Category: Open Access

Canadian Association of Research Libraries and JISC Join Confederation of Open Access Repositories

Both the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and JISC have joined the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) as founding members.

Here's an excerpt from the CARL press release:

On October 21, CARL became a founding member of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). COAR is an international association of organizations that have a common strategic interest in open access to scholarly communication. COAR was formed out of a need to work together at the international level to promote greater visibility and application of research outputs through global networks of open access digital repositories.

Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) has played a leadership role in the development of open access repositories in Canada. Through the CARL Institutional Repositories Program, the Association has assisted its members in setting up repositories on their campuses; and worked with other research organizations in Canada and internationally in support of open access. Participation in COAR is a natural extension of these activities. "We are delighted to announce our membership in COAR," said Tom Hickerson, chair of the CARL Institutional Repositories Working Group and Vice-President/President-Elect of CARL. "COAR membership offers CARL and Canadian research libraries the opportunity to have a greater influence on the direction and expansion of open access world-wide"

Here's an excerpt from the JISC press release:

Taking inspiration from the European DRIVER repositories project, which helps to enhance repository development, COAR takes this vision to an international scale; founding members of the Confederation include members from North America, China and Japan, as well as Europe. . . .

Neil Jacobs JISC's programme manager for digital repositories says, "JISC's work over the past few years in encouraging the growth of institutional repositories means that the UK now has a virtually unparalleled network of repositories that covers almost all of the research-base of UK higher education."

"Joining COAR at the early stage of its development means members will be able to contribute to shaping the organisation's objectives which will look at interoperability, raising awareness and promoting Open Access repositories, supporting the repository community and working with partners in closely related fields such as research management and publishing."

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.

Duke University School of Law Launches Duke Law Scholarship Repository

The Duke University School of Law has launched the Duke Law Scholarship Repository.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Duke Law Scholarship Repository, launching online this week in partnership with BePress' Digital Commons, provides free, full-text access to more than 3,000 scholarly articles written by Duke Law faculty or published in Duke Law journals.

The repository offers a fresh presentation of Duke Law scholarship, but the idea of freely accessible legal scholarship and a commitment to open access to information has deep roots in both practice and theory at Duke Law School.

Under the leadership of Richard Danner, Duke Law's senior associate dean for information services and Archibald C. and Frances Fulk Rufty Research Professor of Law, the Law School became the first in the country to make all the articles published in its law journals — including back issues — freely accessible online in 1998. In addition, unlike most other law reviews, Duke's journals explicitly allow authors to post articles published in the journals without restriction on freely-accessible third party web sites, as well as on Internet sites under their own control.

By making scholarship as easily and widely accessible as possible, Duke does a service to the authors who publish in its journals, says James Boyle, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law. "Imagine spending a year writing an article and discovering after you finished it that only someone with a sophisticated library or an expensive subscription could read it," he says. Duke's commitment to open access increases readership for authors, which include faculty from other schools as well as student scholars, and can contribute to higher citations for Duke-published work. "It's a huge benefit to both our students and to faculty authors," Boyle says.

In 2005, Duke Law furthered its commitment to open access by establishing an online archive of faculty scholarship, providing free access to the majority of articles published by Duke Law faculty. The contents of that archive are now the foundation of the Duke Law Scholarship Repository, which ultimately will include the text of lectures delivered at Duke Law, webcasts from scholarly presentations and conferences, publications of Duke Law's research centers, Duke Law student works, and more.

MIT Open Access Articles Collection Launched in DSpace@MIT

MIT has launched a new collection of authors' final submitted manuscripts in DSpace@MIT, the MIT Open Access Articles Collection.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The launch of the "MIT Open Access Articles" collection coincides with International Open Access Week to reflect the spirit of an MIT faculty policy established in March 2009.

The policy affirms the faculty's commitment "to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible."

The collection consists of the authors' final submitted manuscripts. Published versions may also appear where the publisher's policy allows for such posting. Both versions are identified for readers.

MIT authors are encouraged to send their papers to oapolicysubmissions@mit.edu or use a web form for inclusion in the collection.

The MIT Libraries are administering the policy under the guidance of the Faculty Committee on the Library System, and are maintaining a list of publishers who are fully cooperating with the policy.

Congressional Research Service Electronic Accessibility Act of 2009 Introduced

Rep. Frank Kratovil and Rep. Leonard Lance have introduced The Congressional Research Service Electronic Accessibility Act of 2009 (HR 3762).

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

In an effort to make sure the public has access to the same research reports and analysis Members of Congress use to make decisions, Rep. Frank Kratovil today introduced HR 3762, The Congressional Research Service Electronic Accessibility Act of 2009. This bipartisan legislation, introduced with fellow freshman Rep. Leonard Lance (R-NJ), would make published Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports available to the public in an effort to increase transparency and help citizens become more informed and engaged advocates.

"Across the country, citizens are deeply and passionately engaged in debates about the future of our country and the significant challenges we face at home and abroad," said Rep. Kratovil. "As the public debate has become increasingly partisan and polarized, it is more important than ever for citizens to have full access to the same neutral, unbiased information that many of us rely on to help us formulate important decisions."

The lawyers, economists, reference librarians, and social, natural, and physical scientists of CRS offer invaluable research and analysis to Members of Congress on all current and emerging issues of national policy. CRS has a responsibility to ensure that Members of the House and Senate have available the best possible information and analysis on which to base the policy decisions.

CRS is governed by requirements for accuracy, objectivity, balance, and nonpartisanship — the very sort of analysis sought and valued by engaged constituents. As a dedicated congressional support agency, CRS is joined by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in providing Congress with information and analysis that is unequaled by any other national legislature. While GAO and CBO reports are already available to the public, CRS reports are not.

"Making taxpayer-funded research available to the American people is good government," said Congressman Leonard Lance (R-NJ). "Our bill will allow for greater transparency and ensure that non-partisan, public policy reports that are prepared with taxpayer funds for members of Congress be available to educators, students, members of the news media and every citizen across the country." "When citizens are engaged and informed, we have a better chance of elevating our national discourse and cutting through the misinformation and spin that threatens progress," said Rep. Kratovil. "We must do everything we can to empower Americans to play an active role in the legislative process."

Two Open Access Policies Adopted: NCAR and University of Salford

The National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Salford have adopted open access policies.

Here's an excerpt from the National Center for Atmospheric Research announcement:

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has passed an Open Access policy that requires that all peer-reviewed research published by its scientists and staff in scientific journals be made publicly available online through its institutional repository. The new policy has been put in place by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), the governing body that manages NCAR. A national lab, NCAR is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. It has conducted research into the atmospheric sciences since 1960.

UCAR last month formalized the new policy and is developing an institutional repository known as OpenSky, which will include all published studies by NCAR and UCAR researchers in scientific journals. The repository will be free and available to the public, but access to the works it contains will depend upon the policies of their publishers. In support of copyright law and the health of the publishers that support NCAR and UCAR science, all publishing agreements will be honored. OpenSky will be managed by the NCAR Library and is expected to go live in 2010.

Read Peter Suber's take on this policy at "OA Mandate at a US National Lab."

Here's an excerpt from the University of Salford announcement:

The University has announced its intention to implement plans that will make free, easily accessible research knowledge available to a world wide audience via the University of Salford Institutional Repository (USIR) portal. . . .

For the last two years the University has been implementing systems to enable the University's research active staff to deposit their findings and research into the repository.

The University of Salford is pleased to now declare that from the 1st January 2010, it will be implementing a mandatory policy for all research active staff to deposit research information into the repository. This means that as of January 2010, the University of Salford will officially be an Open Access University.

Institutional Repository Bibliography, Version 1

To celebrate Open Access Week, Digital Scholarship is releasing version one of the Institutional Repository Bibliography. This bibliography presents over 620 selected English-language articles, books, and other scholarly textual sources that are useful in understanding institutional repositories. Although institutional repositories intersect with a number of open access and scholarly communication topics, this bibliography only includes works that are primarily about institutional repositories.

Most sources have been published between 2000 and the present; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 2000 are also included. Where possible, links are provided to e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories.

Table of Contents

1 General
2 Country and Regional Institutional Repository Surveys
3 Multiple-Institution Repositories
4 Specific Institutional Repositories
5 Institutional Repository Digital Preservation Issues
6 Institutional Repository Library Issues
7 Institutional Repository Metadata Issues
8 Institutional Repository Open Access Policies
9 Institutional Repository R&D Projects
10 Institutional Repository Research Studies
11 Institutional Repository Software
Appendix A. About the Author

UK's National Institute for Health Research Funds 15% Discount in BioMed Central Publication Fees for Its Researchers

The UK's National Institute for Health Research has inked a Supporter Membership arrangement with BioMed Central that will allow researchers supported by the NIHR and its partners to get a 15% discount on BioMed Central publication fees.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Under the terms of the NIHR's Supporter Membership arrangement, all NHS researchers supported by the NIHR and its partners will benefit from a 15% discount on publication fees when publishing in any of BioMed Central's 200 peer-reviewed open access journals. Researchers are expected to acknowledge NIHR support.

The NIHR is part of the Department of Health, which is a strong advocate of access to the results of research and a partner in the UK PubMed Central open access digital archive project. In 2007 it made a statement confirming official policy in support of open access. http://www.nihr.ac.uk/files/pdfs/OpenAccessPolicyStatement.pdf

With support through the NIHR, researchers already publish hundreds of open access articles each year in BioMed Central’s journals, and Supporter Membership will further encourage open access publication, increasing public access to the results of taxpayer funded research whilst saving money.

Librarians and Archivists at York University Libraries Adopt Open Access Policy

Librarians and archivists at the York University Libraries have adopted an open access policy. (Thanks to Confessions of a Science Librarian.)

Here's an excerpt from the policy:

Academic librarians and archivists at York University commit to making the best possible effort to publish in venues providing unrestricted public access to their works. They will endeavour to secure the right to self-archive their published materials, and will deposit these works in YorkSpace.

The York University academic librarian and archivist complement grant York University Libraries the non-exclusive right to make their scholarly publications accessible through self-archiving in the YorkSpace institutional repository subject to copyright restrictions. . . .

This policy applies to all scholarly and professional work produced as a member of York University academic staff produced as of the date of the adoption of this policy. Retrospective deposit is encouraged. Co-authored works should be included with the permission of the other author(s). Examples of works include:

  • Scholarly and professional articles
  • Substantive presentations, including slides and text
  • Books/book chapters
  • Reports
  • Substantive pedagogical materials such as online tutorials

Works should be deposited in YorkSpace as soon as is possible, recognizing that some publishers may impose an embargo period. This policy is effective as of 01/10/2009 and will be assessed a year after implementation.

University of Michigan Press Partners with HathiTrust to Provide Free Access to Over 1,000 Books

The University of Michigan Press is working with HathiTrust Digital Library to provide free access to over 1,000 books by the end of 2009.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Launched in 2008, HathiTrust is a digital preservation repository and research management tool for the world's great research libraries, focused on providing scholars in the digital age with the largest collection of electronic research material this side of Google Book Search and large-scale, full-text searching and archiving tools to manage it.

"Presses have had online previews and PDFs of sample chapters, tables of contents, and sometimes entire books on their Web sites for years," said Phil Pochoda, director of the U-M Press. "The HathiTrust partnership is something entirely new that takes into account the actual pursuit of broad dissemination of scholarly information.

"Security restrictions are in place to protect the integrity of the product, but with HathiTrust, a full view of the material is there. It's searchable and it's available to anyone with access. If you want to either search for or happen to come across Michigan Press books, you can look through them onscreen anywhere, anytime."

In keeping with the U-M's leadership role in the use of digitization and print-on-demand technology, U-M Press seeks to push the boundaries of the rapidly changing publishing world to position its resources where many different kinds of audiences can find them, Pochoda said.

Utilizing the latest technology, readers and researchers will find multiple ways to find what they are looking for. HathiTrust links to the U-M Press site allow for fast online purchasing.

In addition to a partnership with HathiTrust, content on Amazon and hundreds of U-M Press books in Google Book Search (in which the U-M Library was one of the original participants), U-M Press has had a "Look Inside" feature on its own book Web pages for several years.

With text search ability powered by Google, the "Look Inside" feature on the U-M Press Web site is another tool for viewing each title without damaging the integrity of the product. It currently contains thousands of table-of-contents and sample chapter views, with more than 100 complete titles available for full viewing and hundreds more complete titles planned for full view by the end of 2009.

Income Models for Open Access: An Overview of Current Practice

SPARC has released Income Models for Open Access: An Overview of Current Practice.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"Who pays for Open Access?" is a key question faced by publishers, authors, and libraries as awareness and interest in free, immediate, online access to scholarly research increases. SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) examines the issue of sustainability for current and prospective open-access publishers in a timely new guide, "Income models for Open Access: An overview of current practice," by Raym Crow.

"Income models for Open Access: An overview of current practice" examines the use of supply-side revenue streams (such as article processing fees, advertising) and demand-side models (including versioning, use-triggered fees). The guide provides an overview of income models currently in use to support open-access journals, including a description of each model along with examples of journals currently employing it. . . .

Developing a sound business model is a critical concern for all publishers and the process can be especially challenging for those considering open-access distribution. The guide recognizes that the needs of individual journals differ, and that publishers will apply a variety of income models to support open-access distribution. The right model must take into account not only the publisher's need to cover expenses, but also the organization's mission objectives, size, business management resources, and other factors. . . .

"Income models for Open Access: An overview of current practice" is available for free to read or download online. The guide is supplemented by an extensive Web resource, which invites community discussion on models described as well as contributions related to new and other models. The resource is online at http://www.arl.org/sparc/publisher/incomemodels/.

Stevan Harnad on "Integrating Universities' Thesis and Research Deposit Mandates"

Stevan Harnad has self-archived the text of his "Integrating Universities' Thesis and Research Deposit Mandates" presentation in the ECS EPrints Repository.

Here's an excerpt:

A growing number of universities are beginning to require the digital deposit of their thesis and dissertation output in their institutional repositories. At the same time, a growing number of universities as well as research funders are beginning to mandate that all refereed research must be deposited too. This makes for a timely synergy between the practices of the younger and older generation of researchers as the Open Access era unfolds. It also maximizes the uptake, usage and impact of university research input at all stages, as well as providing rich and powerful new metrics to monitor and reward research productivity and impact. It is important to integrate universities' ETD and research output repositories, mandates and metrics as well as to provide the mechanism for those deposits that may need to be made Closed Access rather than Open Access: Repositories need to implement the "email eprint request" Button for all Closed Access Deposits. Any would-be user webwide, having reached the metadata of a Closed Access Deposit can, with one click, request an eprint for research purposes; the author instantly receives an automatic email and can then, again with one click, authorize the automatic emailing of one copy to the user by the repository software. This feature is important for fulfilling immediate research usage needs during any journal-article embargo period, and it also gives the authors of dissertations they hope to publish as books a way to control who has access to the dissertation. Digital dissertations will also benefit from the reference-linking and book-citation metrics that will be provided by harvesters of the distributed institutional repository metadata (which will also include the metadata and reference lists of all university book output). Dissertation downloads as well as eprint-requests will also provide useful new research impact metrics

Health Care Debate Sidelines Federal Research Public Access Act

In "Open Access Bill Stalls in Congress," Bob Grant reports on the status of the Federal Research Public Access Act in the Senate.

Here's an excerpt:

Congressional staffers in the US Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, where the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) of 2009 (S.1373) lingers, have been forced to shift their attentions to health care and away from the bill. "They're definitely swamped," Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, told The Scientist. Joseph added that movement on FRPAA is not expected "until after health care gets sorted out."

You can send an e-mail supporting the bill to your Senator using the Alliance for Taxpayer Access Web form.

Georgia Tech Library Awarded $857,005 Grant to Build Statewide Digital Repository

The Georgia Institute of Technology Library and Information Center has been awarded a $857,005 grant for its "The GALILEO Knowledge Repository (GKR): Advancing the Access and Management of Scholarly Digital Content" project.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Georgia Tech, in partnership with the University of Georgia, Georgia State University, the Medical College of Georgia, Georgia Southern University, Valdosta State University, Albany State University, North Georgia College and State University, and the College of Coastal Georgia, will build a statewide digital repository to provide access to scholarly works and research information. The principal investigator on the grant is Tyler Walters, Associate Director for Technology and Resource Services, the Georgia Institute of Technology Library and Information Center; the co-PI is P. Toby Graham, Director, Digital Library of Georgia, University of Georgia Libraries.

The scholarly works and research information to be held by the GKR are materials such as:

Annual Reports; Audio/Video Recordings; Conference Papers; Electronic Theses and Dissertations; Instructional Materials; Lecture Series and Symposia Materials; Newsletters; Pre-Prints/Post-Prints; Proceedings; Research and Technical Reports; Web Sites; White Papers; and Working Papers.

The GKR program has five activities that it will complete during the grant:

  1. Conduct a survey and focus groups of the USG librarians' and faculty's usage and perceptions of digital repositories.
  2. Establish a service to host individual repositories for four participating USG institutions (Medical College of Georgia, Georgia Southern University, Albany State University, College of Coastal Georgia)
  3. Build a central, searchable web site and database from all eight GKR-related digital repositories, featuring the GKR-developed repository collection mapping tool. This will be done by harvesting database records from all eight GKR-related digital repositories (the four hosted repositories mentioned above, plus existing repositories at Georgia Tech, University of Georgia, Georgia State University, and Valdosta State University).
  4. Establish repository-related services for the GKR partners: copyright assistance, digitization, content submission into their repository, and digital preservation
  5. Design and offer to a nationwide audience a symposium and workshop on managing statewide and consortial repositories. The goal of the training program is to increase the number of digital repositories operating in the U.S. and the number of information professionals with the knowledge and skills to manage repositories consortially.

Swedish Research Council Adopts Open Access Mandate

The Swedish Research Council has adopted an open access mandate. The Swedish Research Council is "a government agency that provides funding for basic research of the highest scientific quality in all disciplinary domains. Besides research funding, the agency works with strategy, analysis, and research communication."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement (translation from the Swedish by Ingegerd Rabow):

The Swedish Research Council requires free access to research results.

In order to receive research grants the Research council requires now that researchers publish their material freely accessible to all.. . .

Researchers are required to guarantee that everything published shall be freely available according to Open Access not later than six months after publication.

The Council's decision regarding Open Access has been taken in close cooperation with SUHF, the Association of Swedish Higher Education. To promote free dissemination of research results is not and isolated Swedish occurrence, The so called Berlin Declaration aiming to implement Open Access has been signed by several large, mainly European research funders.

The Open Access-mandate covers so far only refereed journal articles and conference reports, not monographs and book chapters. The mandate will be included in the new grant conditions from 2010.

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."

University of Maryland: "What's the Opposite of a Pyrrhic Victory?: Lessons Learned from an Open Access Defeat"

In "What's the Opposite of a Pyrrhic Victory?: Lessons Learned from an Open Access Defeat," Tim Hackman examines the defeat of an open access resolution at the University of Maryland.

Here's an excerpt:

The "Faculty Voice"; article on open access published in March 2009 had been the first of its kind at UM, and discussion and drafting of the resolution had taken place mostly behind closed doors within the Faculty Affairs Committee, without involving the rest of the Senate. A handful of interested departments (almost all of them in the sciences) had met with representatives from the libraries to discuss scholarly communication and open access, but the majority of faculty members had no direct contact with someone who could explain the issue and its importance and answer specific questions. It was hoped that the faculty newsletter article would help in this regard, but it was a case of too little too late. The lesson then is don't assume faculty understand the situation or sympathize with the library's point of view.

Peter Suber on "Ten Challenges for Open-Access Journals"

Peter Suber has published "Ten Challenges for Open-Access Journals" in the latest issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.

Here's an excerpt:

I start with three disparities:  the gap between journal performance and what prevailing metrics say about journal performance (#1); the gap between the vision of OA embodied in the Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin statements and the access policies at 85% of OA journals (#2); and the gap between a journal's quality and its prestige, even when the quality is high (#3).  Then I move on to seven kinds of doubt:  doubts about quality (#4), preservation (#5), honesty (#6), publication fees (#7), sustainability (#8), redirection (#9), and strategy (#10).

Walt Crawford on Open Access

Walt Crawford has dedicated an entire 34-page issue of Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large to a "Library Access to Scholarship" article on open access.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

A year’s worth of source material and commentary, organized into:
Mandates, Policies and Compacts
The Colors of OA
Numbers
Scandal!
Framing and Mysteries
The Problem(s) with Green OA
Quality, Value and Progress
Miscellany
Conclusion

Chances are, this is the last hurrah for Library Access to Scholarship and my semi-active independent commentary on open access.

Let's hope that Walt changes his mind about discontinuing "Library Access to Scholarship," which has always been interesting, thought-provoking, and informative reading.

Publishing and the Ecology of European Research Project Releases PEER Annual Report—Year 1

The Publishing and the Ecology of European Research project has released PEER Annual Report—Year 1.

Here's an excerpt:

PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research), supported by the EC eContentplus programme, is investigating the effects of the large-scale, systematic depositing of authors' final peer reviewed manuscripts (so called Green Open Access or stage-two research output) on reader access, author visibility, and journal viability, as well as on the broader ecology of European research.

Peer-reviewed journals play a key role in scholarly communication and are essential for scientific progress and European competitiveness. The publishing and research communities share the view that increased access to the results of EU-funded research is necessary to maximise their use and impact. However, they hold different views on whether mandated deposit in open access repositories will achieve greater use and impact. There are also differences of opinion as to the most appropriate embargo periods. No consensus has been reached on a way forward so far.

The lack of consensus on these key issues stems from a lack of clear evidence of what impact the broad and systematic archiving of research outputs in open access repositories might be, but PEER aims to change this through building a substantial body of evidence, via the development of an "observatory" to monitor the effects of systematic archiving over time.

Greater Western Library Alliance Members Send Letter Supporting Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009 to Senators

Greater Western Library Alliance member universities have sent a letter supporting the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009 to members of the U.S. Senate.

Here's an excerpt:

Timely, barrier-free access to the results of federally funded research supports the core mission of our academic institutions and is essential to fully utilize our collective investment in science. FRPAA will help us maximize this investment by increasing the sharing research results, advancing the pace of discovery, and applying this knowledge for the benefit of our communities.

The FRPAA bill also expands on the success of the public access policy of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the first U.S. agency to require public access to taxpayer-funded research. More than 450,000 unique users access material from the NIH repository each day. Under S.1373, we envision researchers and students working in fields of equal importance—from climate change to renewable energy—having the same access to federally funded research to advance their critical work.

This bill is a crucial step in realizing this goal and we look forward to working with you to secure the bill’s passage.

"Worldwide Use and Impact of the NASA Astrophysics Data System Digital Library"

Michael J. Kurtz et al. have self-archived "Worldwide Use and Impact of the NASA Astrophysics Data System Digital Library" in arXiv.org.

Here's the abstract:

By combining data from the text, citation, and reference databases with data from the ADS readership logs we have been able to create Second Order Bibliometric Operators, a customizable class of collaborative filters which permits substantially improved accuracy in literature queries. Using the ADS usage logs along with membership statistics from the International Astronomical Union and data on the population and gross domestic product (GDP) we develop an accurate model for world-wide basic research where the number of scientists in a country is proportional to the GDP of that country, and the amount of basic research done by a country is proportional to the number of scientists in that country times that country's per capita GDP.

We introduce the concept of utility time to measure the impact of the ADS/URANIA and the electronic astronomical library on astronomical research. We find that in 2002 it amounted to the equivalent of 736 FTE researchers, or $250 Million, or the astronomical research done in France. Subject headings: digital libraries; bibliometrics; sociology of science; information retrieval

BioMed Central Launches Its 200th Open Access Journal

BioMed Central has launches its 200th open access journal, the Journal of Angiogenesis Research.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

This major milestone reflects a growing trend as senior academics and learned societies turn to open access to publish their new journals or to improve the reach and visibility of their existing journals.

The success of any scientific journal, open access or subscription based, depends on it receiving a good number of high-quality papers in its area of interest. But for a subscription-based journal to succeed, it faces the additional hurdle of selling enough subscriptions to pay for its costs. In the current financial environment, libraries are increasingly having to trim their collections and are finding it virtually impossible to purchase new titles. This makes launching new subscription-based journals extremely challenging. Also, learned societies or scientific institutions who publish only a small number of titles are struggling to maintain their subscription numbers in competition with the larger publishers who sell collections of titles under the "big deal." In contrast, more and more institutions and funding bodies are making funds available for scientists to publish their papers in open access journals (see our recent blog posting on the Open Access Compact).

As a result of this situation, BioMed Central has recently seen an increasing number of institutions and societies choosing to take the open access route, either to launch new journals or increasingly to convert their existing journals to open access. Just this year, additions to our portfolio include Genetics, Selection and Evolution, owned and supported by INRA (the French National Institute for Agricultural Research), and Journal of Biomedical Science, which is supported by the National Science Council of Taiwan. These are established journals with impact factors and good rankings in their subject categories in the Journal Citation Report.  Also moving towards a re-launch with BioMed Central is Allergy, Asthma and Clinical Immunology, the official journal of the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. In addition, several societies have launched new journals with us this year, including Sports Medicine, Arthroscopy, Rehabilitation, Therapy & Technology and Diabetology & Metabolic Syndrome.

Our experience with journals which have transferred to open access shows that they increase their submission levels and impact factors. For instance, the 50 year old Acta Veterinaria Scandanavica has doubled its submissions and nearly trebled its impact factor within three years of moving to BioMed Central. The journal has already risen to an upper mid-table position in the "Veterinary Sciences" category of the Journal Citation Report (57/134 in 2008), from its previous position in the lower reaches of the category.

"SPARC Member Spotlight: Testing the Waters with Open-Access Funds (University of California at Berkeley and the University of Calgary)"

SPARC has released "SPARC Member Spotlight: Testing the Waters with Open-Access Funds (University of California at Berkeley and the University of Calgary)."

Here's an excerpt:

In a move to encourage researchers to make their work open to the public, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Calgary established funds that faculty and graduate students could use cover publication charges for open-access journals. Berkeley and Calgary are two of several funds established in recent years, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, the University of Oregon, and other sites in the U.K.

After a year of implementation in Calgary and Berkeley, librarians at these universities are reviewing their efforts and are pleased to report on the results.