Category: Open Access

Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the Costs and Benefits

JISC has released Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the Costs and Benefits.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Sharing research information via a more open access publishing model would bring millions of pounds worth of savings to the higher education sector as well as benefiting UK plc. This is one of the key findings from a new research project commissioned by JISC.

Professor John Houghton from the Centre of Strategic Economic Studies at Melbourne’s Victoria University and Professor Charles Oppenheim at Loughborough University were asked to lead research that would throw light on the economic and social implications of new models for scholarly publishing.

The research centred on three models which include:

  • Subscription or toll access publishing which involves reader charges and use restrictions;
  • Open access publishing where access is free and publication is funded from the authors’ side; and
  • Open access self-archiving where academic authors post their work in online repositories, making it freely available to all Internet users.

In their report, Houghton et al. looked beyond the actual costs and savings of different models and examined the additional cost-benefits that might arise from enhanced access to research findings.

The research and findings reveal that core scholarly publishing system activities cost the UK higher education sector around £5 billion in 2007. Using the different models, the report shows, what the estimated cost would have been:

  • £230 million to publish using the subscription model,
  • £150 million to publish under the open access model and
  • £110 million to publish with the self-archiving with peer review services plus some £20 million in operating costs if using the different models.

When considering costs per journal article, Houghton et al. believe that the UK higher education sector could have saved around £80 million a year by shifting from toll access to open access publishing. They also claim that £115 million could be saved by moving from toll access to open access self-archiving.

In addition to that, the financial return to UK plc from greater accessibility to research might result in an additional £172 million per annum worth of benefits from government and higher education sector research alone.

Max Planck Institute Releases Best Practices for Access to Images: Recommendations for Scholarly Use and Publishing

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science has released Best Practices for Access to Images: Recommendations for Scholarly Use and Publishing.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The recommendations were prompted by the barriers encountered by those who wish to use and publish images of cultural heritage objects. High licence fees and complicated access regulations make it increasingly difficult for scholars in the humanities to work with digital images. It is true that the digitization of image collections has acted as a catalyst for scholarly research. However, archives, collections and libraries differ greatly with respect to the question of how, where and on what basis images may be used for scholarly purposes. Moreover, their policies in this regard are becoming increasingly restrictive, especially when it comes to new forms of e-publishing.

The MPIWG drew up its recommendations for facilitating the scholarly use of digital images following consultations with international experts which took place in January 2008. The recommendations call on curators and scholars to develop a mutually binding network of trust. The aim of the initiative is to encourage stakeholders jointly to address the current and future challenges raised by the digital age. The document urges curators to refrain from restricting the public domain arbitrarily and calls on them to accommodate the needs of scholars for reasonably-priced or freely-accessible high-resolution digital images—both for print publications and new Web-based forms of scholarly publishing. It exhorts scholars to recognise museums, libraries and collections as owners and custodians of physical objects of cultural heritage and to acknowledge their efforts in making digital images available. Moreover, it urges them to take their role as guarantors of authenticity and accurate attribution extremely seriously.

Clarifications about the Michigan/OCLC OAIster Deal

Dorothea Salo has posted "The Straight Story on OAIster and Its Move" on Caveat Lector in which the University of Michigan Library's Katrina Hagedorn answers questions about the future of OAIster.

Here's an excerpt:

Q. Once oaister.org ceases to exist, there will be no way to search the harvested records for free except through worldcat.org, is that right?

A. I think those details haven’t been hammered out yet. Worldcat.org is one choice, yes. There will be likely be other products and services, and it’s likely you’ll be able to limit to just oaister records (for what that’s worth).

University of Michigan and OCLC Form OAIster Partnership

The University of Michigan and OCLC will jointly support the OAIster search engine for open access documents.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Launched in 2002 with grant support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, OAIster was developed to test the feasibility of building a portal to open archive collections using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). OAIster has since grown to become one of the largest aggregations of records pointing to open archive collections in the world with over 19 million records contributed by over 1,000 organizations worldwide.

Under the partnership, OAIster.org will continue to function as the public interface to OAIster collections, through funding provided by OCLC to the University of Michigan. Later in 2009, metadata harvesting operations will transfer from the University of Michigan to OCLC. . . .

Starting in late January 2009, while OAIster continues to be freely available at the www.oaister.org Web site, OCLC will host a version of OAIster on OCLC's FirstSearch platform and make it available through subscriptions to the FirstSearch Base Package at no additional charge.

University of California Affiliated Authors Will Be Able to Publish Using Springer Open Choice as Part of Journals License

Under the terms of the journals license negotiated by the California Digital Library for the University of California Libraries, UC-affiliated authors will be able to publish in Springer journals using the Springer Open Choice option without paying additional publication fees. (Thanks to Open Access News.)

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

There will be no separate per-article charges, since costs have been factored into the overall license. Articles will be released under a license compatible with the Creative Commons (by-nc: Attribution, Non-commercial) license. In addition to access via the Springer platform, final published articles will also be deposited in the California Digital Library's eScholarship Repository.

The University of California-Springer agreement is the first large-scale open access experiment of its type undertaken with a major commercial publisher in North America.

"UC faculty members have told us that they want open access publishing options in order to increase the impact of their published work and eliminate barriers to educational and research use," said Ivy Anderson, director of collections for the California Digital Library, which licenses content on behalf of the University of California libraries. "Just as importantly, they want these options in the journals in which they routinely publish, without disrupting their normal research activity. The CDL agreement with Springer supports the transformation that our faculty seeks, while continuing the libraries' crucial role in facilitating access to research information. Springer is a leader among commercial publishers in open access experimentation, making it a natural partner for the University of California in this endeavor."

EDUCAUSE Review Special Section: The Case of the Textbook: Open or Closed?

The latest issue of EDUCAUSE Review has a special section on "The Case of the Textbook: Open or Closed?."

Here are the articles:

Podcast Interview with John Wilbanks of the Science Commons Project

Gerry Bayne of EDUCAUSE has released "CNI Podcast: The Science Commons Project—An Interview with John Wilbanks."

Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

Science Commons, a project of Creative Commons, has three interlocking initiatives designed to accelerate the research cycle. These include making scientific research “re-useful”, enabling “one-click” access to research materials, and integrating fragmented information sources. Together, these initiatives form the building blocks of a new collaborative infrastructure to make scientific discovery easier by design. Wilbanks discusses the copyright and technical challenges of contemplating a true knowledge browser.

ARL Releases "Establish a Universal, Open Library or Digital Data Commons"

The Association of Research Libraries has released "Establish a Universal, Open Library or Digital Data Commons."

Here's an excerpt:

Deepening our understanding of our Nation and its culture and history, advancing scientific discovery, tackling environmental, economic issues and more, all depend on scientists, researchers, students, scholars, and members of the public accessing our Nation's cultural, historical and scientific assets. A large-scale initiative to digitize and preserve the public domain collections of library, governmental, and cultural memory organizations will support research, teaching and learning at all levels, will help stem the current economic crisis by equipping and employing workers in every state with 21st Century skills, and it will lay a foundation for innovation and national competitiveness in the decades ahead. The goal is to establish a universal, open library or a digital data commons.

Updated ACRL Scholarly Communication Toolkit Released

The Association of College and Research Libraries has released an updated version of its Scholarly Communication Toolkit. It has been released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The toolkit continues to provide context and background by summarizing key issues to offer quick, basic information on scholarly communication topics. It also links to examples of specific tools, including handouts, presentations and videos for libraries to adapt and use on their own campuses. . . .

“Given the current economic climate, it's natural to ask if scholarly communication activities are a luxury or a distraction,” said Richard Fyffe, librarian of the college for Grinnell College and co-chair of ACRL’s Scholarly Communication Committee. “We define scholarly communications issues as central to the mission of virtually every kind of academic library because they are central to the mission of our institutions. We feel libraries need to maintain a commitment to awareness, understanding, ownership and activism.”

The updated toolkit serves as a resource for scholarly communication discussions inside the library, outreach programs to faculty and administrators and library school students seeking to incorporate these issues into their course work. The ACRL Scholarly Communication Committee, as part of its efforts to keep the toolkit current, encourages librarians to contribute tools and case studies on their local scholarly communication campaigns. Simply post a comment describing your tool and provide a link in the appropriate tab.

New Press to Publish Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own

The New Press will publish David Bollier's Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Reporting from the heart of this "free culture" movement, journalist and activist David Bollier provides the first comprehensive history of the attempt by a global brigade of techies, lawyers, artists, musicians, scientists, businesspeople, innovators, and geeks of all stripes to create a digital republic committed to freedom and innovation. Viral Spiral —the term Bollier coins to describe the almost-magical process by which Internet users can come together to build online commons and tools—brilliantly interweaves the disparate strands of this eclectic movement. The story describes major technological developments and pivotal legal struggles, as well as fascinating profiles of hacker Richard Stallman, copyright scholar Lawrence Lessig, and other colorful figures.

Stanford's HighWire Press Hits 5 Million Article Mark

With the addition of a backfile 1884 article, "Dermatitis Herpetiformis," in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, HighWire Press, a division of the Stanford University Libraries, hit the five million article mark. Over two million of those articles are freely available.

Read more about it at "5 Million Articles Online at HighWire: The Evolution of an e-Publishing Platform."

Digital Library Software: Greenstone Version 2.81 Released

Version 2.81 of the Greenstone digital library software has been released.

Here's an excerpt from the home page that describes Greenstone:

Greenstone is a suite of software for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a new way of organizing information and publishing it on the Internet or on CD-ROM. Greenstone is produced by the New Zealand Digital Library Project at the University of Waikato, and developed and distributed in cooperation with UNESCO and the Human Info NGO. It is open-source, multilingual software, issued under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

See the Greenstone Fact Sheet for a more detailed description of the system.

Concord Free Press: It Really Means Free

The Concord Free Press gives away its printed books for free, shipping included, but asks for a donation to a charity of the reader's choice. Initially, it will publish two books a year, with a print run of about 1,000 copies each. Selected independent bookstores carry its books.

Writers are unpaid, and the press relies on "on donations from our Advisory Board and supporters—and sales of our stylish t-shirts."

Study of Open Access Publishing Fellowship at CERN

CERN is seeking applicants for its Study of Open Access Publishing Fellowship. Applicants must be a citizen of one of the CERN member states, hold a MSc or higher diploma, and have less than 10 years post-MSc professional experience.

Here's an excerpt from the job posting:

SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) is a project being negotiated for financing by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Program. Partners of the SOAP consortium are CERN, the coordinator, the Max Plank Society, the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council and the publishing companies BioMed Central, Sage, and Springer. The project is expected to have a duration of two years, starting in March 2009. Its objective is the study of Open Access business models and a comprehensive survey of the attitudes towards Open Access of researchers across all disciplines. SOAP will deliver evidence on the potential of sustainable forms of Open Access Publishing.

Conditional to the final availability of funding, CERN is looking for a dynamic, enthusiastic and motivated person to play a leading role in the SOAP project.

Podcast: Library Publishing Services: An Emerging Role for Research Libraries—An Interview with Karla Hahn

EDUCAUSE has made available a podcast recorded at the CNI 2008 Spring Task Force Meeting: "Library Publishing Services: An Emerging Role for Research Libraries—An Interview with Karla Hahn." Hahn is the Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication at the Association of Research Libraries.

PALINET to Digitize 20 Million Textual Pages

With support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, PALINET's Mass Digitization Collaborative plans to digitize 20 million textual pages of public domain material from participating member libraries. The scanned digital texts will be freely available from the Internet Archive.

Read more about at "PALINET's Mass Digitization Collaborative Underway."

Author's Rights, Tout de Suite

Author's Rights, Tout de Suite, the latest Digital Scholarship publication, is designed to give journal article authors a quick introduction to key aspects of author's rights and to foster further exploration of this topic through liberal use of relevant references to online documents and links to pertinent Web sites.

It is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, and it can be freely used for any noncommercial purpose, including derivative works, in accordance with the license.

The prior publication in the Tout de Suite series, Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite, is also available.

Six New Open Access Books Available from Michigan's digitalculturebooks

The University of Michigan's digitalculturebooks, a joint imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library, has published six open access books: The Best of Technology Writing 2008; This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities; The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age; Broadcasting, Voice, and Accountability: A Public Interest Approach to Policy Law, and Regulation; Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism: Teaching Writing in the Digital Age; and Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China.

The books are also available for purchase in print form.

It's Open Access Day, Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association Launches

It's Open Access Day, and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association has officially been launched.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, OASPA, announces its official launch today in conjunction with an OA Day celebration hosted by the Wellcome Trust in London. The mission of OASPA is to support and represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journals publishers globally in all scientific, technical, and scholarly disciplines through an exchange of information, setting of industry standards, advancing business and publishing models, advocating for gold OA journals publishing, education and the promotion of innovation.

From having first emerged as a new publishing model over a decade ago, OA publishing has become an embedded feature of the scholarly publishing landscape: The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists over 3500 peer-reviewed journals; a growing number of professional organizations offer OA publications; university libraries increasingly support OA publishing services; funding organizations support and encourage OA publishing; and a long tail of independent editorial teams and societies now publish their titles OA. Professional OA publishers such as BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have been in business for over five years, while some scientist/scholar publishers (editorial teams operating independently of a professional publisher) have published their OA journals for a decade or more. Moreover, a number of traditional publishing houses are now engaging in Open Access activities, the recent acquisition of BioMed Central by Springer and the SAGE-Hindawi partnership being two cases in point. By bringing together those who share an interest in developing appropriate business models, tools and standards to support OA journals publishing, it is hoped that success in these areas can be achieved more quickly to the benefit of not only OASPA members, but more importantly, for the scholarly community that OA publishers serve.

Membership in OASPA is open to both scholar publishers and professional publishing organizations, including university presses and for profit and non-profit organizations. Members are expected to demonstrate a genuine interest in OA journals publishing by having signed either the Berlin or Budapest Declarations and must publish at least one full OA journal. Other individuals and organizations who support OA journals publishing or who are interested in exploring opportunities are also welcome. Membership criteria and an application form can be found on the OASPA website, www.oaspa.org.

The founding members of OASPA represent a broad spectrum of OA publishers and include: BioMed Central, Co-Action Publishing, Copernicus, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, Journal of Medical Internet Research (Gunther Eysenbach), Medical Education Online (David Solomon), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), SAGE, SPARC Europe and Utrecht University Library (Igitur). Representatives from each of these publishers will form an interim board until a first General Meeting is held during 2009.

PEER Project to Examine Large-Scale "Green" Open Access Impacts

The PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) project will examine "the effects of the large-scale, systematic depositing of authors' final peer-reviewed manuscripts . . . on reader access, author visibility, and journal viability, as well as on the broader ecology of European research." The project will conclude in 2011.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The aim of PEER is to build a substantial body of evidence, by developing an 'observatory' to monitor the effects of systematic archiving over time. Participating publishers will collectively contribute 300 journals to the project and supporting research studies will address issues such as:

  • How large-scale archiving will affect journal viability
  • Whether it increases access
  • How it will affect the broader ecology of European research
  • Which factors influence the readiness to deposit in institutional and disciplinary repositories and what the associated costs might be
  • Models to illustrate how traditional publishing systems can coexist with self-archiving

The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), the European Science Foundation, Gottingen State and University Library, the Max Planck Society and INRIA will collaborate on PEER, supported by the SURF Foundation and University of Bielefeld, which will contribute the expertise of the EU-funded DRIVER project.

Committee on Institutional Cooperation and University of California Launch HathiTrust, Shared Digital Repository

The Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University of California System's university libraries have launched the HathiTrust, a shared digital repository.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

A group of the nation’s largest research libraries are collaborating to create a repository of their vast digital collections, including millions of books, organizers announced today. These holdings will be archived and preserved in a single repository called the HathiTrust. Materials in the public domain will be available for reading online. . . .

Launched jointly by the 12-university consortium known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and the 11 university libraries of the University of California system, the HathiTrust leverages the time-honored commitment to preservation and access to information that university libraries have valued for centuries. UC’s participation will be coordinated by the California Digital Library (CDL), which brings its deep and innovative experience in digital curation and online scholarship to the HathiTrust.

"This effort combines the expertise and resources of some of the nation’s foremost research libraries and holds even greater promise as it seeks to grow beyond the initial partners," says John Wilkin, associate university librarian of the University of Michigan and the newly named executive director of HathiTrust. Hathi (pronounced hah-TEE), the Hindi word for elephant incorporated into the repository’s name, underscores the immensity of this undertaking, Wilkin says. Elephants also evoke memory, wisdom, and strength.

As of today, HathiTrust contains more than 2 million volumes and approximately ¾ of a billion pages, about 16 percent of which are in the public domain. Public domain materials will be available for reading online. Materials protected by copyright, although not available for reading online, are given the full range of digital archiving services, thereby offering member libraries a reliable means to preserve their collections. Organizers also expect to use those materials in the research and development of the Trust.

Volumes are added to the repository daily, and content will grow rapidly as the University of California, CIC member libraries, and other prospective partners contribute their digitized content. Also today, the founding partners announce that the University of Virginia is joining the initiative.

Each of the founding partners brings extensive and highly regarded expertise in the areas of information technology, digital libraries, and project management to this endeavor. Creation of the HathiTrust supports the digitization efforts of the CIC and the University of California, each of which has entered into collective agreements with Google to digitize portions of the collections of their libraries, more than 10 million volumes in total, as part of the Google Book Search project. Materials digitized through other means will also be made available through HathiTrust.

Read more about it at "University Libraries in Google Project to Offer Backup Digital Library."

Reactions to AAA's Free Access after 35-Year Embargo Decision

In "Open Access or Faux Access?," Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed has rounded up some initial reactions to the American Anthropological Association's decision to provide free access to American Anthropologist and Anthropology News after a 35-year embargo period.

Perhaps stunned that the AAA, a well-known OA opponent, would make any move towards free access, two anthropologists on the Savage Minds blog seemed to feel that, on balance, this was a positive move forward. On the other hand, Patricia Kay Galloway of the University of Texas at Austin School of Information called the notion that this move constituted open access "just crap."

Read more about it at "AAA 'Goes OA': The Emphasis Should Be on 'First Step'" and "Open Access and 'Open Access'."

Springer Will Acquire BioMed Central Group, Major Open Access Publisher

Springer Science+Business Media will acquire the BioMed Central Group, a major open access publisher that publishes over 180 journals.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

BioMed Central was launched in May 2000 as an independent publishing house committed to providing free access to peer-reviewed research in the biological and medical sciences. . . .

BioMed Central’s flagship journals include Journal of Biology, BMC Biology, BMC Medicine, Malaria Journal, BMC Bioinformatics and Genome Biology. BioMed Central has revenues of approximately EUR 15 million per year. The company is based in London, with a second office in Liverpool, and has approximately 150 employees.

Derk Haank, CEO of Springer Science+Business Media said: "This acquisition reinforces the fact that we see open access publishing as a sustainable part of STM publishing, and not an ideological crusade. We have gained considerable positive experience since starting Springer Open Choice in 2004, and BioMed Central’s activities are complementary to what we are doing. Additionally, this acquisition strengthens Springer’s position in the life sciences and biomedicine, and will allow us to offer societies a greater range of publishing options."

Matthew Cockerill, Publisher of BioMed Central said: "We are very excited about this new phase of BioMed Central's growth and development. Springer has been notable among the major STM publishers for its willingness to experiment with open access publishing. BioMed Central has demonstrated that the open access business model can work, and we look forward to continued rapid growth as part of Springer. The support of our authors, journal editors and institutional customers has been vital to BioMed Central's success and we will continue to focus on offering the best possible service to these groups."

Peter Suber has commented on the potential implications of the sale for the open access movement.

American Anthropologist and Anthropology News Freely Available after 35-Year Embargo Period

The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association has announced that access to American Anthropologist and Anthropology News will be free for "personal, educational and other non-commercial uses after a thirty-five year period."

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Starting in 2009, content published from 1888 to 1973, will be available through AnthroSource, the premier online resource serving the research, teaching, and professional needs of anthropologists. Previously, this information was only available via AAA association membership, subscription or on a so-called "pay per view" basis. . . .

The initiative, which will be re-evaluated by internal AAA committees in the next year (the Committee on Scientific Publication as advised by the Committee for the Future of Electronic Publishing), may be expanded in the future.