Category: Self-Archiving

"Green on What Side of the Fence? Librarian Perceptions of Accepted Author Manuscripts"

Jimmy Ghaphery, Sam Byrd, and Hillary Miller have published "Green on What Side of the Fence? Librarian Perceptions of Accepted Author Manuscripts" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

INTRODUCTION There is a growing body of accepted author manuscripts (AAMs) in national, professional, and institutional repositories. This study seeks to explore librarian attitudes about AAMs and in what contexts they should be recommended. Particular attention is paid to differences between the attitudes of librarians whose primary job responsibilities are within the field of scholarly communications as opposed to the rest of the profession. METHODS An Internet survey was sent to nine different professional listservs, asking for voluntary anonymous participation. RESULTS This study finds that AAMs are considered an acceptable source by many librarians, with scholarly communications librarians more willing to recommend AAMs in higher-stakes contexts such as health care and dissertation research. DISCUSSION Librarian AAM attitudes are discussed, with suggestions for future research and implications for librarians.

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"Leading Across Boundaries: Collaborative Leadership and the Institutional Repository in Research Universities and Liberal Arts Colleges"

David M. Seaman has self-archived "Leading Across Boundaries: Collaborative Leadership and the Institutional Repository in Research Universities and Liberal Arts Colleges."

Here's an excerpt:

Two methodologies—content analysis of IR web pages and surveys of library directors and IR developers—were employed to determine if IRs revealed evidence of collaborative leadership. The study populations were those members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Oberlin Group of liberal arts colleges that operated IR services by July 2014 (146 institutions overall). The research examined if IR format, size, age, nomenclature, or technology platform varied between ARL and Oberlin Group members. It asked if there is any difference in the perception of collaborative leadership traits, perceived IR success, or collaborative involvement with stakeholder communities between ARL and Oberlin Group members or between library directors and IR developers. The study found evidence of all six collaborative leadership traits being examined: assessing the environment for collaboration, creating clarity, building trust, sharing power, developing people, and self-reflection.

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"Journal Flipping or a Public Open Access Infrastructure? What Kind of Open Access Future Do We Want?"

Tony Ross-Hellauer and Benedikt Fecher have published "Journal Flipping or a Public Open Access Infrastructure? What Kind of Open Access Future Do We Want?" in LSE Impact of Social Sciences.

Here's an excerpt:

Open access (OA) is advocated by science funders, policymakers and researchers alike. It will most likely be the default way of publishing in the not-so-distant future. Nonetheless, the dominant approach to achieve OA at the moment—journal flipping—could have adverse long-term effects for science. To try to stir debate, we here present two dichotomic scenarios for open access in 20 years' time [journal flipping vs. a public open access infrastructure].

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"Dissertation to Book? A Snapshot of Dissertations Published As Books in 2014 and 2105, Available in Open Access Institutional Repositories"

Anna Marie Johnson et al. have published "Dissertation to Book? A Snapshot of Dissertations Published As Books in 2014 and 2105, Available in Open Access Institutional Repositories" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

Only a small percentage of books published as dissertations were found in ProQuest and then subsequently in IRs. The number of libraries holding book titles with corresponding dissertations in IRs dropped between 2014 and 2015.

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The State of Open Data Report 2017

Figshare has released The State of Open Data Report 2017.

Here's an excerpt:

Its key finding is that open data has become more embedded in the research community—82% of survey respondents are aware of open data sets and more researchers are curating their data for sharing.

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"The Next Stage of SocArXiv’s Development: Bringing Greater Transparency and Efficiency to the Peer Review Process"

Philip Cohen has published "The Next Stage of SocArXiv's Development: Bringing Greater Transparency and Efficiency to the Peer Review Proces" in LSE Impact of Social Sciences.

Here's an excerpt:

Looking ahead to the next stage of its development, Philip Cohen considers how SocArXiv might challenge the peer review system to be more efficient and transparent, firstly by confronting the bias that leads many who benefit from the status quo to characterise mooted alternatives as extreme. The value and implications of openness at the various decision points in the system must be debated, as should potentially more disruptive innovations such as non-exclusive review and publication or crowdsourcing reviews.

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"Q&A with PLOS Co-founder Michael Eisen"

Richard Poynder has published "Q&A with PLOS Co-founder Michael Eisen" in Open and Shut?.

Here's an excerpt:

ME [Michael Eisen]: The most important thing to do now is to get publishers—commercial and non-profit—out of the process. The whole industry is unnecessary and needlessly cumbersome and expensive. We should all just publish in places like bioRxiv (assuming its software gets better and produces finished documents people are happy to read) and do all peer review post publication. There should be little or no money transacted in the process—the infrastructure should be subsidized so it’s free to both publish and access all the content.

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Lots of Institutional Repositories Keep E-prints Safe

The seductive allure of a commercial mega repository is two-fold: (1) everything is conveniently in one place, and (2) a company is taking care of the dreary and expensive business of running it.

Everything seems fine: problem solved! That is until something goes wrong, such as the repository being bought and controlled by a publisher or being threatened by lawsuits by a coterie of publishers.

Then it's important to remember: it's a company, and companies exist to make a profit.

Heh, companies are great. I wouldn't have just had that tasty cup of coffee without them. But, we should be very clear about what motivates companies and controls their behavior. And we shouldn't be shocked if they do things that aren't motivated by lofty goals.

I know: institutional repositories are hard work. The bloom is off the rose. But they exist to serve higher education, not make money, and they part of the academic communities they serve. And they can't be bought. And their universities don't often go out of business. And there are a lot of them. And they are not likely to be attractive targets for lawsuits unless something has gone very, very wrong at the local level.

Copyright is complicated. No one is advocating that we ignore it and just shove e-prints into IR's willy-nilly. Getting faculty to understand the ins and outs of e-print copyright is no picnic, nor is monitoring for compliance. But the battle is easier to fight at the local level where one-on-one faculty to librarian communication is possible.

For self-archiving to flourish in the long run, institutional repositories must flourish. By and large, librarians establish, run, and support them, and they are the quiet heroes of green open access who will continue to provide a sustainable and reliable infrastructure for self-archiving.

"Has the Open Access Movement Delayed the Revolution?"

Richard Poynder has published "Has the Open Access Movement Delayed the Revolution?" in Open and Shut?.

Here's an excerpt:

As I said, publishers are also co-opting green OA. They are doing this by buying up repository platforms like SSRN and bepress, for instance, and by imposing lengthy embargoes before green OA papers can be made freely available. Again, the OA movement has assisted in this by, for instance, advocating for and supporting OA policies that accept publisher-imposed embargoes as a given, and by partnering with publishers in initiatives that turn repositories into little more than search interfaces. This has the effect of directing users away from repositories to legacy publishers’ sites (see here for instance, and here).

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"Penn Libraries to End Partnership with bepress"

The University of Pennsylvania Libraries has released "Penn Libraries to End Partnership with bepress."

Here's an excerpt:

In August, bepress sold their company to Elsevier, a business with a history of aggressive confidentiality agreements, steep price increases, and opaque data mining practices. In their acquisition of bepress and other companies like SSRN and Mendeley, Elsevier demonstrates a move toward the consolidation and monopolization of products and services impacting all areas of the research lifecycle.

We are worried about the long-term impacts from these acquisitions and are concerned that such changes are not in the best interests of the library community. Therefore, we feel obligated to begin exploring alternatives.

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Coalition for Responsible Sharing’s Statement: "Publishers and Societies Take Action against ResearchGate’s Copyright Infringements"

The Coalition for Responsible Sharing has released "Publishers and Societies Take Action against ResearchGate’s Copyright Infringements."

Here's an excerpt:

Numerous attempts to agree with ResearchGate on amicable solutions, including signing up to the Voluntary Principles of Article Sharing on Scholarly Collaboration Networks and implementing a user-friendly technical solution, remained unsuccessful. Members of the Coalition for Responsible Sharing are therefore now resorting to formal means to alter ResearchGate's damaging practices. The coalition members include the American Chemical Society, Brill, Elsevier, Wiley and Wolters Kluwer. These organizations will begin to issue takedown notices to ResearchGate requesting that infringing content be removed from the site. Concurrently, The American Chemical Society and Elsevier are asking the courts to clarify ResearchGate's copyright responsibility.

See also: "ResearchGate: Publishers Take Formal Steps to Force Copyright Compliance."

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"Publishers Taking Legal Action against ResearchGate to Limit Unlicensed Paper Sharing on Networking Site"

Jyllian Kemsley and Andrea Widener have published "Publishers Taking Legal Action against ResearchGate to Limit Unlicensed Paper Sharing on Networking Site" in Chemical & Engineering News.

Publishers could issue "millions" of take-down notices to ResearchGate.

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"The Prehistory of Biology Preprints: A Forgotten Experiment from the 1960s"

Matthew Cobb has self-archived "The Prehistory of Biology Preprints: A Forgotten Experiment from the 1960s."

Here's an excerpt:

In 1961, the NIH began to circulate biological preprints in a forgotten experiment called the Information Exchange Groups (IEGs). This system eventually attracted over 3600 participants and saw the production of over 2,500 different documents, but by 1967 it was effectively shut down by journal publishers’ refusal to accept articles that had been circulated as preprints. This article charts the rise and fall of the IEGs and explores the parallels with the 1990s and the biomedical preprint movement of today.

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ACS Launches ChemRxiv

ACS has launched ChemRxiv.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

ChemRxiv, a new chemistry preprint server for the global chemistry community, is now available in a fully functioning Beta version for use and feedback by researchers. The Beta launch has been undertaken with initial strategic input from the American Chemical Society (ACS), Royal Society of Chemistry, German Chemical Society and other not-for profit organizations, as well as other scientific publishers and preprint services. The free-of-charge service, originally announced late last year, is managed on behalf of the chemical science community by ACS and is powered by Figshare, an online digital repository for academic research.

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"Reflections on ‘Elsevier Acquires bepress’: Implications for Library Leaders"

Roger C. Schonfeld has published "Reflections on 'Elsevier Acquires bepress': Implications for Library Leaders" in the Ithaka S+R blog

Here's an excerpt:

If this is the case, libraries adopting standalone institutional repositories are moving in exactly the wrong direction strategically. Instead, thinking more in terms of a workflow as are Elsevier and the Open Science Framework (and to some degree Digital Science) may be the strongest strategy. If this is so, then the urgent question facing institutional repository managers and strategists is how quickly and thoroughly they can integrate into one (or more) such workflows. And, while such integration may not require the kind of platform-first multi-tenant approach to repositories that Digital Commons and OSF Preprints each seems to have developed, it seems like a strong design approach.

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SSRN Launches ChemRN (Chemistry Research Network)

SSRN has launched ChemRN

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Chemistry researchers can share ideas and other early stage research, including posting preprints and working papers on ChemRN. Users can quickly upload and read papers for free, across all of Chemistry, including the fields of Energy, Environmental and Materials Sciences.

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"Elsevier Acquires bepress"

Roger C. Schonfeld has published "Elsevier Acquires bepress" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

Today, Elsevier announces its acquisition of bepress. In a move entirely consistent with its strategy to pivot beyond content licensing to preprints, analytics, workflow, and decision-support, Elsevier is now a major if not the foremost single player in the institutional repository landscape.

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"Research Output Availability on Academic Social Networks: Implications for Stakeholders in Academic Publishing"

Mikael Laakso, et al. have self-archived "Research Output Availability on Academic Social Networks: Implications for Stakeholders in Academic Publishing."

Here's an excerpt:

In an effort to map out factors related to ASN [Academic Social Networks] use this article provides a multi-method case study of one business school (Hanken School of Economics, Finland) that incorporates 1) a bibliometric analysis on the full-text availability of research output on ASNs for research published 2012–2014 by Hanken affiliated authors, 2) semi-structured interviews with faculty active in publishing in order to gain insight into motivations for use and use patterns, and 3) a survey distributed to all research-active faculty and doctoral students in order to gain a wider perspective on ASN use.

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"Workflow Development for an Institutional Repository in an Emerging Research Institution"

Jeanne Hazzard and Stephanie Towery have published "Workflow Development for an Institutional Repository in an Emerging Research Institution" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

We discovered that our faculty retain nearly none of their pre-print or post-print versions of their published articles, and so we are unable to archive those titles in the repository. Nearly 47% of the articles found were in green journals that allow only pre- or post-print copies. Most faculty were unable to produce versions of their work other than the publisher’s PDF, which many publishers restrict from upload into a repository.

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SSRN Launches Biology Research Network (BioRN)

SSRN has launched the Biology Research Network (BioRN).

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Biology researchers are able to post preprints and working papers on BioRN, share ideas and other early stage research, and collaborate. It allows users to quickly upload and read abstracts and full-text papers, free of charge. A preprint is the author’s own write-up of research results and analysis that has not been peer-reviewed or had any value added to it by a publisher (such as formatting, copy-editing, technical enhancements). A preprint server, or working paper repository as they are also known, allows users to share these documents.

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"Four Decades Of Open Science"

Bernard L. Hecker has published "Four Decades Of Open Science" in Nature Physics.

Here's an excerpt:

INSPIRE, the central information resource of the high-energy physics community, pioneered the open dissemination of scientific literature. I

See also: "INSPIRE: Realizing the Dream of a Global Digital Library in High-Energy Physics."

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Arizona State University Adopts Open Access Policy

Arizona State University has adopted an open access policy.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Public access to information is at the heart of a new policy at Arizona State University, the ASU Open Access Policy, which was passed by the University Senate and approved May 3 by University Provost Mark Searle. . . .

More than 70 universities in the United States, including Harvard, Duke and the University of California system, have adopted open access policies, part of a growing movement that is rapidly transforming the traditional model of scholarly publishing.

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"The Stars Are Aligning for Preprints"

Judy Luther has published "The Stars Are Aligning for Preprints" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

Significant events have occurred in rapid succession in the last year signaling that preprints, the author’s original manuscript before submission to a journal, will play a much larger role in the landscape. Developments with DOIs, changes in funder expectations, and the launch of new services indicate that preprints will no longer be limited to the hard sciences and social sciences.

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"Ready for the Future? A Survey on Open Access with Scientists from the French National Research Center"

Joachim Schöpfel et al. have self-archived "Ready for the Future? A Survey on Open Access with Scientists from the French National Research Center."

Here's an excerpt:

The CNRS senior research managers (laboratory directors) globally share the positive opinion towards OA revealed by other studies with researchers from the UK, Germany, the USA and other countries. However, they are more supportive of open repositories (green road) than of OA journal publishing (gold). The response patterns reveal a gap between generally positive opinions about OA and less supportive behaviours, principally publishing articles with article processing charges (APCs). A small group of senior research managers does not seem to be interested in green or gold OA and reluctant to self-archiving and OA publishing.

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