Category: Self-Archiving

PEER Behavioural Research: Authors and Users vis-á-vis Journals and Repositories—Final Report

PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research has released PEER Behavioural Research: Authors and Users vis-á-vis Journals and Repositories—Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

Over the period of Phases 1 and 2 of the Behavioural research project the increase in the number of researchers who reported placing a version of their journal article(s) into an Open Access Repository was negligible.

Researchers who associated Open Access with 'self-archiving' were in the minority.

Open Access is more likely to be associated with 'self-archiving' (Green Road) by researchers in the Physical sciences & mathematics and the Social sciences, humanities & arts, than those in the Life sciences and the Medical sciences who are more likely to associate Open Access with Open Access Journals (Gold Road).

There is anecdotal evidence that some researchers consider making journal articles accessible via Open Access to be beyond their remit.

Authors tend to be favourable to Open Access and receptive to the benefits of self-archiving in terms of greater readership and wider dissemination of their research, with the caveat that self-archiving does not compromise the pivotal role of the published journal article.

Readers have concerns about the authority of article content and the extent to which it can be cited when the version they have accessed is not the published final version. These concerns are more prevalent where the purpose of reading is to produce a published journal article, and are perceived as less of an issue for other types of reading purpose.

Academic researchers have a conservative set of attitudes, perceptions and behaviours towards the scholarly communication system and do not desire fundamental changes in the way research is currently disseminated and published.

Open Access Repositories are perceived by researchers as complementary to, rather than replacing, current forums for disseminating and publishing research.

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

OpenAccess.se’s Steering Committee Objects to Elsevier’s Self-Archiving Policy’s Position on OA Mandates

OpenAccess.se's Steering Committee has issued a statement that objects to Elsevier's self-archiving policy's position on open access mandates.

Here's an excerpt:

Elsevier now requires specific agreements with universities or research funders if there is an open access mandate to deposit and disseminate articles in a specific open archive. These agreements may involve long embargo periods and restrict availability of research results. . . .

We recommend that Swedish universities with open access mandates refrain from concluding separate agreements with Elsevier. Instead, this issue should be managed along with negotiations over national license agreements with Elsevier.

Previously, UKB, a consortium of the thirteen Dutch university libraries and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, issued a statement about the policy.

Here's an excerpt:

The [Elsevier] clause states that an author "has the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal or institutional web site or server for scholarly purposes, incorporating the complete citation and with a link to the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the article (but not in subject-oriented or centralized repositories or institutional repositories with mandates for systematic postings unless there is a specific agreement with the publisher. . . .

UKB is deeply concerned about the fact that Elsevier has recently adapted its Open Access policy and has taken the initiative to negotiate directly with universities and research institutions about the conditions under which their authors may deposit manuscripts of their own articles in repositories. UKB aims to expand the digital availability of Dutch scientific output and is an advocate of publication in Open Access. UKB therefore deplores every action that results in the restriction of that accessibility, such as unacceptably long embargo periods. In addition, UKB is concerned about the consequences of this clause, namely that it will become even less clear for authors whether and according to which conditions they are allowed to post their article in a repository. This in turn will create an extra obstacle preventing authors from doing so. It is the view of UKB that an author should in principle have the right to deposit his own article, preferably in the version produced by the publisher but in any case in the final author’s version, a right which should not become dependent on (subsequent) agreements with publishers. UKB is particularly concerned about the fact that publishers may overrule agreements made between authors and funding bodies by means of this policy.

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

Open Access Deposit Issues: "Seeking Custody"

Peter Suber has published "Seeking Custody" in the latest issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.

Here's an excerpt:

If we want to make a digital file OA, and we already have an OA repository, then we face just two hurdles. We need a copy of the file and we need permission. We can call these the custody and copyright conditions. "Custody" here doesn't mean ownership of the rights, just possession of a copy. If we have possession and permission, then we don't need ownership.

The OA movement has given far more attention to the copyright or permission problem than to the custody or possession problem. This may have the effect of sweeping a difficult problem under the rug. We often have permission when we lack custody, and often find that solving the permission problem is easier than solving the custody problem. Here are some examples of what could be called permission success and custody failure.

(1) You've published an article in a TA journal which allows green OA or self-archiving. But the journal only allows deposit of the final version of the author's peer-reviewed manuscript, not the published version. You're fine with that and eager to make the manuscript OA. But you can't put your hands on the version you're allowed to deposit. You think it's on your hard drive somewhere, or in your email archive. But you're not sure. You haven't had time to look, or you've looked and found six versions. You don't have time to figure out which one, if any, is the deposit-eligible, peer-reviewed manuscript, or you've taken the time and you're still unsure. Or you have the version you submitted to the journal, and all the correspondence with the editor, but you don't have time to reconstruct the version approved by peer review. Or you might have deleted the relevant version in a fit of spring cleaning, as a superseded version not worth saving, or you might have failed to copy it over from your last computer when you upgraded. With enough detective work you could find out, but you don't know how much time it would take and you're pretty sure it would take more than you have.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Institutional Repository Bibliography |

"The Costs and Potential Benefits of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models"

John W. Houghton has published "The Costs and Potential Benefits of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models" in the latest issue of Information Research.

Here's an excerpt:

The costs and benefits associated with alternative scholarly publishing models demonstrate that research and research communication are major activities and the costs involved are substantial. Our preliminary analysis of the potential benefits of more open access to research findings suggests that returns to research are also substantial and that different scholarly publishing models might make a material difference to the returns realised as well as the costs faced. It seems likely from this preliminary analysis that more open access could have substantial net benefits in the longer term and, while net benefits may be lower during a transitional period they would be likely to be positive for both open access journal publishing and self-archiving alternatives.

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

Emerald Group Publishing Limited’s Use of the Attributor Anti-Piracy Service

In "Thanks but No Thanks Emerald," Kristin Eschenfelder reproduces and discusses a letter that she received from the Emerald Group Publishing Limited. In short, this letter says that Emerald is expanding it's use of Attributor to detect copyright violations from "cyberlockers" to "the full breadth of the internet," and it requests the URLs for her personal, institutional, and corporate websites so that they can be excluded from Attributor searches and its "legally-binding takedown notices."

Will this expanded use of Attributor affect self-archiving of articles from Emerald journals?

Emerald's publication policies are detailed in its Authors' Charter and its Review Copyright Assignment Form. Emerald requires that authors assign their article copyrights to Emerald as a condition of publication.

The Authors' Charter states that (I have added italics in certain places in the below quotes):

Authors are not required to seek Emerald's permission to re-use their own work. As an author with Emerald you can use your paper in part or in full, including figures and tables if you want to do so in a book, in another article written for us or another publisher, on your website, or any other use, without asking us first.

It further states that:

It does NOT, in any way, restrict your right or academic freedom to contribute to the wider distribution and readership of your work. This includes the right to: . . . .

2. Reproduce your own version of your article, including peer review/editorial changes, in another journal, as content in a book of which you are the author, in a thesis, dissertation or in any other record of study, in print or electronic format as required by your university or for your own career development.

3. Deposit an electronic copy of your own final version of your article, pre- or post-print, on your own or institutional website. The electronic copy cannot be deposited at the stage of acceptance by the Editor.

Authors are requested to cite the original publication source of their work and link to the published version — but are NOT required to seek Emerald's permission with regard to the personal re-use of their work as described above. Emerald never charges its authors for re-use of any of their own published works. Emerald does not allow systematic archiving of works by third parties into an institutional or subject repository.

The Review Copyright Assignment Form says:

This assignment of copyright to Emerald Group Publishing Limited is done so on the understanding that permission from Emerald Group Publishing Limited is not required for me/us to reproduce, republish or distribute copies of the Work in whole or in part.

Given the above, it would appear that the author can: (1) self-archive an article on his or her personal website, (2) self-archive an article in his or her institutional repository, and (3) self-archive an article in a subject archive (the restriction is for “systematic archiving of works by third parties,” not self-archiving). Institutional repository staff or subject repository staff cannot archive articles for authors.

If this is not correct, it would be helpful to hear from Emerald what its interpretation of these documents is.

Unlike the RIAA and the MPAA, scholarly journal publishers have a limited primary customer base—academic libraries. Moreover, academic librarians are authors as well as customers, and, for some publishers, they are a significant subset of their authors. The endless serials crisis has already seriously strained relations between academic librarians and publishers. Hopefully, scholarly journal publishers will be sensible and sensitive to customer concerns in their attempts to cope with difficult digital copyright issues.

[See Emerald's reply in the comments.]

"Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research"

Yassine Gargouri et al. have published "Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research" in PLoS ONE.

Here's an excerpt:

Background

Articles whose authors have supplemented subscription-based access to the publisher's version by self-archiving their own final draft to make it accessible free for all on the web (“Open Access”, OA) are cited significantly more than articles in the same journal and year that have not been made OA. Some have suggested that this “OA Advantage” may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002-2006 in 1,984 journals.

Methodology/Principal Findings

The OA Advantage proved just as high for both. Logistic regression analysis showed that the advantage is independent of other correlates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number of co-authors, references or pages; field; article type; or country) and highest for the most highly cited articles. The OA Advantage is real, independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles receive about 80% of all citations).

Conclusions/Significance

The OA advantage is greater for the more citable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage, from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only. It is hoped that these findings will help motivate the adoption of OA self-archiving mandates by universities, research institutions and research funders.

| Digital Scholarship |

University of Tromsø Adopts Open Access Policy

The University of Tromsø in Norway has adopted an open access policy.

Here's the English translation:

Free access to scientific results is an important prerequisite for a well-functioning democracy, for the free exchange of opinions and to enable science to be a tool for the development of society and industry. The University of Tromsø has as its goal that all scientific publications from the university shall be made available either in an Open Access journal or in an institutional repository. Hence, the University of Tromsø will adhere to the following basic principles of Open Access to scientific results.

  • Self-archiving: The University of Tromsø has as its general rule that students and researchers shall self-archive their publications in Munin, the university’s institutional repository. Publications will be made available through Munin within the constraints of the agreements the authors have made with the publisher and publishers’ principles for self-archiving. The University Library of Tromsø has the responsibility for investigating and ensuring compliance with publishers’ policies and other questions regarding intellectual property rights in this context.
  • Choice of publishing venue: The University of Tromsø has as its general rule that students and researchers shall – provided publications are of equal scientific worth and stature – choose publishing venues that provide the freest access to the publications, either through having a positive attitude to self-archiving or by being an Open Access publishing venue.
  • The University as a publisher: The University shall endeavour to make journals and other publications published by the University Open Access publications. It is a goal that all publications published by the University shall permit self-archiving, and that self-archiving of the final published version (publisher’s PDF) shall be encouraged.

| Digital Scholarship |

Teesside University Adopts Self-Archiving Mandate

Teesside University in the UK has launched its institutional repository, TeesRep, and adopted a self-archiving mandate.

Here's the mandate:

For record keeping, research asset management and performance evaluation purposes, and in order to maximise the visibility, accessibility, usage and impact of our institution’s research output, all Teesside University researchers are mandated to deposit the publicly available output of the University’s research activity into TeesRep, the University’s Institutional Repository.

Self-Archiving Study: PEER Annual Report—Year 2

The PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) project has released PEER Annual Report—Year 2.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Reporting on the past 12 months of activity in this ground breaking collaboration between publishers, repositories and the research community investigating the effects of Green Open Access, the PEER Annual Report highlights the complexity of the infrastructure required for PEER and the substantial progress achieved towards the project’s objectives.

To simulate the large-scale, systematic depositing of authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts accepted for journal publication, 12 participating publishers are providing content and associated metadata from 241 participating journals. Half of the manuscripts are being submitted directly to PEER, while for the other half, authors are invited by publishers to self-deposit into the project.

All submitted content is being received by the PEER Depot, a central repository created specifically for the project by INRIA, which undertakes filtering for EU research content, metadata matching and transformations, and embargo management prior to distribution to participating repositories.

By the end of year 2 (August 2010), almost 25,000 unique publisher provided manuscripts had been processed by the PEER Depot, resulting in 10,000 EU manuscripts after processing (some still under embargo), with embargo expired manuscripts distributed to participating repositories.

The three areas of usage, economic and behavioural research commissioned by PEER are well underway, with the Baseline Behavioural Report already publicly available from the PEER website.

"Almost Halfway There: An Analysis of the Open Access Behaviors of Academic Librarians"

College & Research Libraries has released a preprint of Holly Mercer's forthcoming article "Almost Halfway There: An Analysis of the Open Access Behaviors of Academic Librarians."

Here's an excerpt:

Academic librarians are increasingly expected to advocate for scholarly communications reforms such as open access to scholarly publications, yet librarians do not always practice what they reach. Previous research examined librarian attitudes toward open access, whereas this article presents results of a study of open access publishing and self-archiving behaviors of academic librarians. Following an analysis of open access to library and information science literature in 2008, several strategies to encourage academic librarians to continue embrace open access behaviors are discussed.

Digital Repository Deposit: SWORD Course Videos

The SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) project has released a series of tutorial videos.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

  1. An Introduction to SWORD: Gives an overview of SWORD, the rationale behind its creation, and details of the first three funded SWORD projects
  2. SWORD Use Cases: Provides an introduction to use cases, and examines some of the use cases that SWORD can be used for
  3. How SWORD Works: A high level overview of the SWORD protocol, lightly touching on a few technical details in order to explain how it works
  4. SWORD Clients: The reasons for needing SWORD clients are shown, followed by a tour of some of the current SWORD clients
  5. Create Your Own SWORD Client: An overview of the EasyDeposit SWORD client creation toolkit, including the chance to try it out

"Publishing Practices of NIH-Funded Faculty at MIT"

Courtney Crummett et al. have published "Publishing Practices of NIH-Funded Faculty at MIT" in Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship.

Here's an excerpt:

Faculty and researchers who receive substantial funding from NIH were interviewed about their publication practices. Qualitative data was collected from interviews of eleven faculty members and one researcher representing six academic departments who received NIH funding. Interview responses were analyzed to identify a representative publication workflow and common themes related to the publication process. The goals of this study were to inform librarians about faculty publication practices; to learn how faculty are affected by and responding to NIH publication policy changes; and to inform planning and discussion about new services to support NIH compliance in addition to general faculty publishing.

Major themes from the interviews included consistency in publishing workflows, but variety in authorship patterns and in data management practices. Significant points of pain for authors included difficulty finding quality reviewers, frustrating submission processes, and discomfort about the implications of publication agreements. Some authors found the NIH submission requirement to be burdensome, but most assumed their publishers were taking care of this process for them. Implications for library services are considered.

Institutional Repository Deposit: SWORD v2.0: Deposit Lifecycle

JISC has released SWORD v2.0: Deposit Lifecycle.

Here's an excerpt:

SWORD is a hugely successful JISC project which has kindled repository interoperability and built a community around the software and the problem space. It explicitly deals only with creating new repository resources by package deposit a simple case which is at the root of its success but also its key limitation. This next version of SWORD will push the standard towards supporting full repository deposit lifecycles by using update, retrieve and delete extensions to the specification. This will enable the repository to be integrated into a broader range of systems in the scholarly environment, by supporting an increased range of behaviours and use cases.

"Asking for Permission: A Survey of Copyright Workflows for Institutional Repositories"

Ann Hanlon and Marisa Ramirez have self-archived their presentation "Asking for Permission: A Survey of Copyright Workflows for Institutional Repositories" in DigitalCommons@CalPoly.

Here's an excerpt:

Most survey respondents reported providing mediated deposit (material is deposited on behalf of the author by a third party, usually someone associated with the IR), whether it is completely mediated by the library or whether the author, in partnership with the library, deposits their work. The only respondents to report author self-deposit as the primary method of IR deposit were in Australia and Europe.

Digital Repositories: Multiple-Deposit Function Added to EasyDeposit SWORD Client

Stuart Lewis has announced that a multiple-deposit function has been added to the EasyDeposit SWORD client.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

For those of you unfamiliar with EasyDeposit, it is an online tool that allows you to configure your own SWORD client. It is intended that you run multiple copies of EasyDeposit and configure each for a specific tailored use, such as thesis deposit, journal deposit, multiple deposit etc. The deposit process is made up of a set of 'steps' which you can configure and change into a preferred order to make your chosen client. . . .

The new multiple deposit functionality allows the administrator to 'hard code' the details of a set of repositories, and upon completion of the deposit process the item is deposited into each of those repositories. EasyDeposit has been designed with extensibility in mind, so if you wish to write your own 'steps,' for example to allow the depositor to select which repositories from a given list they would like to deposit into, this is easy and straightforward to write in PHP.

EasyDeposit, Toolkit for Creating SWORD Deposit Interfaces, Released

Stuart Lewis has released EasyDeposit, a toolkit for creating SWORD deposit interfaces.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

EasyDeposit allows you to create customised SWORD deposit interfaces by configuring a set of 'steps'. A typical flow of steps may be: login, select a repository, enter some metadata, upload a file, verify the information is correct, perform the deposit, send a confirmation email. Alternatively a deposit flow may just require a file to be uploaded and a title entered. A configuration file is used to list the steps you require.

EasyDeposit makes use of the CodeIgniter MVC PHP framework. This means each 'step' is made up of two files: a 'controller' which looks after the validation and processing of any data entered, and a 'view' which controls the web page that a user sees. This separation of concerns makes it easy for web programmers to edit the controllers, and web designers to tinker with the look and feel of the interface in the views.

PEER Behavioural Research: Authors and Users vis-à-vis Journals and Repositories; Baseline Report

The Publishing and the Ecology of European Research (PEER) project has released PEER Behavioural Research: Authors and Users vis-à-vis Journals and Repositories; Baseline Report.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The PEER Behavioural Research Team from Loughborough University (Department of Information Science & LISU) has completed its behavioural baseline report, which is based on an electronic survey of authors (and authors as users) with more than 3000 European researchers and a series of focus groups covering the Medical sciences; Social sciences, humanities & arts; Life sciences; and Physical sciences & mathematics. The objectives of the Behavioural Research within PEER are to:

  • Track trends and explain patterns of author and user behaviour in the context of so called Green Open Access.
  • Understand the role repositories play for authors in the context of journal publishing.
  • Understand the role repositories play for users in context of accessing journal articles.

The baseline report outlines findings from the first phase of the research and identifies the key themes to emerge. It also identifies priorities for further analysis and future work. Some interesting points to emerge from the first phase of research that may be of interest to a number of stakeholders in the scholarly communication system include:

  • An individual's attitude towards open access repositories may change dependant on whether they are an author or a reader; readers being interested in the quality of the articles but authors also focused on the reputation of the repository itself
  • Reaching the target audience is the overwhelming motivation for scholars to disseminate their research results and this strongly influences their choice of journal and/or repository
  • Researchers in certain disciplines may lack confidence in making preprints available, and to some extent this is not only a matter of confidence in the quality of a text but also due to differences in work organisation across research cultures (e.g. strong internal peer review of manuscripts versus reliance on journals for peer review). Other factors are likely to include career stage and centrality of research to the parent discipline
  • Value-added services, such as download statistics and alert services, would contribute to the perceived usefulness of repositories and could help them gain popularity in what is an increasingly competitive information landscape
  • Readers often need to go through a variety of processes to access all the articles that they require and widespread open access may reduce the need for this time consuming practice.

"Citing and Reading Behaviours in High-Energy Physics. How a Community Stopped Worrying about Journals and Learned to Love Repositories"

Anne Gentil-Beccot, Salvatore Mele, and Travis Brooks have self-archived "Citing and Reading Behaviours in High-Energy Physics. How a Community Stopped Worrying about Journals and Learned to Love Repositories" in arXiv.org.

Here's an excerpt:

Contemporary scholarly discourse follows many alternative routes in addition to the three-century old tradition of publication in peer-reviewed journals. The field of High- Energy Physics (HEP) has explored alternative communication strategies for decades, initially via the mass mailing of paper copies of preliminary manuscripts, then via the inception of the first online repositories and digital libraries.

This field is uniquely placed to answer recurrent questions raised by the current trends in scholarly communication: is there an advantage for scientists to make their work available through repositories, often in preliminary form? Is there an advantage to publishing in Open Access journals? Do scientists still read journals or do they use digital repositories?

The analysis of citation data demonstrates that free and immediate online dissemination of preprints creates an immense citation advantage in HEP, whereas publication in Open Access journals presents no discernible advantage. In addition, the analysis of clickstreams in the leading digital library of the field shows that HEP scientists seldom read journals, preferring preprints instead.

Final Report on the Provision of Usage Data and Manuscript Deposit Procedures for Publishers and Repository Managers

The PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) project has released: Final Report on the Provision of Usage Data and Manuscript Deposit Procedures for Publishers and Repository Managers.

Here's an excerpt:

This report concludes the development of an overall framework for depositing stage-two outputs in and for harvesting log files from repositories. An innovative workflow has been devised to describe and standardise the deposit from publishers to repositories that demonstrates, in a core group of interoperable European repositories, the capability of accepting material deposited from third party publishers and authors beyond the project duration.

The development of an appropriate workflow for author deposits has proved challenging, as the author response is unpredictable, and cannot readily be standardised. The guiding principle adopted is that authors are encouraged to follow their established practice of deposit in an institutional or subject-specific repository. Failing such practice, a central deposit in the PEER Depot for distribution to designated PEER repositories is recommended.

Publisher Self-Archiving Policies: Major SHERPA RoMEO Upgrade

SHERPA has released a major upgrade of its RoMEO service, which lists publishers' self-archiving policies.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

A major upgrade to RoMEO has been released today, giving:

  • Extra Category for the self-archiving of the Publisher's Version/ PDF
  • Expanded Journal Coverage
  • Extra Search Options for Journal Abbreviations and Electronic ISSNs
  • New Tabular Browse View for Publishers
  • Selective Display of Publishers' Compliance with Funding Agencys' Mandates . . . .

Previous versions of RoMEO have concentrated on highlighting information on the use of the pre-print and post-print. There has been great support from the community for also providing clearly labelled information on the use of the publisher's version/PDF as a separate item. This feature has now been included and sits alongside information on self-archiving rights for Pre-prints and Authors' Post-prints. The information is available in both individual publisher entries and in the new Tabular Browse View.

RoMEO now provides expanded journal coverage, enabling users to draw from both the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the Entrez journal list for the Life Sciences, along with the existing resource of the British Library's Zetoc service.

In addition to searching for journals by Print ISSN, users are now able to search by Electronic ISSN. They can also search for journals using title abbreviations.

The new Tabular Browse View enables users to display comparative charts of publishers, to quickly determine and compare what different Publishers allow them to deposit, and if the Publisher has a Paid OA Option.

If you or your authors receive funding from any of the 50 plus agencies listed in JULIET, you will now be able to restrict your search results to display Publishers' compliance with any of the funding agencies' policies listed in JULIET.

Trinity University in San Antonio Adopts Open Access Policy

Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas has adopted an open access policy.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Trinity University's faculty members today endorsed a measure to allow them to bypass some publication restrictions while sharing their scholarly research with the broader academic community.

Trinity becomes the first small, primarily undergraduate liberal arts institution to pass such a measure, known as Open Access. To date, the only U.S. universities to implement such policies are Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of Kansas. Diane Graves, Trinity University Librarian, professor, and chair of the Faculty Senate, said she hoped the Trinity model would be emulated by others in higher education.

"Members of Trinity's faculty have been studying imbalances in the scholarly communication system for several years now," Professor Graves said. "I am proud that the faculty as a whole came together to support change toward a more sustainable and equitable model for access to their scholarly output. My hope is that other institutions will see the broad range of universities that have taken this action – from Harvard, to the University of Kansas, to Trinity – and choose to join us." . . .

The new Open Access policy also would enable Trinity professors to post the author's version of the article in a freely-accessible digital repository. Such a repository already exists as part of the Liberal Arts Scholarly Repository, a collaboration among Trinity and other private liberal arts colleges, including Carleton College, Bucknell University, Grinnell College, University of Richmond, St. Lawrence University, and Whitman College. . . .

Trinity's Faculty Senate approved the proposal in late September. The vote by the full faculty on Friday, Oct. 23 was taken at an assembly during International Open Access Week.

ETD Self-Archiving Tools: ICE-TheOREM Final Report

JISC has released the ICE-TheOREM Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

ICE-TheOREM was a project which made several important contributions to the repository domain, promoting deposit by integrating the repository with authoring workflows and enhancing open access by prototyping new infrastructure to allow fine-grained embargo management within an institution without impacting on existing open access repository infrastructure.

In the area of scholarly communications workflows, the project produced a complete end-to-end demonstration of eScholarship for word processor users, with tools for authoring, managing and disseminating semantically-rich ETD (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) documents fully integrated with supporting data. This work is focused on theses, as it is well understood that early career researchers are the most likely to lead the charge in new innovations in scholarly publishing and dissemination models.

The authoring tools are built on the ICE content management system, which allows authors to work within a word processing system (as most authors do) with easy-to-use toolbars to structure and format their documents. The ICE system manages both small data files and links to larger data sets. The result is research publications which are available not just as paper-ready PDF files but as fully interactive semantically aware web documents which can be disseminated via repository software such as ePrints, DSpace and Fedora as complete supported web-native and PDF publications.

University of Illinois' IDEALS Repository Tops One Million Downloads

The University of Illinois' IDEALS institutional repository has topped one million downloads.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (IDEALS), a digital repository for research and scholarship developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has surpassed its one-millionth download.

The service, offered through the University Library and Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES), is sponsored by the Office of the Provost at Illinois and was launched in 2006. The campus institutional repository includes articles, working papers, preprints, technical reports, conference papers and, data sets in various digital formats provided by University faculty, staff, and graduate students. Although central to the University of Illinois, anyone can access and benefit from IDEALS collections and services. "Today, over 12,000 items have been uploaded into IDEALS," said Sarah Shreeves, associate professor and IDEALS coordinator. "The success of this service has surpassed what anyone envisioned two and a half years ago, and we hope that others in the Illinois community will take advantage of its services."

The mission of IDEALS is to preserve and provide persistent and reliable access to digital research and scholarship in order to give these works the greatest possible recognition and distribution. IDEALS endeavors to ensure that its materials appear in search engines such as Google, Google Scholar, and Bing and that the majority of the research is openly available for anyone to access. As a result of its efforts to disseminate research produced at the University of Illinois, IDEALS was recently ranked in the top 10 of institutional repositories worldwide. "I am delighted with the exposure that IDEALS has provided us with. Whenever we place a thesis or a report, the downloads start and never stop. We get many comments back from readers and researchers who have seen our work only on IDEALS," said Amr Elnashai, head, Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

IDEALS contains a wealth of diverse information, from a Mid-America Earthquake Center report on the Kashmir Earthquake of 2005 to the Ethnography of the University Initiative’s publications and presentations, including campus folklore and cultural perceptions. "I appreciate that my thesis is archived in a stable location for reliable long-term access. The document is now freely available to anyone in the world, yet I retain the copyright," said David P. Hruska, an Illinois graduate. "Furthermore, my thesis is now displayed in search results returned by Google Scholar, improving the dissemination of my research."

SWORD PHP Library Version 0.9

The SWORD PHP library version 0.9 has been released. SWORD is "a lightweight protocol for depositing content from one location to another. It stands for Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit and is a profile of the Atom Publishing Protocol (known as APP or ATOMPUB)."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

  • Changed swordappservicedocument to build the servcedocument from the xml response rather than having the swordappclient do the work. This allows the service document to be parsed at a later time.
  • Changed the swordappclient deposit method to stream the file being deposited straight from disk rather than via memory to avoid using excessive memory and potentially exceeding the PHP memory limit. I’ve successfully tested this against DSpace with deposits of 600MB CD images.
  • Added some validation to the SWAP/METS packager to allow it to cope with filenames and metadata containing ampersands

SWORD2 Project Final Report

JISC has released SWORD2 Project Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

The SWORD vision is about 'lowering the barriers to deposit', primarily for depositing content into repositories, and additionally, for depositing into any system which may wish to receive content from remote sources. The SWORD protocol defines a standard mechanism for depositing into repositories and other systems. The project and protocol were developed because there was previously no standardised way of doing this. A standard deposit interface allows repository services to be built that can offer functionality such as deposit from multiple locations, e.g. disparate repositories, desktop drag'n'drop tools, or from within standard office applications. SWORD can also facilitate deposit to multiple repositories, increasingly important for depositors who wish to deposit to funder, institutional or subject repositories. There are many other possibilities, including migration of content between repositories and transfer to preservation services. In addition to refining the existing SWORD application profile, the SWORD2 project has developed a number of tools and services to demonstrate these possibilities. It has also been pro-active in promoting SWORD and encouraging uptake within other repositories, services and tools, notably with its adoption into the Microsoft Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 and with the new Microsoft Zentity repository system .

The core aims of the project were to update the SWORD Protocol, the SWORD repository code libraries in the DSpace, Fedora, EPrints and Intrallect repositories, and the existing reference demonstrators. A Facebook application and validator have also been developed. Advocacy efforts include an e-learning case study, a briefing paper, a new SWORD website, and a range of additional dissemination activities, including conference papers, presentations, demonstrations and workshops at a number of national and international conferences and meetings.