their own OA policies within the general guidelines laid down in the bill. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution and agencies are free to differ on the details. If the bill passes, they'll have one year to develop their policies (Section 4.a).

But agencies must mandate OA to agency-funded research. The must mandate OA "as soon as practicable" after publication (4.b.4), but no later than six months after publication. The guidelines do not stipulate the timing of deposits, only the timing of OA. For researchers employed and not merely funded by the federal government, FRPAA allows no embargo at all (4.c.2).

Like the NIH policy, FRPAA applies to the authors' peer-reviewed manuscripts (4.b.2), not to the published editions of their articles. Like the NIH policy, it allows consenting publishers to replace the peer-reviewed manuscripts with the published editions (4.b.3). It does not apply to classified research or royalty-producing work such as books (4.d.3). It also exempts patentable discoveries, but only "to the extent necessary to protect a…patent" (4.d.3).

Unlike the NIH policy, FRPAA doesn't specify the OA repository in which authors must deposit their manuscripts, the way the NIH specifies PubMed Central. Agencies could host their own repositories or make use of existing repositories, including the institutional repositories of their researchers. FRPAA only requires that the repositories meet certain conditions of OA, interoperability, and long-term preservation (4.b.6).

FRPAA and the NIH policy differ slightly in how they secure permission for the mandated OA. The NIH requires grantees to retain the non-exclusive right to authorize OA through PubMed Central. If a given publisher is not willing to allow OA on the NIH's terms, then grantees must look for another publisher. FRPAA requires agencies to "make effective use of any law or guidance relating to the creation and reservation of a Government license that provides for the reproduction, publication, release, or other uses of a final manuscript for Federal purposes" (4.c.3). The FRPAA approach gives agencies more flexibility. Agencies may use the battle-tested NIH method if they wish. They may use a federal-purpose license such as that codified in 2 CFR 215.36(a) (January 2005) if they wish. Or they may make use of "any [other] law or guidance" that would be "effective" in steering clear of infringement.

FRPAA does not amend copyright or patent law (4.e).

FRPAA applies to all unclassified research funded in whole or part (4.b.1) by agencies whose budgets for extramural research are $100 million/year or more (4.a). This includes the Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Science Foundation.

The House and Senate versions of the bill are identical. FRPAA was introduced twice before (in 2006 and 2009-10), and is essentially identical to both previous versions. . . .

(2.8) Will FRPAA pass?

We don't know, of course. Several factors weigh against it: This is an election year. Congress is as gridlocked and incapacitated as it has ever been, even for legislation with bipartisan support. Many policy issues have a higher priority in Congress than OA.

But several factors boost its chances. This is FRPAA's third time around, and the first two times did a lot of the hard work in educating policy-makers about the issues. The first two times around also gathered some significant endorsements, for example, more than 120 US college and university presidents and provosts, 41 Nobel laureates, major library and public-interest organizations, and at least two non-academic, business-oriented organizations, NetCoalition and the Committee for Economic Development. The White House RFI responses are generally stronger than FRPAA; they're already public and may soon appear in Interagency Working Group reports and White House action.

Finally we can't overlook the RWA shipwreck and the rising tide that beached it. The same forces that brought down RWA are now refocusing on raising up FRPAA. The same forces that protect the NIH policy from repeal now want to see it strengthened and extended to other agencies. The Congressional offices which have begun to understand the issues are heartily tired of publisher misrepresentations.

The RWA, COMPETES Act, FRPAA, and the White House RFI can be put in roughly this order: anti, weak, strong, and stronger. Subtract anti and what do you have? Unambiguous good news. Only time will tell how good it is. And that's where you come in.

| Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt:

We analyze the online response of the scientific community to the preprint publication of scholarly articles. We employ a cohort of 4,606 scientific articles submitted to the preprint database arXiv.org between October 2010 and April 2011. We study three forms of reactions to these preprints: how they are downloaded on the arXiv.org site, how they are mentioned on the social media site Twitter, and how they are cited in the scholarly record. We perform two analyses. First, we analyze the delay and time span of article downloads and Twitter mentions following submission, to understand the temporal configuration of these reactions and whether significant differences exist between them. Second, we run correlation tests to investigate the relationship between Twitter mentions and both article downloads and article citations. We find that Twitter mentions follow rapidly after article submission and that they are correlated with later article downloads and later article citations, indicating that social media may be an important factor in determining the scientific impact of an article.

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

Here's an excerpt:

The NIH public-access policy did not cause either an increase in the PIs' open-access awareness or a change in their publishing habits. The open-access advocates were supporters of the immediate free access to scientific information before the policy and provided their manuscripts free-of-cost before the policy’s mandate. The non-open-access advocates choose their publications based on quality criteria such as the journal’s prestige, impact factor, speed of publication and the attracted audience, while the article’s open-access availability is considered to be a plus. Furthermore, since a large number of journals comply with the NIH-policy, the participants did not have to change their publishing habits.

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

Here is a selection of comments:

Publishers

• ACS Publications
• American Psychiatric Publishing
• Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
• Elsevier
• John Wiley & Sons
• Oxford University Press
• The Publishers Association
• SAGE Publishing
• Springer Science + Business Media
• Taylor & Francis
• Wolters Kluwer Health Ltd (UK)

Scholarly Professional Associations

• Acoustical Society of America
• American Anthropological Association
• American Association for Cancer Research
• American Association for Dental Research
• American Association for the Advancement of Science
• The American Association of Immunologists
• American Association of Petroleum Geologists
• American Association of Physicists in Medicine
• American Astronomical Society
• American Educational Research Association
• American Geophysical Union
• American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
• American Institute of Biological Sciences
• American Institute of Physics
• American Mathematical Society
• American Physical Society
• American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
• The American Society for Cell Biology
• American Society for Investigative Pathology
• American Society for Nutrition
• American Society of Plant Biologists
• American Society for Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics
• American Society of Hematology
• The American Society of Human Genetics
• American Physiological Society
• American Psychological Association
• American Sociological Association
• Archaeological Institute of America
• The Association for Research in Vision and Ophtamology
• Botanical Society of America
• Ecological Society of America
• Genetics Society of America
• The Linnean Society of London
• The Optical Society of America
• Phycological Society of America
• Poultry Science Association
• Protein Society
• SEPM Society for Sedimentary Geology
• Society for Conservation Biology
• Zoological Society of London

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

Here's an excerpt:

HR 3699, the Research Works Act will be detrimental to the free flow of scientific information that was created using Federal funds. It is an attempt to put federally funded scientific information behind pay-walls, and confer the ownership of the information to a private entity. This is an affront to open government and open access to information created using public funds.

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

Here's an excerpt:

We fully respect copyright law and the protection it affords content creators, owners, and users. The NIH Public Access Policy operates fully within current U.S. Copyright law as articles reporting on NIH funded research are copyrightable, and the copyright belongs to the author. The NIH Policy requires only the grant of a non-exclusive license to NIH, fully consistent with federal policies such as Circular A-110 and Circular A-102. The author is free to transfer some or all of the exclusive rights under copyright to a journal publisher or to assign these anywhere they so choose—a freedom crucial to the authors of scientific articles, who rightly want to determine where and how their work is distributed.

Under H.R. 3699, authors of articles reporting on federally funded research would face a new restriction. The proposed bill requires authors to seek the permission of a publisher before their work can be distributed through an online, networked government channel such as NIH’s PubMed Central, even if they themselves—as the author of the work and the relevant rights holder—have already consented to do so, potentially limiting the authors ability to distribute their work as widely as they may wish.

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